Sonic 1 Blastless DX+ (2025 Update: Widescreen, CGA mode)

Final Update: Widescreen support, 4-color CGA mode

It's been way overdue, but allow me to introduce the final promised update: Sonic 1 Blastless DX+
This is one final update, that wraps up quite a long history of development of this hack, which began in 2017 and was first released in 2021. This update was originally scheduled for 2022.



New Features

• Full widescreen support for the GenesisPlusGX-Wide emulator on RetroArch;
• Disabled NES-like limited sprites in 8-bit SMS mode (it got quite nasty in widescreen); it still works in Atari and GameBoy modes;
• All new 4-color CGA color mode (experience the palette of early PC games!);
• Various bugfixes and optimizations.

And the usual Sonic 1 Blastless DX features are here as always:

• Instant on the fly video and audio mode switches (now even slightly faster!);
• Full PAL optimization, including full 240p resolution and all in-game physics;
• Still smaller ROM than the vanilla game (wow)!
  
• Super-secret engine config menu so you can build your own Sonic 1 demake;

Accessing the engine config menu

• While on title screen, press Up, Down, Left, Right, B + Start (same as level select, except you hold B in the end);
• When the cheat is active, you can return to this menu from any level pausing and pressing B (notice you'll restart the level after exiting the menu);
• You can exit to the title screen by pressing A.

Download

• Download Widescreen (for GenesisPlusGX-Wide emulator)
• Download 4:3 (for any emulator or real hardware)

Screenshots

Spoiler

Bonus FAQ

Q: You said it will be released "in a few days" back in 2022. What happened?
A: That's true. This update was finished on February 22, 2022 it was set to release on February 25, 2022, but then February 24 happened in my country and split my life into the before and after. Those were the circumstances beyond my control, sorry. Not that times are particularly better now, the only reason it's being released at this time is because I think it's a good time add more hacks to the widescreen library at last.
Also, the source code wasn't collecting the dust all the time, it accumulated a few bugfixes over the years, as some Sonic 1 Blastless modules were battle-tested in other projects.

Q: Ending sequence and bosses are slightly unoptimized for widescreen, and look there's another bug I've found...
A: Yes, level data and boss programming were unaltered from the 4:3 version, but I did my best to adapt the camera system. See, Sonic 1 Blastless supports so many arbitrary screen resolutions (4:3 builds also use H32 mode so they are not always 4:3!), adding widescreen to equation makes it extremely hard to support everything without breaking the game or spliting widescreen into a separate source code branch. I did my best to maintain it at a reasonable level; and I don't have any energy or will left to polish that 1% of imperfection that can cost me months of work. I consider this project as done, and widescreen version is just a cherry on top.

Q: Any plans to release the source code now that the project is done?
A: I can promise that I'll release the source code eventually, once I'm happy with its state and get some documentation up. It wasn't originally meant to be released at all, but I see people wanting to see this, so I'll try to get them something that won't disappoint. The main challenge is that the source code is too customized for my own needs and is barely modifiable by others as-is: build system is Linux-only, moreover, the engine drifted so much from the original that sprite, layout and animation formats are custom and not compatible with any tools, art compression is also very specific in the latest version, there are no publicly available compressors/decompressors yet! In other words, game data will be uneditable for you and you will have issues even building it in the first place. I'll release it once I get it in a more digestible shape.