Sonic 1 GBA

..."nothing the fuck"?

 

Sure. "Nothing the fuck around here is cool anymore" or something like that. Excuse me on that one as it's like 6:30AM.

 

Yeah, nothing the fuck. Like what the fuck, who the fuck, how the fuck. "There is nothing the fuck better than eating ice cream." It works.

 

Getting (slightly) back on topic... does anyone else actually have the cell phone version of Sonic 1? THAT is hardcore hand-cramping.

Also, I'd just like to be clear on one point. Are people arguing that the original DS is superior to DS Lite, or to buy a DS Lite after already having an original DS is not worth it?

 

In my opinion, both.

 

I have all three scene releases of it on SonAR. Wish I could play 'em. =/

 

Theres one problem about sonic 1 being ported to gba.
Genisis Hardware:
Model Number: MK-1601 (r1), MK-1631 (r2).
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.61 MHz
1 MByte (8 Mbit) ROM Area
64 KByte RAM Area
Co-Processor: Z80 @ 4 MHz
Controls PSG & FM Chips
8 KBytes of Sound Ram
Graphics:
64 simultaneous colors of 512 color pallete.
Pixel resolution: 320 x 224
VDP
Dedicated video display processor
Controls playfield & sprites
64 KBytes of dedicated VRAM
64 x 9-bits of CRAM
3 Planes: 2 scrolling playfields, 1 sprite plane
Sound:
PSG
FM chip
6-channel stereo
8 KBytes RAM

GBA Specs:

Height: 2"
Width: 4"
Depth: 0.7"
Weight: Approximately 2.8 ounces
Hardware colors: Silver or Black
Faceplates: all faceplates are interchangeable
Memory (RAM): 32KB, 256KB external
CPU Speed: 32-bit RISC-CPU (16.78MHz)

Power:

Lithium Ion Rechargeable Battery
Charge lasts six to 10 hours.
Recharging takes approximately 2 1/2 hours

Screen:

Size: 2" (diagonal)
Resolution: 240 x 160 pixels
Colors: 512 out of a maximum 32,000 colors
Screen Type: TFT with adjustable back light
Manufacturer: Sharp

Well The Genisis Has a Higer Resoultion, so there will be sprite problems,
And The GBA Does Not Havce A Sound Generator Eg: Fm chips, psg, instead it playes back samples, and that's why the sound is not so good. The Z80 is missing too, so that means even worse sound quality.

 

Er... what's your point with the specs? The chip in the GBA is faster. Sure it probably couldn't emulate an M68K, but it's capable of pretty much anything the genesis does *insert clip of genesis does commercial*, and that extra unused CPU could be used for a software based synth. The only problem is the resolution as you said, but it could be scaled down, and even if it isn't it'd probably still be playable.

 

The Z80 is redundant; It's only a processor.

The GBA has a PSG chip as well. It's all about getting good enough sounding samples to rival the FM sound, really.

 

The PSG chip is a motherfucker to use though, unless you're really up on your technical sound knowledge.

 

Indeed.

Well, you can always used compressed audio, but because they're tiny cartridges, you're fucked for good quality audio anyways.

 

The original "Sonic the Hedgehog" was 512 KB.

Those "tiny cartridges" can hold quite a lot despite their size. Heck, Sonic Advance 2 was like, 16 MB. (wasn't it?)

 

From Wikipedia's GBA article:

(quote modified to remove "mebibyte" nonsense)

 

The GBA does hardware sprite scaling, so it's trivial to render everything to a 320x224 virtual screen in memory and then scale it down.

Not really - the processor has more than enough oomph to do the job of the sound hardware in the original Megadrive. To be frank I'm happier to see that they're actually writing code rather than just using an emulator.

"mebi-" is technically more accurate since "mega-" has the connotation of powers of ten (as per SI, where everything is in powers of ten) while "mebi-" by definition is powers of two.

 

Although, for quality reasons, it would probably be best to design the game at the GBA's native resolution, seeing as the GBA essentially uses nearest-neighbor for all of it's hardware transformation.

My feeling is that the traditional terms were never intended as SI units, and so they should not be treated as such. The computing industry went for decades without that nonsense, so I see no reason to change. I'm firmly in the camp that supports the traditional terminology, and noone is going to change my mind =P

 

That's true, although I wonder whether the game will fall into the trap the GB Megaman games fell into if they design for the new aspect ratio.

They're SI prefixes. =P

That was before computers hit the mainstream - normal people are used to 1 kilometre being 1000 metres and 1 millilitre being one thousandth of a litre. Asking them to accept that a kilobyte is a special unit (1024 bytes) which doesn't conform to the powers-of-ten system everything else uses is asking for trouble; better to invent a new unit to avoid confusion on their part. Sure, we techs can understand the special case, but ordinary people will find it more difficult.

I'm in favour of the "new" units and am equally set in my ways, so I shan't make this a pointless debate.

 

I would think they would just do as they did with Sonic Mobile, and just make all the art a bit smaller.

Scaling would be ridiculously unnecessary, unless it was running some sort of emulator. (highly doubtful)

 

Sorry for the bump, but Sonic Mobile seems to be more like a remake than an emulated port. Physics behaviour are way different than they were on it's genesis counterpart. Plus, don't think all the mobiles have enough processing power to run decently a Sega Megadrive emulator (IMHO).

 

Sonic Mobile (for phones, I'm presuming you meant) IS a rewrite. Speculation suggests that it may have even been based on original Sega materials for that game, as the Pink flowers in GHZ and the UFO tiles in MZ suggest. Really interesting stuff, we should try and get in contact with the team who rewrote the game and find it out for sure.

 

Old school box art <3
Thank god