Apparently nineko has made SMPS conversions of the PC songs: <a href="http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/DATA_71(2).vgz" target="_blank">http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/DATA_71(2).vgz</a> LBZ2 <a href="http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/DATA_65(2).vgz" target="_blank">http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/DATA_65(2).vgz</a> CNZ2 I haven't had a chance to listen to them because Winamp won't start.
Thanks for posting those, apparently many people tend to forget about The Genesis Music Thread, I think there might be other S&KC songs in there, as I remember Puto converted the competition menu and the unused track (iirc). I did LBZ1 and ICZ2 as well, but I did them with fan-made MIDI files when the perfect rips weren't out yet, so those two wouldn't qualify to begin with. My LBZ2 and CNZ2, instead, have been made with the perfect MIDI rips, so if Tiddles is going to add a music option, and given that people like them, I'll look into converting them to the Sonic 3 format (maybe with Varion's help. Speaking of which, where did he go?)
Those seem like they should have toms instead of timpanis EDIT: Youtube says I'm right. I guess you didn't have them in your sound engine. EDIT 2: Also it sounds like you would need one new sample to get these sounding proper, but one could likely do it at the expense of one of the many Samples that were just for Ice Cap
You're right, I didn't have toms in soniNeko's sound driver, so I used timpani as a replacement. Remember, soniNeko uses Sonic 1's dac library, with the addition of a Cymbal and a Hand Clap. Not a big deal, if those songs get converted to the Sonic 3 format, the drums can be remapped to Sonic 3's HUGE dac library
That'd be great - if you can produce these tracks in S3K SMPS format, I'll certainly have a go at patching them in. In general for any such track replacements: if they all fit nicely over the old S3 ones without upsetting the existing music pointers and ROM layout it should be pretty simple, and I should just be able to throw out extra patches for the current base version. If not, I'll still try to something out eventually, but it'd be a lot longer and I couldn't guarantee when I'd be able to get something together. (Heck, I haven't even got around to doing any of the post 100404 changes I was already planning yet!) In other words, I don't want to offend anyone if I end up sitting on their work for ages before getting to plugging them in... Just one suggestion for conversions: try to avoid DAC B2 and B3, since the actual sample varies depending on which version of the Knuckles track is patched in. Although I suppose if we did the whole set as one patch and replaced the S3 Knuckles track, we could just pick one, as long as we also flip the miniboss back over to use the S&K version as it does on the PC.
If an accurate VGM wants to be made I can get nineko to give me the binaries and I can edit them as I have the complete S3K DAC in my hack.
Hey Tiddles, I read somewhere (the wiki I think) about how you lose a shield when getting hit by the blue spinning platform in MGZ, and that it was fixed for this hack. Is that when you run into an enemy while running on the spinning platform? (which is happening rather sooner than later). If so, maybe the same thing is happening when the player rides one of those rotating-around-a-pole platforms in LBZ and the platform gets loose and hits a wall? (Sorry I haven't tested it myself, I just got reminded by a Youtube video) If you are reprogramming things to make Sonic 3 more complete, I have two suggestions: 1. Eggman carrying the mid boss in LBZ1 should use the grip claw from S&K's HPZ and DDZ2 (Eggman escaping with Master Emerald in the final boss) since that grip claw wasn't invented until late in development and looks like it can carry other things than just the Master Emerald, like for example Knuckles in SSZ2 (Knuckles final boss). 2. The Master Emerald gets spawned twice in the HPZ super ring room (Zone $17 Act $01) which isn't affecting the gameplay but could easily do so when animating the glow palette, but what I want to see is the overlay shine animation in that scene to be used on all Master Emerald sequences throughout the game (was it cut because of VRAM limitations, or because of lazyness? If you don't know what I am talking about, it is the triangle sparkle animations that is going across the top of the emerald, at the same time as it is glowing) And of course, it would actually be nice to have a true GHZ boss in SCZ, instead of that crappy (worst programmed GHZ boss ever in a Sonic game, not counting Sonic 4), where the ball and chains SHOULD use swinging platform simulated gravity (which one of those swinging spike grabbers in the same zone already has!) instead of just going back and forth mirrored. But fixing that would require some skills :P Do you have skills/time?
Indeed, that was the fix. It was a pathetically simple change that fixed it, and when that happens, I always worry that I've broken something legitimate elsewhere... but I really can't think of a situation where you should be hit and lose a shield if you have it, but keep your rings if you had no shield. Oddly, that always allowed you to keep your shield. I was just about to write that I couldn't understand why both scenarios wouldn't follow the same codepath, but then I already thought of one exception - if you're invincible you should still be knocked back out of the LBZ "teacups", but not from an MGZ spinner. How about that, I never even noticed all this time. I wonder if its omission elsewhere might also be related to palette, since from casual inspection it looks as if all but the central flashes are using colours not present elsewhere on the emerald, and the emerald itself is even missing some of its normal colours in some places (notably the ending). At the moment it would probably be most accurate to say I don't have the knowledge of how that stuff works already to be able to say whether I have the skills - but time is certainly something I'm short of that I'd definitely need. Nevertheless, I'll add this - and your other suggestions - onto the list of things I hope to do some day, although as always I'm careful not to promise anything I might never do.
I will, as soon as I find out where is Varion and what happened to him. I can't port S1 smps to S3 smps to save my life, so I'll need his help.
That isn't odd at all. I see it all over Sonic 3's code. You see, Sonic 3 was programmed by Yuji Naka, and two other guys Masanobu Yamamoto and Hiroshi Nikaidoh. When mixing programming styles, some programmer wants their own "superior" ways of doing things. But also when it comes to knowing everything about an engine is not easy, when it was written in assembler. The new object format is not a new technology. Having a callback instead of a constant table of objects is superior and is used by many game including Super Monaco GP from 1989. So it is basically an addon by the other programmers, and makes it much faster to do quick objects. So when you see objects that only use move.l #action,(a0) at initialization, it's possibly done by one of the other programmers. And when you see objects with the usual move.b action_counter(a0),d1 and the jump table, it was probably done by Yuji Naka. But we can't really know. So why did I ask if you had skills? I am actually not talking about if you know how to port objects or understand everything behind a Sonic game, but the actual skill that those other two programmers in S3&K lacked. The ONLY thing that made Sonic 3 & Knuckles in the same class as Sonic 2 and Sonic 1 was because of Yuji Naka's pixel police attitude (and we should thank him for that). In the 0408 build, the Knuckles demo in HPZ was horrible out of quality! Knuckles was not in sync with the boss ships & emerald claw movement at all, and that's so wrong! Those stuff happens in Sonic CD and every Sonic Advance game, and I dislike those games because of that! That demo was fixed in the 0517 build, but at the same build the final boss was implemented, and it's laser shield was off sync again with the movement of the other boss parts. And looking at the laser shield graphics, it would be very hard to spot it on a blurry television, but yet again it was fixed in the next builds (I know it was fixed in the final, I checked). What we also know is that at the time S&K was split up into its own ROM, Sonic 2 was built to suppert Knuckles, and I am really guessing that's why Yuji Naka was off the final objects of S&K, such as the GHZ boss (which he would have aced for sure, having the Sonic 1 code to copy from). Another boss is the orb with the player tracking shield at the end of Death Egg Act 2, which uses a completely new arctan routine to follow the player, that has no advantage what-so-ever over the original one used by Sonic and the bumpers. It still has a function call, and a divide instruction, but it is not as accurate as the original, and not pixel aligned with the circle radius routine. Yet again, we have that other programmers, making their own stuff (probably because they didn't have time to understand or remember the original code, being so late in development, and having a deadline) And that's what you need for skills, to be able to work with boss parts that move in sync. You need the slowmotion (framestep) debug on, and you need to make sure all the objects, and interactive stuff like platform riding is synched. That's the visible quality needed to work on Sonic 3. The actual code to do it, can differ or be new objects. You can see it is pretty much every boss in Sonic 3, how there is a new object for the boss head, and not reused between bosses. *Sonic Advance 1's ending demo, when Sonic stands on the wing of the plane, he is scarry off synched, and I think Naka sound have spotted those things, but he stopped caring for some reason. Maybe it was only his own code that needed to prove something, or maybe it was impossible to reach Dimps's programmers. But every single platform in that game is off synch, so it sucks! *Sonic CD only has the first couple of objects synched, which were copied straight from the Sonic 1 source. As soon as new objects were introduced, the synch was off! And so was my love for the game.
I believe he's referring to when two or more sprites are "linked" and move together, if the positions of the sprites don't update on the same frame it looks a bit dodgy, because the distance between the two sprites won't always be the same. Chaotix probably suffers from this the most, because the 32X framebuffer sometimes falls out of line with the Mega Drive VDP when updating.
Okay, but that only happens for what, a single frame? Is that such a game-breaking deal? If you're telling me you hate Sonic CD because Sonic's sprite lags a bit behind when he's riding a moving platform, then excuse me while I laugh my ass off.
Hey, I like Sonic CD! (Should be obvious given what I showed everyone last year) it's LOst's opinion not mine :P
One unsychronized frame is the only thing needed to break collision detection. It all comes down to how fast you want the objects to move. For a Sonic game, you want fast movements. But for me, it is more about smoothness. When you feel you are the player, it plays much better. You try to catch up with what is going on, on the game screen, by reading movements and predicting what will happen next. If the brain gets fooled every time, because of lag, pixel jagging, vertical retrace errors, you just don't read the game right. Original Sonic was good because of how it played, and synchronization was a huge part of it. Well go ahead. I am such a huge original Sonic fan, I demand the highest quality possible, always, until the end of time. Sonic CD doesn't do it for me. (Sonic CD is a good game though! And I love the music, and the intro/outro movies)
Now that I think about that, there is an issue in Sonic & Knuckles' ending, at the very beginning when Sonic starts falling from the space, the Master Emerald is messed up with tiles from the title card for one frame.
Oh, never noticed that! Also at the Sonic & Knuckles title screen, when pressing start to skip the into, things are messed up for one frame. Remember that we are talking one frame of error here, and not errors over many frames (like I was talking about before)
There's good news and bad news. The bad news is this: I've barely got around to doing anything on this hack yet since the last release. The good news is this: this week, I've managed to get the original Sonic 3 object layouts loading properly. This leads to a question: should these be used by default for Sonic and Tails in the next version? I'm leaning towards "yes" at the moment, because "Sonic 3-ification" was always the primary goal Launch Base! It's scary again! It doesn't bring back any of the weird bugs, like Tails dying in Icecap or getting stuck in Carnival Night's walls. (Not that the object layout generally would affect that, but just for reassurance.) However there are some good reasons to only make it a patch option: Launch Base! The difficulty is something of a spike for a mid-game zone and the drop down in Mushroom Hill is definitely more pronounced. In a sense, I'd be replacing the "final" versions of the layouts with "unfinished" ones, but you could probably argue that about most of the Sonic 3 regression-type alterations. Perhaps most critically, the layouts just aren't usable by Knuckles (only Marble Garden, Carnival Night and Icecap are completable, with the former only working via Sonic's route and the latter missing its midboss; Carnival Night works "properly" but has almost no object layout in Knuckles' act 2.) Currently I have the layouts switched so that Sonic & Tails get the original ones, and Knuckles gets the new ones, which works just fine, but this leads to some oddities - the section where Knuckles' route to the boss splits off in Marble Garden 2, for instance, looks quite different architecturally between the two versions. I don't know how much of a problem that is. I'd be very interested to hear your opinions on this, although as ever I reserve the right to ignore them on a whim. :v: In any case, there'll at least be a patch option next time to use Sonic 3 layouts, and probably some extra "research purposes only" patches to use them for Knuckles and for the Sonic & Knuckles zones. Interestingly, it's not just Flying Battery that has some minimal object layout in S3 - Mushroom Hill/Valley actually has a good deal more, which does appear to be deliberately arranged (e.g. there's a ring monitor and a 1up monitor carefully placed next to each other), but it doesn't seem to correspond to the physical layout any more - everything ends up in nonsensical positions. I haven't checked yet whether it matches any better with any other zones or anything from the 3C prototypes. The next release is still a long way off anyway, since I want to make more changes before a new public release.
As long as it's optional, I don't think anyone would complain. Personally, I like the 'Sonic 3-ish' feel. Besides, isn't the point of a hack to make it different in some way?
