Dang, this is amazing, I'm just starting my playthrough now, and it sounds a lot better than the original.
So I'm necrobumping this, but I'd like to note that with Adobe flash now being disabled, neither BTS or ATS will play their respective cutscenes anymore. I'm not even sure if this can still be fixed or is even now possible, but a patch for these games would be nice so that aspect of them don't get lost to time, as they've been influential in the retro fangaming scene for quite some time now. Otherwise, go about your business.
I believe that Lake released the source for the 4 games a while back. If someone were to ask for his permission to recompile the games with the necessary changes, someone with the proper program could reimplement the cutscenes and maybe widescreen support. Just so long as no one messes with difficulty like that brief port of ATS called Omega.
Real talk here, what would it take for these games to be updated and preserved? I don't really have access to Multimedia Fusion 2, but I imagine that running the source through that program is a requirement. We would also need Lake's permission and I doubt he'd have the time to update the trilogy (plus BTS aftermath if you want to throw that in there) since he's busy with Spark 3's development. I would give it a go, but I don't have the knowledge or the time at the moment
Just to be clear, the games are still fully playable from a gameplay perspective. It's only the flash cutscenes that stopped functioning. But I agree that they should be preserved, perhaps even updated with a new engine in some ways. They're solid efforts and got critical media attention for years before Mania came along. It'd be nice to ensure their future survival.
Well, I messaged Lake on Twitter and got no reply from him. He's probably too busy working on his next game. If any restoration were to happen, it'd probably be up to someone with access to the source code he posted. I've never touched Sonic Worlds, but I imagine it's not all that difficult to adjust the aspect ratio of the game and incorporate the cutscenes as videos rather than SFW files.
I just tried opening the BTS source in CF2.5, but it just spits out an error: Code (Text): Cannot use control \"Shockwave Flash Object\" registered at {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-444553540000} in this computer registry: Unable to find any programming interface. followed by "Cannot load object Shockwave Flash Object". If anyone knows how to fix it I might give converting the SWFs into videos with Swivel and incorporating them in the source a shot.
alternitavtly you could look for youtube videos of them and just scalp them off you tube. As mp4's or something.
Right, but Youtube videos have video and audio compression, however minimal it might be; with Swivel there is basically none. Besides I wouldn't feel right taking them off of Youtube when I could convert them myself.
One thing id say is if you did clean up and make a modren release, is that maybe take some of the new bosses idea one fan re release had and run with it. i kinda liked the idea of implimenting new bosses to spice things up, i mean it is a re release may as well add in some bonus shizz right?
Honestly, given how lackluster ATS Omega was, I'd recommend just releasing a straight port. A lot of people were very off-put by the unnecessary spike in difficulty. I am curious if the source code for ATS still has the extra boss fight and drop dash from the latest release. If not it may take some work to reimplement them.
Honestly, were I to get the source code working, I'd just publish the fixed game as-is. EDIT: I managed to run BTS's source! It took me a long while, but here's the gist of it: Lake's Sonic games (sans Chrono Adventure), as you know, use .swf files for cutscenes. These are loaded into the game executable by the ActiveX object, which rely on Internet Explorer's Flash plugin to work. What I did was I ran an older installer of Flash Player for IE in Windows 7 compatibility mode, which ended up doing the trick! Also, if you guys want to play the games with the cutscenes, just do what I did and then set .swf files to run with IE.
I actually need features to be removed instead of added. I didn't play DX and Omega beyond the first act thanks to that implementation of the drop dash, so I don't know the other features you're talking about but I'm quite pissed off by that one alone. Is there a chance to also fix the pre-Mania version of the game? Because that's the only one I will play.
The source code Lake posted was that of the original Sonic After The Sequel, so that's what I'll be working with. I don't know if ATS DX or ATS Omega have freely available source codes.
Any idea where this installer might be? I tried setting the SWFs to open in internet explorer and I still get the "end of life" screen.
The second link in this video ( description is an archive.org link with a .zip: inside it there are several installers, the one you want to run in W7 mode is the one with "winax" at the end.
Still no dice. Seems I'll have to wait until your update to the source. Edit: I don't know if it's the recent windows update or some fiddling I did with flash player between this post and now, but cutscenes are working again in BTS and ATS DX. I wouldn't complain if we got the games in widescreen still, but it seems to be a viable solution after all.
