Sonic and Knuckles Split Disassembly v1.0

There was Master Edition which has some layout changed. Hard, but awesome.

 

Just noticed a slight mishap: The SonED2 object definitions jman distributed with this disassembly are a bit out of date. I've been the one doing these (apart from jman himself doing Launch Base) and I had fixed the shading on the global sprites as well as redid Mushroom Hill. I gave these changes to Stealth, so they were included in his Sonic 3 ROMulan release, but I must have forgot to send them to jman too.

Here is the more up-to-date version, as it appears in Stealth's ROMulan distribution, with better shaded global sprites and Mushroom Hill's big mechanical pulley thing, and probably a few other improvements.

That said, sooner or later I'm going to finish these, so you'll never again have to see those useless little ?-blocks when editing Sonic 3's level layouts. =P

 

I have found (another) palette related issue with the disassembly when saving in SonED2. If you save FBZ1 (or FBZ2), it sort of saves the outside cloud palette line over the indoor palette line. The best way to see this is to save FBZ1 or 2, build it and play FBZ1 or 2. Pass a checkpoint and die. When you come back, the indoor background now has blue shades all over the metal structure. This fixes itself if you go outside and then back indoors or pass from Act 1 to Act 2 (The palette jumps to the right one). Just thought I shoud let you know.

 

Awesome work! Congrats guys (Y)

 

The SVN version now has a copy of s3.bin, sk.bin and all split data files, like the Sonic 1 and 2 disassemblies.

 

Awesome job! This will be perfect for my S3K hack, which had been on hold since last January.

Thanks for the release guys! This is heavily appreciated for those starting on S&K/S3K hacks.

 

FBZ's background palette is a tricky customer, and by tricky I mean retarded. There's the normal level palette of the standard size (three lines, for objects, foreground, and background generally) and the background colors on that are made for the indoor areas. Then, however, there's two "patch" palettes that are only about eight shades apiece, not even a full line of 16. One of these is for the outdoor cloudy sky, and the other is for the indoor areas. The indoor background is already covered by the main palette, but this patch palette loads whenever you go outside and back in, which is stupid because it should just reload the main palette. Now because of the way these are all loaded, you will only see the "main" level palette on the background if the level starts in an indoor area (in the normal game this occurs at the start of act 2, and anytime you mark an indoor checkpoint and die, as you did). If you start outside, like in act 1, it loads the outdoor patch immediately, and then the indoor patch when you go inside.

Getting all three of these into the SonED2 project files was an utter pain in ass, as you can probably guess. I chose to, in act 1, put the indoor patch on the primary palette (over shades 2 to 9, like it is ingame), and in act 2, show the "pure" main level palette with no patches. In both acts, the 'accessory' palette is the level palette with outdoor patch (over the same shades as the indoor one), (and Knuckles' palette in place of Sonic/Tails's, just because=P). This means that parts of the main level palette are loaded by SonED2 in both areas, which is kind of unavoidable, so you might need to edit both of them or something.

Sorry this is complicated, but it's the fault of the original developers being idiots.

 

I've tried editing both Acts 1 and 2, but I get the same problem in both Acts now, which is obviously not my intention. I guess I'll have to leave FBZ alone for a while, then.

EDIT: I just couldn't leave it alone. Turns out that if I make my changes to the sky background palette through SonED2, save and then replace the main level palettes (I.e. FBZ1 and FBZ2 in the palettes folder) with the original palette files, it doesn't have this problem as the sky palette colours, as you said, are stored elsewhere. Obviously this leaves me unable to edit the actual level's palette without the problem coming back though.

 

Thank you so much for the hard work!

 

First person to jury-rig a rendition of Blue Spheres that generates random palettes for the stages utilizing all 512 of the available colors gets a free blowjob.

 

I hate to do this, but I have found another palette related issue with the disassembly. (It seems that this is becoming a regular occurence).
Saving MHZ2 in SonED2 proceeds to overwrite the last 2 palette lines of the second (Autumn) palette with nothing but the colour white. As you can expect, this isn't supposed to happen and until a fix is issued, I can't really edit MHZ2 (Unless I do some replacing of palette files every time).

I apologise that I am posting nothing but problems, but as great as this disassembly is, it seems to have a fair few palette related problems.

 

I would edit them in a hex editor if I knew how to do so. I used ChaoSax Pal for the palettes before moving to a disassembly, you see.
I just think that trying to accomodate these changing palettes and patches that S3K uses in SonED2 wasn't really the best choice, as it seems to be more trouble than it's worth. I'm now refraining from editing the affected levels for the forseeable future.

EDIT: Thanks to qiuu pointing me in the direction of HivePal, I'm not too worried about this anymore. As long as I make backups of the palette files beforehand, it's not too much of a problem to work around.