Sonic AX

The pallete for Marble Zone and for Labyrinth Zones look good. Spring Yard Zone isn't half-bad either, but Green Hill Zone...too much green man. As I tell a lot of people...you should consider trying to put in new art, even if its something that's just a tweak on the existing art rather than a full-blown overhaul. The GHZ and SLZ edits on Aka Mekon's hack are the best examples of what I mean. Done right, just amending the existing art can add a whole new feeling to a level.

 

The palletes are really hit-or-miss to me. I think the green soil just plain doesn't work for GHZ, but maybe tweaking the shades would be an improvement. MZ, on the other hand, is fantastic and really pulls off a convincing "snowed over" look. I'm not a big fan of the red background in SYZ; it looks too evil for such an early level in the game. LZ is great. The foreground/background contrast is awesome, and it reminds me of something (but don't ask me what).

 

To put it simply, the hack needs a lot more polish. Green Hill 1's layout was pretty good for a first layout, but walking along the bottom of the screen in Marble 1 was "wtf?", and the layout in general felt disjointed to the point that it needs reworking.

Then there's the music. I can understand wanting to swap the voices in tunes; that's something I don't see enough of anymore and it can make old tunes sound new. But what you had in the ROM was so screechy I took my headphones off 10 seconds in. This is the part where new hackers tend to say, "I didn't really understand the Wiki," so I'm going to try something since it's clear you made the effort to read it and try things out. I'll attach an edited version of Mushroom Hill 1's music that I made but never used, because it really seems to fit the theme of your level what with the plush greens and mushroom bridges. If you want, you can take it and insert it into the ROM by yourself since you seem to know how to hex edit, and it'll be all yours. It seems easier to insert new music than to modify existing files in a lot of cases, so I figured I'd put this on the table. *shrugs*

Anyway, keep plugging; your first level makes it clear that you can make a solid game.

 

Well, Earthworm Jim and Mega Man 2 are using completely different sound engines than Sonic games (see here). You'd likely have to write the songs from scratch. The rest would have to be done via porting the songs from their various modifications of the engine that Sonic 1 is running on. I'd start with something small like songs from other Sonic games, since there's utilities that'll do about 90% of the work for you with those. You'd said you'd tried just swapping values in voices to get results -- instead, try finding voices from other songs and placing them over the existing ones, and you'll be more likely to get results (although it's still rare to find ones that synch really well).

Well, it was obvious you tried to figure things out on your own, so I didn't see a reason not to. You're always better off asking for help than sitting in the dark, and all we (usually) ask is that you check that the answer's not in plain sight first...

 

That, or figure out the format used by those games. Wiz cracked the Cube/Iwadare format and now we can have songs from Mean Bean Machine in our hacks

 

I am so glad you consider this viewpoint. I can't fathom how many hacks have Azure Lake for the first level's music, even though Megamix had already done it years before (in the original 2005 release). Yeah, we know the song fits well, but how about something new?

I play other hacks to get a unique gameplay experience. If all hacks have the same changes, what's the fun in that?

 

I am not a supreme lord of the hack, but perhaps you should move your work to the ASM68K version of the disassembly (the second option on the Disassemblies page)? I don't honestly know if it will help, but the only thing it'd cost is your time.

As for the music, however.....
I THINK - I am NOT 100% sure about this because, well, I'm not, that AT the hex location mentioned (in your case $68F52) will be two hexadecimal... things. It'll look something like A0 81 or something like that, just with different letters. What you do here is you swap them so 81 A0. So F81A0. So you go the location F81A0 and this is where the music file begins at. You just need to figure out where it ends, copy and paste that into a blank .bin file, and hey presto, music extracted! Converting it from the SMPS version it is in to the version Sonic 1 uses, however, will be necessary before you can use it.

Note: I'm probably completely wrong, but this is what I got from reading the wiki for a couple hours, is probably a start, and I'm sure somebody will correct me on my errors.

 

Do what Oreg told me: delete s1built.bin and rebuild.

 

You don't need to port all your work over, it's trivial to convert your current disassembly to assemble with ASM68k, as covered here