Sonic Classic Collection

So uh, is it worth buying or not?

 

It's a somewhat faulty Genesis emulator for DS with 3 Sonic games lazily put together.

Just look at the price tag and decide if it's worth it.

 

I wonder.… Is it possible to edit the internal genesis save-state in the SCC to make pre-enabled the level select cheat code in Sonic 2?

 

Well, it's cheaper than a PSP for homebrew in any case. Plus I can just return it, can't I?

 

I would think this collection will drop price rather fast in the UK, most sonic games follow that pattern lately.

 

I'll reserve judgment until there's a version dumped that can work with my R4. If it's fantastic, I'll buy it.

 

Same here, I can't find one that works. There's like 2 different places I've downloaded it from, both really unknown sites. I know it's been dumped, but it's not on Romulation, which is very telling.

 

It was, but they took it off because evidently someone at SEGA fucked up and gave it a DSi header, even though it features ABSOLUTELY NO DOCUMENTED DSi ENHANCEMENTS. Nonetheless, the scene is considering it a DSi release, and Romulation doesn't distribute those, only plain DS.

 

Glad I managed to download it before it went away (Flash drive FTW)

I've gotta say, it's ok for the DS, and maybe it's 'cause I didn't grow up with the classics, but the scaling's fine for me.

 

Good luck with that, R4 gets no support anymore so I doubt there will be an anti-piracy fix. Anyway, I bought it even though I could have played it on my flash card. The emulation is actually surprisingly solid. Only issue I have is that damn jittery floor in Blue Sphere Special Stages.

 

The Legend of Zelda - Spirit Tracks would like a word with you, as would the Japanese release of Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver

edit:
And yeah, a release that works with my R4 is what I'm waiting for as well, NO$ is all well and good, but I'd like to try it on actual hardware before I decide wether or not it's worthy of a purchase.

Also, is it piracy when you own so many various copies of the same games, just not in this compilation?

 

Most definitely. I'm sure they spent a full 5 minutes piecing together that menu.

 

Oh, hey. They didn't even bother making one single tune for this compilation, so it must be good then! =P

I bet the Sonic Jam music they directly ripped from the CD takes up more than half the space of the whole compilation.


As for the other stuff:

Sprites: Always look squished, with missing lines. So you'll never see the graphics exactly as you remember them.
Music: Poorly digitized (slight high-pitched beeps all around some tracks, MJ sounds like he had a bad night) and it doesn't speed up when required (power sneakers, Sonic 3 Special Stages) and is played at the wrong places sometimes (Sonic & Knuckles minibosses)
Sound effects: Poorly digitized (rings don't sound in stereo, revving up the spindash plays the same sound repeatedly) from a bad sound core (signposts and anything high pitched make awful noises instead)
Game: On top of all the above, it sometimes skips frames. Also, Time Attack and 2 player modes were removed. Oh, and you can't pause by pressing start.


So perhaps you should consider getting this instead, for your portable classic Sonic needs.


One has to wonder how comes so many people are credited in this compilation, when the emulator was the work of one guy, and the menus could have been slapped together in one evening. By a monkey.

 

The music does speed up (for power sneakers in Sonic 1 and 2 at least), but it sounds wrong because they modify the waveform (so the pitch gets fucked up), not the tempo as it was supposed to (but can't because it isn't emulating the music at all).

 

Was this in emulation, an R4, or the actual cart? Just wondering.

 

EDIT: Oh wait, I see what you mean.

Still, it's a fuck up if they can't make that right. Sonic Jam got around that issue by actually thinking a little.

 

Has anyone actually confirmed that it has no changes on DSi?
It's been suggested elsewhere that DSi mode was used to give the emulator more CPU power thus alleviating some of the minor slowdowns. But I don't think anyone's posted an actual comparison to confirm or debunk this.

 

That might be possible, but you'd think the publishers would be forced to mention any DSi enhancements in the box or instructions manual, which doesn't happen in this case.

 

Only thing is if it does boost the performance on the DSi would you really want to advertise "HEY! This game will run worse on your old system!"? It would make sense to me that it'd just be a hidden feature if it is indeed true.

 

All games run smoother on the DSI, it's roughly twice as powerful.