don't click here

Sonic Pocket Adventure - disassembly and tools

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by ValleyBell, Oct 1, 2023.

  1. ValleyBell

    ValleyBell

    Tech Member
    246
    25
    28
    researching PC-98/X68000 sound drivers
    Recently I got a few requests for a release of the Sonic Pocket Adventure disassembly I did back in 2016.
    I always wanted to release it at some point, so this gave me a reason to finally clean it up and release it to the public.

    And so I started collecting everything I did with SPA back in 2015/2016. Let's be honest - I was really surprised about how much effort I put into this back then.
    I didn't just disassemble the game, but I also wrote a bunch of tools. Some of them helped analysing the game, indentifying/dumping graphics and sounds. Others were written for the Sonic Pocket Winter hack and allowed to do graphics and sound editing. There is a modification of SonLVL that can be used for editing levels.
    The sound driver was disassembled and even received a reimplementation in C.
    I almost completely forgot about the TLCS-900 IDA plugin, which I had modified to output files that the AS assembler can reassemble.
    AS also got a few patches to allow for an almost bit-perfect rebuild of the original ROM from the disassembly.

    So after more than a month of work, I eventually got everything sorted and documented. Some tools received minor updates to remove hardcoded paths and fix bugs.

    And here it is: the Sonic Pocket Adventure Disassembly and Tools package

    Everything mentioned above is in there.

    Enjoy hacking!
     
    • Like Like x 9
    • Useful Useful x 1
    • List
  2. Devon

    Devon

    DROWN, DROWN, DROWN MYSELF! Tech Member
    1,395
    1,684
    93
    your mom
    You did already release the disassembly back in 2016. However, this is definitely a much more complete package, so it's real nice to see, especially since the SPA branch of SonLVL seems to have been taken down.
     
  3. ValleyBell

    ValleyBell

    Tech Member
    246
    25
    28
    researching PC-98/X68000 sound drivers
    I don't consider the disassembly of Sonic Pocket Winter a "proper" release of the SPA disassembly, because it features numerous changes from the vanilla game.
    I also did some additional labelling after SPW, so this release is definitely an improvement over the SPW source code as well.

    The SonLVL branch was turned into a separate repository called SonLVL-SPA.
     
  4. Devon

    Devon

    DROWN, DROWN, DROWN MYSELF! Tech Member
    1,395
    1,684
    93
    your mom
    Oh shoot, I thought that was a source release of the hack, I misinterpreted. My apologies.
     
  5. Bobblen

    Bobblen

    Member
    427
    216
    43
    Thanks for releasing this, great to see one of the more obscure releases get the sonic retro treatment. I look forward to continuing to muck around with the editor (now with un-wintered first level :-) )