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Sonic Spinball Tilesets

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by FireRat, Nov 28, 2019.

  1. FireRat

    FireRat

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    I have found the palette address for the machine in sonic spinball, it's located at $10FC.
    So i done a test: I took the Metropolis Zone's foreground palette line and put it into The Machine
    Here is the result:
    [​IMG]

    As you can see, it fits pretty well.
    So I was thinking, according to what we know, Metropolis and Genocide City would share the tileset on a similar way that happens between Emerald Hill and Hill Top. And we know that The Machine recycled art from Genocide City. Does anyone know if Sonic Spinball uses a tileset system like Sonic 2? with 16x16 blocks and maybe even 128x128 chunks? I would love to compare it with Metropolis, but I can't find the addresses.
     
  2. InvisibleUp

    InvisibleUp

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    Don't host on Dropbox directly, you can't hotlink from there. Use a site like imgur instead.

    Reuploaded image:

    [​IMG]

    Anyways, Sonic Spinball was written in an entirely different engine than the classic Sonic series (wiki claims it was programmed in C instead of ASM like almost every other Mega Drive game) so the odds of it having the same chunk system as the classic Sonic series is about 0.

    EDIT: It seems your images work on my phone but not on my computer. Strange.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2019
  3. Vangar

    Vangar

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    Holy shit though, that works EXTREMELY well. The gears and pistons look amazing?

    Can you do the reverse into Sonic 2?
     
  4. MarkeyJester

    MarkeyJester

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    Sonic Spinball is notorious for having Sonic 2's Hidden Palace Zone rocks in the first stage.

    To be fair though, the above could be a coincidence...
     
  5. Travelsonic

    Travelsonic

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    Silly question, which is unsurprising given my level of sleep deprivation right now, but which part could be a coincidence, the original post, or the HPZ recycling?
     
  6. FireRat

    FireRat

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    Dropbox is weird, the first version of the post was a hotlink indeed, but I later added the IMG tags and appears just fine here...
    Anyways, using a tileset handling system is not uncalled for, a lot of games rely on blocks system (in the case of 16x16 blocks, you'd get 4 times a tilemap's size with a single array). Blocks aren't exclusive to Sonic games, even SMB3 or SMW are made like this.
    Not only does Spinball feature recycled art with matching palette arrangement; Knuckles' Chaotix (and Crackers) features a different engine written by someone else too, but it also happens to feature a chunk system, in 128x128 size just like Sonic 2 and 3/K. I don't think a chunk system would have been required for Spinball-styled levels, but the language is definitely not a barrier against what you can plan to program (unless we talk about, for example, CPU efficiency, which Spinball clearly lacks, so particle effects really are a bad idea here).
    This is why, although I don't see much use from it, I don't think the chances for a chunk system are about 0.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2019
  7. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Wow, you get that just by directly swapping the palettes with Metropolis'? I'm surprised that none of us ever thought of trying this before...
     
  8. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    Working on my art!
    That is spot on palette wise. I'd love to see what metropolis looks like with that purple palette.
     
  9. Zero modifications would be extremely surprising - but since it seems to be that way...
     
  10. FireRat

    FireRat

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    This is how Metropolis looks like with this palette (no match with the background palette):
    [​IMG]

    From our part, I have no news about level blocks yet. It would be interesting if there were also more similarities to Metropolis I think :P
     
  11. rata

    rata

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    Trying to be useful somehow.
    Looks kind of ok for a cyber city at night time.