It apparently is right - and, best off - this page includes source. IMHO, this is the best jumping point if anyone seriously wants to pick up serious Chaotix reverse engineering. We definitely need a disassembly to get started. I can definitely lend *some* hours to it; but I can’t promise a ton of time, as much as I’d love to contribute. btw - drx’s 32X port does *not* really make much actual use of the 32X hardware - IIRC it was a proof of concept mostly designed to create a decent 32X tool chain and example port. All this shit is 15 years ago for me, but SH2 assembly *isn’t*, as I am currently engaged in various Saturn homebrew tasks. If anyone here is interested in a real Chaotix disassembly, and has the knowledge and time to make it a real thing, please hit me up. I myself would *love* to see a combi-free hack - a true ‘Sonic 4’; as it were - from Chaotix - but it’s totally dependent on us getting in there and modifying routines to make it work. I’m definitely happy to help, there - but again it’s just a disassembly that we need. There are - unfortunately - not a lot of resources (fine, practically none) on the obscure field of 32X development in particular. There’s gotta be a bunch of good old Genesis ASM in there, but there’s also gotta be a bunch of SH2 code - that’s where all that scaling, etc; has to come from. If we could tear apart and rebuild Chaotix in a meaningful way - we could do stuff like add Tails (with actual tails, the tail behaviour is what prevented JJFTails from porting Tails to start), kill the combi system (we’d have to seriously redesign levels so they could be beaten, but that won’t realistically be too difficult) - and improve things like the awful transitions, etc. I don’t even know if it would make anyone in the community happier than me. I’ve been obsessed with this game for *way* too many years. The attention Chaotix is getting here is enough to call this sleeping beast into action, as long as we’ve got a couple people on it, even another one or two. EDIT: This site is realistically one of the only / best examples I could even find online for homebrew 32X development.
Sadly I can't help much with disassembly, but if someone ever creates a solid map editing tool for the game, I'd be interested in seeing ways to tweak the stages to be friendly to a more combi-free experience. Since every character (save Heavy and Bomb) either has flight or wall climbing abilities, that may help a lot in giving people the ability to still scale stages in the game. After all, there are decent chunks of the game where you can be without your partner if you take a hit without rings, so there may be less un-passable areas without Combi than one might think. Mind you, I don't even hate the Combi system. I think it's a fascinating mechanic once you master it and a skilled speedrunner can use it in some amazing ways. It's 100% momentum based, so it's still in line with what makes Genesis era Sonic fun too. I just wanted to suggest the hack as it'd be a neat way to play the title, similar to the Time Travel changes we've seen in Sonic CD. (Also, if you haven't been following the Sonic CD mod scene recently, you should go back and look again. Lots of cool stuff being released this past month. Miracle forms with time travel abilities, Better &Knuckles Mods, Playable Mighty, and more! https://gamebanana.com/games/6108 ) Edit: Actually, after looking over the maps. Very little tweaking would be required to make the stages beatable without Combi. At most, you just need to place a few springs in certain spots to make traveling upwards without combi-throw easier. It's that simple. And even without springs you could just argue those pathways as Knuckles or Charmy only routes.
I imagine it wouldn't take a lot to make the stages not require the combi-rings to be beatable, but I think there's still a distinction between "beatable" and "fun" here. Putting springs and launchers everywhere would just automate areas intended to slingshot your character up a slope (or throw them to a higher level). That'd just make the level design even more uninteresting. Making these stages "fun" would probably require creating a few more tiles. Each stage's tileset seems to mostly just be built for flat stretches, walls, ramps and halfpipes. There'd need to be some crafty artists that could make or repurpose more interesting chunks for the levels; like loops and varying sizes of slopes. And also maybe some tweaking to the physics so it doesn't feel so.. weird. Man, there's a lot to do to make Chaotix into a fun experience.
