The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

The vocal samples featured in the background track to the initial Sonic 2006 TGS trailer, (0:50 onward), eventually also get used in the Wave Ocean (Water's Edge) (2:12 onward) track in the final game. They seem to be pitched up by some amount in the Wave Ocean track compared to the TGS trailer, but it's cool that they survived into the final game.

I've never actually seen this documented anywhere before, but I have no idea if this would have any place in the Retro wiki other than a trivia section, which are generally frowned upon, so I guess it can just go in this thread for now.

 

It would go on a development page under music I suppose.

 

Guys, am I seeing things?


Poor boy.

 

Ah, the ps3 version of sonic mania was always a favourite of mine

 

Have people got Mania running on the PS3? They made it run on the Wii U

 

It was a weird decision to map the up button to running right.

 

This is true to the best of my memory. I was wondering why my first experience with Unleashed was renting the Wii version as opposed to buying it on Xbox. Now I remember that this was the case.

I just checked and my first achievement was December 1st. It does seem like a long time after release for me to get a Sonic game, but I was 13 so it’s not like I could get it myself.

It’s funny to see how hard I fell off the game. I got the air boost achievement on December 6th of 2008, and then the next achievement (S Rank) wasn’t until May 2010. Then the last achievement I got until getting an Xbox again for Frontiers was the Lightspeed Dash one a few days later. So I only completed 4 continents over the course of 1.5 years before I ended up buying the game again and beating it for PS3 last year. Maybe it was just a matter of me reaching an age where it didn’t have the same cool factor, but it’s interesting that I didn’t even beat it. I also didn’t beat Colors until two years ago or so despite owning it from day 1. Unleashed did finally capture me during the platinum process this summer though and I’m glad it did. It was the first thing I downloaded when I got the Series X.

 

I know for a fact I got the game on release (as I have for every Sonic game since Heroes) and my earliest Achievement is dated Nov 21, 2008

 

Sonic Jam on the Game.com was announced and advertised before they knew what it was going to look like.

https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:Gamecom_US_Catalogue.pdf&page=6

Once upon a time it was a conversion of Sonic 3D. Except it wasn't.

One of many false truths in this catalogue.

 

The advertising copy doesn't match the released game either, "Play classic levels from Sonic 1, 2 and Sonic & Knuckles", but the final game uses Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, with no Sonic 1 content.

 

I was playing Generations with mods and I noticed something interesting. Classic Sonic’s fire shield dash is technically boosting. I noticed using the Frontiers HUD mod that keeps the boost bar by Sonic like frontiers, and it pops up when Fire dashing and you actually lose boost.

 

Didn't know where else to dump this tidbit:

US Netflix has Sonic X 1-52 in (multi-language) dubbed form.
Like 2/3 of the episodes use their Japanese titles.
And there's a smorgasbord of subtitle options including… Japanese? For international edited episodes?

*confused Tim Allen noises*

 

Sonic Channel has started a thing where you can vote which characters appear in their new over-the-top mini comic series. It's entirely in Japanese, but doesn't look like it requires deeper understanding of the language. This month you can vote for Infinite or Cream.


Looks fun!

 

I'm sorry if this is old news, but I've looked everywhere and haven't seen anyone talking about this, so I figured I'd post this here.
Apparently there's some kind of Sonic Frontiers promotional material being given to some people from gaming networks like Shacknews, and something that really caught my eye was this particular item:

(even though this is promotional material publicly posted on YouTube, it contains spoilers from the game, so be warned)

Spoiler

It's a map of Kronos Island with some hidden messages only visible with UV light, here's a transcript of all of them:

Spoiler

"I believe in us, we won't let it happen again."
"Lesson #4: We arrived."
"We will endure, even as dreams."
"Our hopes lie in the dream. Our hearts lie in the Koco. Our bodies lie in the earth."
"Sunrise. Till the fields. Sunset. Well earned rest."
"Lesson #6: It followed."
"We are castaways. You are our inheritors."
"Lesson #7: We fought."
"We will endure with the chaotic power."

This is pure speculation, but I think there may be other Press Kit mystery boxes with more "Lessons" and messages scattered across the maps. Maybe there's a separate box variant for each island map. Again, sorry if this is already known information.

 

That's interesting... And I hate it. I hate it when publishers do marketing stunts like this, it always feels like they're just holding things back from the players.

 

it really is weird how that single image transcends the film it's from, which is arguably even more out there than the image itself.
(Not in a bad way, obviously)

 

Someone on Twitter found an ancient Sonic Crane game at Mitsui Greenland, an amusement park in Kumamoto, Japan. Curiously, it plays music from Sonic 1 minus the DAC and PSG channels: https://xcancel.com/dizzydennis/status/1601436235884417029

 

I dunno, I can definitely hear something replacing the drums when the camera is close to the 'prize out' flap. I guess it's using weak tinny FM drums instead of the usual DAC drums.

As a Sonic sound engine nerd, this has me wondering how exactly the crane game is playing that audio. I doubt it's just playing PCM recordings since the data for that would be unreasonably large, and yet it sounds accurate to the original music, so I imagine it must be using a proper YM2612/YM3438. In the Mega Drive, the PSG was part of the VDP (video chip), so I guess it's not surprising that that's missing here... though I'm sure discrete PSG chips were used in consoles like the Master System.

As for the audio format itself, since the music sounds so close to the original (minus the PSG channels and the proper DAC drum samples), it can't just be a recreation, so it must be derived from the original SMPS song data. While the music data in this case could just be a series of raw YM2612 commands (just like the '.vgm' file format), I think it's more likely that it's using SMPS. The question then is how: packing a 68k into a crane game sounds like a bit much, so maybe it's using a Z80, which I assume would have been much cheaper than a 68k at the time. That could explain why the DAC drums have been replaced with FM drums: DAC drums were a feature unique to the 68k version of SMPS, while the Z80 version of SMPS exclusively used FM drums for much of its existence. According to ValleyBell (the 'GameList_Year.txt' file in his SMPS Research Pack), games using a version of SMPS Z80 that could play DAC samples only started appearing in 1991, so there's a chance that the DAC-capable version of SMPS Z80 wasn't available at the time this crane game was made.

Additionally, DAC samples are PCM (which, as I said earlier, take up a lot of space), and, assuming that the crane game has a Z80 with the same amount of RAM that it does in a Mega Drive (8KiB), then there likely wasn't enough room in the Z80's RAM to fit SMPS's code, variables, the music data, and the DAC samples, which offers another possible explanation for why the drums were changed from DAC to FM.

It might be possible to tell if the driver is SMPS 68k or SMPS Z80 just by listening to the music: believe it or not, the two versions of SMPS actually behave slightly differently, leading to music and SFX sometimes sounding different between them. Perhaps the most infamous is the 'note-rest-duration-duration' behaviour, which can cause audible notes to become silent (in SMPS 68k) or silent notes to become audible (in SMPS Z80).

If you listen to Scrap Brain Zone's music playing in that video, you can hear an extra note at 0:40 that isn't there in the original game. However, this doesn't seem to be caused by the 'note-rest-duration-duration' quirk, as there is no silent note (rest) there in the original music data. Instead, it appears that the original, really long, note was split into two shorter notes for some reason. I wish I could think of a good reason why.

 

That's a UFO SegaSonic - there's a fair number of these around, and yes that machine has been modified (or not - it's always difficult to know exactly what setups Sega were willing to sell people).

It was released after the Mega Drive game.