The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

By the looks of it, the wings, tail, and head of the bird, and the fins of the fish are hand drawn
So they were probably even simpler to render, being modified spheres.

 

All of Sonic 1's graphics were drawn by hand (this was confirmed in an interview somewhere) - it was meant to look 3D, without actually being 3D.

Sonic 2 had some pre-rendered art, which IIRC was all done by Tim Skelly: the corkscrews in Emerald Hill, the nets in Metropolis, and the Special Stage tube - elements that were presumably quite difficult to draw. I've no idea what he used, though the fact they only turned up in a few places suggests it was a tricky workflow.

SGI workstations were used for Sonic 3, but at this point in history it wouldn't have been super unusual for big software developers. However, in 1990's Japan before Sega were raking in the cash... this stuff wouldn't have been viable. Even if you had some expensive CAD machines on-site, the process of turning the drawings into raster images that can be used in games sounds like a nightmare.

 

Could you elaborate? Do you mean that the GameCube ports aren't just ports when it comes to the Chao Garden?

 

this is correct. The way progression and stats play out (and also, stats aren't visible outside the VMU) is different, though I can't tell you specifics atm. I know Chao Island talks about them. For instance, the units of increase (decimals vs percent) and traits given by animals are different.

 

SA2 expanded upon SA's Chao Garden a fair bit. It introduced alignments, more stats, the kindergarten, and so on.

SA2B is based off of SA2DC, although with additions like the skill display on pickup, whistling to call your chao, the Black Market, and other changes. SADX is based off of SA2B's Chao Garden (albeit with some removed features like Chaos Drives and the Chao Kindergarten) - so comparing SADC and SADX's Chao Gardens is essentially comparing two whole different games. SA2DC and SA2B are closer, but there's still some major differences in how you can raise your chao in terms of what's available, glitches, etc.

I don't know the specifics, unfortunately, but there's a quick overview here that goes over the main differences.

 

That page is only scratching the surface. It doesn't even cover the fact stats were overhauled in SA2B, or the introduction of grades.

 

The biggest difference between the dreamcast and gamecube chao mechanics is that stats are modified directly in the dreamcast games when you give a chao a drive or animal. There isn't the experience system as on the gamecube where you give each stat a certain amount of experience from each animal and then it increases; this is tied to the noted level system for stat values. While on the one hand this means that stat changes are easier to intuit on the dreamcast, you can in fact decrease stats by giving animals to the chao, whereas in the gamecube version you only lower, in effect, the experience to reach the next level of a stat.

The hidden stats (luck and intelligence) are changed by different means in SA2, as both are tied to events in the VMU game Chao Adventure 2, which is underappreciated for how delightfully strange it is

 

I couldn't stand the Chao system in SA2DC, I had to download Tyro's Chao Editor to even get all the Chao emblems

 

Haha, I never got all the Emblems in SA2, DC or GC, because of those damn Chao race emblems. I think I just used an action replay eventually to play Green Hill.

I initially was like "I'm gonna play Chao Garden on Sonic Advance to get a Chao at super high stats!", forgetting that I need to unlock the Hero & Dark gardens, so I still need to do a LOT to unlock a Chao of either of those.

 

I was working on my own disassembly of Sonic 1, and I got to the code that handles Labyrinth Zone's wind tunnels. It uses a table of 4 words, consisting of a start X and Y position, and an end X and Y position (So you don't re enter the tunnel). And with the way it's set up it only allows for 1 wind tunnel per act (Although there's hard coded exceptions elsewhere). But there's another set of coordinates that go unused, just before where the table itself is addressed.

So where does this wind tunnel point?

It's the first wind tunnel in LZ!
So if it's not used, then how does the wind tunnel work here?
Well it's one of those hard coded exceptions I mentioned, in this instance it's handled by the door at the entrance of the tunnel.

Now I don't think this was a limitation of the fact that the table could only have 1 wind tunnel per act, but rather a design choice. I believe that initially it wasn't planned to have a door there and the tunnel would automatically pull in players, which it was decided that that was unfriendly, especially since the player would still be adjusting to the water physics and the gimmicks around them. So to ease them into using the wind tunnel gimmick, they gave the player agency by locking it behind the door, which then required the wind tunnel code to be written inside the object itself.

It's always neat to me uncovering the design process through context clues like this!

 

Pretty sure that maxing out stats in Tiny Chao Garden would have taken far more work and time that unlocking the Hero and Dark gardens.

Even maxing out stats in SA2 itself would have been faster.

 

Right? Unlocking the Hero and Dark Gardens is no effort whatsoever. Spend 30 seconds petting a baby chao as a character from the alignment you want, leave the game idle whilst you go have some dinner, come back and you're done.

 

The Preview prototype of Sonic Unleashed (August build) contains a lot of very early DLC stages:
These include:

• Windmill Isle Day Act 4 (No terrain and a copy of Act 3 layout) :
  
  
• Savannah Citadel Day Act 4 :
  
  
• Savannah Citadel Night Act 4 :
  
  
  ^This one seems to have been split from the main act 1, as the name is "
  ActN_AfricaEvil_Bao_20080619", instead of "ActN_SubAfrica_03"as it is in the DLC, and it also contains an object layout behind the start of stage that somewhat matches up with the terrain of Act 1 ( I placed the set file for "Act 4" over the Act 1 Set file:
  
  ^ Also Eggman's base at the end of Act 1 seems way too enlarged, and keeps popping out of view, where as it's location at the end of Act 4 seems much more reasonable: (Also the platform Act 4 ends on here is unused in the DLC stage)
  
  
• Cool Edge Day Act 3, which crashes
• Cool Edge Day Act 4:
  
• Cool Edge Night Act 2:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXy6v8aLFWk
• Rooftop Run Day Act 4:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxrRExPIoQQ
• Rooftop Run Day Act 5:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEvfmiSdtfo
• Rooftop Run Night Act 2: (Crashes near start):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHvyonR3pO0
• Dragon Road Day Act 4: Crashes
• Dragon Road Day Act 5:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fk3ciO7iY
• Dragon Road Night Act 1 (Beta Section):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZazFkREhe4
  ^ The "Beta section" seems more complete than the main act 1, the beta Section layout would become the DLC act 1-2
• Dragon Road Night Act 3:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X4NR6Bm780

Playlist for all the stages: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl1hIsOweJuxxJF_eX5bJzS9d0Ef1Fu2I

(Also sorry for all the edits, I accidentally published this too early)

 

Most of these are already documented on the wiki, but adding the new info you found would be much appreciated.

 

Guess I missed that, and I just created an entire page on TCRF: https://tcrf.net/Proto:Sonic_Unleas.../Preview_Prototype_(Disc_1)/Stage_Differences
Well at least we have recordings of the stages now.
I also found something else interesting in the Prototype, the Final Hotdog mission option translates to "Hard Trail"

Which implies the unused hard mode layouts were to be accessed via hotdog missions.
Also speaking of the Hardmode layouts, they aren't entirely unused, as many were repurposed for missions, and the layouts continue out of bounds.

Edit: I've added info to the comparison page

 

I finally found a post on Sonic Adventure 1’s in-game website from early 2000 about cheating on the world ranking boards that I vaguely remembered:

"Thank you for your participation in the Sonic Adventure community.
Recently, it has been discovered that a non-standard controller sold in some parts of the world allows players to move slightly faster than those using standard Dreamcast controllers. (This is due to different analog output values in the non-standard controller.)

In order to keep the World Rankings fair for contestants worldwide, we ask that all participants only use standard Dreamcast controllers in all future competitions. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Also, for future World Ranking events, we will select competitive events and stages very carefully, to minimize any differences caused by the use of non-standard controllers.

We ask for your cooperation in making sure that Sonic players worldwide can enjoy these competitions.”

Always wondered what it’s talking about exactly, I’d guess it’s either referring to the the controllers having a higher maximum tilt value above 100% and the Dreamcast somehow allowing it and affecting movement speed/acceleration or that the maximum range on the standard controller was actually less than 100% and the third party ones didn’t have that issue. Cant recall ever seeing this explained or mentioned in bugs and speedrunning guides.

 

I think it's more like the Dreamcast control stick natively just doesn't reach the maximum range it could - not a real number but let's say "85%". This third party controller probably doesn't have a regard for that so it registers higher values the further it goes, maybe "95%", and that's a problem because the developers probably didn't think they'd need to limit the speed values themselves, but were designing with those limits in mind.


As for how the differences feel, I think it's possible it's actually a lot like the movement you'll get on the PC version. If you play SADX on Dolphin and then play it on the PC with the input mod, it feels not insignificantly faster on PC, where Dolphin I think is putting limits trying to maintain accuracy.

 

Oh my god I actually know the answer to this one
Okay so basically, the Dreamcast analog stick's deadzone is a literal circle, as in it's perfectly set to be elliptical. Most controllers including third party controllers don't do this, they handle the stick like most deadzones i.e. go anywhere in the box. But the Dreamcast wasn't designed to go outside the circle in the box, so anything diagonal (that is, outside the circle's range) is interpreted as a much bigger input.
This causes Amy to easily go fast and it looks very weird in action. Dreamcastify covered this https://dreamcastify.unreliable.network/index.php/miscellaneous/

 

Thanks I wasn’t expecting to see a answer to this so fast, that’s really wild explains why the controls have felt off on Dreamcast emulators too.

 

So a little bunny told me that something amiss in the land of Ekkusu was brewing



So a post on X claims that North America had a different shade of Dreamcast and that it was just like how Sega's logo was more cerulean in Japan. Now, obviously with us folk it's easy to check the internet and find that the Japanese and American models are more or less the exact same outside of Designed for being changed to Compatible with, courtesy of Adam Koralik who had a video that conveniently had both models next to each other.

But I have a Canadian Dreamcast, and the main differences there is there's a Industry Canada sticker on the modem. Since we never got Sonic Colours over here, I wanted to compare my console with a photo of a Japanese console. So I took a photo of my console and put them side by side.



They're the same. Outside of the nearly 25-year old grime on the buttons, of course.