Unofficial Sonic Unleashed Port

My 360 has apparently stopped working. The power brick is bright red. It's from 2008, so I have the fuckass top loading HDD. I bought the USB transfer tool off ebay just now and I have to *hope* that it's still installed on that HDD or I uninstalled it after I got my Series X. If I did, I have to figure out a way to redownload it.

 

Thats crazy, its the one Sonic game people wanted ported to work on PC and the mad lads actually did it. Ill have to try and test this later.

 

By the way, this was brilliantly announced with this stream.



Although it will probably be a minute before all of this is truly released and made available for this version, but it's a fun showcase of how surprisingly stable this can be.

 

This is really impressive! However, the only thing stopping me from going through the rigamarole of dumping my game + DLC from my basement-buried 360 is that there are apparently graphical glitches with Intel Arc GPUs. I think I'll wait a bit for bugs to be flattened before getting this going on my end...

 

Having played Unleashed recently, I feel like just playing the Generations mod that ports the daytime stages over is... a much better experience...

Still, having those levels at high resolutions and silky-smooth framerate with the original game's lighting and mechanics intact is cool, and even if other people come out of Unleashed also feeling a bit down on it like I did, at least people will be able to play it for themselves and come to that conclusion themselves instead of just wondering for eons! So I'm really happy and thankful this was done! Awesome and impressive work!!

Now only one X360/PS3 Sonic game left for a PC port........

 

Can you put your save from 360 into this decomp? I would love to... just not have to play all over again.

 

Would just a standard rip online that'd work with Xenia ever work? 99% of people don't just have a transfer cable laying around, nor the patience.

 

Online rips and ISOs work, but you didn't hear that from me
But just for the sake of not getting in any trouble, I do legally own the game:

Also tried it out myself, it's utterly bizarre playing it at 1080p 120 FPS. Doesn't change the fact that the Wherehog sucks, though. Looking forward to mods to fix literally everything.

 

Tried it as soon as it was available, Sonic fans never cease to amaze me. I was planning to do a 3D Sonic marathon but ran into a roadblock with Unleashed since Xenia wasnt working for me and I wasn't buying a new console just to play a 16 year old game.

The recomp works like a dream, and being able to turn off the Werehog battle music makes him 700% more fun to play (still sucks though). Apparently the recomp works with Hedge Mod Manager? Would the mods made to work with xenia work here?

 

I remember seeing Nerrel's video about N64 static recompilation a while back, and thinking to myself "This is the fucking future. Emulation is dead. Why don't we just do this for everything?". And while that's perhaps a bit overzealous, I do love being shown that it really can happen. I'm at work right now but I'm excited to take a look at this tonight, and see what little things I can mess around with.

I really hope this is going to be part of an arms race to port games, especially Sonic games, now that it's clearly so much more versatile than emulation. Advance 2's decomp and port will probably be the foundation for Advance 1/3 ports (and project 06 will fulfill the desires of all but the most dedicated 06 hub/story/mission/multiplayer fans), but we're still looking at Shadow, the Rush trilogy, the latter two Riders games, both Storybooks and Dream Team that are up for grabs, and that's just main canon.

Only trouble for Unleashed is it'll be a bit before all the mods I've been using on Xenia to get ported over, like the proto build physics, less annoying voicelines, not bothering with leveling and the werehog being faster and stronger. But I'm also excited to see what can be done in the future now, it's easy to get greedy. My number one hope would be a reimagining of the progression system to integrate the Wii and (revised versions of the) DLC stages so that medal hunting is replaced with just, yknow, actually playing the levels (alternatively, port the Wii temple hubs and put the medals in their little challenge puzzle areas).

My mind is spinning with the possibilities right now. The worst boost game is finally going to be redeemed.

Spoiler

EDIT: although that being said, this should be in the "Engineering and Reverse Engineering" subforum, right?

EDIT 2: Holy fuck, Hedgemodmanager already has prototype support for it! A bunch of the old emulator mods work right out of the box!

 

Unleashed has always been my favorite sonic game, I have never been happier in my life. It feels absolutely surreal to play this game at 1440p 144fps with no input lag or framedrops. Out of the box mod support too, christmas came early.

 

No matter how divisive and sectarian this fandom can get, nothing will stop the sheer ingenuity that it attracts.
This is amazing work.

 

oooooooo, this is wonderful ! I liked the game quite a bit, but I always hated the half frame rate on the 360 game. If I can figure out how to get anywhere with this, I'll spend a while playing the night stages again (and if possible, not at all the day ones...) lol

 

I'll bring this up now: static-recompilation is just another form of emulation, so don't get on your high-horses.

This is pretty exciting to see though: so many quality-of-life improvements aught to make this game way more bearable.

 

Cool, I gather you're a Steam Deck user yourself -- can you comment as to whether this is better in practice than the Xenia version one can already run on Deck?

 

Well done! This is absolutely amazing for those of us who love this game.

One thing - it's totally unplayable for me. Any time I boost, the game stutters into unplayability. Like my framerate tanks to 1 or 2. I have no idea why this is happening.

 

downloaded this on Steam Deck, it runs really well. Maybe one day SEGA will get a clue and make Sonic x Knuckles Unleashed or something

17 years later and this is still genuinely the most visually impressive 3D Sonic game ever made, these screenshots probably don't do it justice

Spoiler

 

There is Motion Blur setting which mainly work when boosting, maybe try turning it off? this port also offers enhanced version of it which they clarify that it does affect performance

 

I attempted the methods of extracting the game legitimately from my 360, both the games on demand version and a disc rip. The recommended software would not read my drive. After a bit of sailing, set up was a breeze and the game runs perfectly fine on my main rig, Ryzen 5600G + GTX 1070 + 16GB RAM. Potato laptop, Ryzen 5300U, runs at about 360 spec, just like Generations 2011 Steam.

This feels like when the Retro Engine decompilations hit. Something the fans have been begging for over a decade from Sega provided by fans themselves. Remains to be seen how Sega will respond, but they've shot themselves in the foot by not getting on it before the talented bunch here did.

Oh, and a built in option to turn the jazz band off? Superb. Improves werehog immensely.