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Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by saxman, May 9, 2023.

  1. saxman

    saxman

    Oldbie Tech Member
    I don't think it shuts the theory down. Both ideas can be true. They could have made it (rediculously) difficult while also leaking it to the press once Sonic & Knuckles was getting close to being revealed to the public as a way to create renewed interest in Sonic 3.

    I believe the latter for sure. I believe Sega knew exactly what they were doing. Those extra levels were VERY interesting when the level select was first revealed, as was being able to use debug mode to explore unseen areas of stages. For me, it created a Mortal Kombat level of mystery.

    However, I think it was unnecessary to make it difficult to enter the cheat, because who would honestly accidently enter those eight buttons, in that order, in that 1.3 second window? Nobody! I think it's more likely that it was the result of poor and rushed programming. I believe it qualifies as a bug to not register the button presses as one would normally expect.

    If Yuji Naka breaks out of jail and is able to talk to us on Twitter without being caught, maybe we'd be able to ask him about the code. I'm sure he'd have some very interesting information to share about it. Surely it wouldn't be breaking any NDAs.
     
  2. Brainulator

    Brainulator

    Regular garden-variety member Member
    @Fred actually went over this in his Sonic 3 Unlocked blog, in a post called "Once more, from the top". I'm not sure if it would be OK for me to post relevant parts here, but he explains that the problem is that some of the opening animation frames are so big, they take more than 1 frame to decompress. As a result, the game lags and controller inputs are not polled for that frame.

    I'll add that the music is slowed down alongside the visuals.
     
  3. Papa Rafi

    Papa Rafi

    One on one, I wanna play that game toniiight ♪ Oldbie
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    Detroit, Michigan, USA
    Fatherhood, husband...hood and a few mobile apps.
    This code is so complicated that back in the day when I had my cousin —whom I considered a game and code master— try to put it in for me, he concluded that the code was simply fake. This shit is so precise that you could pretty much write it off as not even being legit, it's just crazy.
    Prior to actually getting a copy of Sonic 3, this code and the lone screenshot of the level select screen as a well as a screen of MGZ were the only glimpses I had ever had of the game. I'd seen it in a magazine long before and this was the most I'd ever seen of Sonic 3 outside of the box art. I remember being amazed and perplexed at two things; the "Sonic/Miles" background that it had in common with Sonic 2 (to the point where I thought this code must have been for Sonic 2 and the magazine was mistaken...the mind and logic of a 6 year old, I tell ya) and the fact that FBZ was listed in levels in the featured screenshot. By this point I had only played the Sonic & Knuckles half (I may have even had my own copy by this point) and I was practically drooling at the idea of what the "Sonic 3 version" was like.

    Anyway, To date I've only successfully entered this code the hard way once, and that was sometime during a Winter storm in 2001, ironically when I couldn't really focus because I was on the phone. On the flip-side, outside of the Game Genie, I've always had success with the "Sonic 2 swap-cart shuffle" method, scary as it is. Never lost a save file and all my Sonic 3 and Sonic 2 cartridges still work as they should.

    I never understood why this code was so difficult — weren't these codes more or less left over developer tools? I always wondered who in the heck decided to make it so complicated and precise. The idea of it being purposefully difficult to implement in order to hide S&K leftovers makes sense, but to that point I'm wondering why it wasn't just dummied out all together. Then again, I'm not much of a programmer, especially with ASM so I'm probably way oversimplifying how simple that would've been.
     
  4. Level Zone Act

    Level Zone Act

    Member
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    It would be useful to see the Sonic Retro table of valid/invalid input frames visualised in real-time. Someone could make a video or GIF of the game's startup sequence that has red/yellow/green icons overlaid in the corner, changing colour in time with the frame number events listed in that table.

    You could also translate it into sound by generating tones on the valid input frames. (Inspired by the old claim I used to see online that the code should be input in time with the drums!)

    Then make versions of the video that are slowed down to 50% and 25%, and you'd have a helpful tool for getting the hang of the button-pressing rhythm.