Why wasn't Sonic CD featured in Sonic Mega Collection Plus?

Gems Collections was likely already in early production by the time it came out.

 

It's there in the list on protos, which means they tried too. The only logical reason would be that they couldn't emulate it. GEMS Collection of CD and R are PC ports for that reason probably.

That's also why it's speculated that Chaotix was supposed to be there and couldn't make the cut for GEMS.

 

Wasn't Chaotix available to stream on Gametap? Does anyone know if that was a port or an emulator?

 

The solution they used for these two was emulation. "Using the PC version" is not emulation requires porting. Which is what they did in GEMS Collection.

 

That's actually what Sonic Gems Collection is. Those unlockable "demos" of all the Genesis and Game Gear games in Gems' Museum are all the full game ROMs, just save stated to put you up against the final boss/level.

 

Yeah, no. Gems is just the other half of Mega Collection Plus. The GameGear games that aren't on Gems are on MC+ plus other games that aren't aren't Sonic, so Vectorman, etc. just wasn't "slapped on" to compensate.

It was emulation.

 

So they did have a working emulator for it. Good to know.

 

This doesn't address the Plus version, but it does offer internal insight as to why Sonic CD wasn't in the original (which could also extend to the later multiplatform versions).

From Pachuka of Sonic CulT, who was a tester at SOA when Mega Collection came out in 2002.

So presumably, they were attempting only the Sega CD version, and when that went to hell, for Gems they just said fuck it and ported the PC version instead.

 

So they could get Genesis sound working okay, they could get Mega Collection's streaming audio working fine, but they couldn't get the Sega CD's streaming audio working? Then again, being developed in 2001-2002, this would be coming off of that lovely Sega Smash Pack on the Dreamcast. And I'm thinking Sega CD emulation on PCs was still kind of hit-and-miss at the time. Corrections are welcome though.

I remember blank empty spaces where the barcodes would be on the covers, but not much else beyond that. What else was there?

 

Does line up with what I've seen. Even Switch was just a remake instead of a emulation


"hellooooooo i'm some asshole from the internet" Get out of my fucking head!

 

This thing:


On Mega Collection, it looks like this:

 

I mean obviously getting the streaming audio working at all isn't terribly hard given that there had been plenty of GC and PS2 games out at that point, but managing to do stuff like pause, fade, or stop a stream and load and then play a new one as a result of *interpreting sega cd commands* isn't necessarily a trivial one, especially since the operations are mediated by a bespoke IC.

 

I have a very old memory of this being discussed on Sonic Stadium back in the day.

And I want to say it's something as mundane as "They couldn't solve some of the porting problems in time. It was so close to working but just missed the cut."

I can't remember who said it, be it aauk or someone who was on QA back then.

But it really was something as mundane as "The games need to be in working order by X date".

X date came and CD wasn't working as it should. It was close but just missed the deadline.

 

This is before the days of dedicated porting houses like M2 and Digital Eclipse having built up a big library of solid cross platform commercial emulators for this sort of thing. So they're building an emulator in house presumably on a very tight schedule, and emulating the mega cd is a pain in the butt. I don't blame them for dropping it, when the payoff is only one extra game. All just a big guess of course, but it seems the most likely explanation to me.