Sonic 1 and 2 getting the Sonic CD treatment by Taxman and Stealth

But they weren't scarred by harder games like megaman ( or 99% of the NES catalogue)...I will never understand :specialed:

 

Mega Man's not hard, it just has some moments that take a little bit of concentration.
Sonic 2 GG is medium difficulty with a sudden spike at the first boss fight that was - as stated above - made stupid-hard by the smaller screen size and the random bounce pattern.

Keeping this on-topic(-ish), it'd be like if after Emerald Hill Zone Act 2 you were taken to a short act without rings and placed against the Metropolis boss

 

I recommended the Sonic 2 remake to a friend at work, he has a Sony android tablet S model, but it's an older model. Would his device be okay running the game? He said he downloaded it but it just hangs when downloading (or maybe it was when booting - I'll double check) - is this a compatibility issue?

 

I'm curious as to how some of the 1 player elements of levels work on 2P VS mode. Can you still trigger earthquakes or rising water by yourself? And how does that affect the other player?

Also by all levels, does that mean Hidden Palace and the three final single act levels too? Which Metropolis acts are played?

 

It's not all levels, actually it ends right at Oil Ocean zone

 

Just tested Hill Top Zone, as I was curious too. The Earthquake and Lava Rising sections are replaced with alternate paths.

 

Levels that had specific triggers like in Hill Top just have a bunch of platforms in place to compensate for the lack of lava.

Also there's no water in Chemical Plant 2.

 

So I got to play the Android version on a friend's tablet.

Spoiler

Man, I am so pissed at myself for looking up how to find Hidden Palace zone. If I just looked at the select select after beating the game, it would've been so obvious to me. >_>

Though at that point, I was filled with frustration trying to beat the last boss with touch screen controls. I'm so bad at touch screen controls that I died four times in Sky Chase. Fucking Sky Chase of all levels. But anyways, I'm really impressed with the work put into this version of the game and I loved the work that went into Hidden Palace Zone. I can only hope a similar version will release on consoles and PC at some point. But however long that takes, I don't care as long as the quality is as good as the Android version. The PC version of Sonic CD seemed half assed compared to the Android version. :/ I like my sharp pixels so that version really bugs me. Any chance an updated version of Sonic CD will come out at some point for PC?

 

Interesting. This means it might be possible to port all these levels back to the Mega Drive's Vs mode.

 

Having a now official tweaked layout helps, though there's still the problem that the Mega Drive can't process half the graphics for the other levels. Hill Top was the nearest to running properly and even then it had issues with stuff such as the lifts (disappear mid way) and important items not being activated or invisible.

 

Wouldn't that last issue be fixed by just using Sonic 3's object engine, though?

 

Hi :v:

 

inb4 speedrunning general gets revived
(pls pls pls)

 

Why not? you guys seem to be butting heads over times, might as well do it in the official topic.

 

Special level events and water aren't the only things inhibiting other levels from being included in 2P vs on the Genesis; there's also the special requirement to use double-height interlace mode

Sonic 2 gets the vertical resolution to display two screens stacked on top of each other by switching to interlace mode 2 which effectively renders a 320x448 screen image. It doesn't only double the vertical size of the screen, but also the tiles used to draw it, so you'll be working with 8x16 tiles instead of 8x8. Not that this is not an increase in storage, you still have the same 64K VRAM area. This is only an increase in the amount of data that is read as a single tile, and thus, the size of a single tile displayed on-screen. Also, tile IDs as understood in the regular 320x224 mode are "cut in half". What would usually be an odd-numbered 8x8 tile, such as tile 1 (starting with tile 0) can not be read as the start of an 8x16 tile. 8x16 tile 1 would start at the same VRAM location as 8x8 tile 2

In terms of Sonic 2's level data, the 16x16 blocks that are usually 2x2 grids of 8x8 tiles become 2x1 grids of 8x16 tiles; basically, only the entries representing the upper two 8x8 tiles are used for tile ID, palette ID, draw priority, and draw direction. This means that the graphic data for the bottom-left 8x8 tile within a 16x16 block, for example, must be stored in VRAM immediately after the graphic data for the upper-left 8x8 tile (if it's not, the lower-left 8x8 portion of the 16x16 tile will use the data for the tile that is stored immediately after the data for the upper-left tile because it is all treated as one tall 8x16 tile), and when drawn, it will be drawn with the same high/low draw priority and palette line as the upper-left 8x8 tile. Also, if the upper-left tile uses vertical flip, not only will that tile be flipped, but the lower-left tile will be flipped as well, and they will both have traded places (the lower-left tile will be drawn upside-down and above the upper-left tile, as if the entire block had been flipped).

Most levels in Sonic 2 are designed only for single-player mode, and their graphics don't conform to these requirements. If they did, there would be fewer unique tiles in those levels, because in single-player mode, 8x8 patterns can be arranged freely (within the 16x16 blocks) whereas the 8x16 tile mode would require duplicate data (multiple occurrences of any given 8x8 pattern) to produce the same images. Even if you were to get around the tedium of manually rearranging the data to conform to this by creating something to automate the process (SonED2 can do this :P), you still have to deal with the fact that not only will this corrupt 16x16 blocks that use vertical flip on some tiles or different priority and/or palette settings between the tiles on the top row and the ones on the bottom, but it will also immensely increase the size of the overall tile data. When a level already tries to squeeze the most tile and sprite graphic data as possible into the available space, it just plain wouldn't fit after conversion

This is why the levels that aren't included in the final 2P mode in the Genesis version look corrupt when you enable 2P in the prototypes or try to force it in the final (and also why most tiles in HTZ don't look corrupt- it draws from exactly the same tile data as EHZ, but also loads a small patch on top of it). It's also why GHZ had corrupt sprite graphics in the early prototype- the level graphics were converted for 2P mode, and overflowed into the space that was used for sprites

Tiles for sprites also become 8x16 in interlace mode 2. That's why sprites for non-2P levels look corrupt when 2P mode is forced, and why the Genesis hardware sprite format reads tiles by column instead of by row

Naturally, bitmap sprite blitting means that we wouldn't have those problems even in a scenario when we did have a split-screen mode :P

 

Wow, thanks for the explanation. No wonder why Sonic 3 just ditched the idea altogether in favor of the extra Competition levels.


+ - Which would be awesome to play in full-resolution, by the way..   .

 

Can I add someone here on Game Center to help me get the achievement? Everytime I quick search a game... the other user disconnects on me before we can even start the game... judging by the avatars, they're kids. Who knew?

 

It could be that you and they are using two different versions of iOS. It seems that the GameCenter API doesn't like that, at least when one side is pre-7, which causes a disconnect when the match is made

 

Well then. Lemme rephrase that. Can someone else Pre-iOS7 please add me and we can play real quick? lhsxcountrychamp