[HN Gopher] Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)
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Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)
Author : tosh
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-01-03 12:37 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (info.sonicretro.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (info.sonicretro.org)
| adamrezich wrote:
| Sonic 3D Blast has a special place in my heart. one summer in
| elementary school my buddy and I were in the basement taking
| turns playing this game, and we'd just got the furthest we'd ever
| gotten, to some stage we hadn't ever seen before. my younger
| siblings were running around the basement and my sister tripped
| on the controller cord, yanking the Genesis forward, causing the
| game to crash. we were stunned--Sonic 3D Blast is pretty
| difficult, especially for a couple of kids, and it had taken
| meticulous effort to get as far as we did. we were about to
| lambast my sister for her carelessness, causing us to lose hours
| of progress (the original game has no save system), when suddenly
| the TV flickered and a blue screen exclaimed:
| C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S YOU HAVE FOUND THE SECRET
| LEVEL SELECT SCREEN
|
| there was much rejoicing, and we proceeded to check out all the
| levels we had never been able to get to, including the final
| boss. I never knew how it happened until years later I read
| something about how jiggling the cartridge can cause that to
| happen, which still seemed like black magic. it wasn't until even
| later that I found out, from the youtube channel of the guy who
| worked on the game and later this romhack, it was because the
| error interrupts (exception handlers) restart the game and jump
| to this congratulations message and level select screen:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw
| daveidol wrote:
| I think ROM hacks are such a cool thing.
|
| Childhood me never really knew about them, but it is so cool to
| see entirely new things added to old games (e.g. Super Mario 64:
| The Green Stars, or some of the Pokemon Red/Blue hacks). Maybe
| this is kinda silly, but I feel like hacks like these really
| extend the magic and mystery of that specific game "world" we
| grow to know and love inside and out after playing a game for
| years.
| makerofspoons wrote:
| This is awesome. How cool must it be to come back to a beloved
| project 20 years later and add all the stuff you wish you could
| have the first time around?
|
| I see the wiki says this was the Mega Drive version but the one
| I'm familiar with was the Saturn one. Does anyone know if they
| are different? The screenshots are familiar.
| tosh wrote:
| I think they actually run the same code (!) but the Saturn
| version has different/better graphics iirc.
| farmerbb wrote:
| Yep, the Saturn version utilized Sega's 68k assembly to C
| converter which was common for them to use when porting their
| Genesis games to platforms such as the Saturn and PC.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Note this is from 2018, it's not a new release. Still, I didn't
| know this was a thing, it's very interesting - note how the
| changes are generally to make the game much more forgiving.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I played this on PC as a kid and really did not like it. I have
| not revisited it since, but what I remember is that it felt awful
| to control. Like Sonic was underwater, which is not exactly what
| you want from Sonic. Evidently this adjusts the speed and
| movement, it will be interesting to see how it changes the game.
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Did he still have access to the source?
| laumars wrote:
| Everyone does because most games back then were written in
| assembly so the raw code is there on the ROM.
|
| Games written in C slow in comparison, as seen with Sonic
| Spinball, so I'd wager Sonic 3D would have had to be assembly
| too given the technical achievements involved in that game.
|
| There's some YouTube videos from various developers of that era
| and you can see them stepping through the assembly of those
| games too.
| mrob wrote:
| A disassembly of the ROM is not the same as the source code
| because it's missing the human-readable labels for memory
| addresses. It's more like the source code after using an
| obfuscator to remove variable and function names.
| [deleted]
| laumars wrote:
| Technically yes. But it's still usable on a platform like
| the Mega Drive / Genesis and it's how ROM hackers would
| generally work.
|
| They might still have the original code though given they
| wrote the game. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if they
| just worked off the ROM instead.
| joneholland wrote:
| The guy is actually the cofounder of the studio that wrote the
| game (Travelers tales)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I know, but that doesn't mean he was allowed to leave the
| company with source code.
| tombert wrote:
| I think he must, because on his YouTube channel he'll show
| different development iterations and "what if" scenarios
| throughout the games he has worked on. I suspect that he cannot
| legally release the code, so he had to do the Director's Cut as
| a ROMHack where you supply your own copy.
| spicybright wrote:
| This was done by someone on the original team who went back to
| fix these things.
|
| He has a fantastic youtube channel documenting lots of tricks and
| facts about games he's worked on.
|
| There's a ton of old-school programming cleverness that you just
| don't see now a days!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/GameHut
| Grazester wrote:
| He was not part of Sonic Team. He was part of Traveller's
| Tales. That was a British studio who was contracted to do some
| Sonic games. This game and Sonic R.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > This game and Sonic R.
|
| Ouch.
| tombert wrote:
| I think you see cleverness in coding still, certainly in the
| distributed space I'll find insanely clever stuff on occasion,
| but I mostly agree that the "optimizing for every single bit of
| memory and shifting between five different palates to spoof
| monochrome animation" days are mostly over. I think this is
| largely a good thing, as it makes programming more accessible
| to people who don't have the ability to figure out every bit of
| minutia involved with a CPU (particularly since modern CPUs are
| ridiculously complicated!), but I will admit that occasionally
| I do love seeing old-school tricks to stretch out memory and
| make systems do things that they have no right to be doing.
|
| My favorite "wtf how is this possible" classic game will
| probably always be the SNES port of DOOM. It's definitely among
| the worst ways of playing DOOM _now_ , but for a port to the
| SNES, even with the SuperFX chip assisting it, it really does
| not feel like that should have been possible.
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| Mostly, yes indeed. Partial counter-example though, Jon on
| his Coding Secrets channel demonstrates how to achieve PS5
| effects on lesser hardware, so maybe on PS4 for example. This
| [0] Ratchet and Clank example focussed on debunking marketing
| hype that certain effects were only possible on PS5 SSD.
|
| An obvious other counter would be 3D engine development
| (Unity, Unreal) where the developers of those engines will be
| employing some obscure seeming low level stuff to make this
| look good. Not to be unclear though I'm 100% in agreement
| that for most devs, those days are mostly over. [0]
| https://youtu.be/5XOV3pZj8rI
| Beldin wrote:
| > _My favorite "wtf how is this possible"_
|
| Mine are from the demo scene. Second Reality, free-flying in
| 3D in a time where running Doom taxed machines.
|
| The 8088MHz demo: 1024 colors on CGA.
|
| 64Kb demo generating really good mountain landscape.
|
| That sort of thing.
| tombert wrote:
| Just looked it up...holy crap! I didn't think it was
| possible to get that level of color depth in CGA.
| piercebot wrote:
| Are there any copyright concerns around doing this kind of thing?
| Surely SEGA will come after him for providing this as a free
| download?
| wk_end wrote:
| It's provided as a patch - you still need to procure the
| original ROM yourself (legally or otherwise, but that's on
| you). Someone more knowledgable in copyright law can discuss
| the specifics, but AFAIK this is totally legal. It hasn't been
| any kind of problem for the ROM hacking scene so far, anyway.
| reificator wrote:
| It's distributed as a patch file, and also he founded and
| currently serves as director of the company that originally
| developed the game. I think he'll be fine.
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(page generated 2022-01-05 23:00 UTC)