Monday, May 1, 2017

Welcome to Sonic 3 Unlocked!

Updated every weekday, this blog aims to catalog all sorts of minutiae about the 1994 titles Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, be it easter eggs, oversights, or just how certain effects are accomplished under the various hardware and software constraints.

If there’s a particular subject or question you’d like to see answered, please leave a comment on this post. I have enough material to keep this train going for a while, but you might come up with something I hadn’t considered. Either way, your input will surely influence which topics I talk about first.


Why did I decide to start this blog? Well, the classic Sonic trilogy is my favorite video game series of all time. For the longest time, I followed the Sonic hacking and speedrunning communities as they digged deeper and deeper into what makes these games tick. I finally got into hacking with Sonic 3 Complete, originally just offering suggestions and tweaking various graphics stuff.

I soon got ambitious in what I wanted to do, and started messing with the split disassembly and reading the game’s code. I moved onto fixing bugs and developing new features, tremendously increasing my knowledge about the game and appreciation for what it does behind the scenes. Eventually the things I wanted to do no longer lined up with what Sonic 3 Complete was doing, so I decided to take a break.

Thinking what my next project should be, I realized the value of documenting what I had learned thus far. TCRF is a great resource for unused content in video games, but the scope is too narrow. Sonic Retro is good for sharing bugs and code snippets, but not suitable for the volume of information I wanted to share. I considered doing a video series, inspired by pannenkoek2012’s SM64 analysis, but realized 90% of the work would be video recording and editing.

Instead, I turned to programmer blogs. The episodic format allows individual topics to be discussed in their own post, over time forming a large resource that’s nonetheless easy for new readers to get into. In particular, Raymond Chen’s blog The Old New Thing manages to blend technical knowledge and real life anecdotes into a compelling narrative style that I can only hope to one day imitate.

On a more personal note, I'm not the world's most confident writer, and I obsess over details, so posting regularly on this blog will be a fun way to exercise that part of my brain.

Thanks for reading, and hope to have you along for the ride!

3 comments:

  1. Seeing the work you have achieved in Complete, this blog will be Outstanding!

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  2. An interesting thing for you to look in too: Why is it that, sometimes when going too fast in Marble Garden Zone Act 2 between the normal area and the earthquake areas where the background is solid, does the game decide to boot into the Blue Sphere game out of nowhere? It's rather infrequent, but it can happen on both Sonic/Tails and Knuckles' paths.

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  3. Going back through your archives, and here's an idea you could look into sometime. You could compare how Sonic 3's physics and mechanics were implemented in Sonic Advance. On the surface, they seemed REALLY close in that game, and I've always been interested in learning how much of the Genesis programming was able to be transferred over.

    You might have covered this one, but I also recall a glitch where Sonic will very briefly change to a different color, just after turning Super. It _may_ have just been an emulator bug circa 2000, but I've been playing Complete so long that it's hard to remember. Any insight on this?

    Finally, and again, apologies if you've covered this, but have you ever talked about how the various cheats were implemented? I'd love to learn the details of why entering Sonic 2's level select code and hotswapping the cartridge works, AND why it's so much easier than entering Sonic 3's _actual_ cheat. I seem to recall it having something to do with the FMV meaning the Genesis doesn't check the input on every frame, so maybe you have covered that one...

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