Yea, frame rate issues on the decomp versions of the Retro Engine are mainly a thing because the games are rendered entirely in software, with the GPU only handling scaling of the engine's internal 424x240 framebuffer to fit the screen. This is a bit of a double-edged sword; it means that the Retro Engine is pretty easy to port to consoles, since draw calls don't need to be rewritten, but it also means performance will take a hit. This is especially noticeable in the 3DS/Vita ports of the decomps, with special stages universally performing poorly (to say nothing of the entire games on Old 3DS, sans an incomplete hardware render backend for CD). Performance can improve if the decomps are compiled with -O2 or above (-O3, -Ofast), but that can only go so far. Mania on New 3DS couldn't even reach full speed in normal stages until it was compiled with the -O2 flag. FWIW, the rendering code used to be pretty unoptimized (earlier versions of the decomps relied on loop unrolling for rendering performance, which essentially amounts to just typing out the same line of code over and over instead of using a for loop), but this was in early 2021, mind you. Pretty sure newer autobuilds of the decomp are compiled with -O2, can't say anything on Mania, though.

loved the gametap tangent, never heard of that service before. No idea we were this close to a rerelease of panzer dragoon 10 ish years ago

@ThePlayerinBed

Жыл бұрын

I remember first finding out about it's existence thanks to this Space Ghost Coast to Coast Iceberg video I once saw (link here kzread.info/dash/bejne/a397sbCiYqS7Y6w.html). Never would I thought the service had Knuckles Chaotix tho lmao. Funny enough tho, Space Ghost actually had a S3&K reference.

You should definitely do more of these videos! As for the new Patreon support, you are more than welcome! I hope this will help to improve things on your end!

The unintentional syncronization at 27:38 of the music with the footage was great

"My brain is but a leaf, floating down a river." Boy, do I know THAT feeling. Also, glad to hear the last Sonic Origins video got some decent play and brought out supporters!

34:03 another thing to note about the drop dash is that it likely is clunky in 1 and 2 because those games still have the roll jump lock. 3 and CD removed it for origins but it was even in the originals. Guess the roll jump lock applied to drop dash too

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

And it caused so many issues for me. When I play the mobile versions it's not as bad since Sonic 1 and 2 were built with this in mind, but in Origins my Mania muscle memory starts kicking in so I want to use and abuse the drop dash, only for the roll lock to dick me over at the worst times. Funny enough, this isn't an issue in the decompilations since the drop dash mod I use for those removes the roll lock. A truly perfect storm.

Would love to see more videos like this! It's nice to have something I still feel like I took away something from without needing to necessarily pay super close attention, as podcasts go

you are a true emerald for this community. thank you so much for all your work and search. i remember on my 7ys in 2006 reading blogs and articles. and now theres youtubers like u. gathering all this stuff from lost media. its just a uncomparable work. thank you, keep the great content

there's a second conspiracy theory about the sonic 3 music that i'm curious to hear your opinion on: the idea is that the Origins tracks are mostly from an earlier prototype that has yet to be dumped. evidence for this includes correct notes that got dropped for S&KC but exist in the later prototypes, as well as Senoue probably not ever having been a sound programmer for the Genesis (he made compositions yes, but generally they were demo tapes handed off to someone else who would program them in) (i have heard claims that this is incorrect but they don't really make sense to me). plus, we know the new Super Sonic theme uses several instruments from Sonic 4, so i doubt that would've happened if Senoue had done new arrangements of everything else from scratch

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

That's definitely an interesting theory I hadn't really considered before, specifically that the only totally new track uses the Sonic 4 instruments and yet the other tracks are still firmly playing on a YM2612 (or equivalent). That's a very strange mismatch, and does suggest the songs may have come from a version of Sonic 3 we have never publicly seen.

The time I get for watching super long video essays comes down to me doing other things while I listen to them.

It may interest you to know that Cirocco Jones and Doug Grigsby III passed away last year.

@HHog

Жыл бұрын

Odd, I can find news about Grigsby's passing, but nothing about Jones.

Something I've only found out today because I refused to buy Origins... if you get a Game Over in Sonic Origins and restart the game, you'll restart at the last checkpoint, just like how if you lost a life and didn't Game Over or if you loaded from a savefile where you didn't Game Over on it. So there's no punishment for a Game Over whatsoever. So there's no point in lives in Classic Mode whatsoever. There's no point in having Classic Mode if it doesn't work properly. That's so dumb... And here I thought the biggest problem with Classic Mode is the forced 4:3 aspect ratio and keeping stuff in that the original releases didn't do (if you really want to stick to 4:3, e.g. you'd think they'd prevent the spindash in Sonic 1).

ICZ used Hard Times by the Jetzons- Brad Buxer was a member. Pieces of MJs Jam was used in CNZ. The ending theme was used as a base for MJ's Stranger in Moscow.

Coming back to this vid, about HE2 being used as the launcher front end; The Genesis Classics Collection on Steam uses Unity as its frontend launcher. On PC this kinda thing is becoming more and more common, an intermediary program that launches game executables rather than compiling all of the games into one executable and building a native front end into that executable. Now likely using Unity was considered at some point, however; Unity has a weird caveat in its licensing where once you hit a certain number of sales, you start owing them royalties. Considering that Sega knew they'd easily clear that figure, they had two options: Write that front end intermediary program from scratch, or bite the bullet and pay. However, the secret third option was to use HE2. Rather than starting fron absolute scratch, HE2 is more than capable of displaying a menu, opening executable files, encapsulating other games, hell, if you own Sonic Generations on console then you know that Hedgehog Engine 1 could run a genesis emulator inside, since that version of Generations has an easter egg that lets you play Sonic 1. Simply put, using HE2 to make the intermediary launcher was kind of a no brainer since everyone at Sonic team was familiar with it, they made it so no licensing fees were due, and because of its capabilities, they could make a big splashy menu with 3D renders. Especially since their lighting engine out the box would look great without having to fiddle with things in Unity to get them to look great. Only downside is that this is a technically expensive solution. HE2 is overkill for intermediary software like this, Sega knows this, that's why the Classics collection has a "simple launcher" option. But if you're going to charge $40 - $60 for a collection of old games, you might as well over engineer it and try justify some of that cost, even if the unique development circumstances of the Sonic 3 and Knuckles port kinda already does. EDIT: A thing they could have done would be to outsource a simple launcher build in something like Godot. There's already precedent for this since Sonic Colors uses Godot in its rendering pipeline. Since Godot is entirely free and open source, and also is much less technically expensive, they could likely have made a "simple" launcher that way.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

May be worth mentioning but the Sega collection on Steam still has an option to ignore the Unity launcher and use something more simple and compatible with older machines.

Who the hell has the time to make a 7 hour video??

@EggFighterXB-

Жыл бұрын

Mauler...

@thelastgogeta

Жыл бұрын

Whitelight (Death Stranding) and Shaymay (Pokemon)

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

7 hours? You know, that sounds like a good length for a Pokemon Omega Ruby video, someone should make that :P

I enjoyed this, when it comes to KZread videos that I watch it has to be under 20 minutes but if I'm listening like a podcast then 45min to 2hr is what I feel is good

My guess as to why the final version of Sonic 3 used the MJ tracks is because the prototype tracks weren't finished and by the time they were about to hit the deadline, someone must have gone "fuck it" and put the MJ music anyways, and then Sega never bothered to replace the tracks again because as you pointed out in your follow up video on Sonic 3 AIR, it is more difficult than it seems to just replace the tracks in the code of the game. Maybe that's why Sonic & Knuckles Collection uses the prototype tracks, they just had the MIDIs just laying there in some workers' hard drive and they went with that to avoid litigation or perhaps just because they didn't want to pay Buxer, Scirrocco Jones and all the people who made the music for Sonic 3 that weren't working with Sega anymore. Now, like with most things related to the mystery of Sonic 3's music, I don't think that should be taken as a definitive answer, maybe if you think about it for a bit you will find discrepancies, like, for instance, how it doesn't make sense that the MJ music was used anyways because the prototype tracks weren't finished because almost all the music on the october prototype has certain differences, like the different tempo on Lava Reef Act 1 or the fact that a lot of instruments sound completely different on the prototype compared to the final game. Maybe the MJ tracks are in because of a mistake. In any case, I don't think we'll ever actually know just what the hell happened anyways because the development of Sega games almost always end up looking like a nightmare for the people involved, and in any case pretty much everything related to Michael Jackson during the 90s is a clusterfuck because of pretty much everything that was going on with him at the time between his drug use and the allegations of child abuse.

Your experience with the decompilations is very weird, since our computers are very similar in specs but they run pretty great on mine? Even on my laptop.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

I honestly don't understand it, either. I feel like things are slowly running worse on this system. I don't know if it's a heat issue or what. I need to build a new one.

I loved youtube video replies, it was removed 15 years too early

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

Was always a bit of a double edged sword. It made for wonderful freeform conversation where a video could have a reply chain going but then it also enabled endless hostile arguments.

The S1-2-CD Decomps work like a charm on my 15 year old laptop. Must just be your computer.

More of these please.

Sonic 3's music likely either wasn't licensed properly in the first place and there is plenty to suggest this or these now "has been" artists realised that there was some cash to be made after MJ died as presumably he himself didn't care about the music being in the game. Many people keep mentioning the date of the prototype cartridge but is that even important? This cart was put together specifically for a magazine preview, that's it, it uses Sonic 2's sprites in the main game where the 2P mode uses the Sonic 3 sprites so despite these 'correct sprites' being in the game the main game didn't use them so was clearly still being worked on by different teams. I think it still having older music tracks in is very plausable as whoever put the cart together didn't have the most up to date assets etc. I also believe that the Origins compositions are NEWER than the prototype. People keep saying they are older basically as they don't like them but when we consider the prototype cart contains Mushroom Hill sounding very different also shows this music was still being worked on. Also the Origins music is closer to the PC midi tracks which came out in 1997 again hinting that these are later compositions. As you say, the people at Sega back then are not now and likely the actual truth won't be known. Sega may have thought that they own all that music outright for a number of years as I am certain that they would have released S3&K a billion times over the years if they could. By not releasing it, they have played safe. If they had released it as us then it may have played into Buxer & Co's lawyers hands or if they had changed the tracks they would be acknowledging the possibility of not owning the tracks.

The new patreon donor "AltF4Games" you mentioned at the end is a german youtuber with about 400k subscribers. Makes some pretty cool video and did a stream together with SambZockt (also a german youtuber) about Sonic Origins. Would recommend the videos but they are in german :D Interesting video and thank you for keeping it not much longer than 40min.

@altf4games

Жыл бұрын

hm

If you get yourself an aftermarket cpu cooler with a big heatsink you can overclock to maybe 4.2-4.3 and breathe new life into your machine. I have a 2500k that would absolutely blow if it wasn't for that overclock

I think the argument about sega being too greedy to relicense sonic 3’s ost is even further disproven by them relicensing the lyrics to you can do anything and cosmic eternity for origins. If they were able to get that situation sorted, they definitely would have for sonic 3 if they had the ability to do so. It’s really just the situation they’re put in that makes them have to go with the prototype versions as you said in the video.

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

Sega knows that soundtracks, especially Sonic soundtracks, are a huge sticking point for customers, and internally there was probably a big panic when they realized this music licensing issue couldn't be resolved. I don't envy them. A licensing mistake they made in 1994, where none of the people involved have even talked in 20 years, is coming back to haunt them. But as much as I pity them... They did kinda do this to themselves. Pay your artists, draw up better legal agreements, don't reneg on your end of those legal agreements. Hopefully Sega understands this going forward.

@polocatfan

11 күн бұрын

​@@ragnarockerbunnyconsidering Brad Buxer literally made the release of hard times look like Ice Cap Zone to get sales, I do not respect the fact he won't let Sega license it. You can't have it both ways.

You corrected most of your previous errors, sorry I never elaborated on my older comment telling you how wrong the original video is (I forgot!). Thanks for making a correction commentary like this. Being a classic Sonic expert and hearing the first video triggered me, sorry if my comment sounded kinda rude!

I haven't been able to even fully boot Sonic Origins on my computer for months.

@shadowopsairman1583

2 ай бұрын

Just get Gens and a Rom. Enjoy it, it's better.

@AwijoshSun

2 ай бұрын

@@shadowopsairman1583 I prefer BlastEm or Kega, personally.

Btw there will probably be a mod to remove the menu being so taxing of the system.

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

The Genesis Classics Collection has a "simple launcher" for low spec machines, and honestly... I wish they did this for Origins. Fans shouldn't have to do this kind of work, you know?

While the drop dash does work closer to Mania in the CD port, it still doesn't work *exactly* like in Mania and 3&K. In CD it just does a spindash charges once whenever you drop dash.

Forever 1.4.2 and Absolute 1.1.1 run perfectly on my i5 2500k + GTX 970 system. Make sure Vsync is set to false in settings.ini to get smooth frame pacing. I don't get screen tearing with it off, but it could be because I'm using Gsync. You could also look into the Sonic CD Restored and Sonic CD & Knuckles mods for the CD decompilation. CD & Knuckles used to be an add on to Restored, but now it's a stand alone mod. Sonic CD Extended Revival is another big CD improvement mod to look forward to whenever it's finished.

@jgamer9307

Жыл бұрын

I hope the CD extended mod gets finished someday. Until then I got Restored 2.0 and Knuckles Add on.

@ThePlayerinBed

Жыл бұрын

@@jgamer9307 Please tell me what this "CD Extended" thing is, I have heard about it so many times but I cannot find any footage, info, or anything like that.

I have a stupid theory but hear me out. What if the prototype of sonic 3 was a rebuilt version of the game after mj left the project. But the prototype was too unpolished and they couldn't fix it by February. So they just used the build with mjs music. I know that's stupid I just wanted to put my theory out there.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

The story we know about the prototype and where it came from doesn't really line up with this, unfortunately. Sonic Team was actually working on a completely different (and so far, totally unseen and unknown) build of Sonic 3 for Sega's failed SVP chip (their answer to Nintendo's Super FX chip). The SVP chip ended up changing dramatically during production and Sonic Team scrapped that version of Sonic 3. But Sega announced a brand deal with McDonalds, so Sonic Team had to hurry up and throw a brand new version of Sonic 3 together in less than 9 months, which is the version we ended up getting. The prototype we have is dated only a month or two before the game was to "go gold" (get finalized for release) and is predictably a mess because they were rushing to get the game together. I believe Yuji Naka is on record saying Sonic 3 is maybe the hardest he's ever worked on anything, ever. There would be no version of Sonic 3 to "fall back on" because the SVP chip Sega ended up using was dramatically less powerful than the one Sonic Team was developing the original Sonic 3 for.

@AguywithanH

Жыл бұрын

Ok that makes sense thanks

You def should do forever and absolute as their own videos, also best mods that aren’t just for fun like goku in sonic 1 lol

Personally, I don't care how long a video is, and I don't think most of your fans do either. I mean, since people watched both videos, then there's no difference from if everything here had been said in that video. People can just watch it some at a time.

@ragnarockerbunny

Жыл бұрын

It takes me long to fall asleep so long videos make great noise to drift off to. I just rewind to the last thing i remember the next night and that's how I get through it. Or just throw it on in the background while I do something else.

Technically the cd drop dash still is broken because it’s not a full speed one

27:32 "origns" Was that misspelling a joke?

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

An accident. With the font it's hard to tell at a glance that the I is missing. I didn't see it until watching it back here on KZread after it premiered.

I remember video replies

To Go from Mania, to this disgrace, tells me Sega needs to fire Sonic Team and the Idiots at the top

If the sonic & tails mode is the only cheat you use, don't get all 6 emeralds (or atleast not before the patch or the game crashes, also in the phone the sonic & tails mode was already in the game without tjat cheat but in origins which is based on the phone version, that's removed for some reason

@16bitsam.

Жыл бұрын

I also had the game crash in that mode. I think the way to fix it is to: go back to the title screen and start a new game as Sonic. Tails will still be there and I think that's what fixes it (you can also use this to play as Knuckles & Tails).

@thomasverslycken2563

Жыл бұрын

@@16bitsam. ok i did not k oww that, it would be funny if this worked when playing as tails too

@TomTheyy

Жыл бұрын

@@16bitsam. I don't think you can play as Knuckles w/ Tails in Origins' version of Sonic 1, even by glitching?

You don't have to tell me anything, but I'm curious with your life situation to where $101 a month on Patreon is close to enough to review full time. People need way more than that to live and also afford things like house and car payments, and you buy video games. It feels like you should need at least 3 grand a month.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

In most places it's not. Right now I am living with my brother and giving him some money for rent when I can. I am keeping a safety net of money (my savings), which to most people is probably comparatively small. The $100 a month from Patreon covers monthly groceries only.

Do you intent to make "best way to mod Sonic Origins" video?

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

I make no guarantees. I haven't really been keeping up with Sonic Origins mods and it sounds like we might actually be getting one last patch. People have noticed Steam is reporting there's a private beta branch of Sonic Origins that sees occasional updates. Let's see if that ever drops first.

@leGUIGUI

Жыл бұрын

@@BlazeHedgehog Thanks.

Based

Uh... if you're going to acknowledge that the "new" songs aren't exactly the same as what we already had of the prototype songs, not even the same as the ones TCRM dug up, could you actually compare them for quality? We came here for a review and that was a decently significant change that in the video boiled down to "it's different now" and nothing else.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

That's what I said, though? I said that some of the songs sound like the prototype, some sound like the PC version, and some are new. Are you looking for an exact song-by-song breakdown? That should be its own entire video, and preferably by someone who is more knowledgeable about music terminology than I am.

@appliedatoms7066

Жыл бұрын

@@BlazeHedgehog Wow, did not expect a response. With the age of the vid I'm sure this will never be seen, but to be clear, I meant more of a "these are better than the originals, these are worse than the originals but better than the prototypes," etc. We didn't need an entire breakdown, but leaving it at "these sound like this" removes the quality aspect completely, which is odd in a review. Even just a personal opinion would've been nice.

@BlazeHedgehog

Жыл бұрын

@@appliedatoms7066 I get a notification for every comment on my videos! I always see them. As for my personal opinion, I gave it in the accompanying original video, which was that I did not feel like I could give an opinion because I'm too bias to the original 1994 soundtrack. I don't like them. Any of them. They're different and weird sounding, because I have 25+ years of muscle memory for the old songs.