#Sonic Hacking Contest

[sonichedgeblog]

The Sonic Hacking Contest has begun for 2024! For the next week, we'll be posting about every entry that's showing up! Check it out at https://shc.zone/ Support us on Patreon

[evajellion]

Mean Bean Tsuu Demo Review

Wow, cool. This is a thing that exists as a work in progress. Gonna shoot my shot and give criticism while praising some stuff, as I do.

Biggest praise right away, love the graphic and soundtrack adjustments to to the main gameplay. The remix of Green Hill Zone is great. The main three now also use the final boss theme that Dr. Robotnik had. It's a neat touch.

Actual criticism I have (that isn't the lack of offset rules, they are gonna add that in the full game) so far is that apparently this game is going to follow "a story more in line with that of Japanese Classic Sonic canon"…

I mean not for nothing, but the whole appeal of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is that it's set in the AoStH universe and has the characters. I would lean more into that aspect than just using generic Badnik designs. I asked what some other peeps thought, and they agreed.

I love the effort put into Coconuts, but… as much flack as DiC gets, I definitely always thought this design was an upgrade from Sonic 2 to the cartoon.

There is room for compromising the designs, which would have been to use the reboot Archie comic one-

But yeah, I mean, I would have reskinned Humpty into DOS Holiday instead of altering Coconuts for the demo. And of course, I think they should just use characters from the cartoon. AoStH does have good designs despite how out there they are.

Also- not criticism, but damn, how do you expect me to pick on poor Humpty when he's so sweet? I could never. 😭

Not sure if the fan favorites are gonna be removed from the final, that doesn't bode well, given how popular Davy Sprocket always was with deviantArt users.

One last thing I would like to go over, is that although the game is based on Puyo Puyo Tsu, it probably isn't going to have the… frankly, insane roster it had for the time. A whooping 33 opponents (37 in the Sega Saturn one), with a score system that determined how quickly you can get through the game. That's a tall order that no one could easily fulfill unless you reskin Puyo Tsu in its entirety.

But I do hope the full game does at least have more than 13 opponents, and includes the "first boss of the first game becomes a penultimate enemy" that was done with Draco. Arms deserves a redemption arc. :)

Besides offsetting, I hope they add the rest of the Puyo Tsu features such as "ALL CLEAR", Rule Henka (Point Puyo and Hard Puyo), and how crazy the nuisance queue can get.

Maybe also make a silly name for the title, since the whole "tsu" thing only works in Japanese. "Robotnik's Eggspertise Machine"? "Mean Bean Part 2: Electric Boogaloo?" I dunno.

So yeah, dunno if anyone from SHC will see this post. I don't have an account there and joining the Discord makes me nervous, so this is just a drop in the ocean I'm making here lol.

Hope my silly yaps are taken into consideration. If not, then that's okay too. We AoStH fans will take anything at this rate.

Demo can be found here if anyone wants to try it out.

[vadapega]

One thing I do when porting or composing music is to hide the PSG channels since I'd rather the FM take precedence, here's what this song sounds like when split between FM, PSG and the DAC & Noise tracks:

In my works, PSG is most useful for normalizing channel panning, since the YM2612 can only do full panning, no partials! It can also work as a good echo.

Sound Effects are also a big factoid so to avoid sudden stops in music channels, redundancy is necessary. In other words : despite the fact we have 5/6 FM and 2/3 PSG channels, in reality we only have about 3-4 channel polyphony.

[segadriven]

The hacking contest coverage continues with a look at Sonic 2 Archives developed by Team Conquest & Team Technical!

[hazelspooder]

STONE SHC 23 DEMO IS OUT!! GO PLAY IT NOW!!

[chopp-6467]

[claire-starsword]

me: i am ridiculously busy, i don't have time to check out the sonic hacking contest lmao, i'll just watch the trailer and download stuff for lat-

REIMU????

[sonicfangamebot]

'Sonic Pocket Winter' (2016) by ValleyBell & @VAdaPEGA (Hack) A small proof-of-concept hack, made using a disassembly of Sonic Pocket Adventure. Adds Tails & Knuckles with flying, and an edited stage. https://archive.org/details/sonic-hacking-contest-2016

[amyfarbright]

Sonic 1 Mega CD Port

(download here)

(if you think this is cool, consider helping me find work/money <3)

Welcome to the Next Level!

NOTE: I'm aware of issues regarding audio playback and transitioning between zones, and intend to push an update once the contest judging period is over. In the meantime, you can use level select (Up Down Left Right A + Start at title screen) to explore the game.

At the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show, a teaser for a Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was shown within a sizzle reel. No Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was ever produced, and this footage is almost everything we know about this project, but it's extremely likely that this idea is what morphed into the separate game Sonic CD, the only Sonic game officially released for the console.

In 2006, Stealth released the Sonic for MegaCD tech demo, marking the first time any substantial effort was made to bring another Sonic game to the console. It contained the title screens and first levels of Sonic 1 and 2, with three playable characters. In the following years, he would build on the ideas in that demo further, eventually reaching a point where his setup accommodated a Mega CD version of a rom hack called Sonic Megamix.

For a long time, this rom hack was the only way to experience Sonic 1's levels, and was the closest you could get to playing the original game on your Mega CD...

until now.

This is a port of the original Sonic the Hedgehog (revision 1, mostly) to the Sega Mega CD (running in Mode 2/off a CD). Not a mere one-zone demo, not affected by an original hack's mechanics, this is a full playable Sonic game running on the Mega CD, with the source fully available, and with the intent of enhancing the game with the extra hardware.

I started this project about a month and a half ago to enter into the annual Sonic Hacking Contest. This was done as both a learning experience for myself to learn new hardware (I was already familiar with programming for Mega Drive, but wanted to explore its addons), and as an example others can learn from.

This has been tested with BlastEm, Fusion, Gens, and on real hardware using a Mega Everdrive Pro.

Features:

Expanded Sound.

The Mega CD comes with a chip supporting PCM playback for up to 8 channels, complementing the 10 sound channels already in the Mega Drive. This port leverages that by moving playback of drum samples to a custom PCM sound driver running on the Mega CD CPU.

Because drums no longer need to play on the Mega Drive hardware, an extra sound channel was added in the main sound driver to allow for more sound effects to play without cutting out channels of the music.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get CD audio playback fully implemented in time for the initial release. Most of the pieces are there though, and I intend to add it in a future update.

An open-source Mega CD game. The scene for Mega CD has grown significantly over time, and over the years there has been new homebrew and hacks of other games, but not nearly as much done with the blue guy this contest is about. This port aims to change that; this is a full game running on Mega CD, with source code and development history available for browsing right now. Code for the kernel programs to load and run the game from disk is written in mostly C using the megadev toolchain. Rom hackers and developers more familiar with the Mega Drive standalone can use the code repository as an example of how to bring more full-fledged MD projects over to Mega CD with as few changes as possible.

Other features:

Custom loading screen while files are loaded from CD

Modified title screen, to remind you that this is indeed utilizing Mega CD hardware

Various bugfixes applied (for those familiar with Sonic Retro's Sonic 1 disassembly, FixBugs is turned on)

Much smoother special stage. The movement of objects making up the maze was unlocked, and the walls now display with 128 degrees of rotation (up from 16).

Even though I started this project to have something for the contest, I'm incredibly happy with what's been done so far, and I intend to work on it further after the contest to add more features. I consider this the beginning of a goodbright future for Sonic games and hacks on Mega CD.

Note: Debug mode and sound test have not been fixed to accommodate for the code that has been moved around. Try at your own risk!

Credits

Main developer: Amy Farbright

Playtesting and bug reporting: The Let's Talk About Sonic Discord

Special thanks: @fiffle, @milly, @crepe

Code used/referenced:

drojaazu's megadev toolchain

Devon's partial Sonic CD disassembly

SCHG How-to Guide

tversteeg's Rust implementation of rotsprite

Graphics used:

CD graphic on title screen: Sega Multimedia Studio, converted from sprites ripped by Mister Man

[blazehedgehog]

Mostly an "is it me?" question, but like... is it fair to say Shadow got a massive power buff purely out of popularity? I feel like he had two good narrative threads, years pass, then Forces grandfathered him into boosting and the Generations remake rewrote a fight he lost in 2011 (I know it changes nothing, but it annoys me nonetheless.)

Yes.

In my mind, the point of Shadow and Biolizard are lab-grown versions of Super Sonic and Perfect Chaos. Professor Gerald reverse engineered them from Echidna legends.

All throughout the final boss, Sonic expresses concern for Shadow. He seems to be having trouble maintaining his super form. He looks tired. And if you get far enough into the boss fight, Shadow comes to a realization: "Sonic... I think the Ultimate Lifeform... is you!"

Almost as if Shadow realizes what he was created from. Shadow is accepting his role as nothing more than a synthetic clone of Super Sonic. He was invented to become the very thing standing in front of him. And he can't keep up. Because he's just a clone.

But Shadow won't give up. Even if he's just a clone, he can still fulfill Maria's wish. He's going to give the earth a chance to find their happiness.

He succeeds. But it kills him.

It's been retconned now to make Shadow the ultimate coolguy vigilante hero, but that was Shadow's complete character arc in 2001. I mean, some of the most infamous exchanges in that entire game are Sonic and Shadow arguing over who copied who. Shadow fans have told me to my face I'm wrong, but Shadow realizing in the end that he's the copy is how that pays off. Sonic Adventure 2's storytelling is a hacked up mess that's poorly translated, but that's a real, actual character arc. One of the only ones in the entire game.

Shadow is brainwashed into doing evil deeds, attempts genocide on the whole of planet earth, and redeems himself through self-sacrifice because he was just a clone anyway. He was never real, and always living on borrowed time. In some ways, the care he and Maria shared for each other was the only thing real about his entire life. And so he must live that truth and become more than just Gerald's creation.

But everybody loves Shadow. We can't just tell them no. We've got to bring him back from the dead. They think Shadow is the coolest. But what if he was even cooler? What if he was a tortured soul, gifted a strength beyond anyone else, and is constantly torn on how to use that power? Does he serve himself, or does he serve the greater good? And who deserves to benefit from his power?

And so Shadow goes from "not quite as powerful as Super Sonic" to "significantly more powerful than anyone else in the franchise." Because now Shadow's like a character that may as well be in the Super Sonic state at all times. And presumably, when he uses all seven emeralds, he just becomes even more powerful.

In my own personal headcanon, Shadow is the most powerful character in the series... but only because Sonic never really pushes himself to his limits. Sonic's too carefree, Sonic doesn't like to punish others too harshly, and nothing in his life has ever actually tested his limits.

Weird comparison, but it's sort of like Frieza in Resurrection of F. Frieza reveals that his race are just naturally the strongest in the galaxy and as such he's never actually done any kind of real combat training. So he plots his revenge against Goku, which can basically be summed up as "plan ahead, do some training for the first time in his life, and actually put a little effort into it this time."

Sonic is similar. He gathers the emeralds, transforms into Super Sonic, and effortlessly wins almost every single time. But if it came down to life or death Sonic vs. Shadow, no holds barred, no going back, I think Sonic still wins, no contest.

[monarchcelebi]

Check out the trailer. The updated visuals, abilities, and momentum are huge changes. This mod looks really cool, and the team clearly put a lot of work into this.

‘New Genesis: Gameplay Overhaul’ (Frontiers Mod) by LexStorm High Speed Style (a initial momentum-based mod) has been revamped into New Genesis https://shc.zone/entries/contest2024/1153 Support us on Patreon

[mashounen2003]

Patchy's Magical Maze ~ v0.2 demo for the Touhou Pride Game Jam 2022 – Easy Mode playthrough

After discovering Touhou: Luna Nights and the demo of ILLURAMA: Masters of Illusions and finding both of them very satisfying, I decided to delve into the world of Touhou fan games and Touhou-inspired indie games even more. This is when I found out that, just like the Sonic series with the SAGExpo and the Sonic Hacking Contest, the Touhou fandom also holds annual events featuring games made by the fan community: the Touhou Game Jams, both the main one and a separate event for games with LGBTQ+ themes, the Touhou Pride Game Jam.

Among the titles released as part of the 2022 edition of the Pride Game Jam, I found this one: Patchy's Magical Maze, described as a Dungeon Crawler with Action RPG mechanics and Hack-and-Slash combat. I don't really know what Dungeon Crawlers are about, but I'm already playing a series of Action PRGs –Mega Man Battle Network aka Rockman.EXE– and I've already seen some very interesting Hack-and-Slash titles –namely Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance– that I'd really like to play someday (when I get my hands on a PC that doesn't melt upon trying to run those games), so I was already sold on this. Plus, doing a playthrough of this game in Pride Month would be perfect timing; I hope this playthrough here gives this cute-looking and also badass game the attention it deserves, as well as convincing more people to go support it and its creators.

Patchy's Magical Maze can be found on itch.io: https://fiorefire.itch.io/patchys-magical-maze/

This game is being developed by "FioreFire" (also known as "FireLily", "Fiore", and "Firecat1311") with Touhou music covers arranged by Miles "Chuunibyou" Yalzin (also known as "Mai-chan") and sound effects made by "Gubbles".

FioreFire's accounts:

itch.io page: fiorefire.itch.io

Twitter: https://x.com/Firecat1311

Miles Yalzin's itch.io page: https://milesyalzin.itch.io/

Gubbles's accounts:

Personal web page: https://www.gubblesdev.com/

Twitter: https://x.com/_Gubbles

[starlos-soulmate]

Oh my god apparently one of the games in the sonic hacking contest this year has an uty reference... I can ask my brother for the details

You are JOKING!!! PLEASE let me know any details, I need to see what it is! :3

[segadriven]

The hacking contest action continues with a look at Sonic 3 Master Edition 3 developed by Xebninmaj!

[hazelspooder]

I am pleased to announce that Agent Stone in Sonic 3 A.I.R. will be making an appearance at Sonic Hacking Contest 2023! It won't be the full version as we may need more time to cook in regards to what we have planned. However, I can guarantee that it'll certainly hold everybody over until then, as this version will be jam-packed with several new bosses, features, palettes, music, and so on! Let's take a look at a few things, shall we?

Eh? That doesn't appear to be Stone, though it certainly has his color scheme....

Yikes! Whose idea was it to put legs on this Gapsule!?

Y'all may have seen this already, but what about when Knuckles makes his way here?

...hey, who broke the door off????

What a coward, hiding behind the lava! Come out and face me!

Hey wh-what the heck are you doing he-

Stone's sprites got a major revamp thanks to MiaCDi! In addition, several new palettes have been added, plus an option to randomize the palette used!

A brand new boss theme now plays whenever you fight Stone in any Act 2, composed by @cartoonsanimate22!

Miscellaneous new additions and changes include both 3D Blast music options being merged into one option, some minor tweaks, fixes, and refinements, and Stone being added to the No Way screen.

I also have a backstory put into place that explains how he made his way to Angel Island, met and teamed up with Dr. Robotnik (& Knuckles, begrudgingly), and why he's out for revenge on Knuckles after the Death Egg's inevitable destruction. Consider it an alternate timeline of S3K's events, if you will.

That's all I'll share for now, there's a few more things I haven't shown yet, but I hope it'll be worth the wait! See ya soon!

[coolgreatwebsite]

Happy 1 Million Views to the Video That Broke Me

This is a repost of something I wrote over on my Cohost, but I figured a year later it should also probably live on the domain I pay money to have. Better late than never!

This is the most successful piece of content I have ever created. At one million views it is the thing I've made that people have seen the most. It is the thing that the most people have seen my name attached to. And it's total trash.

It's 2017 and we're a week or so out from the release of Sonic Mania, a game that I'm, at that point, pretty damn excited for. A kindly poster from the Something Awful forums (that I have known from many forums previous) poses a challenge: be the first to beat his short kaizo Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM hack and he'll gift you a copy of Sonic Mania on Steam when it comes out.

I was already getting the game on PS4 but I figured whatever, everyone else seems to be having trouble with it, I'm bored, I got nothing better to do, I'll give it a shot. I load up KEGA Fusion, start a low bitrate and resolution OBS recording because it'll probably take a few hours and who cares it's a forum contest verification video, and get to work. A hour and half-ish goes by and I'm finished with the hack. I upload the video to YouTube, post it in the thread, win my free copy of Sonic Mania, and that's the end of the story. Thanks for reading.

Except of course it's not the end of the story. A few months after I got done thoroughly enjoying Sonic Mania, I realized that I'd been getting a weird amount of new subscriber emails from YouTube. I decided to actually look at my metrics and noticed a uh, highly localized spike of activity. Give you one guess on which video (hint: it's the one this post is about). "The Algorithm" had suddenly taken it and was running away with it at lightning speed.

In the timespan between posting the video and this spike, YouTube had announced they were drastically raising the bar on the metrics you needed to hit to have your channel monetized. I was by no means a large YouTuber at the time, but I was meeting the old requirements for monetization just fine. I wasn't anywhere near meeting the new requirements until now and this video was blowing the hell up for whatever reason, so I decided to do what any good opportunist would do and made it an unwatchable experience.

I set the ad frequency on that thing to the maximum that it'd let me. I forget exactly how frequent that was but it was something absurd like an ad every 5 minutes. Maybe even more than that. I figured I'd either get rich or maybe it would make people stop watching and leaving the worst comments in the world. Seriously the comments on this thing are their own nightmare, a bizarre soup of people ascribing meaning to nothing, trying to suss out emotions where there are none, saying complete gibberish, I'd need an entire second post to unpack whatever the hell is going on there.

Well, I wouldn't quite say I got rich. The money you get off what most people would conventionally call a popular YouTube video is just not much in the grand scheme of things. But holy shit they didn't stop watching. If anything they were watching more. Why didn't they stop watching? This video was less than nothing. It was an ordeal to watch all the way through. Why were they doing this? Why was the algorithm showing this to everyone? Why this and not one of the things I put effort into or something that was at least meant to be entertaining at all? I didn't have the answers and I still don't.

Before this I personally wasn't lamenting the possibility of losing monetization on my channel as up until this point I had made around $40 total on YouTube in the decade or so I'd had a channel. But I had been spending a lot that time watching friends with channels around the size of mine who were actively hustling to, and unfortunately failing to, meet the new hurdle. They were putting out some really good shit. Way better than my stuff, frankly. And here I was getting launched to the finish line by... a throwaway, blurry, hour and a half long, commentary-free, save state abusing playthrough of a crummy Sonic ROM hack? That I had made as a means to a completely separate end?? That got promoted by a computer program for seemingly no reason???

It felt shitty. One of the friends I mentioned in that last paragraph was my longtime friend Fotts who was in the middle of getting their (sadly now dormant) series TAS Force off the ground. They were constantly tweeting about the ordeal of trying to meet the new monetization requirements and it was a damn shame because they were putting in a ton of effort and it was great. The kind of thing I'd watch even if I wasn't friends with anyone on it. It was a million times funnier than anything I was doing, and the complete opposite of my shitty contest video. If there was any justice in this world the views I was getting on this dumpster fire would be going to them. But as it turns out, there is no justice online.

I recalled a conversation I had with them a few years back while they, I, and a group of about 7 or so other friends were all wandering around an Orlando Wal-Mart wearing identical black t-shirts that read "MARVEL CAN SUCK MY COCK" in big block letters (long story). They had actually kind of gone through this sort of thing before. See, they're the uploader and one of the voices of this video you may or may not have seen with 6.5+ million views on it.

They lamented to me many of the laments I was currently lamenting. "This was just a stupid throwaway thing", "why is this so much more popular than the stuff I put effort into", "it's just me making PaRappa the Rapper say the word 'Chinese' over and over". Ok maybe that last one was a bit more specific to them. Anyway, I responded with (and I admit a lot of the reason I felt this way was because I thought and still think the video is funny) something along the lines of "you can't pick what hits for people, it might have been throwaway but at the end of the day you posted it because you thought it was at least a little bit funny, try and focus on the fact that you have a popular video at all rather than the fact it's not one of the videos you're particularly proud of".

But yeah damn turns out that advice is easier said than done when it happens to you, and it's even harder done when it happens to a factually not entertaining video. One you could have uploaded as unlisted and achieved your intended result with. The runaway success of this thing genuinely broke me on this whole "Internet" deal.

I should stress I mean this in a good way. I realized that it's not so much that you can't pick what hits for people, it's that you physically cannot pick what gets put in front of people. The people cannot pick what hits for them. A computer does. You can try and promote and affect what gets seen in your own small sphere of influence, but ultimately we are, on YouTube and on all of our social platforms, at the mercy of a black box of computer programs that I'm not even sure the people who created them understand anymore. I'd obviously known this on some level prior to this video existing, but bearing witness to it all happening firsthand to this video in particular was another thing entirely. Anything prior that I had achieved marginally similar success with (there were a couple that had broken 100k) was meant to be entertaining. It was meant for people to watch and go "I liked that", not for one guy on a forum to see and go "good work solving my maze Superman". I could classify the success as "neat, people liked that one" in my brain. This defied classification.

The only logical conclusion was that it truly didn't matter what I uploaded. It's all decided by a random machine picking things at random to serve random amounts of people, and the people click on it and watch it simply because it is there. You can poke at the machine, prod at the machine, try to guess what the machine likes, try to iterate on something the machine has previously demonstrated that it likes. It's all an effort to get the machine to put it in front of the people who will click it because it is there. That's what all the bigger capital-C Content Creators do. From the high level stuff of "what kind of things do I upload" to the low level minutia of "how many curse words can I say in the first minute", making it Big On Line in any capacity is about trying to appease an unknowable mechanical entity and nothing else. It's either that or you're "old money" in a sense, established before this all became the case.

And again, the bigger names do this. Entire companies do this. If I were "smart" I would have pivoted my entire YouTube channel to nothing but hour and a half long commentary-free bullshit hard ROM hack playthroughs. Maybe another one would hit like this did. But for the life of me I could not and cannot think of anything more soul crushing.

I wouldn't say I had aspirations to be a Big Time YouTube Man, but at that time I would have maybe liked to be a Moderate Size YouTube Man. Or a moderate size Twitch man. Someone who had people watching but was still able to have fun with it and do his own thing. This newfound realization that it was truly a random lottery, even beyond the random lottery that most of human life is, that becoming any size bigger than Small Time was literally decided by an actual factual random number generator, freed me from the desire to do anything that I didn't want to do. If actively chasing success on these modern, algorithmically-driven platforms, actively going after "Kaizo Sonic 2 Full Run" numbers, meant putting aside the things I like and reinventing myself and the things I do down to the minute details in order to appease a literal ghost beyond anyone's understanding or control that changes what it's looking for on a whim, then I did not want to do that. I did not want to keep a timer for when I could talk normal, I did not want to announce my streams on Twitter with the link in a separate reply one day, in an embedded image the next, and in my display name the next. If there is absolutely one thing I do not want to do in my life, it's dance for a robot.

But the most freeing thing about realizing this is that it also meant if I just kept doing stuff I liked, maybe, someday, I could get lucky enough to where the unknowable internet robot would push that in front of a million or so people. In the grand scheme of things it's about an equal chance of that happening on something I like and am proud of versus something I made in a desperate cloying attempt to placate an algorithm.

Anyway damn this got long and rambly sorry about that lol. This was initially meant to just be a little toast to the 5 year-ish anniversary of me fully becoming an Internet nihilist. Remember folks, it's meaningless to chase success in an algorithm dominated landscape. In the words of a certain extremely Normal-type man, "real life isn't all just being true to yourself", but I reject the notion that the Internet is not or should not be, in spite of the legion of ghouls and freaks at the top of the chain actively trying to make that the case every day.

Be true to yourself. Do what you love, make what you love, post what you love, and maybe if you're lucky a computer somewhere will decide it's your turn, because that's the single deciding factor in all of this. In the mean time, you'll end up slowly and naturally surrounding yourself with cool people who get you, if only a little bit. At least that's what's happened for me so far. I've been pretty alright with it.