Some art from my old Sonic project

From time to time people ask me about the graphics for the Sonic game I started to code for the NES, and since recently I put together a bunch of them in order to show someone, I saw no reason to not share the files with everyone else. There are many variations of everything, and nothing here was ever considered final. These are all pretty old now, the most recent sprites are probably from 2009.

Here's more:

These are the last:

Honestly, and this is just my opinion, but it all seems to look a lot better than the Master System versions ever did. I don't remember a "Square Shores" zone though. I'm guessing you were planning to build more of an original game than just a port of an existing Sonic?

Thanks. The goal was indeed to get slightly closer to the MD titles than the SMS games did. I'm not sure I would be able to succeed in that.


What about "Mingwink Zone"? (this was just to see how names using M and W would look like)


The closest thing to a port I have considered was a "best of" collection with re/demakes of my favorite zones from the 4 games, but I dropped the idea fairly soon. At some point I considered a geometric shapes concept for the zones, but most names sounded silly! =)

Very beautiful graphics. Still hope to see this project being completed someday.

Thanks.


Me too!

I know that I'll eventually work on the engine again, but the theme of the game might be changed to avoid copyright issues.

Traditionally, SEGA hasn't really cared about Sonic hacks or fan games. I've never heard of them shutting one down.

You're welcome!
Feel free to use Sônica, my shameless rip-off character

I wonder whether that more relaxed attitude has anything to do with the company's own unclean hands. In a world with stricter enforcement of copyright, Sega might have had to change "Flying Battery Zone" from Sonic & Knuckles because it sounds like "James Bond Theme" by John Barry and "Standing on the Corner" by The Four Lads. In the comments, Cockshield points out that both Bond and Sonic feature "A bald evil dude launching space weapons from a volcano crater". Compare the later "Byelomorye Dam" from GoldenEye 007, which uses the motif from "James Bond Theme" under license. Not to mention "Waluigi Pinball" from Mario Kart DS and "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga sound a little like "Flying Battery Zone".

EDIT (October 2015): They sound so dam similar...

I know, but it kinda sucks not being able to call a game I made from the ground up mine just because of the character that stars in it.


Holy shit, Sonic + Mônica! I could get sued twice!

Faced with the same problem, WB Games and Sunsoft put WB's own characters into Sunsoft's Sonic-clone engine and produced Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos. (East Asian pirates would later hack Sonic back into this game.) Epic Games put The Tortoise and the Hare, Sonic, and Contra into a three-way and came up with Jazz Jackrabbit.

Wait.... What?

Now Bad Romance and Flying Battery do kinda belong together, but I'm really not hearing the similarities to the James Bond theme. I mean... at all. I suppose if you sped it up quite a bit you have a similar chord -pattern- and kind of a similar feel with that horn hit on the upbeat, but... still. I sincerely hope such a claim would never have held up in court. Otherwise, SEGA should definitely be suing Nintendo too.

Which Sonic is your favorite?

I think the first one looks the best, but is a little too big for the NES. My second favorite is the last one.

It may look big, but it isn't significantly more expensive sprite-wise than the smaller versions. IIRC, I made him facing forward so that the color overlay for the face could fit in a single sprite. The body is pretty narrow, not so different from the smaller versions. The shoes are almost completely separate, avoiding overlays.

I allowed myself to use up to 4 sprites per scanline for Sonic. It may sound like a lot, but remaining 4 can be used to draw an equally complex enemy or an item box without flicker. Of course some animation frames would extrapolate this 4 sprite limit, but I'd try to keep those to a minimum.

Unless you meant a big sprite would look out of place in an NES game, as opposed to the PPU limitation. I can think of a few games with large sprites that I think look great, even though they come with a bit of extra flicker.

I count 9 pixels across the face of red/yellow/white palette.

Then it's probably not the "final" sprite. =)

Also, IIRC, white was along with the blues. Is the extra pixel white?

The extra pixel is red.

I guess the motto should now be 'Genesis does what Ninten-also-does'. While I'm not a fan of expanded audio, maybe this could use the VRC7 audio as well for that Genesis-y sound, but that's for another time.

Still very impressed what a bit of arranging could do with the NES' limited graphics.

I'll gladly say that when/if I get a playable level! =)


I'm not a fan either, mainly because over half of the official consoles ever manufactured (according to Wikipedia) can't play expansion audio without modifications.

Music is not my strong suit anyway, so unless I got some help in that area, the audio wouldn't be up to par with the graphics. But either way I'd still like to stay within the limits of the stock NES audio hardware, just like I didn't want to use MMC5 (or similar) graphical enhancements.


I'm thinking I should make a complete mockup so we can get a better impression of what an actual game could look like.

And then you have stuff like Miniplanets popping up at about the same time.

But yes, the reason I had asked for the pics originally is because I recalled from many years ago that his concept art was attempting to look like the Mega Drive counterparts, so I wanted to see how far that could be (theoretically) pushed.


Something that strikes me is that VRC7 remixes tend to sound rather similar to most Mega Drive tunes, which just goes to show how awfully underused 4-op FM was (since VRC7 is 2-op).


Not even including the expansion port? (OK, that would require an extra add-on in addition to the cartridge, but it should work, right?)

Having used a soundcard with an on-die OPL3 (CM8738) for way too many years, I was struck by how insufficiently different 4-op sounded...

I see what's happening now... You probably looked at the Sonic in the first picture, but that one is horizontally stretched (sloppily, in MS Paint) to be closer to the aspect ratio of the NES (look how weird his right hand is). The image with a bunch of Sonics contains the original sprite, where the blue part is 16 pixels wide and the tan part is 8 pixels wide, for a total of 3 sprites for the head. Right next to it is an anti-aliased stretched version.


It was never my intention to make a direct port though, so zones would be 100% original (possibly taking cues from existing ones), and sprites would always be created from the ground up, using the originals for reference only.


The fact that you have to break the case in order to gain access to the expansion port is already a big let down for me. Also, I'm not aware of any easily/cheaply obtainable device that can be plugged to the expansion port for this purpose. It appears that there isn't even a consensus about which cartridge pin should be used for the expansion audio.

I'm not terribly against audio expansions, but unfortunately Nintendo didn't make all consoles with the same capabilities, and to me it wouldn't feel right to have my game working correctly only on some units. It's the same reason why I don't think it's right to make use of the extended VBlank time of PAL consoles without a fallback solution for NTSC.

To add to the trouble, recreating these sound chips doesn't seem easy at all, seeing how Flash carts are always struggling to get them to sound right, not to mention mixing issues (I always see people complaining that certain sounds are too loud or too quiet).

I'm not an audiophile, I'm actually much more interested in the melodies than in the instruments being used to play them, and to me the 2A03 is capable of producing very interesting sounds by itself.

Well I meant art style-wise.


Huh, I thought it had a lid to open it or something =| (I never had a NES, only Famicom/clones)


At this point I'm not allowed to make games that don't account for the speed difference either =P (by general rule it's better to make the game for NTSC and then use the extra vblank time in PAL to perform game logic (sans-drawing) twice every 5 frames)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you have to break/cut it.


I'm not forbidding anyone else from doing whatever they want, I'm just explaining the reasoning behind my own decisions. =)


That's one way to do it, but while 70 scanlines is a lot of VBlank time, it's still much less than the 240 that the game logic normally has, and skipping drawing for a frame might have disastrous consequences for the background.

I never got around to solving this problem, but my intention was to adjust the physics parameters to account for the lower frame rate, but that wasn't so high on my list, specially considering that most commercial games from back in the day didn't do anything about it and nobody seemed to care (Europeans probably didn't notice anything until they saw footage of games they were familiar with running on NTSC hardware).

Yes, there's a lid, and under it is a piece of plastic that has to be cut (comes off fairly easily though).

Ah, so it's both! =)

Such a weird choice Nintendo made... Cutting/breaking plastic is not something ordinary consumers do.

This is what Project MD does, and it's awfully hard to get right. Besides being forced to use good subpixel accuracy, there's the issue that acceleration is non-trivial to adjust and you'll most likely resort to trial and error to tweak the values until they seem correct. Also, since practically none of the values is integer anymore (even dumb stuff like a silly animation counter) you have to account for the fact that a variable may never pass through a given value, ruling out equal / not equal comparisons.

It's not that hard. Accelerations need to be 44% greater on a 50 Hz console. The duration of the time quantum of a 50 Hz console is 1.2 times that of a 60 Hz console, and the acceleration unit contains that unit squared.


Unless it's a counter derived from 10 Hz. Animations of walking characters in Thwaite and RHDE are based on a variable counting from 0 to 5 on NTSC or 0 to 4 on PAL. So is missile spawning and cooldown. Clocking a 10 Hz animation on a particular value or clocking a 20 Hz animation on 0 and 3 or 1 and 4 can produce good results.


Defensive programming likely ruled out non-equal in the first place.

A good guess would be that Nintendo was planning on putting the FDS out for the United States, but saw literally no reason for it since cartridges superseded the only advantage the diskettes had. So Nintendo likely had the audio lines cut out so that they could be re-connected just for the FDS, and not for anyone else. It sounds kind of odd putting it that way, but considering Nintendo was very controlling of their console, it wouldn't be surprising that Nintendo did that so that they could maximize their cartridge profits.

One of the really great things about your Sonic art is how natural it seems to fit the system. It doesn't look like a game trying to be something it's not. It could pass for an original NES title.

I know your engine isn't finished, but it would be so great to be able to see the visuals on a ROM through the real hardware with the PPU's unique filter. Just a taste is all I ask, just a taste... lol

That would rule out just about every animation that has to update every frame (e.g. moving things and such). That could be made up for by having destination values being multiples of 30, but sadly these systems prefer powers of two way too much to make that an option.


Unless you keep forgetting what "carry"/"not carry" translate to, in which case you'll go for "equal"/"not equal" whenever you can (not an issue for me since I program on the 68000, but a huge issue on 8-bit CPUs - I keep having this issue on the Z80 all the time, and I don't recall the 6502 being any better).

Also there are times where you want things to happen only at a specific spot and nowhere else without having to stop the counter, which is where "equal" is ideal. Sadly you don't have a guarantee that it'll work anymore, so you have to resort to doing a "less/greater than or equal" comparison and keeping around flags to keep track of events.

Also if some stuff is fast enough to trigger 1 event per frame in NTSC, now you have multiple events going off in the same frame in PAL and you need to account for that... yeah. I think you're underestimating all the effort that goes under this, unless you want games to ditch vblank altogether and use some other hardware timer (maybe even include one in the cartridge).


Er, think about this: how would you connect the FDS into the VCR-style cartridge slot?

For things that happen every frame, having the speed be a few percent off is probably acceptable. Thwaite has a bunch of 13/16 and 19/16 factors applied to various values.


MOS Technology was founded by Motorola alumni, and I'm pretty sure 6502 and 68000 share carry semantics. I know ARM's carry matches that of 6502. Z80 and x86 are a different story because the Intel 8080 has the opposite convention for borrow from the 6502.


The system card for the NES version of FDS would be shaped like an ordinary NES Game Pak, with the disk signals routed through the expansion pins.

I meant more like "did carry mean less than or greater than", stuff like that. Not everybody has such a good memory =P


Point stands, some part of the hardware would have to stay away from the cartridge slot or it'd be impossible to connect. May put the audio lines there as well, especially if it would have helped designing or manufacturing the hardware.

What I'm trying to say is that whatever carry means, it means the same across 6502, 68K, and ARM. So if you do manage to memorize it on one, you've memorized it for all three.

Given that they put the audio mix on the NES's expansion connector, and they only reserved 10 pads, and the cable from the FDS base to the drive itself is 11 conductors, two of which are power and ground... I guess they could have done it that way. (q.v. electronics junkers' RE'd schematic: http://green.ap.teacup.com/junker/119.html )

Seems a little weird to me to have deliberately decided to route audio through the expansion connector twice, but it's pointless to second-guess now.