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Sonic The Hedgehog, Coming To The C64 (+REU)

Vimster

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Vimster

Vimster

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Yes, some clever souls are nearly done converting the Master System port of Sonic The Hedgehog to the C64 with at least 256k REU.  More info on this CSDB forum post - https://csdb.dk/forums/?roomid=10&topicid=153904

 

 

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We're proud to announce Sonic the Hedgehog for Commodore 64/128 + REU (PAL and NTSC).

This is the first game that has exclusively been designed for the REU, to make a fast and smooth full-screen scrolling version of Sonic with little compromises.
This game is a direct port of the SEGA Master System 8-Bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog, with about 64 KB of code hand-translated from the Z80 to the 6502 architecture.

The game will be released as a free download in the coming weeks (exact release date to be announced).
It requires a C64 or C128 (in C64 mode), a compatible REU of at least 256 KB, a compatible drive (.d64 and .d81 images will be provided) and any joystick or gamepad (no extra buttons required). On NTSC, a C128 or other CPU accelerator is highly recommended.

 

Looks phenomenal.

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Camel

Camel

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3 hours ago, Dudley said:

Impressive though it is, what we basically have here is a game from a £50 8-bit machine running with worse colours and music on a £300 one if you also have an expensive RAM upgrade...


Not sure what difference the price of each machine makes?

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Dudley

Dudley

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None really.  How about that the C64 needs a ram upgrade when the SMS does it in 8kb? :D

 

I'm just messing really it's just weird seeing the internet drop their pants for "8-bit game runs on 8-bit machines".  It's not like the absolute bloody miracle that was Pinball Dreams on CPC.

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carleton

carleton

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2 hours ago, Dudley said:

None really.  How about that the C64 needs a ram upgrade when the SMS does it in 8kb? :D

 

I'm just messing really it's just weird seeing the internet drop their pants for "8-bit game runs on 8-bit machines".  It's not like the absolute bloody miracle that was Pinball Dreams on CPC.


It won't be 8kb on the MS. Best I can see is the dumps appear to be 256kb which sounds about right.

I do think it's not really a C64 game though, apparently the RAM upgrade has DMA transfer which can greatly assist in the scrolling. So that has solved one of the major stumbling points.

 

I think it looks really nice though. 

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carleton

carleton

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8k of RAM sort of becomes secondary when you can bank switch data in from a cart. If you exclude video ram from my C64 games I pretty much only use the zero page as RAM.

 

SNES stuff like that felt like a SNES game to me because there was no extra hardware involved (other than in the cart).

 

I wrote a criminally slow vector graphics C64 game in 1987. I don’t think running it on an accelerated C64 or emulator makes it a better achievement today.

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Dudley

Dudley

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Yeah that's generally where I fall, if you can plug the "Game module" into a 100% original system and it works, it's running on it.

 

Which is interesting because Donkey Kong 64? Majora's Mask? Not N64 games by that token, they didn't work without the separate expansion pack..

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Nick R

Nick R

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1 hour ago, Dudley said:

Yeah that's generally where I fall, if you can plug the "Game module" into a 100% original system and it works, it's running on it.

 

Which is interesting because Donkey Kong 64? Majora's Mask? Not N64 games by that token, they didn't work without the separate expansion pack..

 

By that logic it's impossible to play Sonic 3 & Knuckles on a Mega Drive - you can only play it on a Mega Drive that's combined with a Sonic & Knuckles cartridge. ;)

 

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Dudley

Dudley

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10 hours ago, Nick R said:

 

By that logic it's impossible to play Sonic 3 & Knuckles on a Mega Drive - you can only play it on a Mega Drive that's combined with a Sonic & Knuckles cartridge. ;)

 

 

I was pondering making a video on this so that's a good shout thanks!

 

Thinking about that, it absolutely is running on a Mega drive but is Sonic 3 "Additional hardware" here.

 

I don't think so, it's basically like an Amiga game with 2 disks.

 

11 hours ago, Unofficial Who said:

Donkey Kong 64 could run without the pack when it was in development but there was some sort of bug they couldn’t track down which was solved with the ram pack if I remember reading correctly.

 

 

You're correct, and they bundled the pak with the game.

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Gregory Wolfe

Gregory Wolfe

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19 hours ago, Camel said:

More accurately, the programmer of that unofficial public domain version struggled. 
 

Colecovision was a beast though.

 

I owned a Colecovision and a C64, it's why I was aware of this travesty on the latter machine. Looking at how clunky the sprite moves, it's possible that the game was actually done in basic*.

 

* EDIT: The Basic programme is listed at the end of the video. My memory has not deserted me.

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Gregory Wolfe

Gregory Wolfe

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2 hours ago, Camel said:

Not sure of your point then. 

 

It's not too bad that it's in Basic. Had it been an assembly language game then it would have been a poor show. Very few games became well known on the C64 if they were written in Basic.

 

My original point was look how well the 1982 C64 hardware has done reproducing the 1990 game, Sonic The Hedgehog, compared to how badly it did reproducing the 1982 game Smurf, originally released on the 1982 Colecovision hardware.

 

Perhaps it's more about how I felt, back then, moving from Colecovision gaming hardware to C64 gaming hardware. *shrugs*

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jamesy

jamesy

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It does indeed work! There's a digital manual you can choose to view when you first boot it up and everything. It runs really well too from what I played up to. Got to the jungle zone before getting a game over haha. Managed to lose 8 lives on the second boss! Gonna try the master system version now to rejig my memory.

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