Okay, I'm going to answer a few questions, but first I want to say that I didn't personally rip any graphics from the Sonic games, I simply saved them from one of the many Sonic fangame/spriterip websites that are out there. Sega has never has a go at anyone for making fangames, and they don't seem to mind at all.
Flashlab, yeah I was the guy with the poll about what kind of games the Amiga community wants, and I have the results here if you want to see them. I'm going to open another similar poll soon. We have gotten a team together and started "Underground Arcade", and currently have a few games in development, at least two of which should be out some time this year. We are still a small group though, and we desperately need more coders, graphic artists and other creative Amiga people to join the team so we can get more games made faster!
This Sonic project was just something I decided to whip up one morning after I woke up, just to see if I could do it. I didn't want to work on it for more than a day though.
I reduced all the background blocks down to 7 colours, although a few unique blocks use some of the colours from the player sprite (who has his own 8 colour palette). I tried to stick to what I observed in OCS games like Mr. Nutz and Brian the Lion, I would hope that these graphics could be used in a fully optimised OCS Sonic engine, which would have to use 7 colours for foregrounds (and possibly enemy sprites), 8 colours for the main sprite (not sure where Mr. Nutz got an 8th colour from, maybe reusing a single colour BOB from the background layer?). So with a bit of tweaking, I think Sonic could still look quite nice on OCS Amigas with a good engine, it would have heaps of parallax if we used the dual playfield mode. Of course with the AGA version you wouldn't lose any colour depth at all since it can do the same 16 colour layers as the Mega Drive.
I'm sure OCS Amiga people wouldn't mind the colour loss compromise if they still get to keep the speed and depth of the original Sonic game, but if the game were to use 32 colours for the sprites and foregrounds and missed out on the parallax, it just wouldn't feel the same, it'd probably feel like this Backbone game (raster bars are nice, but parallax is so much better).
I've left this project open for anyone to continue. They can download all the files required from here -
http://sonicamiga.blogspot.com/ and of course new graphics and sounds can be found on the web, Google should produce a few results.
As I was saying earlier though, we have other games that need to be worked on and since we have no other pixel artists in Underground Arcade I've got a lot of work cut out for me, so I'm off of this Sonic thing for now. I just wanted to see if it could be done, and then give it away if anyone wants to continue it.
