Sonic the hedgehog?

[Cammy]

It would be really cool if someone could compose some 3/4 channel Protracker mods in the same style as the Mega Drive Sonic/Sonic 2 music for us to use in our Amiga Sonic fan-game. Many of the correct sound effects are already in the game and apart from a lack of parallax and sloped tiles the graphics look pretty spot-on, the gameplay is surprisingly accurate for a Backbone game, and it would be so easy for us to make this a community project where a few people might contribute their own levels to be included in the full game.

[Cammy]

Here's the first half of Green Hill Zone Act 1 recreated in Backbone with Rebel's Sonic pack and using Tricky's music. Just extract it and double-click the icon to play, but remember this was made with Backbone, not coded properly and suffers from all of Backbone's limitations.

http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/Sonic.lha

[Cammy]

Sorry, this package is stand-alone, just run it from Workbench 3.x. Some people have complained that the game won't run and requires lowlevel.library, so I'm going to try and fix up a version that doesn't use any CD32 buttons and upload it soon.

In the meantime, here's a screenshot of the Workbench from the A1200 we're building this Sonic game on:

[Cammy]

I wonder if anyone with some spare time who might want to help out with these Sonic fangames might want to rip some of the fonts from the Sonic games and make them into real Amiga fonts, or ColorFonts even, using ColorType? It's as easy as using Personal Paint and picking up a brush, since ColorType was made by the same guys who made PPaint. I would probably end up doing it myself eventually but I have a whole bunch of Amiga projects on my plate at the moment so it might take a while to get around to it.

Anyone could use the fonts in their own games or even on Workbench afterwards if someone could rip them and upload them! The HUD font would be the most useful since it's the one that is onscreen throughout the game.

Here's a link to ColorType:  http://aminet.net/package/biz/cloan/ColorType

[Cammy]

If anyone would like to try the latest half-level demo of Sonic the Hedgehog on their Amiga I have just uploaded a new archive  http://amigachristmastree.ultimateamiga.co.uk/SonicBackboneDemo.lha

Here's a video of an earlier version:
[YOUTUBE]OxPOZu-fpsw[/YOUTUBE]

[Cammy]

Unfortunately with Backbone there's no control over the channels it uses for the sound effects, I think it tries to use a free channel if there is one and just cuts out a random channel when they're all in use, but it sounds fine with 3-channel mods.

Mr. Beanbag sounds good though, I wasn't sure if you had used 3 or 4 channel mods because I never notice the tune cutting out, good idea cutting out the base channel to play a sound effect.

I always wondered if a game could resume playing a note that was cut out, or if that channel would stay silent until the next note in that channel of the track is played, perhaps if the sample for the note was a long one or was inserted once with a loop. I also wonder about things like using the CPU to mix the channels to give you eight instead of four like how OctaMED does it, could it be used in an action game like a platformer or is there too much going on already?


Oh yeah, and I think Backbone is actually better suited to making a Metal Slug clone than any other type of game, so I think we should have a go at that too if people are interested.