-
The interwoven paths of the Chemical Factory Zone are beautiful on this scale.
-
Casino Night Zone looks a little repetitive when you zoom out.
Sega
-
Use the magnifying glass to find Sonic in the Hilltop Zone.
Sega
-
The labyrinth-like Metropolis Zone is easier to navigate when you can see it at once.
Sega
-
Mystical Cave area, demystified.
Sega
-
It’s like one level stacked on top of another …
Sega
-
Behold the scale and grandeur of Fortress Wing
Sega
-
At least now you can see the fresh air while you are trapped underwater.
Sega
-
The familiar flat horizon of the Emerald Hill Zone ends up repeating itself several times in this resolution.
Sega
-
O Sonic 2 title screen struggles with the new scale …
Sega
-
… as well as the stage introduction cards.
Sega
A group of coders decompiled the source code to Sonic the Hedgehog and its 1992 sequel to its well-known smartphone ports from 2013. That means these highly enhanced versions of the 90s Genesis games – developed by Christian Whitehead using the same revamped Retro / Star engine that powers Sonic Mania—Now can be easily recompiled to play on new platforms, including PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch and Windows / Mac computers.
This is an interesting hacking / coding achievement in itself. But with a little bit of tweaking, the PC versions also allow players to scale the game window to any arbitrary resolution, expanding the visible playing field without increasing the game’s core pixel graphics. As you can see from the photos and videos included in this article, this setting effectively zooms out of the game’s standard camera to show large chunks of a stage at once, giving players an exciting new perspective on these classic titles.
But how?
Adjusted to 4096 x 2160, you can see much more Sonic 2 at once. Be sure to extend to full screen for maximum impact.
Filling your PC screen with a game sonic map is not quite as simple as dragging the corner of the game window. First, you have to make a legally obtained copy of one of the 2013 documents sonic games (which are still available on Google Play and the iOS App Store) and extract the “RSDK” file to your computer (this handy video tutorial can help). From there, you can run the precompiled version of Windows and edit the settings file to extend the playing field horizontally with relative ease (you can also edit the pixel scale if you want to effectively enlarge the game camera on a monitor big).
Unfortunately, the vertical height of the game remains encoded at 240 pixels in this build, which means the game looks like a long, thin strip when extended the width of a modern PC monitor. To extend the playing field vertically, you need to dive into the decompiled source code, change “SCREEN_YSIZE” in retroengine.hpp and then recompile a new executable (there are some complicated dependencies involved to make this work; thank you very much to @CodeNameGamma for your help in my attempts).
The thousand-foot view
Once you get things done, however, the effect of this “reduced” view is immediately impressive. The standard 32×48 pixel Sonic sprite becomes a small, Where is Waldo– ski speck on a 2560×1440 monitor (or even smaller if you have a 4K or widescreen display). The new point of view allows players to see well beyond the limited area of the 320×224 screen that they can be used to in Genesis, allowing them to assimilate the scale and design of these huge levels at once. Hidden paths and secrets that once passed in a blur become immediately apparent when you can have an ultra-high level view of a stage at a glance.
-
It’s like Google Earth, but for sonic…
-
The road less traveled becomes much more apparent when you enlarge the Green Hill Zone (be sure to go to the full screen to get the maximum impact from all of these images).
Sega
-
The Labyrinth Zone looks much less labyrinthine when shrunk.
Sega
-
The engine struggles to rotate the bonus stage correctly at this resolution, but it is still quite a scene.
Sega
These 2013 mobile ports were originally designed to work in “full screen” resolution on a variety of different smartphones, so the engine handles all of this rescheduling without problems on its own. Enemies, mobile platforms and animated background elements usually work, even if Sonic is thousands of pixels away from the opposite corner of the screen. The game’s physics still works as expected, and everything is rendered with perfect pixel authenticity at 60 frames per second, too (assuming your machine can handle all those pixels in these expanded resolutions).
Still, there are some weird visual and gameplay artifacts when you try to scale a game originally designed for 90s standard definition TVs to modern computer resolutions. This is most apparent at the end of many levels, where Sonic can get stuck in an invisible obstructive wall and the game goes into an infinite loop waiting for him to leave the screen. At flat levels, the background tiles and even the level architecture itself can sometimes repeat in a vertical pattern as well. And AI for the battle against Dr. Robotnik’s boss also tends to freak out a little thanks to the new, much larger playing field.
These problems can be resolved as hackers continue to tinker with the source code and build new versions of these newly decompiled games. In the meantime, however, we will never look at the classics sonic the same way again.
Sega’s list image