The GHZ Forum

as someone who acidentally downloaded both the japanese and european roms of sonic cd and tried both even reading they're the same, does the euro version run just a tiny bit slower than the japanese? i just feel the japanese version runs smoother. was just wondering if this was right or if i'm just imagining things. could also just be the roms themselves.

The Euro version is PAL, which has a lower refresh rate or something than NTSC, but I'm not sure how if at all that would affect its operation in an emulator.

All pre-Dreamcast video games run slower in PAL territories. (Which is why I bought a MD2 with 50hz/60hz switch, a multibios mod for my MCD2 and a Japanese Saturn. The difference is enormous, especially for Sonic games.)

Actually, no, not all. Most, yes, and Sonic games certainly but there are exceptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_console#PAL_issues
A few examples there (DKC 1 and 2, Trubografx games).

so what speed do most people prefer of the two? is the original US version at the speed of E or J? and what about the re-release on the gems collection or any other compilation release that featured sonic cd that i may not know about?

emeralds wrote:so what speed do most people prefer of the two?

The original NTSN speed of of course. Unless you enjoy playing in consttn slow.motion and in the case of S1 slower music even.

is the original US version at the speed of E or J?

Japanese and American are both always 60hz.

and what about the re-release on the gems collection or any other compilation release that featured sonic cd that i may not know about?

(Only talking Europe region, since the NTSC folks never have such problems anyway.) The Gems Collection runs at 60hz and the PC version doesn't run at all but if it did, it'd be 60hz as well. As I said, aside from Nintendo's shitty Virtual Console, none of the post-Dreamcast consoles have 50hz issues in PAL regions, aside from single games that were badly localised (Metal Slug Collection for PS2 for example). And on PCs it's completely irrelevant.

Um? No, the european Gems Collection runs exclusively in 50hz, making it the only Gamecube Sonic game to not feature the expected option to switch between the two modes. As for the actual speed Sonic CD runs at, I honestly don't remember, but it was probably 50 and not 60.

The PC version actually had a menu option called "Game speed" which had two settings, "Fast" and "Smooth", euphemisms for 60 and 50 fps, respectively.

Oh. Well I never got the latter to run more than once or twice for a few seconds so...
As for the Gems Collection however, it seems to have at least been optimised. I could not make out any speed differenced between the Japanese Mega-CD and GC versions whereas there were major ones between it and the PAL MCD one.

P.P.A. wrote:The original NTSN speed of of course. Unless you enjoy playing in consttn slow.motion and in the case of S1 slower music even.

*NTSC, constant, slow-motion

Curse you, post edit restriction!

P.P.A. wrote:aside from single games that were badly localised (Metal Slug Collection for PS2 for example).

Whaaaat? Really? I've been looking to get this, heard nothing about PAL issues. That's a shame.

Neo wrote:The PC version actually had a menu option called "Game speed" which had two settings, "Fast" and "Smooth", euphemisms for 60 and 50 fps, respectively.

30 and 60 respectively, actually.

Really? Hmm, now that you mention it, that might've been the case. Weren't the actual values displayed in the debugger menu?

Since the game was meant to run on 75 MHz Pentium CPUs with about 8 MB of main RAM or so, they implemented the "Fast" mode which halved the framerate so to leverage data processing load. I remember playing it on a Pentium MMX 233 MHz with 32 MB of RAM, the "Smooth" mode was noticeably slower.

would you guys happen to know if ristar has any speed differences between versions? i figured since it was developed by the sonic team this would be a good place to ask.

Ristar is one of the few Mega Drive titles I know which does have differences between the NTSC/PAL versions. The music plays faster to make up for the lower CPU speed, and the movement and animation speed of the various objects is increased so they move at about the speed they should. Interestingly enough, Ristar actually moves faster in the PAL version, probably due to some rounding issues.

It's also the only title I know which actually uses the extra 16 lines available in PAL mode, for a full resolution of 320x240, without borders. (This makes certain things act weird, though, such as the bouncing title cards.)

Misinformation Smash: Ristar is not Sonic Team's puppy. No idea why journalists insist it is, but it isn't. The staff behind it had some future ST employees, which I think is as close as it gets.

Also, guy, do you know about the mind-boggling amount of localization cuts done to the jap version before it came to the west? There is a page that documents them all on one of the bigger Ristar fansites, but said fansite has a habit of never keeping reliable hosting for longer than a few months at a time...

Yeah. All the enemies were redesigned to look angry, and Ristar was made to use his angry "boss" sprites through the whole game. And for some reason a flying squirrel enemy was turned into a bat. I never got how a bat is more original than a flying squirrel.

Other changes include the title screen dropping the "the shooting star" subtitle, the stages being totally renamed (Neer -> Flora, Leatow -> Undertow, Onaclove -> Scorch, etc), the bonus stage items becoming unnamed, some cheat codes being removed and the ending screen being changed from a scene depicting a surviving Greedy looking into the stars to Ristar meeting his father.

Then there was the Elykiki(?) boss! Which was randomly changed from an ice-guzzling robot cat to a generic "ice monster". And other random details were removed, such as a sprite of some star goddess or other which appears briefly during the intro, and the frame saying "Valdi Solar System" in the level intermission screen, leaving the system unnamed in the western release.

I'm sure there were more details, like some sort of enemy that only appeared in the Japanese release (a starfish, maybe?), all this stuff was on Ristar Cluster, which, well.

thanks for the info. since i've already steered completely off the original post's topic, i might as well ask another unrelated question to further stick the uselessness to one thread.

i read somewhere that you can play tails in s&k. how does one do this?

Having Sonic 3 on top of it.

Since the game uses an updated version of Sonic 3's engine, it obviously also has all the Tails code. However, the his sprites aren't in the ROM, so if you were to force the game to pick him he'd be invisible. I don't think there's any way to do this without a cheat device, though.

Now stop being a pansy and capitalize your words properly.

Neo wrote:However, the his sprites aren't in the ROM, so if you were to force the game to pick him he'd be invisible.

orly? But I imagine it's plenty glitchy.

recently inspired to go through the old sonics after just playing sonic CD for the first time, i'm playing knuckles in sonic 3 through the s3&k rom, was about to come back here after beating the launch base boss (last boss in sonic 3 as sonic) and it took me to mushroom hill. i was pissed off as i just figured knuckles didn't have an ending but saved it went back in and realized it saved mushroom hill as zone 7 so i'm guessing now it's just leading into an exact repeat of beating s&k with knuckles. i'm also assuming this is how you get tails into s&k levels by going through the s3 levels first?

FlashTHD wrote:orly?

Ya rly. Notice how the only Tails sprites in there are the ones that didn't exist in S3 (S&K level gimmicks, Super Tails). Though that upside-down half-Tails is quite... interesting. I wonder what it's for?

emeralds wrote:i'm playing knuckles in sonic 3 through the s3&k rom, was about to come back here after beating the launch base boss (last boss in sonic 3 as sonic) and it took me to mushroom hill. i was pissed off as i just figured knuckles didn't have an ending but saved it went back in and realized it saved mushroom hill as zone 7 so i'm guessing now it's just leading into an exact repeat of beating s&k with knuckles. i'm also assuming this is how you get tails into s&k levels by going through the s3 levels first?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_%26_ ... Hedgehog_3

I'm just curious now, what happened when you overwrote a S3 save game with a S3&K one, then plugged the S3 cart alone? what happens with the S3&K save data?

oh i'm just playing roms. the s&k and s3&k are separate so no overwriting needed.

Isuka wrote:I'm just curious now, what happened when you overwrote a S3 save game with a S3&K one, then plugged the S3 cart alone? what happens with the S3&K save data?

IIRC, Sonic 3 actually stores the two save datas separately, but if you load up S3&K and the saves are all empty, it imports all the existing Sonic 3 saves. So S3&K saves wouldn't change the Sonic 3 ones in any way.

I don't have anything to back my claims, though, so don''t take my word for it.