A Time Attack mode, Stage Select, multiple save slots, and other expanded options round things out. You can use the spin dash in Sonic 1, for instance, or play as Knuckles or solo Tails in either title. QOLDecompiling from the 2013 ports also means these versions come with a few important quality-of-life (QOL) improvements over the Genesis originals (or the emulated Steam versions). To extend the playfield vertically, you have to dive into the decompiled source code, change 'SCREEN_YSIZE' in the retroengine.hpp, then recompile a fresh new executable (there are some tricky dependencies involved in getting this to work much thanks to for her assistance in my attempts).

Unfortunately, the game's vertical height remains hardcoded at 240 pixels in this build, which means the game looks like a long, thin strip when extended across the width of a modern PC monitor. From there, you can run the precompiled Windows release and edit the settings file to extend the playfield horizontally with relative ease (you can also edit the pixel scale if you want to effectively zoom the game's camera back in on a large monitor). First, you have to take a legally obtained copy of one of the 2013 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 be of assistance there). Be sure to extend to full screen for maximum impact.įilling your PC screen with a playable Sonic map isn't exactly as simple as dragging the corner of the gameplay window. Scaled up to 4096x2160, you can see a lot more of Sonic 2 at once. As you can see in the pictures and videos included in this article, this tweak effectively zooms out the standard in-game camera to show huge chunks of a stage at once, giving players an exciting new perspective on these classic titles.

But with a little tinkering, the new PC versions also let players scale the game window to any arbitrary resolution, expanding the visible playfield without scaling up the games' core pixel graphics. That's an interesting-enough hacking/coding achievement on its own. That means these heavily enhanced versions of the early '90s Genesis games-developed by Christian Whitehead using the same revamped Retro/Star Engine that powers Sonic Mania-can now be easily recompiled for play on new platforms including the PlayStation Vita, the Nintendo Switch, and Windows/Mac computers. Further Reading Beyond emulation: The massive effort to reverse-engineer N64 source codeA group of coders has decompiled the source code for Sonic the Hedgehog and its 1992 sequel from their well-regarded 2013 smartphone remakes.

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