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1
Gaming and Grazing / Regarding PC Recording
« on: March 20, 2017, 10:04:59 pm »
For the past few years I've been experimenting with patches to some of the Genesis Sonic games to allow custom music and I'm interested in putting up long-play videos of the soundtracks I came up with, but recording them is a whole other matter. Outputting via cables to my DVD recorder seems cost-prohibitive, so I'm leaning towards direct recording, and I'm wondering if anyone has recommendations as far as software they use for capture.

The three criteria I'm looking for, in descending order of importance, is that it (1) runs and records smoothly on my computer, which is fairly old and has "only" 2 GB of RAM, (2) is inexpensive, ideally free, and (3) doesn't throw watermarks all over the screen. It would also need to be able to capture from both emulators (for Sonic 1 and 2) and stand-alone programs (specifically the Collection versions of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic CD). I realize asking for all three I might as well be asking for the secret to cold fusion, but mainly I'm just trying to get an idea of what people use for recording their PC runs.

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Wikkity! / Earliest Sonic memory
« on: October 06, 2014, 03:32:29 am »
Went through the whole forum and didn't see a topic about it, so I thought I'd post my first memories of Sonic and see what others' were.

WARNING: TL;DR

My absolute earliest memory of Sonic was hearing a neighbor kid a year younger than me discussing it back in the summer of 1991. He had a Genesis, and I did not; frankly, I didn't care as no games for it interested me. My NES was more than enough for me and I was biding my time waiting for the Super Nintendo to come out. We were outside, hanging out on summer vacation and talking, and he mentioned he'd played a new game called Sonic the Hedgehog. "He's like, this hedgehog who can run like 120 MPH," I remember him saying. "It's so cool."

I was unimpresssed. I had just discovered Final Fantasy and was diving into RPGs for the first time, and the only Genesis game I'd even played was Altered Beast, which bored me. I wrote the game off mentally.

A few weeks later, I had hassled my mother into taking me to the nearest Funcoland (now Gamestop) to let me look at the newest games and see if they were paying anything for games I'd be interested in selling. This was sometime in late July or August, 1991. I went into the store and looked around a bit and some very good music caught my ears. I looked over at one of the Genesis demo units the store had set up and saw this bright, beautiful, colorful landscape and this blue creature standing in the middle of it. Someone had been playing it and walked away, leaving the game running instead of pausing it. The blue creature was staring straight out and tapping his feet, with an expression on his face that said "What are you waiting for?"

I went over and grabbed the controller. I started playing. I noticed as he ran faster and faster his legs started spinning around in circles like in a Roadrunner cartoon; I found this awesome. He collected rings, not coins. There were loops and tunnels and collapsing ledges. This was beyond Mario. Being used to Mario, I had to adjust to not being able to just drop onto enemies; I had to jump or spin onto them to not take damage. I made it to the end of the stage, and a screen came up that said "SONIC HAS PASSED ACT 1." I finally put two and two together: This was the game my neighbor was talking about. This was Sonic the Hedgehog. My mother eventually had to pull me away from the machine to get me to put it down. I think I made it to Act 2 of Marble Zone.

Sonic 2: Christmas season of 1992, my grandmother took my younger brother and I to the Mall of America. There was a demo unit playing Sonic 2 at the Kay-Bee Toy Store, so of course I played it. I had seen the TV commercials and wanted to find out more about Tails and "Blast Processing". I made it to Act 2 of Chemical Plant Zone, whereupon I got stuck at the Shaft of Death and drowned repeatedly. I remember getting frustrated because I tried to find air bubbles, not aware there simply weren't any in that stage. New Year's Eve, my parents rented a Genesis for me with Sonic 2, and my neighbor (the one who told me about Sonic a year before) and I played co-op Sonic and Tails. I was Sonic. We made it all the way to Wing Fortress Zone, where we got stuck at the gun hatch part (I didn't realize they were platforms; I thought they would shoot at me so I waited for them to close and then jumped--straight into the bottomless pit).

The next year, Christmas 1993, I finally got a Genesis, a model 2 with Sonic 2 and Spinball. I played the shit out of them whenever I could, although my parents usually hid the controllers from me during the school year to keep me from getting distracted from homework. My first time I beat Sonic 2, I beat it as Tails, and therefore I had no idea there was an ending cinema until I went back and beat it with Sonic. Likewise for Chaos Emeralds; the first time I collected all seven was with Tails so it took me another playthrough to find out about Super Sonic. I had resigned myself to the fact that we would never be able to afford a Sega CD attachment and therefore I wouldn't get to play Sonic CD.

Sonic 3: A few months after I got my Genesis, along came Sonic 3. I rented it on spring break 1994, but to my immense irritation after renting it my dad made me go out and shovel the driveway while my younger brother got to be first to play Sonic 3. I remember getting frustrated at the immense size of the stages (commercials said it was "3 times bigger than Sonic 2" but I figured this referred to the number of stages, not the size of the stages) and having to fight a boss at the end of every single stage. I also didn't like the constant presence of water in almost every stage. I made it to Carnival Night Zone and got stuck at the fucking barrel; I assumed I made a wrong turn somewhere and had been trapped, but I couldn't find any other route through the stage. I didn't beat the game until a few months later, when Game Informer rushed out a special issue with a Sonic 3 guide that explained how the barrels worked. We didn't have an internet-capable computer and I don't think GameFAQs existed at that point anyway. Just like with Sonic 2, I first beat it as Tails.

Sonic & Knuckles: No story behind this one, I saw it was coming out in a magazine ad, I rented it and played it. Got stuck several times. First time, in Mushroom Hill I couldn't exactly figure out how to operate the lifts for several minutes ("JUST PUSH DOWN DUMBASS"). Then, in Flying Battery 1 I got stuck at the part where you have to let the bombs blow up the floor; it didn't occur to me to hang around and let this happen. Then, Sandopolis 2. Jesus christ, what a pain. I finally beat the game as Knuckles, made it to Death Egg 2 and game overed as Sonic. In the Summer of 1995 I finally experienced the whole game locked on, and I was like "Holy shit this is awesome." I bought both Sonic 3 and S&K and still own them to this day even though my Genesis no longer works properly. I also still have my Spinball cartridge, but my Sonic 2 has been lost for years (I think my parents threw it out).

I didn't start playing the 3D games until years after they came out, so I largely missed out on how other people reacted to them. I think this is actually a good thing. I played Sonic Adventure 2 before Sonic Adventure because my used Dreamcast refused to load my used SA1 disc, and I remember that I played from the start of the Hero story through Eternal Engine, where the DC froze and refused to load the level, so I shut it off, came back the next day and finished it. This was in October 2009. Shortly after finishing the game for the first time, I watched yoshifan and Petrie911's single segment runs on SDA and I made the decision to do a speedrun myself. My Dreamcast gave up the ghost and quit working a few months later, so I bought and transitioned to the Gamecube version, which I've been playing on since. About a year and a half of practice, usually minimum two hours a day, elapsed between my decision to do a run and the completion of my SS Dark story run in July 2011. The only other game I played during this time besides SA2B was Heroes, which I spent about two weeks with in spring 2010.

The rest of the Sonic games I've played don't have any real stories behind them: Buy game, play game, beat game, sometimes speedrun game. I do have unpleasant memories of my first times playing Sonic Adventure DX (March 2011) and Shadow (October 2012), as both games caused me to get motion sickness so badly I actually threw up. The only levels in Shadow that provoke that reaction from my stomach are Lost Impact and The Doom, but for SADX I pretty much have to play it on an empty stomach, so I don't have much incentive to play it at all. I had the same problem with Sonic 3D Blast (December 2011), although I made myself stop playing until my stomach settled down before coming back to it so I never barfed (I had to leave my Saturn running for 3 days to finish it as a result, though).

TL;DR: I ARE OLD

3
General Sonic / Well, this was bizarre.
« on: January 08, 2014, 12:53:02 am »
I just finished unlocking Expert Mode on Shadow today, and I've been working my way through it... on Central City, though, I had something really strange happen. I got the first three or so big bombs detonated; after the third one (the one in the green slime that has the robots drop down to defend it with the explode-able wall to a pole behind it), I climbed up the pole, ran down the street and grabbed the rocket. At this point I got thrown off by a level difference; usually I jump off the rocket in midair, land on the sidewalk and hit a springboard that launches me up to a ledge with a GUN robot and a shielded soldier; however on Expert that springboard doesn't seem to exist. It didn't occur to me to turn around and get in the truck next to the checkpoint to get across the slime in the street, so I just started jumping and homing attacking my way across, taking damage repeatedly as I did so since there is no sidewalk there.

Eventually after losing 30 or so rings I made it to the other end, jumped out where the big bomb was supposed to be and... nothing. No bombs, no cage, no robots, no cars. It was like the game forgot to load any objects, just the stage layout. I thought I might have accidentally gotten into an area that Expert Mode wasn't using and that I wasn't supposed to be in, because I went down the higher road that leads in the other direction and still didn't encounter any objects.

Eventually I got to one of the big metal doors that seals off routes, and had to use a spindash jump with the ramp effect to get myself up and over it and back into an area with loaded objects. By this point I was getting very irritated, because I had already been in the stage for around 11 minutes and was running out of places to look for bombs. I doubled back through the whole stage, checking again, and eventually wound up at the rocket again. I took it again, but this time, I dropped straight down on the other side of the metal wall to the checkpoint with the truck next to it and got in the truck. I drove through the slime instead of jumping through it, and... boom, there were the robots, rubble, the bomb, and the springboard to get up to it. I was annoyed that for whatever reason, the game hadn't loaded it the first time around, but was glad I could at least move on with getting the stage over with, so I detonated the bomb, went down the other road and... sure enough, enemies, rings and objects were loaded. Found the final bomb, blew it up and finished the stage.

I'm wondering if this is a glitch in the game that can be reproduced (like in The Doom where one GUN robot won't spawn unless you leave the room and come back after taking it out of draw distance), and if it's not, if it means my Gamecube is about to crap out. I really wish I'd recorded this. After I finish getting through Expert Mode, maybe I'll try to make it happen again.

4
Hiya Folks / New year, it's time.
« on: January 01, 2012, 07:53:44 pm »
Hello. I've been visiting this site almost every day for a bit over two years to watch videos and read guides, but only now did I work up the nerve to sign up for it. I've been playing Sonic games ever since the first one way back in 1991 as a kid, but it was strictly for fun; only in the last year or two did I start to put in the effort to do it competitively. I originally came over here via being linked from Speed Demos Archive.

The only game I consider myself any good at running at the moment is Sonic Adventure 2; I originally got into speedrunning it with the intention of challenging Petrie911's single-segment Dark side speedrun. In early July I recorded a 29:33 single segment run with no deaths; it was submitted to SDA but I had to withdraw it a few days after submitting due to it being obsoleted by Son1cGu1tar's run. I don't hold much of an illusion about ever holding any records for a game so intensely competed and optimized, but my goal now is just to keep my head down, learn as much as I can and see what the best I can achieve is. I've idolized the players here for a few years, and I find it awesome that this place is so serious about competition, but it also intimidates the hell out of me, which I why I was scared to join until now. But hey, I had to make some new year's resolution, so I resolved to stop being a chicken and sign up.

Uhhh... other stuff about myself: I play guitar and bass (I own 9 guitars, 1 bass and two uncompleted guitar projects), I'm a certified ProTools operator, and my favorite game of all time is Xenogears. I also play Touhou, but I really suck at it.

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