When Sonic arrived on the Genesis / Mega Drive at the start of the '90s, it caused shockwaves.
Not only did this 2D platformer look and sound amazing – and arguably better than anything on rival systems at the time – it also ran really fast, hence the name.
I recall a playground debate at the time with an Amiga-owning friend about whether Sonic would even be possible on Commodore's 16-bit home computer. I seem to remember that I smugly predicted it wasn't up to the challenge, but it appears I need to eat my words, as a new tech demo has proven otherwise.
RetroRic has released a playable demo of Sonic's opening stage, running on the Amiga, available in both 32-colour and 16-colour versions. He says the release was inspired by the fact that fellow homebrew coder Reassembler is currently working on a similar project, albeit one with a wider scope:
"I had the idea of trying to bring Sonic to the Amiga earlier this year, but with the current projects I had in the pipeline, I decided to put it on the back burner and revisit it sometime in the future.
With news of Reassembler's new Sonic project for the Amiga, I realised that there wasn't much point in keeping this project alive, as I'm sure his version of Sonic on the Amiga will be built from the ground up and will have dedicated code to try and squeeze Sonic onto the platform. I couldn't quite let it die though, I really wanted to see what was possible with the Scorpion Engine regarding Sonic, so I decided just to make a tech demo for my own creative curiosity."
RetroRic admits that this was "only meant to be a graphical demo", but it soon grew in size and has become an "almost complete level 1 of Mega Drive Sonic the Hedgehog, in both 32 colour and 16 colour versions."