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The bank holiday brought surprising news in the world of emulation, as Sega's inimitable icon Sonic the Hedgehog was spotted hitting the loop-de-loop on the humble Commodore Amiga, courtesy of a new playable demo from fanmodder Reassembler.
Currently titled "Aonic", Reassembler's demo uses A1200 technology to recreate Green Hill Zone Act 1, a stage practically canonised in the minds of classic gaming fans the world over. The Aonic demo, meticulously adapted directly from the original Sega Mega Drive code, authentically reproduces the stage design, enemies, speed, and physics of Sega's phenomenal 1991 release - a release that became the studio's best-selling game to date while also making a multimedia superstar out of its spiny protagonist.
Reassembler's announcement video includes a one-to-one of the original Mega Drive game running alongside the Aonic demo, leaving very little room for comparison. Visually, Aonic looks almost identical to its Mega Drive counterpart - save for a necessary alteration to the game's HUD, which lacks the transparency of the original game and is forced to exist outside the gameplay window. The recreation of the Mega Drive's colour palette is courtesy of another modder, RetroRic, who released their own demo back in January of this year. The combination of RetroRic's visual tinkering and Reassembler's adaptive coding has resulted in Aonic's spectacular first showing. Teamwork indeed makes the Dreamwork.
The Aonic demo also features a level editor (though it is currently unoptimised and operates sluggishly when run on Amiga tech) and even includes the classic Level Select cheat! Ok, so it's a little redundant given that the remaining stages are yet to be implemented. But we'll get there, Scrap Brain fans.
(Oh... Up, Down, Left, Right, A+Start. But you knew that already.)
The most notable omission in Aonic's presentation is a lack of sound. The demo doesn't feature the Green Hill Zone earworm, nor do we get the iconic Ring "ding" (though we do get the opening "Se-ga" jingle). Reassembler says that while adding sound at this stage is possible, they would rather wait until they are able to recreate the classic audio as faithfully as the visuals. Regardless, there's no denying that the demo is already extremely impressive - a real testament to the skill (and no doubt patience) of its developers.
Aonic - which is compatible with numerous emulators as well as original A1200 hardware - is now available to download from Reassembler's itch.io, where you can also read up on some of the adjustments and modifiers that have enabled the Blue Blur to make his Amiga appearance a reality. Don't tell Zool.