Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut (Windows, 2004)

Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut
Developer: Sonic Team Publishers: Sega (JP/EU), Activision Value Publishing (US) Platform: Windows Released in JP: December 18, 2003 Released in US: September 14, 2004 Released in EU: February 6, 2004 Released in KR: 2004 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden level select. This game has regional differences. This game has a prototype article

This page covers the 2004 port of the game, not the 2011 version. You can find that version's page here.

A 2004 PC port of Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut that, as was standard with other PC ports of Sega games at the time, is pretty poor. This version of the game would also be the basis for the HD console and Steam ports.

Sub-Page

Prototype Info

Leftovers

Download Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut PC Leftovers File: SADXPC Leftovers.rar (280 KB) (info)

d:\SADXPC\sonic\Release\sonic.pdb

At 0x48FE1C in sonic.exe (U.S. version) is a file path for the main PDB file, which would've stored debugging information for the game.

PSOV2

At 0x34A5D40 is the initials for Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2, whose Korean PC port was released a year prior.

Debugging Features

Debug Movement

Setting 0x3B29D08 to 1 in Cheat Engine will enable a Debug Movement display showing all invisible walls and inactive objects on the map. This also enables Free Movement mode for every character, except Tails, moving around for a bit will also activate a display.

Debug Collision

The Collision Debugger from the Dreamcast version is also present, but it has been almost completely removed.

Tokyo Game Show Menus

The TGS menus from the Dreamcast version are still present, to access it, replace the seven bytes at C53A in sonic.exe with seven 90 bytes, or install the "TGS Menus" mod from this page.

The menus haven't been updated for 60FPS, Tikal's theme starts playing after a sixth of a second, the title screen lasts 2.5 seconds and the character select lasts 10 seconds, the fading is also broken.

In the Dreamcast version, pressing the X and Y buttons together would bring you to a Level Select, but in the PC version, the game strangely exits.

In the same section of code is a Level Select, though there's no known way of accessing these normally. The code to display the text was removed, though it still functions. The game mistakenly loads the player in "Adventure" mode in the Action Stages without setting an Adventure Field to return to, so selecting the "Quit" option from the pause menu simply puts you in Hedgehog Hammer (level 0).

SPR Task

DRAW:
EXEC:
NUM:
MAX:
SPR TASK

Earlier versions of Sonic Adventure included a SPR Debugging feature displaying various functions. It's unknown if it can still be accessed, but some of the text still exists.

Japanese Level List

There is a Japanese level list in the main executable (pointer table at 50A250 in US PC sonic.exe), which is not referenced by any code.

 プラクティス 		(Practice)
 エメラルドコースト 	        (Emerald Coast)
 ウィンディバレー   	(Windy Valley)
 トゥインクルパーク  	(Twinkle Park)
 スピードハイウェイ  	(Speed Highway)
 レッドマウンテン    	(Red Mountain)
 スカイデッキ    	        (Sky Deck)
 ロストワールド  	        (Lost World)
 アイスキャップ  		(Icecap)
 カジノ  			(Casino)
 ファイナルエッグ    	(Final Egg)
 きのこ                  (Mushroom)
 ホットシェルター    	(Hot Shelter)
 ジャングル  		(Jungle)
 砂漠    		(Desert)
 カオス０    		(Chaos 0)
 カオス２    		(Chaos 2)
 カオス４    		(Chaos 4)
 カオス６    		(Chaos 6)
 カオスＦＩＮＡＬ    	        (Chaos FINAL)
 エッグモービル１    	(Egg Mobile 1)
 エッグモービル２    	(Egg Mobile 2)
 エッグモービル３    	(Egg Mobile 3)
 ＺＥＲＯ    		(ZERO)
 Ｅ－１０１  		(E-101)
 Ｅ－１０１改    	        (E-101 Mk.II)
 シューティング１    	(Shooting 1)
 シューティング２    	(Shooting 2)
 砂ボード			(Sandboard)

Notable items include:

• Hedgehog Hammer listed as プラクティス (Practice).
• Three empty level slots listed as きのこ (Mushroom), ジャングル (Jungle), and 砂漠 (Desert).
• Adventure Fields and Twinkle Circuit listed as empty strings.

Free Movement Mode

There is a Free Movement mode that can be used to fly around, this is also in the Dreamcast version. It can be found by changing the Action ID to 87 for Sonic, 57 for Knuckles and 53 for Amy.

The controls are as follows:
Analog Stick = Move
Analog Stick + X = Move Up/Down
A = Exit Free Movement mode.
B = Go to the current character's start position.

Free Movement mode seems to be partially removed from the game. Big's Free Movement can be seen by setting his action to 59, but the only remaining feature of it being the way his arms move when pressing the buttons to move up or down. Tails and Gamma don't have free movement mode at all.

Leaving Free Movement mode puts the character in an action natural for the current stage. For example, in Icecap and Sand Hill the player will regain their board upon leaving free movement mode. This is the same for stages such as Perfect Chaos, which drops the player as Super Sonic.

Differences from Prior Versions

Sound

The Dreamcast and GameCube versions store music in .ADX files and sounds in .MLT archives. The PC version stores music in .WMA files and sounds in .DAT archives. This means music tracks no longer loop and everything sounds lower quality. The voice clip's format also causes stutter, and some sound effects are too quiet.

Dreamcast	PC

The PC version also supports up to 7.1 surround sound, however it is rather poorly implemented with subpar sound effect panning.

Graphics

Lighting

• The Windows version uses a severely more limited lighting engine compared to the (already simplified) GameCube version:
  • The GameCube version used a custom formula for level lighting that applies Diffuse lighting last, while character lighting was still palette based (and, unlike the Dreamcast LANTERN engine, was per-pixel rather than per-vertex) with five possible values and independent light direction.
  • The Windows version uses the Direct3D 8 lighting system, which applies Diffuse first; it also only uses two of the five character light values, which are then converted to create Direct3D 8 lights, as well as light direction now being dependent on the camera and now being per-vertex again; combined with values often being inflated to absurd extremes, it results in the characters looking even more plasticy than on GameCube.

GameCube	PC

The Windows version also ignores vertex lighting not build directly into the level model (i.e. objects).

Textures

• The Windows port goes back to using PVM files for its textures. Interestingly, while some textures were seemingly reimported from the Dreamcast version (mainly related to menu textures), most were left unaltered, resulting in the textures being even worse quality than on GameCube.

Dreamcast	PC

• Knuckles' Shovel Claw has lost its environment mapping.
• Knuckles’ Maximum Heat attack aura is more broken.
• The GameCube version had a water distortion effect possible using the GameCube's TEV system. The PC version removes this.
• The PC version alters the way some textures are mirrored. Instead of a flag being set in part of a level model to flip the texture, the textures themselves are flipped. While this doesn't sound bad on paper, most flipped textures are squeezed into the resolution of the unflipped texture, resulting in massive quality loss.
• Cream the Rabbit, who was given a very small cameo in the GameCube version, now has corrupted textures for seemingly unknown reasons.

Other

• The Dreamcast and GameCube versions includes a check to ignore a model's material colours. For some reason, this check was removed in the PC version. This means many objects in the PC version has different coloring, like platforms in Hot Shelter being orange instead of gray.
• The FMVs are stored at a considerably higher resolution than all other releases, being 640×480 rather than 320×256, although the intro suffers from rather sloppy compression. For unknown reasons, the HD console and Steam versions go back to using the lower quality Dreamcast/GameCube cutscenes.

Dreamcast/GameCube/PS3/X360/Steam	PC

Dreamcast	PC

Stage Differences

Emerald Coast

• For whatever reason, the PC version of the game reuses the deep blue sea texture from the GameCube Preview prototype, instead of the greenish texture used in the final GameCube release; this may have been to improve the graphical fidelity, however, as the Preview ripple textures are higher resolution than GameCube final.

Red Mountain

• The clouds and lava are darker due to poor lighting.

GameCube	PC

GameCube	PC

• The fog in act 1 has been made thicker.

Hot Shelter

• The bridge's UVs were altered to make the textures look more washed-out.
• Gamma's level has a transparency issue with the glass, which is odd as most transparency issues happened when the game was ported to the GameCube.

Other

• The controls are much less sensitive than the Dreamcast and GameCube versions.
• Assuming you have a powerful enough PC, the framerate isn't unstable anymore.

Regional Differences

Japanese and North American Versions

Both of these versions are nearly identical, however the Japanese version comes with SafeDisc 4 DRM protection, while the North American version uses a simple disc check; the Japanese version also forces the title screen, introduction, and main menu to in Japanese, regardless of what language is selected in the options menu.

European Versions

There are multiple known European versions of the PC game; notably, the original European version used SecuROM 5 DRM, while the Sold Out Software re-release uses the SafeDisc 4 DRM (which was also used for Sonic Heroes); the version of the game released for the Sonic PC Collection in 2009 seems to be the European version recompiled to remove the DRM, as its executable is incompatible with the mod loader, which expects a U.S. executable.

The individual regional differences (including the Israeli and Singaporean versions) haven't been documented, although the Hungarian version is reportedly not based on the "regular" European version.

Korean Version

Seems to be based on the American version due to lacking any copy protection besides the basic disc check, to the point that an American disc 2 will boot up the game fine:

• ALL dialogue has been properly translated, including text, menus, the Chao Garden, et al.
• Presumably due to strict laws relating to Japanese media at the time, Japanese voice acting is completely disabled and can no longer be selected from the options menu, despite being present on the disc and the textures for it still being translated. The developers went so far as to replace one piece of dialogue in the voice archive with its' English equivalent (the "select your file" voice, since the game doesn't force Japanese voices until after saves are loaded).
• For whatever reason, not only does the game's FONTDATA0.BIN come with the expected Hangul script, it also has characters for Russian, Greek, and Chinese.

(Source: DC Mods)