Sega Saturn Sonic Mania port attempt Update 2
DISCLOSURE: This project is made using Claude code AI for the code. I'm saying it here because i don't think everyone read the description of the last video.
i know its going to disappoint a lot of people and it does make this less impressive than if it was made by hand. But making this by hand would also take a tremendous amount of time because it is not an engine port but a complete game rewrite from zero for the Saturn hardware.
I decided to start this because after experimenting with Claude a bit i was impressed by what it managed to do and so i decided to challenge it by starting this to see if Claude was even capable of writing code efficient enough to run on the Saturn and it once again is doing a heck of a lot better than i expected it would. The game runs at 60fps with a perfect frame time so far on the stock Saturn memory with still room to spare.
The first step i did to start this project was to take a few hours to first gather all the Saturn manuals and information i could get about the hardware itself. then i told the AI to read all of them one at a time and told it to take notes so it could know how to implement a feature without guessing how to implement it. i also discussed with the AI to make a list of strict rules to follow and things it must do as to reduce the risk of mistakes. for example it must go read trough the decompilation to gather any game logic values or art assets placement. still a lot of the game logic have to be rework to work better with the Saturn hardware.
Everything is added one thing at a time for example i don't just go add all the green hills object, i have to pick one see how many frames it has/ how many duplicates frames it has because there tends to be alot of those in mania remove the duplicate frames and have the code point to the identical frames that are already in memory, this way it saves memory and the animation stays the same. sometimes i can also mirror frames and it results in either no difference or a difference minimal enough to go unnoticed. the rings are mirrored for example unlike the real game.
Still i am well aware of the downside of using ai so it's why i'm still calling this an attempt cause for all i know the code might become an unmanageable mess eventually and if that turns out to be the case well that will be the end of it.
I have a pretty high standard for this project especially since i use ai the least effort i can do is have it be as perfect as the Saturn can possibly run it. i wont tolerate to release a buggy unplayable mess so you can be sure that if i ever release it eventually it's because it should work. Now of course i still expect it will have some bugs like any piece of software but interestingly enough its probably going to be a case where the bugs are going to be different than those from mania. especially since its not reusing the engine it means bugs mania has might not exist in this port and vice versa.
for those wanting a more technical video explaining all the optimization and how everything has been implemented i might make a video eventually explaining it but that might take a while to come so i can't say when.
Created thanks to the sonic mania decompilation project: github.com/RSDKModding/Sonic-Mania-Decompilation