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 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden level select. This game has a prototype article

This page covers the 2004 port of the game, not the (different) 2010 Next-Gen port of the game, and not the 2011 Steam port. 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.

Sub-Pages

Prototype Info

Leftovers

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

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.

Graphics

Lighting

The way lighting works is different compared to the Dreamcast and GameCube versions. The GameCube version replaced the original palette based "Lantern" engine with something more generic. The PC version's lighting engine is even more simplified. The player's lighting changes depending on the camera angle while level lighting is extremely bright. The PC version also ignores built-in vertex lighting that's not attached to the level model.

GameCube	PC

Textures

The textures are re-compressed into PVM files, thus making the PC version (and later versions based on it) have the worst-looking textures.

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.

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 colouring, like platforms in Hot Shelter being orange instead of gray.
• The FMVs, surprisingly, are higher-quality. The original game's FMVs were 320×256 stretched to 640×480, whereas the 2004 PC FMVs are natively at 640×480. As a result, the 2004 PC version has the highest-quality FMVs and one of the things that can truly be marked as an improvement.

Dreamcast/GameCube/PS3/X360/Steam	PC

• The same can't be said about the intro, though: While it's also natively in 640×480 without borders, it suffers from compression.

Dreamcast	PC

Stage Differences

Emerald Coast

• The sea texture was changed.

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.