Why didn't Lock-on Technology go anywhere besides being an excuse to release Sonic & Knuckles a near year after Sonic 3 due to time constraints? Could you imagine the possibilities and all the collabs that could of been had this gone somewhere?
Because it was destined to be a gimmick that could only really function properly on games designed by the same devs, where the devs would need to put effort into finding a use for it.
>>12389897It's a weird beast. From what I remember it was an experimental thing that never was supposed to be used for actual games but devs of Sonic 3 ended making way too big game and Lock-On allowed them to just put all the content on 2 separate carts.
>>12389897Because cartridges were quickly replaced by disc based systems
>>12389897I remember there being talk of making the SVP chip used in Virtua Racing into a lock on cartridge to reduce costs instead of shipping it in every game that used it. Obviously no other games ended up using it and I suspect that had something to do with the 32X which took the concept to pants on head levels of retardation.
>put Street Fighter II on Sonic & Knuckles>can't play as Knuckles in Street Fighter IIMoney stolen
>>12390251>think how useful Knuckles would be in Sonic 1 with zones like marble and labyrinth being slow and difficult>lock-on sonic 1 with sonic & knuckles>get pic rel
>>12389897I mean the potential was there but think of the limitations. The lock on cartridge is the one that has to somehow rom hack the previous games, and include that information already there. Easy to do for future titles for older ones not so easy, that's why Sonic 1 doesn't have knuckles playable.Also what other Sega franchise could've done this where people would've had prior entries or bought future entries?Would people have bought a Streets of Rage cartridge to play a new character in older games?
>>12390403>Would people have bought a Streets of Rage cartridge to play a new character in older games?yeah, this sounds fun
>>12389928>finding a use for it.>>12390076i would say that is the exact use for it. could have had genesis games with twice as much content. they should have shelved the 32x, and went with lock on carts for the end of the generation. probably wouldn't have been very many, but it's a cool enough idea to keep cart sales up, and not incur the expense of the failure of the 32x.
Only really existed because of a McDonald's promotion cutting Sonic 3's development, that's it, it was just for one game. No one was going to spend time coding shit that's just "Oh, we have to manufacture MORE cartridges for this shit!"
>>12389897Check out PS1. It had lock-on tech built in to the console. Games such as Monster Rancher and Vib Ribbon let you put in other discs to unlock content.
>>12389897imagine if there was a wily wars 2 that locked onto 1 and it pretty use all of the weapons from all of the games to fight all of the bosses.The sequel wars fan game could do it
Reminder that Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are better off played stand alone unless you want to do a Knuckles or Tails run.Knuckles The Echidna in Sonic The Hedgehog 2 is actually pretty cool because Knuckles' lower jump apex makes it require different strategies in some places, not many, but for example the final boss
>>12389897It didn't go anywhere because it was a marketing gimmick and not at all practical. As such, it would never have gone anywhere. To imagine otherwise demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of what it done, how it works, and the costs involved.
>>12389928Not necessarily. Sharing assets for additional content is something that could have taken off for things like crossover content, something that many companies embraced quite a bit over time. If a game like MK9 didn't have to worry about licensed content like Kratos in the PS3 version instead of it being incorporated in its code, it might have never been delisted. Games like Soul Calibur 2 could be unified between platforms with the exclusive characters being tied to a seperate module, games like Tony Hawk could have their soundtracks as interchangeable carts, etc.It would get exploited to hell because money, but there was always potential in the idea in how that type of asset supplementation. Even if done exactly like &K imagine shit like Castlevania games being able to carry over characters like Sypha/Grant/Alucard between entries.>>12390403Keep in mind, the idea is based on dependencies more than wholesale 1:1 code. It wouldn't be difficult to add new code for old content that only activates when its present, so you could do things like put Max in SoR3, and give him a run and roll like everyone else. Not the best example since its Max, but games like SoR4 used the existing assets to make new attacks for legacy characters the same way. The memory limit on the cart would be the only real limitation.
>>12389897The people that made the Game Genie tried that concept on the NES
>>12390816That looks like it was just an attempt to get around the seal of approval lockout bullshit, especially since it so prominently focuses on Dizzy games. The NES was not very well supported or adopted in Europe.
>>12390403The sonic and knuckles cart contains the entire game code for sonic2. The sonic2 cart is used as a data resource, sound, graphics and level layouts are loaded from the sonic2 cart. This reduces the rom required from 1mb to 256kb, a decent reduction. But its not the simple patch you might have imagined. This is why creating lock-on carts are not viable, because its not a simple rom hack, its a full on rebuild of the game code and thus takes a lot of rom.
>>12389897Are those the 3D modeled carts from the Sonic Jam menu?
>>12389897Lock-on can only append data, not edit it. The fact that Sonic 2 & Knuckles works is a bit of a miracle on its own.
>>12389897Late in the game for physical expansions, too early for downloads. Optical disk drive systems with virtually no internal storage (xbox/n64 excluded) ruled the 5th and 6th gens which made expansions a generation away and physical disk expansions on 4th gen were already late to market to grow a sustained consumer base. It was too late in the 4th gen to market expansions and too early to feasible deliver them because 5th and 6th gens largely had little to no hard drive space.
>>12390924Its not a miracle. Its actually pretty trivial. The sonic and knuckles cart contains the entire game code. Only data comes from the sonic2 cart. Referencing that data is easy. Whenever the game code includes a binary file, you just replace that with a fixed address constant to where that file was in the original rom.
Wasn't the "Game was too big for 1 cart" thing disproven and the real reason was because of a McDonald's ad campaign that forced them to split development into 2 cycles?
>>12390354It's apparently because they didn't have a solution to color palettes for Sonic 1, where Sonic's sprite and background elements shared the same blues.I wouldn't mind seeing a technical breakdown of how the Sonic & Knuckles cart achieved on-the-fly patching of Sonic 2, since that's a fair bit more involved because it was entirely retroactive, as compared to Sonic 3 where they probably anticipated it when they were rushing to get the game out to shelves because of those McDonald's Happy Meal toys.If you fuck around with overloading memory when playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you can get the game to panic and reset to the title screen, but it reverts to being Sonic & Knuckles instead.https://youtu.be/PRkxPODPc-A?t=161I've done shit like this on real hardware with debug mode.
>>12389897I was 8yrs old when this game out and it was the coolest thing ever.
>>12389897Because it was only made out of necessity. Sonic 3 wasn't finished but Sega wanted it out soon. They never actually wanted it.
>>12391248yeah, they took the time to create a new technology so they could push 1 game out ahead of schedule... lol
>>12391257>it isn't an optimal situation, therefore it isn't trueFucking midwits, I swear man.
>>12391257SEGA's entire history is them making and abandoning technology. Their default answer to "last thing didn't sell well" was "let's make another weird thing."
>>12391132Doesn't the S&K cart just have a whole new program ROM for Sonic 2? I feel like I read ages ago that it doesn't actually "patch" anything, it just uses entirely its own code, even for Sonic 3 and this new code will use the graphics and sound from the original cart but that's it.
>>12390658see:>>12390480>>12390995Super turbo ultra street fighter 2 the new challengers hyper tournament edition says hi
>>12391261producing a custom cart would require more time to get the production line ready than it would take to just delay the game. these decisions were made at the top, after exhaustive consultations. don't be a retard
>>12391257Sticking a cartage slot on top of another cart is not some ground breaking novel tech. Its the kind of thing you could prototype in a single day.
>>12391276yet not something you could spare a production line for unless you had a very good reason
>>12391265That would make sense, if the S&K cart stores the program for S2&K and uses the S2 cart as as ROM mapper for graphics and audio.Likewise for S3&K, it's just mappers across two boards.I recall that for the Blue Sphere mini-game when played with whatever unsupported game was inserted, it was generating the stage based on the ROM's header or something.Makes me wanna look-up if I can emulate that whole process now, actually. I recall Dynamite Headdy (PAL) or maybe some other game generating a piss-easy stage that had a really high difficulty rating, because it just had a shitload of spheres and rings.
>>12391285Its not a big deal. I am pretty sure the main cost to producing carts is the rom chips.
>>12391301anon, production lines were limited and everyone had a backlog of things to print. if you made a wrong move you'd get overstock of stuff that didn't sell, and shortages of stuff distributors wanted right now. adjusting a production line to an out-of-standard project was a strategic decision that affected your entire pipeline.
>>12391285For all we know that very good reason might have been "hey, do you think we could get two bites at this cherry?"Game devs are notorious for putting 5 years of content onto the whiteboard and massively underestimating how long it'll take, using the big knife of cuts to get it down to a shippable state. I'm beyond certain SEGA execs signed off on a 12 stage behemoth of a game that they totally could get done by christmas. And then as they got closer and closer and had to admit that they only had 8 stages and 4 half finished ones, someone has to ask the question. Do we release the 8 we have and call it a day? Or could we try something new and see if we can sell a part 1 & 2? And all we have to spend to figure that out is a month or two for the software and hardware teams to collab on a relatively small design change.Remember, every idea has to be tried before you know for certain if it's good or not. For all they knew lock on technology was going to be their killer feature that everyone was going to want a piece of. Didn't work out that way, but that's business. If all you do is copy what already works, you'll never be a major success.
How exactly does the lock in system work? This thread only confused me more.
>>12391443The broad overview is that there's a special mapper in the cart that is designed to take the top add on cart and remap its contents into the megadrive's address space such that the console sees a customised ROM that combines the data in the lock-on cart + the original cart. The S&K cart contains all the code needed to run the full S3&K combined and the S2&K hack, plus the bonus blue spheres mode. What's changing is that the loader checks what the cart header that's in the inserted cart contains then based on that decides which branch of the code to run which configures the ROM mapping in some fashion.
>>12389897Collabs? Like what? Would Capcom give up the source code of their game to Konami so they could spend a year developing and manufacturing a cart that would allow you to replace John Mortonblood in Castlevania Gaiden with Mr Contra then have to turn a profit off it? Cool idea, bad idea.
>>12391513So basically S&K cart already includes everything in the cart itself but the cart on top just "unlocks it"?
>>12391271>see a a childish fantasyWhy? I'm here to talk about old games not read fanfic.>>12391301>I am pretty sure the main cost to producing carts is the rom chips.So your solution to that is to use two of the things that are the main cost instead of one. Brilliant! If you were old enough to smoke you'd buy loosies to save money.
>>12391535Not everything. The bulk of any cart is the graphics and to a lesser extent the sound. That stuff comes from the passthrough cart. No reason to duplicate it. But when it comes to the code I'm fairly certain it was completely contained on the s&k cart. Mappers being what they are even if you only need to change a few hundred bytes you need to have a whole block so for simplicity's sake, just include the whole program ROM and use that instead of the the original in the passthrough. There's likely duplicate data because of how it was packed in, but I've never looked at a detailed ROM dump to check, I'm just surmising based on how I expect such a project to have gone.
>>12391443The S&K cart is only 2MB, leaving the rest of the Genesis's ROM map open for the locked-on cartridge. It contains the rest of Sonic 3 to make the game complete, and has a patch file for Sonic 2 to make Knuckles playable in-game if Sonic 2 is detected.All it does is check the ID string in the official header in every Genesis game, which is always in the same part of every ROM. If Sonic 3 is detected, it loads Sonic 3's data into the remaining ROM map. If Sonic 2 is detected, it loads that data and patches it to make Knuckles playable. If Sonic 1 is detected, it lets you play any blue sphere stage. If any other ID code is read, it will generate a blue sphere stage off of that ID code. That's it.
>>12389897Because it's literally just a meme. The roms for Sonic 3 and Sonic 2 and Knuckles are inside of the Sonic and Knuckles cart, it's just checking the ID of the cart on top to decide which ROM to boot.
>>12391635>>12391703>i don't know. but ima ask an ai and pretend i do
>>12390403>Would people have bought a Streets of Rage cartridge to play a new character in older games?Yes. If you want an example, a new class was just released for Diablo 2, and it costs money to upgrade the game. Despite that it reeled tons of people back in.Now imagine back in the early/mid 90's, most people knew what Streets of Rage was and played it, and then they hear you can play a new character or new content for it. You're damn right they're going to want to give that a go. That would be a great gimmick for Beat Em Ups and fighting games, and even RPG's
