That was beyond stellar. I couldnt find the grey, but got the others. Is there a music conversion program you use or did you manually recreate it in the pico8 music maker? And is this the default pico8 mapspace or did u use some kind of extended memory method? Is this going to go up on splore? Curious how u madeout with the sprite editor etc.
Very good question!
I explained the audio conversion process here: https://github.com/hsandt/sonic-pico8#audio-1
Sum-up: I worked from 8-bit remixes made by danooct1, then used FamiTracker to export source files to midi, followed by midi2pico. I still had to manually edit notes a lot, because I had to put everything on 4 channels to leave the 4th channel free for SFX.
For the level, I coded my own map streaming system: the level is made of sub-maps, each one being a standard PICO-8 map. When the camera gets close to a sub-map’s edge, the game automatically load the neighboring sub-map (combining half-maps when crossing horizontally or vertically, and quarter-maps when crossing diagonally). I use the general memory as a “buffer” for the copy-paste operations. However, this still requires a reload from cartridge operation when reaching new regions, so I had to patch PICO-8 binary to hide that extra loading time (with the new general memory at 0x8000 it may be possible to store more maps in live memory, I haven’t tried it yet). It also means that I did nothing special with the sprite editor (although I have multiple cartridges to store extra spritesheet, e.g. one dedicated to the title menu, one to Sonic, etc.)
For a future version, I’m considering using PicoMap (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=91798) which handles everything from map data stored in runtime Lua memory. However, it is not compatible with the existing tilemap, which means I’d have to redraw the full map in PicoMap, and I don’t know how much time that would take… But something to keep in mind for future projects.
It’s not on splore for the reasons above, that it requires many cartridges for the title menu, intro/ending sequence, and above all the level data; and also that it requires binary patches to work. If I can make PicoMap work, we could have a single cartridge version running on vanilla PICO-8 with just the in-game (level) part.
Another PICO-8 game called “Dungeon Witches” did it, but I’m unsure whether or not it’s possible for this one yet. As an alternative, I could make a small demo level like bonevolt’s Sonic 2.5, which was also running on a single cartridge.