Man, I'm really keen for this. The GBA Sonic games are often slept on but I think they were amazing at recreating the feel of the original Mega Drive games, with great music and sprite work too. I've long thought they deserved a modern PC port in the style of Sonic 1 Forever or Sonic Origins, to free them from the cramped GBA screen.<p>Sonic fans have been making a lot of these unofficial, enhanced, moddable PC ports using decompilation, recompilation and emulation techniques, including Sonic 1 Forever, Sonic 3 A.I.R. and recently, the Sonic Unleashed PC port. PC (including Linux) is getting to be the definitive platform for playing a lot of these older Sonic games, which is great to see.
I love projects like these. Between decomps and static analyzers, we've seen so many fantastic games modernized and ported.<p>Ocarina of Time is able to play natively on just about every system system imagineable (pretty sure native PS1 builds exist)
Sonic Unleashed, previously an 360/PS3 exclusive, now can be played in ultra wide on PC natively.<p>Majoras Mask got a recent static deanalyzed PC port and has higher FOS and ultrawide mods.<p>Perfect Dark for the N64 has a native PC port with ultrawide and mouse and keyboard controls.<p>These are just a few off the top of my head.
I wonder how old codebases are managed at Sega. Is there a server somewhere where you can see the code and assets for all the various games they've published going back to the 80s? 90s? Is it walled off? In cold storage? Could some junior dev decide to go check out the original GBA Sonic code just for fun?
Shame... All those sprites and tile backgrounds are just begging for a DMCA take down. Why not just put up the tools that disassemble those from the ROM instead?
I wonder if the Android port of Advance 3 came in hand here. That version was ported to Java — and being unobfuscated, would've been a great reference point.