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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • You should look into the Dreamcast conversion mod and the Lantern Engine (lighting engine tweaks) at the very least. Pretty much everything that comes with the “Better SADX” modloader is great.

    In short, when they updated the Dreamcaast original to DX, they changed the textures entirely along with most of the player models and broke the lighting engine. Every time the game was ported after that, the textures have gotten more compressed and lower quality, and more bugs have been introduced.

    For example, you know the spot in Emerald Coast where Sonic can clip through the wall really easily and drown? Never happens in the Dreamcast original, fixed by the conversion.

    So mods that restore stuff tend to bring the quality up considerably and fix bugs. Personally I prefer the DX player models (the Dreamcast ones look barely better than PS1), but you can adjust the DC conversion mod to switch off whatever changes you don’t like.

    Oh, and for replayability, the time trial ghosts mod is great. It displays a see through playback of all your movements from your fastest playthrough of the level, like racing games do. So you can race yourself.

    Also, with the modloader you get real widescreen. No more inane borders on the side squishing things to 4:3.




  • There are a bunch of “gimmick” alarm clocks that might help.

    I had this one for a little while that sounded like R2D2 being kept alive while it’s brain was being scrambled. If you didn’t get to it in 10 seconds or so, it would roll off the table and start scurrying around the room. It was annoying enough that my parents returned it, after it was their idea in the first place.

    There was also one where the alarm could only be turned off by a “key” that would take off like one of those pull cord helicopter blade toys when the alarm went off.

    I think there’s also things like big vibrating bass speakers you can strap to a bed frame to try and “shake” someone awake.

    In the end what worked for me was just setting a ton of alarms. Like every 15-30 minutes starting an hour before I actually had to get moving.

    Good luck.






  • Common Redist is used for “commonly redistributed” installers of other software the game relies on.

    Like how sometimes when you install a game through steam and it also installs a Microsoft .net framework (because it needs that installed to run). In that case you’d the .net installer in the common redist folder. In this case, all those VCredist files.

    OALinst is just an installer for OpenAL, a piece of audio processing software. A lot of games use it for handling positional audio, like something exploding to your left and behind you actually sounding like it exploded behind and to the left. Some games will also use it for more complicated audio things, like actually simulating sound echoes against the walls of a room and their material.