PC fan port of early Sonic games lets you zoom the camera way, way back

• 

  The intertwining paths of Chemical Plant Zone are a thing of beauty at this scale.

A group of coders has decompiled the source code for Sonic the Hedgehog and its 1992 sequel from their well-regarded 2013 smartphone ports. That means these heavily enhanced versions of the early ’90s Genesis games—developed by Christian Whitehead using the same revamped Retro/Star Engine that powers Sonic Mania—can now be easily recompiled for play on new platforms including the PlayStation Vita, the Nintendo Switch, and Windows/Mac computers.

That’s an interesting-enough hacking/coding achievement on its own. But with a little tinkering, the PC versions also let players scale the game window to any arbitrary resolution, expanding the visible playfield without scaling up the games’ core pixel graphics. As you can see in the pictures and videos included in this article, this tweak effectively zooms out the standard in-game camera to show huge chunks of a stage at once, giving players an exciting new perspective on these classic titles.

But how?

Filling your PC screen with a playable Sonic map isn’t exactly as simple as dragging the corner of the gameplay window. First, you have to take a legally obtained copy of one of the 2013 Sonic games (which are still available on Google Play and the iOS App Store) and extract the “RSDK” file to your computer (this handy video tutorial can be of assistance there). From there, you can run the precompiled Windows release and edit the settings file to extend the playfield horizontally with relative ease (you can also edit the pixel scale if you want to effectively zoom the game’s camera back in on a large monitor).