Youtuber and streamer Cybershell, who is known for his Sonic videos from a few years back, has made a comeback with a video on SADX downgrades, which you can watch here:
It’s a great video and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. At the same time I feel the need to highlight several very important points that weren’t mentioned in the video:
“Dreamcast Conversion” is the name I chose for my mod. It’s a total conversion (hence the name) for SADX PC that restores Dreamcast levels, special effects, object models, textures and a lot of other things, fixes several bugs in the PC version and so on, but it doesn’t include two important aspects of the original experience: Dreamcast lighting and Dreamcast characters.
I understand that “Dreamcast Conversion” sounds like an umbrella term for all projects restoring Dreamcast stuff in SADX, which can be confusing because there are Dreamcast projects for SADX made by other people. With this in mind, I feel it is incredibly unfair to the developers of those other projects, whose authorship doesn’t belong to me. So let me clear up the situation and give shout-outs to the people whose efforts should be acknowledged just as much as (if not more than!) mine:
SonicFreak94, the developer of the Lantern Engine (palette lighting) mod. I want to make it clear that, while I helped around with research and testing SA1 lighting, the actual implementation of authentic Dreamcast lighting in SADX PC is his work. It was his incredible insight and dedication that inspired me to work on Dreamcast Conversion in the first place. I’ve contributed to several of SonicFreak94’s projects, such as SADX: Fixed Edition and the Input Mod (and he did some work on Dreamcast Conversion as well), and I am very proud to have been involved in the development of his Lantern Engine to some degree, but overall my contribution to the actual implementation of it in Direct3D was minimal, and I wouldn’t have been able to restore Dreamcast lighting on my own. So the full credit for Dreamcast lighting on PC goes to SonicFreak94, not me.
ItsEasyActually, the developer of the Dreamcast Characters mod. It’s his mod that restores original character models, and it is not part of my Dreamcast Conversion mod. While I did help with the development of this mod here and there, as well as made some minor contributions to it, it is overall a completely independent work with a ton of research and effort put into it. So we need to thank ItsEasyActually for putting all that effort in restoring Dreamcast character models in SADX PC.
MainMemory and SonicFreak94, the main developers of SADX Mod Loader and SA Tools. The Mod Loader and its mod framework make it possible to develop mods for SADX PC with different levels of complexity, from simple file replacement to custom code that rewrites parts of the game’s programming. SA Tools let us work with data from both games and are extremely useful for making comparisons or converting assets between different versions of the game. Without the Mod Loader and SA Tools it would’ve been much more difficult to develop all these mods, to the point that I probably wouldn’t have started work on Dreamcast Conversion if those tools weren’t available.
So yes, while I did have some involvement in all of these projects to some extent, it is important to understand that the restoration of Dreamcast assets in SADX PC is a combined effort of many people, and much of that effort went towards reverse engineering the game’s internals and making tools long before I came to the scene to make Dreamcast Conversion.
To sum up:
1) My Dreamcast Conversion mod is one part of the Dreamcast restoration, which includes multiple mods and is a combined effort of many people, not just me;
2) SonicFreak94 and ItsEasyActually should be credited for Lantern Engine and Dreamcast Characters respectively;
3) The Dreamcast Conversion mod is built using MainMemory and SF94’s Mod Loader framework. “PkR’s Mod Loader” is actually my Mod Installer, which installs MainMemory and SF94’s Mod Loader and a few mods.
If you want to learn more about the mods and the people behind them, I recommend TheArcadeStriker’s interviews with me, SonicFreak94 and ItsEasyActually for further reading.