A fan has been porting Sonic Mania to the Sega Dreamcast and has achieved impressive results. YouTuber sonicfreak94, real name Michael Fadely, uploaded the video below of him playing through both Oil Ocean acts of 2017’s Sonic Mania on hardware that came out nearly two decades prior to the game’s release.
We aren’t game developers ourselves, so we can’t talk about the process or the difficulties of porting Sonic Mania to the Dreamcast, but this video seems pretty impressive to us. While the colors and visual quality of the picture itself look close to how the normal game would play, the aspect ratio has definitely been converted to something that could play on a CRT television.
Fadely says he works on this project in his free time, so things are slow-moving, and there is definitely more to do. For example, spikes don’t show on screen until you die at least one time, fire isn’t rendered properly, and the game takes up too much memory for any background music or gameplay audio to play. Regardless, it is very impressive to see classic hardware run a game like this as smoothly as it does.
If this kind of development interests you, we highly recommend following Michael at his X account below and subscribing to his YouTube linked above.
We would love to see more of Sonic Mania running on a Dreamcast. With how good Oil Ocean looks, we bet Green Hill and Chemical Plant Zones look right at home on Sega hardware. Fadely has stated that the 3D special stages are not quite ready yet as well, so it will be a surreal experience seeing the full game working whenever he reaches the end of his development.
