I dunno, maybe it could have happened? Had they not been strapped for time. Sonic 3 famously missed its street date and was split in two, and it's honestly a miracle that everything lined up in a way that made Knuckles in Sonic 2 possible.

The colors are definitely a concern in both games though!

The most successful approach is probably still Stealth's 2005 hack: it coerces Knuckles' sprites into the Sonic 1 palette, which unlike later games has three shades of red available.

If you paste in Knuckles' reds, it starts looking pretty good! Robotnik starts becoming a bit festive though. 11/12

Because of that, if you try to shove Knuckles' colors into the Sonic 1 palette, you'll suddenly need to replace a *lot* of graphics. 9/12

And therein lies the rub: the vast majority of sprites in Sonic 2 already avoid the blue gradient, since those colors change when playing as Super Sonic. In Sonic 1, a game without Super Sonic, the blue gradient is as safe as any other color in the palette, so level sprites make good use of it! 8/12

They missed a few spots, though. Flickies and the Aquatic Ruin Zone waterline become red with green spots when playing as Knuckles. Flickies seem intentional, as they also turn red in S&K, but the water seems to have been an oversight even in vanilla S2 - it becomes yellow when Sonic is Super. 7/12

Extra graphics still need to be shipped, though. Sonic 2's palette has four shades of blue, but Knuckles needs three shades of red + green for his socks. This disturbs any graphics with blue gradients, so replacements are provided in the S&K ROM, colored gray presumably for aesthetic reasons. 6/12

They solved this by altering the routine that queues a DMA transfer of Sonic's sprites from ROM to VRAM. It now "pre-scrambles" the pixels of Knuckles' sprites into a RAM buffer, then queues a DMA transfer from RAM to VRAM. If you apply the Sonic 2 palette, the colors are suddenly unscrambled. 4/12

This created a problem for the Knuckles in Sonic 2 project: if you use the Sonic 2 version of the palette, all the level objects will look correct but Knuckles gets scrambled. If you use the Sonic 3 version of the palette, Knuckles looks correct, but *everything else* gets scrambled. 3/12

The global palette used for the player sprites, as well as several level objects, is quite similar between Sonic 1 and 2, but was significantly rearranged in Sonic 3. The motivation behind this is unclear, but it almost certainly predated the idea of Sonic & Knuckles or Lock-on Technology. 2/12

I was looking at the Undertale pages and now I'm curious: is there any technical reason Papyrus' JP textboxes can't use writing-mode: vertical-rl? Looks great especially combined with something like justify-self: end!

This is him now. Feel old yet?

Remember the level select?

two of them

First night over and she is enraptured by breadtube

Hello Bluesky