News Sonic Mania is unofficially being ported to the Sega Dreamcast by fans

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The Sonic homebrew and hacking community is for sure one of the most active communities when it comes to game modifications themselves. The fanbase has even made their own hacking contests and fan game events to showcase modified games from the franchise, to even games inspired by the blue blur himself, all of this in part thanks to SEGA's leniant use of the Sonic IP for Fair Use purposes.

One of the most recent projects to come out of the community has been the decompilations of the Retro Software Development Kit, or Retro Engine for short, which is commonly known to be the custom engine made for the recent outings of Sonic The Hedgehog that focus on its iconic and classic 2D physics, like Sonic Origins, the Sonic 1, Sonic 2 and Sonic CD mobile ports, and of course, Sonic Mania. All of these have on-going decompilation projects that allow porting such classics natively to other devices, like in the case of projects like Sonic 1 Forever and Sonic 2 Absolute, which not only decompiled and allowed porting the mobile ports of Sonic 1 and 2 to other devices, but offer a huge set of new features, improvements, QoL changes, modes and characters, in a way that many consider those two to be the definitive way to experience Sonic 1 and 2, alongside Sonic 3 A.I.R. as the definitive way to experience Sonic 3 as well.

However, the classics aren't the only 2D Sonic games that are getting the decompilation and port treatment, as Sonic Mania has also seen its fair share of fan-made ports to unofficial systems, like the homebrew Wii U port made some years ago.

To add to the vast number of fan ports, Michael Fadely, also known as SonicFreak94 on X, has been working on a brand new port of Sonic Mania to the last console manufactured by SEGA themselves, the Dreamcast.

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The port has been in development for quite some time, and it wasn't until a day ago that we got to see the Dreamcast port in real hardware action (through some network streaming from the console), which was compiled using the SH-ELF-GCC14.1.0 toolchain and using KallistiOS's SDK, and while the port itself is still in a testing stage, the vast majority of the stages are now running on console and with a locked stable framerate, with a 4:3 resolution tested at 480p, with 240p being planned too.

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The special stages are still left to be done according to Fadely's words, and for sure those will be the most hardware straining parts of the game given their 3D usage. In a rather interesting turn of events, the Sonic Mania special stages were actually envisioned and designed to resemble a 3D Sonic stage that could have been released during the SEGA Saturn era, with the 3D model for Sonic being modelled after his appearance in the Saturn game titled "Sonic Jam", and with this port, it's getting closer to the original vision of it running in an actual Saturn, albeit in this case, on its successor console.

Sonic Mania Decompilation for Dreamcast
RSDKv5 Engine Decompilation for Dreamcast