Home	Forums	What's new	Resources

Yuji Naka vs. Mike Wallis - Who's Right?

the Sega Saturn Pope - Jan 8, 2023

		the Sega Saturn Pope		Jan 8, 2023
			This July, in response to a longstanding claim by Sonic X-Treme producer Mike Wallis, Yuji Naka tweeted a couple of key claims regarding the NiGHTS engine: 1. That NiGHTS was written in Assembly while X-Treme was written in C; 2. "NiGHTS program was so special that it's impossible to use it for anything" My questions for those with programming knowledge: 1. Is it possible to determine (via a decompiler perhaps?) that... a. NiGHTS was written in assembly; b. Sonic X-Treme (at least what has been released) is written in C; c. that the 3 dimensional Sonic pieces of Sonic Jam and/or Burning Rangers did not use code from NiGHTS? Purpose of this exercise: It's part of a broader attempt at getting to the bottom of what was going on at Sega in '95-'97ish. Establishing the credibility of either person (consequently, reducing that of the other) would be beneficial for this purpose.

		Knight0fDragon		Jan 8, 2023
			1) Yes, NiGHTS was largely written in assembly, but it does use libraries that were C (Sega SBL probably) 2) There are so many different versions of Xtreme, who knows which one is being talked about absolutely lol, some were in C yes. 3) Sonic Jam is leftover work from Sonic World, which was then resigned into what is now Sonic Adventure.

		the Sega Saturn Pope		Jan 11, 2023
			Knight, regarding point 1, is this based on interview comments? Or have you decompiled it? Or, something else? Regarding point 2, I tend not to regard the Chris Senn version as a Saturn game, since it was developed for PC. Apparently a third party was porting that though, so if that exists...but yeah, I think there are a lot of fan-made forks by this point. Regarding #3, that's what I've heard. The totality of Sonic Team's output on Saturn should be Jam, NiGHTS (+ Christmas NiGHTS), and Burning Rangers, to my knowledge. According to Wikipedia they also contributed to 3D Blast and R, but those are the only ones that are "pure" Sonic Team.

		Knight0fDragon		Jan 11, 2023
			the Sega Saturn Pope said: Yes, I helped the folks with the datamining project out last year.

		the Sega Saturn Pope		Jan 17, 2023
			Knight, awesome. If I were to run a decompiler on Burning Rangers or 3D Blast, could you compare that to what you have? It seems inefficient to me that they would not re-use anything as per Naka's claim (or maybe it is a bad translation). But I'm obviously not a programmer.

		Knight0fDragon		Jan 17, 2023
			the Sega Saturn Pope said: A decompiler should fail for most parts of it.

		the Sega Saturn Pope		Jan 22, 2023
			Is there any other way to do it?