Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

Some years ago, [ColinC10] released a wonderful hack called [Sonic 2 - Battle Race] and while me and Natsumi were playing it, we couldn't help notice the series of bugs and problems with the hack. Now, this is by no means an indictment on Colin, as programmers ourselves we understood that the hack was not built to be flawless and if anything was merely a proof of concept, and probably made for just a bit of fun. We are sure that if he had continued it, he would most definitely have made it flawless.

Regardless, we wanted a version of the hack that was fixed, with improved routing and winning direction detection, and perhaps some minor things added here or there, so one day Natsumi said:

...and so it began.

We carefully plotted out how we would handle such a thing, looked at the good things and bad, and Colin's hack supplied us the perfect insight and lessons learned to clean it up. We came up with a box system, and it seems to work pretty well, not perfectly, but pretty well. Of course, there were a heap of bugs to fix with the original Sonic 3 title, these took quite a lot of time to hunt down and fix, and because of the time it took, we ended up adding more to this hack than we had originally planned and even now we still have more we want to add. Likewise, bugs will no doubt still be present, though, compared to the bugs that were in place originally which Natsumi has spent countless hours hunting and fixing, it's not too shabby if you ask me.

We did have plans for some extra game modes, gimmicks, options/museum, and a brand new level, and a slew of other things, but these will have to wait until the next release which we hope will be sometime early next year. We are actually getting a little fed-up of working on the project as it is taking up time we really don't have, so I doubt a few months will turn into a year (even though I have been wrong before).

Anyway, if you are not familiar with ColinC10's Sonic 2 - Battle Race, then we suggest you head over to SonicRetro's [wiki page], download it, and give it a play yourself first, don't worry, our version can wait, we simply cannot thank Colin enough as our hack would simply not exist if his didn't.

We would like to also thank RedHotSonic for allowing us to use his bounce feature (from Sonic Bash) in this hack, and to Egor for specially creating a few musical themes for the hack, and to MainMemory and Fred (Neo) for their amazing work to make Sonic 3 & Knuckles easily editable. It has and will help us and many more for years to come. A big thanks to the following for testing, bug reporting and feedback; Vladicomper, Ozaleto, Qiuu, LazloPsylus, Clownacy, VAdaPEGA, and Jorge. Finally, to Cinossu and flamewing for a few inspirational ideas we've "borrowed" (without asking of course d=) so to speak.

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A few notes about the hack.

- This hack is designed to be a 2 player only hack, therefore, there is no single player support, we apologise to those expecting single player and can only encourage you to find someone to play with.
- We recommend Kega Fusion as your go-to emulator due to its netplay feature, though if there are other emulators out there which support some sort of netplay, then by all means.
- This hack will not function correctly in the emulator series known as "Gens", we normally never tell people what emulators they can and can't use, but in this situation, "Gens" breaks alot of the menu functionality, and in some cases causes the hack itself to be unplayable, so we have locked it out. Sorry about that, it's not our fault though, I mean, the hack works fine on hardware so it's clearly an emulation fault.
- This is a demo version for the hacking contest, so it will be incomplete, and things may be missing. If you would rather not ruin it, then by all means wait until the next release and we'll have more content by then.

A download link will be provided below in the next post shortly, we hope you enjoy playing it.

For updates, we may post a few in this thread, but you can always check the official site for the hack at "http://mrjester.hapisan.com/S3KBR".