October 26, 2026 · Preservation 0.1.0

Sonic the Hedgehog: original game, sound and artwork

The supplied Genesis cartridge now has a browser preservation edition, a separate audio archive and an original-artwork gallery. This entry records the initial website release prepared on October 26, 2026.

What is included

• The supplied revision 00 Sonic the Hedgehog cartridge is playable through a self-hosted Genesis emulator, with keyboard, touch and controller configuration, browser snapshots and portable snapshot files.
• Three independent optional cheats: damage invincibility without hurt or knockback; keep rings during a normal hit; unlimited lives. All start off. Disabling restores the original instructions.
• Recovered 19 original music commands: 10 sound-driver transport loops and 9 finite pieces. The music player retains introductions and repeats the verified loop interval. Seven separately labeled speed-shoes contextual excerpts remain finite.
• Recovered 50 sound-effect/chant entries with original command IDs and source data, browser auditions and lossless recording downloads.
• Recovered 262 byte-matched original visual resources. The gallery presents 401 image previews, including 117 mapped sprite sheets and 18 runtime context sheets with 737 total nonempty frames, 167 tile-bank sheets, 44 palette sheets, level planes, all six special-stage layouts, fonts and screen artwork. Original resources and mapping records remain downloadable.
• The original ZIP and SMD member remain unchanged. The documented SMD deinterleave reverses exactly; the canonical ROM matches the REV00 reference disassembly build byte-for-byte.

What was checked

The retained Genesis WebAssembly core was tested against the supplied cartridge. Ordinary movement into the first Green Hill enemy distinguishes damage immunity from ring protection; explicit private native fixtures check spikes and the life counter. The tests also verify original instruction restoration and native serializer round trips. Research RAM and QA states are excluded from the public release.

All compressed visual resources were compared with the original game’s own 68000 decompression routines. Browser verification covers actual inputs, save/load/reopen, portable file validation, audio repeat boundaries, gallery zoom and phone layouts. The immutable release manifest binds these results to the uploaded files.

Coverage and remaining work

• This is the original cartridge running under emulation. It is not a native Java or JavaScript reconstruction.
• Damage invincibility leaves pit, drowning, crushing and time-limit rules intact. Ring protection alone still permits zero-ring death. Unlimited lives keeps the normal death and stage restart flow.
• Native audio recordings preserve the original sequences and sound engine. Loop points are proven against complete active sound-driver transport state. Chip oscillator phase is not asserted to repeat at a recording boundary; any player seam smoothing is a disclosed playback derivative. Original lossless downloads remain unchanged.
• Speed-shoes excerpts demonstrate original tempo-table behavior and are finite contextual previews; an exact repeating whole-driver phase was not established for every tempo variant.
• Static level planes omit moving objects, animation, parallax and water palette transitions. Dynamic display combinations are not all reconstructed as separate static images; every original art bank, glyph and mapping record is retained. The artwork provenance identifies the remaining display-composition limits.
• No complete campaign playthrough, physical wireless-controller test or original-console audio comparison is claimed. Browser snapshots are emulator states; the original cartridge has no battery-save feature.

The detailed artwork record identifies individual preview limits. Coverage report · Release file hashes