Chaotix/Hidden content

Various information regarding possible design choices in Knuckles' Chaotix (often referred to as Chaotix) was extracted through the process of ROM hacking.

Lost Sprites

Artwork	Name	Description
	"Dizzy Knuckles" sprite	Sprites of Knuckles spinning around. Possibly could have been used as part of a death animation.

Mighty: A Sonic Clone?

The absence of Sonic the Hedgehog as a playable character in Chaotix resulted in a lot of speculation from various members of the community, which often resulted in questioning whether Sonic was ever planned for Chaotix. Furthermore, the speculation is fueled with the presence of leaked games such as Sonic Crackers, which offers a similar gameplay engine to Chaotix, except with Sonic and Tails as the only playable characters. However, careful observation proves that Sonic may not be entirely absent from this game. Mighty the Armadillo is one of the available characters in Chaotix, who shares a lot of the behavior of Sonic in Sonic Crackers.

As the sprite sheet above demonstrates, nearly all of Mighty's poses match up with Sonic's poses from Sonic Crackers, and occasionally Sonic the Hedgehog CD. Likewise, some of the unused poses in Sonic Crackers match up with Sonic.

Amy in Chaotix

Amy, while not a playable character in Chaotix, nonetheless makes a cameo appearance as an extra for the sound test screen. Input the following code at the color select screen to "unlock" Amy:

Once the code is entered, Amy then appears at the sound test screen.

Removed Character

Through unlocking the level select, you can access an unused, removed character from the game. The code for the level select (input on the color test) is the following:

This code will also unlock debug mode, which works exactly like the debug mode in Sonic Crackers. From there, you can access the stage select:

Inside the stage select, you can change the "player" option until you arrive to the option of "**********".

Finally, once the new character is selected, it is possible to play the game with it. The Sonic Community referrs to this character, for convenience, as Wechnia.

As you can see, the character is just a garbled version of Knuckles' sprites with Mighty's palette and moveset.

In addition, these leftovers are a result of Tails' leftover data. Proof exists that "Wechnia" is a leftover of tails by observing the Knuckles' Chaotix 1207 prototype. By holding the button after performing a double jump, the character will fly, which is a trademark behavior of Tails in most incarnation of Sonic games he appears in. Further digging into the ROM by resident reverse-engineer Cinossu reveals the following life icons:

Further Connection Between Chaotix and Sonic Crackers

While this is a somewhat minor observation, it is still of interest in solidifying that Crackers might have been an early prototype of Chaotix. Particularly, an unused green character palette, when applied to vector, matches up extremely well with the character. This implies that developers were considering implementing other Chaotix characters into Crackers.

Sonic Crackers

The connection between Sonic Crackers was usually strong but it lacked concrete evidence. This was found in the early prototypes released by drx. xdaniel found text referring to Sonic Crackers while examining a savestate, it's possible for anyone to see it by following these steps:

• Start the ROM in Kega Fusion.
• Select TIME ATTACK in main menu.
• Advance through PLAYER and NPC SELECT.
• On ATTRACTION SELECT, create a Save State.
• Now, start the ROM in Gens and load the Save State (note: the game has a chance of crashing at this point).
• Enter the Genesis VDP viewer via CPU->Debug->Genesis VDP.
• If you can't see anything, select a different palette.

If it works you will get a screen like this, note the graphics in the green box:
File:SonicCrackersS32X1.png
When the tiles are rearranged they would look like this:

Unused "Sega" sound

As it turns out, the Sega screen at the beginning of the game was to have an accompanying sound. This has been confirmed in Knuckles' Chaotix (prototype 0202). However, it is never used. It is still located in the final game under the sound test menu with the SFX I.D. of 6B.

Unused Plane

After some hacking, Andlabs found this unused sprite of Tails in the Tornado deep within the Knuckles' Chaotix ROM. It is a heavily updated version of the Tornado sprite found in Sonic 3, making use of the extended colour palette. Unlike the version in Sonic 3, the "SONIC" text has been changed so that it is readable from this angle (in the Sonic 3 & Knuckles ending the entire sprite was simply flipped). It may have been connected to the "good ending", in which both Sonic and Tails are visible, or a leftover from a scrapped introduction screen, similar to how Sonic 3 followed straight on from Sonic 2.