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Green Snake

From Sonic Retro

Aurora Fields is Finnish member of the Sonic scene, and a Tech Member on Sonic Retro, she is a skilled high level programmer with knowledge of Java, C#, HTML, JavaScript, and some C, she also has deep knowledge of the SEGA Mega Drive hardware and some low level assembly skills with 68k and Z80 CPU's. She doesn't consider herself to be artistic though she has been learning a great deal about audio (from both theory and technical points of views) and her musical skills are improving through time.

She is friendly and outgoing, and her opinions are quite vocal on the forums, though not to be discourage by her aggressive approach to express them, she is honest with them. She has a good sense of humour and is open minded.

History

Aurora's mother bought a Sega Mega Drive which she used to play as a kid with her brother, after many years she had discovered Sonic ROM hacks through MegaGWolf's YouTube videos, eventually leading to emulation and the Sonic Hacking scene.

She eventually signed up to the SSRG forums in October of 2011 under the alias Green Snake, she (like many young people first starting out) was very friendly, though quite nooby and childish, and predictably her posts on the forums were met with heavy criticism. She attempted to sign up to the Sonic Retro forums in February of 2012, however was initially unsuccessful and left in Pending Member status for a few years. In June of 2012 she released her first "notable" public Sonic Hack Sonic Green Snake, the hack was widely criticized for its poor implementation and, unknown to her, for containing stolen code from other hacks (which was heavily frowned upon), while not intended to do harm, the scene did not welcome it and instead labeled it as "The hack of shame", an example of "what not to do". Following this she was banned from SSRG and went into obscurity for the next few years.

During the hiatus she befriended a few outcasts of the community, creating a wealth of friendship and contributing to projects with them, while the projects themselves did not lift off the ground, she had slowly grown her knowledge, English skills and social communication through them. After hanging out on Sonic Retro's IRC server for months, she gradually improved her reputation and made friends with the locals, eventually leading to her Sonic Retro forum account's status being opened up. She proceeded to contribute positively on the boards, offering help in the Basic Q&A thread and overall socializing maturely in the scene. This eventually led to her becoming un-banned from SSRG, once again, allowing her to post. Shortly afterwards she had changed her name to Natsumi (later Aurora Fields), with her Sonic Retro account eventually changing to follow suit.

Today

Aurora continues to contribute on the forums to this day, openly expressing her honest opinions and ideas, and all around being a great asset to the hacking community. She continues to self-improve, her English is vastly better and her programming skills have become professional. Over time she has created several hacks, each one surpassing the previous including (but not limited to) SonicMT.bin, Achi, and S3K Battle Race. She has also provided her fair share of useful tools for the community to use, many involving the reverse engineering of sound driver formats into unified assembly format(s), and other minor (yet useful) tools.

She has been improving on her high level programming skills and putting her HTML knowledge to use to create very professional looking sites, as a side line she has been looking into music as a hobby and slowly gaining talent from practice.

Projects

Below are a few notable projects she has worked on or contributed towards:

  • Sonic Green Snake - The highly criticized hack which encouraged her to self-improve (June 2012)
  • Sonic 4 in 1 - A hack that combines Sonic 1, 2, 3, & Knuckles, Knuckles in Sonic 2, S3K, and Blue Spheres, all into a single ROM (November 2016)
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles - Battle Race - A collaborative project with MarkeyJester - Sonic Hacking Contest Winner (November 2018)
  • SonicMT.bin - Initially a joke hack, later expanding and containing several unique concepts (October 2015)
  • Achi - A humourous achievement based hack featuring experimental concepts, including a demo of AMPS (February 2018)
  • AMPS - An advanced and powerful sound driver for Mega Drive software (April 2019)

Tutorials/Research

Some contributions and research she has made with tutorials/guides to follow.