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MarkeyJester

From Sonic Retro

MarkeyJester is a Tech Member on Sonic Retro and known as the "Resident Jester" of the Sonic scene, he is a skilled software engineer spanning knowledge of several assembly CPU architectures and C/C++, with musical and artistic knowledge, making him one of the few who can both create assets artistically/musically, and program them. He develops hacks/homebrew games, tools, and guides, and occasionally shares help on the forums. He has worked with multiple teams on projects such as Sonic Megamix, The S Factor: Sonia and Silver, Sonic Boom, and S3K Battle Race, as well as a multitude of solo projects. He has created various personal effective compression formats, and several game engines from scratch, as well as a handful of graphical manipulation tools.

History

MarkeyJester began on a hunt on the internet to find old Sonic related stuff from his childhood, having not owned a SEGA Mega Drive in years, he wanted to gain some form of nostalgia from his search. He eventually came across screenshots of the Sonic 2 beta levels, and a tutorial on putting them back into the game, of course, his knowledge on binary ROM manipulation was very limited, and didn't know about the existence of emulation. One day, using his school computers, he downloaded an emulator and a few Sonic ROMs to play around with on his home computer, with a guide on editing uncompressed art and a hexadecimal editor he had picked up months before, he began editing the art of Sonic in the Sonic 2 beta ROM, here he had learnt about the tile and palette system, and was on his way to learning more about Sonic hacking and the Mega Drive hardware in general.

After months of working with binary ROMs, he was inspired by videos on YouTube of the ever popular Sonic Megamix, after pursuing knowledge on how they managed to make their modifications possible, he had discovered split disassemblies and their potential in Sonic hacking, and got straight to work on putting in the Super Peel-Out (with thanks to the Spindash guide, which contained a lot of information about the animations, mappings, and plc format), and after moderately succeeding, he incorporated his hack onto it and integrated his level artwork. Shortly before obtaining home broadband, he made a YouTube video of his hack in play, featuring a water level with half new art, new character abilities, and some new music, which seemed to have impressed many at the time, it encourage those at SonicRetro to invite Markey to the Sonic Retro IRC channel, and the forums.

Of course, things didn't look up too well after a few months of being within the scene, he had offered his help carelessly towards too many people, and was left with far too much work, it was then that he decided to quietly leave the scene. Despite leaving the scene, he continued his work from scratch once again, learning more about the software engine in Sonic 1, and the hardware of the Mega Drive, feeling guilty though about running out on the people he had offered to help, he came back to the scene months later under the alias DrXInsanity to hide his identity, and released his new hack Sonic 1 Brother Trouble in demo form, and obtained Tech Member status upon registration of SonicRetro, of course, Tweaker worked out that it was Markey in disguise right away, but allowed him to remain anonymous until weeks later when he would reveal his true identity.

Today

Markey has been working mostly on tools, research and homebrew projects, whilst ROM hacking directly is not a main pursuit these days, he is often encouraged to make the occasional hack at times.

Projects

In order of creation:

External Links

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