Categories #Games

These Mods for Sonic Adventure DX on PC Bring Back Dreamcast’s Glory

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Author Dreadknux
12 Comments

Remember the PC port of Sonic Adventure DX? Ever noticed how it looked a little… too… washed out? Bright? Lifeless? Well, thanks to a bunch of fan modders, you don’t have to worry about that anymore, as you can now patch the game to play and feel just like the original Dreamcast version.

You can go from this…

…to this by installing a few cheeky patches. How cool is that?

The technique involves a number of mods installed to Sonic Adventure DX, using a tool such as ‘SADX Mod Manager‘ or ‘BetterSADX‘ (depending on whether you have the game on Steam or on disc – it works on the North American version, but has yet to be tested on other regions).

One mod, called ‘SADX Dreamcast Conversion‘, patches in a number of assets, textures and objects/effects from the 1999 console original, that were removed or modified by SEGA during development of the PC version. Another important mod is called ‘SADX Palette Lighting Mod‘, which crucially restores the Dreamcast version’s lighting engine.

Veteran community member BlazeHedgehog has been testing the mods out and he seems pretty impressed with it, if his Tumblr blog post is anything to go by. If you have SADX, we reckon it’s well worth the time to give these patches a go. Blaze has a how-to on how to download and install the mods here.

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Dreadknux

Founder of The Sonic Stadium and creator/co-organiser of the Summer of Sonic convention. Loves talking about Sonic the Hedgehog in his spare time. Likes Sonic Colours a little too much for his own good, apparently.

12 Comments

  2. So happy fans made a widescreen version of the game. Although I still wish sega could have given it the treatment it deserves like sonic adventure 2. I mean they both are made from the same engine for the most part so why not do it for the first.

  3. I still wait for they day that they decide to re-release the game with the current voice actors.

  4. Seems like kind of a minor thing to fuss over, but whatever. I think both games are beautiful in their own rights, though I find the idea of preferring something to look darker and duller rather than brighter and more vibrant kind of weird, seems like a bit of a downgrade if you ask me. But whatever, I always felt like both versions of Sonic Adventure should have been combined in some way or form.

    1. Assuming that by “darker and duller” you mean SADX? The Dreamcast version was the most vibrant and had the best graphics out of all versions of Sonic Adventure (except the character models perhaps, but even those are debatably worse since they don’t quite fit with everything else in this game).
      The reason I decided to bother with all this stuff in the first place is exactly because SADX is so dull and ugly looking, and that the half-assed “graphical upgrade” we got with the Gamecube and later re-releases only ruined the beauty of this game. If you think otherwise, I suggest you play the two side-by-side just to see how much stuff was made to look worse or simply cut in SADX.

  5. Pingback: Make Sonic Adventure DX on PC look like the Dreamcast version with these mods | SEGA Nerds

    1. Probably because the PC port is actually a port from the Game Cube version and it had worse lighting than the Dreamcast version so they tweaked the textures to compensate.

  7. I found the downer image ugly compare to the upper one. Kinda remind me why I hate SA2 artistic direction.

  8. I can’t use the palette lighting mod on the GPD Win without killing my framerate but everything else looks splendid.

    It does work on my desktop, though, which is excellent.

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