Currently, there's quite an active development of mods that range from anything between GUI, audio, graphics, animations, and others for Sonic Origins on PC.
When installing the game on PC, you get all of the assets of the game properly distributed within folders for each of the individual games included in the collection (Sonic1u, Sonic2u, SonicCDu and Sonic3ku), which are located in the following folder structure:
However, when we check the files included in the Switch release of Sonic Origins, we find that all of the graphics, animations and other stuff for each game is instead packed within the RSDK files that correspond to each of the folders/games for the PC release.
Currently, the only mods that are compatible with the Switch version are the audio mods for Sonic Origins following this folder structure:
So, how do we tackle the problem of the files for the Switch version?
Well, for this we will cover two things in this tutorial:
- Extract the per-game assets out of the RSDK files, and a way to pack the back into .rsdk files.
- Extract the WAV audio out of the .acb and .awb files for music and SFX of the game in order to create custom music/sound mods.
- Dump your Sonic Origins files:
You can easily do this by using the latest version of NXDump-Tool by DarkMatterCore:
https://github.com/DarkMatterCore/nxdumptool/releases
Simply extract the files from that ZIP and open NXDumpTool from the Homebrew Launcher.
Then follow these instructions:
- Since Sonic Origins only had a digital release, you'll need to select the "Dump installed SD card / eMMC content" option
- Select Sonic Origins from the list of available titles
- Highlight "RomFS options" and select it
- You now have 2 options:
- Make it dump the entirety of the game's data through the very 1st option available "RomFS section data dump"
- Select the option to "Browse RomFS section" (should be the 2nd option), and browse to /raw/retro/ and select/dump ONLY the files you want to modify depending on the game.
- Extract the RSDK files
- Grab your recently dumped .rsdk files from Sonic Origins from your Switch into your PC.
- Grab both RSDKv5Extract and RSDKv5Pack from MainMemory's GitHub repository here:
https://github.com/MainMemory/RSDKv5Extract/releases
- Unzip both RSDKv5Extract and RSDKv5Pack alongside all your RSDK files dumped from the game. Both the RSDK tools and your extracted rsdk files should be in the same folder. (Make a backup of your RSDK files!)
- Drag & Drop the rsdk file you want to modify into the "RSDKv5Extract.exe" and it should automatically extract the file into a separate folder, depending on which game's rsdk you dragged over it.
- Extracting the audio files
- Grab your recently dumped files from Sonic Origins from your Switch into your PC. The audio files should be in both .abc and .awb format.
For an exact list of the audio files and what each one contains, go to the Discord of "Retro Engine Modding" and search for the name of each file, you should find a list of all the tracks or SFXs that each file contains inside, and for which game they correspond:
https://dc.railgun.works/retroengine
- This tutorial won't go into detail about how to audio mod the game, since the same tutorial is covered in Gamebanana and is the same for both PC and Switch, you can check the audio tutorial here:
https://gamebanana.com/tuts/15106
- A personal advice for those wanting to make audio mods:
Additionally, make sure that, in order to listen to the tracks in foobar2000, you Extract and Pack back the acb/awb files, and drag/drop the repacked .acb file into foobar2000 for listening and checking each track's labels.
Lastly, the normalization levels for each game's audio tracks and SFXs are different, so take that into consideration if you intend to move tracks or SFX from one game's audio files to another!
- Adding your mods
- With your RSDK files extracted, all you need to do is simply download your desired mod from Gamebanana.com:
https://gamebanana.com/mods/games/15780
- Download whichever mod you want in zip, and extract them in the proper folders for the proper games (Sonic1u, Sonic2u, SonicCDu, Sonic3ku).
- To repack the RSDK file so you can use it on Switch, simply Drag & Drop the whole main folder (Named Sonic1u, etc.) into "RSDKv5Pack.exe", and a new RSDK file with your modified files should be created!
- Simply grab these newly created RSDK files, and put them into the appropriate folder structure for CWF Atmosphere to recognize these as mods, and enjoy!
- Running your mods with Atmosphere CFW
- Now that you have your modified Sonic Origins files, create the proper folder structure for the game in the Atmosphere files inside your SD card.
- For RSDK files:
- For Audio files:
- For RSDK files:
- Copy your RSDK files inside the /retro/ folder, and for your audio files, copy them inside the /sound/ folder
- Boot up Sonic Origins on your Switch, and enjoy!
That's all!
Basically, the only downside the Switch version has is that it contains the game-specific assets as RSDK files. Outside of that, it's pretty much the same as the PC version.
With these simple steps, you can now customize your Sonic Origins experience to your liking! (Just as I did by adding the Smooth animations to all 4 games, and removing the obnoxious Jumping Sound from Sonic CD to be that of Sonic 2
)