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Sonic Riders

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Sonic Riders
Sonic Riders cover
Developers
Now Production[1]
Sonic Team
Publishers
Sega
Engines
Sega NN Graphics Library[2]
Release dates
Windows November 16, 2006[3]
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer, Multiplayer
Pacing Real-time
Perspectives Third-person
Controls Direct control
Genres Racing
Vehicles Hovercraft, Motorcycle
Art styles Anime, Cartoon
Themes Sci-fi
Series Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic Riders on HowLongToBeat
Sonic Riders on IGDB
Sonic Riders guide on StrategyWiki
Sonic Riders on MobyGames
Sonic Riders on Wikipedia
Sonic the Hedgehog fangames (series)
Sonic CD 1995
Sonic's Schoolhouse 1996
Sonic 3D Blast (series)
Sonic & Knuckles Collection 1997
Sonic R (series)
Sonic Adventure (series)
Sonic Heroes 2004
Sonic Mega Collection Plus 2006
Sonic Riders 2006
Sonic Racing (series)
Sonic the Hedgehog 2010
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine 2010
Sonic Spinball 2010
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 2011
Sonic 3 & Knuckles 2011
Sonic Generations 2011
Sonic CD (2012) 2012
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I 2012
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II 2012
Sonic Dash 2014
Sonic Lost World 2015
Sonic Mania 2017
Sonic Forces 2017
Sonic the Hedgehog (Mobile Decompilation) 2021
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mobile Decompilation) 2021
Sonic Colors: Ultimate 2021
Sonic Origins 2022
Sonic Frontiers 2022
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog 2023
Sonic Superstars 2023
Sonic Dream Team 2023
Sonic X Shadow Generations 2024

Warnings

SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows Vista and later (see Availability for affected versions).

Key points

Most of the fixes documented in this article target the DRM-free executable and will not work with other versions.
No in-game quit option. Must use Alt+F4 to quit.
3-4 player modes from the console versions are absent on the PC version and can only be played with up to 2 players.
Unfavorable to the console versions in many ways, including missing graphical elements (such as the heat wave effect in Egg Factory), characters' pupils being stationary in Story Mode cutscenes, FMV playback occasionally being choppy, and several in-game lines being excluded.

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
Disc check (requires the CD/DVD in the drive to play)
SafeDisc v4 DRM[Note 1]. 3 CDs.
Windows
Retail
DRM-free
Sonic PC Collection. 1 DVD.
Windows
SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows Vista and later (see above for affected versions).

Demos

A demo is available here.

Essential improvements

Tweakbox for Sonic Riders

Work-in-progress, all-in-one mod that adds online multiplayer, widescreen support (without patching the game's executable file), controller support and more.
Requires Reloaded II. Installation instructions are available on the mod's GitHub page, website and this YouTube video.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Save\Config.ini[Note 2]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Save\Game Data*\save.dat[Note 2]

Video

External graphics and sound settings
External graphics and sound settings

Field of view (FOV)

Change FOV with Cheat Engine[citation needed]
  1. Download and install Cheat Engine.
  2. Download the WSGF attachment.
  3. Use the included Cheat Table file to adjust the FOV values.
Change FOV with hex edit[citation needed]
  1. Open d3dx9_25.dll with a hex editor such as HxD.
  2. Go to offset 0x3F9A9.
  3. Replace bytes 00 00 80 BF with bytes representing your float value multiplier at a negative value (default multiplier is -1.0). Remember to invert the byte order to Little Endian.

Notes

Use this online float to hex converter.
If the code is replaced with the command to jump to allow the extending of vertical fov at 0x3F9A9, replace bytes 00 00 80 3F at 0x1F8F3A with bytes representing your float value multiplier in a positive value (default multiplier here is 1.0).
FOV multiplier values lower than -0.75 or 0.75 will also cause blue clipping on geometry.

Input

External gamepad settings
External gamepad settings

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Sliders for BGM and SE/VOICE available in the external launcher.
Surround sound
Supports up to 7.1.[6]
Subtitles
Limited to cutscenes in Story Mode only; cannot be disabled. Voiced dialogue during races, such as pre and post-race lines and play-by-play commentary, are not subtitled.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Royalty free audio

Localizations

In-game text language settings
In-game text language settings
Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
French
German
Mix of Real Voice/Voice-to-Voice Fandub by "Maschinelle Klangkaskade"
Italian
Japanese
Russian
Fan text translation by "Falling Forward".
Fan audio localization by "Best Blast Team".
Spanish
Castilian.

Network

Multiplayer types

Type Native Players Notes
Local play
2 Versus
The PC version supports 4 player gameplay like the console versions without issues. However, the developers decided to disallow 4 players in the game's menu code and did not implement reading of inputs for players 3 and 4 (their input data is still stored). Through hacking, playing 4 players is possible.[7]
LAN play
Online play
Asynchronous multiplayer

Issues fixed

Game Lags when Rendering Lots of Particles (e.g. End of Red Canyon)

Set CPU Affinity to single core.[8]
  1. Open Task Manager.
  2. Go to the Details tab.
  3. Right Click SonicRiders.exe
  4. Press Set Affinity
  5. Check CPU 0, Uncheck all other boxes.

Note: The real fix is to hijack the Direct3D device creation; disable the D3DCREATE_MULTITHREADED flag (unused) and enable the D3DCREATE_DISABLE_PSGP_THREADING flag.

Infinite Loading Screen When Loading Race

Use decompressed game files.[9]
  1. Download Uncompressed Sonic Riders Assets.
  2. Extract to the Data directory of the game.

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
Direct3D 9.0c
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 2000, XP
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz or AMD equivalent
System memory (RAM) 128 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 3 GB
Video card (GPU) Direct3D compatible video card
64 MB of VRAM
DirectX 9.0c compatible
Sound (audio device) DirectSound compatible
Other Windows compatible keyboard and mouse
Windows 98: Second Edition (SE) and Me also launch the game, but are not officially supported.


Notes

  1. SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows 10[4] or Windows 11 and is disabled by default on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 when the KB3086255 update is installed.[5]
  2. 2.0 2.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References

  1. Credits:Sonic Riders - GDRI :: Game Developer Research Institute - last accessed on 2023-10-16
  2. Verified by User:Sewer56lol on 2019-11-03
    Confirmed via checking file formats and embedded strings in executable: nn Ver 1.18.43 Build:Sep 14 2006 15:08:29, SEGA NN Library for Direct G1.1
  3. SEGA SHIPS SONIC RIDERS FOR THE PC | GamesIndustry.biz - last accessed on 2023-05-19
  4. Not Loading in Windows 10; this will break thousands of - Microsoft Community - last accessed on 2017-01-16
  5. Microsoft - MS15-097: Description of the security update for the graphics component in Windows: September 8, 2015 - last accessed on 2018-02-16
  6. Verified by User:MasterBlaster on 2020-05-09
    Tested in 7.1 using Orban Loudness Meter in conjunction with Razer Surround.
  7. Verified by User:Sewer56lol on 2019-11-03
    I will make a patch for this someday. [https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/sonic-riders-pc-hacking-info.28359/#post-919475 Relevant forum post.)
  8. Verified by User:Sewer56lol on 2021-01-05
    This fix will be part of a future modification I'm working on.
  9. Verified by User:Sewer56lol on 2021-01-05
    This seems to be an issue caused by bad threading/lock mechanism between a thread that does decompression and a thread which reads file data from disk. It occurs when a lot of files are submitted to be decompressed at once and is more prominent on fast single-threaded CPUs. While I have not wrote a Reloaded-II mod that fixes the issue yet, I have decompressed the game files which should prevent this issue.