Sonic 2 gets an AI-assisted Amiga AGA port

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has arrived on Commodore Amiga AGA in an unofficial port that uses modern AI assistance alongside conventional reverse-engineering and testing. The project, developed by EAB moderator Cody Jarrett, aims to reproduce the complete Mega Drive game rather than stopping at a short technical demo. ¹

The conversion includes all eleven zones, twenty acts, the special stages, boss fights and the closing sequence. Sonic can be joined by a computer-controlled Tails, while a second player can take over Tails in cooperative play. The project also includes the two-player versus mode and the familiar campaign from Emerald Hill through to the final confrontation. ¹²

Jarrett used Anthropic’s Claude to help translate the original 68000 game logic from the Sonic Retro community’s s2disasm disassembly into C. The original and converted code were then run side by side with the Unicorn engine to check whether they produced matching results, according to the project coverage. ¹

That approach does not remove the difficult platform-specific work. The Amiga version needs to handle the AGA chipset’s dual-playfield screens, hardware sprites and audio hardware, while the game’s graphics and level data have been adapted from the Mega Drive release. Copper effects provide per-line background scrolling and water effects, and the blitter handles objects. The soundtrack has also been converted into four-channel ProTracker modules for the Amiga’s Paula audio chip. ¹²

The test release requires an AGA Amiga such as an A1200 or A4000 with a 68020 processor or better, Kickstart 3.0 or later, 2 MB of Chip RAM and 4 MB of Fast RAM. It needs about 20 MB of hard-disk space for the LHA or HDF version. ¹

Early testing has already identified bugs and performance problems. Reports mention a possible memory leak, a crash around Chemical Plant Act 2-1 on some configurations, stuttering during the first levels’ waterfall sections and slowdowns during certain scrolling patterns. Casino Night appears to be a particularly strong test case, with reports of it running at the Mega Drive game’s intended speed. ¹

Why the port matters

The project is separate from the upcoming human-coded Amiga conversion of the first Sonic the Hedgehog. That makes it an interesting experiment in how AI-assisted translation can be combined with painstaking hardware testing, rather than a claim that generated code can simply replace a programmer’s work. The remaining memory and rendering issues show how much validation is still required when a game is moved between two very different 16-bit platforms. ¹²

Our opinion

The headline here is not that AI has magically ported Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It has helped with one part of a much larger engineering process. The more impressive achievement is the scope of the finished test build: a full campaign, multiple modes and a serious attempt to preserve the game’s timing on hardware never designed to run it. Until the memory and level-specific bugs are resolved, this is best treated as an ambitious experiment for Amiga owners, not a finished replacement for the Mega Drive original.