Hello, people of the Sonic Hacking Contest!

I would like to say thank you, for the bottom of my heart, for making the Sonic Hacking Contest 2024 as great an event as it was! We are currently reading your feedback as it is coming along, and we're very pleased!

Unfortunately, I don't come with only pleasant announcements.

My own enjoyment of the Sonic Hacking Contest was affected by internal and external stressant events, the most intense ones happening just in the span of this month. I also can not 100% praise whatever internal management of the Contest I carried out, for there were clear, undeniable issues with stress and deadline management most prominently.

For these reasons, I've decided to go on a couple month long break from managing the Sonic Hacking Contest. During this leave period, expect me to be far less active to happenings in the public SHC Server. If you need support from Staff related to the SHC, I also have to ask that you don't directly send me DMs on Discord. Although I appreciate that lots of you trust me enough to come to me for support, it was never proper procedure, and was meant to be a last resort, with the Discord Server's ModMail bot being the *true* proper procedure for reaching out the in-server Staff of the Sonic Hacking Contest. If I, specifically, am needed, Staff knows how to reach me, and I *will* make sure to be there. Otherwise, please use the ModMail bot. Alternatively, for those not present on Discord, you can reach out via shc<.>zone<.>site<@>gmail<.>com, or via the official SHC Social Media DMs.

Thank you, once again, for your support to the Sonic Hacking Contest, and look forward to a new-and-improved Sonic Hacking Contest 2025!

That's right! This 40-ish question form will be your place to give us your two cents on just about everything of this year's Hacking Contest. Do take your time filling out each question!

Fill in now

Kept you waiting, huh? Judge evaluations are finally public!! Please do note that a couple of our judge's evaluations are running late, as they both have had various factors come into play that has kept them busy, but rest assured they will deliver their evaluations soon! Also as a reminder, jubbalub has previously been excused from judging this year, but they might end up writing up some evaluations eventually, so keep an eye out for those!

Apologies for the evaluations coming in so late. A lot of factors came into play that we never considered, and we're already discussing how to iron out these issues for future years. Thank you for your patience!

Without further ado, you can view the Judge Evaluations here!

Finally available, the Trophy banners, as shown in our announcement thread!

The trophy banners are available in two formats:

• Raw: Completely devoid of any background, these banners are served to you at a much smaller native resolution, for you to use and upscale at your liking. Pretty good for forum signatures!
• Upscaled: These are the images as presented during the announcement thread, upscaled to better fit a 1080p canvas, and sporting our own SHC background!

Download now!

A certain other social media seems oh so desperate to have Sonic hacking stuff in its AI dataset, among other things :P
For this reason, we are shifting our primary social media focus to Bluesky! Follow us there for news on all things Sonic Hacking and Modding!

The original X (formerly Twitter) account will still be used as a secondary legacy account for as long as we can bear using it.

We regret to inform you that whatever promised in this announcement will have to suffer a delay, due to enhanced stress of many key figures of our Staff.

Judges' Evaluations, Banners, and the Feedback form will still be released sometime throughout the week.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

It has been brought to my attention that the ROM Hack results in the previous post were wildly incorrect and were not the same as the results posted elsewhere. I'm not sure how this happened, but those responsible will be sacked.

Jokes aside, I'd like to personally apologize if you learned about the results here only to learn that they aren't correct. None of the results outside of the site post were incorrect, only some trophy results that were posted here were. We have gone through the post and corrected the results. I have also double-checked Modern 2D and 3D to ensure the results are correct there as well.

Here they are, in text format, for easy consultation!

Judges' Evaluations and Banners will be distributed in the next 24 hours!

Expect the feedback form to be released this week with a News post on the website!

Thank you all for following the Sonic Hacking Contest 2024! We hope to make the next years EVEN BETTER than this one!

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Hello! The Head Judges have received the results of this year's Sonic Hacking Contest, and are currently processing them. Judged results will take a bit longer than anticipated, so bear with us!

We will be revealing the results later this weekend!

Speaking of Judged results, we must inform you of a few changes that have occurred, which will slightly affect weighting of the results.

Below, you will see a list of what Judges have been excused from judging what entries. You will be able to see what exceptions apply in the Judges Code of Conduct. Please also note the introduction of Exception 4, as earlier announced.

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I'd like to inform you that you have ROUGHLY ABOUT 48 HOURS to cast your votes!

You wouldn't want your favorite entries to miss out on a chance to win Community trophies, do you?

So GET VOTING!

Make sure to create an account or log into it, then browse the entries you root for the most, and cast your votes!

For the sake of transparency, we must highlight the fact that the previous ruling for the original rule was made under strong bias for the ROM hack category.

The way the rule was enforced could have posed harsh consequences against open-source entries, which would impose strict moderation towards commits made to publicly available repositories as "updates".

Had the ruling been rejected, a multitude of ROM Hacks would have been disqualified, under the assumption that the strictest moderation was applied. Examples of entries specifically affected by these circumstances include:

• Sonic ERaZor 7
• Sonic 1 Mega CD Port

We'd like to note that Sonic 1: South Island Expedition was also potentially subject to disqualification under this rule, due to an accidental, very minor post-deadline update that was pushed without the knowledge of even the developers.

The verdict nullifying Rule 7 was pushed prematurely, with insufficient review from the 3D and Modern 2D Judges. The incident was internally reviewed, the verdict was subsequently approved, and internal measures will be put in place to prevent future occurrences of similar incidents.

After internal discussion, and further discussion with some members of the general public, we have recognized some egregious flaws with Rule 7 of the Sonic Hacking Contest, which can be read from the Rules.

Given said discussion, it has been decided to undo enforcement of the rule for the remainder of the Sonic Hacking Contest 2024.

The implications are as follows:

1. The one entry that was previously disqualified for this violation, Foreign Input System, has been undisqualified;
2. You may release updated builds of the entry anywhere other than the Sonic Hacking Contest;
3. You may post links to updated builds of your entry even in the comments section of said entry;
4. Entrants that have open sourced their own entries are allowed to continue updating their public iteration of the repository;
5. The entry's attachments of the Sonic Hacking Contest's entry listing will still only be updated in case of game-breaking errors, and with approval from the Judges

Please remember that votes should be attributed based on the contents of the builds presented at the Sonic Hacking Contest, and not on the updated builds found elsewhere.

I would like to personally offer apologies to all affected by the enforcement of the rule, my own especially.

Hello, everyone! NiphFM, our host for the Mega Drive Music Contest, has announced a SPECIAL round of the Contest, to accompany the Sonic Hacking Contest!

The prompt for this round is to compose or arrange a short theme to accompany the Sonic Hacking Contest Splash Screen! And of course, the winner will have their 12 second sound track become part of the Official Sonic Hacking Contest Splash Screen! (Or at least the iterations where we can actually implement custom sound bits :P)

Got what it takes to secure a winning chance? Then join our Discord Server to access the Mega Drive Music Contest! You've got until October 6th, the moment midnight first strikes at Rome's timezone, to submit to this special round of the Mega Drive Music Contest!

If you log into a SHC user account, you can vote for your favourite Judged entries in their page, and by looking at the selection of trophies!

You can check out what the awards are under the Categories and Trophies page.

You have until the end of October 6th, 2024, to cast your votes!

Please note that Unjudged entries are not eligible for awards.

go play the games

now

Been a while since I made a post here. How about another set of announcements?

First off, I'm glad to announce 3 new and returning folks to the media panel. First up, we have both AntDude and The Geek Critique returning to do live streams this year! Secondly, I'm happy to announce that CallieMacN and Mar Katoto will be joining our media panel as well! Be looking forward to their live streams for this year!

Finally, the media panel stream schedule is now available to the public, and much like the entry list, it's PACKED this year! You can view the streaming schedule here! That's all for this announcement! Entries and voting will be available to the public tomorrow!

Kept y'all waiting, huh?

Two major announcements, one good, and one not as good.

First off, the good one! I'm happy to confirm that the Sonic Hacking Contest will be starting on September 28th at 9AM, Rome's time zone!

Secondly, the not as good one. There have been quite a few hiccups with the production of the trailer, which was, admittedly, started far later than warranted. Meaning that the trailer will have to be turned into a Launch Trailer. Believe me, though, you're going to love it!

That's all for the announcement!(Read More)

The SHC Quality Control has just now concluded! All entrants that have completed their entry, but no longer see it on the website, should check their email associated to their SHC user account as to why it was rejected.

Anyway, a number of people have highlighted to us an issue with the Judging process, involving the fact that Judges backing out of entries would penalize entries, on account of them receiving pottentially less votes.

In the attached video, I'll tell you about how we intend to solve this issue! Please watch it until the end for a big reveal!

Once you're done watching, click here to see who judges what this year!

We have received one particular submission that, although it doesn't violate the SHC rules, can actually test the boundaries of tolerance of some of our Judges, on account of the entry being particularly disturbing.

In response, we are introducing a new exception to Judgment, effective immediately, which is as follows:

"If a Judge deems an entry exceptionally gruesome or disturbing, and the entry does not otherwise violate the rules of the Sonic Hacking Contest, they may still exempt themselves from Judgment. This, however, may only be granted on serious and particularly grave instances."

We understand that introducing new rules of this kind may not be a popular move, but understand that the welfare of all involved with the Sonic Hacking Contest is important. For entries of this kind, you will be given a warning through an appropriate notice on the entry's listing.

In response to an incident in the Sonic 3 AIR Discord Server, Dynamic Lemons has been removed from the Judges of the Sonic Hacking Contest.

The incident involves a display of high unprofessionality in regards to a potential SHC Entrant, it being the Amy Galore modification.

The choice has been reviewed by the Head Judges, and by the Sonic 3 AIR Judges, with no expressed dissent.

We believe the conduct to have been exceedingly unprofessional, and unbefitting of someone who, at the end of the day, is meant to be a representant of their community, and the Sonic Hacking Contest.

Some of you may also be aware of reoccurring personal issues between HazelSpooder, and Dynamic Lemons, among others. Please note that those events have had next to no impact in the decision making process.