Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Sonic 3 A.I.R.)

Game: Sonic 3 & Knuckles → (Mega Drive / Genesis, 1994)

Sonic 3 A.I.R. (Angel Island Revisited): a fan-made widescreen remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It runs on the Oxygen Engine, its own engine that emulates the parts of the Mega Drive hardware the game needs, and the game logic is rewritten function by function in lemonscript, the same author’s scripting language, from the original’s 68000 code: about 7 MB of scripts in the repository, each function marked with its ROM address. Graphics, levels, and sound are read from your ROM. It adds widescreen, upscaling filters (xBRZ, HQ3x, and HQ4x), Time Attack, Competition mode, the Blue Sphere minigame on its own, Act Select, achievements and unlockable secrets, new moves such as the drop dash, controller rumble, and an experimental mode, Ghost Sync, that shows other players connected to a server. It supports mods, which can bring their own scripts, with documentation and a dev mode. SpinnRG’s remastered soundtrack is downloaded from the options menu. There are builds for Windows and Linux; the macOS one is published by Sappharad. The latest stable release is v26.03.28.0 (March 28), which added a file browser for importing mods, more skippable cutscenes, and pause and Act Select menus written in scripts, and test builds have followed since, the latest on August 15. The repository also includes, from the game and the series, music from the Sonic 3 prototype, the Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 boss themes, Sonic 2’s Super Sonic theme, and Sonic CD’s peel-out sounds.

You needA compatible ROM from your own copy of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, such as the one from Sonic 3 & Knuckles on Steam (part of SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics), which is no longer sold. Plus Windows (32- or 64-bit) or Linux; on macOS, Sappharad’s build.

How it gets to PC

Port of a decompilation

Console

Sega Mega Drive / Genesis

Original studio

Sega Technical Institute

Year

1994

Author

Eukaryot

Stars

676

Last activity

2026-10-24 · 7 days ago

Latest version

v26.03.28.0-stable · 2026-03-28

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C++

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