So I was playing Act 1, Stage 2, and I got enough rings for knuckles. I handed them over, entered the stage, hit the very first spike before reaching any rings, and lost the stage. Irritating.
But " no problem" I thought, I'll just grab more rings. So I ran around and collected rings again only to accidentally bump tails and do a tails stage, but I already had the emerald from stage 1 tails, so that was pointless. Then I FINALLY got enough rings again, gave em to knuckles.. and nothing happened. Apparently once you lose a bonus round you have to complete the level, go back, and then redo the stage AND the level all over again.
This is frustrating, why not just make Knuckles and Tails let you retry for another 50 rings?
To be fair, vyperii kind of didn't answer your question, in a sense it means you have four tries per zone to get each emerald now so even though you are sure not to get super sonic until the last level, getting all the emeralds is now way easier. In fact you don't just get four tries, you get as many as you need since you can replay the levels indefinitely.