English Amiga Board - View Single Post - NeoGeo Metal Slug conversion to Amiga 500 - madman task ;-)

Shatterhand · 10 November 2017, 13:50

First, trachu, you can't believe redrawing the graphics for 16 colors is halfway the work you need to make this... this is, like Britelite said, like 1% of all the work for doing something like this.

Second, yeah, you can't do a 1:1 port of Metal Slug by just watering down colors. You don't have enough ram for all graphics and even if you had it the amount of stuff moving on screen (and the parallax etc) would make the game run at like 2 frames per second.

BUT... if you cut it correctly, you could have a very close port gameplay-wise. That Gameboy color version is completely doable on an A500 with 1mb of ram (Maybe you'd have to load stuff on levels, like the PS1 version, because of the amount of BG graphics)... and that BGC version is surprisignly faithful to the arcade on in terms of level design. Something like that on Amiga without flicker and with better framerate (which I really think it's doable) would be a very good Amiga game IMO.

if I recall correctly, Metal Slug never scrolls backwards... and only scrolls vertically at level 3 (but then it has no horizontal scroll up until you reach the top of the mountain, then it goes back to only horizontal scroll), so you could use a simple scrolling routine.

And double buffer would probably be enough.

But the amount of work here is insanely huge to tackle off as a hobby job on your free time. Good luck with that, it would really be impressive to see it .

10 November 2017, 13:50	#21
Shatterhand Warhasneverbeensomuchfun Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Rio de Janeiro / Brazil Age: 41 Posts: 3,450	First, trachu, you can't believe redrawing the graphics for 16 colors is halfway the work you need to make this... this is, like Britelite said, like 1% of all the work for doing something like this. Second, yeah, you can't do a 1:1 port of Metal Slug by just watering down colors. You don't have enough ram for all graphics and even if you had it the amount of stuff moving on screen (and the parallax etc) would make the game run at like 2 frames per second. BUT... if you cut it correctly, you could have a very close port gameplay-wise. That Gameboy color version is completely doable on an A500 with 1mb of ram (Maybe you'd have to load stuff on levels, like the PS1 version, because of the amount of BG graphics)... and that BGC version is surprisignly faithful to the arcade on in terms of level design. Something like that on Amiga without flicker and with better framerate (which I really think it's doable) would be a very good Amiga game IMO. if I recall correctly, Metal Slug never scrolls backwards... and only scrolls vertically at level 3 (but then it has no horizontal scroll up until you reach the top of the mountain, then it goes back to only horizontal scroll), so you could use a simple scrolling routine. And double buffer would probably be enough. But the amount of work here is insanely huge to tackle off as a hobby job on your free time. Good luck with that, it would really be impressive to see it .