This question has been circling in my mind for a long time: could the SNES Megaman X be possible to make on the Amiga? And I mean the basic Amiga 500, with 1 MB RAM. Because if the standard Amiga is capable of Turricans and other awesomeness, surely Megaman X should also be possible?
So just for fun I made some palette conversion tests , check it out.
From these mockups you can see that it is possible to convert the graphics to 16 colors without any major quality loss. The palette that I made is able to re-produce the "color athmosphere" of the SNES version quite nicely. And it's in fact just 15 colors, because I reserved one color for the sprite/bob transparency. Every major color is included, at the price of having only two grays, but the browns and the other colors can be used to support the grays if needed.
Most sprites in MMX are colored by a mix many different colors, and at first they might seem too "high color" for a 16 color palette. But to my surprise this is not the case, in fact it has the opposite effect: the multi-colored sprites ALLOW us to use the entire 16 color palette that we have, and the results look great, as you can see from the color edit mockups I made. And on the Amiga, if we use blitter objects (bobs) for all game sprites, then 16 colors in the same sprite is possible right?
And because the sprites are cartoonish and have a black outline around them, they stand out really well from the background. And this too is a good thing for our 16 colors, because the sprites and the background can use the same colors without any fear of sprites being lost in the background gfx.
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Although as you can see in the mockups I removed all extra background stuff like clouds and parallax layers, only sprites and foreground objects remain...but I imagine this is how a potential conversion would need to be done; the backgrounds in the SNES version have so much stuff in them that the Amiga would just run out of memory and disk space and all the parallax layers would slow the game down. But of course we could do the backgrounds like they're done in Turrican 2; copper skies and other cool tricks.
And if necessary (as it well might be) the levels could be split in two parts, with the level bosses and boss music loaded separately once the player reaches them. This techique is used in many other games too, like in Shadow of the Beast, and surely one boss + music could be loaded quickly enough.
And about the controls; the SNES version uses 3 buttons of the gamepad. One button shoots, one dashes, and one jumps. But on the Amiga this would be: Fire shoots, Joy Up jumps, and dashing would be done by either moving the Joy diagonally down, or even straight down, because that direction is not used for anything else; Megaman can't crouch. And space bar would be used to access the equipment menu.
And performance wise, I don't think Megaman X would be too much to handle. The amount of sprites on the screen at the same time is about at the same level than in Turrican. And even on the SNES version Megaman himself can only have 3 active bullets on the air at the same time; this works well because the bullets are so fast and exit the screen quickly. Only a few special weapons occasionally cause more bullets to be shot. Compare that to Turrican with 10+ player bullets on the screen all the time.
About the level designs, maybe some stuff might need to be redesigned for the Amiga version, like adjust the tile amount and size for memory reasons and maybe cut a few special effects out...but I don't see anything that would be impossible to accomplish here. Megaman X has 8 levels + an intro level + Sigmas fortress, which is 3 levels long, and all of them have bosses. And some people might think "that would take 12 disks", but Turrican 2 had many levels, each with unique music and boss tunes and it fit on a single disk. And even if it would need more, then so what? Good games have many disks.
So I think technically Megaman X is possible, if it would be specifically re-designed for the Amiga. A 100% accurate copy might be impossible, but surely an Amiga version could be done. But of course it would still require a very skilled and motivated development team, confident in making multi-way scrolling platformers and advanced stuff like "wall jumps", charge shots and dashing. And the enemy intelligence is quite complex too, especially the boss AI, so I think that alone would take many months if done properly.