The X68000 games porting experiment

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by ChefDeadpool

I would love to see any of the x68000 Record of Lodoss War titles on Amiga, but this is probably a pipe dream.

The funny thing is that games like those would be the easiest to get working. Tons of RPGs and such were developed for PC-98/X68000/FM-Towns using the exact same codebase and have entirely CPU-driven graphics and don't use the sprite engine/etc. of the X68000 at all. Usually the X68000 version would have more colors and that would be the only difference (using same FM synth code as PC-98, or MIDI).

In the end the patches to get these running on an Amiga would be extremely similar to say, Shapeshifter's virtualization to deal with graphical differences, storage access etc., and you'd need a software FM or software/hardware MIDI implementation for the sound. I have no idea what the CPU overhead for emulating those old FM synth chips is, but with sound disabled even a slow 68020 with an RTG card could probably run all base X68000 games of this type perfectly. Running on AGA would be a taller order due to C2P overhead so you'd need a faster CPU.

[jotd]

one of the cool arcade ports which should be possible on AGA would be Galaga '88.

[Retro1234]

Is anything like your Ghouls N Ghosts for STE actually possible on the Amiga,?

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Is anything like your Ghouls N Ghosts for STE actually possible on the Amiga,?

Literally anything the STE can do an ECS A500 can do, but it might require a slightly faster CPU + real fast RAM to do it (as opposed to trapdoor mem).

And in practice even a stock A500 can make up for its slightly slower speed and more contentious memory by using sprites and copperlists with some fancy code rewrites.

[Retro1234]

I think thats one of the problems there wouldnt be any use of Sprites Etc its all done with CPU power.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I think thats one of the problems there wouldnt be any use of Sprites Etc its all done with CPU power.

What I meant is that you can make up for the slightly slower CPU by identifying bits of the code that could be handled by the custom chipset instead and rewriting for that. In the case of STE ports the blitter is already doing a lot of the work so it's not as easy to find candidates for rewriting like with a pure-CPU ST game, but if you can find them and free up enough CPU cycles then you are good.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by jotd

one of the cool arcade ports which should be possible on AGA would be Galaga '88.

Cosmo Gang too would be nice (at the end was a galaga clone with the cosmo gang franchise characters)
EDIT: Correction - i confused this thread with the Next Game to port one, sorry