Shinobi Arcade Conversion

[saimon69]

The Shadow Dancer route envision a recode from scratch so, for how jotd wanted to do the port (almost an emulation of the arcade), is not feasible i think

[sokolovic]

Every game was generally adapted on console, not strictly converted.
I'm not a Shinobi specialist but does having Ninja of different colors affect the gameplay ? Because you could just mix green and blue ninjas for example.
I love how Konami converted their licence on MSX, X68000, NES, SNES, MD and PCE adapting them to every support àd not trying to force an impossible port.

[saimon69]

Different color ninja = different behavior, as far as i remember: the green ones are mimetic in example

[Howardphilips]

Originally Posted by jotd

Different problem for that one. For that one we need the sprites, and as game is fairly recent, it doesn't run from MAME tile saving. The sprite show (in Shinobi they don't, that's why Denis worked so hard to rip them), but we can't dump them to pngs.

But somehow it looks really slower and less action paced than Shinobi, no parallax, a lot of tiles, not so many sprites, and smaller ones. Atari was always behind Sega in terms of hardware (check RoadWars vs Outrun)

And what about converting the Master System version instead?
I remember it was quite fun and looking good at the time.

[jotd]

The point of converting Shinobi is to keep close to the arcade. And the code is 68000 too, I have no interest in recoding a game anymore, plus if I can save a transcode...

[Howardphilips]

OK, I see. I remembered that the SMS is based on Z80 but I don't know if anybody has managed to extract the source code of this version.

[jotd]

there is no source code of Shinobi on any platform. But it's generally not a problem

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

The point of converting Shinobi is to keep close to the arcade. And the code is 68000 too, I have no interest in recoding a game anymore, plus if I can save a transcode...

The code is full 68000 asm. The question is : can you isolate the sprites routines and background build routines, the levels tiledata ?

The big question is : do you want to convert the bitmap chunky graphics to planar, or keep the original bitmap chunky graphics ?

[jotd]

Yes, I can isolate the sprites routines and tiles, as the game writes to given locations to enable sprites & set tiles.

If I did this, I would take your rips and convert to planar, reducing the number of colors automatically at first, maybe create one tileset and one spriteset per level so less colors would be required.