Possible Dos game port project

[Keranu]

I must admit, I have played a ton of hours of Jedi Knight online though (in third person perspective). Won't be building any hopes for a Turbo port though lol.

[BigusSchmuck]

I must admit, I have played a ton of hours of Jedi Knight online though (in third person perspective). Won't be building any hopes for a Turbo port though lol.

Well considering someone took the time to port over Halo to the Atari 2600, http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/halo-2600-halo-redone-for-the-atari-2600/ I think anything at this point in the game is possible.

[saturndual32]

Not on the list but i would love to see a port of the great DOS Turrican 2 on the PC Engine. The system need more jump and run action!

[spenoza]

I'd rather see a homebrew Contra than a port of Turrican 2. You've seen what the "pros" did to Turrican, not that I really care for the original all that much.

[Arkhan Asylum]

If anyone ports a Turrican game to the PCE, I will personally delete them from Earth.

[HercTNT]

Since we are all throwing out our opinions here. Personally i don't get peoples fascination with the quake games. Quake 1 and 2, doom 1 and 2 all use the same basic weapons and concept as wolf 3d did. For me, i would rather play wolf 3d any day as it did it better, and first. Morrowind is an excellent game that requires alot of patience. The depth of the game is mind numbing and is not for the button mashing weekend warrior.  If any body does port over turrican i will wrestle arkhan for the right to hit that delete button.  And for my final rant, the catacomb games were great and i believe would look good on the turbo.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Quake 1 and 2 are basically the real sequels to Doom, since Doom 3 sucked.

The difference with the Doom/Quake games is they present a darker atmosphere due to lighting effects, and varied heights...

and take place in space/hell/awesome.

Catacomb would be an excellent game to port to the PCE, but it is one that would require effort.  Raycasting is srs bidnis.

[Mishran]

I actually like the idea of a Contra port. I still think a good "point & click" game would be a worthy candidate. Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tenticle, Monkey Island, etc.

I also like how Ultima is staying hot on the heels of Keen in the poll. I think they were even tied for a couple days. Awesome.

[HercTNT]

Games like gunstar heroes, metal slug, and contra are definately some of my favorites. I would prefer to see a turbo original along these same lines that we could call our own, than a port. the turbos sprite capabilities would make for some crazy action in such a game i would think.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Bug Fragmare about PC Gunjin then.

Its a Contra game.

[Edmond Dantes]

Btw Arkhan, not to nitpick but... the original DOOM didn't have slopes.

Uhh, what?  I'm pretty sure I've seen Slopes in Doom, and not just staircases, and not just in the source ports.

Otherwise what you said about the engine is pretty accurate.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Btw Arkhan, not to nitpick but... the original DOOM didn't have slopes.

Uhh, what?  I'm pretty sure I've seen Slopes in Doom, and not just staircases, and not just in the source ports.

Otherwise what you said about the engine is pretty accurate.

You see slopes in the logical, obvious, mathematical sense (lots of steep stairs = slope).

but from a goony technical hoojoo level building/environment standpoint, there are no actual slopes.


It has slopes in the textbook mathematical sense with Riemann sums, and with player travel.  Otherwise, when you walk off a platform, you'd fall straight down.

It's nitpicking and depends how you are looking at it.

[Edmond Dantes]

Nonono, I mean, I could swear I've seen slope-slopes.  Like ramps and stuff.  I'm sure its not limited to just stairs.

As soon as I get home I'll look.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Nope, the ramps are just a buncha stairs jammed together.

The closest thing youll get to slopes is angular non square rooms.

[BigusSchmuck]

If I'm going to port a FPS, it will be Descent (even though its not a FPS in a traditional sense). Enough said.

[Arkhan Asylum]

good luck porting descent, lol. youre crazy.

[BigusSchmuck]

good luck porting descent, lol. youre crazy.

I know I am ^^ Thats way down the road though and I'm almost positive it can only be done with the arcade card. At this point, if I can get a title screen for Commander Keen, I'll be very happy indeed. ^^

[saturndual32]

Ports of the arcade Contra and Super Contra on the PC Engine would be a dream come true...that i know cant happen, something about licensing issues i hear...

[ParanoiaDragon]

Ports of the arcade Contra and Super Contra on the PC Engine would be a dream come true...that i know cant happen, something about licensing issues i hear...

Well, I wouldn't say licensing is a problem, anyone can make them in the privacy of their own home.  However, AFAIK, no one has done either of these yet, but those are high on my list.  I want to see them be like the NES versions, but with the arcade gfx.

[Arkhan Asylum]

The arcade card adds more ram, not more power.

You need a faster CPU to perform Descent power.

[BigusSchmuck]

The arcade card adds more ram, not more power.

You need a faster CPU to perform Descent power.

It ran on a 386, it could be possible to port it. Once I get this porting thing down, I may attempt it. All in due time of course...

[Arkhan Asylum]

yes but a 386 is a 12ish mhz 32bit cpu

whereas the PCE is a 7ish mhz 8 bit cpu.

Its like bringing a gun to a tactical nuke fight.

[spenoza]

Descent required an 80386 running at 33 mhz or faster and a minimum of 4 MB of RAM. If you think of a PC Engine as a really fast, really memory constrained Apple II with great graphics, you can see why porting Descent is not going to be an option. Descent was technically more advanced than Doom and used proper polygons and everything. We've seen how well the PCE handles polygons...

[Arkhan Asylum]

Man I thought descent could run on a lower end 386.  Guess not. (Checked the box instead of guessing).


It'd be nice, but yeah, it isn't happening.

[_Paul]

Hmm, if the Spectrum can do it...

[Arkhan Asylum]

yeah but the spectrum doesn't need to rely on tiles..

AND that game is atrocious.  I've played it.   It lacks the things that make Doom Doom.  Its more like Wolf3D w/ Doom graphics to me...

[BigusSchmuck]

yeah but the spectrum doesn't need to rely on tiles..

AND that game is atrocious.  I've played it.   It lacks the things that make Doom Doom.  Its more like Wolf3D w/ Doom graphics to me...

I was more on the lines of thinking if it could be done, we could use the game engine. After all, it is yet another open sourced project and we have seen crazier things ported (N64 emulator on Dreamcast?) to other consoles. I played it too on a old 486 with 4 megs of RAM, floppy disc version mind you ^^ so yeah I thought it may be done, only time will tell...

[Arkhan Asylum]

N64 on a dreamcast makes sense though because you are going from lower harder onto higher hardware.

We're going backwards here.  It's hard to emulate 32bit computation on an 8bit CPU.  It'll be hilarious to try, and awful to watch the finished result,

lol.

[BigusSchmuck]

N64 on a dreamcast makes sense though because you are going from lower harder onto higher hardware.

We're going backwards here.  It's hard to emulate 32bit computation on an 8bit CPU.  It'll be hilarious to try, and awful to watch the finished result,

lol.

Like those Halo and Doom ports on the 2600? Heh. A bit off topic, I may need some help getting HUC to work in windows 7 64-bit, might have to dig up my old XP machine..

[Arkhan Asylum]

Those aren't really ports though... they're completely different games with a similar theme, lol.


use HuC Win32 version off Zeograd for 64bit winderps. =3

[BigusSchmuck]

A strange thought popped into my head, what if we did a Kings Bounty (the original 1990 version) port? I think its completely feasible vs trying to do a Heroes of Might and Magic port (unless we did the gameboy version lolz), however neither one is open sourced so it could be difficult, but the reward would be great. ^^ I dunno, just another idea I had instead of wasting time with doing a Descent port.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Look dude, the public says they want keen! 



not that I don't want to see Kings Bounty too.

I just want to see Keen.

[nat]

Those aren't really ports though... they're completely different games with a similar theme, lol.

Agreed.

I watched the video of the Halo "port" thinking it was going to be some hilariously blocky (24x24 or something ludicrous like that) 3D thing in 4 colors.... In actuality, it's a top-down view of a stick figure running around a sparse field of trees.

It's no more a "port" of Halo than it is a "port" of the RPG mode of Final Lap Twin. Actually calling it a "port" of anything is being knowingly deceitful.

[Mishran]

Mortal Kombat...

Yeah right! How about a real beat'em up like double dragon or bad dudes.

[arromdee]

Would it be feasible to port a simplified version of ScummVM, enough to run some older games (considering that Loom actually exists for the system anyway)?

[Arkhan Asylum]

Would it be feasible to port a simplified version of ScummVM, enough to run some older games (considering that Loom actually exists for the system anyway)?

yeah. probably. 

Those games aren't exactly action oriented .. so wasting CPU processing Scummcrap wont really hurt.

[Mishran]

Has anyone tried examining Loom? Perhaps it's just a port of scumm itself? Just talking out my ass here.

[BigusSchmuck]

Has anyone tried examining Loom? Perhaps it's just a port of scumm itself? Just talking out my ass here.

The problem is, I don't think its open sourced, but I do believe scumm is open sourced. No you are not, at this point in the game I'm up for any feasible projects so long as it is open sourced that is until I get good at doing this. ^^

[arromdee]

The problem with ScummVM, I think, is that it's meant for modern systems.  It's probably too big to compile for or run on a Turbografx.  Porting it would mean more than just using the existing source code--you'd have to rewrite big parts of it and only use the bits and pieces of it that were meant for the simpler games.  Of course it depends on what you mean by a port.  I doubt that Mysterious Song uses any significant amount of code from the original Mysterious Song, rather than being rewritten from scratch.

Also, any game I'd want to see a port of is probably one I've played to death, and therefore wouldn't care about a port of, unless it's something like ScummVM that runs many different games.  Maybe you could try porting Frotz?  (Which is an interpreter for text adventure games such as Zork).  It's been ported to the GBA so the system requirements probably aren't too bad (though you'd have to think about how to support a keyboard).

Maybe you can try porting the Palm version of Jumpman Zero (http://www.jumpmanzero.com/) which does have source available, supposedly, although it's not in an obvious spot on the website.

[spenoza]

The Game Boy Advance is actually a rather powerful little system. It certainly trounces any of the 16-bit generation machines. I would be more worried about the memory overhead of the SCUMM VM engine. It is a virtual machine, so you have both game data, game code, and the interpreter in memory. It might be better to go back to the old King's Quest games as a starting point, since they are generally simpler.

[saturndual32]

Ports of the arcade Contra and Super Contra on the PC Engine would be a dream come true...that i know cant happen, something about licensing issues i hear...

Well, I wouldn't say licensing is a problem, anyone can make them in the privacy of their own home.  However, AFAIK, no one has done either of these yet, but those are high on my list.  I want to see them be like the NES versions, but with the arcade gfx.

Actually i would kill just to hear PCE PSG renditions of the classic Contra tracks. And great idea, ParanoiaDragon, the NES games but with arcade quality graphics would make for a killer combination. We could call the PCE Contra version: Contra X or Gryzor X, hehe. Ah, its so beautiful to daydream...

[BigusSchmuck]

Added the Oregon Trail as a possible port as a new Oregon Trail game came out for the Wii not to long ago. From what I understand, the cpu of the pce is very similar to that of the Apple II?

[Arkhan Asylum]

Its better than the Apple ][!

[spenoza]

Better, but very similar. The PCE CPU is basically the same CPU with some minor reworking, some new functions thrown in, some audio circuitry bolted on, and a better process allowing for a faster CPU clock. That's the short version, anyway.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Well it depends which Apple ][ you look at.

The original Apple ][ uses the original piece of fuck 6502.  The ][C uses essentially the same CPU as the PCE (65C02).  The difference between the two is pretty great.  A lot of features were added to the CPU that would make doing an original Apple ][ game a complete joke on the PCE.    The PCE just has it's extra little doodads that make it a PCE CPU.

but they're all still shitty 6502's, so all annoyances are still present.  

[spenoza]

Maybe that's the direction we need to go... Pick an old Apple II game and go from there. Limited work RAM on the PCE might be a problem, though.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Maybe that's the direction we need to go... Pick an old Apple II game and go from there. Limited work RAM on the PCE might be a problem, though.

Screw that.  There's like 7 good Apple ][ games, and 5 of them are Ultimas

[Mishran]

Screw that.  There's like 7 good Apple ][ games, and 5 of them are Ultimas

What he said...

[BigusSchmuck]

Maybe that's the direction we need to go... Pick an old Apple II game and go from there. Limited work RAM on the PCE might be a problem, though.

Screw that.  There's like 7 good Apple ][ games, and 5 of them are Ultimas

Don't forget the wizardry games too ^^ But yeah, Oregon Trail could be interesting..

[spenoza]

The D&D gold box games were good on Apple ][ also. Basically, I can't help but wonder if ports of games from native CPU architectures would be easier, that is, assuming source can be found somewhere on-line. Coding from scratch? Doesn't matter which CPU instruction set the original was in, really.