New game Xevious!

[tcdev]

Cho Ren Sha?

Sorry, missed this one. Hadn't heard of it until you mentioned it. Watched a bit of the YouTube; seems like a decent game but not quite my cup of tea, plus I don't have any connection to it like GnG, Bubble Bobble, Raiden etc.

Choosing a horizontal (for me) is difficult because although there are a few candidates (as I mentioned above) there are vertical games that I played a lot more...

 

[Robbbert]

A few years back someone made a NeoGeoCD version of Phoenix, unfortunately the result was slow and buggy. It seems that the project was then canned.

I was hoping that whoever it was would finish it, but nothing happened. This Xevious port is light-years ahead both in playability and a pleasant lack of bugs.

 

[Darksoft]

Indeed, it's a great job.

 

[tcdev]

A few years back someone made a NeoGeoCD version of Phoenix, unfortunately the result was slow and buggy. It seems that the project was then canned.

I was hoping that whoever it was would finish it, but nothing happened. This Xevious port is light-years ahead both in playability and a pleasant lack of bugs.

Yes, that was actually an emulation written in C and I was in contact with the author (Cristiano Bey) early on in the project and gave him some assistance getting graphics from the emulated video memory onto the Neo Geo display. I think it was always going to be a big ask to have the Neo Geo emulate Phoenix in C at full speed... IIRC the 8085 core was just lifted from MAME at the time?!? But an interesting exercise none-the-less.

 

[Robbbert]

HBMAME has been released, so Xevious can be evaluated by anyone who is interested. The short name is "xeviousn".

 

[Fluffy]

Given the number of tiles available on the Neo Geo, and the rather limited landscapes on the map, it might be possible to analyse the map and re-define it with 16x16 tiles if there aren't a ridiculous number of 2x2 tile combinations... but that's an exercise I haven't done yet.

If you're lucky they used a larger tile size in their map editor, so graphics are well enough aligned so the tile count doesn't explode.

 

[kuze]

Some of the earlier SNK games like Prehistoric Isle or Ikari Warriors would be cool to see running on MVS.

Really nice work here with Xevious! Looking forward to giving it a spin soon.

 

[Ryoandr]

ah dang, yeah, Prehistoric Isle would help forget the abomination that is PI2

 

[Fluffy]

I thought long and hard about this. Aside from losing 64 pixels (8 tiles) of vertical resolution, there's the issue of scrolling the screen in the other dimension. Ordinarily with 16x16 tiles that wouldn't be a problem (of course a lot of other games do), but Xevious uses 8x8 tiles for the background. I found a limitation with sprite wrapping - the exact details escape me now as there has been so much in my head since - but basically it can't be done with shrunken sprites. There's a good write-up of it on one of the other forums, as someone else found the same problem as I experienced.

Could you reposition the background in a scanline interrupt to get correct wrapping behaviour in that case?

 

[Hammy]

Great work! Looking forward to giving it a try!

Love all the reactions, always "what's next?" never happy with what you get... :/

Surprisingly in those, not one of the suggestions gave the the "fruit" on the same hardware:
Bosconian (c) 1981 Namco
Galaga (c) 1981 Namco
Xevious (c) 1982 Namco
Dig Dug (c) 1982 Namco

All classics!
Depending on the way it's done it and how the games are written some of the routines may be re-used?

Anyway keep up the good work!

 

[tcdev]

Surprisingly in those, not one of the suggestions gave the the "fruit" on the same hardware:
Bosconian (c) 1981 Namco
Galaga (c) 1981 Namco
Xevious (c) 1982 Namco
Dig Dug (c) 1982 Namco

Depending on the way it's done it and how the games are written some of the routines may be re-used?

Thanks! I'm a big Galaga fan, the others not-so-much. It would be interesting to see of any of the others use a similar code base, though I don't see that Galaga would be a good fit for the Xevious code.

I've been looking at Super Xevious and have all-but-finished the RE for that. The code base has basically been added to, rather than changed; it's almost identical. So adding Super Xevious to the transcode would be trivial. Working out the best way to package both variants in the same ROM image would be the most challenging part!

 

[rtw]

I would just release two ROM packages. Like in real life, two PCBs