How well would have other NeoGeo ports fared on the PCE/TG16

[Dicer]

I was watching a playthrough of viewpoint today and it got me to thinking, what other NeoGEo games could have gotten a fair port to our little console.

I know the FEKA got stuff like Sam showdown and Viewpoint which we never got.

i think a Magician Lord or Super Spy port would have been fun....

Thoughts?!?!?!

[TheClash603]

Give me some 4-player simultaneous League Bowling!

[Psycho Punch]

Mahjong Kyoretsuden would have been a perfect port on supercd.

[SignOfZeta]

KOF comes to mind since it doesn't heavily rely on scaling and CDs could take the sound chip load.

The Super Spy would probably been blocky as fuck. League Bowling too, but at least that would have been four player.

Samshow is probably a no no. The other 16 bit ports sucked shit, even some of the PS1 versions do and that machine has better scaling ability, a double speed drive, and the same about of RAM as an Arcade Card. Samshow was built around the Neo's weird nature and it works really well. You could do it on PCE, but it might be like trying to make a film version of Tristram Shandy.

Master of Monsters, Sengoku, Kizuna Encounter, Cyber Lip, Thrash Rally, Aggressors of Dark Combat, Super Baseball 2020, Street Slam, Neo Turf Masters, lots and lots of stuff would work really well if a company as skilled as Hudson did the work.

[o.pwuaioc]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

[sirhcman]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

I think it was a Data East property. It is getting a release on PS4 soon or is already out

[o.pwuaioc]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

I think it was a Data East property. It is getting a release on PS4 soon or is already out

You're right! I didn't realize that. I wonder why it didn't make it to the Wii Data East compilation. Regardless, I would have liked to see it on the PC Engine (or at least the Saturn).

[nopepper]

Twinkle Star Sprites would be a good fit.

[Arkhan Asylum]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

windjizzers on anything would've been sweet

[deubeul]

I would have killed for a Arcade Card KOF back in the days.

[BigusSchmuck]

Super Baseball 2020 and the King of the Monster games would have been pretty cool considering they were ported over to the other 16 bit consoles.

[touko]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

i think you can do a pixels perfect(or very close) port on SGX,even on PCE but it should be more difficult to do .

[o.pwuaioc]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

windjizzers on anything would've been sweet

I wonder If Aetherbyte ever wants to port it... 

[NecroPhile]

Using the arcade card, it could do decent ports of anything that didn't go too crazy on scaling.  I'd expect the usual simplifications of colors and parallax, of course.

[sirhcman]

The biggest crime SNK committed is not getting Windjammers on more consoles.

I think it was a Data East property. It is getting a release on PS4 soon or is already out

You're right! I didn't realize that. I wonder why it didn't make it to the Wii Data East compilation. Regardless, I would have liked to see it on the PC Engine (or at least the Saturn).

It might be in the Data East gamesack episode but when Data East went out of business I think all of their IP's were sold off to all different people. Could be the reason.. maybe?? Not really sure




EDIT: From the giantbomb site for Windjammers:

Following the bankruptcy of Data East in 2003 it is unclear who exactly obtained the intellectual rights to the game. While many of Data East's properties are documented as being sold to G-mode, Inc. however a significant number of Data East's asset went to Paon Corporation, Ltd. which was composed of several members of Data East's staff. Another company also obtained several of Data East's assets however, D4 Enterprise, Inc., who released the game alongside many other Neo Geo games on the Japanese Wii virtual console on June 2010. The game was later delisted from the virtual console service on December 2013, suggesting that the virtual console release was only a temporary license by D4 Enterprise, Inc. which expired resulting in the delisting. This suggests that D4 Enterprise, Inc. are not the property owners of the game. In March 2015, Paon merged with DP Inc. to form Paon DP Inc and so if Paon are the rights holders then one could assume it transferred over with this merger.

[saturndual32]

Would love to have a King Of Fighters game on PCE, but the game has to load 6 characters for the matches, thats beyond the capabilities fo even the Arcade Card. Having long loading times between rounds would totally break the game. Maybe if they simplified it to 1 on 1 matches. Would still be pretty cool.

And would love to have seen Last Resort on the PCE. Would be a nice substitute to RType 2, which the PCE should also have received.

Samurai Spirits for sure, dont mind missing the zooming effect. The effect used on the Art of Fighting port would do fine.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Unless I missed it in the thread, there were reportedly finished versions of World Heroes 1 & King of the Monsters 2.  Who knows if they'll ever make it into the wild.  I've said it before on these forums, but years ago, when talking to one of WD's Shirley Bros.  He said that they weren't going to release World Heroes, since they were convinced TTI was going to release the Arcade Card & World Heroes 2 in NA, & WD was afraid World Heroes 1 wouldn't sell because of the 2nd game better I guess.  Ironically, King of the Monsters 2 wasn't release, but it turned out it would require the Arcade Card, since as is, it had to load several times within a level with the limitations of the Super CD.

 Wish I had a recording of the conversation, incase there's anything I'm forgetting about the conversation.

[SignOfZeta]

Would love to have a King Of Fighters game on PCE, but the game has to load 6 characters for the matches, thats beyond the capabilities fo even the Arcade Card. Having long loading times between rounds would totally break the game. Maybe if they simplified it to 1 on 1 matches. Would still be pretty cool.

And would love to have seen Last Resort on the PCE. Would be a nice substitute to RType 2, which the PCE should also have received.

Samurai Spirits for sure, dont mind missing the zooming effect. The effect used on the Art of Fighting port would do fine.

1) You don't need six chara in RAM at a time with KOF unless it's 2003, which is the only one with full tag available. Load times *are* murder, but that didn't stop Playstations version of KOF from selling very well. Also, have you heard of Neo CD? It has KOF 94-99.

2) why even play Samshow without scaling? It loses all of its atmosphere. Just say Last Blade.

[Dicer]

I'm pretty sure Blue's journey would have made the trip over just fine.

[saturndual32]

Would love to have a King Of Fighters game on PCE, but the game has to load 6 characters for the matches, thats beyond the capabilities fo even the Arcade Card. Having long loading times between rounds would totally break the game. Maybe if they simplified it to 1 on 1 matches. Would still be pretty cool.

And would love to have seen Last Resort on the PCE. Would be a nice substitute to RType 2, which the PCE should also have received.

Samurai Spirits for sure, dont mind missing the zooming effect. The effect used on the Art of Fighting port would do fine.

1) You don't need six chara in RAM at a time with KOF unless it's 2003, which is the only one with full tag available. Load times *are* murder, but that didn't stop Playstations version of KOF from selling very well. Also, have you heard of Neo CD? It has KOF 94-99.

2) why even play Samshow without scaling? It loses all of its atmosphere. Just say Last Blade.

Yeah and load times, i am afraid, would be even worse on PCE AC than on PS1. And KOFs on Neo CD are almost unplayable, and that system has 7MB of RAM!, no comparison. I had a NeoCD, KOF looked and sounded great, but loading times totally crippled the games and other late generation titles. The Neo CD was fine for ports of early Neo games. PS1 and Neo CD ports of KOF were getting mediocre to bad reviews,

No zooming doesnt break Samurai Shodown for me, after all we arent expecting arcade perfect ports on PCE, as long as they play fine, its ok. Megadrive, Mega CD and SNES ports of it were mediocre, each for diferent reasons. A PCE version of the quality of FFS and WH2 would put them to shame. As for the 3DO port, unfortunately, the zooming seems to have killed its frame rate. Its so choppy.

And why would i mention The Last Blade?, first of all, it wasnt around when the PCE was still alive and kicking. Second, it also had zooming AFAIK. And the game is even more hardware intensive than Samurai Showdown.

Anyways, if we are counting games released after the PCE was relevant, then i dont care about the downgrades, i want Metal Slug on the PCE, it needs some run and gun action! Oh and Pulstar too. But i was only mentioning games that came out when PCE was sill supported (by KOF, i meant 94).

Hey, but to each their own, hehe.

[Gredler]

You think sengoku would be possible? Loved that and have heard about some other beat em ups that would be fun and fill a void of possible.

[TheClash603]

You think sengoku would be possible? Loved that and have heard about some other beat em ups that would be fun and fill a void of possible.

Sengoku isn't that impressive of a game from a technical standpoint.  I'm not an expert on tech stuff, but just from playing through it, it would appear a port would've been possible.  The sequels on the other hand, I would say those would've been very challenging to port.

Neo Geo turned things up for the sequels.  Baseball Stars could be ported in some way (even if an improved port of the NES port), but part two seems like it would've been very difficult.

[esteban]

I would love Magician Lord. And, for sillies, I would want 8man (because I played that all the time at college lounge, too).

[TelcoSurveyor]

Turbo Turfmasters has a nice ring to it.

[SignOfZeta]

Would love to have a King Of Fighters game on PCE, but the game has to load 6 characters for the matches, thats beyond the capabilities fo even the Arcade Card. Having long loading times between rounds would totally break the game. Maybe if they simplified it to 1 on 1 matches. Would still be pretty cool.

And would love to have seen Last Resort on the PCE. Would be a nice substitute to RType 2, which the PCE should also have received.

Samurai Spirits for sure, dont mind missing the zooming effect. The effect used on the Art of Fighting port would do fine.

1) You don't need six chara in RAM at a time with KOF unless it's 2003, which is the only one with full tag available. Load times *are* murder, but that didn't stop Playstations version of KOF from selling very well. Also, have you heard of Neo CD? It has KOF 94-99.

2) why even play Samshow without scaling? It loses all of its atmosphere. Just say Last Blade.

Yeah and load times, i am afraid, would be even worse on PCE AC than on PS1. And KOFs on Neo CD are almost unplayable, and that system has 7MB of RAM!, no comparison. I had a NeoCD, KOF looked and sounded great, but loading times totally crippled the games and other late generation titles. The Neo CD was fine for ports of early Neo games. PS1 and Neo CD ports of KOF were getting mediocre to bad reviews,

No zooming doesnt break Samurai Shodown for me, after all we arent expecting arcade perfect ports on PCE, as long as they play fine, its ok. Megadrive, Mega CD and SNES ports of it were mediocre, each for diferent reasons. A PCE version of the quality of FFS and WH2 would put them to shame. As for the 3DO port, unfortunately, the zooming seems to have killed its frame rate. Its so choppy.

And why would i mention The Last Blade?, first of all, it wasnt around when the PCE was still alive and kicking. Second, it also had zooming AFAIK. And the game is even more hardware intensive than Samurai Showdown.

Anyways, if we are counting games released after the PCE was relevant, then i dont care about the downgrades, i want Metal Slug on the PCE, it needs some run and gun action! Oh and Pulstar too. But i was only mentioning games that came out when PCE was sill supported (by KOF, i meant 94).

Hey, but to each their own, hehe.

I had KOF 98 for Neo CD when it was a current game and I personally loved it. The load times were brutal but no worse than SFZ1 on PS and everyone loved hat. When you had everything set to run like a cart but with quick loading it was easier. One on one was perfectly fine. The PS1 version is so fucking murdered I can't even combo in it.

The reason I mentioned Last Blade is because the scaling doesn't matter. The camera is fixed during fighting most of the time. Samshow needs the scaling. It happens all the time and it's way more important. The terrible Takara ports do a good job of showing why fixed camera fucks the game. On the MD you can't escape your opponent and on the SNES the sprites are so hilariously small you can barely see what moves are being performed. SS1 and 2 might be smaller carts but they need the Neo more than any Neo game. They do not port well. Even monster stupid games like RB2 or Rage of Dragons would probably port better.

It sounds like you'd be happy with shitty game but personally if I blew as much money on an Arcade Card as it costs of buy an entire Super Famicom I'd want something better than the SFC version. Fatal Fury does this for sure, better than any version, possibly even Neo CD. Sadly the Neo's major second wind that came from KOF 95 was too late for any of the stuff to show up on AC.

[CrackTiger]

I couldn't find any stage or sprite rips from Samurai Showdown during a quick search, so I can't do a mockup, but the PCE is the perfect 16-bit console to do a good-for-consoles version of the game. The PCE can do pretty much any horizontal resolution between its minimum and maximum. So you could have the entire width of the stage visible at all times. It might mean that Earthquake doesn't make the cut, but it would still be a nice addition to fighting games for proper consoles.

[saturndual32]

I couldn't find any stage or sprite rips from Samurai Showdown during a quick search, so I can't do a mockup, but the PCE is the perfect 16-bit console to do a good-for-consoles version of the game. The PCE can do pretty much any horizontal resolution between its minimum and maximum. So you could have the entire width of the stage visible at all times. It might mean that Earthquake doesn't make the cut, but it would still be a nice addition to fighting games for proper consoles.

Sounds pretty cool. Hope you can get those Samurai Shodown mockups done.

[seieienbu]

I've thought about it a lot, and I think that one of my personal favorite Neo titles, Pulstar, wouldn't work well on the PC Engine.  I think that the gameplay would work fine but you would lose a good portion of what made the game so special when porting it to a system with only a bit over 2 Megs of storage.  I think it would go from being something unique to being another shooter on a platform with many excellent ones.  It would lose the sense of style that it carries without the impressive amount of rotations and enemy morphs that were all done with pre rendered sprites.

[CrackTiger]

I've thought about it a lot, and I think that one of my personal favorite Neo titles, Pulstar, wouldn't work well on the PC Engine.  I think that the gameplay would work fine but you would lose a good portion of what made the game so special when porting it to a system with only a bit over 2 Megs of storage.  I think it would go from being something unique to being another shooter on a platform with many excellent ones.  It would lose the sense of style that it carries without the impressive amount of rotations and enemy morphs that were all done with pre rendered sprites.

I've watched longplays of Pulstar a few times in the past, to be able to pay attention to all of the little things that are happening, while thinking about how a PCE port would turn out. I also tested out various screen shots in PCE color and it suits it well. I don't think that Pulstar would lose too much to ruin the experience and you can already see an impressive amount of rotations and enemy morphs that were all done with pre rendered sprites in Sapphire. The most noticeable change would be scaled back parallax and/or simplified background elements for dynamic tiles.

[SignOfZeta]

As long as you didn't mind mid-level loading (see: CD versions of Metal Slug) I don't see why Pulstar couldn't work very well. All it's really doing is "lots of animation" on top of R Type. AC games can do "lots of animation" pretty well and we all know the PCE works with R Type.

[touko]

As long as you didn't mind mid-level loading (see: CD versions of Metal Slug) I don't see why Pulstar couldn't work very well. All it's really doing is "lots of animation" on top of R Type. AC games can do "lots of animation" pretty well and we all know the PCE works with R Type.

Because you are also limited by how much data you can transfert in vram,the NG don't suffer of this because his "VRAM" is connected directly to cartridge .
Changing a big chunk of tiles is something like changing the PCE's scroll values ,very easy .

[saturndual32]

Tech question regarding those Arcade Card NG ports. So the AC adds 2MB of RAM to the PCE, but i think i read that its not a full 2MB bank of memory, but its segmented into smaller banks. So lets say, in Garou Densetsu Special, on any given match, how much RAM does the PCE have access too after loading the match.

Sorry if my wording isnt correct, not much of a tech head myself, and english isnt my first language.

[gilbert]

Take it this way, the CPU in the PCE is based on the 8-bit 65(C)02, with a 16-bit address space, so at any single instance, the maximum amount of memory it can "see" is only 64 kb.

However, through bank switching you can choose what it can see at any instance. The 64 kb space in the PCE is arranged into eight 8 kb "banks", such that you can switch in or switch out the content of each bank at any time you want. For example, a 1 Mbit (i.e. 128 kbyte) HuCard actually consists of sixteen such banks of data, so say, banks 1-4 of the cart contain data for level 1 of a game, and banks 5-8 contain that for level 2, so when you're in Level 1, banks 1-4 of the cart are switched into the main address space of the system so the CPU can access these data, and when you reach level 2, the CPU uses data from banks 5-8 instead, etc. (this example is of course oversimplified in an attempt to give a more straight-forward explanation).

For the memory buffer of the original CD-ROM system (64 kb total) or the Super CD-ROM system (256 kb), such memory can be switched into the main address space on the fly for the CPU to "see".

For the 2MB in the Arcade Card, unfortunately, things are a bit different(I don't know why, but there were some speculations that it's related to RAM speed or whatever). While the 2 MB are still arranged into a series of 8 kb banks, you cannot switch in these banks directly to the system's main address space for direct usage. Instead you need to copy the contents of these banks to the 256 kb SCD memory (or for graphic data, directly to VRAM) for use, like those RAM disks on computers, in which you need to "load" the files into the main RAM to use them. Fortunately copying from a AC bank to memory is more or less automated, thanks to those advanced bulk memory copy/move features in the CPU.

[SignOfZeta]

As long as you didn't mind mid-level loading (see: CD versions of Metal Slug) I don't see why Pulstar couldn't work very well. All it's really doing is "lots of animation" on top of R Type. AC games can do "lots of animation" pretty well and we all know the PCE works with R Type.

Because you are also limited by how much data you can transfert in vram,the NG don't suffer of this because his "VRAM" is connected directly to cartridge .
Changing a big chunk of tiles is something like changing the PCE's scroll values ,very easy .

Just to be clear, I'm specifically saying that since Pulstar was done on Neo CD (not just cart) that a PCE ACD version could maybe work (ie: reduce assets until they fit) if you broke the levels up (like they usually are on CD, be it Neo, SS, or PS).

Obviously having all the mememory of a Neo CD would help but let's be clear. It's jusy R Type with a lot of animation. So if you break the level up into three times as many sections as the Neo CD version and then make cuts at each section if something doesn't work, keeping in mind that Pulstar is supposed to have tons of slowdown. You're basically just making R Type with as much animation as possible.

It would never be perfect but then neither are any other Neo ports from back then.

[CrackTiger]

Neo Geo hardware is inefficient for "tiling" together assets and Pulstar took it a step further by using lots of swatches of stuff that is basically fmv, but didn't need to be. While on PCE some of it could be done by color cycling one or two 8 x 8 pixel tiles or raster effects.

[saturndual32]

Thanks for the explanation gilbert.