Jackal nes2pce

[TurboXray]

I'll need some play testers.. pretty soon. 2 players simultaneous testing too (get your TAPs ready).

Download:
wayback://nes2pce/Jackal_beta_031_.zip

[Opethian]

loved this game! Im curious as to how the music sounds on this version

[TurboXray]

Game is up and running (bg, sprites, gamelogic, controls), but I'm working on the music code as I write this.

[Psycho Punch]

Aww yeah.

I want to test this so much.

[TurboXray]

Ok, download is able for testing. Go to my blog (in my sig) and find it in the 'Download and Links' section. Looking for regular 1P testing, as well as 2player TAP testing.

[NightWolve]

Pretty cool, Tom! I remember this game, I liked it well enough. I completed stage 1 right quick, no problem.

BTW, kinda just thought of a point to these NES2PCE projects of yours: If a TurboExpress owner really likes it and bought a Turbo Everdrive, now they'll get to go portable with some of the great NES games on it that you converted like Castlevania, Megaman, and Contra, etc. Otherwise, what's the point of this if any perfectly good NES emulator will run the original ROM ?? Your skills go to waste. But yeah, this got me thinking how say Megaman or something would look like on an original Express!

[TurboXray]

Pretty cool, Tom! I remember this game, I liked it well enough. I completed stage 1 right quick, no problem.

BTW, kinda just thought of a point to these NES2PCE projects of yours: If a TurboExpress owner really likes it and bought a Turbo Everdrive, now they'll get to go portable with some of the great NES games on it that you converted like Castlevania, Megaman, and Contra, etc. Otherwise, what's the point of this if any perfectly good NES emulator will run the original ROM ?? Your skills go to waste. But yeah, this got me thinking how say Megaman or something would look like on an original Express!

 Other than the novelty to play them on the a TG/PCE console? Not much. Though the goal was to hack these games once they achieved a certain state. Give them graphic and audio upgrades. Megaman (first one), turned out to be a pain in the ass to hack. Not so much as of getting the upgrades to show in the game, but hacking the game logic itself. NES doesn't have left side sprite clipping the way PCE does (it's not wide enough to 'hide' PCE sprites, in normal 16x16 or larger mode). It doesn't even have larger than 8bit coords for sprites. So while I can easily change the code to point to newer and larger sprites, the game logic itself has to be hacked. Case in point, Megaman 1 hack uses 32x32 4bpp color sprites for the new main character graphics. They look great, but the game detect logic immediately disables the sprite when it touches the left side of the edge of the screen - because it still thinks megaman is one large meta-sprite made of 8x8 cells. So it can be a pain, in that respect.

 Yeah, I should be putting this time into something else. But this is play-time for me. I liked the small challenges it presents (each game requires tweaks here and there, because of code to backend emulation race issues). NES is all hacky hardware just by itself. Adding PCE console specific layer on top of that, makes for an interesting challenge (no, not a reference to Ys II).

 I wasn't really gonna do much more of these, to be honest. But I thought playing two player simultaneously game on the TG/PCE would be cool. It would be even cooler to hack the game to support 3 or more players in Jackal.

 I do have Dragon Warrior, that I had dug up recently. It's the first one that I had done for nes2pce, but never publicly released. I still plan to release that one, sometime this year.

 BTW, thanks for the heads up/link to that reference manual.

[roflmao]

Woot!  I'd love to see Dragon Warrior.  Thanks for all your efforts.  These are awesome. I recently spent a fair amount of time playing Contra on my Duo.

[NightWolve]

Though the goal was to hack these games once they achieved a certain state. Give them graphic and audio upgrades. Megaman (first one), turned out to be a pain in the ass to hack.

Yeah, there was more of a point to your CD version of Megaman, doing things like upgrading to redbook tunes and so forth. But anyhow, now there is more value to this work with Everdrive + Express so that's purty cool.

[TurboXray]

Woot!  I'd love to see Dragon Warrior.  Thanks for all your efforts.  These are awesome. I recently spent a fair amount of time playing Contra on my Duo.

 Really? I never really played tested Contra (I didn't do much work on it). Is it beatable? The audio is fubar too, in that conversion. Probably stuff that's not emulated right.

 I was originally gonna gonna hack the title screen of Jackal, and release it as Joe Redifer's Jackal. But, alas, priorities... ;)

[TurboXray]

Didn't somebody already port Dragon Warrior ?? I could swear I saw that. Unless Tom/Bonknuts is the only one that has ever done this.

Some Finnish guys beat me to the punch, but their stuff is more hack than anything else (mine is more emulation, with a tiny bit of hacking. That way I can reuse the core emulation for other NES projects. And get them up and running much faster. Jackal took me about 4 hours to get playable, but I've been doing this for a while). But as far as I know, I'm the only one that did Dragon Warrior (there's a youtube video of it). I also have that NES hack of DW called Dragoon Omega, running on the PCE CD. Sliver-x was supposed to upgrade the graphics and musics(CDAA) for it, but he never got around to it.

[roflmao]

Woot!  I'd love to see Dragon Warrior.  Thanks for all your efforts.  These are awesome. I recently spent a fair amount of time playing Contra on my Duo.

 Really? I never really played tested Contra (I didn't do much work on it). Is it beatable? The audio is fubar too, in that conversion. Probably stuff that's not emulated right.

 I was originally gonna gonna hack the title screen of Jackal, and release it as Joe Redifer's Jackal. But, alas, priorities... ;)

No, I've always sucked at Contra.  I didn't get very far, and the audio was a little unsettling.  But it was very cool to be playing Contra on a Duo, nevertheless!

[wyndcrosser]

I'm definitely up for it. I've played your other releases. I have a turbodrive as well, for real hardware testing.

Wynd

[TurboXray]

Thanks I suspect there are going to be some graphic glitches (sprite 0 detection isn't emulation, so no split scrolling yet. Probably later bosses). You can post results here or on my blog.

[esteban]

Jackal is most worthy of PCE. 

[ParanoiaDragon]

Like I said over on yer site, this is one of those games I'd love to work on(music), ported over to the Turbo, using the arcades gfx along with other games like Trojan & Contra!

[TurboXray]

Same here. I started tracer through the game in the debugger, and found the tile/sprite decompression routine (game uses chr-ram instead of chr-rom). I need to write a decompressor for the game's graphics, and then write a hook to update alt graphics (16 color tiles/sprites). Next would be to trace and locate the sprite handling code, and change all sprites from 8x16 to 16x16.

[Bernie]

Woot!  I'd love to see Dragon Warrior.  Thanks for all your efforts.  These are awesome. I recently spent a fair amount of time playing Contra on my Duo.

Dragon Warrior here as well! 

[TurboXray]

Dragon Warrior is planned, but I have to update the old emulation code in it first (which requires some new code to be written).

[Greg2600]

Runs really well, the music is great.  I have a TG-16 and Turbo Everdrive but no Turbo Tap.  Gameplay feels exactly like the NES.

Issues: The sound effect for the grenades is not great, nor explosions.  In the game music, anything that is drum/percussion heavy seems to have a popping sound.  Screen scrolling occasionally gets a single black horizontal/vertical line for a second.  Lastly, when scrolling, the "ground" seems to get a lot more blurry than the NES version.

Frankly, this is amazingly close to the NES, though I can't test 2P mode, and I feel a huge improvement musically over your Contra port.  The music (beyond the drums) is an improvement over NES thanks to better TG hardware.

PS: I compared my results to using Magic Engine on PC.  On the emulator, the scrolling seems fine, no blurriness, with occasional screen glitches.  Percussion isn't as distorted/popping.  FWIW, I used TurboBooster composite out directly to HDTV, which looks like shit.  Then used it with my DVDO upscaler, which cleans it up nearly perfectly.  Still has the glitches I mentioned.

Lastly, I hooked up the TG to an old CRT, and the blurriness in the background scrolling seems much better, so could just be the LCD TV's crappy deinterlacing.

[TurboXray]

Thanks for the report

 The version is a bit harder than the NES, specifically because there's no slowdown (which makes the nes one easier). I posted as version that have 9 lives starting out and for continuing.

[Greg2600]

Right, no Konami code.

[whisper2053]

Just played around with it a little bit, and as far as I can tell, the only oddity is the weird *BOOP* whenever stuff blows up. I am assuming those are just placeholder sounds for now?

Anyways, here's a quick test vid I made showing it running on my Duo:

[TurboXray]

Cool. Thanks for testing

[Keith Courage]

The only thing I notice that is different is the lack of drums for the audio. Other then that it plays great

[TurboXray]

Yeah, drums aren't in yet (no nes DPCM emulation). I'll add that in, when I hack the game to use more PCE specific stuff, instead converting on the fly. Working on that now.

 I also had an idea; hack the game's audio tracks for stereo. NES uses a lot of phase pair channels and such. They sound nice when separated. For games that don't use the DPCM, I could reserve two channels to add a slight echo effect on the two pulse channels too (since 2 PCE channels aren't being used for anything).

[esteban]

I also had an idea; hack the game's audio tracks for stereo. NES uses a lot of phase pair channels and such. They sound nice when separated. For games that don't use the DPCM, I could reserve two channels to add a slight echo effect on the two pulse channels too (since 2 PCE channels aren't being used for anything).

Awesome! That would add a nice touch to the soundtrack.

[Mortis]

We played this enough yesterday to make it to what I assume is the the final boss, on the last level. Its second form has misaligned sprites and so much flickering with the graphics that it's impossible to beat at the moment!

That being said, wow, this game is pretty darn good for what it is, 1988 and all. So many novel ideas - they really mixed it up with the weapons system, you basically use special weapons for normal enemies and the basic gun for bosses. That is really strange and cool. Thanks so much for making the port!

[TurboXray]

Thanks for testing it that far Yeah, the last boss second form is something that I'm aware of. I'll be fixing that.

[Xak]

I loved Dragoon Omega also, a NES rpg with a facelift would be gorgeous

But for now I thank you for the countless hours of fun you have provided me! Great game so far so good in Jackal i shall report any errors