SMS2PCE - Games SMS on PCE

Started by hardgb, 12/06/2018, 06:45 PM

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hardgb

This is my first post in the group. Forgive me if it's right.
I have a dream, to be able to execute the game Phantasy Star 1, of the Master System in PC Engine.
Does anyone know if this is possible? Has anyone done the port of some SMS game for the PC engine?

NightWolve

* You'll have to learn how to do that yourself if you really want to make it a reality. Making that clear upfront.

* There is only 1 man (Bonknuts/TurboXray) that previously did "hackulation" port projects like this but of NES games and that is precisely because the PCE/TG-16 CPU is almost the same 8-bit CPU as the NES, except it has a few Hudson enhancements. You could potentially learn from his work, but there really isn't anybody else AS talented that would have the motivation to code a "hackulation" layer for a SMS game... Bonknuts is mostly retired from hobby projects at present, he's actually done movies on occasion.

* He called these projects NES2PCE (as you made reference to). Upon review, seems he removed links.

https://pcedev.wordpress.com/category/nes2pce-2/

But I tried WayBack, and found some links for you. He/TurboXray includes the ASM files to build a .PCE ROM file you can use with an emulator or TurboEverdrive, so there is learning potential left behind.

Contra_pce_ver_0.35.7z
Castlevania_PCE_ver_0.44.7z
megaman_098_hu.zip
(ENIX's Dragon Warrior exists somewhere too)

I used an old copy on WayBack to find those ROMs and it appears they're still on his server, so they work, but here's the WayBack link to look around yourself:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120604004925if_/http://pcedev.wordpress.com:80/downloads-and-links

I also checked with SuperPlay our link master, and he has one link that collects them all, so here's that:

https://www.tg-16.com/superplay/MISC/pcedevnes.zip




Anyway, 99% sure it'll never happen, but Bonknuts represents the ONLY such port attempt known (Oh right, somebody did Super Mario Bros. too, you can Google for that) so if you wanted to learn, that's where you'd start.

Get the source code of a SMS emulator, port it to PCE Assembly, that would be the other piece to it. The Sega CPU is totally different, a Z80A, no clue on the technical complications of porting a SMS emulator to run on a Hudson HuC6280 CPU.

If you have no programming experience, just hoping somebody else does it, you're wasting your time as I said at the start, and you're better off asking at romhacking.net.

gilbert

Porting from the NES/Famicom to PCE is relatively "easy" because, as mentioned, the PCE's CPU is almost identical to the Famicom, so a lot of the codes just run with little to no modification, but then there are still tweaks here and there to make stuff work due to hardware differences, etc.

Porting something from the SMS to the PCE, however, would only be harder, as these two systems use completely different CPU architecture (apart from other differences). That means a lot of work has to be done, in a game-by-game basis. It could help if there are source codes of the game in question (possibly from a disassembly, which does exist for this particular game it seems). With this some experienced coders may translate the source from Z80 assembly to 65(C)02 assembly(or reprogramme the whole thing completely, using the source codes as a reference), but that would still be A LOT of work (automated conversion tools may exist, but I expect a lot of fixes still has to be applied afterwards). So this definite is possible (as there shouldn't be anything in the game that the PCE cannot do), but it depends on whether there are people with that much skill, time and interest to do so, similar to how SMB was ported to the Mega Drive using the game's source code obtained from disassembly.