WIP - Shinobi MD port

[tryphon]

Just to show that my port begins to look like a game
It improves slowly, not because of coding difficulties (though there are some) but because of lack of free time.



Some notes :

1) Colors are wrong

I coded a quick and dirty converter for the arcade arts, and it messes colors (more exactly, some different colors are converted to the same MD color). I'll rewrite that later.

Moreover, for the moment I still haven't decided how to handle palettes. I think I'll use palette 1 for Musashi, HUD, and maybe hostages, palettes 2 & 3 for ennemies, and palette 3 for backgrounds. Unfortunately, that's much less than the arcade, so I can't be sure that the final result will be nicer, just different (brighter and more contrasted)

2) There's no collisions between sprites

That's my next job.

3) Some hotspots are misplaced

I'll do that when I'll be in testing phase.

4) The engine is still not optimized

Because "premature optimization is the root of all Evil". That said, some optimization will be easy. If it isn't sufficient, I'll rewrite routines in pure asm (should not be too hard once the engine architecture will be stable, and it's easier to design in C)

5) There are sometimes one quick ghost frame here and there

It's hard to debug, because it happens rarely, it lasts only one frame and is hardly noticeable, and it's not reproductible.
I bet it's due to a too long VBLANK, so it should be fixed with optimization. If not, I'll have a deeper look inside.

6) Other than that

Musashi can move (all his moveset is implemented, with the exception of magic), the background scrolls, the ennemy has an AI similar to the arcade (the simplest AI of the game).

If something feels wrong, don't hesitate to criticize.

[Tor Landeel]

Wow! Even if it's still an early job, it already has a very good feeling!

[djcc]

Code-wise, are you working from the arcade assembly or you're writing it from scratch?

[Nightwolf]

Great, great... great!!! :_) Love Shinobi arcade!!

[LinkueiBR]

"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to tryphon again."

[Wesker]

I love where this is going.

Even if the palettes are not quite right, it already looks better than the PC Engine version for example.

[EPSYLON EAGLE]

Very exciting!

[Mad Moham]

That looks so cool!

It has me wondering why there was never an official version for MD, I can't wait to see where this project goes, good job so far.

[maxxfarras]

Watch that short demo in the video was an great experience. I been waiting for someone to do something like this for years. Thanks for sharing!

Tryphon, If you consider that eventually you need some help with by hand palette conversion please let me know.

For other side, I did some palette conversion for a never released sega master system version years ago using just a single 16 color subpalette for all sprites (of some stages I think) including musashi. It looked good IMO, even if not very acurate.

I will look for that pics and I will send them to you. Dont sure if will be useful for you as an reference for help you to decide how to share the subpalettes for the megadrive, but nothing is lost if I send it to you

[chilled]

Amazing! I often dream about a 32meg Shinobi MD that kicks the butt of the SMS version. I also wish someone did proper 32meg early MD ports like Golden Axe and the like

[maxi]

Good to see this level of progress! But I still think the game should use the sprites of the remake (but with Joe Musashi's cloth changed to white, like the sequels):

[cabear]

Nah, that redesigned joe sprite looks too much like hanzo from Sam Sho. A proper shinobi port has to look as arcade perfect as possible!

[tryphon]

Wow! Even if it's still an early job, it already has a very good feeling!

Thanks! I studied the game frame per frame to figure out the physics.

Code-wise, are you working from the arcade assembly or you're writing it from scratch?

From scratch, using SGDK. That said, I used some ideas from the game engine of Shadow Dancer MD. I'd like to read the arcade disassembly (would it be only to get some data quite annoying to enter by hand, like the bounding boxes, hit boxes or whatever boxes) but have no idea how to get this disassembly (a MAME ROM is a set of several files, I don't know which is data or code, if data and code are separated or mixed...)

Watch that short demo in the video was an great experience. I been waiting for someone to do something like this for years. Thanks for sharing!

Tryphon, If you consider that eventually you need some help with by hand palette conversion please let me know.

For other side, I did some palette conversion for a never released sega master system version years ago using just a single 16 color subpalette for all sprites (of some stages I think) including musashi. It looked good IMO, even if not very acurate.

I will look for that pics and I will send them to you. Dont sure if will be useful for you as an reference for help you to decide how to share the subpalettes for the megadrive, but nothing is lost if I send it to you

Thanks. I saw your pm and it looks indeed impressive using only 16 colors ! I may need some help for gfx later in the development process, if I'm not satisfied with my results. I'll make you know then. And you'll have more than 40 colors to work with! (wooh!)

Good to see this level of progress! But I still think the game should use the sprites of the remake (but with Joe Musashi's cloth changed to white, like the sequels)

I know this remake. I didn't use its sprites for 2 reasons :

1) I'm fond of the arcade original (I finished it when I was 11, instead of going to school :P )

2) the remake sprites use another resolution and much more color than the original (the System16 has the same resolution than MD, but slightly more colors) so it needs much more work to convert and redesign the remake sprites for MD. If you feel inclined to do this work, I'll gladly include them in my port. I can even import the 2 sets and let the player decide.

[BladeJunker]

What great time to be alive, Shinobi on the Gen/MD, no offense to the other platforms but it belongs on a Sega 16-bit platform.

The timing does look good on the physics, feel is big part of being arcade perfect that can get overlooked.

Don't you dare use any remake sprites, it's just not the same when he isn't rescuing albino orphan children that look like Casey from the Mr. Dressup show.

Part of my Canadian childhood if you've never heard of him.

I really like the way Joe looks in original game as he never looked like that again, to me it personified what a modern ninja is while later revisions went more traditional.

Anyway thank you tryphon for attempting this port, I wait patiently for it's completion.

[negative chill]

Wouldn't it be much easier to just do a sprite hack of Shadow Dancer? Because near as I can tell, the two are almost identical gameplay wise