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New Games On Old Systems

Bullet Club

Banned



Playable demo

I haven't posted anything on Intellivania in some time. But it has been slowly coming together. I recorded a little of stage 5 while playing through and looking for bugs and issues to work out.

Pretty much everything is finished. There have been some compromises. The secret treasures found by kneeling or waiting are unlikely to get added, and no form of weapon multipliers exist either. Enemies also don't randomly drop items as they do in the NES game. Besides that, all the levels are there, as well as the bosses, and I also managed to squeeze in the ending.




Nice graphics and music in that one.








Download





 

Bullet Club

Banned
Demons Of Asteborg Full Preview - New for Genesis & Mega Drive




The Demons of Asteborg for the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Genesis is a brand new game coming out in 2020. In today’s show, we take a look at then next big game to come to the Mega Drive and cover all the information we have on it so far.





 

Liftplus

Member
Man making all those games takes a lot of dedication and before this thread i didnt even know that people bothered with making new games for old systems.
 

Kazza

Member
An impressive new Megadrive/Genesis games showing off some super-smooth Mode 7-esque graphics:




It seems the effect was partially achieve by using one third of the screen for the HUD (a similar trick used in other games). There are some nice opening animations and speech too. It's a shame that the character art is pretty horrific:

Eburw2W.png
 

Bullet Club

Banned
The game looks pretty cool but as you mentioned, those characters in the cutscenes are laughable.

Great voices for a MD game.
 

Kazza

Member
The game looks pretty cool but as you mentioned, those characters in the cutscenes are laughable.

Great voices for a MD game.

This could be incorrect, but according to that youtuber this is probably a one man game. I think one of the attractions of making this kind of game is being able to do everything yourself, and I'm sure it's very personally satisfying to have to bring so many different skills together like that in a single project. However, if it was me and I was at the point of selling the game commercially, I would take an honest look at it and identify the weak points, which in this case is definitely the character design. Everything else is super impressive, so it's a shame he didn't hire a pro to do some character art (I suppose that may have proved expensive)

The FAQ has some interesting insights into how the game was designed:

How does the rotation work?
It's a lot of sprites. It's much faster to move around sprites than to try rendering a rotated field in the background. The downside is that the sprite limits get in the way, which is why the visible area is restricted and scenery is so sparse.

Sprites usually come in steps of 11.25°, but large objects (including walls) are made out of multiple sprites that move independently and hence it looks much smoother.

What's the sprite limit?
Old consoles didn't draw everything to a framebuffer (because that required too much memory), instead they generated the graphics on the fly as they scanned the screen. This is great for framerate and memory usage, but it meant that if they didn't have time to process all sprites they would drop the excess instead of slowing down.

In our case, there are three sprites limits: 80 sprites on screen, 20 sprites per scanline, and 320px per scanline (including transparent pixels). These limits prevent Arkagis Revolution from lining up too many sprites horizontally, which is why the viewport is restricted.

How much space does voice acting take up?
Around 800KB. There's around 76 seconds worth of voice acting, however the game uses a system where cutscenes are built out of multiple sub-phrases that are strung together, so the total scenes add up to much longer.

Voices are stored uncompressed (raw 8-bit) at 10650Hz. They could have been compressed, but there's a lot of free ROM space and it wasn't worth risking to break the sound driver.

The system for squeezing all those voices into just 800kb is even more impressive than the mode 7 effects.

Anyone interested can order the game here. There is also a free demo to download and play on your MD or emulator:

 

cireza

Member
Thanks for sharing these games. I had already seen Demons of Asteborg, pre-ordered the rom to support them. Will also buy a rom of Arkagis, if this is possible. Certainly not a whole package though, I am willing to give 10 or 15$ to support, but it does not look like it deserves more in my opinion.

Still great job from these developers.
 

Kazza

Member
From the same guy who recently made Tanglewood on the console, this new Megadrive/Genesis game it sounds a little bit like a 16-bit Monster World style game, but with mecha dinosaurs instead:








I imagine it'll be a while before we see gameplay, but it's definitely one to keep an eye on. It sounds like a very ambitious concept for a 16 bit game. Those multiple sprite enemies are going to require some Treasure/Konami levels of coding magic from these devs.
 
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Bullet Club

Banned





rKFqEMb.png
 

Bullet Club

Banned



- The game runs at 50fps. Resolution is 192 x 256 pixels.
- The game & replayer are coded in C99 (compiled with GCC 10.1)
- The game includes 6 music tracks/jingles and 26 sfx
- All music+sfx use 5488 bytes (after precalc 51kb chipram is used)
- The game shows a maximum of 101 moving things on screen
- All graphics take 17kb and use only one bitplane.
- No sprites are used

Download:





Download:

 

D.Final

Banned
A thread for new games that are being made and released for ancient hardware.

There are still a fair few new, interesting looking games coming out on older systems, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread to keep track of them and to also look at some of the games that have come out in recent years that might have been missed by people.

Here's something that was posted recently that fits into this subject:

Farming Simulator is coming to the Commodore 64

Portal
System:
Commodore 64
Developer: Jamie Fuller, Del Seymour, Roy Widding
Release Date: Out Now
Price: Free
Website: https://www.jamiefuller.com/portal/

title.gif


A 2D version of Portal.

Review: Portal (C64)




Micro Mages
System:
NES
Developer: Morphcat Games
Release Date: 2019
Price: Digital - €8 EUR + Shipping/Cartridge + Digital - €42 EUR + Shipping
Website: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/micro-mages-a-new-game-for-the-nes#/

Micro-Mages-2.jpg


A nice looking 40kb vertical platformer with funky music.






Sam's Journey
System:
Commodore 64
Developer: Knights of Bytes
Release Date: Out Now
Price: Digital - $23.99 USD/Boxed Disk - €45/Boxed Cart - €65
Website: https://www.knightsofbytes.games/samsjourney

ZEWOG3n.gif


A colourful and cute platformer with lots of levels.




The Shadows of Sergoth
System:
Amiga, Amstrad CPC 6128
Developer: AgedCode
Release Date: Amstrad version Out Now/Amiga ???
Price: ???
Website: https://doublesidedgames.com/the-shadows-of-sergoth-for-the-commodore-amiga-coming-2019/

Amiga-Mock-Up-01.png


A cool looking dungeon crawler in the style of Dungeon Master, Eye Of The Beholder etc. The Amstrad version has gotten good reviews.



Planet X3
System:
MS-DOS
Developer: David Murray
Release Date: May 2019
Price: DIgita; - US$10/Floppy - US$20/Boxed - US$35
Website:

Y3cqlq8.png


A real-time strategy game for DOS by David Murray AKA The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube. The sequel to Project X2, which came out on the C64.






More to come.

If you see any errors in this post, let me know and I'll fix them up.

Updates

- 5 more games posted

- Another 5 games posted

- 5 more!


Awesome idea
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
No doubt it’s intentional but EON looks very Shadow Of The Beast. Tbh thought for AGA I’d expect a bigger graphical lap (though one could argue that AGA was one of the least explored states of evolution of the 2D-focused era).
 

Bullet Club

Banned
Yep, it looks like SOTB with a touch of Lionheart.

It's a shame we didn't get a Psygnosis or Bitmap Bros game developed solely for AGA. They would have got some good things out it.
 

Tschumi

Member
Great OP :) thanks a lot~

I can't add anything to this of course, but I do want to take this chance to - it's a bit of a stretch I know - shout out BLACK for the xBox. I mention this game because it came right at the end of the xBox life cycle, just before 360, and it really felt quite next gen. Had great graphics~ I only played it for a short time before giving up that old xBox, but I really thought it was as fun as the other great shooters of the console, if not quite as dramatically accomplished~ Had great gun graphics, I remember one of the loading scenes was just a gun porn shot of an assault rifle pumping out spent shell casings :p

FamousHideousAmoeba-size_restricted.gif
 

Kazza

Member
GG Aleste 3 announced for Sega GameGear (or Sega GameGear mini of incoming release), TGS2020 announcement ...



That's insane, a new Game Gear game in 2020! However, I do think that 8-bit machines struggle a little with that genre, as there are just too many sprites flying around. On the other hand, this new game does look pretty solid from the trailer:




I suppose making it 8 bit means you don't have to spend as much time doing the graphics, given how much more simple they are. They should release a Game Gear physical version too.
 

Bullet Club

Banned
That's pretty awesome. And it looks great.

Tweet translation:

[SEGA Partners Title Stage] The secret ball of the shooting game "Arresta Collection" released on December 24th was the new game "GG Arresta 3" for the first time in 24 years. We have delivered the charm and new information with President M2 Horii!
 
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