SG-1000 ports on the ColecoVision

[Cybergoth]

Some more:

 

Exerion: I see what they're trying to achieve with the 3D effect, but it looks horrible. The actual game seems to be as generic as it can get.

 

Flicky: I'm not sure how properly this is emulated in MEKA. I think jumping and shooting should eventually be triggered by two different buttons and also the collision detection while jumping seems to need some serious work until this will be really "fun". Great potential though. The bonus round is way cool!

 

Girl's Garden: This is a must!! I'd immediately buy one! (It also seems to be a SG-1000 exclusive, so it won't have to compete with an arcade original )

[+5-11under]

Can I vote for Loderunner? I've never seen the ROM.

 

Thanks,

5-11under

[Hakogame 箱亀]

Girl's Garden: This is a must!! I'd immediately buy one! (It also seems to be a SG-1000 exclusive, so it won't have to compete with an arcade original )

 

It's also Yuji Naka's first game.

He later went on to program Phantasy Star and Sonic The Hedgehog.

[+thegoldenband]

Girl's Garden seems like a perfect choice -- anytime there's a title unique to a particular platform, it's great to see it on other platforms.

[Bruce Tomlin]

It seems to be an early Hack'n'Slay dungeon crawl RPG game, in best Wizardry/Bard's Tale tradition. I hope that does get you interested, else that'll gonna be _many_ screenshots

 

Maybe it can be hacked to display all messages/text on a couple of screens? Definitely a more challenging task then "just" porting a game, so it'd depend on Eduardo on how far he wants to go and wether he considers worth it

Well then, someone's going to have to tell me where to find the ROM, since I apparently never found any SG-1000 floods on alt.binaries.emulators.misc.

[Pixelboy]

Alright people, here's what's going to happen:

 

First of all, I can tell you that one of the two SG-1000 ports will be Bank Panic: The graphics are excellent, the game itself is fun, and if Eduardo likes the game enough to want to port it, I think I owe it to him to let him do it. So Bank Panic is official!

 

Secondly, I'm going to give Girl's Garden a second try, now that I have a better idea of what the game is about. Considering Cybergoth's and others' comments about the game, I need to know if this is an overlooked gem.

 

Thirdly, on the morning of April 2nd (not April 1st, because I don't want to stir unwanted controversy), I will start an official poll with a selection of ten SG-1000 games, and I will let you people vote for the one you most want to see ported to the ColecoVision. The poll will end on April 7th, and on that day (which happens to be my birthday, incidently) I will officially submit my port selections to Eduardo.

 

What happens next will depend on Eduardo's available free time for the remainder of 2007, and depending on certain factors, the two SG-1000 ports may actually be released in early 2008. It goes without saying that I'll do my best to release at least one of the two games before the end of this year, but the truth is it's not really under my full control.

 

Please keep posting your comments in this forum thread. I like reading other people's opinions about the best SG-1000 games.

Edited March 28, 2007 by Pixelboy

[Pixelboy]

It seems to be an early Hack'n'Slay dungeon crawl RPG game, in best Wizardry/Bard's Tale tradition. I hope that does get you interested, else that'll gonna be _many_ screenshots

 

Maybe it can be hacked to display all messages/text on a couple of screens? Definitely a more challenging task then "just" porting a game, so it'd depend on Eduardo on how far he wants to go and wether he considers worth it

Well then, someone's going to have to tell me where to find the ROM, since I apparently never found any SG-1000 floods on alt.binaries.emulators.misc.

If you want to have a look at the ROM, you can Google it using "Black Onyx SG-1000 ROM" as keywords. However, be warned that The Black Onyx is NOT on my list of preferred candidates for the ColecoVision. On the other hand, if you just want to have a look at the game out of curiosity, I'd be curious to know your impressions.

[Cybergoth]

Thirdly, on the morning of April 2nd (not April 1st, because I don't want to stir unwanted controversy), I will start an official poll with a selection of ten SG-1000 games, and I will let you people vote for the one you most want to see ported to the ColecoVision.

 

If you send me a list with your choices, I can make it the pinned board poll for April.

[Pixelboy]

Thirdly, on the morning of April 2nd (not April 1st, because I don't want to stir unwanted controversy), I will start an official poll with a selection of ten SG-1000 games, and I will let you people vote for the one you most want to see ported to the ColecoVision.

 

If you send me a list with your choices, I can make it the pinned board poll for April.

This list may change slightly between now and next Monday, but assuming Girl's Garden is good enough, here it is in alphabetical order:

 

- C-So!

- Drol

- Flicky

- Girl's Garden

- Ninja Princess

- Pitfall 2 Arcade

- Sega Flipper

- Sindbad Mystery

- Soukoban - The Warehouse

- Star Force

 

Note that Gulkave is not on the list for the reason I stated before, and Elevator Action is also not included, because I want to give Eduardo more time to decide whether he will port the arcade (or MSX) version within the next few years. Eduardo recently told me he would love to port the game, but if he ultimately decides not to do his own port of EA under the Opcode Games label, and if he offers to port at least one more SG-1000 game for me in 2008, Elevator Action will automatically be my default choice.

Edited March 28, 2007 by Pixelboy

[Cybergoth]

Golgo 13: I don't get this one. You're a terrorist sniping civilians in a train?!?

GP World: Garbage

Gulkave: Again very generic IMO. But I've been playing tons of horizontal shoot'em ups on the C64 lately, after a while they all look the same I'm not too sad that it's no option right now.

[Pixelboy]

Golgo 13: I don't get this one. You're a terrorist sniping civilians in a train?!?

As I understand it, the train is out of control, and you have to shoot the wagon windows to help the civilians jump off the train. It gets harder each level, because of obstacles that block your line of fire. Pretty original for a game...

 

Gulkave: Again very generic IMO. But I've been playing tons of horizontal shoot'em ups on the C64 lately, after a while they all look the same I'm not too sad that it's no option right now.

There are far better shooters out there, but Gulkave is impressive for the hardware it's running on. And it's fast and challenging too! Have you collected the different weapon upgrades? Anyhow, I find it very impressive, personally.

[Cybergoth]

As I understand it, the train is out of control, and you have to shoot the wagon windows to help the civilians jump off the train. It gets harder each level, because of obstacles that block your line of fire. Pretty original for a game...

 

Ok, that makes more sense now

 

There are far better shooters out there, but Gulkave is impressive for the hardware it's running on. And it's fast and challenging too! Have you collected the different weapon upgrades? Anyhow, I find it very impressive, personally.

 

At one time I had a weapon that was so big that I could just sit in the middle, almost not even needing to move anymore. What I considered weird though, when I collected the next upgrade, instead of an even bigger one, I got set back to the early double shot instead

[Pixelboy]

At one time I had a weapon that was so big that I could just sit in the middle, almost not even needing to move anymore. What I considered weird though, when I collected the next upgrade, instead of an even bigger one, I got set back to the early double shot instead

Yep. Gotta be careful what you pick up!

[Pixelboy]

Alright, I tried Girl's Garden again, and it is indeed a very nice game. Not exactly what I would call a gem, but it's relaxing fun and the graphics are nice too. There are other games I would rather see ported before this one, but I'll keep it in the poll, just to be fair.

 

I also gave Drol and Flicky another try.

 

In the case of Flicky, the fact that shooting and jumping are mapped to the same button accurately matches the controls in the arcade game (which I tried in MAME minutes after). The one frustrating thing about this game is how hard it is to jump to a higher platform from below. More often than not, my bird bumps its head on the ceilings. Lots of practice required.

 

Drol is fun and challenging, so I wouldn't mind porting this one either. Writing a good manual for Drol could be problematic, as I would probably need to acquire the manual from another version, like the one for the Commodore 64, just to make sure I don't forget anything. In terms of platforming action, I tend to prefer C-So, Flicky or Pitfall II over Drol.

[Bruce Tomlin]

If you want to have a look at the ROM, you can Google it using "Black Onyx SG-1000 ROM" as keywords. However, be warned that The Black Onyx is NOT on my list of preferred candidates for the ColecoVision. On the other hand, if you just want to have a look at the game out of curiosity, I'd be curious to know your impressions.

I found all the SG-1000 games lurking in GoodSMS.

 

And curse you all for getting me started on this. I'm into a serious disassembly of this right now and will probably try to load an untranslated conversion on my ICE next week. At least the character set is straightforward, if definitely non-ASCII. I'm having to use DBs of a bunch of constants (like "DB _E,_X,_I,_T") to keep it readable. And it should be possible to strip out a bunch of unnecessary crap (like scanning a keyboard at port 0xDE/0xDF that didn't exist on SG-1000) to make room for the expected increase in text size from J->E translation.

 

Though it looks rather ugly by today's standards, it's not bad in comparison to typical Colecovision games.

[Cybergoth]

Way cool, Bruce!

[Pixelboy]

And curse you all for getting me started on this. I'm into a serious disassembly of this right now and will probably try to load an untranslated conversion on my ICE next week. At least the character set is straightforward, if definitely non-ASCII. I'm having to use DBs of a bunch of constants (like "DB _E,_X,_I,_T") to keep it readable. And it should be possible to strip out a bunch of unnecessary crap (like scanning a keyboard at port 0xDE/0xDF that didn't exist on SG-1000) to make room for the expected increase in text size from J->E translation.

 

Though it looks rather ugly by today's standards, it's not bad in comparison to typical Colecovision games.

Bruce, if you manage to complete the translation of The Black Onyx for the ColecoVision, I officially promise to do everything in my power to publish it, box and manual included. And that's a promise you can quote me on. This thread is about Eduardo's porting offer for two games, but hey, if I can publish two games this year, rest assured I can publish three!

 

EDIT: Oh, BTW, assuming you'll want to see this to the end, you'll probably have to test this game to death to make sure everything is translated and working. While you're doing that, if you could take notes about gameplay and any special features in the game, I could use these notes to prepare the manual. Also, if you want to share your work with other beta-testers, be my guest, and please note their names so that I can credit them in the manual. I could beta-test your work myself, if you want.

Edited March 30, 2007 by Pixelboy

[Bruce Tomlin]

FWIW, this looks both easy and hard to port. Easy in that it's an SG-1000 game, so it needs some I/O ports changed, and different controller read code. Hard in that I'm doing as deep of a disassembly as I can, trying to find all the little hidden pointers and everything. (but still much easier than on the 6502 when pointers may be split in half and jump table addresses are off by one) Since SG-1000 starts at 0x0000 and Coleco starts at 0x8000, the dissassembly has to be pretty good.

 

I can understand most of the Japanese already, but I will probably need to rearrange some code when translating because word order is different. ("you can't use X" vs "X ga tsukawanai") The way I'm disassembling it should make it easy to use different string lengths when it comes time to translate, so there won't be any "we must fit it in 8 characters!" nonsense... unless that's how much space is left on the screen.

 

EDIT - oh yeah, and the save function will need to use a new character set instead of random hiragana

Edited March 30, 2007 by Bruce Tomlin

[Pixelboy]

FWIW, this looks both easy and hard to port. Easy in that it's an SG-1000 game, so it needs some I/O ports changed, and different controller read code. Hard in that I'm doing as deep of a disassembly as I can, trying to find all the little hidden pointers and everything. (but still much easier than on the 6502 when pointers may be split in half and jump table addresses are off by one) Since SG-1000 starts at 0x0000 and Coleco starts at 0x8000, the dissassembly has to be pretty good.

You're the right guy for the job, Bruce. No doubt about it.

 

I can understand most of the Japanese already, but I will probably need to rearrange some code when translating because word order is different. ("you can't use X" vs "X ga tsukawanai") The way I'm disassembling it should make it easy to use different string lengths when it comes time to translate, so there won't be any "we must fit it in 8 characters!" nonsense... unless that's how much space is left on the screen.

You should create a separate forum thread for this CV port... That way you could discuss gameplay issues, release WIP binaries, and get some input from others.

 

EDIT - oh yeah, and the save function will need to use a new character set instead of random hiragana

I'm at work right now so I can't check for myself: How many characters are we talking about? Perhaps you could use weird symbols, like something from a lost ancient language, instead of hiragana. People could then write down these symbols on paper, and the nice part is that you would only need to change the character graphics, not the code that parses the password entry. Just an idea...

 

EDIT: Just tried the ROM again. The password system uses numbers, hiragana and letters. Not exactly an ideal situation... I made a map of the area surrounding the starting point, which was kinda fun. Lots of stuff conveyed through reading, but not much interaction beyond crossing various doors, talking to people and buying stuff. I'm still trying to figure out why I'm teleported to a spot near the starting point each time I cross the door near the black obelisk... Perhaps I need to buy stuff and/or defeat a special enemy? Pretty nice game overall...

Edited March 31, 2007 by Pixelboy

[Bill Brasky]

Golgo 13

Bomb Jack

Elevator Action

[7800]

I wouldn't mind if all the SG-1000 games were ported to the Colecovison... and in English where applicable. 

[Swami]

On 2/20/2021 at 11:36 AM, 7800 said:

I wouldn't mind if all the SG-1000 games were ported to the Colecovison... and in English where applicable. 

I stated several times if we are going to get ports from other systems, the most important are English translations of games like Enix Portopia Satsujin Renzoku Jiken series and Animal Land Satsujin Jiken which can only be played if you know Japanese on their original system.