Mortal Kombat for Lynx...

[Lynxpro]

1 hour ago, laoo said:

Yeah. It's by design in party version. Selection part permits you to select any character, but only few characters have assets (due to memory constraints). In such case Scorpion is selected by default.

 

 

Thanks for clarifying. I thought it might've been the emulator. Round One likes to start all over again a lot. Glad to know that's the progress of the design currently. It looks fantastic and plays well even on a keyboard via OpenEmu.

[Leonis]

The download link does not work, can someone put the game on a file hosting?

[miker]

It seems that untergrunt.net has some problems lately.

 

The game is available also at Atarigamer site (online and downloadable version as well).

 

Just here: https://atarigamer.com/lynx/game/MortalKombatSV2k19Version/850540296

[sd32]

Is there a place to check the progress on this? I still cant believe how good this is turning out. The colors, the animation, the parallax, the voices...OUTSTANDING!

[Clint Thompson]

On 6/25/2020 at 1:34 AM, sd32 said:

Is there a place to check the progress on this? I still cant believe how good this is turning out. The colors, the animation, the parallax, the voices...OUTSTANDING!

+1 =D

[dashv]

This is why I google search crazy stuff like “Mortal Kombat lynx” at 3:30am. ?

 

nice job!

[Rick Dangerous]

I want this game with box cart and manual SO bad......hopefully someday

[Lost Dragon]

Whilst talking about Lynx Rolling Thunder in Frank Gasking's GTW book, Chuck Ernst reveals he approached Atari with idea they see Mortal Kombat converted to the Lynx. 

 

Atari Management rejected the idea, saying they already had Pitfighter and that was similar enough. 

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Lost Dragon said:

Whilst talking about Lynx Rolling Thunder in Frank Gasking's GTW book, Chuck Ernst reveals he approached Atari with idea they see Mortal Kombat converted to the Lynx. 

 

Atari Management rejected the idea, saying they already had Pitfighter and that was similar enough. 

Haha

[+Stephen]

3 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

Whilst talking about Lynx Rolling Thunder in Frank Gasking's GTW book, Chuck Ernst reveals he approached Atari with idea they see Mortal Kombat converted to the Lynx. 

 

Atari Management rejected the idea, saying they already had Pitfighter and that was similar enough. 

With such stellar management, I can't imagine that Atari ever went belly up.

[TrekMD]

9 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

Whilst talking about Lynx Rolling Thunder in Frank Gasking's GTW book, Chuck Ernst reveals he approached Atari with idea they see Mortal Kombat converted to the Lynx. 

 

Atari Management rejected the idea, saying they already had Pitfighter and that was similar enough. 

 

[Leeroy ST]

On 9/16/2020 at 11:28 AM, Lost Dragon said:

Whilst talking about Lynx Rolling Thunder in Frank Gasking's GTW book, Chuck Ernst reveals he approached Atari with idea they see Mortal Kombat converted to the Lynx. 

 

Atari Management rejected the idea, saying they already had Pitfighter and that was similar enough. 

This may seem funny now but Pit Fighter was a big deal (in the US and maybe parts of Europe? Not sure about Japans popularity) back in the day it was SFII before SFII became popular and the Lynx was one of the only versions even remotely close to the arcade since most ports were garbage. 

 

Also correct me if my dates are off but MK came out in 1992 the same year Pitfighter Lynx came out so Atari likely didn't think the game was going to do very well especially since it used similar digitized sprites. 

 

Of course this would depend when they approached Atari as well. If it was after the console releases, which sold gangbusters, like late end of the year 1993 or anywhere in 1994, then that would be a completely different situation.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Leeroy ST

[agradeneu]

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

This may seem funny now but Pit Fighter was a big deal (in the US and maybe parts of Europe? Not sure about Japans popularity) back in the day it was SFII before SFII became popular and the Lynx was one of the only versions even remotely close to the arcade since most ports were garbage. 

 

Also correct me if my dates are off but MK came out in 1992 the same year Pitfighter Lynx came out so Atari likely didn't think the game was going to do very well especially since it used similar digitized sprites. 

 

Of course this would depend when they approached Atari as well. If it was after the console releases, which sold gangbusters, like late end of the year 1993 or anywhere in 1994, then that would be a completely different situation.

Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter Arcade is like day and night. And seriously, ALL Pit Fighter versions were garbage. 

[8th lutz]

2 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter Arcade is like day and night. And seriously, ALL Pit Fighter versions were garbage. 

I loved the Genesis version of Pitfighter and yes, I am fan of the arcade game. I first liked Pit Fighter back in the early 1990s. 

 

People do enjoy bad games. There are people out there that actually like Deadly Towers and Super Pitfall for the Nes. 

Edited September 22, 2020 by 8th lutz

[Leeroy ST]

17 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter Arcade is like day and night.

Not unless we know when they approached midway because the time period does actually matter.

 

14 hours ago, 8th lutz said:

I loved the Genesis version of Pitfighter and yes, I am fan of the arcade game. I first liked Pit Fighter back in the early 1990s. 

 

People do enjoy bad games. There are people out there that actually like Deadly Towers and Super Pitfall for the Nes. 

I don't think the arcade version of Pit Fighter is bad, just limited in character and not too much depth. The ports are sure, including the latter ports for recent consoles which puzzles me because those should run the arcade version fine. Same thing happened to Primal Rage.

 

 

[LordKraken]

15 hours ago, 8th lutz said:

I loved the Genesis version of Pitfighter

I did too ?

It is bad retrospectively, but at that time, before Mortal Kombat, Pit Fighter was sort of enjoyable, at least on genesis.

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

Not unless we know when they approached midway because the time period does actually matter.

 

I don't think the arcade version of Pit Fighter is bad, just limited in character and not too much depth. The ports are sure, including the latter ports for recent consoles which puzzles me because those should run the arcade version fine. Same thing happened to Primal Rage.

 

 

Who is they? I doubt it was very influential for the development of MK. If anything MK is more influenced by Street Fighter 2 and chinese mythology in movies. 

True, the Arcade game looks not THAT bad, but if you consider Street Fighter 2 hitting the Arcades 6-8 months later, it somewhat looks outdated and trashy: bad collision detection, choppy animation, a fighting system with less depth than Final Fight or Street Fighter 1 (1987). 

The Lynx version was especially awful.

 

 

 

 

[LordKraken]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

The Lynx version was especially awful.

You haven't seen the Amstrad (Schneider) CPC version

[Greg2600]

Wow, this was really amazing!  Had some bugs here and there, but wow, the Lynx was a hell of a system.

[Leeroy ST]

6 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Who is they?

 

Uh, they the people who came to Atari if they wanted a MK conversion on the Lynx?

 

6 hours ago, agradeneu said:

I doubt it was very influential for the development of MK. If anything MK is more influenced by Street Fighter 2 and chinese mythology in movies. 

 

Except the movements, the way the digitized sprites, the movesets using direct inputs instead of arcade stick quarters and half circles, and some other elements were all taken from Pit Fighter. Fatal Fury and SF2 popularized part of the format that would be used for movement and view for MK2 although one could argue tht fighting games were already getting in that position and Pit Fighter was an outlier, but you could say that, as well as other SFII influences with some other elements and characters, however to act like Pit Fighter didn't have influence is wrong.

 

Also as hard as it is to believe Pit Fighter was a pretty popular game even after SF, issue is lack of good console ports made it's longevity sink while it extended SF's and to be fair it makes sense since consoles wouldn't be able to handle the same game as the arcade, MK in comparison with quick fighter, opinion that MK is a better game aside, is a more watered down and is easier to put on a console.

 

Lynx version has tons of issues but it was arguably the first step to a real arcade port that played or looked anything like the arcade until compilations would come out ons tronger consoles.

[agradeneu]

6 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Uh, they the people who came to Atari if they wanted a MK conversion on the Lynx?

 

Except the movements, the way the digitized sprites, the movesets using direct inputs instead of arcade stick quarters and half circles, and some other elements were all taken from Pit Fighter. Fatal Fury and SF2 popularized part of the format that would be used for movement and view for MK2 although one could argue tht fighting games were already getting in that position and Pit Fighter was an outlier, but you could say that, as well as other SFII influences with some other elements and characters, however to act like Pit Fighter didn't have influence is wrong.

 

Also as hard as it is to believe Pit Fighter was a pretty popular game even after SF, issue is lack of good console ports made it's longevity sink while it extended SF's and to be fair it makes sense since consoles wouldn't be able to handle the same game as the arcade, MK in comparison with quick fighter, opinion that MK is a better game aside, is a more watered down and is easier to put on a console.

 

Lynx version has tons of issues but it was arguably the first step to a real arcade port that played or looked anything like the arcade until compilations would come out ons tronger consoles.

If you look at the development history of MK, it was not even planned as an 1vs1 fighter. That came after the huge success of SF2. The projectile attacks and general gameplay dynamics are taken from Street Fighter 2, especially the jumping, air kicks and punches. 

Not sure what you mean with "watered down version", MK of Pit Fighter?? That would be curious, as MK is a technically MUCH more advanced game, and runs on better hardware. The fighting system provides precision and some real depht, nothing that is in PF.

Both Genesis and SNES are perfectly capable of running Pit Fighter, but the ports were low budget affairs, espeially the SNES version is one of the worst games ever for the system.

The Lynx running MK is a little miracle, as nobody thought the resolution, colors, lack of buttons and small RAM would support such a game. (That is 16MBit ROM on SNES btw).

And you can argue with the very poor PF, that is considered one of the worst games for the Lynx btw, that it would never be possible to port such a game to the Lynx.

But the demo, compared to Lynx PF, looks like from a different time and dimension.

 

Edited September 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[Leeroy ST]

10 hours ago, agradeneu said:

If you look at the development history of MK, it was not even planned as an 1vs1 fighter. That came after the huge success of SF2.

 

Which I implied.

 

10 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Not sure what you mean with "watered down version", MK of Pit Fighter?? That would be curious, as MK is a technically MUCH more advanced game, and runs on better hardware.

 

It runs on better hardware but the format of the game itself is easy to translate to consoles because of the lack of shit going on. I never said MK looked worse graphically or ran on a worse machine but Pit Fighter isn't straight forward so porting to consoles of the time ALWAYS produced shit results. If Pit Fighter was the same game but with less enemies, few to no pickups, and a 2D view with no z-axis then it's be easier to port. Because a lot of what I said are why the ports have issues in the first place, the ports that could run games like MK anyway. A weak machine wasn't ever going to have a good port.

 

10 hours ago, agradeneu said:

The Lynx running MK is a little miracle, as nobody thought the resolution, colors, lack of buttons and small RAM would support such a game.

 

I mean it's not perfect, and when you adjust things to the levels of power of the Lynx it can run a lot of games. It's why people always talk about how there should have been a Lynx console because of the compromises made to be a handheld with the kind of strength it had.

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

Which I implied.

 

It runs on better hardware but the format of the game itself is easy to translate to consoles because of the lack of shit going on. I never said MK looked worse graphically or ran on a worse machine but Pit Fighter isn't straight forward so porting to consoles of the time ALWAYS produced shit results. If Pit Fighter was the same game but with less enemies, few to no pickups, and a 2D view with no z-axis then it's be easier to port. Because a lot of what I said are why the ports have issues in the first place, the ports that could run games like MK anyway. A weak machine wasn't ever going to have a good port.

 

I mean it's not perfect, and when you adjust things to the levels of power of the Lynx it can run a lot of games. It's why people always talk about how there should have been a Lynx console because of the compromises made to be a handheld with the kind of strength it had.

The Pit Fighter ports were cheap and ported to every system under the sun with no quality control, but honestly the arcade was not a good game in the first place. MK required some high production values, the game had to fit within 2 MB which was quite big in 1992 for a ROM. If you have a closer look at PF, its still a simple game, not much more sophisticated than Double Dragon. It has huge digitized sprites and some scaling effects, that was new, but with only 2 frames animation and a very limited move set. The AI  was poor, compared to a proper 1 vs 1 fighter like SF2 or MK, it's looking hilariously primitive. 

 

But yeah, go tell the guys that did MK demo for the Lynx, that MK was so much easier to port than Pit Fighter. I guess they will have a good laugh.?

 

The thing is, MK should have been impossible to port to the Lynx, due to lack of RAM, only 16 colors, low res, only 4 sound channels, 2 buttons. But the demo is as faithfully translated as it could get.

On the other hand, Pit Fighter is a shoddy, rushed out the door port of an already not so great game. The colors, the sound, the confused gameplay, it's absolute trash. 

Edited September 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[Leeroy ST]

38 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The Pit Fighter ports were cheap and ported to every system under the sun with no quality control, but honestly the arcade was not a good game in the first place. MK required some high production values, the game had to fit within 2 MB which was quite big in 1992 for a ROM. If you have a closer look at PF, its still a simple game, not much more sophisticated than Double Dragon. It has huge digitized sprites and some scaling effects, that was new, but with only 2 frames animation and a very limited move set. The AI  was poor, compared to a proper 1 vs 1 fighter like SF2 or MK, it's looking hilariously primitive. 

 

But yeah, go tell the guys that did MK demo for the Lynx, that MK was so much easier to port than Pit Fighter. I guess they will have a good laugh.

Arcade not being good is opinion, reviewers liked it at the time. Not saying I did or didn't just that it was a popular game for a time.

 

The thing about the ports is all those features you mentioned were things that consoles weren't good at doing on the fly, especially if they wanted the graphics to resemble the arcade game even a little bit. This is why I said that Pit Fighter was harder to port because higher digitized sprites roaming around with those audiences with decent animation with Z-axis movement and scaling is not really something several of the machines the game was ported to where good at handling. While the only thing about MKII you really had to deal with was size and dropped color count for things like the Genesis port and some other minor adjustments. Because despite what you say it's still a straight forward 2D fighting game with one plane.

 

Pit Fighter isn't SToR or FF,  it has pretty good for the time scaling with a lot of stuff going on with above average graphics, large sprites, pickups, Z-axis and other elements that many machines couldn't do right. 

 

I'm not going to pretend some of the ports on weaker machines weren't lazy, as those often look like completely different games that just slap the name on the cartridge, But some of the "better" ports struggled dealing with a lot of the elements I mentioned above. 

 

What you're doing is ignoring all of that and acting like I am saying that Pit Fighter was the "stronger" or more "powerful" game which I never said. Capabilities of the machines are important when dealing with ports. For example, the 7800 has powerful titles the NES can't run, but Ball Blazer is NOT one of those titles. Ball Blazer is a more basic 7800 game compared to later games that are more powerful.

 

If you hold SMB3 next to Ball Blazer it's clear that SMB3 is the more technically advanced game, so you would think the NES could handle a game like Ball Blazer, but it can't and runs it poorly. So if you were to port Ball Blazer to systems similar to the NES that don't address those weaknesses Ball Blazer will run poor on all of them, despite the NES and the hypothetical similar consoles hardware producing games that are clearly technically superiors.

 

This same thing applies to Pit Fighter, it's not more powerful than MK. However, it's clear it was a harder game to port due to the elements used in the arcade game that are hard to emulate, excluding the ports that look like different games of course.

 

I don't think this is reaching very far look at how easy it was to port MK to consoles back in the day even earlier homebrews.

 

With that said I do have to point out you are misunderstanding me I never said MK was easier to port on the lynx specifically, just in general the Lynx capabilities are different from other consoles having capabilities that would be a problem on the SNES or example, it's a very capable device and considering that Pit Fighter was an Atari arcade game it was likely easier to port the game on the Lynx than other consoles. 

 

A game like MK would be more difficult to port as it's a game that plays to the strengths of home consoles which the Lynx took a back seat to for it's sprite functions and 3D.

 

I would say even with a top pro developer if you ported Pit Fighter on the Genesis and Lynx at the same time the Lynx would always have the better version with exceptions to the resolution of course. While for MK if using the same hypothetical, the Genesis version would always have the better version than the Lynx. Different strengths in different areas.

[agradeneu]

14 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

Arcade not being good is opinion, reviewers liked it at the time. Not saying I did or didn't just that it was a popular game for a time.

 

The thing about the ports is all those features you mentioned were things that consoles weren't good at doing on the fly, especially if they wanted the graphics to resemble the arcade game even a little bit. This is why I said that Pit Fighter was harder to port because higher digitized sprites roaming around with those audiences with decent animation with Z-axis movement and scaling is not really something several of the machines the game was ported to where good at handling. While the only thing about MKII you really had to deal with was size and dropped color count for things like the Genesis port and some other minor adjustments. Because despite what you say it's still a straight forward 2D fighting game with one plane.

 

Pit Fighter isn't SToR or FF,  it has pretty good for the time scaling with a lot of stuff going on with above average graphics, large sprites, pickups, Z-axis and other elements that many machines couldn't do right. 

 

I'm not going to pretend some of the ports on weaker machines weren't lazy, as those often look like completely different games that just slap the name on the cartridge, But some of the "better" ports struggled dealing with a lot of the elements I mentioned above. 

 

What you're doing is ignoring all of that and acting like I am saying that Pit Fighter was the "stronger" or more "powerful" game which I never said. Capabilities of the machines are important when dealing with ports. For example, the 7800 has powerful titles the NES can't run, but Ball Blazer is NOT one of those titles. Ball Blazer is a more basic 7800 game compared to later games that are more powerful.

 

If you hold SMB3 next to Ball Blazer it's clear that SMB3 is the more technically advanced game, so you would think the NES could handle a game like Ball Blazer, but it can't and runs it poorly. So if you were to port Ball Blazer to systems similar to the NES that don't address those weaknesses Ball Blazer will run poor on all of them, despite the NES and the hypothetical similar consoles hardware producing games that are clearly technically superiors.

 

This same thing applies to Pit Fighter, it's not more powerful than MK. However, it's clear it was a harder game to port due to the elements used in the arcade game that are hard to emulate, excluding the ports that look like different games of course.

 

I don't think this is reaching very far look at how easy it was to port MK to consoles back in the day even earlier homebrews.

 

With that said I do have to point out you are misunderstanding me I never said MK was easier to port on the lynx specifically, just in general the Lynx capabilities are different from other consoles having capabilities that would be a problem on the SNES or example, it's a very capable device and considering that Pit Fighter was an Atari arcade game it was likely easier to port the game on the Lynx than other consoles. 

 

A game like MK would be more difficult to port as it's a game that plays to the strengths of home consoles which the Lynx took a back seat to for it's sprite functions and 3D.

 

I would say even with a top pro developer if you ported Pit Fighter on the Genesis and Lynx at the same time the Lynx would always have the better version with exceptions to the resolution of course. While for MK if using the same hypothetical, the Genesis version would always have the better version than the Lynx. Different strengths in different areas.

Sorry but that is wrong, even Double Dragon has Z axis movement and both the SNES and Genesis can do scaling sprites pretty easily.  There is nothing with Pit Fighter that challenges both hardware, BY ANY MEANS. The sole reason for Pit Fighter versions being so poor is that they were rushed ports with very low production values.

 

On the other hand, MK doing TONS of animation frames, parallax scrolling for the backgrounds and digitized sounds were really demanding for both 16 bit consoles. A home port of Street Figfhter 2 was thought impossible to do because of it's demands for graphics. Capcom had to produce the first 16 Mbit ROMs, doubling from the standard 4 and 8 Mbits. MK required 16 Mbit as well, wehen 8 Mbit were still more common. Later versions/sequels of those games required even 24 Mbit ROMs.

 

 

 

Edited September 23, 2020 by agradeneu