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dave18 / BubNext

Port of Bubble Bobble for the Spectrum Next
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Thanks and various questions #5

Open danboid opened 4 months ago

danboid commented 4 months ago

Hi Dave

I got a xberry pi a couple of weeks ago and I think BubNext is the best open source game for it yet. Great job! I'm sure it wasn't easy.

Do you think you might ever attempt to port another z80 based arcade game to the Next? If you do, it'd be great if you could keep a log of how you do these conversions as I'm sure it would help and might even help convince others to give it a go.

Is there a list online of all arcades that used the z80 as its CPU? It should be possible to write a script to get such a list from the MAME sources I suppose. Was the mame version of bubble bubble helpful to you in creating this?

There were several great arcade games of the early to mid 80's that used two or three z80s like Rygar, Kung Fu master and Trojan etc. Do you think it might be feasible to get something like Rygar running on the Next in the similar way to how you did BB? I'm sure it would be no overnight task but maybe a new Next core could be created that has 2 z80s to support porting some of these mid 80's arcade games?

Impressive work!

Thanks

dave18 commented 2 months ago

Thanks for the nice comments. It was a massive challenge especially as it was a bigger game than I realised and I made some poor choices (in hindsight) going about the conversion. I started it while waiting for the kickstarter so the Next hardware specs were changing and the emulators were WIPs so that meant having to rework a lot. I think it took me about 4 years in total.

I used MAME heavily, both to disassemble the Z80 code and also to use the debugger to help understand it. Having bootleg versions helped so I didn't originally have to emulate the protection (although this is now added thanks to someone else's code).

Lessons learned have been to try and match the memory regions to the original where possible, so much time was spent replacing the original addresses with virtual ones. I also developed some tools to automate certain things like reformatting MAME disassembly to usable source code later on in the process as originally I was spending a lot of time doing that manually.

I have got a couple of other half finished conversions on the go (Chack n' Pop and Kung Fu Master), neither anywhere near finished though and I have so many half finished projects and so little time. Maybe I'll take another look at those soon...

danboid commented 2 months ago

Developing for a developing platform is always going to be tough! It's not something I'd be willing to take on. Your tool for reformatting MAME disassembly to usable source code sounds like it could potentially be usable for others involved in such niche activities.

I'd never hear of Chack n'Pop before you mentioned it. A Kung Fu master core or remake for the Next would be Very Cool!