Well this is incredible news!! As an IndieRetroNews reader, has recently informed us in our comments feed, that JOTD is now working on a Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja Arcade conversion for the Commodore Amiga (AGA). Although it's still in a very early stage of development, and the original Amiga version of the game was regarded as terrible with one such Lemon Amiga saying "This is absolute dreck with horrible graphics, terrible backgrounds, how did this get released in this state?" Rest assured if JOTD finishes this conversion, it's sure to be another hit in the Amiga scene.
While you can follow the latest developments located at the EAB link below. Here is what the wikipedia says about the game. "In Bad Dudes, the players are tasked with rescuing "President Ronnie" from ninja kidnappers. The game was a commercial success, becoming one of America's top five highest-grossing games in 1988. The arcade version received generally positive reviews from critics, while the home conversions received a positive to mixed critical reception. It has since become widely known for its general premise and introductory cutscene"
Dev Notes : Been working on this "secret" project for a few weeks reverse engineered from scratch, but now it's really promising, even if riddled with bugs and stuff that doesn't work properly. The only uncertainties is
- how it's going to fare with all objects on screen, but at 25Hz with fastmem it should cut it, even if minor slowdowns at some point...
- will there be enough memory to hold a whole level enemy sprites. We'll see about that. But the game has already some file loading to avoid having all memory at once (unlike my other conversions)
Links :1) Source
SHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!!!!!!!!! Nice :D :D :DD:D:D:D:D
ReplyDeleteThat's wonderful news!
ReplyDeletelooking good :) looks like we could have decent ports back in the day if the developers could of been bothered.
ReplyDeleteThere were a few really good arcade ports on Amiga but also really bad ones. Some were probably rushed while others from devs really strange 3rd party companies that made cheap software. Without the same restrictions of time and disk space many of these homebrews have been fantastic. Making games that took up memory and space were really expensive back in the day. Now people are doing it for free.
DeleteYeah!! Now Amiga conversions are getting seriously cool! 😎 Great work JOTD!
ReplyDeleteTrue, original Amiga version was terrible, C64 version with its impressive combined sprite multiplex was better. Fingers crossed, it looks nice on the Amiga now too!
ReplyDeleteI don't get all the excitment about ports like these. I mean you can already play the ORIGINAL arcade version at home these days thanks to MAME.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it's a fun challenge to the guy porting it, but that's about it.
It is about to play it on a real Computer without any EMU.
DeleteIt's a challenge for the developer for sure, but it's also fun to know you still get games for your "beloved" system and if you liked the original game for the arcade machines, but you haven't been satisfied with the origin port for your system you'll get now the feeling of "things getting fixed".
DeleteStrictly speaking, it's just a hobby for both sides, which isn't really good for anything either way but is just a lot of fun. It's a bit like a model train: It's fun to build, it's fun to control, but it's also fun to watch.
The real challenge would be a near perfect port for a500 ocs,not a reverse engineering for an expaded a1200...That said,i had dragonninja for 64 and amiga and was not a terrible port,it was just ruined by the implementation of the jump.Graphics were good but simply a 1:1 conversion from ST-f(which was way slower than amiga one) so i think they can just enhance the original adding a second button for jumps and using the extended palette of Amiga ocs.No need,in my opinion,for aga chipset at all!
DeleteBasically true: I myself use MAME (and a G-Sync monitor) for Arcade games. Computer ports today have lost their utility.
DeleteHowever is interesting to see how those arcade dreams could have been (much better) ported to our beloved Amiga in the good old days! :)
S(not H)wweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt !!!!!!
ReplyDeleteKeep the Good Work ! It's great and We need such Amiga version.
ReplyDeletelast night i played the original amiga version via whdload on my 1200! It was a broken game with bad controls unplayable even with cheats...I thought that it would be nice if there was a new version and today i read this!!! I am looking forward for this one!
ReplyDeleteComparing it to the arcade it really does look arcade perfect
ReplyDeleteGood news I love Bad Dudes Vs Dragon Ninja. I suggest adding extra features to entice video game players to play this version istead of the Arcade such a more weapons and more martial art fighting positions.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with many of the comments here. The Amiga version of Dragon Ninja, while far from perfect, was a pretty decent conversion for its time. That guy on Lemonamiga was way too harsh in his comments. Sure, compared with the coin-op, the Amiga version had a smaller play area (hence, smaller sprites), less colors, didn't have all the animations and special effects of the original, but... sometimes it managed to display up to 10 large sprites on the screen at once (with some slowdown, of course), the action was fast and furious, and the gameplay was even faster (not smoother) than the coin-op version! The music was awesome, IMHO it sounded better than the synth tune of the coin-op. The game ran on a stock Amiga 500 with no expansion, but if you had 1MB of RAM, you could get some more enemy variants and music+effects at once. Not bad, I must say, for a game from 1989!
ReplyDeleteSo, respect for the developer of this new A1200 version, but if someone could make a better "Amiga 500" version, I would be much more impressed. But there were much worse conversions on the Amiga that would desperately need a decent remake: Black Tiger, Rolling Thunder, Eswat, 1943, Strider, Bionic Commando, Alien Syndrome, Renegade, Shinobi, SideArms, Tiger Road and many others... I wish someone would take the trouble (or the fun!) to make some decent versions of them for the original Amiga 500, not for an Amiga 1200.