MiSTer FPGA Forum

News about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is blowing up YouTube. One can find some footage here.

I realize that someone would need to contact Dotemu, Mirage Studios, and possibly Konami to secure consent, and obviously, the game needs to actually come out in completed form on PC and consoles in the first place, but would anyone be up to the challenge of trying to port this game to some early-mid Nineties Konami arcade hardware, such as the X-Men or Mystic Warriors graphics chipsets? Obviously, if Konami's sound chips are too obscure or simply difficult to work with, we could substitute in the Yamaha YM2151+3012 and some wavetable and PCM chips from somewhere else with better documentation, but given how people have been raving about the elegance and efficiency of Konami's late Eighties-mid Nineties video chips, those would need to be a must. The reason I mentioned the X-Men hardware in particular is the possible six player support, so that they could do a hypothetical version with all the turtles plus any two of April, Master Splinter, and Casey Jones.

Anyone else like this idea, or is it too far out there?

This reminds me of ideas like "What if we port Sonic Mania to the Saturn/Dreamcast?" or "What if we port Shovel Knight to the NES?" While these are games that evoke the visuals of classic consoles they're built with modern tools for modern hardware, and the amount of effort it would take to get them to run on old hardware would be equal to making them from scratch. I doubt there's much of a homebrew scene for Konami arcade hardware or any public tools for game development on those machines so I doubt anyone is up to this challenge.

Remember that Bloodborne PS1 demake? It doesn't actually run on PS1 hardware or emulation, because it's much easier to make a game in a modern engine that looks like a PS1 game than to actually make a PS1 game. There are folks who do make PS1 games, and Saturn games and Genesis, Game Boy, etc because there are homebrew tools available that make this possible. Even then it will always be easier to make a game that looks retro but has modern code under the hood than to make an actual retro game with retro code.

For the record, someone actually did port Shovel Knight to the NES.

Actually, I can find footage of three different ports on YouTube. The only compromises made were from the way they had to use a 7:8 aspect ratio instead of a 9:16, and that they were limited to the 2A03/7's five sound channels due to using Western Hemisphere and PAL/SECAM NES models instead of the Japanese Famicom, and so couldn't pack in the Konami SCC and Namco 163 sound chips added in because Yacht Club Games found the two square wave, one triangle, one white noise, and one ADPCM channel too limiting when it came to combining score and sound effects in play at the same time, though two of them did need need to use MMC5, while the third used the Member Industries GTROM.