<INTRO> IT’S BEEN ANOTHER BUSY MONTH FOR CODING COMPETITIONS. VOTING TOOK PLACE IN THE CPCDEV 2022 AND NESDEV (ITCH.IO/JAM/NESDEV-2022), AND THE AMIGA BLITZ BASIC JAM (ITCH.IO/JAM/ABBGJAM) ALSO ENDED. WE ARE NOW LOOKING FORWARD TO AMIGA GAME JAM 2023, WITH ITS SWORD-ANDSORCERY THEME AND THE ANNUAL SMS POWER COMPETITION DUE TO END ON 27 MARCH. THERE WILL ALSO BE ANOTHER MSXDEV TO LOOK FORWARD TO. READ THIS COLUMN TO KEEP UP WITH IT ALL! </INTRO>
<BODY> “I knew the tricks to earn more points with the boxes and shooting the points in the third and fourth stages. I also finished it with one credit. When I got my Sega Genesis in the Nineties, I really wanted an arcade version of for it, but it never came.” As a result he’s now developing a new port. “I use Microsoft’s Visual Studio, C++ and the SGDK,” he says. “The most difficult things are converting arcade sprites to the Genesis colour palette and remaking map tiles to fit VRAM.” Interestingly, no changes will be made. “My plan is to develop a faithful arcade port,” he says. “I do not intend to release this port on a cartridge, as I believe the community makes its own cartridges.” There. Retro Encoder is also looking forward to the forthcoming Amiga version. “I don’t think the original Amiga version did the hardware any justice,” says Daniel Allsopp of his AGA remake, adding, “I just wanted to learn 68000 assembler, and do something meaningful whilst learning. My only memories of playing the arcade game were on holiday in Mallorca when I was probably 10 or 11.” Daniel is hoping it will be a nice companion piece to Ocean’s games. “There are differences in the home versions which I do want to include, for example, the alleyway shoot-out, and the photo e-fit sub-games. Some of the prologue phrases were a bit… oddly worded so I’ve changed those slightly to make it read better,” he adds. “I’ve also added a few things to the intro sequence, like the fourth directive and some moody music from Amiga . There’s also a nice cutscene before the level loads of the newsreaders explaining about the riot on downtown main street. Gameplay will obviously have to change slightly too, the arcade was easy to complete so long as you kept threading coins into it – but that’s not going to work with a home version, so I’ll have to think about that a bit.”
