Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap – Reverse engineering the 1989 original

Yeah i met Omar recently I believe it will release in this year.

I never played the original, as I was a Nintendo brat, but this looks really fun. I can't wait until they release, and I can buy it and add it somewhere in the playlist I have of a few hundred steam games from humble bundles...

See also the Monster Boy project.

Well, then they can't do widescreen, 60hz, etc. All of which they want to do and arguably have to do to sell it to console gamers nowadays. Aside from that, perhaps they want larger sprites, better physics, a different game saving mechanism, at some point you're holding yourself back by emulating.

And then there's the fact that this blog post just convinced me to buy this game.

I love wonderboy, I think it's extremely underrated and is as classic, and timeless, and as mechanically refined as Super Mario Bros. and Zelda were on NES. Master System just had so much less market penetration that Wonder Boy is now nowhere near the size of those other franchises, not because it lacks the merit, but because it lacked the publicity.

I had thought this was simply a "hand the IP to some new guys so we can milk the cash cow" when I saw the news that it was being made. The fact that these guys give this much of a damn has convinced me to pay full retail, I want them to be able to keep doing this kind of work after this game is done.

/my 2 cents

I think your approach is clever, and can result in a best-of-both-worlds situation where the original logic runs with improved assets. But I can also realistically see your solution as a stepping-stone to reverse-engineering the game logic itself to the point where it too can be replaced.

That _is_ what they're doing. They're not recreating it from scratch.

That's similar to the idea used in a lot of emulators, especially some of the Nintendo 64 ones, except that they programmed those to look for specific patterns of opcodes that they could replace with higher-level C/C++ functions. Some of the emulators might only support 1 or 2 games, but get phenomenal speed emulating them.

Somewhat separate, but related, I remember one of the video plugins that would accept external images as replacements for in-game textures.

Anyhow, I agree that for at least some games, replacing parts of the code makes getting the game running with some degree of improvement easier than completely re-implementing it. On the other hand, I like the idea of reverse-engineering the original binary, and along with an engine re-implementation, providing documentation of how the game originally worked. I think of it as a kind of software archaeology.

Weren't most TV's running 25hz or 29.97hz? Double for interlace, but that would still be ~30 fps?

Yes. It was more common than you think to use a 30hz update, even back then - those CPUs simply couldn't do very much, and it made more intensive scenes possible. Mega Man, to name one famous example, struggles to hit 30hz at points. The arcade Double Dragon seems to manage perhaps 20hz on average.

Please please please come to GoG. I'll buy it wherever it comes out and I can play it (Vita/PS3/Windows/Linux(!) ) Just don't bother too hard on Vita; I'll never be able to play it on mine.

I think you mean late-morning coffee music. :P