Return to an old project (briefly)

Tonight, prompted by postings on other forums, I returned to an old porting project in part upon request and in part to satisfy my own curiosity.

The project in question was Apple II Lode Runner, and the target platform was the Neo Geo.

Quite a while back I invested in a flash cart for the Neo Geo (AES) called the NeoSD. Aside from allowing you to play any and all Neo Geo titles on the console, it also allows you to play homebrew titles; something which was hitherto impossible without building and programming your own cartridge. As you can imagine, this was quite a serious impediment to any potential Neo Geo homebrew scene.

Anyway, I had never tried programming any of my ports - or any homebrew games for that matter - into the NeoSD. And since someone had asked about Lode Runner, it prompted me to pull the console out of my unfinished games room and finally learn how to do it.

After some research (detailed information is sorely lacking) and a little experimentation, I managed to get my Lode Runner ROMs into the correct format and loaded onto the SD card.

Apple II Title Screen

Attract mode game play

Bearing in mind that I had burned a CD for the NGCD in the past, I was confident it would actually run. But it's still pretty cool to see your project running on the AES after all this time!

Apologies for the potato camera. Aside from the obvious fuzziness, the colours are pretty washed out, in particular the orange which in actuality looks pretty much how it does look on the Apple II.

To re-cap, there was one last AI bug in the C port that I hadn't tracked down. It was evident only when comparing the attract mode game play, where the second screen exhibits slightly different behaviour from the guards near the end of the demo. It's lacking the "circular wipe" transition screen (problematic to implement on the sprite-only Neo Geo) and no sound. Those issues aside, completely playable.

We will now return to our regular programming.