Wonder Boy - HOT NEWS as an Arcade game from 1986 gets an unofficial Amiga port by Acidbottle

Wonder Boy is a game designed by Ryuichi Nishizawa which started its life as a skateboard rock jumping and axe bashing platformer, that later became the great adventure platformer with RPG elements known as ' Wonderboy in Monster Land '. Both of these games have lived on in the hearts of many, and as such, thanks to a heads up by Saberman, we've been told AcidBottle has released the much talked about Amiga port of the 1986 Arcade classic of 'Wonder Boy'.


Wonder Boy running on real hardware(not emulated)

We've mentioned a lot of Arcade conversions on Indie Retro News throughout the years, and you'll be pleased to learn that not only has Wonder Boy been created using Earok's amazing Scorpion engine using Aseprite and PPaint with a palette of 32 colours. But while the game does require an Amiga with 2MB Chip (020 cpu or better & fast ram highly recommend), you will be very much entertained traversing through 28 levels of deep dark forests, endless oceans and arid deserts, all the while, fending off nasty creatures and natural disasters.

Links :1) Website

26 comments:

  1. Scrolling seems VERY jittery, hopefully it's just the video

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    1. The video defaults at 360p 30fps.
      If you change the quality to 720p 50fps you will get smooth scrolling in the video.

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    2. Might be because of 50hz update in the game and 60fps youtube video, but the rest of the movement doesnt appear to be as jittery, so Im guessing the scrolling isnt perfect.
      Would be nice if the scrolling in the game is a bit smoother, but as long as it doesnt influence the game it doesn't matter too much in my opinion.
      As much of an improvement Scorpion Engine is vs. other similar tools on the Amiga it's never going to give results as good as something hand coded, even in something like AMOS, let alone lower level languages.

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    3. It looks fine to me - has the video been replaced?

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    4. Scrolling is smooth enough in game, no worries there!

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    5. NEW REAL HARDWARE VIDEO ADDED :D Enjoy!! :)

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  2. Not a great result for a 2MB+020 or better requirement...

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    1. Remember this is a game engine game. If it was not for Scorpion Engine this game would never happen. I think as long as you stay with original hardware specs. it is great. A1200 spec. OCS gfx.

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  3. Can this run in an Amiga 500?

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    1. if it has 2MB+020 or better...

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    2. If you have 1MB of chip and 1MB other RAM it will run.

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    3. Indeed it does, runs on all OCS ECS and AGA Amigas. Will require 2MB ram of which at least 1MB must be chip ram. An accelerated A500 is highly recommended.

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  4. 28 levels?! I was worse at this game then I thought.

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  5. The requirements are kind of wrong. The game require 2MB RAM but only 1MB of Chip any other 1MB of RAM will do. I tried the game on A500 with 1MB Chip and 1MB slow with 68000@14MHz and it ran perfect.

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  6. Thats still not an original specification though

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    1. It is! A1200 spec. is 2MB chip and that is all you need. Good thing is that if you have A500+ A600 or do a chip mod. on standard A500 you have 1MB chip and you need 1MB other RAM. This is like saying that Amiga 500 that is really 0,5MB and 90% of the games that are made for it use 1MB is not original spec.

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  7. You wrote "I tried the game on A500 with 1MB Chip and 1MB slow with 68000@14MHz " that is not an original specification.

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    1. Agree, PAL 68000 in A500 runs on 7.09Mhz.

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    2. That is true but that was just for information. The game run perfect on original A1200 that is a computer from 1992. Happy now :)

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    3. It's not a great accomplishment if you need an a1200 for a sideways scrolling game with a couple of sprites on screen.

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    4. Are you the resident internet buzzkill? Cheer up, or better still, please direct us to your awesome optimised arcade ports to show us how its done :)

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  8. Wonderboy is a fantastic port from the arcade and,in my opinion ,is a better port than Rygar or green beret...it works flawlessy on every amiga model,from a500 ocs to amiga 1200 aga etc...the scroll is smooth and 2mb of ram are really a little price to pay for this masterpiece! In addiction to this every amiga model from 1987 on,by the way, supported the expansion chip..It also demonstrate that is possible to create a great arcade conversion with bare minimum specs also with the Scorpion engine!! yeah it's not like programming Assembly but it's a great accomplishment by the way!! Cheers from Italy!!

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  9. Overall a very good conversion! But a pair of things can be improved: lagging scrolling could be silky smooth, and inertial controls in the arcade are much harder: player will slide much more after a slightly directional jump in the arcade (annoying but that was the original gameplay ;-))

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  10. Game and gameplay looks nice, when i see the youtube-video, but not really understandable, why this game needs a 020CPU and 2MB upwards? This is a problem of alot new released Amiga games, i have the feeling. When i compare this game here, to some of the old classic jump-and-runs, that all run on 1MB Amiga500, like for example "Superfrog, Arabian Nights, Fire and Ice, Lionheart and Soccer Kid" then it's even more understandable. Are construction-kits used nowadays, to make new games, which then means, that the system-requirements are much higher, than they were back then, or why is that? I don't want to talk bad about new released Amiga games and i am happy, that still new games for my beloved Amiga comes out, but I just always think to myself, when I see one of these new games, it should definitely be able, to work on a normal A500 with 1MB memory, compared to the old software of the 90's.

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    1. I'd argue it's inaccurate to call Scorpion a "Construction Kit" ? Construction kits are things like SEUCK and 3D Construction Kit. Ie: inflexible game engines that are little more than level editors with knobs on, and very little customisation. Scorpion is a modern graphical IDE you have to script heavily to make do almost anything.

      It'll never be as to the metal as a bespoke ASM game but it is not "a construction kit" any more than most modern game dev packages. Try making a game in it and you'll see what I mean. 😁

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  11. Some of these construction-kit style games are made in 32 colour, Wonderboy is no exception. This will eat up more more chip ram than games of old, many of which were crafted carefully in 16 colour palettes, or used a number of copper tricks to give the illusion of more. I think more could have been done to optimise but it may have ended up looking more like Thunderboy! There is certainly some trade offs with construction kit games, this is sadly unavoidable.

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