This week just gets better and better as another game has hit our news feeds and it's none other than Double Dragon for the Amiga, but as an AGA edition. First released way back in the 80's by Taito Corporation, Double Dragon in the Arcades was a fantastic beat 'em up game that featured high grade fighting two player fun on many different systems such as the Amstrad, Amiga and C64. But now thanks to JOTD, he is working on bringing the Amiga version more in line with the Arcade. In fact one person even said "I honestly thought that the original was the worst home conversion that could possibly exist."
The long-standing quest to bring a definitive, arcade-quality version of Double Dragon to the Amiga could be reaching its full potential. Legendary porter JOTD (Jean-François Fabre) has provided a significant update on the project, which is being developed specifically for AGA-equipped Amigas (such as the A1200 and A4000). After what JOTD described as "brutal debugging sessions," the developer has successfully stabilized the core of the game, with scrolling still to fix and a completable game. While the original 1980s Amiga port was often criticized for poor graphics and lackluster performance, this new AGA edition which also features music by n09, aims to leverage the advanced chipset to deliver a much more faithful recreation of the arcade original.
- This project follows JOTD’s successful track record of high-quality Amiga conversions, including recent releases like Dig Dug 2 (January 2026) and Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja. His ports are known for being "transcodes" that often use original arcade code (z80 to 68k assembly) to ensure maximum accuracy.
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How does the conversion work? Do you take the original ROM and “transcode” the code to make it compatible with the Amiga? I’d like to understand more about this kind of conversion
ReplyDeleteLook up Reassembler on youtube, He did an outrun arcade to Amiga conversion and is currently working on Sonic Megadrive to Amiga conversion.
DeleteYes, it's is roughly the same process, except that Reassembler uses 68000 code, and here code must be converted from 6809 to 68000 first, which is no picnic.
DeleteI had the original Amiga port way back in the day, and it was pretty bad even then. A shame because the Amiga could surely have done much better.
ReplyDeleteI can’t decide whether the old Amiga port is more bad or hilarious. It’s so typical 80’s. A lot of the beat em up games had terrible controls which was always my main issue. The PC version I had on a 5 1/4 floppy disk looked far worse. Who would have known that decades later arcade perfect ports would be released not by the companies but by fans who care.
ReplyDeleteTry the Commodore 64 port.
DeleteThen you'll have seen how bad Double Dragon conversions really were.
Amiga users, you've hit the jackpot with JOTD =)
ReplyDeleteAhhh! Finally the conversion we always dreamed of for the Amiga (perfectly capable to do a decent job at that time already...). Glorious DD probably received the worst computer/console conversions ever in the history of arcade conversions
ReplyDeleteRest in Peace, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, creator of Double Dragon and Renegade and all its River City sequels, who just died at the age of 64. His legacy will last forever.
ReplyDeleteCongrats ! Please make an .adf version.
ReplyDeleteFinally, the definitive conversion for AMIGA!!!
ReplyDeleteIt arrives just as the creator of the original ARCADE game leaves us.
RIP, great Yoshihisa Kishimoto, you brightened up my arcade childhood.
This is brilliant! Why all the negativity?
ReplyDeleteHow many people run original OCS hardware these days?
Perhaps JOTD might consider an OCS version if he connects with the guy who was working on the OCS port a few years back, as he had a prototype under way in the Scorpion Engine with 32 colours visuals completed. 68000 cpu should have enough power to do the game at 25fps. Just a matter of swapping out the visuals and then optimising.
What an impressive job he does.
ReplyDeleteLooks like an ECS version might be in the works too "ECS version is planned but 32 colors will make this horribly washed. I know that the Scorpion demo is super good even better and faster than this port even if this is just a video and you cannot play it, but to achieve this you need to rework all tiles & sprites. The game is using more than 256 colors, and it changes colors for tiles during level 1 already
ReplyDeleteI'll try with brutal quantizing but I think this will suck"
Some of you guys are taking this way off track, to the point you are attacking each other. Come on guys play nice please! Don't drag the site down. I for one have a huge respect for JOTD and every developer out there. I could never dream of creating an Amiga game let alone having the time to do so. As for AGA, atleast JOTD has hinted he might be working on an ECS version as well. So lets see what happens next :)
ReplyDeleteThe Original Arcade game uses 3 buttons : punch, kick and jump. How about this amiga Version ?
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of controllers with enough buttons can be used ?
it will be sega 3 button, CD32, or ... keyboard :)
ReplyDeleteYou can use loads of buttons on an Amiga, Cd32 pads are a thing.
ReplyDeleteA500 was powerful enough to have perfect ports of the arcade games from the era. The problem was programmers should code the game to use Amiga's cuatom chips and all the 'tricks' that they could do. Motorola 68k was was quite weak CPU even at the time when A1000 was released. All the magic was within the custom chips which were true marvel and they were simply ahead of it's time. Games like Lionheart or Elf Mania showed how powerful OCS/ECS chipset was. The main bottleneck of the Amiga was floppy medium and RAM. 2MB of RAM and additional cartridge slot like in MSX computers would made Amiga not only better machine but it would extend the lifespan of the machine. Even Chip/Fast Memory architecture was amazing thing. Adding Fast RAM made the machine faster which was ahead of it's time again. Some people say that Amiga wasn't good computer for office work which is wrong. Hardware multitasking was outstanding on this machine and only the mai
ReplyDeletedevelopers of office software didn't really understood how to use the potential. But still plenty of great offi e apps were released after the C= flop. Wordworth was pretty good WYSIWYG word processor, especially if you had 4MB of RAM and Harddrive. I had a lot of fun using it with my Star LC10 dot matrix printer. Very user friendly app and I was like 15 years old when I was using it. Still can't get over the fact that Amiga isn't the third power on the market nowadays, but thanks to emulation I still have lots of fun withplaying games and using Amiga productivoty software. Cheers. :)
wrong analogy with specifically designed amiga games. A500 7MHz cannot cope with games like this (unchanged) there are just too many colors and objects on screen at the same time. Arcade hardware is merciless. But with some fastmem, mild acceleration and AGA, more things become possible.
ReplyDelete