POW - SNK's arcade beat em up is coming to the Amiga as an AGA edition

ESKAY has announced that he is working on a new project: a native conversion of the classic arcade brawler P.O.W. (Prisoners of War) by SNK. Driven by a childhood love for the game—having owned the original arcade JAMMA board as a teenager—and inspired by prominent scene figures like Hoffman, ESKAY has partially brought the game's first level to life on the Amiga 1200. Leveraging 25 years of professional coding experience alongside cutting-edge AI tools like Claude Code and Codex, the developer meticulously converted the arcade ROM machine code into clean C language. To pull this off, custom scripts extracted map data and sprite behaviours directly from the MAME emulator, while an AI-assisted debugging pipeline continuously cross-referenced the new C code parameters against the original arcade state to ensure absolute accuracy.

Though originally intended as a wild coding experiment that "got out of hand," the project has evolved into a highly optimized showcase of classic Amiga hardware capabilities. The Amiga platform layer employs sophisticated techniques, including triple buffering, full hardware scrolling, and a HUD rendered entirely via hardware sprites, allowing the game objects to run surprisingly smoothly on an A1200 equipped with a standard 020 processor and just 1MB of Fast RAM. Because ESKAY cleverly abstracted the core game engine from the machine-specific platform code, the underlying engine has also been successfully compiled as a proof-of-concept across other platforms like the Sharp X68000, Sega Mega Drive, Atari STE, and PC, though the Amiga version remains the most polished and robust. With the technical foundation firmly in place after four months of spare-time development, ESKAY is now actively looking for a talented musician to compose a custom Amiga audio .mod file for the first level, reserving roughly 100KB of memory exclusively to bring the arcade's gritty soundtrack to life.

Links :1) EAB 2) Download Alpha