Caiusarcade has just released an early build of an unofficial fan port of Taito's 1989 horizontal shooter Insector X for the Commodore Amiga. Rather than building a remake from the ground up, this conversion uses static recompilation to translate the original arcade machine's dual Z80 processors straight into native 68020 code. Every piece of game logic, artwork, and audio is pulled straight from the coin-op original, with the developer and the full use of AI assistance verifying the translated code frame by frame and matching the Amiga display pixel by pixel against the arcade release.
To get this arcade-accurate insect blaster running, you will need an Amiga 1200 (or another AGA based machine) equipped with a hard drive, Kickstart 3.x, around 1.3 MB of free chip RAM, and at least 4 MB of fast RAM, though 8 MB is ideal. While a stock 14 MHz 68020 keeps the gameplay and music running at full speed with a lower refresh rate during hectic moments, stepping up to a 50 MHz 68030 or faster delivers faster performance throughout most of the action. Setting up the game is also straightforward if you have the ROMS, as users can compile the build using a simple one-click tool on Windows 10 or 11, or put it together on Linux and macOS using Python 3 and vasm.
- Please note the Audio seems to be broken in the video which may be early beta related
AI Disclosure AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Sounds, Text
Links :1) Source 2) Download Full Pack via Amiga France (Check Source for latest main files to update)
Nice! No mega drive dev expertise here.. but taking inspiration from the Amiga's coprocessor to do copper gradients, would it be possible to do something similar with horizontal interrupts instead? Or would that compromise other aspects of the port? It could certainly save colours if possible.
ReplyDeleteHistorical note: this game was the original inspiration for Apidya. I note that Apidya runs at a super-smooth 50fps, though.
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