First, I have been following your blog for the last few years and love your projects.
Second, do you think you could port Ozma Wars since its SI based? I had always thought it would be nice to have SNK's "first" game put on Neo.
Thanks! Ooh, didn't know about Ozma Wars, nor the link with SNK! That would be seriously cool - yes!!!
Not to derail this thread with OT banter, but Knight Lore was ported from the (Z80-based) ZX Spectrum to the (6502-based) Atari 800 by first running the code through a Z80-to-6502 translation tool. A tall order for a 1.8MHz 6502 to emulate a 3.5MHz Z80 and not surprisingly it did require some hand optimisations but ultimately it was successful and by all reports ran as fast as the original. With this in mind, I'd like to think that the Neo Geo would be capable of running auto-translated 2MHz 8080 code without much issue... maybe that's the way to go with Space Invaders and Ozma Wars???
Sorry, another edit, another tangent, but Knight Lore on the Neo Geo is actually a C port that I wrote as a
direct translation of the original Z80 code. I contemplated doing the same for Space Invaders, but the code simply doesn't lend itself to a C implementation. Knight Lore was a really nicely written piece of code, and only jumped around in a few cases, and returned a few levels up the call stack once or twice. As a result, the C code is quite nice as well, mirroring the Z80 code quite closely. Space Invaders jumps all over the place, and has two ISRs which do much of the work; a C port wouldn't resemble the original code at all.
Would be interesting to crack open Ozma Wars and see how the code looks...
OK, last edit - I promise! Had a quick look at a YouTube video of the Ozma Wars gameplay. From what I saw, this could probably be ported to the Neo Geo without a bitmap layer, especially if the code is nicely written. In fact, for Space Invaders I contemplated attempting it, as 95% of the game consists of objects that could be translated to sprites. The sticking point in Space Invaders was the shields, and the damaged caused by player shots and alien bombs. I couldn't see a way of being able to replicate that with even a silly number of sprites. Note also that both Lode Runner and Knight Lore were originally written for bitmap systems, and it's fortunate that the nature of the game and the coding lent itself to the use of sprites instead. Ozma Wars could potentially do so as well.