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Retro (TimeExtension) How R-Type was de-made for the Game Boy before demakes were a thing

PixelKnight

Observing the process
Pronouns
He/Him

Fascinating article on Jas Austin, who had only ZX Spectrum experience when he worked on the porting process here, I loved this game as a kid.

What tricks did you use in order to shrink a coin-op down to work on a monochrome portable?

One sneaky trick I used was multiplexing the sprites. Because of the screen was LCD, there was a very slight latency when turning off a sprite. So I was able to re-use some sprites by switching them every other frame. Because of the latency, they just appeared duller than normal. I used this mostly on bullets and the large R9 weapons, like the ripple laser.

What was the hardest aspect of the port?

The hardest was the constant fight with memory. Back then, the cartridge size had a huge impact on production cost, so we always tried to use the smallest cart size we could. This was why two levels were cut straight away. Video space was also a problem. With the first level, we couldn't fit both the background graphics and the boss in V-RAM. So you'll notice a very short pause before the boss, this is where I dump some of the now unused background characters and replace them with the boss graphics.

How long did it to take to complete the conversion?

It's so long ago I can't remember how long it took us. I think it was a few months in total. I do recall that with the first meeting with Foo, I walked away with a basic dev kit, and we were tasked to get a first pass on level one in two weeks or so. There were some late nights, but we managed it. Having never developed on the Game Boy, I was certainly thrown in at the deep end

Also, I wasn’t even aware there was an unreleased GBC port of Jet Force Gemini!
Can you give us a little snapshot of where your career has taken you since the Game Boy days?
After R-Type, I worked on a number of other Game Boy games including Terminator 2, Alien 3 and two Spider-Man games. I stayed at Bits till the end, around 2006 working on various other consoles. Including coding and co-designing the unreleased GBC version of Jet Force Gemini


Much more at the link.
 
Oh god i had this cartridge. Taking the differences in account, it was amazing how good it ran on the GB and how much it looked like the SNES counterpart.
 
Oh god i had this cartridge. Taking the differences in account, it was amazing how good it ran on the GB and how much it looked like the SNES counterpart.
The art was amazing seeing as it was effectively drawn from scratch for a different screen size in four colours.

I think it had five levels and I don’t think I ever beat level 4.
 
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The art was amazing seeing as it was effectively drawn from scratch for a different screen size in four colours.

I think it had five levels and I don’t think I ever beat level 4.
It really shows the difference when the art is drawn from scratch for the GB screen.

In Jeremy Parish' Game Boy World series the issue appears time and time again. It's clear wich games have been drawn from scratch, wich games have edited sprites and wich ones are straight NES ports.

I never beat level 4 either xD classic R-Type games were hard af.
 
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I loved R-Type on the GameBoy and even the little drawing mode hidden in the game ^^.
 
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Great interview but the notion of "demakes" being some recent concept is bizarre given how many arcade games were squeezed down to early and mid 80s consoles and micros. It's not really new at all, hell it's was Game Boy's whole business model upfront. R-Type wasn't even unique in that on it's platform.
 
Great interview but the notion of "demakes" being some recent concept is bizarre given how many arcade games were squeezed down to early and mid 80s consoles and micros. It's not really new at all, hell it's was Game Boy's whole business model upfront. R-Type wasn't even unique in that on it's platform.
Oh for sure. There were some really interesting ones across the GB and GBC, pretty much any port counts as one, particularly later on when you started getting GB ports of 16-bit games.
 
Game Boy has a lot of games that run better than their SNES counterparts and closer to the NES/arcade originals. It's an incredibly system.
I feel like the same philosophy existed well onto the GBA and DS too. There’s DS versions of multiplat games that are just completely different from the home console ones, made by different developers, and in some cases that use the system well too.
 
Yeah, it's for real very amazing what they managed to do with the OG Gameboy and the GBC considering the hardware limitations.
 
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Seems kind of a loose premise, there were plenty of 'demakes' prior to this, as long as the gaming medium has had more than one platform, so has the concept existed because the search for more money persist. You can just as easily point to something like Frogger on the 2600 as a demake of the arcade game, essentially the most relevant software on that system were 'demakes'. Donkey Kong arcade probably has a dozen of them as well.

That said, it's still very cool, I have a particular fascination with this side of gaming and often buy multiple versions just because of it.
 
Seems kind of a loose premise, there were plenty of 'demakes' prior to this, as long as the gaming medium has had more than one platform, so has the concept existed because the search for more money persist. You can just as easily point to something like Frogger on the 2600 as a demake of the arcade game, essentially the most relevant software on that system were 'demakes'. Donkey Kong arcade probably has a dozen of them as well.

That said, it's still very cool, I have a particular fascination with this side of gaming and often buy multiple versions just because of it.
I think that’s just a lack of clarity in the headline if read in isolation. In the first para they clarify they mean the modern idea of a demake as in modern games (or a slice of them) remade to look decades older to invoke nostalgia. I agree there were tons of what were essentially demakes on computers and consoles in the 80s (so mostly before GB ports) given how common it was for a ‘port’ to be both based on arcade games and/or the game rebuilt from scratch for weaker hardware, years later. The sheer amount of hardware at the time too- pretty much any arcade game ported to GB or Spectrum or C64 or NES etc was a demake by definition, so was any console/computer version of anything with arcade origins, where the goal was to get it as close as possible. Some succeeding more than others. Sega had so many of them too due to the origins in arcade of so many of their big hitters of the time.

Even the 16-bit machines of the time were often ‘demakes’. Didn’t stop us arguing over the pros and cons of the various SNES/Megadrive/Amiga versions! Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat on GB in the 90s are the ones that always springs to mind as a ‘demake’ for me!

Platformers, Shmups, scrolling fighters, fighting games. I always remember checking out the arcades when I was on holiday for a glimpse of what might land on consoles (that I wouldn’t be able to afford) in the following year or two! :)
The concept of 'de-making' a game is one that most modern players will be familiar with; you take a recent title, strip it down to its bare essentials and then make it 'work' in a retro-style, taking inspiration from classic machines such as the NES, ZX Spectrum or Mega Drive. It's a fun approach which allows developers to flex their creative muscle and see how modern games could look if they were somehow flung back in time a few decades.
 
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I'm gonna join in on saying that R-type for gameboy wasn't the 1st "demake". Ports of games to much weaker system, especially of arcade games, were super common. GB R-Type being good isn't even exceptional, see a huge portion of the NES library as an example.
 


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