Hehe, I was talking only about the scroll

Of course the rest of the game could be a PITA. But hey!, implement the extensible arm with sprites is, after all, a good idea. The arm always (IIRC) extends over the head of the main character and never in horizontal direction; not sure right now...

Hard job anyway!

This thread remembers me other old Magaman discussion, hehehe, but anyway... any game is doable in MSX. I just made a little work on it, to see how it could look on MSX1. Here you have some fake shots:



Again this is my point of view on how to face a conversion. Probably there are other ways but I think this fits the best. Again, think about how is the original Nemesis (arcade) and the MSX conversion of it: comparin' both games, the MSX one could look as crap, but is a GREAT game. Why?. Because it has the original spirit of the game within, and because it do it the best the MSX can: that is the best way to face a conversion of a game with higher specs than the MSX have(always talkin' about MSX1)



The main character would be done using sprites (2 in a row), the same for some of the enemies. Enemies with no movement (or just objects) can be made using patterns. The same goes for all shoots in the game. The expanding arm frames can be done using patterns too (just remember Athletic Land). The thing is that all patterns for "background" tiles should be blank: I tried to hide that problem making a bi-color background (first bank=blue, 2nd and 3rd=green), and a line of mountains that divide that bg color. When horizontal scrolling (8x8 pixels) the mountains will scroll pixel by pixel due to redefinition. When vertical scrolling, that horizon won't move at all. It's tricky, beacuse as it's divided thinkin' on how pattern banks work, there is no process time thinkin' on what bg must have the tile, in the first bank will be blue just by printing it. Anyway, this conversion (as all back-specs conversion) should be studied a lot (more than I did), because I do not know the game in-depths so probably other stages will work differently and i'm missing something . But anyway I think this way the game will work and would be fun.

Again, it's better to think this way. Note that the gb, NES, arcade, speccy versions are all VERY different, because they try to make the game fit to the hardware specs. If we think Bionic Commando is imposible to make on MSX(1), then Salamander or Twinbee are impossible to make too

You are not only enthusiastic here, jltursan! 

Those "fake" screenshots look already very promising!! ( why they must be called as fake... they are real screenshots! )

They look much like old Sega SG and other similar systems´ megagame screenshots! Ingame shot has really nice old feeling as tree leaves don´t have any details. But I must say I envy a bit the spectrum conversion as speccy has tree leaves!  Bad Speccy.   

As always...I love this man !! in a couple of words...A MASTER :god: :god: :god:

KNM
Straigth man,of course... ;

Sorry... I was making a preview screenshot too... 

How can I attach it in here?

<Long Live Sprites!>--- 

Your screenshots do look too Gooood!!! 

by the way, what program did you use to make those two fake MSX screenshots, Leandro?


Viejo, I think that the horizon is not the main element in Bionic Commando  If it appears to be hard to make horizon which does not move along scrolling, then just drop it, it doesn´t affect to gameplay anyway.  Most players probably don´t notice at all your programming skills, if there would be realistic non-moving horizon. (how could they know it was very hard to make it? And even if they would know, would they care?) Playable game is the most important thing, nice graphical effects should come after good playability. I think it is enough, if background is just black behind the forest, and when you climb high enough, cyan sky would scroll from the top of the screen, I think it will look good even the horizon will scroll down when you climb upwards. I mean horizon will not scroll by itself, it is just part of the scrolling background.

Grrrreat pics!!
I like best the first version Leandro did. The horizon seems a bit unrealistic and the full trees creates a much darker and deeper scenary than with sky. Now we can add the Viejo dual sprites and we'll have a very good looking MSX version.
Btw, the bionic arm sprite trick seems clever; but it could be a bit tricky to implement. If the sprite must move at his maximum speed to fake a full extended arm, it can't be interrupt controlled; so you must implement a main game loop using the interrupt and move this kind of sprites out of it. Doable; but not easy...I think.