Some of you may already be familiar with this phenomenal PC-98 Doujin Shmup, personally it's one of my favourites in the genre, easily my No. 1 on the system (not like there's much competition)
For those who aren't, here's a little video of it:
So, since the PCE is the king of shmups, it would only make sense for me to imagine what would this game look, sound and play like on the system right?
Well, anybody who's listened to my album (Which btw can be found here:
https://michirin9801.bandcamp.com/releases) already has kind of an idea what this game could sound like on the PCE, but then there's the whole rest...
As far as I'm aware, the PC-98 is even more limited than the PCE in terms of parallax scrolling, the thing can't even smoothly scroll a background horizontally, it has to do that tile by tile, or do some witchcraft like C-Lab and Melody did when they were making Rusty, Totsugeki Mix and Night Slave, that said though, the system has no issues with vertical scrolling, most likely because it was meant to scroll text... It also only has 1 BG layer btw, and its "sprite layer" isn't technically a "sprite layer" per-se, it's complicated and I don't know the specifics...
Anyway, with that in mind, this game pulls off loads of parallax scrolling on the system, which is a bit of a rarity in case you couldn't tell by the aforementioned limitations! Well, being able to show a whole load of sprites on-screen without flickering does help it pull that off, but you know, I was wondering how that could be done on the PCE, because well, the limited amount of sprites on-screen and per-scanline would certainly bottleneck what you could do without flickering... As you can see in the video, this game throws bullets and enemies at you like there's no tomorrow, add the BG sprites on top of that and it will certainly flicker, but still, I'd really like to see the PC engine doing something like that...
The parallax isn't the only thing I've been thinking of though, but also about the resolution, you see, this game runs on a mode on the PC-98 that cuts the horizontal resolution to 448 pixels as opposed to the usual 640, and that allows this game to run at 60fps, or at least I'm assuming it does, because every PC-98 game I've ever seen running at 60fps uses this mode (Rude Breaker and Touhou come to mind) but you can still display still graphics and text on the unused horizontal resolution which is nice and is how they did the HUD for this game (and for Touhou too), so I was thinking of different ways we could port the graphics, parallax aside, to the PC engine, and I have 2 ideas:
1 - We could use the 512 pixel mode to do a near-perfect port of the game's graphics (side-bar HUD aside, unless you'd be okay with making it only 64 pixels wide, which honestly, isn't enough), but well, I don't think that would be the best idea, because that would mean more flickering and we'd only be using 16 colours for the graphics, which honestly, sounds like a complete waste of the system's colour potential, not like we need to make it hyper colourful or anything, but with just a few extra colours we could make the PCE version look even better than the PC-98 one at half the resolution, which leads me to:
2 - Use the 320 pixel mode, remake the graphics to better suit the PCE (but still keep them somewhat close to the original) why the 320 pixel mode and not the 256 one you ask? Because that way we'd be working with exactly half the PC-98's horizontal resolution, so we could make the gameplay take place on a 224 pixel play field on the left and have a 96 pixel side-bar with the HUD on it on the right, so it would look just like the original! That bar would of course be rendered as a vertical stripe of the BG and no sprite would ever be on top of it, that way we'd be able to cover the entire horizontal length of the 'background' with only 7 sprites, not that it would be needed very often, but still...
I imagine you could also flicker some sprites by priority, like for example stars behind the BG, they wouldn't be missed too much in case of there being too many sprites on the same scanline, and of course, we'd have to tone down the amount of bullets some enemies throw at you, and the number of 'floors' the buildings in stage 2 have, (the ones in stage 4 and the end of stage 3 could be done with vertical BG stripes) there are also some clever zooming and rotation effects that could be done by moving different vertical stripes of the BG apart from one another and moving sprites around respectively...
Back on the topic of sound, this game has 2 versions of the soundtrack, there's the MONO version for the YM2203 (OPN) soundchip, and the Stereo version for the YM2608 (OPNA), and some of the compositions are actually different depending on which version you pick, and even the ones that aren't sound pretty different depending on the soundchip, so I was thinking, wouldn't it be awesome if this theoretical PCE port also had 2 versions of the soundtrack?
Like, we could do PSG covers of the MONO version for the regular old PCE, and covers of the Stereo version for systems with CD attachments and the DUOs, those would take advantage of the ADPCM channel to play percussion and free up a channel to do some phasing, reverb or play a triad instead of a power chord! But of course, both versions of the soundtrack would be in Stereo, so the versions would need to be renamed "PSG" and "CD" as opposed to "MONO" and "Stereo", also yes, we'd do this on a Hu-Card... (There goes my dream of making a Hu-Card game with support for sampled percussion on the CD ADPCM again)
I think I've already rambled for long enough, keep in mind this is all hypothetical, it's probably never gonna happen, and even if it did happen it would most likely be just a 1 stage demo, this is all just some food for thought, but yeah, I like to imagine what this game would be like on the PCE...
