Galaga – An Arcade classic as a new Commodore Amiga conversion by JOTD and team!

Remember when we said that a possible 1:1 Arcade conversion of Galaga was coming to the Commodore Amiga thanks to the hard work of JOTD and team? Well if you’ve been following all of our previous articles on Indie Retro News, then you’ll be pleased to know that as of today you can download the final version which is feature complete! A game that was originally developed and published by Namco Japan and by Midway in North America in 1981.

As we said before, Galaga puts you in control of a mighty spaceship that must destroy waves of enemy formations that are out to destroy or capture you! As for this latest release, rest assured that if you have a Commodore Amiga and have played any of JOTD’s previous Arcade conversions such as Phoenix, Tetris, or even our personal favourite Donkey Kong, then you’ll love this new conversion that is available right now!

Credits:

• – Jean-Francois Fabre (aka jotd): Z80 to 68k transcode, Amiga code, sound and assets
• – Glenn Neidermeier: Z80 reverse-engineering (https://github.com/neiderm/arcade)
• – Mark McDougall (aka tcdev): graphical assets (ROM extract)
• – no9: remade amiga tunes
• – DanyPPC: amiga icon
• – phx: ptplayer sound/music replay Amiga code
• – blastar: NGFX SoundBuilder (Neo Geo sound tool)
• – Namco: original game 🙂

Changes:

• – fully playable with sound
• – all game bugs fixed (now a few graphical minor bugs remaining)
• – this is still slow at 25FPS on a plain A500 or even A1200. Speed is good on a fastmem-equipped amiga, it will run at 50FPS.

Dev Notes : Final version released on itch. I’ve added 17FPS option (1 frame out of 3) and it runs but is very jerky. I’ve tried everything to make it run faster on plain A500 at 25Hz but it’s still slow despite a lot of optimizations. Runs perfectly at 50FPS on fastmem-equipped amigas…A lesson learned: too many small objects on the screen is too much for vanilla machines. Slightly disappointed, as the game is great and it took me several months to transcode it prorperly, even with the source code.

Links :1) Source