Commando – 1980’s military shooter by Capcom is getting an Amiga AGA edition via JOTD [UPDATE]

The legend that is JOTD, who has done many conversions such as Double Dragon, Ghosts’n Goblins, and Xevious, is bringing Capcom’s classic vertical shooter Commando to the Amiga as an enhanced AGA edition. The upcoming conversion leverages the Advanced Graphics Architecture of the Amiga 1200 and 4000, hopefully bringing an arcade-faithful experience that aims to surpass previous home ports. While Elite Systems originally released a well-received ECS/OCS port for the platform back in 1989. JOTD has acknowledged that the classic Elite version remains a quality conversion, noting that the architecture of the game wasn’t overly complex to adapt, making an upgraded, arcade-accurate AGA version an enticing challenge he couldn’t pass up.

JOTD’s updated version

The prominent developer, renowned for high-quality arcade-to-Amiga transcodes like Double Dragon and Ghosts’n Goblins, revealed that this project marks a return to his specialized porting techniques. JOTD explained that he selected Commando specifically to kickstart his Z80 assembly-to-68000 binary conversion efforts again, utilizing the project to fine-tune and perfect his custom-built code translation tools. Just beware however, that JOTD has stated that the conversion is still in its early stages. The current software framework has visual glitches and some bugs, but early previews successfully convey the definitive direction and high potential of the final release.

Original Version

[UPDATE] Great news for a Saturday as JOTD has released another downloadable build with the following being said ” Playable version available (whdload/HD only)! New fixes include blocked paths and buggy scrolling titles, optimizations, awesome albeit incomplete music by IM76, and second button usage for grenade throws. Just be aware there’s missing end level music, highscores are not saved, sprites disappear too soon on the bottom and sometimes missing sprites (palm trees) in the center.

Extra Info :

• I needed a simple yet properly coded & reversed game to test my new Z80 converter. Game was disassembled by Scott Tunstall (who also did a few other Z80 ones and which helped me a lot). It was incomplete and I completed it a little bit to be able to convert the code. 
• I wanted to do that game not because I like it (I never played it in the arcades, or even on amiga), also not because the amiga conversion is bad (it is awesome for OCS) but it seemed fun and doable, with a hardware close from Ghosts’N’Goblins. Capcom code has good quality like Konami & Sega but unlike Namco shit, so it seemed easier to do that starting with DigDug or others.”

And that’s all there is to say, so for now check out the beta below  

Links 1) Download 2) Discussion