
Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap – Reverse engineering the 1989 original - eriknstr
http://www.thedragonstrap.com/blog/post/201609_ReverseEngineering/
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rckclmbr
What nostalgia-- I loved this game as a kid, and haven't seen it brought up
for a long time. Technical details aside, I would love to play this in
widescreen.

Edit: wow, I just checked out the domain, they are completely updating it??
Everything looks true to the original. I love it.
[http://www.thedragonstrap.com/](http://www.thedragonstrap.com/)

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kbenson
I never played the original, as I was a Nintendo brat, but this looks really
fun. I can't wait until they release, and I can buy it and add it somewhere in
the playlist I have of a few hundred steam games from humble bundles...

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pepijndevos
Is the disassembled and annotated code online somewhere?

I've had a lot of fun reading disassemblies of Pokemon Red
[https://github.com/pret/pokered](https://github.com/pret/pokered)

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ggambetta
While I admire the sheer skill necessary to reverse engineer a game to that
degree (and starting from making a hardware dump!), I can't think but helping
that the approach I propose at
[http://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html](http://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html)
would take far less work than recreating the game from scratch.

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kayamon
That _is_ what they're doing. They're not recreating it from scratch.

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ggambetta
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't get that impression on a first read,
but ended up having a chat with the OP and I'm now even more impressed by what
they're doing!

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danschuller
This is really neat.

I'd curious to see the movement code they ended up using in their own game,
though it's understandable if they don't want to share it.

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dchuk
Every time I read things like this, I am fucking awed by the skill of the
authors. I consider myself fairly technical but this stuff is next level.
Deconcstructing a game is one thing, but writing and teaching about it is a
whole different ballgame. Very impressive.

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thought_alarm
Neat. But why does he say that the original ran at only 30 FPS?

Virtually all of the sprite-and-tile games of the era ran at 60 FPS. Is Wonder
Boy III so complex that it only updates sprite and scroll positions every
second VSYNC signal?

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0x0
Weren't most TV's running 25hz or 29.97hz? Double for interlace, but that
would still be ~30 fps?

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izacus
PAL TVs had 50Hz interlaced screen refresh (each refresh updated only half of
scanlines, but that's not the same as having a 25Hz refresh). NTSC was 59.94
Hz.

The console hardware had to drive an actual 50/60Hz signal and you had to
account for that - including doing some updates/color switches/bank switches
in horizontal blank interval (when the cannon was returning to the left side
to start a new line) and vertical blank interval (a longer one, when cannon
was returning to the top to start displaying another interlaced field -
"frame"). So you couldn't just behave like you have a 25/29.97 Hz refresh.

A lot of games did the refresh in lockstep with this frequency so there were
actual issues porting them between regions.

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phjesusthatguy3
I've played all (I think) the Monster World games, from the Sega Master
System, to the arcade (on MAME), to the Sega Genesis, to the ports on TurboCD
and Game Gear -- I'm really looking forward to this one too. It's just too bad
it's not coming to Vita, where I play the majority of my games these days.

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phjesusthatguy3
Please please please come to GoG. I'll buy it wherever it comes out and I can
play it (Vita/PS3/Windows/Linux(!) ) Just don't bother too hard on Vita; I'll
never be able to play it on mine.

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walkingolof
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpP2X6-ia4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpP2X6-ia4)

Excellent remix of the theme for the game .... its Saturday evening after all
:)

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kbenson
I think you mean late-morning coffee music. :P

