-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 5
Porting to different platforms
First, we have to identify viable target platforms for a port. The most common non-8086 CPUs of the era were the Zilog Z80 and the Motorola 68000, as well as the less capable 6502. While tool-assisted decompilation and subsequent recompilation can be used to port the game logic, all target specific parts will have to be rewritten.
The ideal candidate for a first Z80 port appears to be the Enterprise 128 (or rather an emulation thereof), because it has 128 KiB of RAM (duh!), PC-like screen resolutions with sufficiently flexible palette and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to load Z80 COM-files from an MS-DOS formatted 720 KiB 3.5" floppy disk.
From there one can branch out to e.g. the Amstrad CPC 6128 with an external 3.5" floppy disk drive and a minimalistic custom DOS, and perhaps also to the MSX 2 or similar machines. Thanks to the Enterprise 128's flexible video hardware, the Amstrad CPC 6128 and Enterprise 128 can share the same video code, even though the Enterprise 128 should ideally use its native linear frame buffer. While the Amstrad CPC 6128 was much more widespread than the rather obscure Enterprise 128, the PC-compatible disk format combined with its CPC-compatible video hardware make the latter the preferable platform for an initial port.
On the MSX 2, the 160x200 pixel artwork could be trivially scaled to 480x200 pixels on a 512x212 pixel screen. Displaying 320x200 pixel artwork would be more difficult, though. What speaks for the MSX 2 is that it, as well, can use MS-DOS formatted 720 KiB 3.5" floppy disks.
The ATM Turbo, a Russian ZX Spectrum clone with various enhancements, is yet another interesting candidate, whereas the original ZX Spectrum is clearly not capable enough.
All of these machines have audio hardware suitable for converted Tandy music.
The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga come to mind. Both are more than capable enough and both can read MS-DOS formatted disks, even though the Amiga typically uses its own native format. Converted Tandy music can be used for both. The Amiga can enhance it with arbitrary wave forms. The Atari ST's MIDI ports can also be used with either MT-32 or General MIDI synthesizers.
Conveniently, an EmuTOS boot disk can be used to run a hardware independent or Amiga aware Atari ST executable on an Amiga.
This is pretty much just the Commander X16. Since there is going to be the dedicated Planet X16 for this machine, porting Planet X3 seems pointless.