>for some odd reason Double Dragon gets this Mega Drive port in 1993, like half a decade after the arcade game was relevant
>it's an unlicensed Accolade cart produced under contract by some guys called Ballistix
>being an unlicensed game it was also done on the cheap and so only a 4 megabit ROM
>the game kind of suffers for it, lot of missing sprite frames etc (think the arcade game was like 2 megabytes in size)
>also it's of course not a source port, it was made by the programmers just playing and memorizing an arcade cab so the mechanics, enemy AI, etc are horribly inaccurate
Might have been an ok rental back in the day and it's still better than the assortment of utterly horrifying home computer ports of the game, but...meh.
it came out in the arcades in 87 and beat-em-ups had evolved a lot since then. it would be acceptable as an early MD port in 89-90 but by 93 the game was just too simplistic.
even the arcade game was a little underwhelming, it has a lot of slowdown as they didn't optimize the code very well
I loved this game. Still beat it once in awhile. It's got some good mods for it that make it closer to the arcade.
>like half a decade after the arcade game was relevant
The Double Dragon series was extremely relevant for most of the 90's. It was a series which named most kids knew, so it was always relevant.
and 1993 saw the release of Battletoads & Double Dragon, which only get ported to MD a year after. This release makes a lot of sense to me.
Also, 1993 was when the animated series was made. The movie would come out in 1994. The franchise was at its peak of popularity
>Also, 1993 was when the animated series was made. The movie would come out in 1994. The franchise was at its peak of popularity
Was it really, it seemed to me they were TRYING to make it remain really popular but kinda failed, as neither the cartoon and toyline or the live action movie were exactly rousing successes. DD definitely was well known as a series but I'd say kind of overshadowed in the gaming world by its competitors like Final Fight and Streets of Rage, despite all the stuff coming out.
Technos was a small company, they just didn't have Capcom's promotional budget and they also completely blew the transition to 16-bit consoles.
all I know is that were I lived, Double Dragon was known by every pre-teens. You go to a friend's place ? You're gonna either be playing Double Dragon 2 in coop, or taking turns in DD1; and occasionally find someone who has DD3. Everybody who was into video games had played a DD game at some point but nobody knew SoR or Final Fight.
It's just personal experience but where I lived Double Dragon was huge and that mostly due to being on the NES. I got the movie on VHS and watched it many times.
SoR and FF were on 16-bit and then were considered for older kids
I get that, though my experience was kind of opposite. I was way more familiar with the bigger SNES and Genesis games when I was younger, NES properties I mostly knew of just because of name recognition, but I never played a NES in my youth. I was very aware of Double Dragon as a series, but the beat em ups I played most as a kid were Streets of Rage and Golden Axe on Genesis, and Turtles on SNES.....of course though, this is also just because those were the games I had available
>some guys called Ballistix
ballistic. it's accolade's own label that they used for their unlicensed ports.
it did need at least 8 megabit ROM to be a creditable port. the arcade game predates the MD by a year, it would be simple to do a port of it.
it also needed Japs to not hose the whole thing up. Western dev on consoles was almost always AIDS.
I'm surprised the fans havent done that yet to be honest, we have the software and tools these days.
>I'm surprised the fans havent done that yet to be honest, we have the software and tools these days.
they're too busy discussing the C64 and Amiga DD remasters that they will never do
Not as weird port as the official Atari 2600 port of same game. And by Activision from all companies.
in that case it was a technical miracle that they could even port the game at all. for the Mega Drive it was underwhelming and a case of "could have been better had it not been done on a $20 budget."
>half a decade after the arcade game was relevant
I can tell you weren't alive at the time.
also because it's unlicensed it would only work on some Model 1 Genesis before they started doing that check for Sega copyright string
I thought that was only some early EA titles.
I have a model 1 genesis with the copyright check and this cartridge and it works
two different things happened.
>the early Model 1 MDs didn't check for a Sega copyright string
>EA went and made unlicensed carts
>later Sega changed the BIOS to add the copyright string check to prevent unlicensed games from working
>this made the early EA titles like Marble Madness and John Madden Football not work on MDs made after 1990
>later Accolade figured out that they could just put the Sega copyright string in unlicensed carts
>Sega sued them but lost when a judge ruled that they couldn't copyright the "(C) SEGA" string in the carts
>They gave in and let EA and Accolade make their own carts as licensed developers but asked that they not disclose to other publishers how to cheat the BIOS check in the console
hmm
i have marble madness and it also works on my newer model 1 with the copyright screen
Unless they did a later run of the game that was modified for newer consoles. Possible.
Maybe you’re just full of shit
yeah this has a 1991 date in game, im lookin at ebay for variants and there does seem to be two different labels / box arts
I wouldn't really call it a BIOS, it's actually more of a boot ROM that displays the Sega splash screen and does the cart header check. It also contains the CPU vectors as it sits at the top of the CPU address space. Even the Colecovision had more of a real BIOS since it had actual toolbox functions for things like reading the controller.
Nintendo didn't include any BIOS on their consoles (well the Gameboy did have a cart header check similar to the MD's but it was just as easy to evade). You had to supply your own CPU vectors in a game.
>well the Gameboy did have a cart header check similar to the MD's but it was just as easy to evade
details?
the Gameboy logo splash screen is a graphic that is contained in the cartridge header. on bootup the BIOS does a checksum to make sure it's present and if even one pixel is wrong it will fail the checksum. however it was easy to evade this.
Oh also the MD got a port of DD2. A very shitty early release from '90 that's just a NES game with some more colors, even runs in 256 pixel mode. Never made it out of Japan and was panned by the magazines there as unabashed kusoge.
Ok but that was forgivable because it was so early. That's like complaining about Famicom games from 1984. The port of DD1 came out at a point where one expected a little more than what we got.
the pc engine version of DD2 is solid
it's more of a remake of the nes version though
And that's why it's solid.
>Mega Drive port in 1993
The Japanese version released in 88.
My bad, that was the Master System version
Anyway...
I've played NES DD and the shitty DOS PC port but I never tried it on any other platforms.
>like half a decade after the arcade game was relevant
like that matters lol.
a lot of NEC Avenue's arcade ports on the pc engine were delayed by years and still came out solid (minus strider, which is still "ok")
>geneshart can’t even compete with Gameboy DD
Lmao