Since Frogger was a Konami game I'm surprised at the lack of ports to Japanese systems, just this MSX one. My guess is that there was no NES version because the color attribute system forcing the use of 16x16 tile blocks would have made it too difficult to do the moving logs and other crap.
It's probably more that it was old. 1981 game for Famicom, not many of those, are there? Of course there's Donkey Kong and Pac-Man (both miles more popular than frogger), but for example famicom has no Galaxian, it has Galaga the sequel.
it has galaxian, smallest rom for the system, some emulators cant play it in fact
just expand the ROM to 16k, big deal. Namco's arcade ports on NES also had MSX versions; while the latter had somewhat more limited audiovisuals they probably played more accurately as the MSX used Z80 so the arcade code could just be directly copypasted.
Emulators can play, but they need an overdumped 24KB rom. iNES header format assumes that the smallest rom size is 24K (16K PRG + 8K CHR), while Galaxian was actually 16K (8K PRG + 8K CHR). Saving an accurate 16K dump with an iNES header pruduces a borked rom which confuses emulators. NES 2.0 headers fixed that oversight.
AFAIK there was a Taiwanese slot machine game that used 8k PRG if that counts.
The NES doesn't have complete address decoding so if a PRG ROM is smaller than 32k it will just mirror. For Galaxian you have to overdump it to 16k and then duplicate the game in the second half of the PRG, you can't fill it with 0 or FF. The reason you can't is because some instructions in the game use addresses above the actual game ROM with the assumption that it's reading mirrored data, like JMP $D420 would be identical to JMP $F420.
On an actual Galaxian cartridge the PRG is only occupying $E000-$FFFF with the rest of the PRG space mirrored three times (on 16k carts it mirrors once).
Galaga is amusing because original Famicom release was 16k but the North American release was 32k, I guess by that point 32k ROMs were cheap enough that they could afford to waste half of one. Whether the game was duped to fill the second half of the ROM I don't know, I should probably download and disassemble the thing to find out.
The issue of Galaxian is not with NES hardware but with how emulators see the rom itself. iNES header tells them that Galaxian has 16K PRG, so the emulator tries to map it from the game rom. An accurate rom, however, will only have 8K PRG, so an emulator will map missing 8K of rom with nothing, breaking the game in result.
That was what I was trying to explain. Emulator formats don't recognize 8k PRG so you have to do a 16k overdump but also make sure to duplicate the game in the second half of the ROM so it works properly as it would mirror on an actual console+cartridge.
Ah, I see now. Thanks for detailed info.
Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Galaga, Warpman, and Crazy Climber were ported to Famicom and they all predated it. So that alone wasn't a reason. it was most likely due to issues with trying to animate the logs. they also didn't port Super Pac-Man because it couldn't do the giant-sized Pac-Man sprite when he goes into super mode.
>the Atari 2600 and VIC-20 could handle Frogger but the NES couldn't
Weak.
>IP count didn't go up
say what?
again it was the attribute system. char sprites do not work well on the NES due to each group of four tiles needing to share a palette. Gauntlet is the only game i know that does it and it still has some weird graphics glitches due to palette overlap.
Official ports, maybe. Plenty of clones though, this one is from 1982 on PC-8001. Pretty sure there should be one more on the same system that is properly named and this system doesn't have a very complete romset.
Wasn't Sega somehow involved with manufacturing Frogger machines? Maybe they had veto rights on home ports, or did Konami handle it in Japan alone?
Sega had the North American distribution rights due to Konami's lack of an overseas branch at that time.
I'm surprised that Frogger had such a rich lineup of home sequels.
Hasbro's PS1 Frogger sold millions. Konami saw the numbers and got into action once Hasbro's licensing deal expired.
the eternal question:
are the cars really small or is the frog really big?
RC cars and RC treetrunks.
It could have been done if they were clever, say the logs use two colors and the turtles another two so you don't overrun the palette limit. I believe it's more likely that it would have been tricky to animate with the NES's ROM-based graphics as they didn't have CHR RAM carts until later on when the game was seen as too old to bother porting.
The SG-1000 had a couple of 8k games (Guzzler arguably the best one) but the Famicom just had Galaxian and no I don't count chink bootleg trash.
Ok I downloaded US Galaga. It's not duped, the second half of the PRG is empty. They probably went throught the code and modified anything that was trying to access addresses above $C000.
it would be sad and hilarious if the NES was the one classic 8/16-bit system that can't handle Frogger
I love this game but it's another one I'm not convinced the NES was capable of doing. The Master System would have been a better fit for it.
A pretty good version on Megadrive.
>the programmer of the Mega Drive Frogger said although the arcade game was Z80-based and the console used a Z80 as its APU, he opted to use the normal 68000 for the code instead as Frogger used screen-mapped graphics that did not easily translate onto the console's port-mapped video
Yet many other similar games were ported to the MD. Basically he was admitting he either lacked the talent, development time, or both to properly convert the game.
It sounds like the programmer made a sound design decision based on the platform architecture, resulting in a very accurate home port.
this game was like 25k or something despite the physical ROM being 512k
It was 1998, not like 512k ROMs by then were pricey enough that you couldn't afford to waste one.
That's the stupidest thing I've read on /vr/ this week and I've been in the MiSTer thread.