Obvious ports of NES games

The other day I was playing Dragon Ball Z Super Saiya Densetsu, which is a port of a NES game... and let's just say that I guess they reused the original code because WTF? Sprites are small and have chunks vanishing at the top of the screen, and there are scrolling glitches in the overscan area when you move around. While there are obvious improvements (more colors, better instruments, some simple parallax in battle scenes, some mode 7 scenes) they didn't even consider fixing the obvious stuff?

Are there any other SNES games that are obvious ports of NES code?

Super Mario All-Stars. Tetris & Dr. Mario.

How much of it is a direct copy? I mean, they did manage to mess up some of the mechanics in the SMB1 port (namely the fact that if you run horizontally and jump to break a brick above you, it will kill your horizontal velocity), so they must've reimplemented at least parts of it.

Final Fantasy IV has a clear NES influence in how the sprites are drawn, especially how they disappear on the left edge, even when the SNES has the technical ability to do that cleanly.

Dragon Quest I&II as well as Dragon Quest III were remade for the SNES, but I don't think many elements of the NES games were re-used, they are complete remakes instead.

Mega Man: The Wily Wars is a collection of the first three Mega Man games for the Sega Genesis. Although there are some graphical changes, the gameplay is pretty much exactly the same as in the NES versions.

Looking more about actual ports of the original NES code (i.e. the original code being used on the SNES rather than having been rewritten from scratch).

Has anyone checked the games listed here to make sure that this is the case of ANY of them?

I have not personally checked All-Stars, but I remember reading reports of where others have disassembled All-Stars, and there's plenty of vestigial stuff in the ROM. ShaneM might be able to explain in more detail.

The vast majority of games mentioned here are remakes, so that rules them out.

The one I mentioned in the first post has the kind of glitches you'd expect only from a NES game though. On top of that most of the graphics (i.e. anything that isn't mode 7 or parallax) are pretty much the same as their NES counterparts, just with more color shades (and all mode 7 scenes are pretty much just animations isolated from everything else). This is why I suspect they just used the code from the original NES game instead of rewriting it, that seems too absurdly close for a remake.

All-Stars is full of 6502-specific code too, like "clc \ adc #1" in place of "inc a"

Final Fantasy IV spent half its development life on the NES. It was up-ported to SNES at some point, rather than being built from the ground up for SNES.

Go search through any game by Bandai. I remember thinking the same about the first few Gundam games on the SFC... aside from the shading, those were totally NES-sized graphics.

I have to imaging Dragon Quest V was the same, because that game is only marginally better than an NES game in terms of graphics and music. However, it does have an amazing story, so that makes up for it. But Dragon Quest VI ... so much nicer at demonstrating what the SNES was capable of.

I don't know if I'd call it obvious, but SimCity was (apparently fully) developed for NES, but only the SNES port was released.

Tecmo's Secret of the Stars looks as though it was meant to be an NES game.

Are you sure? I was under the impression that a Final Fantasy IV started to be developed on the NES, simultaneously with a SNES Final Fantasy game. But then the NES project but was cancelled as a whole and ideas within the game were probably re-used in various games, and the SNES project remained, and had become the real Final Fantasy IV.

So I wasn't under the impression the Final Fantasy IV was ever ported from the NES, maybe they used ideas they originally had for the NES Final Fantasy IV project though.

My point was that the sprite code was probably ported from the NES - on the SNES you have to be crazy to use 4 8x8 sprites when you could use just one 16x16 sprite for a better result. I didn't check if the code related to sprites uses only 8-bits, however.


About music definitely not - the SPC has nothing in common with the 2A03 so it was impossible to re-use anything - if something sounds like beeps beeps it's on purpose (and as far as I know the whole DQ series always retained the NES beeps for the sound effects - purely by tradition).

The game engine is obviously different than the NES ones : The sprites are taller, you can walk on a 8x8 gird instead of a 16x16 gird, and the lag when you press a button before your character actually moves is suppressed. If you walk half into a wall the game engine is even smart enough to deport you 8 pixels and make you continue your way. I canot prove it, but I'd guess the game engine was completely re-done and no code from DQ1-4 was re-used.

I was just going on memory of something I may have read years ago, so if you have some clear source of information it's probably better than my vague memories.

Actually from the Japanese Wikipedia page(https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ファイナルファンタジーIV) the FF4 story was closer to the one Bregalad mentioned.
Some addition according to the page: FF4 on FC and FF5 on SFC were being developed simultaneously. However, FF5 seemed to be more ahead in development and because of marketing concerns(obviously) development of FF4 was then frozen, and someone suggested to release FF5 first and then resumed development of FF4. Soon afterwards, FF4 was canceled and FF5 was renamed FF4 and was released for the SFC.

That the final FF4 looked bad was probably because people were not really familiar with the new console.

Wrecking Crew '98 included the original NES game, in addition to the new puzzle-style game mode. I haven't run the game in a debugger, but it seems pretty likely that they reused large parts of the original code.