Fighting game homebrew port demake (w/ video)

I'm considering porting a GameBoy / GameBoy Color demake of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 that I've been working on to the NES. Thoughts?

The NES and GameBoy weren't known for fast-paced fighting game action, so I enjoy the novelty of seeing a game like UMK3 running on the hardware.

Here is a video of some gameplay just released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwoVsvt7luI
EDIT: The video is of the GBC version. The NES version would use the same sprite graphics, but with a larger play field. Flicker would be marginally increased (which you can see occasionally in the video). The GBC demo is complete gameplay-wise. Only major thing missing is making more graphics (which isn't really a challenge from a technical standpoint). The video is to demonstrate that an 8-bit fighting game has potential.

I'm working on getting some more videos up.

I also have a Twitter page to follow the project: https://twitter.com/PortableMK

How long until the Warner Bros. order YouTube to take this down?

What you posted was a video of the GBC version, which does exist. I was expecting some footage of your hypothetical NES port, which instead I was greeted by some guy who can't stop talking.

Not to put you down or anything, but I know for a fact you won't finish this game because it is simply too ambitious. Too much ambition will crush your working motive.

Good point. I've edited to the original post to be more clear, so thanks for the feedback.



Which game? The GBC or NES version? The UMK3 project is not intended to have all the arcade fighters. What you see on the "Select Your Fighter" screen is the roster, which is very manageable. This isn't a 100 fighter mugen project. The NES project/conversion isn't underway yet, I'm just curious if you guys in NES-land have any interest in seeing a fighter game for the system. It's not a problem if you don't, as the GBC project is virtually finished anyway (sans-graphics).

I don't think ambition is such a bad thing as so many people want to believe. Even unfinished projects like Retro City Rampage are still neat to see on the system. And would anyone criticize Super Bat Puncher for still being an unfinished demo? Hell, even things like Tokumaru's NES Sonic mockups are great to see.

Ambition is what motivates us to push the boundaries and reach new heights. "Failure" is not even trying in the first place; especially if it is something that you want to do. And if you really think about it, nothing is ever really "100%" complete. "Complete" is just an idea.

Probably about as long as it takes Nintendo to take down videos of their games. Oh wait.

(but yeah, if this was a movie it'd be taken down immediately, but a demake of an old game that doesn't even trigger the autoflagging bot? hm...)

Back in 2009, Arika Ltd. was using OCILLA notices of claimed infringement (which are manual, not autoflags) to take down videos of fan remakes of one of its games, including one of my videos. Square Enix is notorious for cease-and-desists against noncommercial fan remakes of its games. Even Nintendo has been using Content ID (the autoflagging bot) to take the advertising revenue from partners who make Let's Play videos. Ultimately I do want to see fighting games on NES and GBC, but with original art. Using Mortal Kombat characters is like using Bugs Bunny. But I don't know if the similarity between RHDE: Furniture Fight and WB's Rampart makes me a hypocrite.

Now the technical problem: GBC allows up to 10 sprites per scanline, which is half the screen's width. NES allows only 8, which not only produces more flicker with characters of the same size but also is smaller relative to the whole screen. And GBC has 8 sprite palettes compared to the NES's 4, so projectiles would have to share with something.

I'd really like to see you port this to the NES. It already is a very cool project, but seeing it on NES would be another highlight.

I agree with MottZilla I'd love to see this on nes.I'm not going to get into technical limitations as one would assume with your programming skill you've already taken this into consideration.Best of luck too you let us know if you need any assistance.

Will the TOASTY guy (sound programmer Dan Forden) be implemented?

If he were to be implemented, how would that work on the NES? Would he be a background object that suddenly appears on screen?

I considered him for the GB version, but didn't have enough sprites in the tile memory. For NES, I could do the extra sprites, but there would be the additional problem of limited palettes. I think the bigger problem would be him causing the fighters to flicker to much, especially when they are fallen, as they take up the most horizontal space that way.

Currently the GB version uses two palettes on some fighters (Jax, Kung Lao, Shao Kahn, Jade's staff), so all of the NES sprite pallets would be used up on the fighters alone. For the blood, I think I would remove the droplets but keep the splash. The large blood splash is actually an animated background area that merges with the map. This is also how I pull off large projectiles like Scorpion's spear, Reptile's spit, and SubZero's iceblast. The backgrounds (above the floor) are designed to only use 3 of the 4 colors, so that the 4th color can be the projectile or blood splash.

Since I have a fighting engine finished, I was also considering just swapping out the graphics and tweaking the gameplay to create a brand new fighting game. I think for a NES project I would limit the fighter roster to just 5-7 characters.

Wait, couldn't toasty guy be done with the window layer?

Fine on GBC, but use of the window layer on NES would force use of MMC5.

The NES has a larger space, can't it be just done with sprites, really? I mean, because of the larger space, his head would not overlap the players after all =P

Or maybe stick him in a different corner, away from the fighters. Like at the top, peeking down from above.

The Master System version has the "Toasty" guy, doesn't it? Oh, just remembered that fighters are drawn on the background in the Master System games, so there are plenty of free sprites.


Can't you give each player a fully customizable palette and allow them to use the remaining 2 palettes, which would fixed? You'd have to optimize the fixed palettes so that they could represent blood, special effects, and the extra colors needed by the fighters you mentioned above. With original sprites it would be easier to embrace this limitation, but it might still be possible for MK.


That's a pretty good idea! If you do the same on the NES, that means you'll have to use CHR-RAM, right? That's a lot of CHR-RAM updates, considering you'll have to animate each player in addition to all the effects. Any ideas on how you'll handle all this pattern traffic?


I think the NES is in great need of good fighting games. This is a genre that was barely explored in that platform, when you exclude all the crappy pirate demakes. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Joy Mecha Fight (the dismembered fighters made things easier), Ninja Turtles - Tournament Fighters (which is pretty good graphically, don't know if it plays well), and Datach's Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho games (which look interesting, but have tiny tiny sprites).

There was some other game by Namco (Famicom, of course) where you and the enemy shared the same graphics, and you kinda looked like monks. Then there's the various Culture Brain games with the occasional 1-on-1 perspective, the fighter mode of Double Dragon, and the nefarious Karate Champ. Fighting games did exist on the NES, but they weren't made in the SF2 era. That said, I think an SF2 port with graphical assets in the vein of Mighty Final Fight would work spectacularly well, though I'm certain they didn't bother with it because SF2 is defined by it's vocal samples, and Capcom never used samples of any kind in any of their NES games.

I wonder if the Chinese would be ambitious enough and port something like Skullgirls to the NES, assuming the game is actually worth bootlegging and if the third world still plays on clone NES consoles.

I've said it before: A platform fighter (think Smash Bros.) with 48px tall sprites (think Shaq-Fu) would probably work great on NES.

Perhaps a port of the famed Super Smash Land game would be a good candidate for an experiment, with upscaled graphics. Then again, this game, since it was developed in a higher language, probably has some complex math that wouldn't be possible even on a number crunching beast like the Genesis.

This pirate game has some of the best sprites I've ever seen in an NES fighting game (they're really colorful!), and it proves that a decent port of SFII could have been released on the NES if Capcom wanted to. It's a bit flickery, but I bet it'd play great with a proper engine.

Having played it to death I can tell you that the engine is probably the least of the issues =P 60FPS and the controls are actually responsive (not sure if as tight as they should be but still responsive enough that they actually do what you want). Also I just remembered there was a magazine featuring all the special moves in that game (yeah, it was that common over here). Not sure if it has 2P mode though (I wondered if it was there by pressing some button but I never tried), but then again I doubt it'll be very hard to add if it's not there since the CPU player is going through the same code as the first player anyway.

The ↑+Start thing completely ruins it though =/