Indie Retro News: Phoenix – 1980’s Arcade game by Taito is coming to the Amiga via JOTD [WIP Update]

JOTD is certainly no stranger to Indie Retro News, especially with announced Arcade to Amiga conversions/ports such as Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong, Tetris 1200 (AGA), Super Bagman, Karate Champ, Galaxian500 and our personal favorite Super Xevious. Well it looks as if he’s not going to take a break any time soon from game news. As he has recently announced the first playable version of the in-development Arcade to Amiga conversion of Phoenix: A 1980’s Arcade fixed-screen shooter by Taito, with a later release in 1983 for the Atari 2600.

(playable version. No sounds, but otherwise works despite some minor issues).

Dev Notes from JOTD in brief “Another easy task you think? C64 can certainly take it while decrypting RSA-encrypted messages? Well. Game uses 12 colors, so no biggie… but… uses 2 layers of tiles, which means… dual playfield, which means 8 colors max per playfield… It’s also a tile-only game which is cool but at the same time annoying because tiles are 8×8 and we can’t use the blitter or HW sprites… We’ll have to use the blitter for double buffering I think.

“So after a lot of head scratching, I figured out color approximations and adaptation of palette according to current level (not all colors are present at the same time). Then transcoded game from Z80 disassembly. Originally intel 80xx is *** but Christopher from arcade museum had the bright idea to disassemble using Z80, which adapts perfectly to my Z80 translater!”.

Please note this is pretty much the same news article as the other day, but the only difference being the first playable version. Still, I can’t wait to play the final release which should be released as soon as JOTD works out how to render the sound(see here).

Links :1) Source 2) Download