Super Scaler
Anyone who suffered through the
lumpen, austere driving of OutRun on
the ZX Spectrum will recall that, in the
eighties and nineties, home conversions
of much-loved arcade games could be
a decidedly hit-or-miss affair. In recent
years, though, we’ve seen developers
and hobbyists make old computers
and consoles do things that might once
have looked impossible. In the Amiga
scene, for example, a collective of Finnish
multimedia artists called dA JoRMaS
has made a ‘proof of concept’ port of
Sega’s 1985 arcade racer, Hang-On,
running at a silky smooth 50 frames per
second. “In theory,” the collective writes
on its website, “the Amiga hardware is a
reasonable fit for a racing game of the
era, with the dual playfield mode giving
good control over the race track and the
objects on top.”
Certainly, the results are a lot smoother
than the fun yet somewhat choppy Amiga
port of the game’s sequel, Super Hang-
On, programmed by Zareh Z.K. Johannes
and released in 1988. That game was,
admittedly, more complex than Hang-
On, with undulating tracks and more
roadside objects zooming past at anyone time, and dA
JoRMaS are quick to
point out that their
demo is more of a
technical exercise
than a serious
attempt to make
a finished game.
Still, it’s impressive
stuff – you can take
a look at all the
sprite-scaling goodness for yourself at
wfmag.cc/hang-on.
There’s another superior arcade port
that caught our eye recently: Mappy.
In 2018, programmer John W. Champeau
released an unofficial Atari 2600 version
of Namco’s arcade classic – a feat we onlystumbled on recently
after randomly finding
a YouTube video of it.
Given the restrictions
of that four-decade-
old console, it’s a
remarkably faithful
rendition of the cat-
and-mouse platformer- right down to its
infuriatingly catchy
soundtrack. It’s a spectacular-looking
piece of work – certainly well in advance
of some arcade adaptations we saw back
in the Atari 2600’s lifetime – and if you’re
interested, there are even physical copies
available to purchase from AtariAge’s
website (wfmag.cc/mappy).
WRITTEN BY RYAN LAMBIE64 / wfmag.cc
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