Any port in a storm?

To complement my BIOS disassembly, I had an idea to port an existing arcade/computer game to the NeoGeo. Ordinarily I would be tempted to emulate, but I don't think a 12MHz 68K is going to be powerful enough to emulate even a lowly 2MHz Z80.

What I had in mind rather was taking a simple arcade game, for which I had a fairly comprehensive disassembly, and then more-or-less translate it line-for-line into 68K assembler for the Neo Geo. This is exactly what Sockmaster has done for the arcade Donkey Kong on the TRS-80 Color Computer, and it's a very, very impressive piece of work too!

The disassemblies I have include (arcade) Space Invaders (Z80), (arcade) Tutankham (6809), (arcade) Donkey Kong (Z80) and (MSX) Lode Runner (Z80). Unfortunately both Space Invaders and Tutankham run on bit-mapped hardware, which the Neo Geo is incapable of supporting. That leaves the tilemap/sprite-based hardware of Donkey Kong and Lode Runner.

The FIX layer on the Neo Geo is, unfortunately, the top-layer graphic and as a result can't be used for background tilemaps. This leaves the system sprites to be used for all tilemap/sprite graphics. The Neo Geo has sprites in bucket-loads, but unfortunately they're all 16x16 pixels. Donkey Kong is 8x8 and Lode Runner is 8x10 - making it all-but-impossible to use Neo Geo sprites and still get a full-screen display.

One option is to scale 8x8 tiles to 16x16 and either use a scrolling half-screen display, or scale the sprites by 50%, as the Neo Geo has hardware sprite scaling. That's OK for Donkey Kong but not for Lode Runner with its 8x10 tiles.

So right now I need to find a candidate horizontal arcade game that I'm actually interested in with either 8x8 or 16x16 tiles and/or sprites and that can be disassembled relatively quickly/easily. But nothing is coming to mind atm...

EDIT: I've just had a brainwave!

The idea is to render the Donkey Kong tilemap in 16x16 tiles (by pixel-doubling each tile) and then have the hardware scale to the visible area of the screen. It should be possible to render the entire tilemap as a single sprite, using column sprites and chaining.

Anyway, I'd like to get a proof-of-concept up and running, by rendering a sample playfield from Donkey Kong on the Neo Geo screen. This is itself will be an interesting exercise...