Not so horrible after all!

After a few sessions of getting into the business of porting Z80 code, I must say it's not nearly as onerous as I first feared. Having said that, there's a big difference between blindly porting code instruction-for-instruction, and re-writing commented Z80 code in 68K.

The former would be unbearably tedious, not to mention horribly error-prone, and in hindsight I don't think I'd ever attempt such an exercise. The latter is almost fun!

Whilst technically I'm porting the code line-by-line, I'm striking a balance between keeping the code as congruous as possible, and taking advantage of the 68K instruction set. For the most part I'm using a one-to-one mapping between Z80 and 68K registers, but not strictly adhering to that when it's more efficient not to. I'm also taking care to keep the routines (and data) in the same order, with the intention that once it's all complete, I should be able to merge the Z80 and 68K listings to produce a side-by-side code listing.

Thus far, both the foreground (main) loop and background (NMI/IRQ1) loop structure is there and running. The hardware initialization (video h/w and dipswitches) is done as is reading the controller inputs (which happen to map nicely to the Neo Geo controller). Right now the 1st attract screen is shown (incomplete) and it then transitions to the 2nd (game-play demo, barely started) after a time delay. Here is where the code starts to get more interesting - drawing the in-game screens!

I'm also using macros for all VRAM accesses which means, in theory, I can alter the mapping at a later date by editing a few simple macros. This should allow me to, for example, rotate the screen or map the video accesses directly to non-contiguous / sparse memories such as the Neo Geo sprite tilemap memory.

I'm starting to encounter areas of the code that I haven't commented yet, which means I'll be switching back-and-forth between commenting the Z80 code and porting it to 68K. Actually it's not a bad way of doing things at all, and in some ways makes it a little easier from the reverse-engineering perspective - not to mention a little more interesting!

In the back of my mind I'm trying to think of other classic video arcade candidates for a Neo Geo port. I chose Donkey Kong only because I had access to a (partly) commented disassembly. I'd like to try my hand at a horizontal game next; something more suited to the Neo Geo screen. Unfortunately, most of my favourites are vertical shmups. In particular my all-time favourite, Xevious, which is another Z80 game. The interesting thing about Xevious is that there is already a 68K port - as part of Namco Classics Vol 1. What's perhaps even more interesting is that I wrote the MAME driver for it, and so I'm familiar with the graphics processor that is used!

I wonder if there's a market for an MVS cartridge with a compilation of classic arcade games???