LordKraken

Challenge accepted So here is automatic conversion: Compared to my process that I would call semi-automatic (need a bit of manual work, but that could be scripted)

Any decent image tool -> Image -> reduce colors to 16 colors. Done. Simple process and it would be quite easy to take all the game screens, automatically convert them to 16 colors and stick them together, but for what result?

Yes and... it looks REALLY bad compared to the previous image (and I would know, I spent an hour or two on that one too). The aesthetic is bad, details are lost (do you still see the stairs?) etc. When you have very different colors and a strong contrast, automatic conversion will always give terrible results. One can do a tiny bit better with slightly more complicated processes. For instance that's what is achieveable when using a predefined palette. Also the image would need to be cropped a bit as I used a 1:4 size reduction to have better resizing results.

Not taking a side here, but coming from the "real" game industry, you would be surprised by how technical some artists can be (not all of them I agree). And while they don't necessarily know the deepest arcanes of machines and/or game engines, they are smart and technical enough to come up with creative solutions to make the impossible somewhat possible. So what am I trying to say here? That while a 1:1 NeoGeo port might be difficult, and I trust @Zerosquare on that, there are probably other ways to still make it happen, using both pixel art magic and the Jag strengths to compensate. The first example that comes to my mind, it's not a Jaguar one but it proves my point: Mortal Kombat at (almost) 16-bits quality on the Lynx! Who would have dreamed of that back in the days?

Hmm well... so many reasons to why IT IS interesting Weird ports than nobody expect nor wait

If I had the technical capacity to do that kind of programming magic (which I don't) I would be really really careful when touching anything Nintendo related. Now that legal aspect set apart, let's go back to the interesting part. Doable without texture and vfx or not?

Try that one if you dare It is doable of course, the discussion is purely about what quality we could expect from it. And while "true color" images are possible on the Lynx, it would required a LOT of pre-work and additionnal data. And what I was trying to say was that the image you picked give relatively good result when you convert it to 16 colors. Other can be trickier like the one I just posted above

It's a real 3d games that achieve decent frame rate and can be even fun, so yes defintely worth a try especially because it's one of the cheapest game for the console.

It's not that simple. Reverse engineering is legal in some circumstances but not always. It needs to be done for a good reason like interoparibility for instance. So it's a grey area, and I wouldnt bet on Nintendo closing its eyes forever on that.

I was referring to the actual existing apple II port, obviously... As you can see in the different rendering tests from deater.net, the hi-resolution/hi-color version takes 32kb per image. So I don't know what the reasonable size for an Apple-II game is, but 100mb+ probably isn't. In other words, it's like making a single image hi-color conversion for the lynx and telling the world that the game can look like that. In theory yes, but in practice very unlikely because of other factors (production time, data size, etc.) Not the best image to test, try with more constrasted pictures and you will see that converting them to 16-colors does not give very satisfying results on most of them. Still better than the apple-II hand drawn conversion though

I can assure you that a lynx port would still look much much better

To me the bigger problem when porting that kind of game is the extra coding for all the little puzzles...

That's what I'm saying, it's doable and many demos as well as a few games already did it. The problem is that you need to put a lot of love and care for every single screen (although you could automatized that with scripts I imagine). It would also produce a lot of extra data (one palette per line or so) multiplied by the hundred of screens the game contains... Not imposssible, but not the funniest thing to work on, and that for a game that is not all that great in the end. edit: Thanks for the link to the Apple II demake. This is a nice effort but let's face it, it looks horrible! I'm guessing the apple II has a fixed palette so that was to be expected. The Lynx would do much better since the palette can be created from 4096 colors, so you end up with screens that are easily recognizable.

Getting more than 16 colors is achievable, as a couple of people already showed in a couple of games and demos... Now you CANNOT do that with any image out there. The image needs to be created in a certain way since you cannot have more than 16 colours per line. This would be a LOT of work to just get one image taken from Myst to display nicely on the Lynx. And the games is made of hundred of screens... If I would take on that challenge, and considering that Myst screens are made of different tones of just a few colors, I would try to simply convert them to 16 colors, using dithering. I think the result would be decent. Now as for having movie, with standard cart, I think you can forget about that. At Lynx Screen resolution, on a 512k cartridge, you can store maybe up to 100 images. That would be 10-12 seconds of video.

Probably even more than just 3 times But to be fair, I don't think the final game is doable on Jaguar.

Well, an adventure/rpg game will likely sell more than 40 copies Just consider a more "traditional" release with standard box maybe?

Will the book be some kind of limited edition, and are you considering maybe a more standard version with box + poster for instance with Yastuna? (I realized the game is probably far from being ready, but I really like the tech demo) (I have to admit that I'm more interested in homebrews that looks like the original game, but I have a lot of admiration for handicraft stuff)

Check https://reboot-games.com/jagstudio/ReferenceManual.html and the rapSortSprites function

They were and still are dedicated. And in the homebrew world, they delivered 2 masterpieces. Just not on the Jag ^^

What I can suggest @rygar is that in a far future, you release an extended/remastered edition of the first game for those who couldnt get their hand on the collector edition. That way people who want the trilogy gets a chance to complete it, and those with the collector edition dont feel bad.

I'm going to state the obvious here, but we had the chance to see 2 fantastic "big" releases in 2021 (with a lot of respects too for the other "smaller" ones), made by 2 very small teams of passionate people, and it would be a pity to see those same people argue and fight over such a small detail! For me both games deserved to win, but in the end I think the result is very satisfying. Last Strike won all the technical and artistics awards, but KoE won the main one, probably because it fills a hole in the Jag library that many Jag fans were waiting for. In the end, GG everyone, but please stop fighting! Your games are great, that's all that should matter!

I kind of like what I'm hearing there, would deserve a better production Some songs could make a good trailer soundtrack for Odynexus actually

Yes and interesting to see that last strike "won" all sub categories but not the general one. Ah well still great games

May I ask you why the Jaguar?

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.