Port Commodore or Spectrum game to SNES

[Thunderbird98]

I really like the game Castle Master because of its early 3d graphics. It was originally released on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. The C64 and Spectrum versions look pretty simple, so I thought it would be cool to port the C64 or spectrum version to work on a SNES. Is this possible? If so would it require an enhancement chip like the DSP-1 or Super FX chip?
Thanks

 

Edited January 27, 2021 by Thunderbird98

[bluejay]

Given how different the SNES and the old 8 bit micros are a port would probably require rewriting the entire thing from scratch. I know next to nothing about SNES programming but something tells me utilizing the DSP-1 and SuperFX would be expensive, and unnecessary.

[carlsson]

At least the SNES has a 65816 which I believe to some extent can run 6502 code so very small parts of the C64 program might be possible to reuse. But expect pretty much everything besides the CPU to be different, he said without having looked into the hardware or programming model of the SNES.

[Thunderbird98]

Could it be ported to any other systems? 

[carlsson]

I suppose it depends on the effort. For instance some people in the Atari 8-bit computing section have successfully adapted a number of C64, as well as ZX Spectrum (!) games for the Atari computer but involves quite a bit of work even in the case where the CPU language is the exact same. Also I believe I've read about how Amiga games (or perhaps ST games) once were ported over to the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive but again quite a bit of expertise and hard work surely was involved even if both systems shared a 68000 CPU.

 

Have you programmed anything for the SNES? That is the first question to be answered. If the answer is yes, you probably have a basic idea how it works and what is required. You might know what you already can do and what would require studying routines by others. If the answer is no, the follow-up question if you have programmed for some other more or less similar system, and so on.

[Thunderbird98]

I have no idea how to program the Snes, but I hope to learn programming for some console some day. I just wanted to see if it was possible.

[carlsson]

I see that this particular game also was on the Amstrad CPC, which kind of has a superset of capacities over the ZX Spectrum and quite a few games were ported in that direction. The same goes about ZX Spectrum to MSX, much to the chagrin of MSX owners because those games usually didn't utilize the sprite hardware and other features the MSX had over the Speccy. From the MSX side it has a resemblance to both the ColecoVision and the Sega SG-1000 which in its turn has forward compatibility in the SMS. To make a long story short, it /might/ be possible with relatively moderate amounts of work get the Spectrum version running on SMS but it would still not be trivial.

[Thunderbird98]

Ok. I didn't think the SMS could handle that. Also, I didn't know there was a CPC version. 

[bluejay]

I've always been interested in ports for computers that have same CPUs but are otherwise completely different. What needs to be changed other than I/O addresses?