If you remember the 80s arcade game Dragon’s Lair, you probably also remember it was strikingly unlike anything else at the time. It didn’t look or play like anything else. So it might come as a surprise that it was ported to Nintendo’s Game Boy Color, and that took some doing!
Dragon’s Lair used LaserDisc technology, and gameplay was a series of what we’d today call quick-time events (QTE). The player essentially navigated a series of brief video clips strung together by QTEs. Generally, if the player chose correctly the narrative would progress. If they chose poorly, well, that’s what extra lives (and a stack of quarters) were for.
More after the break!
The Game Boy Color was a fantastic piece of handheld gaming hardware, but it was still quite limited. Porting Dragon’s Lair to the GBC required not only technical cleverness, but quite a few ingenious tricks along the way. Some methods were straightforward. Limiting the frame rate to ten frames per second looked acceptable and saved space, and audio was likewise limited to simple tones and only a few key samples from the original game.
Even so, compression and simplified graphics just wasn’t enough. Cramming everything onto an 8 megabyte cartridge took the form of a custom quantizing tool called the Tile Killer. This tool allowed artists to perform meticulous frame-by-frame optimization of graphics and color palettes in a way that maximized compression savings, squishing animated sequences down to target sizes in a semi-automated way. When steered by an experienced artist who understood constraints and didn’t need sleep, it was a clever and powerful tool.
The end result was a port of Dragon’s Lair that frankly looked impressive as heck, and released to positive reviews. It was a technical triumph, but commercially it made rather less of an impact. Still, it’s really impressive what got pulled off. You can watch it in action in the video embedded below.
The GBC port of Dragon’s Lair may not have been a commercial success, but at least mounds of unsold copies never ended up in a landfill like E.T. for the Atari 2600 did. Console ports aren’t the only task that requires clever developers; upscaling video games brings its own unique technical challenges.
I worked for a vending company when this game was released. Our company bought several machines sight-unseen. They made us a ton of money in the bars and clubs where we put them. I remember working on them to keep them clean and running. The disk player was an extremely robust device with an actual serial port for the video track management. That was in the early 1980’s. I’m not sure but I think those machines cost somewhere around $4000US when we bought them.
Too bad they didn’t target the Super Gameboy that was released about half a decade earlier.
It had specs of the original GB, but featured 12 colors (GBC 56c).
The SGB also allowed using the SPC700 sound-module.
By comparion the GBC had a turbo mode that ran GBC games at twice the CPU speed of the original GB and SGB.
So it would have been much more of a challenge to port Dragon’s Lair over to GB/SGB.
There are very few games that actually make use of SGB features beyond a border. I think the main reasons for this was that it just was a niece target, if you want to use complicated SGB features you need to understand both the GB and the SNES. And at a certain point you just might as well just make a SNES game.
The documentation also likely didn’t help, some details on timing aren’t well documented and things don’t work if you get that wrong.
And finally, to send any bulk data to the SNES you had to use VRAM so trash what you are currently rendering. And VRAM access is already something that is tight in timing. So making mid-game changes to anything the SNES is doing is complicated.
Pokemon red/blue is just the right game that can work with all these limitations, it only does a full screen color overlay on the map, and in battles it just needs to setup some color overlay regions as soon as a battle starts.
next station , move to arduboy 3.0 256×128 screen (16 color or green grayscale)
;-P
Arguably a greater example of technical accomplishment came from a visually accurate port of Dragon’s Lair to the Amiga, in a total of 7Mb across 8 floppies!