Turrican II
Image: Rainbow Arts

In 1995, the developer Sun Project released Turrican II on MS-DOS, an enhanced port of the Rainbows Arts' and Factor 5's sequel for the Commodore Amiga.

This version of the game introduced more colours and detail into the environments as well as the odd alteration like a redesigned character sprite. As a result, it became one of the best ways to experience the classic action shooter. That is, until fairly recently.

As spotted by IndieRetroNews, a group of developers led by SonicSloth (Alastair Murray) this week finished converting the MS-DOS version into Amiga AGA, creating an arguably superior version that takes advantage of the AGA-enhanced 24-bit/256 colour modes. IndieRetroNews states that the project began life as a way for Murray to learn ASM, but that much of it ended up being written in C.

Features include 50/60hz action; support for 2-button joysticks and CD32 joypads, with user-definable controls; and an option to replace the DOS character sprite with the Amiga version. That's in addition to a built-in trainer mode, the option to look down to see blind jumps, restored parallax, and plenty more secrets and enhancements to uncover.

If you want to try this free, unofficial conversion of the game out for yourself, it's available to download from Murray's itch.io. To play the game, you'll need an AGA Amiga (A1200/A4000/CD32) or emulator, 2MB of Fast RAM (for the floppy version), 8MB of Fast RAM (recommended for WHDLoad version), or an A500 Mini (you'll find instructions here). It's been tested on various machines and real hardware, with most of the issues encountered so far emerging from problems with emulation. Murray says that updating your software or firmware may help to alleviate these issues though.

Are you going to give this a go? Let us know in the comments!

[source sonicslothgames.itch.io, via indieretronews.com]