FPGA developer Martin Donlon has just released a new core for MiSTer FPGA, which covers Irem's M107 arcade hardware.
The successor to the M92 board, the M107 offers an additional playfield and twice as many colours and sprites, making for more visually impressive games – but sadly, only three titles were ever produced for it.
These are 1993's Air Assault/Fire Barrel, Data East's 1994 sports title Dream Soccer '94 and Jaleco's 1995 release World PK Soccer.
While it's a pretty low hit rate, Air Assault/Fire Barrel is a seriously polishing vertically-scrolling shmup which has arguably been overlooked in recent times, and this is the perfect way to rediscover it.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 2
Cool news, and can’t wait to try this out!
I think the last paragraph of the article has a typo. Shouldn’t it be a “seriously punishing vertically-scrolling shmup…”?
I translated it into “polished” without thinking about it, but given that “seriously polished” is a very unusual expression and that we are talking about Irem here, then “seriously punishing” is the more likely intention.
I’ve never tried this shoot ‘em up, but I should give it a go at some point as I really like the genre. Especially the ones from the 80s and early 90s, where atmosphere and esthetics were given a prominence that is lost in the bullet-hell subgenre where there is constantly a thousand power-up items messing up the soundscape and visuals.
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