If you're old enough to have been gaming during the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 era, then you'll be familiar with Imagine Software.
This Liverpool-based company was one of the leading lights of the UK industry in the 1980s, producing a series of commercially successful titles at a time when the market was booming. However, in a fit of hubris which was captured brilliantly by the BBC, Imagine overreached and imploded in spectacular fashion, and, from its ashes, the legendary Psygnosis would emerge.
One of the ill-fated ventures Imagine was working on before it collapsed was the 'Megagame' concept, which would see a series of titles push 8-bit home computer hardware to its absolute limits via special add-on hardware modules.
These games – which included Psyclapse and Bandersnatch, the latter of which would inspire an episode of Black Mirror – would have retailed for over three times the typical cost of a Spectrum or C64 title. Imagine took out lavish advertisements in magazines showing the people behind the project but no screenshots, building hype and word-of-mouth for a venture which ultimately never happened.
While Imagine's Megagames concept faltered when the company died, it has inspired British hacker and coder Martin Piper to create his own hardware add-on, called the MegaWang 2000 Turbo Edition.
Described by Piper as modular video and audio hardware for retro systems, the MegaWang 2000 project started "when old retro arcade hardware was being discussed" with friends.
"In the back of my mind was the often fabled 'Mega games' by Imagine Software, which were planned to use extra hardware on the Spectrum and Commodore 64 to augment the machine's capabilities," explains Piper. "I was wondering exactly how much extra graphical grunt could have been engineered and interfaced with these old 8-bit computers."
While the Megagame concept would literally have been extra RAM, Piper's approach is a little more robust. He's leveraged arcade hardware – in this case, a selection of Bomb Jack boards – to transform the C64 into a beast of a system capable of reproducing coin-op-style visuals and sound.
"I was looking at Bomb Jack boards on eBay and pondering how they had enough fill-rate to draw 24 16x16 sprites and have the option for some to use 32x32 mode as well," says Piper. "A friend and I were discussing the clock speed and fill-rate while trying to deduce the operation of the hardware just by inspecting the hand-drawn schematics, as you do."
If you'd like an idea of how powerful this unorthodox setup is, check out this footage of After Burner running on a MegaWang 2000-powered C64:
Piper has even released an SDK and instructions on how to create your own MegaWang 2000 – you can check out the site here.