The legendary nature of Konami's Castlevania series means that many of its key releases have been (or are in the process of being) ported to other platforms by talented fans.
Symphony of the Night, for example, is in development for the Sega Genesis, as is Super Castlevania IV. The original Castlevania has also been ported to the SNES, and the Genesis Bloodlines is headed in the opposite direction.
We're now hearing reports that the original Castlevania is being transported to a console that launched almost a decade before the game was released: the Atari 2600 / VCS.
VampireDev is the person behind this promising project, known as CastleVCS, and explains on the Atari Age forums how it came to be:
"I recently got interested in 2600 development thanks to haroldoop's VCS Game Maker and I was impressed not only by how big the homebrew scene for this platform is, but also with how good the games can be considering the tight limitations of the 2600.
Since I love working under retro system's technical limitations I started working on a small thing for fun, just trying to see how much of one of my favorite games, Castlevania, I could fit in a 4k or 8k limit, while still trying to be as close as possible to the original NES game.
The final result of the experiment was pretty satisfactory: Simon can walk, jump, crouch and attack.
He can hit the torches with his whip and pick up hearts from them. It has a title screen and also the small intro cutscene."
Before you get too excited, the developer has made it clear that this won't be a full port of the game; the goal here is to transfer the first stage to Atari's console.
"Before a proper release there is still more stuff I'd like to add (some of it I'm currently working on already) with the intention to have at least one fully playable stage, as the final goal for this project," says VampireDev.