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The Mega Drive / Genesis has seen more than its fair share of unofficial homebrew ports over the years, and developer Cristiano Camacho is adding another to the mix in the form of Capcom's 1996 belt-scroller, Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara.
Built on the SGDK engine, the port looks impressive, despite being so early in its lifespan. Cramming the CPS2-powered arcade version into the weaker Sega hardware is certainly a challenge, and Camacho admits that he's already pushing the platform to its limits:
"It looks like I can finally show this off: a Mega Drive port of D&D-Mystara that I’ve been working on for a while. The biggest issue is the amount of on-screen content—I don't want to compromise the visuals, but just what you see there already eats up almost all the VRAM.
Believe it or not, I'm spending more time on palettes and minimizing tiles than on the actual programming; honestly, it's turning out to be much easier than programming my JRPG."
This isn't a mere tech demo, however, and Camacho insists his goal is to bring the entire game to the Mega Drive / Genesis.
It goes without saying that an arcade-perfect 1:1 port of the game isn't going to happen on the system, but the developer is hopeful that he can at least do it justice in terms of gameplay and overall feel. "Sacrifices and cuts will have to be made," says Camacho. "But this is one of my all-time favourite street brawlers; time will tell what I manage to pull off."
Shadow Over Mystara and its prequel, 1994's Tower of Doom, were both ported to the Sega Saturn in 1999, exclusively for Japan. Both games were later released on Wii U, Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows as Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara in 2013.