Another unrealised arcade port is one step closer to reality, as Capcom's challenging 1987 arcade actioner Black Tiger is currently being converted to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis platform, courtesy of homebrewer Rester159.

Black Tiger (known in Japan as the more sensible Black Dragon) is a typically fantastical tale of sword and sorcery, with a brave barbarian venturing through his homeland on a quest to slay not one, but three dragons - currently bringing death and chaos to the local townsfolk.

Like much of Capcom's coin-op output, Black Tiger is a particularly punishing platformer, with fast-paced action, constant environmental hazards, and waves of enemies that frequently attack faster than our lunk-head hero can defend himself.

Elements of Capcom hits Magic Sword (1990), Ghouls n' Ghosts (1988), and Bionic Commando (1987) can all be seen in Black Tiger's design, making it a blueprint of sorts for the studio's more ambitious follow-ups

Rester159's NTSC port is already quite far along in development, already including the game's eight stages in their entirety, along with an all-new Boss Rush mode. While Rester notes that the port cannot be considered "arcade perfect", it gets as close as possible given the hardware's limitations, using shortcuts such as limited parallax scrolling, colour reduction, and perpetual rendering of background tiles to allow a little leeway in performance.

The Genesis port of Black Tiger has been crafted with the popular SGDK (Sega Genesis Development Kit) software, an open-source tool that supports C-language coding for Sega's 16-bit hardware. The port uses the console's native hardware/software elements and is thus not running through any form of emulation.

While bugs remain, along with creases to be further ironed out, Black Tiger is fully playable (via Genesis emulation) from start to finish and can be downloaded from rester159's itch.io right now.