Thread by @gosokkyu

4gamer spoke to the team responsible for the Mega Drive Mini's brand-new port of Darius: Sega's Yosuke Okunari, M2's Naoki Horii, Taito's Yuichi Toyama and homebrew creator Hideki Konishi a.k.a. hidecade🇯🇵

https://twitter.com/4GamerNews/status/1168901552259698688

when the MD Mini shifted tack from a JP-only product to an overseas product, talk of a surprise game started & M2 immediately suggested hidecade's Darius port; it also came up during M2's work on the Darius Cozmic Collection but for various reasons it wasn't feasible back then

over the many years M2 has worked with Sega, they'd produced a couple of MD ports, Super Locomotive and Sanrin San-chan (Spatter), that they'd never found opportunity to release in any form, but Okunari judged them as an underwhelming surprise, especially compared to Starfox 2

as Okunari racked his brain for complete but unreleased games with the stature of Starfox 2, only Tetris came to mind and even that wasn't as big a novelty as it has previously been re-released on the Sega Ages 2500 Tetris Collection for PS2, alongside the Flashpoint MD prototype

he started to think Darius might be feasible but there was still licensing to consider; Sega had just moved buildings so he sent Toyama an tour invite as a pretext to ask abt Darius MD; Toyama replied with a joke about Darius MD, not knowing that was the true reason for his visit

discussions started between the various branches of Taito and Sega's MD Mini team but it wasn't smooth sailing; Toyama attributes the deal going through to the flexibility of Sega's team as well as the long-standing relationship with current Taito & former Sega man Hiroshi Uemura

there was uneasiness within Taito about licensing a fan-made product and more generally, some people were of the opinion that it was a no-win for Taito, but it was argued that the MD Mini would be released globally and Darius MD being a big-ticket item would help their profile

M2's Horii proposed a Fantasy Zone port alongside Darius but they didn't even consider it in the end; Okunari decided two STG would be overkill and, because the MD Mini already had Super Fantasy Zone & the arcade game had recent numerous ports, it wouldn't have sufficient impact

Konishi originally made his Darius MD port for himself, but a pal encouraged him to bring it to a local game convention in Saitama; that version was a boss rush running inside a dedicated mini-cabinet, which caught the eye of M2's Nagano who happened to be at the convention

he really wanted M2's Horii to see it but he couldn't make it, so Konishi mailed the cabinet to M2's office with a note saying "I made two but my family members keep complaining about them so you can have one"

before making the mini-cab, he built a 1:1 cab for use with his PCB

Konishi's over 40 now and used to play games in college but left them behind; one day he looked up the PCB on an auction site, got an alert while at work and bought it on a whim, and then had to build a cabinet for it because it was the only way to play the board he'd bought

Horii presumed Konishi must have a background in design but he's actually an ob/gyn practitioner by trade and everything related to the project, including all the coding and construction of the cabinet, came from skills he picked up during middle age, purely as a hobby

M2 began working on Konishi's port alongside initial license negotiations and got the official ok in early '19; the port was receiving quality checks from both Taito & Sega on par with those of a standard retail product, so even just determining what needed brushing up was tough

the sound was a big point of contention: Toyama, with supervision from Zuntata's Ishikawa, requested big improvements to the sound quality, and they debated replacing the sound driver with an M2 driver but stuck with the SGDK dev driver in the end

Sega's Masato Nishimura was not officially involved but always has outspoken opinions about their work, so he'd unofficially debug the game; their job was to rank major bugs like glitches, display issues, etc but by the end he was logging "bugs" that were just gripes abt the port

they'd start playing on Monday, log a bug report on Friday & get a new ROM on Monday with all their bugs addressed no matter how minor, and once they were a few weeks from master up & all the work seemed done, that's when the really nitpicky discussions started

this port also has a boss rush with the 26 bosses from the PCE version; Konishi originally made it for himself so it lacked polish and Toyama thought they should cut it bc it'd take too long to finesse, but Okunari insisted on it & requested it directly to M2 director Komabayashi

he'd never worked with Komabayashi before but when he went and made his somewhat unreasonable request and got the response of "gotcha", he thought "yep, he's M2 through and through"

NEC published the PCE version from which many of the bosses are derived, so did they need to sign off on this version? nope, Taito owned everything and directly designed those extra bosses, which they knew coming fresh off Darius Cozmic Collection which contains Darius Alpha

there was also some discussion & debate about balancing the bosses; Okunari and Nishimura felt some of the boss attacks derived from the PCE ver. weren't well balanced, and M2 knew they could fundamentally rebalance everything, but they eventually erred to something close to PCE

there are some differences from the AC version here&there due to the fact that it's a from-scratch recreation, whereas MD Mini Tetris was built with assets from the AC game with full consideration about converting it for MD use, so you get two different & authentic styles of port

Nishimura worked on MD debugging 25 years ago & seemed almost happy to be doing the same work again in the same way; M2's System 16 version of Fantasy Zone II was mostly debugged via emulation but Darius was debugged on real hardware which accommodated very low-level adjustments

there's talk of how they got around the MD's 4-palette, 16-colors-per-palette restrictions by dynamically switching colors in a certain palette, which meant deliberately mistiming the appearance of certain power-up items bc they shared a color slot that had to be swapped in & out

there's also a lot of idle chatter about other MD games' palette use, including Toyama's own MUSHA & Horii's own Gauntlet IV, how jealous they were of the PCE's zillion palettes and the level of craftsmanship required to bring high-color games to the relatively low-color MD

they weren't able to add the animated background lightning to every relevant stage due to the somewhat meagre 64k VRAM; Okunari's spoken to original MD designers Masato Ishikawa & Hideki Sato before and they struggled to decide the final spec with the ~¥20k launch price in mind

why'd the port start on MD to begin with? Konishi wanted FM music & it was more practical than X68000

the ROM's 32Mbit, which isn't the absolute biggest (Super SF2 is 40Mbit via bankswitching) but as Horii puts it, games only ever got that big if there was no other option

in this case, they had to stay within 32Mbit due to SGDK limitations; bc it began as a hobbyist project, the gfx aren't compressed & there are PCM samples & other things that could have been reduced in size, and they ultimately didn't replace the driver due to capacity concerns

they didn't work on compressing anything due to strict deadlines—they had to focus on getting the game done by deadline & couldn't prioritise reworking what existed—but Horii pledges he'll be able to shrink the ROM if they get the opportunity to work on it again

when asked about the code, Konishi says it was basically his first big coding project and he had to do a lot of research to get his C code running at 60FPS on MD, particularly with relation to hit detection; Toyama comments on how it's novel to just have practical C running on MD

on their MD memories, Okunari namedrops Toejam & Earl, a game that's "hard to tell whether it's fun or not"

Konishi bought and enjoyed Ghouls n Ghosts and Revenge of Shinobi; he also liked a lot of shooting games but in that regard he was more into PC Engine

Horii had been studying both the 68000 processor and the Z80 subprocessor since before the Mega Drive was released and while he did end up making Gauntlet IV, he always lamented that he was never able to put out an original MD game

Toyama quit his job at Technosoft, who'd just released Thunder Force II X68000 & his MSX game Herzog, to work at Compile; from the jump he pitched a port of Aleste 2 for MD to Sega which was rejected, then reworked it into the original MUSHA for a new publisher (Toaplan), but...

...in the time he'd taken to get that one game out the door, Technosoft had already released Thunder Force II MD & Thunder Force III, plus Herzog Zwei, a highly-appraised sequel to his game, so until MUSHA made it to market he was pretty annoyed at himself

on games they wanted for the Mini that didn't make it: they can't name names but there are five games that were completed but left off the lineup due to licensing issues; there are games on the Mini they thought they'd never get & others they imagine may not be possible in future

Konishi's excited to try games he never played like Castlevania Bloodlines & Beyond Oasis/Story of Thor, as well as Comix Zone which he didn't even know existed

Horii would have liked to add a game with polygons like Star Cruiser, just to show it could be done… and Gauntlet ofc

Toyama's pleased about Darius & the Compile games (MUSHA, Puyo Puyo, Madou Monogatari I) being included and is also happy they got Assault Suits Leynos, as he loves that game & considers his own PC Engine game Spriggan mark2 to be his answer to Leynos

both Toyama & Horii lament that they weren't able to include a single game game that used Hitoshi Sakimoto's "terpsichorean" sound driver, as heard in a handful of games including Gauntlet IV, Verytex, Midnight Resistance and Captain America & The Avengers (which all sound great)

Okunari says they actually looked into putting out Captain America on the Wii Virtual Console but it seems that no company inherited the rights to the game itself when Data East went under

...and that's a wrap, but here's one more thing that you should all know: Okunari & 4gamer's photographer both happened to wear the same Darius shirt to the interview

oh & I know none of y'all would ever dream of swiping any of this for your website but when you do, swipe this too: Darius MD was openly made using @MegadriveDev's excellent, Mega Drive dev kit, SGDK!

get it here github.com/Stephane-D/SGD…

& support it here patreon.com/SGDK