Homebrew Yes, This Is Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night On The Sega Mega Drive

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Update [Fri 23rd Aug, 2024 10:30 BST]: Pigsy has released a new video showing off some of the recent developments related to his Symphony of the Night Genesis port.

Both the water and the mermen were absent from the 2023 Xmas demo, so I'm happy to be able to include them now.
If you look closely, you'll be able see the CRAM dots around the water line, as I'm currently changing the entire palette on a single h-int line using C language.
I'm covering these up with those surface waves, and I think it works ok. Normally you have to flicker these on and off as having that many sprites on a single horizontal line results in sprite flicker, but it seems to work fine having them all "on" at the same time.

At the moment they stay at the same position the screen instead of scrolling, as having enough surface water sprites to cover the entire area with scrolling does mean I'll have to flicker the sprites. I'll experiment a bit and see what I can come up with.
I also need to add different movement physics for when Alucard is in the water. Adding some "splash" sprites when he and the mermen jump in and out would also be nice (if I have enough sprites to spare).
Speaking of the mermen, great job by @GabrielPyron to get 3 colours on mermen on a single 15 colour palette!
I've also switched over to the new XGM2 driver for the music. The driver only released this year and had some bugs before where it would mangle the music, but I think it sounds ok now - let me know what you think.

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Update [Mon 25th Dec, 2023 14:25 GMT]: Pigsy has released a playable demo - Merry Christmas!

You can download it here.

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Original Story [Tue 3rd Jan, 2023 12:30 GMT]: Some time ago, our friends over at Nintendo Life reported on the existence of a Sega Mega Drive / Genesis port of Konami's legendary Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Developed by 'Pigsy', this project is now pretty advanced, as you can see from the video below (thanks, Indie Retro News).

Alucard's animation looks perfect, and the backgrounds are also a very, very close match to the PlayStation originals – which is pretty darn impressive when you consider the gulf in power that exists between the two.

Even the audio is decent; sure, the music isn't quite as good as it is in the original game, but Pigsy has done an excellent job of converting the CD-quality soundtrack to the Mega Drive's humble Yamaha YM2612 sound chip.

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Before you get too excited, Pigsy has previously stated that this won't be a like-for-like conversion of the 1997 original but rather a level-by-level experience more akin to the old-school Castlevania titles. However, it will combine elements from the PlayStation version and the Japan-only Sega Saturn port – so you'll get to play as Maria.

Symphony of the Night was in the news recently thanks to the appearance of a prototype version of the Game.com port of the game, which later sold on eBay for a whopping US $7,600.00.

If you like what Pigsy is doing, then you can support him via his Patreon.