Mega Man on Oric: A Fan-Made Demo Experiment

[rax]

Hi ,

What would have happened if Mega Man had never been released for the NES, but for the Oric instead?
Out of pure curiosity, in 2021 I created a small demo-experiment to explore this idea.

Over the years, I had been a huge fan of the classic NES version, which I’ve played countless times. I was curious how the levels from the first game would have looked if they had been ported to the Oric.

As a result, I put together a demo that visualizes the first four screens of Cut Man’s stage. In the executable file, you can scroll left and right using the arrow keys to get a sense of how Oric graphics might have looked.

Of course, there are significant limitations:
- The Oric has no hardware sprites, making it practically impossible to create a real, playable version.
- Screen scrolling is also problematic – it’s difficult to make it smooth, and in the end it tends to annoy rather than provide a real gameplay experience.

That’s why this remains purely a visual demo, giving just a taste of what it might have been like if Mega Man had ever appeared on the Oric.
...but, don't know, maybe I'll get an idea in the future .

Original game:
mm1-cutman level map: https://nesmaps.com/maps/MegaMan/MegaManMapCutMan.html
mm1-cutman random clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQBQjE1UVo0

Oric adaptation:
cutman level map:

cutmanLevel.png

tileset:

tileset12-cutman.png

mm1-cutman.tap

[ibisum]

Nice project idea! Looks like it could be feasible, albeit without such great performance as the original.

Some way to use AIC here to add character graphics? Will you try to push this further?

[Dbug]

- The Oric has no hardware sprites, making it practically impossible to create a real, playable version.
- Screen scrolling is also problematic – it’s difficult to make it smooth, and in the end it tends to annoy rather than provide a real gameplay experience.

The issue was similar on the Atari ST, a solution is to redesign the gameplay so it works per individual screens instead of on a scroll, and have the game move from screen to screen when reaching the border (can directly change, or have a transition involving or not a scrolling).

In HIRES you'll never manage to have a smooth scrolling, the only way would be to do it in TEXT, but then you have limits on how many characters you can use, harder to do color changes, etc...