The Past Has Other Plans

Three corners of the retro scene, one shared instinct: old games are there to be played with, not just remembered.

There is nothing wrong with putting a favourite game on a shelf and admiring the box. Sometimes the artwork alone is enough to bring back a particular room, a particular summer, or the friend who never returned your second controller. But there is something more interesting about treating the past as unfinished business.

What happens when you pull a familiar game’s graphics apart? When you borrow a beloved fantasy world but change the kind of adventure it offers? Or when you stop playing an old game long enough to investigate how it actually works? These three projects approach those questions from very different directions.

Mega Drive VR: a little more room inside the television

Imagine your old television becoming a miniature theatre. The scenery sits towards the back, the characters occupy a different layer, and the picture has space between its components rather than being pressed against the glass. That is the idea behind Mega Drive VR, a browser-based project from VRCADE. Underneath the presentation is Genesis Plus GX, compiled to WebAssembly so that Mega Drive emulation can run in a web browser. The unusual part is what happens to the picture: the console’s background planes and sprites are separated into layers at different depths inside a virtual CRT television.

This is not a machine that turns every old cartridge into a fully modelled 3D remake. The developer describes an effect closer to moving cardboard cut-outs apart: the original graphical layers are rearranged in depth, rather than transformed into solid objects. Think pop-up book rather than a newly built world you can wander around. That distinction is part of the appeal. There is a temptation, when revisiting old graphics, to assume that improvement means replacing them. Here, the proposition is almost the opposite: keep the artwork, but give the viewer another way to appreciate how it fits together.

The project works on an ordinary screen, although VR is its intended setting. WebXR support allows it to run in compatible headset browsers, including Meta Quest. You can load your own .md, .bin or .gen ROM files, and the page also offers a code-based method for loading a ROM from another device. There is no emulator application to install. For a first look, the site provides a Try the Demo option using IRENA: Genesis Metal Fury. This is White Ninja Studio’s Mega Drive homebrew shoot-’em-up, whose freely available demo also has its own project page. It offers a starting point without first having to supply a game file.

There is a sensible limit to the excitement. The creator introduced Mega Drive VR as an early hobby project and specifically asked for feedback on comfort, controls and broken behaviour. It is better approached as an experiment than assumed to be a polished replacement for an established emulator. Still, it is an appealing experiment. Sometimes a different angle is more interesting than a higher resolution.

Links: Try Mega Drive VR · IRENA: Genesis Metal Fury demo

Monster World RPG: Wonder Boy takes the scenic route

A fan game does not have to reproduce the original experience move for move. Sometimes the more interesting question is what happens when familiar characters and places are given a different sort of game. Monster World RPG, created by MAX TEAM & MOTA, takes the world of Sega and Westone’s Wonder Boy and Monster World games and reworks it as a role-playing adventure. Built with RPG Maker 2003, it is described by its creators as a separate story rather than a sequel, prequel or remake. It is also a complete, free Windows PC game; not a Master System ROM, despite the attention it has received among that console’s enthusiasts.

The adventure follows Max, with five additional companions available to join his party. There are side quests recorded in a dedicated book-style menu, along with equipment, spells and other ways to customise the hero. The developers also describe abilities that open access to previously unreachable areas, bringing some of the exploratory character of an action-adventure into the RPG structure.

The stated design priorities are encouraging. Rather than making progress depend entirely on repeated battles and higher levels, the team emphasises secrets, upgrade items, platform elements and minigames. That is a design intention rather than a guarantee that every encounter will delight, but it suggests an effort to do more than place familiar sprites inside a conventional RPG template.

For Master System devotees, much of the attraction lies in the smaller references. In the creator’s recent presentation, the list stretches from Alex Kidd cameos to the snail from Snail Maze, with even a gigantic Master System making an appearance. The developers have also drawn on details from different versions of Wonder Boy, including characters and locations that a more straightforward tribute might overlook. Printable packaging and a manual styled after the Master System’s graph-paper presentation complete the affectionate excess.

That last detail feels particularly appropriate. A pretend cartridge package for a PC fan game is not strictly necessary. Neither is a giant console turning up in the adventure. But these are the flourishes that make a project feel personal rather than merely competent. One point needs keeping straight: this is a rediscovery, not a brand-new launch. The itch.io page lists a release date of 4 August 2017. Its renewed circulation is a reason to revisit an existing project, not evidence that an entirely new Wonder Boy RPG has suddenly appeared. The advertised download also includes extras such as artwork, packaging materials and an original soundtrack credited to Vincenzo Colella.

For anyone who likes the idea of spending more time in this particular fantasy neighbourhood, rather than simply replaying the same familiar routes, that is an invitation worth knowing about.

Links: Monster World RPG — official itch.io page · Creator’s indiexpo page and download information

BBC Micro: looking behind the loading screen

The third project changes the question altogether. Instead of asking how an old game might look, or what new adventure could inhabit its world, it asks: how was the thing put together? A project published on GitHub under tobybuk provides a browser-based environment for working with BBC Micro 6502 assembly language. The developer says it grew out of an interest in reverse-engineering familiar games, including one of their own for which the source code had been lost. The accompanying announcement names Defender, Frak, Zalaga, Rocket Raid and Snapper as games with annotated listings.

The practical centrepiece is the BBC 6502 Web Assembler. Its documentation describes a self-contained HTML application with a source editor, assembler, build information and tools for saving the resulting program. The assembler itself runs locally and can be opened without installing a development environment or setting up a compiler service. The hosted interface also provides a route from assembly to execution through jsbeeb, a browser-based BBC Micro emulator. It can create a bootable DFS disk image and launch the assembled program in the emulator, shortening the distance between changing something and seeing the result.

That is where the project becomes more than a collection of listings. The interesting moment is not necessarily reading thousands of instructions from beginning to end. It is finding a small piece you understand, changing it, and discovering whether your understanding survives contact with a running game. The developer openly credits ChatGPT with helping build the project, and the repository describes AI-assisted decompilation. That makes careful checking important: reconstructed labels and explanatory comments should not automatically be mistaken for the original author’s intentions. They are aids to investigation, not substitutes for it.

Even with that qualification, the invitation is compelling. You do not have to become a 6502 expert overnight. You just need to be curious enough to look behind the screen, and prepared to break something harmless along the way.

Links: Open the BBC 6502 Web Assembler · GitHub repository and documentation

There is still something to do

What connects these projects is not simply affection for old machines. It is a refusal to regard familiarity as the end of the story.

There is pleasure in returning to something exactly as you remember it. There is another kind of pleasure in discovering that you have not exhausted it: that there is another perspective to try, another adventure to make, or another mechanism to understand.

The box can stay on the shelf. The interesting part is what happens when someone presses Start, or opens the source.