Homebrew developer Rafael Daniel has revealed that a SNES port of Darkness Ethereal's 2000 DOS freeware release Mysterious Song is nearing completion.
The game has previously been ported to the NEC TurboGrafx CD by Frozen Utopia, and it was this version which brought it to Daniel's attention.
"I'm not really a game programmer, but I've always been passionate about 8/16-bit consoles," he says on the port's official site.
"Taking advantage of the knowledge I already have in programming, I started to explore the world of development as a hobby. Along the way, I found out about this version for TurboGrafx-CD through PIKO INTERACTIVE, who kindly sent me the source code. Unfortunately, I was unable to take advantage of it due to architecture issues. I used as a base an engine that I already have (FaelRpgEgine) and adapted it through the sprites and tiles that I had in the original source code that I cited to replicate it on both platforms."
Daniel is keen to stress that this is very much a port, and he doesn't expect to take credit for all of the hard work done by the original developer. "All content was originally created by Darkness Ethereal. Frozen Utopia used this version as the basis for its TurboGrafx-CD version, and I used the Frozen version as the basis for creating mine on the SNES/Genesis."
However, it's clear that a lot of work has gone into this version, regardless. "In development, I had a huge job to export all the graphic content, I practically redid everything manually, animation of the spirtes, dialogue box and assembly of the levels so that it could be used on the SNES," Daniel adds.
"None of the previous mechanics were used, and almost everything was created from scratch, and on purpose, as I wanted to have experience to use in future projects. I would also like to thank the excellent work of the composer and programmer Kung Furby in converting the original soundtrack to the SNES audio CHIP, after all his work managed to leave the same as the TurboGrafx-CD."
It's worth noting that Piko actually announced the Mega Drive / SNES ports way back in 2014, so it's taken a decade to get to this point.
You can download a demo here. The plan is to also bring the game to the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, as well as a third undisclosed platform.