One of many extra uncommon reveals at this year’s Tokyo Game Show was that Toaplan’s shoot ’em up Zero Wing was making the jump to SNK’s Neo Geo hardware.
The information emerged after Plaion_JPN shared a now-deleted photograph of its stand on the occasion (the place the Neo Geo AES+ was being demoed to the general public), main followers to note a field for a beforehand unreleased Neo Geo model of the sport.
This inevitably induced numerous confusion and hypothesis on-line about what this mysterious model of the sport truly was, contemplating Zero Wing was solely ever launched in arcades, on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, and the PC Engine CD-ROM² again within the day (in different phrases, not on Neo Geo {hardware}). Shortly after, we confirmed with the demoscener/developer h0ffman that this was truly the Zero Wing port he had teased again in January of this yr, with the developer telling Time Extension that Plaion had approached him to show it into a correct, formally licensed launch.
“Again in January, I used to be a couple of week away from ending the venture after I acquired an e mail from Ben at Plaion,” mentioned h0ffman. “Funnily sufficient, I feel it was a Time Extension article which introduced it to their consideration. They talked about that they’d the rights to the IP and love retro, so I used to be eager for a constructive final result. What I wasn’t anticipating was to study concerning the AES+ venture. As somebody who loves actual {hardware}, it was proper up my road.”
One inevitable query is why h0ffman needed to port Zero Wing within the first place. It is not his first Neo Geo port. Previously, as an illustration, he additionally introduced Shinobi and Golden Axe to the console in an unofficial capability, however we have been curious: why Zero Wing? And why now?
“I like digging into outdated arcade {hardware} and studying the way it ticks,” he tells me. “Particularly once they run on a 68000 CPU. Again in Could 2025, I used to be trying via the MAME drivers and stumbled upon Zero Wing. It’s a sport I wasn’t conversant in; in actual fact, I didn’t even make the ‘meme’ connection until much later. The customized Toaplan GPU it used was fairly attention-grabbing, and at face worth it appeared like fairly a straightforward sport to stand up and working on the Neo Geo. I used to be additionally very impressed with how clear the sport code and information have been.”
As h0ffman notes, after he determined to go forward with the concept, one of many main obstacles he confronted in getting Zero Wing engaged on the Neo Geo {hardware} was the distinction between the unique Toaplan arcade board and the Neo Geo platform, with the arcade {hardware} particularly being constructed to realize some spectacular parallax results. The problem right here, then, was methods to recreate that on the Neo Geo.
“The Toaplan {hardware} has this layer precedence perform which permits it to drag off some insane parallax results,” he explains. “The difficulty is the NeoGeo has a horizontal sprite restrict, so I couldn’t simply bump up the variety of layers; in any other case, all of the sprites begin disappearing. I got here up with a method so the background layers have been extremely optimised to scale back that funds significantly. I additionally constructed a customized degree software which allowed me to composite and cut up every of the background layers. The tip result’s that each parallax impact stays intact whereas not affecting the sprites.”
This wasn’t the one complication, both, with the journey to turning into an formally licensed product revealing one other concern that required a bit extra work on h0ffman’s half.
“[Originally], I had ported the US model of the sport,” h0ffman tells me. “It seems the Japanese launch was significantly totally different, which led to a second spherical of disassembly. It’s not one thing I might have thought-about earlier than. These initiatives have to work for a worldwide market, so now I can get forward of that earlier than getting too deep. So, two very totally different copies of the sport code exist inside the identical cartridge ROM. It routinely selects the model based mostly on the area of the BIOS. On the AES+, you possibly can choose the console area out of the field, so it is easy to modify between them. It’s additionally actually useful to have extra eyes on one thing. It helps make sure the tough edges I would miss get smoothed over.”
As h0ffman explains, after Zero Wing, his working relationship with Plaion continues to be ongoing, however inevitably he cannot discuss a lot about what else he is been engaged on behind the scenes. One factor he did reveal, although, is that he is been accountable for a number of the adjustments coming to different video games within the library, equivalent to introducing the beforehand Neo Geo CD-exclusive Scotland course into the upcoming rerelease of Huge Event Golf (beforehand often called Neo Turf Masters outdoors of Japan).
Referencing the hassle it took to get this working, he tells me, “It wasn’t a small endeavor. Each the ROM and CD variations of the sport needed to be disassembled again into buildable code and structured information. I might then extract all the varied items of information from the CD model and construct them into the ROM model, modifying the thirty-or-so desk look-ups alongside the best way. Weirdly, the toughest half was transplanting the course choice code into the ROM model. They’d flipped a bunch of the logic round when including it, which made it actually complicated. Additionally, because of the nature of the unique sport code, most crashes resulted in some fairly convoluted debugging classes to repair them.”
The Neo Geo AES+ was initially introduced again in April 2026 and was scheduled for a launch in November of this yr. Nonetheless, it has since been topic to a reasonably sizable delay, being pushed back to 16th September 2027, because of “world part provide constraints” which means Plaion “can’t manufacture sufficient techniques to ship the worldwide launch.”
On the street to launch, it must also be famous that there have been ethical and moral arguments made towards supporting the console from some elements of the retro group, over issues concerning the present possession of SNK (which you’ll learn extra about here).