Hi,
I run Makerstown, a small channel/project focused on retro emulation and native ports on ESP32 microcontrollers. I've published an Amiga 500 emulator for the ESP32-S3 and I'm currently working on an Atari ST core, plus an arcade package for the ESP32-P4.
I played your Ruff 'n' Tumble and Superfrog reimplementations and they're outstanding work. Which brings me to why I'm writing.
I want to bring these games to bare-metal microcontrollers — first the ESP32-S3 (240 MHz, 8 MB PSRAM, 16 MB flash), then the ESP32-P4. Not as full A500 emulation, which is too heavy for these games, but as a hybrid: the original 68k code running on a Musashi core, with the Amiga chipset (Blitter, Copper, Paula, CIA) reimplemented natively in C rather than cycle-emulated, and a virtual filesystem serving the game's own data files. The idea is that the framebuffer stays 8-bit indexed at 320x200, which fits entirely in the MCU's internal SRAM — that's what makes the whole thing viable at all.
What I'd like to ask you:
1. Would you be open to collaborating on this? I'm not asking you to hand over your source publicly. Even a private conversation about what you learned during the reverse engineering would save me months. Credit and visibility go entirely to you — I'd present it as an ESP32 branch of your work, not as my own.
2. Failing that: would you object to me using your asset exporter output as ground truth for validating my own extractor? I'd write my own ADF/HUNK/RNC parsers from scratch and hash my output against yours to prove correctness. Nothing of yours would ship — the end user generates everything from ADFs they legally own, exactly as with your releases.
3. A couple of technical questions either way. For Superfrog: how much of the AmigaOS surface does the original executable actually touch after startup — is it exec/dos only for loading, or does it keep calling into graphics.library during gameplay? And for Ruff 'n' Tumble: is chipcode.bin a separate blob the trackloader relocates, or is it copied to chip RAM at a fixed address?
Whatever your answer, thanks for these fantastic releases.
Max — Makerstown