The Amiga is getting another ambitious arcade conversion, with developer Acidbottle working on a new version of Williams’ Defender.
The project began life as a PC game built with Godot before being adapted for Amiga hardware. The developer is using the original arcade source as a reference while translating and optimising the project for the Commodore platform.
That makes this an interesting project to watch because Defender is not an easy game to reproduce. The fast horizontal scrolling, large playfield and constant stream of enemies put considerable demands on the hardware.
The Amiga version is still in development, so this is one for our watch list rather than a finished release. It also shows how modern development tools and techniques are opening up new possibilities for classic machines.
RVG take: Defender is exactly the sort of arcade classic that deserves a serious Amiga conversion, and we’ll be following this one as development progresses.
Source: Acidbottle project information.
Also checked: Indie Retro News coverage and the wider Amiga homebrew scene.