The CEO of Evercade company Blaze Entertainment says Rare was a big help during the development of its native Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie ports.
The company is set to release a Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack cartridge on October 30, which includes Nintendo 64 titles Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie on a single cart and is playable on any Evercade console, handheld or mini arcade.
Rather than simply running the N64 ROMs from an emulator, however, Evercade has created native ports of both games, offering new features.
This includes improved resolution, a 60fps frame rate, save states, improved camera controls and a new control scheme designed for Evercade systems that only have a D-Pad instead of analogue sticks.
It also adds new features including a new cheat menu, new dialogue and a music player including previously unreleased music from the series.
In an interview with FRVR, Blaze CEO Andrew Byatt explained that Rare helped the company with its work on these new native supports, supplying source code and unused materials.
“We got source for these,” Byatt confirmed. “We can do a lot with backwards engineering of the original… it’s quite rare that source is available, really.
“We’ve done it without source before and you’re sort of engineering this stuff from assembly, basically, and converting it. That’s another 12 months on top, really, or 9 months on top, but if you’ve got source it makes a massive difference.”
He added: “Sometimes the licensors, in this case, [are] really involved and want to see the best possible product, and they’re really pushing and testing themselves.
“Sometimes they just want to literally sign a contract and get some cash and move on, because they’ve got other priorities. Sometimes they don’t really get involved. This is one of those where they really put in a lot of energy into it behind the scenes to help and approve and make sure things are perfect.”
While most of Evercade’s cartridges – of which there are currently more than 80, covering hundreds of games – will continue to consist of ROMs running on emulators, Byatt said the company is working on other native ports too.
One of these is the recently announced Doom Collection, which contains new native ports of Doom and Doom 2, as well as six popular map expansions, for a total of eight separate campaigns.
