Overview
What is Dracula Hunter?
Dracula Hunter was an arcade game released in 1979/80 by Japanese firm Teknon Kogyo. The company disappeared soon afterwards, with the only other game released by them being a bog-standard Space Invaders clone. Famously among collectors and retro enthusiasts the arcade version is currently unemulated, and while at least one arcade board is known to exist, the owner(s) have not as yet been willing to rip the ROMs and allow the board to be studied so it can be added to MAME.
A few gameplay videos exist on Youtube which presumably were recorded directly from one of these rare boards. Somehow the game did make it into some UK arcades at the time as a number of people on various forums remember playing it, plus all the videos show the English 'Dracula' logo versus a Japanese logo in some screenshots.
So what's this then?
This is a recreation of the game for PC, Mac, Linux and webGL written in Unity, based solely on studying the available footage. The graphics were also drawn from scratch and are as close as they can be, given the blurry/grainy quality of the Youtube videos and screenshots which makes picking out individual pixels tricky, while the sound was grabbed from the videos.
It's been on my radar for a while as being a unique and realistic opportunity to rescue a 'lost' game and I had drawn some of the sprites a while ago, but I was motivated to press ahead with the project by a member of the Mamemeister discord community who has mentioned many times that he remembers the game fondly from the early 1980s and would love to play it again. Well, here you go, Steve!
Why not make it for era-appropriate hardware and run it in MAME?
Although I have written games for Pacman hardware in the past and have basic toolchains already setup for other machines such as Galaga and Bomb Jack, while studying the game it became apparent that despite its obscurity, it's actually a very advanced board for the time period and I don't think there are any suitable surrogates that could handle this game comfortably without a massive amount of work.
While at first glance it would appear to be a simple tile-based game, on closer inspection it looks like it's some sort of full colour bitmap setup. This is very apparent on the blood dripping animation that happens if you clear the bonus bat stage, which moves smoothly down the screen with drips scaling in the Y axis, very tricky to pull off with tiles and would surely require the ability to create dynamic tile data in RAM, which was very expensive in 1979. There's also a very detailed title screen which would have taken up most of the tileset in a traditional 256 or 512 tile ROM.
I've also recreated as far as possible where objects have a black border and draw over each other, probably because there wasn't enough CPU time to mask up to 21 enemies with all the pixels underneath, but it seems when there was CPU time they did do just that, for example when the black bat flies on the screen full of blood.
Perhaps something like Defender hardware could do manage this game, but there would be the problem of that being a horizontal game and having to get the MAME team to amend their driver. Recreating the sound effects would also be a challenge. Maybe I will look into it further if there is a positive response to this version.
How to play
The aim of the game is to protect the princess from the hoards of vampires and bats. You can throw a cross to kill them, which is quite unique in acting like a boomerang. To complete a level you can either kill all the vampires, or shoot into the blue castle door when it opens briefly. But watch out because every other time a bat will fly out of the castle and if it lines up horizontally will dive at you at breakneck speed. Or as The Fragnostic put it in his video, 'those bats, man, they barrel out of that f--king house like they accidentally flew into a pitching machine'.
When you complete a level the castle explo
