Bubble Bobble gets a free homebrew port for Mega Drive and Neo Geo

Homebrew developer PepAlacant has released a free, native arcade conversion of Taito's 1986 platformer Bubble Bobble for both the Sega Mega Drive and SNK Neo Geo. Released on October 28, the project is available now on PepAlacant's itch.io page (charmingly listed under the typo "Bubble Booble"), providing downloadable ROM files that run on emulators, flash cartridges, and FPGA hardware like the MiSTer.

Bubble Bobble was ported to nearly everything with a microchip during the late 1980s and 1990s, so it's a bit baffling that two of the most prominent 16-bit platforms missed out on the original game during their commercial lifespans. Taito's co-op classic hit the NES, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Game Boy, yet it bypassed Sega and SNK's 16-bit machines.

Two 16-bit blind spots

Designed by Fukio Mitsuji and scored by Tadashi Kimijima, Bubble Bobble arrived in arcades in August 1986. Its premise is simple: two twin dragons, Bub and Bob, work through 100 single-screen stages by trapping enemies inside bubbles, popping them, and collecting the resulting bonus fruit. The original cabinet ran on Z80-based hardware, which makes its absence on the Mega Drive and Neo Geo even stranger given how well both consoles handle 2D sprite work.

Sega's 8-bit Master System got an admirable port, and Taito brought the 1987 sequel Rainbow Islands to the Mega Drive in 1990. For the original game, however, Genesis and Mega Drive owners were left empty-handed unless they tracked down Super Bubble Bobble MD, an unlicensed Taiwanese clone from roughly 1995. SNK's hardware had a similar gap. Taito had a warm relationship with the Neo Geo in the mid-1990s, bringing the spin-offs Puzzle Bobble (known as Bust-A-Move in North America) and Puzzle Bobble 2 to MVS arcade cabinets and AES home consoles, while leaving the 1986 platformer behind.

One 68000 chip to another

Targeting both the Mega Drive and Neo Geo at once makes plenty of sense from an engineering standpoint. Despite their massive difference in original retail price (and sprite-scaling muscle), the 1988 Sega console and 1990 SNK powerhouse share the same foundational architecture: a Motorola 68000 main CPU paired with a Zilog Z80 sound co-processor.

PepAlacant's conversion adapts the arcade behavior, graphics, and audio to run natively on both Motorola 68000 ecosystems, covering the Mega Drive, Genesis, and the Neo Geo MVS, AES, and CD formats. This isn't the developer's first time porting weird old arcade games to SNK's hardware, either. Their itch.io catalog also includes a Neo Geo conversion of Jaleco's 1987 arcade brawler Ginga Ninkyouden.

I'm curious to hear how the Mega Drive's YM2612 audio chip handles Kimijima's main theme loop, a melody that already lives permanently in the heads of anyone who walked into a pizza parlor in 1987. Because the download is completely free, anyone with an EverDrive, a NeoSD, or a MiSTer setup can grab the files and test the two versions side by side right now.