Konami never ported their popular Castlevania game to the Atari XL/XE line of gaming computers. At least of which I am aware. This version is coming from retro gaming community member Thelen. What was originally going to be a near perfect port of the Nintendo Entertainment System version has seen upgrades added. This is not normal, but severely appreciated, as most ports from low power to higher end platforms just include 100% porting.
Castlevania VBXE is looking good
Posting on the Source: AtariAge forums, Thelen stated, “It's a funny adventure so far, I've learned how to make a scroller, which just doesn't scroll threw the ram, but with double buffering. Also learning about blit-lists, how to use them properly. Really nice to see how people work with it.
At first I wanted to use the original NES tiles/gfx and make a sort of replica, but I did a little upgrading, because the VBXE is more capable than that 🙂 Also made it so that the scroll engine so far can use levels which are built with the 'tiled' app so it's easy to design a level, If the tiles are ready. And yes, there is a little bug in the scroller, that will be fixed, but wasn't the main priority so far 🙂”
As you can see there, Thelen decided to give the graphics a slight boost. This is afforded by the additional power available coming from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Atari XL/XE computers.
Potential problems with Konami
Considering Konami’s past, it is not likely they will take action against Thelen as long as he is not profiting from this port. Cool of them to be that way. I wish Square Enix and Nintendo would follow suit.
Source – Source: Indie Retro News