I was thinking; since there was a canceled port of TAP for the PS2, that probably meant that it was possible to port TAP to PS2. That begs the question. Since TGM1 runs off of a PSX engine, is it possible to make a port of TGM1 to PSX?
The arcade platform for TAP (Hitachi SH2, custom Psikyo sprite engine) is nothing like the PS2 (MIPS, Emotion Engine). It's certainly possible to port the TAP source code to the PS2 SDK, as Arika have done, but short of completely reverse engineering the arcade ROM there's nothing like that that the community can do. Of note is that TAP's core game engine appears to be based off of Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura, which runs on PSX (and Ti's core game engine is based on TAP's, but runs on Windows). However, TGM1 runs on Sony/Capcom ZN2, which aside from the music chip (Capcom Q-sound) and some memory addresses, is basically binary compatible with the PSX. So, it's technically feasible to create a modified version of TGM1 that runs on PSX, possibly utilising CDDA for music in lieu of the missing Q-sound chip. Only a minimal amount of reverse engineering would be needed, as most of the compiled code will run as-is as long as differences between the platform are either patched or removed.
Do we know how much RAM the TGM1 board has ? As the ZN2 can have either 2, 4 or 8MB of RAM, the PS1 only 2MB.
I'm pretty sure they upped the RAM/VRAM from 2MB only for games that require it, and TGM1 doesn't look like one. Btw this thread is interesting, I will look into this experiment...
A Sega Saturn port may be possible as well considering its powerful hardware. The Saturn's RAM ranges from 4.5 to 10 MB.
An optimized port of shmupmame/TAP to arm linux would be amazing ... then you could use something like jamma2pi so it boots directly into tgm ... but as it stands ( haven't personally tried it yet either ) but I have been told tgm runs like shit on a pi3 ??
the japanese wikipedia article of TGM states that there was going to be a port of TGM1 on the PSX, but surprise! The Tetris Company said "Fuck you!" and told them that there could only be 1 company per platform. If ACE wasn't enough proof of the Tetris Company being dicks to Arika, than this info will.
It turns out that the Sega Saturn uses 2 Hitachi SH2 processors. So maybe TAP could be possible to port to Saturn.
Well, that is exactly the problem. The Saturn uses a rather unique dual processor configuration which makes programming for (and porting to) the platform less than straightforward. I don't know the specifics though.
That sprite engine is a beast. it is scaling multiple huge sprites at the same time without problems, and smoothly as well. It requires a lot of states with many bits (basically 64 bit registers) to scale those without precision loss. It is/was expensive hardware. I am glad I was able to get around some of the limits of the Nintendo DS just to scale sprites bigger than 64x64 pixels, without any visible gaps, so trust me when I say this: Porting any arcade game to home consoles will give a lesser product, but it is possible! Time consuming but possible.
