I'm also currently working on a new version for desktop and hopefully eventually consoles that uses 3D models, larger maps, 8 team local support, map editor, hopefully either a campaign or challenge mode (eventually, maybe not on first release), and hoping to add support for up to 150-ish stream viewers to join various teams and play on one of the 8 teams (where they vote for moves kind of like in Twitch Plays Pokemon).
Here's a year old video when I was just starting the project, I desperately need to make a newer video (hopefully this weekend finally):
But I still would love to have a weekend project at some point of making a retro version.
Either use a clever way to map your game board to 8x8 tiles, or use a large number (4/8 bit paletted color) tiles so that you can just draw arbitray images (like a bitmap, but its set up in tiles). Or just give up on trying to exactly match the hardware and just draw the hole thing using a bit map mode (e.g. mode 4, with 256 color palette and double buffering) - but that also means implementing the parallax effect by hand (since theres only one layer).