This was often by necessity, I worked on some of these ports and we would just get the game on whatever machine it was coming from (cart, disk, arcade machine) and then we would literally reverse engineer it as best we could - which usually meant just playing it a lot and video taping and making notes. Then we would re-implement / draw / compose a work-alike version on the target platform.

As a kid, I always thought the developers of these ports were simply not very good.

But once I started writing my own code and working in the industry, I realized that you guys were insanely talented people working under ridiculously punishing deadlines and (as you said) zero access to the original source code, assets, etc.

Not familiar with your work in particular but in general, what a heroic and underappreciated game dev niche. Much respect for all that the unheralded port programmers managed to accomplish against the odds.

Yes, also factor in a lot of us were like 19 years old and this was our first project and also we were the lead or only programmer. :D

Absolute heroes of code =)

Nope. The GBA was a 32 bit console, much more powerful than the SNES/Genesis. It was halfway between an SNES and a PSX.

The genesis is arguably a 32 bit console as well. The genesis has only a 16 bit bus to memory, but the GBA has only a 16 bit bus to it's cart and most RAM as well, leaving only on die RAM and MMIO with 32 bit bus accesses.

Additionally, it's GPU is very much derived from the NES->SNES family of PPUs. VRAM can be used as a LFB, but it's generally not the best use of the system.

I'd argue it's about halfway between a stock SNES/Genesis and an SNES/Genesis with a cart addon chip like an SVP or Super FX.

>The genesis is arguably a 32 bit console as well.

24 ;)

The genesis has 24 bit address bus, but my 64 bit CPU I'm typing this on only has a 39 bit physical address bus (48 bit virtual) and we still call it a 64 bit CPU.