#console ports

Someone asked me a weird question, and I'm not sure I can give a straight answer but... based on what little I understand:

The Nintendo Wii version of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core is based on the original PlayStation 2 port of the game.

The Nintendo Switch version of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R is "supposedly" based on the Arcade version of Plus R.

I don't have the precise details on this, so I can't confirm it or not.

All I can say is that the Steam version/PC version of Accent Core Plus R is probably the closest to the Arcade version, even compared to the XBox360 version.

This is largely why it might prove difficult to port Accent Core Plus R to the PlayStation 4/5 at this time... since the PlayStation 3 version of Accent Core Plus R is a "bad port" of the Arcade version... they would likely have to make a port of PlusR from Scratch for PS5 (if they ever decided to).

If anyone has more details on PlusR they could divulge to add to this post, I'd appreciate it... but so far, all I can really say is that Plus R itself is fundamentally an "arcade version" of Accent Core Plus (ACPlus was an "append" to the original PS2 port of the game, but later ported to Arcades in a completely different way).

It took nearly a year to "patch" to the PS3 version of Accent Core Plus to a semi-stable "Plus R" build... so that should give you some idea why the PC version is probably the most stable version in existence.

Prior to ACPlus on the PS2, was the unstable builds of Accent Core, which are famous for the I-No Fortissimo Crash bug, among other issues it had.

Prior to that was GGXX Slash and GG Isuka builds, which were based on Blue Reload, which was based on Red Reload which was based on the original "unpatched" Guilty Gear XX: The Midnight Carnival.

GGXX had several "Arcade Naomi ports" based on the games I just listed, but they aren't nearly as big a project as Plus R was to reverse-port.

Again, I have no idea if they will ever port this game to PS4 or PS5... but I have my doubts.

It really depends on the scope of the port and the state of the original game. If it’s just a bare-bones port job (i.e. just get it to work), it’s often doable by a small team of programmers, usually just building a virtual machine to map the inputs and outputs from the new hardware to the signals recognized by the old software. However, that’s at the extreme basic level, not much more than writing an emulator that works with one ROM.

If the ported game adds new features (e.g. online play, save states, etc.), that gets more involved. This often requires creating new systems where there weren’t any before. If we wanted to add something like online play, this means we need some way to map inputs and handle latency, but we also need systems like lobbies, matchmaking, invitations, regions, etc. so players can find each other in order to play online. That means more engineering and QA, but also designers and artists to figure out how the new systems should work and what they should look like. 

Things get even more complicated if you want to change the internals of the game, like the recently announced Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. It isn’t just a graphical upgrade, some of these models and scenes have been significantly changed. This means that old assets had to have been changed, not just swapped out. Things that didn’t move before like hair now sway, indicating the presence of newly-added physics simulation. Changes like this go beyond keeping the old game untouched and only messing with the inputs and outputs. These go into the old code and change stuff there. A lot of folks call these remasters instead of ports, due to the scope of the changes. It isn’t the exact same game anymore.

For porting an old game like Golden Sun (assuming there are no legal/licensing issues), it really depends on the scope of the port and expected sales numbers for the development resources it would take to build it. A simple GBA ROM emulation is pretty cheap and quick to build, but also probably wouldn’t sell too well. A full 3D remake of the game would be much more expensive to develop and take a lot longer (since they’d need to build all of those assets and all), but would probably sell a lot better. As an example, the latter is the path that Square-Enix chose for Secret of Mana. 

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