The Mega Man Legacy Collection was released earlier this week, giving fans of the classic action platformer series a great excuse to revisit its golden era.
Things aren’t all wine and roses, though. Reddit poster Jack-Walker has been poking around inside the Steam release of the game, and discovered that Capcom’s claims about the game using an entirely new engine may not be quite true.
”First of all,” he clarifies, ”I would just like to say that I am not implying that MMLC is a bad release by any means. However, I feel that Capcom made a bad choice in claiming that MMLC uses a brand new engine and does not use emulation, when this is not the case.”
”Stored inside the .exe of the Steam release of the game,” he continues, ”ROM files can be found for the six Mega Man games. For example, as of the current update of the game (1.0.0.64), the Mega Man 2 ROM can be dumped by opening up Proteus.exe in a hex editor, going to the address 0xE22818, copying 0x40000 bytes to a new file, and adding a proper INES header to the top of the new file, which can be obtained from a normal MM2 ROM, or hand crafted. Once this is done, the game can be played on any NES emulator like a normal ROM file.
Other posters are pointing to this US Gamer interview with producer and director Frank Cifaldi, in which he states the following;
”We set up our Eclipse Engine, and we set up hardware simulation modules, and we convert using source elements provided by the publisher, — their original game to our format. So you have Mega Man running in our hardware module within the Eclipse Engine. The idea being, once it works in Eclipse, we forward Eclipse somewhere else, and it just works, for the most part.”
It sounds like Capcom may have been over-egging the pudding a bit here, by claiming that the Eclipse Engine is more than just a fancy emulator. Judging by the critical and public reception of the game, this clearly isn’t some careless, slapdash release, but - if it is the case that the games are simply emulated - you probably shouldn’t be advertising the collection as being ”developed with an all-new engine”, as Capcom has been doing on the game’s Steam page.
I should point out my near-complete technical ignorance here - the more tech-minded of you may want to check out the full Reddit thread, which is an interesting read.
