No this is not some kind of remake, it's an all-new RockMan game for the black-and-white WonderSwan. The only things taken from the first RockMan & Forte are the protagonists and the music. It's nothing amazing, but it's something new to try if you're tired of the same old RockMan games.
I can't use the new rerecording version of Mednafen yet, but I made some savefiles in the regular version to help anyone test things, so I hope they work for you.
http://www.box.net/shared/f3p5y98m85 Just change the name of the save you want to use to whatever your save file is currently called... I think that will work. "R" or "F" means which character was selected, the boss name is which boss you're
going to fight (so you have all other bosses' weapons), "full" means you have absolutely every power-up, and "stuff" means you only have items that are activated on the menu.
Spike protection was a borderline case there because it is a one-use item, but I consider it an ability enhancer because it will change what happens when you touch a spike, and you can't get rid of it anytime like the rest. So if you want to add to that, I collected 999 bolts in the "stuff" files as well, and the ones with "999" have just the first level beaten with 999 bolts. I saw no point in saving extra bolts before the first level was completed, because I don't think you can access the shop until then anyway.
Once again, you play as one of the two characters for the whole game, so we'll have to find out which one is faster. (I'm betting on Rock!) I made lists of the major differences.
RockMan:
-slides at a height of 2 tiles, letting him slip past some spikes and passages that Forte can't.
-can shoot through walls and has a stronger shot than Forte to begin with...
-can only fire straight ahead, though. This is mainly only a problem with bosses that hover; the worst is that octopus that you have to bounce shots off hard-hats to hit.
-can charge up! The charged shot is 4 times as powerful as the small shot (there is no medium shot in this game), which means it's 8 times as powerful as Forte's starting weapon!
-has a wider variety of helpers. Tango can last a long time in an area without pits. Beat is pretty sweet, because you get invincibility, and Beat flies around Rock killing enemies,
and you can still shoot and even charge up.
-can't reach certain platforms without Rush Coil, which you spend 100 bolts on for just one use. This is necessary for some shortcuts, so this is another way RockMan will lose time compared to Forte.
-gets different weapons from some of the bosses than Forte, like a three-way Vulcan from DanganMan and a flamethrower that reminds me of the charge-up shot from Totally Rad. Has anyone ever bothered to use the Doppel Crash?
Forte:
-can jump once in mid-air, letting him dodge many obstacles and take many shortcuts that RockMan can't. One side-effect is that pushing A on a ladder makes Forte jump off the ladder rather than fall right away. You can even double-jump up through some vertical screen transitions like in Rockman World 1.
-can shoot in 7 directions. (Not being able to shoot straight down seems like a way to help the player fire diagonally downward in the air without moving toward the enemy.)
-can't shoot through walls until he buys a 300-bolt power-up.
-takes twice as many shots to defeat any enemy with his starting gun until he buys an other 300-bolt power-up. This will probably be a killer.
-can't charge up, no matter what he buys!
-gets 4 shots on screen at once, while RockMan only gets 3.
-stands still while shooting on the ground, so you have to jump or stop shooting for a moment to move forward again.
-auto-fires when you hold B, but this is useless outside of casual play because you can tap the button faster than Forte auto-fires.
-has a pretty useless helper in Gospel; why float around when you can get everywhere in these small screens by double-jumping? Gospel doesn't seem to improve anything else about Forte, just floating.
-dashes at about the same speed as RockMan as far as I can tell, but he only goes down to 3 tiles, so he needs Doppler Attack to clear the RockMan-only passages. There appears to be no "dash-jump" physics in this game; jumps are the same speed all the time.
-gets better weapons. Forte Vulcan homes in on things, Flame Mixer covers his whole body and doesn't fly away when he changes elevation, and Doppler Attack lets him float anywhere including through walls, impervious to enemies' attacks but dealing major damage back to them. Seriously, Doppler Attack is like some kind of weird debug mode that they decided to leave in the game as a weapon!
-has a longer entrance animation (laughing) by a second or two. Times 8 levels, this could really add up.
After the Gray Devil, the first four Robot Masters can be fought in any order, then you fight the ClockMen, then CompassMan, then RockMan-Shadow. Interestingly, this setup is quite similar to the Game Gear game, except you get an intro level, and you don't get a weapon from CompassMan because he's mean.
Go ahead and post any exploits you find. One thing I noticed is that you can shoot into a screen transition just before your character actually reaches it, and the bullet will continue into the new room and hit things while your character is still waiting for the scrolling to finish. You can even hit a few bosses this way before the battle actually begins, but charged shots don't seem to take away their life. There may also be a trick to jumping just before teleporting so you teleport from the air and maybe save a little time flying up, but I haven't really tested that.
One last thing I had on my mind was that AirConMan's level is
sideways. This means that on the real system, you would rotate the whole thing ninety degrees and move your hands to a different set of buttons for the duration of the level so that you're playing in an area that's taller than it is wide. Mednafen has enough features that this shouldn't be a problem for TAS, but I think the finished video file would have to be rendered at 244x244, with part of the movie pillarboxed and the rest letterboxed, if I understand correctly.
By the way...
R-Shadow has a bad memory when it comes to sprites
