Ports
The popularity of Bubble Bobble led Taito (or its licensees) to port to many home computers and video game consoles. Ports of the game were released for the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, MSX, Amstrad CPC, Sharp X68000, PC (MS-DOS, 1989 and 1996), Apple II, FM Towns Marty, Sega Master System, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System, Sega Game Gear, mobile phone (Sprint PCS), Texas Instruments TI-8x series of calculators and UltraCade's Taito Arcade Classics. A version also exists for the BBC Micro on public domain though never officially released. The original Sega Master System version had two hundred levels. Of the original 8 and 16 bit ports, the NES and Game Boy ones were made by Taito themselves. Sega converted Bubble Bobble for the Master System (although this version was not released in North America). The Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions were made by UK-based Firebird Software, and most of the other computer ports by US-based Novalogic.
In 1996 Taito announced that they lost the original source code. As Probe Entertainment was in charge of the home conversions, Taito sent them a Bubble Bobble arcade PCB so they could play the original game and reproduce its mechanics. This led to the release of Bubble Bobble also featuring Rainbow Islands for Saturn, PlayStation and PC (MS-DOS) in 1996.
The original Game Boy and Game Boy Color versions have a Moon Water storyline, and are known as Bubble Bobble, and Classic Bubble Bobble respectively.
In 2002, a homebrew version for the TI-83 graphing calculator was released.
In October 2005, a version was released for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and PC as part of the Taito Legends compilation of classic arcade games.
At the end of 2006 a new port for mobile phones in Europe and Japan was released.
On December 31, 2007, the NES version of Bubble Bobble was released on Nintendo's Virtual Console service for the Wii. It costs 500 Wii Points, the equivalent of US$5.
During Christmas of 2011, a new version for the Amstrad CPC, entitled Bubble Bobble 4 CPC or BB4CPC was released for free by programmer CNGSoft, as an update to the original/official CPC version, which has been criticised for its lacklustre implementation and underuse of the system's hardware potential.
Read more about this topic: Bubble Bobble
Famous quotes containing the word ports:
“It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O polished perturbation! golden care!
That keep’st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)