Scorpion Engine fans, rejoice—there’s a fresh Scorpion Engine update in town, and it’s packed with exciting features for retro devs. Erik “earok” Hogan has just rolled out Scorpion Engine v2024.2, bringing broader support and new tools to developers creating games for 68K-based platforms. Whether you’re working on an Amiga classic, a Sega Genesis title, or even dabbling with NeoGeo, this update offers something to enhance your workflow.
For the uninitiated, the Scorpion Engine is a powerful, user-friendly game creation engine and IDE that spans several beloved retro platforms. It supports the full range of Commodore Amiga machines—from the humble A500 with 1MB of RAM to the CD32 multimedia console. On the Sega front, it offers stable development tools for the Mega Drive/Genesis and early alpha support for the quirky Sega Pico. NeoGeo support is also in beta, covering MVS, AES, and CD systems.
This latest Scorpion Engine update continues the project’s mission of making retro game development more accessible and cross-compatible. Sponsored by BitBeamCannon and DragonBox.de, the engine empowers indie developers to bring their 16-bit visions to life without getting buried in low-level hardware quirks.
As retro game development sees a resurgence, tools like Scorpion Engine are bridging the gap between modern workflows and nostalgic hardware. Developers can now create faster, test easier, and share across more platforms than ever before—while still capturing that authentic pixel-perfect feel.
AMIGA:
- “Trackdisk” export for Amiga produces NDOS disks with lower memory usage and lower loading times.
- Visual editor for parallax.
- CD32 NVRAM saving.
- Improved handling for scrolling, particularly where high bitplanes counts and wide screens are used.
- Improved support for keyboard commands, in particular multiple keypress/release events in a single frame are handled.
MEGADRIVE:
- Much improved sprite pattern streaming.
- Support for some line scrolling options, including an “underwater” demo.
NEOGEO:
- NeoGeo maps and actors use 21 sprites at most, allowing more layers of parallax to be added to each scanline.
- Support for NeoGeo’s powerful auto animation feature for level backgrounds.
- Save cart support (as well as NeoGeo CD’s internal save memory).
UNIVERSAL:
- New “Brixx” and “Snek” sample games generously donated by Zooperdan!
- Visual editing for platform jump arcs.
- Improvements for adding new lines to codeblocks.
- Various improvements to stability and performance across all platforms.
- High Score table sample game.
- “Look Up Tables” can be implemented in external text files, allowing large amounts of data to be referenced at real time.
- Major improvements for debug mode, including first time support on Mega Drive and NeoGeo.
PERFORMANCE:
Scorpion Engine uses a benchmark game which is not a scientific measure by any means, but it does give a general idea of how performance on each platform has improved.
A500: 4%
A1200: 6%
A1200+Fast: 3%
Mega Drive: 6%
NeoGeo: 1%
