P.O.W. Amiga AGA Port: SNK's Arcade Brawler Hits the A1200
SNK's P.O.W. (Prisoners of War) is one of those arcade brawlers that never quite got the home treatment it deserved. A developer known as ESKAY is changing that with a native AGA conversion for the Amiga 1200, built from the arcade code itself. A new alpha is already out, and you can now play it all the way through.
A Teenage Obsession Comes Full Circle
This one is personal. ESKAY owned the original P.O.W. arcade JAMMA board as a teenager, so the love for this game runs deep. Scene figures like Hoffman provided extra inspiration, and the project started with a partial version of the first level running on the A1200.
According to ESKAY, it began as a coding experiment that "got out of hand." Four months of spare-time work later, it looks like a lot more than that.
Arcade ROM to Clean C
The process is the interesting part. ESKAY has 25 years of professional coding experience and leaned on AI tools like Claude Code and Codex to translate the arcade ROM's machine code into clean C. If that sounds familiar, it is a similar approach to the AI-coded Outrun port that recently landed on the Amstrad CPC.
Custom scripts pulled map data and sprite behaviours straight out of the MAME emulator. An AI-assisted debugging pipeline then compared the parameters of the new C code against the original arcade state, again and again, to keep everything accurate. That is a lot of checking, and it shows in how faithful the results are meant to be.
Squeezing the A1200
On the Amiga side, ESKAY uses some serious tricks:
- Triple buffering
- Full hardware scrolling
- A HUD drawn entirely with hardware sprites
The result is game objects that move surprisingly smoothly on an A1200 with a standard 020 processor and 2MB of Fast RAM. No accelerator monster required.
There is a neat bonus too. ESKAY kept the core game engine separate from the machine-specific platform code. Because of that, the engine has also been compiled as a proof of concept on the Sharp X68000, Sega Mega Drive, Atari STE and PC. The Amiga version is still the most polished and robust of the bunch, though.
The New Alpha: Start to Credits
The latest update brings a fresh alpha with a full walkthrough from the opening stage to the end credits. It now ships on two disks with level loading, and 2MB of Fast RAM is required.
It is not finished yet. In ESKAY's own words, "The waterfall jump and the lift still need some work." The lift section might end up using a 16+16 colour dual playfield setup to get it right.
Sound is the other missing piece. ESKAY is looking for a musician to compose a custom Amiga .mod file for the first level, with roughly 100KB of memory set aside just for the music. The arcade soundtrack has a gritty feel, so whoever takes this on has a fun challenge ahead.
The project lives on EAB, the English Amiga Board forum, where the alpha can also be downloaded.
Our Take
P.O.W. on the Amiga fits neatly into a wave of arcade conversions that keep proving the A1200 had more in the tank than most of us thought back in the day. We have already seen Castlevania AGA reach version 1.0, and Capcom's Gun.Smoke on the Amiga AGA showed the same appetite for faithful arcade ports.
What stands out here is the method. Combining decades of experience with AI tools and MAME data extraction suggests a faster path from arcade ROM to retro hardware than the old hand-built approach. Splitting the engine from the platform code is also a smart move, and it is worth watching whether those X68000, Mega Drive or STE builds ever grow beyond proof of concept.
For now, the things to keep an eye on are the lift and waterfall fixes, and whether a musician steps up to fill that 100KB with something suitably loud. If you have an A1200 with Fast RAM, the alpha is worth a look.