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Hi all, does anyone know of a list of the games that exist for MAME that are ports of SNES or SMS or any other home console?

Thanks!

I was a bit confused by your question at first, so I'm assuming you mean arcade ports of home console games, since MAME also emulates home consoles now, too.

The short answer is generally "no", home consoles tended to be on the receiving end of arcade ports, not the other way around. The only major exceptions I can think of are the Nintendo Vs. system and the Sega Megaplay system.

Design-wise, home consoles are a much different use case in terms of player dynamics than arcade games. While arcade games are certainly meant to be attractive to players - that's how arcade operators would hopefully recoup the investment made in purchasing the machine itself - the fundamental rule is that they aren't intended to be played indefinitely by the majority of players, and are instead supposed to have a fairly short gameplay experience for all but the most skilled players.

Games for home consoles, meanwhile, tended to be aware of the fact that the player is in the driver's seat (so to speak). A well-liked game on a home console would almost never make a particularly good arcade game, and on the other hand, home console ports of arcade games tended to be downright abusive in terms of difficulty, simply because of their origin.

Konami's "Haunted Castle" comes to mind, ostensibly being an arcade imagining of Castlevania, but it's still its own game, not a port.

Sega's "Megatech" system, Nintendo's "Nintendo Super System" and "PlayChoice-10" system, the bootleg TG16/PC-Engine system made by TourVision, all are notable in that to a greater or lesser extent, they use nearly unmodified Genesis/Megadrive, SNES, NES, and TG16/PC-Engine. However, I wouldn't really call those "ports".

As mentioned before, the only two major examples are Nintendo's Vs. system and Sega's Megaplay. Both involve home console games, heavily re-coded to be more applicable to an arcade environment: Increasing difficulty, reducing the number of levels and assets, making the games themselves support an on-screen display of the number of credits, and so on.

As an amusing aside, one of my favorites is Vs. Duck Hunt. Why? Because you can [i]finally shoot that damn dog/[i]. It's a bit of a meme about people wanting to shoot that stupid Duck Hunt dog in-game, yet the Vs. System game actually lets you do it (albeit only during bonus rounds).

We don't have any records in MAME which show how many arcade games are ports from home consoles, versus how many home console games are ports from arcade games. As Just Desserts says, it's usually the case that the home console versions were ported from the arcade.

But what if you just want to see how many made the jump from one to the other?

From a MAME database point of view:

If it's -literally- a port, and it's in the softlists, and the softlist is complete, and the softlist is made in the suggested way that the shortname is identical across all platforms, then the question becomes "how many arcade games have identical shortnames to items in SNES or SMS (or any other home console) softlists".

We could determine this with some parsing of MAME data, or a website like ADB (http://adb.arcadeitalia.net) could determine this.

IIRC Hyper Street Fighter II was actually released on PlayStation 2 before being back-ported to CPS2, making it a port of a port, since it is seemingly built from the arcade version of SSF2T, modified into Hyper, ported to (or compiled for) PS2, and then ported back to the arcade. Either way, there's a year between the 2003 PS2 release and the 2004 arcade release.

Not all console games differed from arcade. Particularly early stuff like VCS2600 often played arcade-like despite it was no port. Strange is that VCS games often looked better than early Atari arcade games (many colours vs. B/W etc.) by different hardware. But e.g. Pitfall II was ported to arcade in a very modified version.

Another home-to-arcade port platform was Exidy Max-A-Flex, which simply uses the regular Atari XL versions of games and added an external 300 seconds timer to them, which feels a bit useless.

Mouja is an arcade port of a Japanese PC game.

And Choplifter started on the apple 2. There's not many though.

Megatech is original genesis games + timer. Kinda uninteresting for historical development analysis purposes.