How arcade to Amiga conversions should be.
 

Hi,

I made 3 videos, showing how arcade conversions to Amiga should be:

Gradius:
http://youtu.be/i6FGXZ2GLJs

Side Arms:
http://youtu.be/enz3w3mOMbE

Fairiland Story:
http://youtu.be/NGlAYsG6BNA

I converted background to 16 colors and main sprites, bullets and something more to other 16 color palette.

GREAT videos!!!

Side arms is in fact a 256 colors game ;)

Rainbow Islands is using 32 colors only in arcade, i did some test a while ago :)

That 'original' port of Side Arms looks really horrible, almost unplayable..

Seeing Gradius/Nemesis reminds me of playing it to death on my MSX. Konami did the best cartridge games for it in those days lol

Funny to see this as I have been considering tackling a port of this for quite some time but have never found the time to explore it further due to other projects.

Imagine this Gradius on Amiga, what a wonderfull horizontal shooter, Amiga is capable of doing the game almost like pixel perfect.

Hi Toni,
how do you create these video?
You said you allocate 16 colors for BG and 16 colors for Sprites, how you obtain the 2 separate videos?

Thanks in advance!

I like the fact that amiga got also aga chipset and can display more colors so I do not understood why force ports to work only with 16 colors. I'm sure that games could work faster when there's smaller palette, but amiga games do tricks to have both great speed and audio/visual high level.

this is best when the game is designed with the Amiga in mind, conversions are always going to be a compromise on something.

also a pre-AGA arcade game should be converted to OCS, really.

Pang is a noteworthy exception.

Pang use a routine which allows WAY more than 32 colors on screen. Pierre Adane used a trick for that. That's why the screen are as good as the coin-op original.

Maybe I didn't watch far enough into the video, but Fairyland Story certainly looks ripe for conversion to Amiga without too many problems...

The Maptapper docs have a lot of screenshots from the game Pang demonstrating how it was done.

6 stripes of 16 color palettes, thanks to the copper :) That's what thierry told me about Pang. i guess that this technique could be employed in a side scrolling game too ? Allowing to have a lot more colors :)

First, look this Final Fight on 16 colors, all the ingame graphics with the same palette
Attachment 42715

Attachment 42716

Attachment 42717

First of all, I captured some pictures on the same level or levels in the game. The original graphics:
Attachment 42718
I extract the parts I supose to make with HW sprites, this is the background with the BOBs in 16 colors:
Attachment 42722
This is the HW sprites, another 16 colors:
Attachment 42720
This is all mixed:
Attachment 42721

For the video, I make the same conversion for Gradius, then I load the image in Promotion (a good graphics program), with the color palette, I can import the Avi I captured with Mame, then, the video will have 32 colors (in this case, all the graphics because I am not separated the HW sprites from the backgrounds).

I made the same with Rastan:
Original graphics:
Attachment 42724
16 colors backgrounds and BOBs
Attachment 42725
16 colors HW sprites:
Attachment 42726
Background+BOBs+HW sprites:
Attachment 42727

What do you think?

I think the comparison of image 1 to image 4 is excellent!
Are you actually planning to create Amiga ports of any of these?

And, for Atari ST, 16 color Rastan :)
Attachment 42728

Bleurghhh ST? You can leave now ;)