Quote:
Originally Posted by RichAplin
Thing I think could be better;
Color palette selection: I did rip _all_ the original gfx with all frames in original palettes, and they looked gorgeous.. but undisplayable on an Amiga. I was as sad as anyone to see how they came out in a shared 16-color palette. :-( IIRC I looked at using 5-plane mode to allow for at least (say) separate palettes for sprites and background, but it slowed everything down, used more ram... etc. Remember this thing _had_ to work in 512k (and on the ST).
Gameplay: If I could do it again I'd spend time ripping out the gameplay code so it was simply identical to the original. I did consider it at the time, but this was a long, long time ago, and I didn't have in-circuit emulators or a logic analyzer or emulators or any of the tools that would make it a pretty reasonable proposition nowadays. It was quite a gamble trying to rip the gfx; I could have ultimately failed and wasted a bunch of time - but I was pretty sure I could do it and was unhappy with the "meh" graphics that the company artists had done for previous games (Line Of Fire, DD1,DD2, etc).
The sprites were original, the background tilemaps were manually recreated by artists (I think using the ripped gfx, or maybe they took video captures; I don't think I got all the parallax layer gfx ripped until late in the process). The arcade board (IIRC) used "compressed maps of tilemaps" for the background layers so they could be really huge (e.g. some of the parallax layers went on and on).
Converting the original gameplay code would be a fair bit of work even now (basically have to disassemble the whole thing, figure it out, and rebuild it to run with different memory setup ; at least it was 68000 code) the other problem with that is there were lots of missing sprite frames (and that was a sad time too, I discarded so many nice animations) the original code will be expecting.
I think the FF engine stands up to modern scrutiny fairly well (remember it is loading and decompressing stuff on the fly(!); has a dynamic defragging memory manager), but the gameplay.. sure, could stand being rewritten. More ram and deeper palette would allow you to reconvert the gfx...
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Hi Rich, since i looked and extracted things, the arcade code of the CPS version doesn't use any form of compression. Everything is in clear, and the sprites as well as the tilemaps metadatas are coded on WORD boundaries.
Hence my rips from the arcade code for the sprites. a screen of the coin-op is $0800 in length (512x256).