[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

Yep, as I'm sure you're aware I had to drop quite a lot of frames; I was pretty gutted to have had them in all their original-color, full-framed splendor and then drop so much, but... c'est la vie. I vaguely recall that remapping them into the final shared palette was the saddest bit.

Well, i perfectly understand what you mean. The main problem was that back in the day, Capcom artists and engineers were using the X68000 as workstation for the CPS-1, because it was the only computer able to produce this colorful graphics. the PC-98XX series from Nec were not yet able to display 256 colors.

So yes, the sharp computer was the machine that made it all happen, and no computer was up to the task back in 1991 to get the graphics perfect in their original format.

You'd had this machine you could have transfered the original graphics....

Are you sure about that? According to everything I can find (nowadays) CPS1 supports 192 palettes of 16 colors each (according to Wikipedia and even the MAME driver) = 3072 colors total. [/quote@

Yes this information is of course true. But a computer doesn't use multiple palette, it uses a unified palette. And all in all, on a VGA 256 colors machine, you can have the graphics exactly like the coin-op

Because the tools japanese used to make coin-ops had the ability to use splitted palettes, but originally no game is using more than 256 colors.
The only exception to this is Forgotten Worlds. Even when you unify the palettes to one, you can see the game use 512 colors.

You made me curious so...

Then looking at the CPS1 driver on
http://sourceforge.jp/projects/atmam...e/video/cps1.c
line 1509 is the sprite drawing stuff (not counting the background layers) which clearly uses 5 bits per sprite for the 16-color palette select (32 palettes x 16 colors) (line 1550)
Then it's using a separate 5-bit palette selector for each background tile layer (e.g. line 1236, line 1252, line 1291)..
..in total the "palette_basecolor" array has 6 entries, each of which gets a 5-bit index added to it, and 6x5=192 which corresponds to the 192*16=3072 colors described.

So... I'm not sure you're right there; the CPS1 hardware supports 512 colors (16 per tile) just for the sprites (without using any raster split tricks), including backgrounds, 3072 onscreen total.

for most games, i'm right. Why ? Because i have worked out in my head what you wrote in 1991 what you said in the FF startup-sequence.
The machine displays a lot of colors, more than 512. BUT, it's the way it works. Converting the GFX to a computer NEVER means that you have to keep the way the CPS1 arcade hardware engine works.

You have to deal with the assets like if they were never implemented for CPS-1. And what i did proved that i was right. If you have to cheat to get 256 unique colors max on screen, then do it When i get all displayed characters + backgrounds layers for a level, i never get more than 130 colors. So you can guess that there are really possibilities to work out something nice for the 1200

However, the amount colors forbids to me a port on A500 that should make the game justice. It's not a game made for a simple A500, even with 1mb of ram.

Just for information, DAMND, which is not the biggest character, weights alone something like 400kb. multiply by each character, plus backgrounds, plus the music and sound, no it can't be done good enough.

Such a game needs 4mb of RAM on a computer to be done correctly.

originally sprites + background never go higher than 256 unique colors.

Just to prove and illustrate what i say, i have fully ripped the final fight intro sequence with the original colors. If leathered want to use it, the whole graphics screens and animations are contained in a unique 64 colors palette, with NO loss of color. What i got is exactly what the arcade hardware shows on screen. This to say that converted with computer in mind, final fight can be done in 256 colors, that's way enough to get all the original colors. The multiple palettes slots are just an hardware assistance feature for the graphists.

By the way, the CPS-A-01 is dedicated to the program code hardware assistance, when the CPS-B-01 chip is dedicated to the GFX animation function hardware assistance. That's what i discovered by looking in the mame driver, and the CPS-1 video driver.

Final Fight may just possibly have for some reason decided to use less colors than the hw supported but that sounds unlikely (and isn't quite how I recall it)

Most CPS-1 games are not using the maximum colors, because while it's superior to any computer of this era, this system lacks of "memory" and "power" to do so. I have read this from one of the ex-guys of capcom arcade team, this system has incredible abilities, but it's plagued by a lack of RAM. Since one tile ref is working on word boundary, the 65535 bytes of ram are really short. (Just to illustrate, Final fight use a 512kb ROM of tiledata for the whole game (sprites, background, tile layers, whatever).

Just look at SSF2T, the conversion from the CPS-2 arcade hardware on A1200. Out of the fact it was rushed and beta when sold, it shows that an A1200 can do a game such as SSF2T very faithfully (again, 256 colors max). SSF2T is superior to FF in every possible way (each character use each 400 sprite frames => 800 all in all not counting the animations on the background.