codetapper statement was :
I'm really curious to know what approach you personally would take if you had to convert this game to the Amiga! eg:
1) Would you go for 32 colours/half-brite/dual playfield mode?
2) What memory requirements do you think you could achieve?
3) What would you use the 8 sprites for?
4) Would you drop the parallax layer or make it smaller?
5) Do you think you could make a version of the game running at 50 frames per second or you'd go for 25 (or perhaps 25 for updating everything but smooth scrolling the screen at 50fps to fake it)
6) How would you handle the water animation? Would you use colour cycling?
7) Would you double, triple or even single buffer the screen?
512kb is not enough to make halfbright games. You need 1mb at least to make 64 colors games.
To key to these games is mostly having enough memory in fact.
Anima showed with Ghouls'n'Ghosts on Atari STE that the CPU is not the key, but the actual ram available.
Even in 16 colors, GNG requires at least 4mb of ram !
Well true. 1mb became the main standard in 1991, with Alien Breed release.
From then on, the publishers went doing 1mb games.
Tiertex = all done with the 68000 + 16 colors only (even Mercs had been thought to be ported to the Atari ST).
For the moment, What Sandruzzo is doing is so many times above anything we had back in the day.....
It also shows that sharing the same cpu confirms that it's not enough to make a good port.
His choice comes from the use of the 64 colors in halfbright. That's clever, because until now, all the amiga coders just bragged how impossible it was to make fast scrolling games on the A500 in 64 colors because 6 BPL is just too slow.
Sandruzzo just show how wrong they were !
There has never been a limitation from the start about the ram required to run Rygar.
this was not the feature posed by Codetapper when he opened this thread.