English Amiga Board - View Single Post - why Sonic wasn't possible on stock Amiga?

hitchhikr · 25 January 2012, 16:27

Sonic 1 & 2 were ported to the Master System and the GameGear and Sonic Pocket to the Neo Geo Pocket so a downgraded version of the MegaDrive opus would have been possible on Amiga 500.

The reasons you describe + the tiles based video engine which is an advantage for platform games, also the MegaDrive could display 80 16x16 masked sprites and 2 independent playfields with a palette of 64 (3 bit like the ST) colors at full frame rate, that was the fixed specs of the machine, programmers had to play around this and didn't have to waste time in ultra-optimized sprites engine but could, for example, focus on programming proper physics engine like in Sonic.
Also they could move big blocks on the screen made of these 80 sprites and make the background more interactive which was impossible on Amiga.

On Amiga there was no real fixed specs: a lot depended on the program's optimization and the programmers smartness, of course the time spent on optimizing wasn't spent on improving the gameplay and it showed in many Amiga games which were dashed off in term of gameplay (even if they looked and sounded rather good).

25 January 2012, 16:27	#4
hitchhikr Registered User Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: somewhere else Posts: 511	Sonic 1 & 2 were ported to the Master System and the GameGear and Sonic Pocket to the Neo Geo Pocket so a downgraded version of the MegaDrive opus would have been possible on Amiga 500. The reasons you describe + the tiles based video engine which is an advantage for platform games, also the MegaDrive could display 80 16x16 masked sprites and 2 independent playfields with a palette of 64 (3 bit like the ST) colors at full frame rate, that was the fixed specs of the machine, programmers had to play around this and didn't have to waste time in ultra-optimized sprites engine but could, for example, focus on programming proper physics engine like in Sonic. Also they could move big blocks on the screen made of these 80 sprites and make the background more interactive which was impossible on Amiga. On Amiga there was no real fixed specs: a lot depended on the program's optimization and the programmers smartness, of course the time spent on optimizing wasn't spent on improving the gameplay and it showed in many Amiga games which were dashed off in term of gameplay (even if they looked and sounded rather good). Last edited by hitchhikr; 25 January 2012 at 16:57.