Shinobi Arcade Conversion

[jotd]

yes, but the original code also has original data so it has tilemap included, so yes it is the only data exploitable for me.

I've done tile extraction from pngs for Scramble but that was a rewrite, not a transcode job. And I'm not doing that again.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by touko

The usefull thing would be to have sprites and backgrounds in their bitmap mode, and not in tile mode .

Sure, but it was not Sega's choice

[touko]

I said BM mode for ripped GFX, not for those that are in ROM(it's classic and normal to do like this) .
If you want working on an arcade conversion, the gfx must be in BM mode to simplify the conversion work .

[touko]

Hi, i post 2 more pics from the bonus fail sequence .
I added a little touch that is not present in the arcade version :

[TCD]

Originally Posted by touko

Hi, i post 2 more pics from the bonus fail sequence.
I added a little touch that is not present in the arcade version :

That looks really good

[touko]

Thanks

[jotd]

I checked the assets that Denis sent. Each character has 16 colors. For instance each ninja (green, yellow, blue, red) is made of 16 colors. There are common colors but globally it would require 60 colors for all Ninjas to be on the screen at once. Toning down to 8 colors makes the sprites still look good, but that's still a lot of colors.

Random screenshot of the game shows at least 50 colors. Makes dual playfield AGA impossible (16+16), makes an ECS version very washed down, and would require a lot of colors on AGA too. Maybe 128 or even 256 for it to look faithful, with parallax made of AGA sprites (not a lot of colors for the backgrounds anyway).

So now the BOBs and tiles share the same bitplanes... And there's 8 way scrolling so tiles must be drawn twice (or 4 times?), in a clean buffer, to be able to "erase" bobs by pasting the tiles again. I'm not going to do it, probably. Too difficult for me, for a result at best requiring A1200+fastmem.

[touko]

I agree, like the PCE/SGX has 32, 16 colors sub palettes i can replicate very accurately the arcade game . I can easily display more than 100 colors on screen .Some colors of course, must be changed because of the 9 bit palette, but except in some specific cases, it would be imperceptible .

On the amiga (mainly OCS) you are restricted to the colors on screen, but fortunately, the 12 bit palette (and AGA) can help a bit .

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

I checked the assets that Denis sent. Each character has 16 colors. For instance each ninja (green, yellow, blue, red) is made of 16 colors. There are common colors but globally it would require 60 colors for all Ninjas to be on the screen at once. Toning down to 8 colors makes the sprites still look good, but that's still a lot of colors.

Random screenshot of the game shows at least 50 colors. Makes dual playfield AGA impossible (16+16), makes an ECS version very washed down, and would require a lot of colors on AGA too. Maybe 128 or even 256 for it to look faithful, with parallax made of AGA sprites (not a lot of colors for the backgrounds anyway).

So now the BOBs and tiles share the same bitplanes... And there's 8 way scrolling so tiles must be drawn twice (or 4 times?), in a clean buffer, to be able to "erase" bobs by pasting the tiles again. I'm not going to do it, probably. Too difficult for me, for a result at best requiring A1200+fastmem.

graphics must be redone in 128 colors at least, and the palettes used for sprites and background sorted by a good graphist.

the good solution would be using the Megadrive assets in 64 colors, but using 128 colors on A1200.

And hell yeah, the game is not easy at all to convert properly without a good graphist working on the arcade gfx to make them in 128 colors palette.

You throw the towel ?

[jotd]

I'm suspecting that I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to do something far inferior to the arcade version on a A1200 with fastmem when pistorm users can enjoy the original on MAME... Plus I've never done a 8 way scroller, I would have to use interleaved bitplanes to get better speed, which I'm not familiar with... Lots of work. Too bad as the code itself seems very simple.

For an ECS version, I'm pretty sure it will be difficult to do better than the original version.

My other arcade conversions sometimes had compromises made but were visually very close to the arcade (because those were 8 bit). For a "big title", I'd rather try Marble Madness 2 (which is slower paced and no version exist even on pistorm as the MAME fork is too old)

[haps]

Your chance to go down in history jotd.

[jotd]

The scorpion attempts were pretty good, specially because it handled the priorities between sprites & tiles (the fences in the upper level). But on a real machine, it's probably super slow, not just because of Scorpion (which is really the greatest engine the amiga ever hosted, but too bad we can't plug assembly code on it).

Back to something more realistic to do We'll see later.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by jotd

For an ECS version, I'm pretty sure it will be difficult to do better than the original version.

Ummm.. you sure bro?
You know hardware waaaaay better then me, but original was really bad (not as bad as Rolling Thunder.. but still...)

Shadow Dancer is an OCS, and looks very similar to Shinobi (it's actually shinobi 2), and they did amazing job with this port.

Check it out:
[ Show youtube player ]

Maybe Shinobi have some things that Shadow Dancer don't have, that I don't see.

Originally Posted by haps

Your chance to go down in history jotd.

Fully agree!

[jotd]

They did an amazing job on Shadow Dancer. I'm not sure I can do the same with Shinobi. I don't have a lot of experience in 8 way scrolling & a big game with bobs & tiles everywhere.

But maybe I should try that, because for instance Final Fight was Brick Nash first project, and he pulled that off brillantly, with great speed & graphics, on ECS. I should check his source code (since I have an early version of it ).

As someone explained, it takes a lot of work to "tone down" colors from 256 to 32 or even 16 without it looking too bland. Shadow Dancer looks a bit washed down but they still did an awesome job with colors, and it gets the job done.

It's a heartbreaker to remove all colors to create a ECS game, but it's a heartbreaker to create an AGA game that ECS owners won't be able to enjoy...

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'd rather try Marble Madness 2 (which is slower paced and no version exist even on pistorm as the MAME fork is too old)

That would be just AWESOME

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

They did an amazing job on Shadow Dancer. I'm not sure I can do the same with Shinobi. I don't have a lot of experience in 8 way scrolling & a big game with bobs & tiles everywhere.

But maybe I should try that, because for instance Final Fight was Brick Nash first project, and he pulled that off brillantly, with great speed & graphics, on ECS. I should check his source code (since I have an early version of it ).

As someone explained, it takes a lot of work to "tone down" colors from 256 to 32 or even 16 without it looking too bland. Shadow Dancer looks a bit washed down but they still did an awesome job with colors, and it gets the job done.

It's a heartbreaker to remove all colors to create a ECS game, but it's a heartbreaker to create an AGA game that ECS owners won't be able to enjoy...

Let's be honest : Shinobi arcade use exactly 256 _unique_ colors like a VGA PC. So it's almost impossible to even make something great in 64 colors
So 32 or 16, good luck, you need to find a very talented graphist like the guy working on Grind A500 to solve the graphics colors lowered.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by jotd

They did an amazing job on Shadow Dancer. I'm not sure I can do the same with Shinobi. I don't have a lot of experience in 8 way scrolling & a big game with bobs & tiles everywhere.

But maybe I should try that, because for instance Final Fight was Brick Nash first project, and he pulled that off brillantly, with great speed & graphics, on ECS. I should check his source code (since I have an early version of it ).

As someone explained, it takes a lot of work to "tone down" colors from 256 to 32 or even 16 without it looking too bland. Shadow Dancer looks a bit washed down but they still did an awesome job with colors, and it gets the job done.

It's a heartbreaker to remove all colors to create a ECS game, but it's a heartbreaker to create an AGA game that ECS owners won't be able to enjoy...

Honestly, I'd recommend just working on the Marble Madness 2 port since you're clearly more interested in that. If you somehow manage to finish the project you can start working on Shinobi next

[malko]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

[...] you need to find a very talented graphist like the guy working on Grind A500 [...]

A talented graphist... hum.. could it be "Tsak" ?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by malko

A talented graphist... hum.. could it be "Tsak" ?

Yes that's him.

[jotd]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

That would be just AWESOME

Different problem for that one. For that one we need the sprites, and as game is fairly recent, it doesn't run from MAME tile saving. The sprite show (in Shinobi they don't, that's why Denis worked so hard to rip them), but we can't dump them to pngs.

But somehow it looks really slower and less action paced than Shinobi, no parallax, a lot of tiles, not so many sprites, and smaller ones. Atari was always behind Sega in terms of hardware (check RoadWars vs Outrun)