Conversion Capers: Rygar

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

All bobs and hw sprites have to use colors 16-31. Then the tileset uses all possible 32 colors where applicable.
Rygar is a bob in this and the background is a hw sprite that shares the 16 colors with them. You could always go for Rygar as a sprite, they will share the same colors either way and then you reduce the quality of backdrop.

The outline helps to define an object's shape and makes it more clear.

Imo no need to stretch the hardware here just to make a beast-like show with tricks upon other tricks just to show what is possible. Or else we can do a demo.
Rygar as a sprite is better if you use dual playfield, to separate from the 8 colors buddies and tiles and give some extra color here and there (i think lionheart does this) or if you go for a 16 color game.

Ok. I can do some speed test to see if we can have all run at 50hz. I did a hell of you to have rygar as sprite..

In order to save some cycle, we have to reduce background plane on the floor and lava. I'm going to work on visualize all tiles in the correct way

[Retro-Nerd]

Great job so far guys. I'm not a big Rygar fan but now i want to see in running on my Amiga. Any chance for a small tech demo clip or is it too early to show something yet?

[nobody]

maybe if some cooperation happens with map making, music and final plan of what mode to use a demo could happen (?).


All backdrops reduced to same 16 colors with sprites, i think except the last 2 the others are acceptable.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

maybe if some cooperation happens with map making, music and final plan of what mode to use a demo could happen (?).


All backdrops reduced to same 16 colors with sprites, i think except the last 2 the others are acceptable.

Great Job! You're right all is good!

[sandruzzo]

Here we are: Rygars' tiles on screen!

Now we need final gfx tiles' and map too. I would like to close once and for all screen gfx and scrolling too.

[Shatterhand]

I was playing Rygar on Mame other day, the music seems to use just 2 channels. It shouldn't be too hard, for the people with the talent, to make a .mod rendition of it.

Not that I could do it. I'd really would like to help with this project somehow, but I don't have the talent to do anything helpful, other than playtest the game

[sandruzzo]

@Nobody

I would keep rygar as sprite and use the others' 4 sprite to do background. Here what aI'm talking about:

http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/r-type-2/

[nobody]

Nice but this game uses only 16 colors so they didn't care about upper 16 colors and didn't affect the tiles. If you go 32 colors requires some heavy work on tiles and bobs and their palettes every single level and there are 30 of them.

(Because every 4 color sprite uses specific color registers?except if you reduce sprites quality to 12 colors and have 4 spare colors for these sprites? Insane )

[sandruzzo]

Ok, maybe it's too hard to keep a good visual quality. You did a hell of job!! Just waiting gfx tiles and tiles' map

[nobody]

I am sure they went this approach for speed and then have some extra colors here and there using the sprites. Maybe some explosions or bullets and the backdrop.

[Codetapper]

No, they went for that approach in R-Type 2 so that the game could be ported to the Atari ST at the same time. The sprites are only used for the background parallax, even though they could have used 4 sprites for the background and used the other 4 sprites for something else. On the ST, that section is just black background.

[sandruzzo]

Maybe we could do a try to see if we can have a good parallax.

[nobody]

I remember Andrew Braybrook back then said that using 32 colors on the Amiga

-reduces speed a lot, some times slower than the ST with 16 colors
-they should make their games more disks due to more data with 32 colors
-also requiring 1 MB Amigas to run.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

I remember Andrew Braybrook back then said that using 32 colors on the Amiga

-reduces speed a lot, some times slower than the ST with 16 colors
-they should make their games more disks due to more data with 32 colors
-also requiring 1 MB Amigas to run.

I know what him said. With 32 colors on screen we have only 33% of the cycle available when DMA bitplanes work

[dlfrsilver]

there many 32 colors amiga games......

Braybrook also said when Rainbow islands was made that he could not use the 5th bitplan,when he could have actually, but at this time, it was ST first, Rainbow Islands was made to be a 512k of ram only game.

Doing a game in 2015 for 512kb of ram when the base is 1mb is a bit useless....

In the same vein, Steve Turner said that Taito gave them 4 discs with IFF graphics, they had to convert them to Art Studio for Atari ST, because IFF format was too slow to decompress (on ST surely ! lol).....

[sandruzzo]

With Rygars is not the ram the issue, but to keep all running at 50hz..

[chb]

Originally Posted by nobody

Nice but this game uses only 16 colors so they didn't care about upper 16 colors and didn't affect the tiles. If you go 32 colors requires some heavy work on tiles and bobs and their palettes every single level and there are 30 of them.

(Because every 4 color sprite uses specific color registers?except if you reduce sprites quality to 12 colors and have 4 spare colors for these sprites? Insane )

You could work around this by setting the ATTACH bit for those two sprite pairs, but not overlap them. Then you have 4-color-sprites where the lower numbered sprite uses colors 17-19 and the higher one colors 20,24,28 (http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD.../node00C6.html). So for a 4-sprite-background, you'll use use up six of the upper 16 colors., leaving nine independent colors for the player sprite.

EDIT: Forget what I was saying. For a 4-sprite background it does not make a difference, as you would use use eg sprites 0,1,2,3,4 unattached for the background, where 0+1 and 2+3 share the same 3-color-palette. The trick with attached sprites makes only sense if you use more than four sprites for the bg.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by chb

You could work around this by setting the ATTACH bit for those two sprite pairs, but not overlap them. Then you have 4-color-sprites where the lower numbered sprite uses colors 17-19 and the higher one colors 20,24,28 (http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD.../node00C6.html). So for a 4-sprite-background, you'll use use up six of the upper 16 colors., leaving nine independent colors for the player sprite.

@Cnb Thanks for that. We have to see if the parallax with less color is still accetable..

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

maybe if some cooperation happens with map making, music and final plan of what mode to use a demo could happen (?).


All backdrops reduced to same 16 colors with sprites, i think except the last 2 the others are acceptable.

The first strip, use "only" 8 colors, so we can add more, or we can try to do it with 3 colors, and see if with copper we can add more

[Codetapper]

You will most certainly have to make some sacrifices. I don't believe it is possible to have a 64 pixel wide 16 colour sprite background with 5 bitplanes for the game. There is not enough DMA time to reposition all 8 sprites across the screen. By my calculations, you can't even get a 256 wide pixel pattern in 32 colour mode. You might get 208 pixels but that's far too thin for an Amiga game!

So the background sprites really have to be 3 colours.