Final Fight Speculation

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by OmegaMax

There are a few owners of arcade boards prototypes that will not send their boards to anyone for dumping the roms,unfortunately this might be the case with this also.

Yeah I know and understand as they probably paid killer money for these

Shame though, as what happens if their board dies in the future...

[TurboCrash]

Originally Posted by adolfo.pa

Wasn't Vendetta the one where the cop from Village People used some pretty explicit "special" moves on you? In my area it was quite famous and well known, if only for that reason :-)





Could that be Growl? I remember you could use all kinds of gadgets, kick people on the ground, etc.

Yeah, it was Growl, I owe you a beer!



Regarding "special moves" I remember that in Vendetta(?) dogs would have their way with you if you were unfortunate to lay unconscious on the ground.

[Master484]

I think Double Dragon 3 is the only scrolling beat em up on Amiga that runs at 50 FPS.

I tested it on WinUAE and it handles player + 3 enemies at 50 FPS, but if you add the second player, then one more enemy also appears on screen, making it 2 players + 4 enemies, and at this point you can see slowdown.

But still, it's pretty good, 16 colors and decent size characters. Maybe one of the best arcade conversions on the Amiga in fact.

But sadly the arcade original was nothing special, and so this technically good conversion was "wasted" on a mediocre arcade beat em up.

But it proves that a good game of this sort is possible; it's easy to imagine the Double Dragon 3 engine running a game like Streets of Rage 2 at solid 25 FPS. And Final Fight too would be doable, with smaller character sizes.

[vulture]

Would the mega typhoon technique be of use in a beat em up scenario?

[Master484]

Would the mega typhoon technique be of use in a beat em up scenario?

Mega Typhoon uses many different tricks to get lots of moving stuff to screen, but at the core of the awesomeness is sprite multiplication.

But sprite multiplication isn't so useful in a scrolling beat em up, for many reasons:

1.
The characters are big, so many sprites would be needed to make one character. A walking animation could maybe be done with 2 sprites, but action frames like kicks would need more.

2.
Beat em up characters have more than 4 colors, so "attached sprites" would be needed to get 16 color sprites, which eats 2 sprite channels instead of one. So just one 32 pixel wide sprite would need 4 channels.

3.
The characters overlap all the time when they move in front and behind of one and another, which would make sprite multiplication really tricky, if not impossible.

4.
And also combining the sprites with characters made of BOBs would be almost impossible, because both would need to be able to freely to move in front and behind each other.

In Mega Typhoon the sprite tricks work great because it multiplies small bullets that are mostly of size 8*8, and only 4 colors, and clever tricks are used so that too many sprites are never positioned to the same horizontal line.

But on A500, with it's 16 pixel wide sprites, it would be really hard to give the "mega typhoon" treatment to a game like Final Fight.

But A1200 has 64 pixel wide sprites, so for AGA we could have a beat em up with four 64 pixel wide characters, and it would surely run at 50 FPS thanks to the sprites. Four may sound like a small number, but many good beat em ups on the NES don't have any more than 4 dudes on screen at any time, so maybe this is one option.

---

One other trick used in Mega Typhoon is the use of Dual Playfield so that it can blit everything in 8 colors. And this can surely be used in beat em ups too, as has been suggested earlier in this thread. Dual playfield itself adds an overhead, but this can be compensated by making the screen area smaller (for example Mega Typhoon uses a 256 pixels screen in comparison to full 320 pixels) .

The Dual PF 8 + 8 color setup would be good for Chip RAM too; lots of 8 color frames can stored at once, and also the background tiles would be 8 color only.

Although it seems that there are no Amiga scrolling beat em ups that would use 8+8...all are either 16 or 32 color mode. But this just adds one more reason to try it out.

[Shatterhand]

I Agree Double Dragon 3 on Amiga it's a good port. It's actually better than the arcade version in a few ways. Unfortunately the Arcade game is really incredibly crap... so it's a wasted opportunity. Again.

Double Dragon 2 on Amiga it's even a better proof of concept IMO. The game is very smooth (If you say DD3 is the only Amiga game on the genre running at 50 fps, I'll believe its running at 25 fps*), It has up to 4 foes on screen (not just 3), Music + SFX, HUD on top of the gameplay screen (and a colorful one) Multi-directional scroll, a good variety of moves for the player and a good variety of enemies. A wasted opportunity. Again. Again.

All of this running on an OCS 512 kb machine.

It just comes to show how acomplished Richard Aplin was as a programmer indeed. It's just a shame he could never get the gameplay mechanics of those games up to the arcade standards. Double Dragon 2 on Amiga is really *very* close of being a good beat'em up, if it wasn't for its small but annoying gameplay issues. (And , well, also some issues with the original Arcade game)


(Isn't Motorhead running at 50 fps?)

Originally Posted by vulture

Would the mega typhoon technique be of use in a beat em up scenario?

Probably not. You can't mix sprites and BOBs with a pseudo 3D game (unlike a shmup which is pure 2D), as you can't have different drawing priorities between them. And multiplexing sprites doesn't help at all since on this case you may have all objects at the same scanline (Again, unlike a shmup where it's very easy to limit 8 bullets per scanline, as so many shmups did on past even with bigger sprites limit).

And if you use just sprites you are either limited by eight 16 pixels wide 4 colors sprites - Which means you either will have incredibly small sprites, be limited to just 4 moving characters at just 32 pixels wide (still kinda small but doable) or have sprites flickering on screen - and all of this using just 4 colors to them, which will give them a very "NES" feeling which won't be well received on an Amiga game.


The Sprites capabilities of the Amiga are very close to the NES one (the way colors are distributed it's actually more intelligent on NES), and on NES those games usually have flickering sprites (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) or a very low amount of enemies on screen (Mighty Final Fight - which still flickers) . Thing is, people are used to stuff flickering on NES games, it's even surprising when stuff are NOT flickering on a NES game. Not so much on an Amiga game, good luck on trying people accepting your sprites flickering everywhere on an Amiga game

[saimon69]

On powder we had an intelligent way to deal with bobs on 16 colors turning on and off some bitplane blitting and using some reduced palette sets to minimize overhead, but was made in assembly and update stuff at 25fps

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by saimon69

On powder we had an intelligent way to deal with bobs on 16 colors turning on and off some bitplane blitting and using some reduced palette sets to minimize overhead, but was made in assembly and update stuff at 25fps

This won't work if we go the Dual Playfield way. But I still think this is easier to do with a shmup because you usually use less colors on a single bob.

BTW Powder is a great game I should remember it more when discussing Amiga shmups. It does have its flaws, but it's a better game than Project-X

[vulture]

Thanks for the answers. I was actually referring to Mega Typhoon's dual playfield trick rather than its sprite multiplication technique.
I had seen this one, which I find it to be very impressive and seems to be using that same method at its core:
[ Show youtube player ]

Also, isn't AGA capable of 8 64p wide sprites, not 4?

[Shatterhand]

Yes you can. If I ever come to make a beat'em up on OCS system (and I *really* want to do it), that's the approach I'll have. Dual Playfield, background uses 8 colors, the front playfield is where the action happens, no need to redraw background, gets some extra blitter time (by blitting less bitplanes and not redrawing background) and gain some memory by having bobs with less colors.

I really think something like Master System's Streets of Rage 1 with more enemies on screen and 2 players option could be *easily* achieved even with Blitz Basic (Which is all I know how to use) and still come out a a very good game.

A good programmer (which is not my case ) could do even better

[Master484]

Also, isn't AGA capable of 8 64p wide sprites, not 4?

Yes, it has 8 sprites in 64 pixel width too. But those are 4 color sprites, and to make them 16 color half of the sprite channels are "lost", so this is why I was talking about 4 sprites.

[vulture]

Ah, I see!

[seko]

hi , amiga fans
I wanted to write something about the subject you discussed. I made a few applications with Amiga for the designs of arcade games.I just wrote the program using standard features. My development is slow because I do not have enough time.I keep improving about my Amiga game design.The design and adaptation of arcade games is not so easy. You know how well you know about amiga. You can put up so many good products. Sometimes the weak side may be handicap.i am not a professional game developer.

it is useful to take advantage of the techniques that other programmers write in games. The codetapper's amiga site provides very useful information.


A few works (assembly code )

Super fantasy zone (Dual playfield ,enemys , and fire shoot)

[ Show youtube player ]

Diffrent Background version

[ Show youtube player ]


MORTAL KOMBAT 3 " SONYA , SUBWAY PLACES "

Dualplayfield mode Test

[ Show youtube player ]

Single playfield and sonya walks

[ Show youtube player ]


This video real amiga 500 ecs 1mb on test.
Single playfield and sonya jumps

[ Show youtube player ]


SF2 CE ( C Code )

Ken and Ryu stage Ryu Sound fix ( Need 68030 or above cpu )

[ Show youtube player ]


Arcade robocop ( C Code )

Level 1

[ Show youtube player ]


LEVEL 1 BOSS

[ Show youtube player ]

[vulture]

very nice work! I hope you finish something, especially that Robocop remake.

[Master484]

Nice looking demos, it would certainly be cool to have a better conversion of Robocop for the A500. And why not Mortal Kombat 3 too.

But as you said, making arcade games is not easy, and it takes a lot of time. I too have made many demos which test out different graphics and sprite movements, but making a full game is so time consuming, that I have never finished anything.

I can't understand how back then a single programmer could finish an entire arcade conversion in just 6 months or even less.

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by Master484

But as you said, making arcade games is not easy, and it takes a lot of time. I too have made many demos which test out different graphics and sprite movements, but making a full game is so time consuming, that I have never finished anything.

I can't understand how back then a single programmer could finish an entire arcade conversion in just 6 months or even less.

It's clear judging by the quality of some ports that they actually couldn't.

Seriously though, working 8 hours per day 5 days a week, it's doable. If it's your main job, it's doable. Problem is doing it as a spare-time project

Also, I can see how, when working on a hobby project, is hard to keep motivated for too long. In the other hand, also speaking from experience, when you KNOW there's a paycheck waiting for you when the job is finished.... it's a lot easier to finish a game in 6 months

[mcgeezer]

It really comes down to desire and determination if you are not doing it for a job, besides if we really wanted to we could go and work on mobile games and earn a shit load by publishing crud on the app stores but where would the fun be in that?

For me it was my desire to get back into Amiga coding and develop a game that I love, without the love of the game I wouldn't have had the determination or desire to complete the project especially when I have a wife, 2 year old and a full time job - your spare time is precious so spend it wisely on a project you love and care about, in other words - do something for yourself and you'll succeed, do it for someone else and the chances are you won't.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

It really comes down to desire and determination if you are not doing it for a job, besides if we really wanted to we could go and work on mobile games and earn a shit load by publishing crud on the app stores but where would the fun be in that?

For me it was my desire to get back into Amiga coding and develop a game that I love, without the love of the game I wouldn't have had the determination or desire to complete the project especially when I have a wife, 2 year old and a full time job - your spare time is precious so spend it wisely on a project you love and care about, in other words - do something for yourself and you'll succeed, do it for someone else and the chances are you won't.

We could coiche some conversiont that worth doing, and work on them, maybe founding via Kickstarter

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

We could coiche some conversiont that worth doing, and work on them, maybe founding via Kickstarter

But for what purpose?

[sandruzzo]

To finish projects?