NeoGeo Metal Slug conversion to Amiga 500 - madman task ;-)

[sandruzzo]

Another great Metal Slug!

[ Show youtube player ]

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

we're just to talk about possible tecnical solutions.

Ah okay, we are just having a technical discussion here..

Well then, if nobody needs to work anything on it the game is possible off course..

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Ah okay, we are just having a technical discussion here..

Well then, if nobody needs to work anything on it the game is possible off course..

Doing a Game Like that is a HUGE TASK. Doing a Demo to see if it's possible its' another pair of shoes.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Doing a Game Like that is a HUGE TASK. Doing a Demo to see if it's possible its' another pair of shoes.

Why are your emojis always hammering on something, dude?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Why are your emojis always hammering on something, dude?

Just to get things light Mate!

[LongLifeA1200]

Originally Posted by Steril707

What people also forget when discussing a port of Metal Slug is, that the background is almost non repeating. There are almost no tiles, everything is custom.

Means, you would need loads of RAM or streaming content from disk all the time.

Cartridge?

I was thinking that the background should fade to a silhouette after each scroll to the next section and before the start of the next enemy wave to free up memory for more sprites/colors.

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

If you change palette every 16 pixel you'll get 96 of them!

I don't remember if it could be changed that fast.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by LongLifeA1200

Cartridge?

I was thinking that the background should fade to a silhouette after each scroll to the next section and before the start of the next enemy wave to free up memory for more sprites/colors.

I don't remember if it could be changed that fast.

you have to change "only" 8 colors, with 256*192 you've a lot of time...

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by LongLifeA1200

Cartridge?

Yeah, the NeoGeo has that. Amiga don't.

[roondar]

Indeed, the lack of a cartridge slot is one of the biggest mysteries in Amiga land.

The later generation A500's had a minor upgrade to the design that would have made including a cartridge slot (complete with the ability to instantly image* any part of the cartridge Chip Memory) really easy. It is in fact very possible to design a trap door expansion for any of the later A500's (rev 5+ IIRC) that would allow for all sorts of seriously cool stuff - including a SuperFX style 3D accelerator, using 6BPL screens with tons of sprites by offloading the drawing onto that cart, etc.

Sadly, Commodore either didn't realise this potential or just didn't want to add a cartridge slot.

*) meaning no loading, just bank switching.

[chb]

Originally Posted by roondar

Indeed, the lack of a cartridge slot is one of the biggest mysteries in Amiga land.

Maybe the management of Commodore looked at the cartridge slot in the A1000 (which was of course almost always occupied by the in actuality mandatory 256k RAM expansion), and concluded that there was no demand for such a thing because it was never used for anything else*? To be fair, the C64 had a cartridge slot that was also not used very widely for games, despite the rampant piracy on that platform, so possibly the publishers really weren't too keen to use it.

*Or was it? Was there a game or other program for the A1000's cartridge slot?

[Tigerskunk]

I think cartridges were simply kind of getting old fashioned by the time the Amiga arrived. Which was after the video game crash.

I guess that computers after that wanted to differentiate themselves from the pure game consoles of that era.

And since the cartridge port on the C64 wasn't that popular to begin with, the Amiga never even got one.

These days it's missing, though.

[donnie]

To port metal slug you would have to re do everything, like the neogeo pocket one. It will be a completely different game. Might as well make an entire new game completely of your own design.. Then you could actually make it with amiga specs in mind and you would own the copyright.

[Tigerskunk]

But you would have a lot less publicity and public awareness in the Amiga scene.
Doing a port of something people already know generates a lot of free pr while it's difficult for a non port to get noticed, sometimes.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Doing a port of something people already know generates a lot of free pr while it's difficult for a non port to get noticed, sometimes.

And could also land you in some trouble, unless you get a license to do the port.

[zero]

Cartridges are expensive to manufacture, disks are cheap. Same with tape based machines, they could run cartridge games but most were on the cheaper tape format.

[roondar]

Thinking about it some more, I guess it does make more sense that there was no cartridge slot than I originally thought. In retrospect it is a pity though, a cartridge slot that could bank/image directly into chip memory would have made a lot of neat tricks possible.

As is, it remains a sadly unused part of the later A500's & A1000's abilities.

[zero]

There were some cartridge based Amiga games that were part of an arcade system build around an A500. Sidewinder is the only game I know off the top of my head that used it.

The cart didn't really improve the game at all though, but that might have been because they always planned to do a home release on disk.

Interestingly Sidewinder is one of the few games that doesn't disable the 7kHz low pass filter. Modifying the startup-sequence to do that massively improves the sound!

[sandruzzo]

"Only" 16 colors for each background?

http://6th-divisions-den.com/rip_sprites_msadv.html

[sandruzzo]

GBA ripped gfx

https://www.spriters-resource.com/ga...v/sheet/45601/

[zero]

Thanks. Doesn't look too bad, there is a lot of tile re-use.