Amstrad CPC, much better than I thought it would be!

[Retro-Nerd]

The C64 versions actually uses Multicolor/Hires Chars which looks brilliant. The CPC graphic is just colorful.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

The C64 versions actually uses Multicolor/Hires Chars which looks brilliant. The CPC graphic is just colorful.

Indeed

that's what i get when i play Turrican on my c64

But i prefer the amiga/st like colors of the CPC version

[turrican9]

I will agree that the CPC has more vibrant colours VS C64, but the C64 has its own style that is a matter of taste really. However, the C64 has much more smooth gameplay and better sound/music making it the superior gaming platform over the CPC.

I looked at some videos of Turrican 1 and 2 on the CPC. It has strong colours but does not look comparable to the Amiga versions by a long mile. Its also very jerky and not smooth at all. The sounds are also nothing to write home about. The only thing it has going for it is stronger colours VS the C64. As said, this can also be a matter of personal taste.

If this is all down to bad coding and lazy ports on the CPC I dont know. But if that were the case there is nothing to do about it now. A computer is only as good as its software. And in this regard the C64 wins by 100 miles.

[Retro-Nerd]

Look what Enigma Variations did on the CPC. Pathetic.

http://www.mobygames.com/company/enigma-variations-ltd

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by turrican9

I will agree that the CPC has more vibrant colours VS C64, but the C64 has its own style that is a matter of taste really. However, the C64 has much more smooth gameplay and better sound/music making it the superior gaming platform over the CPC.

The c64 version of turrican has some sort of scrolling "headbutt" when you jump...... and yes the graphical scheme of the C64 is very special.

Depending on the games, i can't spend 1 hours on some of them, it hurts badly my eyes, while with others it's ok. Turrican is okish.

I looked at some videos of Turrican 1 and 2 on the CPC. It has strong colours but does not look comparable to the Amiga versions by a long mile.

I can't agree on that point. I have dismembered both games and made the maps with Maptapper, and extracted the tiles.

Both games are using the Amiga assets, and the maps have the size of the amiga version for both games.

The shootem'up part on turrican II CPC is one of the most brilliant CPC coding ever done. It's not 50 fps, but the speed is very good, better than most shits forked out by coders at this time.

Its also very jerky and not smooth at all. The sounds are also nothing to write home about.

I agree about the sound, unfortunately, the maps are so huge and there are so big graphics in RAM that the music had to go.

But i agree it lacks music ingame. However, turrican I and II have a good playability. Good enough to dodge the enemies, as well as shooting when needed

The only thing it has going for it is stronger colours VS the C64. As said, this can also be a matter of personal taste.

It's not a surprise, the CPC version is a port of the Amiga version.

If this is all down to bad coding and lazy ports on the CPC I dont know.

Well, i passed more than a 1000's CPC games on tape. And my coder friend has checked the internal of many of them, just to discover this :

* the game is a speccy emulator running on CPC, making the machine loose any available room to get a better animation or even better playability
* the game is converting on the fly c64 assets and the 6502 has been converted line by line without any rework, both of these resulting in a major overall slowdown. (Barbarian being the most famous case!)

The CPC has a fast z80, and dedicated chips (CRTC for the video, a gate array), but you can't ask it to do thing that should not be there.

For instance, why on Barbarian they have not converted the graphics in CPC format directly instead of making the CPC convert the c64 graphics realtime ? To me it's absolutely stupid, look at Super Wonderboy on amiga !
They kept the atari ST files, in their original format, and then they convert those realtime ! Look how slow the game is on amiga .

Emulating another machine is really a heavy burden, imagine how much you can slowdown a game with that.......

You want another famous case ? Double Dragon III on CPC. Once again, it's a speccy emulator running on CPC.

The speed on this game is a pure catastrophe, because the CPC is even emulating the spectrum VRAM and all the access related to it.

It's the R-type syndrom hitting again. DDIII on CPC is actually a 3 frames per second game. Just compare aside turrican I and II, you'll see how fast both of these are on CPC.

But if that were the case there is nothing to do about it now. A computer is only as good as its software. And in this regard the C64 wins by 100 miles.

Well there is a possibility, doing remakes. And until now, the games remade on CPC are really 90% better than their original counterparts.

R-type 2012 has very fast sprites displayed on screen, while the background is scrolling in a slower manner.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Well there is a possibility, doing remakes. And until now, the games remade on CPC are really 90% better than their original counterparts.

R-type 2012 has very fast sprites displayed on screen, while the background is scrolling in a slower manner.

I was thinking to mention remakes. But then I thought it would not be very realistic to see remakes of all the classics.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

I have extracted the tiles of the CPC version of Turrican.
They are exactly the ones used in the Amiga version side by side.

Ok, ldfrsilver please stop talking out of your ass and stop trolling here. Virtually anything you say is complete nonsense. This will be my last post here..
You say the graphics on CPC are exactly the same as on Amiga... well, lets look at these screenshots. Amiga, C64 and CPC. The same? By far not. What did they take from the Amiga ? The extremely red colours that kick you in the face and never let go? The quarter size gameplay screen where the status panel takes almost as much space as the game? What you don't see is that everything not just scrolls at character steps (8 pixels) but every enemy (everything) that moves also moves in character steps. Looks like this could be a game&watch title sometimes. And then they made the sequel... you can see the same graphics as on amiga there too... it is f****ng identical. And they managed to make the play area even smaller there. Please STOP this. I am unsubscribing from this thread because every post from dflrsilver is making me puke.

[dlfrsilver]

the remakes just show how few and low work was put in CPC versions of the games.

Retro was talking about enigma variations, there is one game they did which was sold completely fucked up, it's the famous five (disk version).

I don't know what the coder did, but the game just can't work, something has been either erased, badly compiled or whatever, the game just stops early in the game.

i only know 2 machines having such wrong things : the CPC, and the Amiga.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Ok, ldfrsilver please stop talking out of your ass and stop trolling here. Virtually anything you say is complete nonsense. This will be my last post here..
You say the graphics on CPC are exactly the same as on Amiga... well, lets look at these screenshots. Amiga, C64 and CPC. The same? By far not. What did they take from the Amiga ? The extremely red colours that kick you in the face and never let go? The quarter size gameplay screen where the status panel takes almost as much space as the game? What you don't see is that everything not just scrolls at character steps (8 pixels) but every enemy (everything) that moves also moves in character steps. Looks like this could be a game&watch title sometimes. And then they made the sequel... you can see the same graphics as on amiga there too... it is f****ng identical. And they managed to make the play area even smaller there. Please STOP this. I am unsubscribing from this thread because every post from dflrsilver is making me puke.

Looking at these pictures one can clearly see that the CPC has oversaturated colours. They would hurt my eyes. And yes, the Amiga version look far superior to the CPC version. Amiga version is also far superior to the C64 version. as should be expected.

But I have to say that the C64 version looks more similar to the Amiga than the CPC version does.

[dlfrsilver]

Just look my post before

No matter the screen formatting, the scrolling speed or whatever, they used the Amiga asset and not the C64 assets to make the CPC version.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Just look my post before

No matter the screen formatting, the scrolling speed or whatever, they used the Amiga asset and not the C64 assets to make the CPC version.

Even if they did use the Amiga asset for the CPC versions of Turrican 1/2 the C64 versions are still superior to the CPC versions. Both gameplay wise and graphics.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by turrican9

Even if they did use the Amiga asset for the CPC versions of Turrican 1/2 the C64 versions are still superior to the CPC versions. Both gameplay wise and graphics.

Graphically ? No. The only thing better the c64 version has is the screen size.

I prefer the CPC graphics any day

[Retro-Nerd]

For the sake of the thread. These are acceptable or even good arcade ports/games because they fit the capabilities of the limited machine.

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[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

For the sake of the thread. These are acceptable or even good arcade ports because they fit the capabilities of the limited machine.

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Tempest while being not my kind of game is a fast game and done by D.Pridmore (Rick Dangerous fame).

Solomon Key is average to me, it lacks a lot of the levels.

Bombjack is a good game, fast and very responsive.

Cybernoid 2 is a gem on the CPC, great graphics, very good animations and a legendary soundtrack

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Graphically ? No. The only thing better the c64 version has is the screen size.

I prefer the CPC graphics any day

Well, as said, it will be about personal taste. If you think the CPC version looks better VS the C64 version then it's your personal opinion and that's fine. C64 has "washed out" colours but the graphics are still good and manages to keep a good style in my opinion. The C64 version also lacks music. Probably because the game is so huge that they couldn't put in music. Games like X-out has both music and sound effects.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by turrican9

Well, as said, it will be about personal taste. If you think the CPC version looks better VS the C64 version then it's your personal opinion and that's fine. C64 has "washed out" colours but the graphics are still good and manages to keep a good style in my opinion. The C64 version also lacks music. Probably because the game is so huge that they couldn't put in music. Games like X-out has both music and sound effects.

Yes, i guess they should have gone 128k instead this would have allowed some other possibilities.

The other reason for the size of the screen, compared to the c64 version came from the fact that the CPC mode 0 graphics are bigger in ram than the c64 graphics. Such games use on the fly decompression to build the huge maps. Having a bigger screen size would mean a memory problem.

In itself, the CPC should have been made with 128k only, 64k is ridiculous considering the amount of colors the CPC has to store in memory.

X-Out ? I love this game on CPC, it's one of the best shooters we have.

But the c64 version is really great. It's one of my favorite game on this machine, i have the tape version in a compilation. Way more polished than the turrican series graphically speaking on the C64, and with beautiful effects.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Yes, i guess they should have gone 128k instead this would have allowed some other possibilities.

The other reason for the size of the screen, compared to the c64 version came from the fact that the CPC mode 0 graphics are bigger in ram than the c64 graphics. Such games use on the fly decompression to build the huge maps. Having a bigger screen size would mean a memory problem.

In itself, the CPC should have been made with 128k only, 64k is ridiculous considering the amount of colors the CPC has to store in memory.

X-Out ? I love this game on CPC, it's one of the best shooters we have.

But the c64 version is really great. It's one of my favorite game on this machine, i have the tape version in a compilation. Way more polished than the turrican series graphically speaking on the C64, and with beautiful effects.

Yeah, X-out looks very polished. Great game. And yes, X-out looks quite good on the CPC. No music though. [ Show youtube player ]

This guy has alot of comparisons

[lost dragon]

At the end of the day, it all boils down to personal preference for which versions are prefered and why, but for myself, whilst CPC Turrican is a great improvement over the ZX Spectrum version, it's clear comprimises have been made and it falls short of the C64 version in some key areas:

Resolution appears lower, bosses smaller, the old status bar trick used to reduce playing window, scrolling and animation weaker and is it not missing 1 or 2 of the enemy ypes as well?.

Full credit to areas where it's improved over the C64, more colourful, great use of shading, more detail at times, but despite all this, it still seems a somewhat comprimised version.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by lost dragon

At the end of the day, it all boils down to personal preference for which versions are prefered and why, but for myself, whilst CPC Turrican is a great improvement over the ZX Spectrum version, it's clear comprimises have been made and it falls short of the C64 version in some key areas:

We're talking about 8 bits machines, hence yes the compromising. When you have everything, you're on a 16 bits machine.

Resolution appears lower, bosses smaller, the old status bar trick used to reduce playing window, scrolling and animation weaker and is it not missing 1 or 2 of the enemy ypes as well?.

the resolution is lower, it's 160x200. The bosses are a bit smaller, due to the smaller screen size. Yes the old bar status trick is present.

the scrolling is not as fast as the c64 one, but it's fast in itself, nothing to worry about. You can get many sprites on screen it never slowdown.
The animations are executed quickly too. I's say there's 15 fps and the game is good and pleasant to play. The CPC version has all the enemies present in the Amiga version. I know very well both version, and they kept everything on the CPC version from the 16 bits version.

Full credit to areas where it's improved over the C64, more colourful, great use of shading, more detail at times, but despite all this, it still seems a somewhat comprimised version.

Yes it's very detailed. The bosses are really drawn with great colors pleasant for the eyes, as well as the levels. My favorite color scheme is the one used on the alien level of turrican 1 with the diagonal plateforms.
It's beautiful, and there is a tiled parallax in the background (it's a trick, but well done).

But yes, considering all the things that Darren White, the Turrican CPC coder kept, all in 64kb of ram, some things had to be cut, the music, the screen size. On a 128k config, the screen size could have been really larger.

[lordofchaos]

To answer the threads original question. Yes, I recon the Amstrad is better than I first thought. Much better? No.

Thanks to JavaCPC I've been able to try out some games I've never played before, along with some old classics. Auf Wiedersehen Monty is better than I thought it would be, loved it on the c64, Amstrad version has it's own charm.