Turrican comparison...

[thinlega]

Originally Posted by Akira

I always foudn multicolor copper backgrounds to be lame shit, they look terrible. I prefer a good layer of simple clored parallax.

Just wait until I have finished my new thinlega website... I have gone abit parallax crazy

[Amiga1992]

Used it as a gag, it;s ok. you know what I mean, bro

Turrican 2's soundtrack is bar none the BEST videogame soundtrack ever made. I'm talking Amiga of course.

[Locash]

If you want to see an example of how incredibly lazy developers can be, load a game called Universal Soldier on the SNES. Quicky run through the first level in the forest then BANG it jumps to Turrican 2. Level design is identical only changes i have found are cosmetic the main sprite an a couple of boss sprites.

[Amiga1992]

Yu, that wa a very lame atempt at something, like someone at the Ocean Experience said, you develop a game and then slap a license on it.

Infos coming in:
Turrican 3 was not downgraded to fit on one disk. There is a comment about this from Peter Thierolf, he did it merely for fun. The Mega Drive was just more powerful and could especially use many more colors in combination with paralax-scrolling.
But the soundtrack sounded much better on the Amiga, of course.

By the way, Super Turrican is even smaller:
Super Turrican: 512 KiB
Turrican 3: 880 KiB (or something near that)
Mega Turrican: 1024 KiB

Universal Soldier actually was Turrican 2. It was developed by the Code Monkeys (like Turrican 1 for Game Boy, PC Engine and Mega Drive) and when it was almost finished, somebody at Accolade (the publisher) decided to change it to Universal Soldier.

[ST Dragon]

I'm not sure if the Mega Drive was more powerful than the AMIGA? Turrican 3 was one of the few games that looked better on the MD compared to AMIGA.
And Global Gladiaors I think.
Lion Heart on the other hand looks better than anything on the MD.

A lot of AMIGA games used 64 colours using half-bright colours. A careful choice of the palete resulted in a very close 64 colour look like the MD.

I think it was because of disk space.

[keropi]

that boss on the Universal Soldier looks MEGA-LAME! Maybe that's why they changed the name, because of quality...

You do not know enough Mega Drive games Many games (Sonic 3 for example) got much more on the screen than even an Amiga 1200 could handle.
If it would only be about colours, the Amiga would be better (the bigger palette (4096 vs 512) was clearly visible in many games, especially when the copper was used cleverly).
But if you use real Paralax-Scrolling on the Amiga, you have two layers with eight colours each or something like that. The Mega Drive beats that easily. You can see this clearly in Turrican 3 and you can see it not so clearly in Lionheart: The first world uses paralax-scrolling and everything, even the enemies, is green (using copper effects this green changes from the top to the bottom of the level). The second world is colourful, but it only has a copper-background.
The big reason, why Lionheart looks so much better than Turrican 3 is simple: Lionheart was designed for the Amiga, Turrican 3 / Mega Turrican was designed for the Mega Drive. The capabilities of both systems are still so close that a conversion always looks poorer, both have different strengths, which should ideally be considered in the design of the game.
Also the Mega Drive can draw many many more sprites. The explosions in Mega Turrican are much bigger than in Turrican 3.

Edit:
@Keropi: No, the boss was added after the name was changed (it is supposed to be somebody of the Universal Soldier movie).

Edit 2:
If you like Lionheart, have a look at Flink, done by the same team. The Mega Drive version looked better than even the CD32 version.

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by RoKo

Turrican 3 was not downgraded to fit on one disk. There is a comment about this from Peter Thierolf, he did it merely for fun.

You are wrong. I still have a mail from one of the guys that did the programming and he told me that.

Originally Posted by RoKo

Universal Soldier actually was Turrican 2. It was developed by the Code Monkeys (like Turrican 1 for Game Boy, PC Engine and Mega Drive) and when it was almost finished, somebody at Accolade (the publisher) decided to change it to Universal Soldier.

I own the game for the Mega Drive and it is a) done by Ballistic and b) NOT Turrican 2. They used the same engine (because Ballistic did almost all console conversions of Turrican) and they used 4 levels from Turrican 2, that's all. Most of the game differs from Turrican 2.

[ST Dragon]

"But if you use real Paralax-Scrolling on the Amiga, you have two layers with eight colours each or something like that"

I think the MAIGA could handle more than that.
One of the coolest things about the amiga games was it's many paralax layers.

The mega drive can only do 2 backgound layers. The SNES was the king in this field (4 layers)

I'll have to find the ISO of Filink It's SEGA CD.

[dlfrsilver]

By the way guys, Lionheart on level for example is using nothing less than 677 colors on screens at the same moment.....

guess about turrican 3 the amiga was dying and the megadrive was a secured platform
on these days...... if you looks carefully, you'll see that they just have cut and paste graphic blocks with less colors.....To me it sounds they have done a quick and fast conversion, as the amiga could handle the game like it was on megadrive really...

Conclusion: Money, money, is a rich men's world

[keropi]

It would not be strange IMHO that the MD would be better in specific features... after all it was intended to use as a gaming machine, not as a computer...
take a ps2 and a modern PC... still the ps2 is better in gfx...

Originally Posted by WindowsKiller

You are wrong. I still have a mail from one of the guys that did the programming and he told me that.

Well, Peter Thierolf was the main programmer. I would be interested in this mail though.
The whole Turrican 3 story is a bit mysterious, cause Mr Eggebrecht and Mr Thierolf tell different stories. We are always looking for more hints (I'm Mr turricanforever.de, if anybody wonders).

Originally Posted by WindowsKiller

I own the game for the Mega Drive and it is a) done by Ballistic and b) NOT Turrican 2. They used the same engine (because Ballistic did almost all console conversions of Turrican) and they used 4 levels from Turrican 2, that's all. Most of the game differs from Turrican 2.

Ballistic was only Accolades marketing name for their unlicensed Mega Drive games. There was no company called Ballistic.
And I got my infos about Universal Soldier directly from the boss of the Code Monkeys by the way I still got the original midis they created for their conversions on my download site.

Originally Posted by ST Dragon

I think the MAIGA could handle more than that.
One of the coolest things about the amiga games was it's many paralax layers.

Don't mix real paralax-scrolling with copper-tricks like the 3D-scrolling in the Lionheart background. That's no real paralax-scrolling as the layers are not on top of each other.

Originally Posted by ST Dragon

I'll have to find the ISO of Filink It's SEGA CD.

It was Mega Drive, MegaCD and CD32. Mega Drive and MegaCD have the same graphics, of course.

By the way guys, Lionheart on level for example is using nothing less than 677 colors on screens at the same moment.....

That's easy to do using the copper. But you are very restricted in how you can use those colours. Turrican 3 has more colours than the Mega Drive version, too. In the paralax-levels the foreground has a copper rainbow in it. Doesn't look too good though

[dlfrsilver]

I have done a compare with number of colors between T3 amiga and megadrive,
the result is that the amiga has a colour loss that is comprised between 23-50 colours.

But as far as i know, the amiga 1200 could do it flawlessly, but everything rely on what the programmer, if he want to beat out everything out of hell the result wil be here,
if not then the game seems to be made 'A-la-va-vite'

[ST Dragon]

dlfrsilver: By the way guys, Lionheart on level for example is using nothing less than 677 colors on screens at the same moment.....

guess about turrican 3 the amiga was dying and the megadrive was a secured platform
on these days...... if you looks carefully, you'll see that they just have cut and paste graphic blocks with less colors.....To me it sounds they have done a quick and fast conversion, as the amiga could handle the game like it was on megadrive really...

Conclusion: Money, money, is a rich men's world

Turrican 3 was 1st released on the AMIGA & then for the Mega Drive so they couldn't have copied & pasted from the MegaDrive to Amiga.
MEga Turrican was the enhanced AMiga version.

keropiIt: would not be strange IMHO that the MD would be better in specific features... after all it was intended to use as a gaming machine, not as a computer...
take a ps2 and a modern PC... still the ps2 is better in gfx...

Don't exaggerate.
Ps-2 can't even match to an old GeForce3 Ti 500 let alone handle something like Doom 3, HL2, Far Cry.

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

I have done a compare with number of colors between T3 amiga and megadrive,
the result is that the amiga has a colour loss that is comprised between 23-50 colours.

Compare the Paralax-levels, World 3 and 4.

Originally Posted by ST Dragon

Turrican 3 was 1st released on the AMIGA

First released on the Amiga, but first developed on the Mega Drive. They had some publisher troubles.

[ST Dragon]

Interesting... how do you know that?
I remember back in 1993 I got a cracked/trained 2 disk copy of Turrican 3 that didn't include the last Machine Level, instead it would show the ending after beating the Alien Queen.

I thought that was weird & i asked the guy that sold me the disks, but he didn't know what I was talking about.
I only discovered that this was actually a Beta of the game when I got into WinUAE emulation.

It's funny how crack/hack AMIGA groups actually got into the trouble in cracking & adding trainers to beta copies of unfinished games like this?!

I bet they didn't even bother to play through the game.

Edit Roko: About flink I searched but I can't find the Mega Drive Rom of Flink?
Got any links?
Thanks.

[keropi]

@STdragon
either you have not seen a ps2 game in action, or u are fanatic against it
really, I have a 5600FX on a 2600XP, and a ps2... the graphics and effects of the ps2 are UNBELIEVABLE... my FX at least cannot reproduce them without dropping the speed a LOT, and in many cases looking the same game on the pc and ps2 (punisher, prince of persia warrior within, onimusha, nfsu2 etc) makes you wonder if a FX5600 really worths its money, considering that I payed for it the same as the ps2...
maybe with the new 6800GT card you can have the same results, but the ps2 was released 5 years ago, and a 6800 costs about 4-5 ps2's ...

Please, I don't think we need PC vs PS2 in this thread, too.

@ST Dragon: Old magazine articles, interviews...I read everything I can find about Turrican. At one point Mega Turrican was actually supposed to be published by Konami (according to a German mag at least).

[JudasEZT]

There are other solutions apart of double-playfield to have more scroll planes.

Toki has two scroll planes in multidirectional scroll. Just the screen is a little bit small. But I remember changing the size of the screen with Commodore1084S monitor. It just looked very similar to original coin op.

RiskyWoods and R-Type2 has a second scroll using sprites.. in R-Type2 works really good.

Another good example of Amiga versatility is JimPower, the game is utterly crap, but JetPac levels are very amazing. Near the end of the game are a fire effect really cool. (I would preferred the game were just those levels and quit the ugly and stupid walking levels)