why Sonic wasn't possible on stock Amiga?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

Oh come on. The first Master System game is pretty good too. The other Sonic games on the system aren't that good (with Sonic Chaos being a complete mess), but the first Sonic is really good.

It's very different to the Megadrive version, I cannot consider it a true Sonic game.
The NGPC game is much more true to the Sonic spirit set by the Megadrive versions.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i think it is more than just coders who care about whether the Amiga can do things its rivals could, and Sonic is an especially sore point, just as Doom was when PCs started to enter the gaming scene. Everyone wanted an Amiga game that could "beat" sonic, but we only got poor cousins, and "beating" it didn't just mean being more fun to play, it meant looking impressive as well. People are still so sore from those old playground arguments that they still want to prove that the Amiga can do Sonic to this day; that is, prove it on a technical level, i'm not even sure anyone would care much about actually playing it.

Yeah I understand that. I guess that I love the Amiga so much that it pains me to see the community being so stuck in the past and unable to go beyond bullshit like this, that I still refuse to believe it is so. This is why the state of the scene is really how it is.
Amiga used to be synonym of advancement, breakthrough and future. Nowadays it's nothing but rose tinted glassed nostalgia, all its original spirit has been lost among those who claim to hold the torch of Amiga. Almost any other home computer scene nowadays are pushing things forward making the Amiga look like garbage from yesteryear.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Akira

Amiga used to be synonym of advancement, breakthrough and future. Nowadays it's nothing but rose tinted glassed nostalgia, all its original spirit has been lost among those who claim to hold the torch of Amiga. Almost any other home computer scene nowadays are pushing things forward making the Amiga look like garbage from yesteryear.

Amen

[vulture]

Hehe!

No, really, I mean, if Kid Chaos can look good, why not a rendition of Sonic. I might give it a try at some point and post a mock up of the foreground and a couple of baddies with 7 colours - I might reconsider my shade choices though. Btw, I've counted the colours of some instance at Kid Chaos' 1st level, only the foreground, where there's some kind of water pool and they are 10 in number. How do you think they did that, I mean the extra 3 colours. Thx!

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

What are you planning here, the ZX Spectrum version? Why not give it a go, see what you can come up with.

There is also the route of using the blitter to render parallax effects, that i have been thinking about lately. "Flimbo's Quest" manages some very colourful parallax graphics. But there is only so much you can blit in a frame at 50fps, so it will have to be limited in terms of size and/or number of bitplanes but i think it is possible to do something nice.


Yes, that is correct. Most frames of animation are 48 pixels wide i believe, so in 15 colours that will use up 6 out of the 7 sprites available (we lose the 8th sprite's DMA channel because of the scrolling).


i think it is more than just coders who care about whether the Amiga can do things its rivals could, and Sonic is an especially sore point, just as Doom was when PCs started to enter the gaming scene. Everyone wanted an Amiga game that could "beat" sonic, but we only got poor cousins, and "beating" it didn't just mean being more fun to play, it meant looking impressive as well. People are still so sore from those old playground arguments that they still want to prove that the Amiga can do Sonic to this day; that is, prove it on a technical level, i'm not even sure anyone would care much about actually playing it.

[Retro1234]

Kid Chaos and Mr Nutz are excellant but if I remember Kid Chaos map is hard to edit using smaller tiles to make up larger tiles also theres no running upside down in aloop but realy love this game.Amazing for 7x8



Blaze seems to have everything but the parallax
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80345

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by vulture

No, really, I mean, if Kid Chaos can look good, why not a rendition of Sonic.

Because Kid Chaos was designed for 7 colours, it wasn't designed for 64 colours and then reduced. We all know what Sonic graphics looks like already, if it were reduced to a few muddy shades of brown and green we'd notice the difference, it's a very brightly-coloured game.

Btw, I've counted the colours of some instance at Kid Chaos' 1st level, only the foreground, where there's some kind of water pool and they are 10 in number. How do you think they did that, I mean the extra 3 colours. Thx!

Just a palette change using the copper, i expect. Sonic itself does the same for its water effects.

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

Kid Chaos and Mr Nutz are excellant but if I remember Kid Chaos map is hard to edit using smaller tiles to make up larger tiles also theres no running upside down in aloop but realy love this game.Amazing for 7x8

Blaze seems to have everything but the parallax
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80345

Mr Nutz was closer to Sonic in terms of game style than Kid Chaos i think, but wasn't 50fps(?), Blaze is even closer, having loops and all but is also not 50fps, sadly, although it does have some parallax, there is a giant moon in the background and copper seems to be used for horizontal as well as vertical effects.

FYI Sonic also used tiles within tiles, at the top level each map is made of 256x256 tiles, which are each submaps of 16x16 tiles, and those 16x16 tiles were in turn made out of 8x8 tiles!

[vulture]

Thx for the answers (it was 11 colours actually) - so, that copper trick (palette change) could be used to somewhat enhance the foreground palette as well and add some extra colours here and there?

Mr. Nutz is a full 50 fps game.

[Mrs Beanbag]

oh yeah, for some reason i remember a discussion about it not being on that other thread, must have been thinking of something else

[Fiery Phoenix]

I am sure the team (or maybe one guy) who did Mr Nutz, turned up at Ocean with an exact replica of Sonic, showing it can be done on the Amiga.

Recently been going through my Amiga mags, and I am sure I read this - possibly in Amiga Power

[vulture]

I recall pretty much reading the same story at some point.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by vulture

Thx for the answers (it was 11 colours actually) - so, that copper trick (palette change) could be used to somewhat enhance the foreground palette as well and add some extra colours here and there?

Of course it can. Have a look at Lionheart:



The top and bottom parts of the foreground use different palettes (grey/blue-ish at the bottom and green at the top. Lionheart uses vertical palette changes on probably every level.

[Gzegzolka]

I'm sure it could be possible to make Sonic for Amiga, even if it was going to be stock A500. It will just need some technical compromise, maybe less layers for backgrounds and less colors for sprites, but it would be possible. Just as You mention, there is Kid Chaos, Mr Nutz and now Blaze. Three great examples that amiga hardware with knowledge could do those kind of very fast platform game.

So why it was not released, why there is no port? I believe it is because of busies - SEGA take care about their IP, just like if You want to play Halo You must buy Xbox, want Killzone - buy Playstation. Same rule go with sonic games for a very long time. Business is a war.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

Oh come on. The first Master System game is pretty good too. The other Sonic games on the system aren't that good (with Sonic Chaos being a complete mess), but the first Sonic is really good.

I think Sonic Chaos would be quite difficult to replicate on the Amiga, and that is an 8-bit game.

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I think Sonic Chaos would be quite difficult to replicate on the Amiga, and that is an 8-bit game.

Why ?The game is kinda slow (compared to previous games) and usually there's never more than 2 things moving on screen at the same time. The game feels so empty for most of the time.

[dlfrsilver]

just an idea :

On page containing the tiles, located in a memory area, using the copper to raise the amount of colors applied on the tiles doesn't take any CPU right ?

then what if you put the tiles on screen after asking to the copper to map a certain amount of colors ?

i don't really understand what is meant by this. Colour only exists on the screen, not in memory.

Let me explain that better :

obviously, before displaying anything, you must have an IFF screen with either the level blocks, and another one with the sprites, right ?

what i meant is that BEFORE displaying anything, you could apply a copper palette change routine over those pages, like this :

do copper palette change from line 0 to 127, 128 to 256 and so on, and then, ask the amiga to display the whole thing on screen.

This is the technique used by Pang, which is using 64 real colors on screen, because it is performing 4 palettes changes on the 4 stripes composing the background graphics.

Yes the Amiga is locked to 8 colors in dual playfield. But some games have proved it can be done via tricks. About Pang, it's not an EHB display, it's a normal 16 colors environnement but with copper palette changes.

Shadow of the beast is actually doing the same, 8 palettes changes so it's 8x16 colors hence the 128 colors displayed at the same time on screen.

Palette changes cost nothing since they're done in hardware, there's no CPU hits. You just have to set them up. By using the Beast trick, you should have all the original colors for level tiles and sprites.

Beast shows that it's possible to have more than 100 colors and a parallax. And it has way more sprites going on screen than sonic.

Toki has more than 32 colors for the main playfield, and 8 colors for the back playfield. I can speak about it, because i have ripped the full graphics of this game. It even does palette change with the copper on the main playfield ! Once again, it shows that you can break the 8 colors barrier on dual playfield mode.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

Why ?The game is kinda slow (compared to previous games) and usually there's never more than 2 things moving on screen at the same time. The game feels so empty for most of the time.

All right, if you accept the frame-rate problems, you may indeed get a port, just like Blaze proved.

But don't just look at the moving objects, look at all screen updates. The background in Chaos is updated a lot, and all that costs Blitter time on the Amiga while it is basically free on the Master System.

Many of those background updates may be solved using colour cycling, but that also requires some thought in colour lay-out. You'll also have to mask Sonic as he passes behind objects.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Palette changes cost nothing since they're done in hardware, there's no CPU hits. You just have to set them up. By using the Beast trick, you should have all the original colors for level tiles and sprites.

Two important corrections:

1- Palette changes do cost.

The copper takes DMA slots when it runs so this reduces the DMA bandwidth available for other things. For example: a 15 colors palette change every 30 lines costs the same as an extra 16 pixels on screen for one bitplane. That's not much but not nothing.

Each copper color change takes two DMA slots, the same as an additional 16 pixels in screen width for two bitplanes. Also, if these lines are not static then it costs CPU to update them.

2- Palette changes every

n

lines do not allow all higher color games to be faithfully replicated.

As Lady Beanbag and this kitten explained a few posts ago, the MegaDrive/Genesis can display 61 colors per scanline and any game which does combine these colors on the same scan lines cannot be replicated by simply changing the palette vertically.

I am not saying this is the case with Sonic, it seems to me that it probably hovers around 32 colors per scanline, but it could be. 32 is already way too high for dual playfield to reproduce (even with sprites: the Amiga has too few of these kittens).

Someone could take a hundred random pictures of Sonic 1 levels and do a color count per line, this would be helpful in determining the actual color constraints of a 1:1 visual conversion.

As I said, the first level and possibly second seem within the Amiga very close reach (and I could be wrong) but this color counting would be a very good way to assess it.

[dlfrsilver]

64 colors, 4 palettes of 16 colors. As said, Beast is going way further than Sonic in term of CPU hits and colors on screen.

In sonic sprites have not that many frames (far from that), and i'm sure that the tricks can overcome the problems the amiga have taken out right off the box.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

obviously, before displaying anything, you must have an IFF screen with either the level blocks, and another one with the sprites, right ?

IFF is a file format, in memory the graphics are bitmaps.

what i meant is that BEFORE displaying anything, you could apply a copper palette change routine over those pages, like this :

do copper palette change from line 0 to 127, 128 to 256 and so on, and then, ask the amiga to display the whole thing on screen.

The palette doesn't affect anything "before it's displayed". It is only applied at the point of displaying the graphics.

You can't change the palette on half of the tile set, and then copy individual tiles onto the screen with them keeping their different palettes.

Games that use the copper to change the palette have to be carefully designed in order to work. Sonic is not so designed. And if we only have 7 foreground colours to work with, even with palette changes, it leaves us with very few colours for our moving objects, which could appear anywhere on the screen. It's do-able on static background graphics. If a game scrolls only horizontally, or only vertically, it's also do-able with careful thought. When you start getting into multi-directional scrolling maps, then it becomes a real headache because it limits which tiles can be placed where, and you've got to keep track of them. Lionheart manages amazing visuals by having backgrounds which are essentially monochrome, but with a colour filter that changes from top to bottom. That isn't going to be any help for a game like Sonic.

[dlfrsilver]

Ok

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

All right, if you accept the frame-rate problems, you may indeed get a port, just like Blaze proved.

People have been writing this also on the Blaze thread but it needs to be repeated that although the Blaze engine is worthy of praise for redrawing the whole screen in 5 bitplanes in under two frames it does not prove anything more in terms of Sonic feasibility than other well known Amiga platform games did not already prove before.

25 FPS platform games in 5 bitplanes with lots of enemies and action do already exist. The fact that Blaze supports loops and background masking is nice but loops never presented any challenge, they are just a design novelty, not a technical one and masking also exists in many platform games.

Blaze is great for many reasons, but its contribution are the full screen redraw at 25FPS and that it looks and feels like Sonic. The former is totally unnecessary (and undesirable) for Sonic, and the latter has nothing to do with technicity.

Blaze feels (in terms of gameplay) like Sonic but that only proves its author's design skills.

It was never needed to prove that Sonic was feasible on the Amiga in terms of gameplay. This much was always obvious.
The challenge lies in compromising the original graphics and sounds as little as possible when translating it to the Amiga and the only proof that this can be done satisfactorily will be in the final pudding, not in any intermediate version.

And let me repeat that Blaze is very nice, just in case someone thinks I am dissing it..