why Sonic wasn't possible on stock Amiga?

[Retro1234]

It wasnt very good but its an excellent editor - I think something could be done with this editor and after messing around with it my opinion is this is Team17 version of sonic but its not quite.

What would people say if there had been a sonic MegaDrive version but static background?

Blaze looks like a great candidate. Blaze is sonic on the amiga

look at what KevG did with 7*8.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=798542#post798542

[Amiga1992]

Superfrog is an awful game riddled with gameplay problems, the physics and controls are laughable. It's just a pretty smooth scroller, if anything at all.

Why do people pay so much attention to the parallax scroll? I really don't get why the technicalities are always the focus of people when they discus the possibility of a game like this. There's a VERY SOLID GAME DESIGN behind all the flashy bits and that can be replicated anywhere. And that game design is the key element in Sonic.

Look at Sonic Adventure Pocket on the Neo Geo Pocket and realize how nice a Sonic game can be WITHOUT most of the flash of the Megadrive version. An Amiga 500 could surely handle that I am sure, from a technical point of view. But who can design such fantastic levels and ambience? Only the Sonic Team.

[ Show youtube player ]

Does it not having parallax bother you THAT much? Really? Do you actually enjoy playing good games or do you just play them to see how technically prodigious they are?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

Cool! Those sprite conversions look very impressive. I can almost see it running in my mind, would need a very cool conversion of the iconic music too, of course.

http://www.glastonbridge.co.uk/mrbea.../mod.greenhill

Originally Posted by Akira

Does it not having parallax bother you THAT much? Really? Do you actually enjoy playing good games or do you just play them to see how technically prodigious they are?

Well... i think a lot of the motivation to having Sonic on the Amiga is much the same as the motivation for making better and better Doom clones... to prove it could be done... so the more accurate the better.

But i did already mention the Master System version, which is certainly not beyond the A500. Or perhaps something half way between.

Parallax is nice though, it adds a level of depth and makes the world feel that little bit more immersive and real, rather than just a drawing.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

http://www.glastonbridge.co.uk/mrbea.../mod.greenhill

Not bad at all Pleasant on the ears. Japanese video game music isn't always the easiest to convert.. Masters of the sub-melody.

[Mrs Beanbag]

i only made it out of samples i had to hand, it could be done better but it's a start.

Most of the Sonic music is available in .it format here https://sphere.chronosempire.org.uk/~HEx/sonic/ so maybe someone could try reducing them to 4 channels?

[vulture]

So, what is that Sonic 1 engine does that Kid Chaos engine can't do exactly? I'm talking about the normal levels, not the bonus stages now. Obviously, the A500 version would have less colours for objects, but more for the background and, quite possibly, better sound. Admittedly, It's been a while since I've finished Sonic, but I can't recall any particular instance of many moving objects while running on a multi-parallax environment. Only thing I can think of are the rings Sonic spews when he gets damage, but is that really undoable? Okay, so not an exact 1:1, but pretty close, minus this-plus that etc. I mean, on pal, Sonic isn't even scrolling faster than Kid Chaos.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by vulture

So, what is that Sonic 1 engine does that Kid Chaos engine can't do exactly? I'm talking about the normal levels, not the bonus stages now. Obviously, the A500 version would have less colours for objects, but more for the background and, quite possibly, better sound.

Neither of these things are true. OCS dual playfield limits you to 7 colours on the foreground layer and 8 on the background layer, although i believe Kid Chaos only uses 4 on the background layer (plus copper palette changes). The enemy sprites are all bobs, meaning they share the 7 colours of the foreground layer. I had to colour-reduce my sprite conversions to get the tile map and the sprites into the same 15-colour palette, getting them to fit into a 7 colour palette is... well maybe you could do it, but it would probably be better not to and just do without parallax instead.

The speed of the scrolling is not a problem, as mentioned previously.

As for sound, the Amiga has the advantage of being able to play relatively high-fidelity samples, but the Megadrive has more channels so you can have more complex music and sound effects at the same time.

[Shatterhand]

The rings spew made me really go in awe the first time i saw it.

The game slowdowns sometimes when it happens though.

Make them blink so you have to draw them for less time. I wouldnt mind.

[Mrs Beanbag]

they blink even on the Megadrive when it runs out of sprites

[vulture]

@Mrs Beanbag

I wasn't very clear, I meant that the background can have more colours because of the copper colour changes. Ultimately, regardless of the method used, the result is a more colourful background

[Mrs Beanbag]

4 colours plus copper effects might be enough for most of the Sonic backgrounds actually... Green Hill Zone is the hardest one to do, i think that would require 8 colours on the part with the brown cliffs and green trees, but that might be do-able.

The foregrounds, however, will look terrible, and that's the bit that you really need to look good.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i only made it out of samples i had to hand, it could be done better but it's a start.

Most of the Sonic music is available in .it format here https://sphere.chronosempire.org.uk/~HEx/sonic/ so maybe someone could try reducing them to 4 channels?

Nice find! Had no idea about these, all the original samples in one module, now that's handy Would have to convert them to IFF, or perhaps they can be exported on Impulse Tracker.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Well... i think a lot of the motivation to having Sonic on the Amiga is much the same as the motivation for making better and better Doom clones... to prove it could be done... so the more accurate the better.

I could understand that between coders, but those who just want to play games? Why do they keep going on and on about technicalities? Seems like everyone is ignoring the version I mentioned which is probably the only cool Sonic game out of the Megadrive, and also -totally- possible with an Amiga (tech wise), actually could be done much better on an Amiga.

Also we could use with less fucking Doom clones, how many are there? Really annoying.

The point of this argument is rather weird nowadays. Can Sonic be technically done on the Amiga? I think the answer is clearly a YES, if you take the right compromises. Like with every other port we got on the Amiga.

Does it make sense to do it nowadays? I guess not, I mean, tech-wise, if you want to get something similar to it, we have already many great examples, including Mr. Beanbag, which show what is possible. But making a 1:1 port would be for me getting a game that works 1:1 in the same way, copying all; game logic and level design exactly, and who would do this and for what reason? Why has it been 20 years and we're still discussing this instead of trying to make new games for the Amiga?

[vulture]

@Mrs Beanbag

Yes, well, I understand that. Still....I mean, blue, white, black, red, grass green, a shade of yellow and another of brown, some mild dithering here and there and it won't look bad at all - at least imo.

edit:
the main sprite can be a hw one and have separate colours, is that correct?

[Shatterhand]

Seems like everyone is ignoring the version I mentioned which is probably the only cool Sonic game out of the Megadrive,

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.

[s2325]

and Sonic Labyrinth & Spinball

[Shatterhand]

Never played Sonic Labyrinth. I only played Spinball on the Mega-Drive and..bleh. A Sonic game running at such a low framerate is a sin. It's not a very good pinball game, not a very good platform game and not a very good sonic game. It fails on everything it tries to do imo.

But a good sonic game outside the Mega-Drive is Sonic R on the Saturn. It's not a 2D platform game, but it's incredibly good and very underrated IMO.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by vulture

@Mrs Beanbag

Yes, well, I understand that. Still....I mean, blue, white, black, red, grass green, a shade of yellow and another of brown, some mild dithering here and there and it won't look bad at all - at least imo.

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.

edit:
the main sprite can be a hw one and have separate colours, is that correct?

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).

Originally Posted by Akira

I could understand that between coders, but those who just want to play games? Why do they keep going on and on about technicalities?

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.

[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 ?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by 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.