Atari ST to Amiga: Starquake Amiga Conversion

[Toni Galvez]

Originally Posted by adrdesign

All the st tunes (5) have been converted into a 3ch mod (about 5 channels emulated), based on Tony Galvez SSC method.

I'd wish there will be fresh remix(es) other musicians here...

Btw i am not very happy with my SCC

You are not very happy, because you converted this musics, but, I am sure, if you make them from scratch, you will make a lot better (without arpegios too ).

[adrdesign]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Hoffman is getting involved after Revision, so Starquake is on hold until after then.

Your contribution is absolutely fine as always

So, i'll finish off Recoil with SFX and that will be ready for release

Any progress on one of these? Waiting anxiously

[Predseda]

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by adrdesign

Any progress on one of these? Waiting anxiously

Just fixing a few issues with Recoil and then will continue with Starquake

[Galahad/FLT]

Been making progress with this one.

Eventually sussed out how the game interprets Atari ST keyboard events, and my keyboard routine with ASCII conversion worked first time.

So, now you can enter a teleporter and enter the code, hit return and teleport to another part of the level.

Recoil is on hold for a mo as there is a bug that keeps crashing the game, and the recent progress I made on starquake makes me want to keep on with this one as its by far the better game of the two.

So, like I said before, would like to construct a basic intro sequence for Star Quake, so that would be graphics and music needed.

Who wants to volunteer for that little job then? Doesn't have to be spectacular, but enough to let people know that its a bit more Amiga than a straight conversion.

Oh, and Star Quake now runs utterly independently of WHDLoad and now loads from floppy on both A500 and A1200.

[Predseda]

This is the oportunity to have the music from C64 version. Could anyone arrange a tune based on that?

[Predseda]

After the game is ported it would be nice to contact Steve Crow to inform him his old game reached another platform. He now works for Blizzard Entertainment.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Predseda

After the game is ported it would be nice to contact Steve Crow to inform him his old game reached another platform. He now works for Blizzard Entertainment.

Stritctly after, dont need any eleventh hour legal problems

[solaris104]

Any news about Starquake? :-)

[invent]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Stritctly after, dont need any eleventh hour legal problems

If at the eleventh hour, I'm happy to donate/pay for my Amiga version.

Always wished that Starquake was on the Amiga
I did enjoy the Amstrad version

[Galahad/FLT]

There is no requirement for payment, i do this for fun. Physically paying for it might well scupper future conversions as lets be honest, no one likes someone else making money out of their game and they not be included

Intro sequence done, which reminds me i need to send to Hoffman so he can be 'inspired' by the format of the intro, ingame music would be nice........

[saimon69]

I like the tune when the play begin on c64, i might elaborate on that...

[Predseda]

Thats also my wish, decent Amiga remix of C64 intro song would be nice.

Here:

[ Show youtube player ]

first part 0:00 - 1:05, second part 2:43 - 3:07

[saimon69]

@Galahad/FLT

tiny question:
do you tihnk is possible to have the soundtrack file reposition itself at every teleport station to point at different points of the same music - but giving so a base interaction?

Or is a completely messed-up idea?
(started to work on something, chip, first two channels and ideas piling up, thats why)

Hi Guys,

I've just learnt about an Amiga version of Startquake and I'm very excited. I recall back in the day that an Amiga version was planned but never released. I think some software companies were even advertising it in the magazines. I was also fascinated to see the Staquake 2 demo. It's interesting and I would love to know what direction they were planning to go in. There a lot of stuff like multiple powerups on a single screen so I'm wondering if they were looking to go in the collect em up and score lots of points direction.... I suspect the level layout present is little more than test data.

Anyway, I should introduce myself, I'm Damien Green aka endangermice. I'm currently working on a Starquake remake for the PC (via XNA). The project was on a light (2 year hiatus) but I'm back working on it now and it is very nearly finished! I see that Kamelito very kindly linked to one of my videos when discussing improving the graphics. I think it would be nice to see the game make use of some of the Amiga's features but I guess that comes down to the way in which the conversion has been written which might place some constraints on customisations like this.

My GFX are designed for 1024 x 768 so some way off the Amiga's resolution of 320 x 256. It might be possible to rescale some of my GFX but I fear a lot of details could be lost and they may not look so good. From memory (I'm on holiday at the moment, which is great becuase once settled I will do some more work on the remake) the graphics follow the general aspect of the original albeit at a higher resolution so a conversion may be possible, though I would like to release my version first (I'm anticipating year's end - I must have a target or it will never be done!). The other problem is that I make heavy use of alpha and I know the Amiga doesn't so this may also make a conversion a little tricky though all may be well on a black background.

Anyway food for thought, of course my GFX are true colour so it may not be possible to make them look any good in 32 colours without redrawing (presume EHB mode too slow...?) but it is a potential option.

Best of work with the conversion Galahad, I don't envy your task!

All the best,

Damien

[kamelito]

Hi Endangermice,

Nice to see you around, can you tell us what is the language and libraries you're using for your port? It may not be ported to Amiga but surely for the AmigaOne series of computers. Are you aware of the DS port? (source code available).

Kamelito

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by endangermice

Hi Guys,

I've just learnt about an Amiga version of Startquake and I'm very excited. I recall back in the day that an Amiga version was planned but never released. I think some software companies were even advertising it in the magazines. I was also fascinated to see the Staquake 2 demo. It's interesting and I would love to know what direction they were planning to go in. There a lot of stuff like multiple powerups on a single screen so I'm wondering if they were looking to go in the collect em up and score lots of points direction.... I suspect the level layout present is little more than test data.

Anyway, I should introduce myself, I'm Damien Green aka endangermice. I'm currently working on a Starquake remake for the PC (via XNA). The project was on a light (2 year hiatus) but I'm back working on it now and it is very nearly finished! I see that Kamelito very kindly linked to one of my videos when discussing improving the graphics. I think it would be nice to see the game make use of some of the Amiga's features but I guess that comes down to the way in which the conversion has been written which might place some constraints on customisations like this.

My GFX are designed for 1024 x 768 so some way off the Amiga's resolution of 320 x 256. It might be possible to rescale some of my GFX but I fear a lot of details could be lost and they may not look so good. From memory (I'm on holiday at the moment, which is great becuase once settled I will do some more work on the remake) the graphics follow the general aspect of the original albeit at a higher resolution so a conversion may be possible, though I would like to release my version first (I'm anticipating year's end - I must have a target or it will never be done!). The other problem is that I make heavy use of alpha and I know the Amiga doesn't so this may also make a conversion a little tricky though all may be well on a black background.

Anyway food for thought, of course my GFX are true colour so it may not be possible to make them look any good in 32 colours without redrawing (presume EHB mode too slow...?) but it is a potential option.

Best of work with the conversion Galahad, I don't envy your task!

All the best,

Damien

Hello, well if this was being written from scratch and not converted directly from the ST version (i.e. ST version is running in Amiga memory with various patches to make it work on Amiga), then AGA Amigas could certainly do something far better than this.

To be honest, even ECS/OCS Amigas could do something superior to this without much effort, because the core mechanics of the game are so simple with regards to its lack of scrolling, and so few objects moving onscreen.

The only thing that stops me doing anything like that is simply time, I do this for fun, and at the moment I simply don't have the time to dedicate to recreating a game from scratch, because I don't want to be the guy to let other people down.

However, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't do something

The other thing that stops me is the scale of Starquake. Its a deceptively simple game, but its size is pretty huge. For me to do a conversion like you're suggesting would require me to have intimate knowledge of how the ST version builds its screens and replace its simple graphics with something nicer.

Only problem is, I haven't needed that kind of information to make the conversion happen.

So in short, YES, i'd love to do a PROPER Amiga version, but, that would extend the time i've already spent on this, and once the music is done, its nearly ready for release, because I don't have the memory space left for samples unfortunately.

However, if you have full details of how Starquake maps work, that might well be something for the future

[Dunny]

Not sure that increasing the resolution is a good idea - the original was designed to run at ... well, I'm sure it's 320x200 on the Atari but the Speccy version was 256x192.

What we tend to get when people increase resolution is lots of sprites that follow the same overall shape but have less "detail" - mostly shading to add a sort of weak 3D effect to them which very rarely works and tends to just look amateurish.

Looking forward to see what you can do though, even if I'm not terribly optimistic...

D.

Hi kamelito,

Thank you for such a lovely welcome, it's great to be around others who love this game so much.

can you tell us what is the language and libraries you're using for your port?

Unfotunately my version isn't actually a port, its a complete rewrite made by mostly observing the game in action and monitoring the execution of some of the Z80 code on the Amstrad version. It's written in C# using the XNA libraries. These are very specific to Microsoft and actually use the 3D hardware of the video card to draw the graphics i.e. sprites are 2D vertices etc.

I suspect it wouldn't be possible to port it to the Amiga One unless someone out there ports the XNA system libraries and creates a C# compiler to that platform. Monogame exists for Linux and Mac (which might make it possible to port it to those versions) but I would have thought an Amiga One version would be unlikely I'm afraid due to the resources required.

I'm with Galahad regarding time. It has taken me around five years to get my remake this far (and ten years of creating other versions up to this point, I've restarted the project four times), I just don't have much of it available to dedicate to game making and getting this version out is going to a pretty big push! I think Galahad is wise to just get a version out that works on the Amiga, reworking the entire game with constitute quite a big rewrite and the Amiga is not a simple system. Maybe in the future though and if that time comes I would be happy to make the graphs available for rescaling back down to the Amiga's resolution.

I agree with Dunny regarding the resolution. On the older systems where colour depth is a limitation, adding more details results in graphics that don't look all that great, then there's also the slowdown associated with having to move what are effectively large objects around the screen.

Hopefully in my version where these limitations don't exist, I've managed to utilise the full true colour palette to make my graphics look acceptable. It's hard to tell when you're watching YouTube so here are some screenshots:

http://www.endangermice.co.uk/shots/shot1.png

http://www.endangermice.co.uk/shots/shot2.png

http://www.endangermice.co.uk/shots/shot3.png

http://www.endangermice.co.uk/shots/shot4.png

[saimon69]

@Galahad/FLT

Have a first basic test for in-game music, want me to post it in the zone?