How does X2:Megablast parallax with all that colors?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

It's useless to convert games existing in MAME. Better do a new game of the same style with new graphics and sprites. But is not easy and for sure will require lots of time to be done just for fun.

Thats' why conversion is better

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by nobody

It's useless to convert games existing in MAME.

Yes and no

As a technical project, just to show that the Amiga could have had a near perfect conversion, then I don't think it's useless... Given that the GFX from the coin-ops can be ripped and converted quiite easily, the time overhead is a lot lot less.

It would though be nice to see some coders & artists use the techniques developed on the Amiga, to produce something original (possible inspired by old coin-ops)

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by DanScott

Yes and no

As a technical project, just to show that the Amiga could have had a near perfect conversion, then I don't think it's useless... Given that the GFX from the coin-ops can be ripped and converted quiite easily, the time overhead is a lot lot less.

It would though be nice to see some coders & artists use the techniques developed on the Amiga, to produce something original (possible inspired by old coin-ops)

I have found a way to get perfect graphics reverse engineered from the games roms.

The problem, the real one, is the amount of colors. Those games for many of them use planar display with 256 colors on screen (mostly dynamic).

It's very hard to repalette them. Just look at Final Fight, even with someone expert in this field, it's very tough to do.

a game i would love to see ported is liquid Kid Arcade.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by DanScott

There's a whole load of great coin-ops that could have been ported so easily (and almost perfectly) to the Amiga..it's a shame that we ended up with some of the worst conversions

Ghouls & Ghosts could have been a great conversion

Xain'd Sleena (Soldier Of Light) is another travesty....

And don't get me started on Black Tiger (my favourite coin-op of the era)

I could provide the arcade graphics with the right palettes if a programmer can rework the whole original game code to include them.

Black Tiger is in fact using a 256 colors palette, it's like a VGA game.

On Amiga OCS, this would mean color loss anyway.

[nobody]

It is impossible to have the same experience from 256 colors to 16. Some of these games use dozens of differrent hues and ramps of 5 colors each and very small steps. Even with hue shifting you cannot match the quality of a 256 color game. I would say you need at least 64 colors to have arcade like graphics. This is the absolut minimum, Megadrive has 64 and even the older 8 bit Master system has 32.



PS Black Tiger doesn't use parallax scrolling. Perhaps it would be possible to have a near-arcade conversion IF you can have 32 colors with full speed. I checked it and uses about 64 colors at all times. Lots of enemy AI there, shops, secret areas, respawning enemies etc. A superb game indeed.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by DanScott

Yes and no

As a technical project, just to show that the Amiga could have had a near perfect conversion, then I don't think it's useless... Given that the GFX from the coin-ops can be ripped and converted quiite easily, the time overhead is a lot lot less.

It would though be nice to see some coders & artists use the techniques developed on the Amiga, to produce something original (possible inspired by old coin-ops)

I agree completely, in fact I think it's almost the ultimate to try and convert an arcade game and make it better than the original. There's probably only half a dozen or so games that either look or play as good/better than the original (Pang, Midnight Resistance, Snow Bros, Silkworm, Rodland etc). It seems to be a couple of coders (Pierre Adane and Ron Pieket) were the masters at this!

[nobody]

Maybe more enjoyable but better than the arcade? i don't think so. The arcades have a sprite engine that the Amiga cannot match. The closest to arcades i remember was Pang, almost identical, for sure they had all assets of the game at hand, same with Rainbow Islands. Possible had the code too, way too similar to be done from the scratch

[sandruzzo]

If we are willing to have a small sprites and a small graphics are, like we're doing with rygar, we could have 64 colors + coppers colors on screen!

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by nobody

Maybe more enjoyable but better than the arcade? i don't think so. The arcades have a sprite engine that the Amiga cannot match. The closest to arcades i remember was Pang, almost identical, for sure they had all assets of the game at hand, same with Rainbow Islands. Possible had the code too, way too similar to be done from the scratch

What about our rygar? And we have to try 64 colors!

We still have Aga to full use

[dlfrsilver]

For coin-op games, i would go for AGA machines.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

What about our rygar? And we have to try 64 colors!

We still have Aga to full use

Looking forward to if you can pull that feat off in Rygar.

In my opinion, it would be hard to get anything with enough BOBs on the screen going in 64 colours EHB.

Not only is DMA time reduced a lot, but you also have to blit 6 bitplanes in stencil cookie cutter mode, plus two raw blits for saving and restoring.

Sounds like lot of stress for the poor Blitter...

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

I could provide the arcade graphics with the right palettes if a programmer can rework the whole original game code to include them.

Black Tiger is in fact using a 256 colors palette, it's like a VGA game.

On Amiga OCS, this would mean color loss anyway.

The graphics in the Amiga conversion of Black Tiger were actually quite nice, considering they were 16 colours, coming from the ST version... just that the game code was terrible (12.5 fps I think)

I think the main character goes in front of everything, so HW Sprites could be used for him. Also, as mentioned there is no parallax to worry about.

It's a great coin-op... spent a lot of money in that one

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Looking forward to if you can pull that feat off in Rygar.

In my opinion, it would be hard to get anything with enough BOBs on the screen going in 64 colours EHB.

Not only is DMA time reduced a lot, but you also have to blit 6 bitplanes in stencil cookie cutter mode, plus two raw blits for saving and restoring.

Sounds like lot of stress for the poor Blitter...

With triple buffer, no more saving back ground

If we keep a tight screen buffer we can spare a lot of cycles..

[nobody]

Black tiger is superb i still play it on MAME. The Amiga version is a joke, more like 5 fps

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by nobody

It is impossible to have the same experience from 256 colors to 16. Some of these games use dozens of differrent hues and ramps of 5 colors each and very small steps. Even with hue shifting you cannot match the quality of a 256 color game. I would say you need at least 64 colors to have arcade like graphics. This is the absolut minimum, Megadrive has 64 and even the older 8 bit Master system has 32.



PS Black Tiger doesn't use parallax scrolling. Perhaps it would be possible to have a near-arcade conversion IF you can have 32 colors with full speed. I checked it and uses about 64 colors at all times. Lots of enemy AI there, shops, secret areas, respawning enemies etc. A superb game indeed.

Not a coder but I agree that using 32 colors only should be possible to do a very decent conversion, maybe not at full 50fps but at 50 updated every 25fps; sometimes colors change in vertical slices so some areas can simply have some BG color changed via copper (?)

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Not a coder but I agree that using 32 colors only should be possible to do a very decent conversion, maybe not at full 50fps but at 50 updated every 25fps; sometimes colors change in vertical slices so some areas can simply have some BG color changed via copper (?)

This game displays in Arcade an average of 85 colors on screen on average.

This game should go multiloading in order to have not to loose colors per parts where Black Tiger can go.

The merchant screen is 64 colors alone (without any items or fix layer).

About the frame per sec, this game use none of the amiga hardware abilities.

Next, i always wondered if the original z80 code was line by line converted in 68000 code.

It's very strange...

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

This game displays in Arcade an average of 85 colors on screen on average.

This game should go multiloading in order to have not to loose colors per parts where Black Tiger can go.

The merchant screen is 64 colors alone (without any items or fix layer).

About the frame per sec, this game use none of the amiga hardware abilities.

Next, i always wondered if the original z80 code was line by line converted in 68000 code.

It's very strange...

Well of course will need some manual rework, not at the 16 flat colors of the old conversion though; often japanese like to add colors to variate the atmosphere and some are unnecessary.

[AndNN]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

For coin-op games, i would go for AGA machines.

I agree the 1200 programmed in the right way using the extra wide sprites and 256 colours is easily suited for Arcade conversions.

The OCS using EHB mode will strain the cpu with DMA contention. Depending on how traditional you want to be or not using fast RAM will help loads. By doing this you will have options to use sprites, BOBs, and CPU sprites (writing to chip, while the code runs and reads from fast does not put much of a strain on the system).

I would love to see an arcade quality game on OCS using fast memory just to see what the Amiga could of done if it was allowed to use all available resources.

[frank_b]

Originally Posted by AndNN

I agree the 1200 programmed in the right way using the extra wide sprites and 256 colours is easily suited for Arcade conversions.

The OCS using EHB mode will strain the cpu with DMA contention. Depending on how traditional you want to be or not using fast RAM will help loads. By doing this you will have options to use sprites, BOBs, and CPU sprites (writing to chip, while the code runs and reads from fast does not put much of a strain on the system).

I would love to see an arcade quality game on OCS using fast memory just to see what the Amiga could of done if it was allowed to use all available resources.

Not every Amiga has EHB btw. My NTSC 1k doesn't

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by AndNN

I agree the 1200 programmed in the right way using the extra wide sprites and 256 colours is easily suited for Arcade conversions.

The OCS using EHB mode will strain the cpu with DMA contention. Depending on how traditional you want to be or not using fast RAM will help loads. By doing this you will have options to use sprites, BOBs, and CPU sprites (writing to chip, while the code runs and reads from fast does not put much of a strain on the system).

I would love to see an arcade quality game on OCS using fast memory just to see what the Amiga could of done if it was allowed to use all available resources.

For Rygar we don't use any fast ram and go well. I guess whit it we can have a very good conversion!