Line of Fire Question

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

From what the mame video stands, yes.

Great - now we can move on.

[albino]

The best sprite scalling have seen on amiga is hugo though unreal is pretty good..

How those guys achived such neat scalling techinics?

[touko]

Ah well, the Line of Fire real-time scaling
sprite routine was slightly neat as well, and look how slow that game was!

Guys you have your answer now .
Taken from :
http://codetapper.com/amiga/comedy/final-fight/

It was in the final fight's startup sequence .

[RichAplin]

Hi, I wrote Amiga Line of Fire. ;-)
The 21-million-colour thing was a reference to how the graphics were ripped, i.e. using a frame grabber connected to the arcade PCB, which output 24bit images. The quality was pretty bad; they got a lot of manual touching up and recoloring to the limited palette... and still came out a bit shit. The actual arcade board was probably 16-bit color (565RGB). It would have been good to have ripped the graphics from the ROM but - at the time - my company didn't want to invest the time in trying (which of course may have been fruitless) - they were all about "just get on programming it".
By the time I did Final Fight I was "fuck this, I'm gonna rip the gfx this time", and got everything (much of which didn't make the cut due to ram/parallax/etc issues)

In terms of the sprite scaling; obviously it's possible to scale sprites on the Y-axis by blitting a few scanlines at a time (but it's relatively slow) - as I recall this is used on the cut-scene with the map where the inset thingy zooms out; the X-scaling for that was (IIRC) precalculated just before the cut scene; you can see it scales smoothly on Y and pops a little on X.

The in-game stuff IIRC just used prescaled sprites on both axis (edit.. ..actually.. looking at it again, that may not be the case; it may actually be scaling when blitting on Y - I have a vague recollection of tweaking it and actually making the Y-scaling slightly jumpy on purpose to closer match the X-scaling (which was always going to be jumpy as precalculated)

Not a great game in the arcade, and pretty silly to try to convert to home computer. It was kinda interesting to do, but was never going to turn out great.

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

Hi, I wrote Amiga Line of Fire. ;-)
The 21-million-colour thing was a reference to how the graphics were ripped, i.e. using a frame grabber connected to the arcade PCB, which output 24bit images. The quality was pretty bad; they got a lot of manual touching up and recoloring to the limited palette... and still came out a bit shit. The actual arcade board was probably 16-bit color (565RGB). It would have been good to have ripped the graphics from the ROM but - at the time - my company didn't want to invest the time in trying (which of course may have been fruitless) - they were all about "just get on programming it".
By the time I did Final Fight I was "fuck this, I'm gonna rip the gfx this time", and got everything (much of which didn't make the cut due to ram/parallax/etc issues)

In terms of the sprite scaling; obviously it's possible to scale sprites on the Y-axis by blitting a few scanlines at a time (but it's relatively slow) - as I recall this is used on the cut-scene with the map where the inset thingy zooms out; the X-scaling for that was (IIRC) precalculated just before the cut scene; you can see it scales smoothly on Y and pops a little on X.

The in-game stuff IIRC just used prescaled sprites on both axis (edit.. ..actually.. looking at it again, that may not be the case; it may actually be scaling when blitting on Y - I have a vague recollection of tweaking it and actually making the Y-scaling slightly jumpy on purpose to closer match the X-scaling (which was always going to be jumpy as precalculated)

Not a great game in the arcade, and pretty silly to try to convert to home computer. It was kinda interesting to do, but was never going to turn out great.

Nice one Richard, I'd be interested to know what you think about porting Metal Slug to the A500 which is a hot topic also in this sub-forum.

Some here think it's possible to do the arcade or Game Boy advance version justice (I don't).

[RichAplin]

Haha codetapped ripped the gfx from LOF and that confirms it uses scaling on-the-fly (I suspect the X-scaling was done when loading the level) - most of the gfx are just in one size
http://codetapper.com/amiga/rips/line-of-fire/

...Ugh, those washed out gfx. Was never thrilled about 'em.

BTW practically nobody used 32 color gfx on the Amiga for many reasons; RAM, everything is slower (more blitting, more bus contention from video DMA, etc), plus porting to ST was always something you had to do...

Metal Slug? That was on Neo Geo hardware originally yeah? Well nowadays when converting anything to the Amiga I'd look to run the original game code wherever possible; most of the complaints about my arcade ports are b/c the (recreated) gameplay often wasn't very good. Given modern tools (MAME, primarily!) and all the info about the Neo Geo, I don't see why you couldn't directly reuse the gameplay code and end up with a less pretty, slower version of the game for >512k Amigas. As for _why_ anyone would do that... shrug! :-)

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

As for _why_ anyone would do that... shrug! :-)

There's some crazy people about

Check out the conversion of Rygar that's currently in progress (much more suited to the Amiga hardware... even if it's for AGA)

Hey, when you over in the UK again Rich? I reckon there should be a St. Tropez re-union

[RichAplin]

Originally Posted by DanScott

There's some crazy people about

Check out the conversion of Rygar that's currently in progress (much more suited to the Amiga hardware... even if it's for AGA)

Hey, when you over in the UK again Rich? I reckon there should be a St. Tropez re-union

Until recently I still had that St Tropez t-shirt! (hell I may do, somewhere in a pile).