soo... what about Final Fight?

[touko]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I dont think thats correct is it? The musician is listed in HOL

Yes the musician is credited,but he didn't make music for FF but a demo

From an aplin's interview:

With hindsight I think what people _most_ hate about amiga FF is simply the lack of in-game music, and ironically that was simply because the head office people at my company didn’t commission any! I asked them to but… The excellent title music was of course borrowed from a Jolyon Myers demo (..and I tried to get him paid, but don’t think it ever happened – sorry ’bout that Jolyon – but I don’t think there’s any hard feelings).

http://retroasylum.com/an-interview-with-richard-aplin/

[mcgeezer]

I’d have refused to put the music driver in the game if there hadnt been an agreement to pay the musician. People not getting paid was rife in those days. Publisher parasites.

[Retro1234]

O ok great piece of Music

[rothers]

Originally Posted by jotd

But Richard worked 48 hours a day.

I heard he did some code to flip hours in real time so he could work both forwards and backwards though the day at the same time.

[d4rk3lf]

Here is the interview with Richard Costello that ported Mortal Kombat 1, and 2, Golden Axe, Primal Rage...etc

Do you think he would do better job then Aplin in porting Final Fight, considering so much great ports (imho) he did for Amiga?
I am personally amazed how he did Mortal Kombat 2 for a plain A500 1MB.
Every aspect is great (graphics, sound, gameplay...) instead of maybe constant disk swapping for those without HD, but you can't expect any more from a port of 1994. game to a computer from 1987.

[Lord Aga]

"in the case of "Primal Rage" it had to be 2 MB"

I wonder why. It looked and played like crap. MKs are way better even with their 1MB constraints.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Do you think he would do better job then Aplin in porting Final Fight, considering so much great ports (imho) he did for Amiga?

Possibly, but I also think had he had more support and time, his Final Fight port could have been better in many of those areas..

I also think E.T. on the 2600 was actually just a few tweaks away from being a really good game. Something more time would have addressed.


I think enough time is huge for proper game dev..
(Then again, I am not a project manager.. ;-)


desiv

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

"in the case of "Primal Rage" it had to be 2 MB"

I wonder why. It looked and played like crap. MKs are way better even with their 1MB constraints.

Because MKs are originally better games.

[RichAplin]

Thing I think could be better;
Color palette selection: I did rip _all_ the original gfx with all frames in original palettes, and they looked gorgeous.. but undisplayable on an Amiga. I was as sad as anyone to see how they came out in a shared 16-color palette. :-( IIRC I looked at using 5-plane mode to allow for at least (say) separate palettes for sprites and background, but it slowed everything down, used more ram... etc. Remember this thing _had_ to work in 512k (and on the ST).

Gameplay: If I could do it again I'd spend time ripping out the gameplay code so it was simply identical to the original. I did consider it at the time, but this was a long, long time ago, and I didn't have in-circuit emulators or a logic analyzer or emulators or any of the tools that would make it a pretty reasonable proposition nowadays. It was quite a gamble trying to rip the gfx; I could have ultimately failed and wasted a bunch of time - but I was pretty sure I could do it and was unhappy with the "meh" graphics that the company artists had done for previous games (Line Of Fire, DD1,DD2, etc).

The sprites were original, the background tilemaps were manually recreated by artists (I think using the ripped gfx, or maybe they took video captures; I don't think I got all the parallax layer gfx ripped until late in the process). The arcade board (IIRC) used "compressed maps of tilemaps" for the background layers so they could be really huge (e.g. some of the parallax layers went on and on).

Converting the original gameplay code would be a fair bit of work even now (basically have to disassemble the whole thing, figure it out, and rebuild it to run with different memory setup ; at least it was 68000 code) the other problem with that is there were lots of missing sprite frames (and that was a sad time too, I discarded so many nice animations) the original code will be expecting.

I think the FF engine stands up to modern scrutiny fairly well (remember it is loading and decompressing stuff on the fly(!); has a dynamic defragging memory manager), but the gameplay.. sure, could stand being rewritten. More ram and deeper palette would allow you to reconvert the gfx...

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

Thing I think could be better;
Color palette selection: I did rip _all_ the original gfx with all frames in original palettes, and they looked gorgeous.. but undisplayable on an Amiga. I was as sad as anyone to see how they came out in a shared 16-color palette. :-( IIRC I looked at using 5-plane mode to allow for at least (say) separate palettes for sprites and background, but it slowed everything down, used more ram... etc. Remember this thing _had_ to work in 512k (and on the ST).

Gameplay: If I could do it again I'd spend time ripping out the gameplay code so it was simply identical to the original. I did consider it at the time, but this was a long, long time ago, and I didn't have in-circuit emulators or a logic analyzer or emulators or any of the tools that would make it a pretty reasonable proposition nowadays. It was quite a gamble trying to rip the gfx; I could have ultimately failed and wasted a bunch of time - but I was pretty sure I could do it and was unhappy with the "meh" graphics that the company artists had done for previous games (Line Of Fire, DD1,DD2, etc).

The sprites were original, the background tilemaps were manually recreated by artists (I think using the ripped gfx, or maybe they took video captures; I don't think I got all the parallax layer gfx ripped until late in the process). The arcade board (IIRC) used "compressed maps of tilemaps" for the background layers so they could be really huge (e.g. some of the parallax layers went on and on).

Converting the original gameplay code would be a fair bit of work even now (basically have to disassemble the whole thing, figure it out, and rebuild it to run with different memory setup ; at least it was 68000 code) the other problem with that is there were lots of missing sprite frames (and that was a sad time too, I discarded so many nice animations) the original code will be expecting.

I think the FF engine stands up to modern scrutiny fairly well (remember it is loading and decompressing stuff on the fly(!); has a dynamic defragging memory manager), but the gameplay.. sure, could stand being rewritten. More ram and deeper palette would allow you to reconvert the gfx...

So the thought occurs to ask if you still have the game source code that could be improved upon? (assuming the commercials could all be agreed of course).

[jotd]

and Richard, despite people saying the amiga version is crap, you've done a fine job with that game, running on 512K only and all.

Of course the arcade game is better, but there are far worse conversions. That and Double Dragon 2 were ambitious and not that bad.

I've ported arcade/amiga games to Windows+SDL and even with all CPU/memory/colors/high-level language available it's very difficult to be faithful without source code or help from makers. Disassembly needs a lot of work too. So thumbs up.

you can check what mcgeezer has done so far (1:1 ports of Bombjack & Rygar without the source code), that's pretty impressive. If you provide the source code, it'll be in good hands (maybe AGA version ...)

[gimbal]

Final Fight with it's big sprites and 2 player mode running in 512k... that's impressive. I cry at the thought what the game could have looked like with 1mb available to it.

[Solo Kazuki]

Final Fight is for sure possible very close to 1:1 on AGA. Leathered (RIP) prove this, but sadly he cannot finish game.

[ Show youtube player ]

Source code and alpha versions are available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z4h5upcs4v...ghtbb.rar?dl=0

Maybe, if Mr. Aplin have sources, mix of code of Leathered and Mr. Aplin can be done?

[redblade]

RichAplin, I too thought you did a good job, getting that to run on a 512k Amiga with two disk drives was nice.

Can you remember how much memory you had left over on a 512k??

What was the deal with the double dragon 2 update? Did you code one for NTSC, one for PAL, and then one for ECS. Did they pay you for the ECS update or was that part of the contract? Do you remember the sales numbers for both that and the Atari?

Thanks

[albino]

What was the deal with the double dragon 2 update? Did you code one for NTSC, one for PAL, and then one for ECS. Did they pay you for the ECS update or was that part of the contract?[/QUOTE]

What the difference between the update and the original version?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by albino

What the difference between the update and the original version?

From memory it's just that it runs on an ECS chipset as opposed to OCS.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

Thing I think could be better;

Wow...
So 2 of my threads about beat em' up games, and both the programmers of beat em' ups (Richard Costello and Richard Aplin), shows up.
Guys, I am very honored.

Here, I mentioned you in this thread, and gave your interview to Costello.
He is very supportive of you (post 56)
----------------------------------

You keep talking about graphics on FF. Graphics are fine... I can totally live with it. They are really not that bad (as some people claim it).
But gameplay.... just a little touch... here and there... would make gameplay 70% better... that's what hurt us most.

Any chance of a source code, so somebody can give it a patch or 2, and make it, what you couldn't do, in your very tight deadline (and we all understand this).
(and when I think of other client request "+ it must work on ST"... OMG!)

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

Thing I think could be better;
Color palette selection: I did rip _all_ the original gfx with all frames in original palettes, and they looked gorgeous.. but undisplayable on an Amiga. I was as sad as anyone to see how they came out in a shared 16-color palette. :-( IIRC I looked at using 5-plane mode to allow for at least (say) separate palettes for sprites and background, but it slowed everything down, used more ram... etc. Remember this thing _had_ to work in 512k (and on the ST).

Gameplay: If I could do it again I'd spend time ripping out the gameplay code so it was simply identical to the original. I did consider it at the time, but this was a long, long time ago, and I didn't have in-circuit emulators or a logic analyzer or emulators or any of the tools that would make it a pretty reasonable proposition nowadays. It was quite a gamble trying to rip the gfx; I could have ultimately failed and wasted a bunch of time - but I was pretty sure I could do it and was unhappy with the "meh" graphics that the company artists had done for previous games (Line Of Fire, DD1,DD2, etc).

The sprites were original, the background tilemaps were manually recreated by artists (I think using the ripped gfx, or maybe they took video captures; I don't think I got all the parallax layer gfx ripped until late in the process). The arcade board (IIRC) used "compressed maps of tilemaps" for the background layers so they could be really huge (e.g. some of the parallax layers went on and on).

Converting the original gameplay code would be a fair bit of work even now (basically have to disassemble the whole thing, figure it out, and rebuild it to run with different memory setup ; at least it was 68000 code) the other problem with that is there were lots of missing sprite frames (and that was a sad time too, I discarded so many nice animations) the original code will be expecting.

I think the FF engine stands up to modern scrutiny fairly well (remember it is loading and decompressing stuff on the fly(!); has a dynamic defragging memory manager), but the gameplay.. sure, could stand being rewritten. More ram and deeper palette would allow you to reconvert the gfx...

Hi Rich, since i looked and extracted things, the arcade code of the CPS version doesn't use any form of compression. Everything is in clear, and the sprites as well as the tilemaps metadatas are coded on WORD boundaries.

Hence my rips from the arcade code for the sprites. a screen of the coin-op is $0800 in length (512x256).

[redblade]

Originally Posted by DamienD

From memory it's just that it runs on an ECS chipset as opposed to OCS.

Maybe it also ran on A500+ k2.0+ ?? Because K1.3ECS shouldn't need a update??

[Hewitson]

The original version of DD2 had a bug which caused it to not work on ECS machines.