Better Outrun port for Amiga

[Nekoniaow]

Originally Posted by StingRay

I am sorry to disappoint you but the game is 100% asm. And the code is actually quite nice specially considered the release date!

Don't be sorry! I'm never disappointed to learn something especially if that means I was wrong.

Now don't tell me they were using the blitter, because even busy wait bliting (does this take two ts?) the drivers and roadside objects can't possibly take that long. I assume they must redraw the whole road and two parallax layers entirely every frame with the CPU.

I'm fairly sure I could do at least as well in pure C.
Edit: forget that, it's silly.

Let's make it "I wonder if one could approach this in pure C with some inline assembly for copies/clears". More reasonable.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by vulture

Well, Lotus 3 can get pretty busy at times and there's no frame slow down compared to MD's outrun , at least. Full screen, bridges, gfx at both sides, a pretty detailed sky/horizon with many colors, 3-4 cars other than yours on the road and the odd crossing big truck. You can even set it to NTSC and it's getting faster. I see no reason miggy can't handle an outrun port the way MD can with some effort.

Well did you ever play Lotus III in an A500? The mountain side scene was unbearably slow if you did not had at least a 030 in my A500 1.2 512k+512k PAL

The unreal flight engine by other hand was able to do some nice scaling at a good speed: seemed to use 8 colors, but is nothing that a clever use of palette switching IMO could not handle...

[dlfrsilver]

Super hang on was made for atari ST, so it's all CPU

[vulture]

@saimon69

admittedly I've only played it on A1200 and winuae with A500 settings. At both setups everything seemed fine. Sadly, I've no actual A500 to try it on. i agree about the unreal doing some nice scaling stuff though. Big run is another example, but again, no idea how it works on a real A500.

EDIT:
I've seen this video here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...=amiga+lotus+3
the rocky level starts at about 1:04:00 and it's running on a real A500. I really see no problem here. Does that seem slow to you? And that's in PAL, in NTSC it'd look even better.

Also, all this Space Harrier bashing.... At least pt II (haven't played pt I) is quite a good port. It's fast, many objects and enemies, good colors. It's a bit difficult gameplay wise, but once you get the grips, it's rather fine. Or maybe I'm too forgiving and the game is indeed crap....

[Decker]

Originally Posted by nobody

It's wrong to compare with A500 lotus which all people do, because in lotus scenery is almost empty instead to outrun that is full of objects plus having some really big sprites.

Since nobody already addressed this: Bullcrap. I'm playing them side by side, and Outrun doesn't throw around any more stuff than Lotus 2 in Snow, City and Desert tracks. And the frame rate doesn't dip.

Lotus 3 chugs along a bit. But still manages to be double the speed of Outrun while exceeding the amount of sprites (just from a glance, that is). Besides, regardless of the number of sprites on the screen, it's NOT wrong to compare a nice fast driving game to like Lotus to OutRun, if only to underscore what a POS the latter is.

Outrun: [ Show youtube player ]
Lotus 2: [ Show youtube player ]

[john1979]

Originally Posted by Nekoniaow

A chip RAM only 1200 should be able to a very good job. Not perfect but very good.

I am not sure why you think a 040+ is necessary?

An A1200 + Fast RAM would probably have the necessary speed and graphics capability to do Outrun properly.

I am surprised no-one has mentioned the Saturn version. A port extremely faithful to the original which doubtless doesn't push the Saturn very hard.

[vulture]

An A1200 + Fast RAM would probably be able to produce an improved Outrun experience in the right hands, ie better/more colourful horizon aka thank God for copper and its tricks!

[lesta_smsc]

Originally Posted by john1979

An A1200 + Fast RAM would probably have the necessary speed and graphics capability to do Outrun properly.

I am surprised no-one has mentioned the Saturn version. A port extremely faithful to the original which doubtless doesn't push the Saturn very hard.

I've never seen the Saturn version. In all fairness, I thought the C64 version was great ... though I'm not sure how that compared to others lol.

[saimon69]

@vulture

My experience in seeing Lotus III slow was on my own A500 with 1.2 and usual 512k expansion, but also watching zeudasz movies i see is behaving properly so i wonder if the lotus III i had was a beta - side mountains seemed taller that they are now

[Nekoniaow]

Originally Posted by john1979

An A1200 + Fast RAM would probably have the necessary speed and graphics capability to do Outrun properly.

I am surprised no-one has mentioned the Saturn version. A port extremely faithful to the original which doubtless doesn't push the Saturn very hard.

The author of Cannonball mentions on his blog that the Saturn version is arcade perfect, uses the same code as the original with many of the bugs of the original having been fixed.

An A1200 would come closer to give justice to Outrun indeed but the machine is not without its limitations so it's hard to determine how far from Arcade perfect a conversion or port would be. The only way to know is to write it.

Originally Posted by Decker

Since nobody already addressed this: Bullcrap. I'm playing them side by side, and Outrun doesn't throw around any more stuff than Lotus 2 in Snow, City and Desert tracks. And the frame rate doesn't dip.

Lotus 3 chugs along a bit. But still manages to be double the speed of Outrun while exceeding the amount of sprites (just from a glance, that is). Besides, regardless of the number of sprites on the screen, it's NOT wrong to compare a nice fast driving game to like Lotus to OutRun, if only to underscore what a POS the latter is.

Outrun: [ Show youtube player ]
Lotus 2: [ Show youtube player ]

Oh, you are comparing (rotten) apples and oranges.

Outrun Amiga runs at the frame rate of the youtube of the video only when played on accelerated Amigas.
On a plain old A500, it is almost a slide show, this video is much closer to the reality of it: [ Show youtube player ]. (And boy, I cringe every time I hear this ridiculous sampled presentation. My instincts take over and I start digging a hole in the ground in order to hide. )

Also, what we are comparing it to is the Arcade version which boast plenty of large and quickly moving sprites, see for yourself how it compares with LotusIII:
[ Show youtube player ]

Fast isn't it?

[dlfrsilver]

well, more than 8mb of ram would be fine but as said, the source code commented would need to have its graphics parts rewrote. It's plainly uncompatible with the amiga hardware (not mentionning that the outrun arcade version use a chunky display, and not a planar display).

[vulture]

@Nekoniaow

Yup, that's pretty fast. But give Lotus 3 a try in NTSC mode and it's pretty close really! I'm not saying we'd get a perfect arcade conversion on an A500/1mb, but at least as good as the MD conversion for sure. For an arcade "perfect" conversion, it'd likely take an A1200 with fast RAM and an extensive reworking to Amiga's abilities to achieve the proper result.

[Decker]

Originally Posted by Nekoniaow

On a plain old A500, it is almost a slide show, this video is much closer to the reality of it: [ Show youtube player ]. (And boy, I cringe every time I hear this ridiculous sampled presentation. My instincts take over and I start digging a hole in the ground in order to hide. )

Ok yeah, maybe your video is a better example.

My point was exactly to show how slow the amiga version of Outrun is and to point out that (unlike "Nobody" claims) Amiga Outrun doesn't even move anymore sprites than L2/L3.

[Flash951]

MSX is the only port that has kept the OutRun gimmick of splitting road I thing. For me it's an important feature of the game.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by vulture

I'm not saying we'd get a perfect arcade conversion on an A500/1mb, but at least as good as the MD conversion for sure.

I doubt it. The Megadrive's hardware capabilities are so much better it's not funny. It can throw graphics around the screen like there's no tomorrow.

[vulture]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I doubt it. The Megadrive's hardware capabilities are so much better it's not funny. It can throw graphics around the screen like there's no tomorrow.

I'm simply saying the A500 could have an equally good port as the MD one in the right hands, given that Lotus 3 is at least as "busy" and fast. The hardware thing, well, that's an entirely different discussion and needs its own thread.

[s2325]

I think Road Riot 4WD for SNES have similar framerate to Amiga Outrun [ Show youtube player ]

[ransom1122]

Is there any difference to the outruns on amiga released from sega or us gold. Etc or is the game exactly the same but with different packaging?

[saimon69]

@ransom1122

AFAIK just the packaging

[lesta_smsc]

Not relevant to this. But just played the Arcade version of this and realised just how poorly made the Amiga version was in comparison. I suppose an AGA version is what would have been needed.