Arcade games that should be ported to the Amiga

[ReadOnlyCat]

Oh, I love this thread.

My take on which arcade games would deserve an Amiga conversion/port is simple:

• Well, most existing conversions are really bad and would deserve another attempt anyway, so we can already list all these ones.
• Most pre-1984 arcade games, as jotd has mentioned, many of them are really good and require zero challenge to reach gameplay/pixel-perfect results.
• Too many to count which were not ported yet.

But the first task to tackle should be item 1 -> first get rid of the bad taste that these horrible ports left in our mouths back in the day.
I am of the opinion that even what are currently considered the best arcade conversions on the Amiga could be made much better but talk is cheap.

Originally Posted by jotd

There are a ton of excellent pre-1986 games that weren't ported just because people weren't into retrogaming at the time (I don't know of any pre-1984 game that was officially ported). So they prefered poor ports of superior arcade games that the Amiga could not cope with (Strider...) than 1:1 ports of older arcade ports (Elevator Action, PacMan, Pengo ...) that the amiga could cope with.

Absolutely, I am not sure why we did not get any of these. There were plenty of arcade classic gems produced in that era that the Amiga was capable of reproducing to perfection.

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

[...]. That said, I like the likes of Golden Axe, Shadow Warriors, Double Dragon... I think it's because I like the progressive elements in the games.

The Amiga does deserve a good Double Dragon though so I may be convinced to do that at some point. Wonder Boy, Rolling Thunder and my own game would all be ahead of it though in the pipe line.
Geezer

Agreed, before converting additional games, first fix the mistakes of the past.

Originally Posted by jotd

Not enough time in a life to recode all the Tiertex botched ports. Side Arms is cool in arcade, yes.

Choose your battles.

I think there both is enough time and that the required effort is not that high actually. Again talk is cheap but you as an example, a game like Rolling Thunder runs on hardware which is not that powerful, static conversion of the 6809 code would be more than sufficient to run the game code, the only real work would be converting the use of hardware sprites to blitter objects.
If Tiertex had any brains, they would have dumped the ROM and done just that but there was scant risk of this happening as we know all too well.

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Kung fu Master from Irem is the same bitchery as what the sega system 16 or 18 is :
an hardware using both planar and bitmap chunky graphics.

Very easy to port on Amiga. But for this one i don't see the challenge.

Why would the technical challenge matter? We just want to play these games on the Amiga.

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

If I had the free time, there are 3 arcade games from the "pre-1985" era I would like to port. Well, either port or make games inspired on them. Those are some of my favourite games of this era:

Time Pilot
Bank Panic
Moon Patrol.

I think they all would be pretty easy to do. Moon Patrol has lots of small stuff that would be a lot fun to code, including the parallax scroll. Bank Panic uses 3 buttons on the arcade, but we could easily have options for 1 button, 2 buttons, CD32 controllers and joystick + keyboard.

I second these (I don't know Bank Panic though), and regarding controllers, ECS machines can support controllers with many buttons (cf CD32) provided protocol converters are provided. Any conversion of these games should use the best possible controller option possible.

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

I also would love to see some of the Capcom brawlers done properly. [...]

I used to say Cadillacs & Dinosaurs could had been done on Amiga, nowadays I know better and you would need HUGE compromises to do it. But I could see King of Dragons or Knights of the Round having pretty acceptable versions on Amiga. Maybe even Captain Commando. And, of course, Final Fight could had been better if Richard Aplin had the proper resources to do it.p

Wholeheartedly agreeing here. With some restrictions, the Amiga could have seen a lot more great Beat-em up ports. And indeed it is a shame that Richard Aplin was not given more resources as he was not that far from greatness with Final Fight.

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

A game that could have a "re-port" but it's not an arcade game is Castlevania. [...] Amiga could have a very good version of Castlevania.

A fantastic one, you mean. But this is not an arcade game.

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

That's what I was going to say.
Gameplay is what matters. No need for parallax to retain gameplay.
King of Dragons, Knights of the Round and Captain Commando all got SNES versions that OBVIOUSLY were very cut down to fit on SNES

It's just a matter of knowing where and how to compromise.

Words of the wise.

Originally Posted by jotd

Yes, I meant Pole Position. Great! since we don't need the ST parts.

100% with Pole Position, can be arcade perfect. Now we just need proper "no friction" steering wheels controllers for the Amiga because without an analog input, Pole Position is just not as fun to play. It requires a mix of precision at times and of brutal movements at other times that a digital joystick cannot match.
Many arcade games, especially the driving ones would lose a lot of their fun by going to digital joystick/controller input route.

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

(I never understood the 8 sprite limit of OCS/ECS and especially in AGA which let you have huge sprites but you couldn't split them up. Even in 1985 8 sprites was a pretty anemic number.)

Well, the reason is simple: not enough DMA bandwidth. Each sprite costs two DMA slots, and there are about 32 DMA slots available between scanlines. So, adding 16 sprites would eat all available DMA slots which would mean that there would be zero DMA slots left for the copper to change colors in the background.
The reason the MegaDrive can display 320 pixels worth of sprites per line is that these sprites are loaded from its VRAM which supports a higher bandwidth than the Amiga's and does not slow down the CPU while accessed.

The flexibility afforded by computers (more RAM, more input devices, more screen modes) come with compromises as far as performance is concerned. The Amiga was a pretty damn good machine for its price.

[Samurai_Crow]

@ReadOnlyCat

The flexibility afforded by computers (more RAM, more input devices, more screen modes) come with compromises as far as performance is concerned. The Amiga was a pretty damn good machine for its price.

Why not up the ante a little bit with Fast RAM requirements or accelerator cards this time around. That will improve the bandwidth for both the custom chips and the CPU.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@ReadOnlyCat



Why not up the ante a little bit with Fast RAM requirements or accelerator cards this time around. That will improve the bandwidth for both the custom chips and the CPU.

Classic answer: because it's lame.

[aeberbach]

Slap Fight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slap_Fight
Mr. Do! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Do

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@ReadOnlyCat
Why not up the ante a little bit with Fast RAM requirements or accelerator cards this time around. That will improve the bandwidth for both the custom chips and the CPU.

Good point, I wish C= had included Fast RAM in every Amiga back then.

There are a few reasons as far as this kitten is concerned:

• Requiring Fast RAM or accelerators significantly reduces the number of people who can play the game on their hardware.
• When we wanted these games to be ported back in the day, we only had stock hardware. Part of the fun is the challenge to target the machines we had back in the day.
• I am not necessarily against targeting beefier machines but I think exhausting the capabilities of the stock ones should be attempted first.

[RichAplin]

I think someone should have a go at making the existing Amiga Final Fight more fun!
IMO the basic game engine is reasonable. Adding music would be super easy; changing the baddie behavior, animation timing etc wouldn't be that hard once you figured it out. Using an emulator would make finding the relevant variables not too hard.. It'd be easier than starting from scratch anyway.

This guy https://aviewfromaskewsite.wordpress...omment-page-1/ wrote a great rant about it.

[MartinW]

Originally Posted by aeberbach

Slap Fight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slap_Fight
Mr. Do! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Do

I second and third Mr Do!

Maybe there is already a really good port out there? If so, please link it. But an arcade perfect conversion would be superb as far as I'm concerned and even Mr Do's Castle (or Mr Do! V.s The Unicorns depending on where you come from) and Do Run Run. I'm not so fond of Mr Do's Wild Ride.

Basically I'm a big fan of the Mr Do! series. Given they're 8-bit arcade games I'm no expert but I think they'd be relatively straight forward. I'm racking my brain from when I was repairing them but I don't think they have any custom chips or anything nasty on the PCBs.

Also, obviously I don't know if an arcade perfect port is even do-able but I like the way that Namco Classics has original and enhanced versions on the same PCB so you have for example Pacman and Enhanced Pacman and the enhanced version is really, really good.

Man it's making me want to go into the loft and dig out my old PCBs

EDIT: Looks like Do Run Run already exits and is pretty decent. Something off about the music but beyond that it looks pretty good:

[ Show youtube player ]

[Pyromania]

A nice Gyrus port would be awesome!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyruss

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by MartinW

Maybe there is already a really good port out there? If so, please link it.

There are three clones on the Amiga, all are decent:

... AppleJack
... Bob's Garden
... Derring-Do

Originally Posted by MartinW

<snip> and Do Run Run.

This already exists: DO! Run Run

Edit: oops, just got to the end of your post and see that you found this

[MartinW]

Will check those out and see what they play like. I was initially thinking more of a 1 for 1 from the arcade version but I guess there is the screen orientation problem so probably not even possible.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

I think someone should have a go at making the existing Amiga Final Fight more fun!
IMO the basic game engine is reasonable. Adding music would be super easy; changing the baddie behavior, animation timing etc wouldn't be that hard once you figured it out. Using an emulator would make finding the relevant variables not too hard.. It'd be easier than starting from scratch anyway.

This guy https://aviewfromaskewsite.wordpress...omment-page-1/ wrote a great rant about it.

He makes a lot of good points indeed but without the source code these changes would be quite tedious to make. Would it not be more effective to restart the port from scratch?
Unless of course you still have the source code lying around somewhere.

I would personally restart from scratch, reusing the original arcade code where possible (it was 68k code after all) instead of attempting to replicate the logic.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by RichAplin

I think someone should have a go at making the existing Amiga Final Fight more fun!
IMO the basic game engine is reasonable. Adding music would be super easy; changing the baddie behavior, animation timing etc wouldn't be that hard once you figured it out. Using an emulator would make finding the relevant variables not too hard.. It'd be easier than starting from scratch anyway.

This guy https://aviewfromaskewsite.wordpress...omment-page-1/ wrote a great rant about it.

I have done all in-game music in two channels (for another failed port) if needed!
[ Show youtube player ]

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by jotd

There are a ton of excellent pre-1986 games that weren't ported just because people weren't into retrogaming at the time (I don't know of any pre-1984 game that was officially ported). So they prefered poor ports of superior arcade games that the Amiga could not cope with (Strider...) than 1:1 ports of older arcade ports (Elevator Action, PacMan, Pengo ...) that the amiga could cope with.

That doesn't mean that there weren't good arcade ports (Marble Madness, Pang for instance), or that Elite Bombjack was botched when it could have been arcade perfect... but still, pity, as a lot of pre 1985 games are classics. Rygar could have been ported, but it would have been lousy, of course, and McGeezer would have had to rewrite it anyway

I thought the same about the amiga 1200/cd32... Why not port strider, final fight, street fighter 2, etc On those ?? More capable of doing a good port than the 500 but you need good coders too, because when you see some ports like battletoads which looks to have been ported from the nes version not from the arcade, it's a big shame !

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I thought the same about the amiga 1200/cd32... Why not port strider, final fight, street fighter 2, etc On those ?? More capable of doing a good port than the 500 but you need good coders too, because when you see some ports like battletoads which looks to have been ported from the nes version not from the arcade, a big shame !

The reason these were never (re)converted to the 1200 is simply that the market for A1200-only games was too small.

Amiga sales had fallen down a cliff starting in 1992, the year of the introduction of the A600 and A1200 and piracy was too high to justify the expanse of a new license + the development costs.

Original games had the advantage of not requiring a licensing fee. This is why licensed conversions are extremely rare for the A1200 and were acquired only for the most famous licenses (Street Fighter II, to be precise).

[Master484]

I have done all in-game music in two channels (for another failed port) if needed!

That sounds good for 2 channels.

So you have musics like this for all levels of Final Fight?

What is the average size of one mod in kilobytes? And how big is the largest mod?

I'm asking because recently I have been making some theoretical plans on how to convert the SNES version of Final Fight for the 1 MB Chip A600.

The SNES version sucks of course ( it has no 2 Player mode and no Guy ), but the graphics size is well suited for the Amiga...although a 512 kb Chip A500 could still have troubles, but the 1 MB Chip A600 should be able to handle it. Even 32 color GFX would fit quite nicely, with 2 players at same time and mirrored frames also stored in Chip RAM.

However, right now I'm only making plans for fun, so don't expect a playable demo next month.

[Wachi]

I would definitely like to see Rastan in Amiga. I'll leave it just in case ...
[ Show youtube player ]

[DanScott]

Black Tiger... doable on A500.. would be easy to do on A1200

Speed Rumbler
Wardner
Trojan
Air Buster / Aero Blasters

[Don_Adan]

Athena
[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Master484

That sounds good for 2 channels.

So you have musics like this for all levels of Final Fight?

What is the average size of one mod in kilobytes? And how big is the largest mod?

I'm asking because recently I have been making some theoretical plans on how to convert the SNES version of Final Fight for the 1 MB Chip A600.

In average between 80 and 100k each, but i did not optimize it (i.e. removing unused samples, reducing loop size, etc).

[Tigerskunk]

Black Tiger would almost be easy on the A500. Not that many objects, no Parallax. You'd need 32 colours though.

Rastan is a different beast, though. With that parallax and a couple of big objects I'd probably go for a A1200 port here.