Wing Commander on the 500 (video)

[Raid27]

I don't know how many fellow Wing Commander fans there are here but here is a video I shot using WinUAE of WC on an original Amiga 500. (without the 1Mb RAM upgrade).
The team that was charged with porting WC to the Amiga had to make it work on an Amiga 500 eventhough the hardware wasn't up to the task. That meant they had to cut corners off the original. One example there is no video-communications, the flightstick doesn't move, fly-by sounds removed, colors reduced and of course the biggest draw of it all was the slow rythm of the game. It was a slide-show!

It was supposed to have gotten the two expansions made for WC1 but it never materialized (). I didn't get to play them (and WC2) until 1996-97 when the remake Kilrathi Saga came out.

The good things though about WC on the Amiga were the superior sounds and music and of course the game was still great despite the slide-show. It really drew you in and felt like you were doing something important. If you failed a mission you could fail the campaign. When you won you got praise and medals/promotions. I'm still a rabid WC fan to this day.

The clip is like I said from an unmodified Amiga 500 and it shows the first McAlife mission.

[ Show youtube player ]

[d4rk3lf]

Are you sure Wing Commander can run on vanilla A500 wit just 512kb chip Ram?
Even in the link you provided, it says that 1MB is minimum (and 1.5MB for HD install).

Either way, it is a great port, and I played it on my vanilla A1200 with floppies.
It was totally fine in terms of speed (unlike A500 (but hey, it's understandable)), the only thing that bothered me is disk swapping after dying in game, just to see the same sequence of dying for the millionth time.
I wish programmers had enabled skipping that, and quick reloading the mission (since it was in ram anyway), and not to have to wait 4 or 5 minute to start mission again.

Never finished it unfortunately, but I got far... I definitely plan to finish it, and maybe even WC2 at some point.

[Seiya]

Wing Commander run on stock Amiga 500 with 512k Chip RAM (some animations are not shown). I started to play with 512k chip RAM and finished with 1 MB.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Seiya

Wing Commander run on stock Amiga 500 with 512k Chip RAM (some animations are not shown). I started to play with 512k chip RAM and finished with 1 MB.

That is incredible achievement then.
Does it runs a little bit faster with 1MB, or you just got an extra animations?

[Seiya]

512k slow fast add some animation like cinematographics explosion and movement of your cloche in the cockpit. I think also something more when your ship is damaged.

[Megalomaniac]

Are we sure that Wing Commander ran in 512k? I thought it needed 1Mb, though only the first 512k had to be chip RAM? The ADF gives an error code 103 when you try to load it with only the 512k Chip RAM. Three disk swaps before you see anything other than disk requests feels a bit sloppy, straight away.

It's just about playable on an A500 provided you're not used to it on something faster, how does the speed compare to the PC version on an 8Mhz 286 in EGA? The box of the PC version recommends 12Mhz. My understanding is that Nick Pelling actually used sprites to recreate the appearance of texture-mapped polygons. As nobody ever got a texture-mapped game running at a decent speed on the A500 in the day (Citadel / Cytadela was probably about the closest?), its hard to know whether this was the best he could have done.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Are we sure that Wing Commander ran in 512k? I thought it needed 1Mb...

It does. Check the box scan: https://amiga.abime.net/games/view/wing-commander#scans

This is the error message I get with only 512k RAM:

[Seiya]

on real Amiga 500 it works. I have bought a second hand Amiga 500 with only 512k Chip RAM and first time tried Wing Commander i was impressed, but it was different from that i saw from my friend. Many animations lacking. Then i addes expansion memory and finally all animation was there. I notice that some old games on WinUAE require more memory than real A500.

edit:
i tried now. with 1 MB RAM (512k+512k no explosion, no movement of cloche). i tried this game on my Stock A500 20 years ago, but i'm sure it was with 512k Chip RAM only. i want investigate about this thing.
Could be that i bad remember and i already have 1 MB RAM and i saw different in animation when i bought 2 MB Fast RAM Expansion.

but for this site, it seems that it should run on 512k chip RAM only
https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Categ...ommander#Amiga

@Raid27
you could share your wing commander disk? maybe you have a version for 512k chip ram. Maybe mine too was another version different from that you can find in tosec.
What WinUAE version you tried?

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

My understanding is that Nick Pelling actually used sprites to recreate the appearance of texture-mapped polygons. As nobody ever got a texture-mapped game running at a decent speed on the A500 in the day (Citadel / Cytadela was probably about the closest?), its hard to know whether this was the best he could have done.

There are no texture mapped poly's in either game, it all relies on real time bitmap scaling.

One way to speed it up would be to pre-scale some bitmaps - such as debris and bullets, but that takes a lot of memory, or shrink the main viewport.

The controls panel area can be updated a lot less frequently than the main viewport, and of course most of it is static. I'd have made those bigger on the A500 version, and shrunk the main viewport.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Yupp, it works on a stock A500 with 512kb Chip-Mem and 512kb other Memory

Origin thought it could not be done on the A500 "
But they wanted it on the basic Amiga because "if it´s not on the A500; where would be the point ?"

Nick Pelling wanted to show those "americans" that it could be done and make it it even smaller in the "footprint".

He wanted the game on 3 disks instead of 11 that the PC version had.
;and 512kb instead of 2MB.

That was the reason why he had choosen the 16 Colors for the Cutscenes.

I would have gone for 32 or 64EHB Colors ... (but i am not a coder)

When i remember correctly; The Graphics for the PC version where done in DPaint on an Amiga ...
But somebody can double Check that

[derSammler]

The game needs 512kb chip and 512kb other memory to run. With 512kb in total, it's not even starting.

I don't remember having more animations etc. was a thing in the A500 version. The PC version did that (e.g. no hand moving the stick in the cockpit without EMS memory), but the Amiga version had all animations from the outset.

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

He wanted the game on 3 disks instead of 11 that the PC version had.
;and 512kb instead of 2MB

11 disks and 2 MB? No idea what game you are talking about, but certainly not the PC version of Wing Commander. It only needed 640kb and came on 3 HD or 6 DD disks. Even Wing Commander II only had 7 disks on the PC...

[Torti-the-Smurf]

True .. 2 MB are recommended on PC; but not needed. Hmm, but it had 11 disks (5.25)

[Megalomaniac]

PC Wing Commander definitely only needs 640K, though I'm sure more has some benefits, and it looks like 3 high density disks on MobyGames, whether 5.35" (1.2Mb) or 3.5" (1.44Mb). The box mentions the chance to send away for other formats, presumably the 11 disks were the single sided single density 5.25" ones (nearly 4 times as many makes sense, as the HD ones are 4 times the capacity)?

The trouble with expanding the control panel area and shrinking the viewport for Amiga WC would be that (unless you shrink everything else) you'd have less time to adjust to approaching enemies when rotating, as you'd see them later (the same issue as so many ST games with a smaller screen window than on the Amiga).

Doing the Amiga version cutscenes in 16 colours rather than 32 or 64 colours would only reduce their size on disk by (if my maths is right) 20% or 33% respectively, which might save a disk, but maybe the reduced loading time from floppy was the reason?

[Raid27]

Originally Posted by Seiya

@Raid27
you could share your wing commander disk? maybe you have a version for 512k chip ram. Maybe mine too was another version different from that you can find in tosec.
What WinUAE version you tried?

I used the "PE" or "Platinum" edition. It didn't ocur to me there would be (radical) differences. Do you still want them?

In any case, I doublechecked my emulator and it's set to "Chip" 512kb and "Slow" 512kb

[Seiya]

ok, i have too Plantin Edition in the Tosec.

I written many years ago my Amiga History and again i had written that i bought a second hand Amiga 500 with 512k Chip RAM and Wing Commander run, but graphically bad in comparsion A1200 for my firend with not good animations and other graphics things. When i bought 512k Slow fast Wing Commander have all extras. It was slow, but with the same grapfhics seen on A1200.

I think that someone should try Wing Commander on Real A500 with only 512k. Could be my bad remember or with Emulator this games require more memory.

in 1992 many Amiga games require 1 MB of memory, so in the box of WC for Amiga is written that require any Amiga with 1 MB, but it could be only a label becase in those days everyone have an Amiga with 1 MB.

[Seiya]

ops, sorry, i written too early...i made some tests and i hoped to have resolved my old remembers, but not.

[Alexco]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

True .. 2 MB are recommended on PC; but not needed. Hmm, but it had 11 disks (5.25)

No, it hadn’t.
If I remember correctly my original PC version came on 2 or 3 1.2 MB 5.25” disks.

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by Alexco

No, it hadn’t.
If I remember correctly my original PC version came on 2 or 3 1.2 MB 5.25” disks.

Also released in 360k disks.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Seiya

ok, i have too Plantin Edition in the Tosec.

I written many years ago my Amiga History and again i had written that i bought a second hand Amiga 500 with 512k Chip RAM and Wing Commander run, but graphically bad in comparsion A1200 for my firend with not good animations and other graphics things. When i bought 512k Slow fast Wing Commander have all extras. It was slow, but with the same grapfhics seen on A1200.

I think that someone should try Wing Commander on Real A500 with only 512k. Could be my bad remember or with Emulator this games require more memory.

in 1992 many Amiga games require 1 MB of memory, so in the box of WC for Amiga is written that require any Amiga with 1 MB, but it could be only a label becase in those days everyone have an Amiga with 1 MB.

I think your memories tricks you.
There is no way that they would havre written "1MB recquired" on the box if the games would boot with 512KB.

That said, who knows, maybe someone made an hack that could boot on 512KB Amiga. But I fail to see in what purpose considering how slow WC was on 1MB A500.

[Mad-Matt]

I have the Space Legends pack version. It definitely wont work in just 512k. The boot script is freeing up as much memory as possible (dumping unused rom libs) just to get it going in 1mb.