Port Wolfenstein on Amiga 500 / 1000 OCS

[britelite]

Originally Posted by utri007

I have seen lots of nice demos, but very few of them has actually materialized to games. It is has much less work to port game than create new.

Indeed, and that's why I said _IF_ I ever continue working on it

Creating all the sprites and levels is big job. Bigger than many could though.

Of course it's a big job, but then again, even for a port the graphics would pretty much have to be redone anyway to suit the 16 color palette. And to be honest, if I'm spending a lot of time getting something to work on the A500, then why not spend some extra time and make it something of my own.

Another thing is, can you keep fps if there is a movin object in screen, like enemy?

The fps will definitely be worse with realtime raycasting and sprite rendering added, which is also a reason for why making my own game would be more attractive, as I could scale down the complexity to a level that still retains a reasonable framerate.

[d4rk3lf]

IMHO, the faster fps - the better, however, I feel that even half of the fps that is there already, would be a very playable game.
People played Cytradel, on stock A500 back then, even it was slow as politician speech, yet they enjoyed. We are kind-a spoiled these days.
I keep my finger crossed, and hoping for the best.
Cheers to all.

Miggy4eva you're certainly a passionate man. And I appreciate passion, but you need some serious reality checks here:

OCS uses a 16-bit datapath and a 512kb/1mb chip mem, while in theory sufficient, isn't when you consider that much more than graphics data on an Amiga is stored there.

The 286, which is a base config for a Wolf3D game, is so much more powerful than the 68000 the A500 comes with.

That an Atari ST is a good baseline to understand why your dream just isn't possible, even with a skilled assembly coder there is simply not enough resources.

I did some basic theorizing on what an A500 could do, after looking at the Wolf3D code for the PC. And I came up with:

16 colours, at the most

Runs in a window with doubled pixels, effective resolution something like 160x100

And 15fps framerate.

This is assuming massive optimizations and leveraging of assembler, doesn't include music or sound routines, and some other general optimizations.

No, your expectations are impossible. It's just not a thing we can do on this hardware. I'm not being mean. I'm not trying to crush your dreams. You just can't really do it.

The Amiga was a neat piece of tech for its time, but it wasn't revolutionary. None of the home computers were. They were about 3-5 years behind the stuff being used in the high end, such as VAX, for example, or later something like PA-RISC or Alpha AXP. Emotion and faith doesn't boil down to raw numbers.

Your dream could probably be done on an A3000, for example, without any issue and with basic optimizations, but you don't have realistic expectations for that.

[Trachu]

Originally Posted by Raion-Fox

Miggy4eva you're certainly a passionate man. And I appreciate passion, but you need some serious reality checks here:

OCS uses a 16-bit datapath and a 512kb/1mb chip mem, while in theory sufficient, isn't when you consider that much more than graphics data on an Amiga is stored there.

The 286, which is a base config for a Wolf3D game, is so much more powerful than the 68000 the A500 comes with.

That an Atari ST is a good baseline to understand why your dream just isn't possible, even with a skilled assembly coder there is simply not enough resources.

I did some basic theorizing on what an A500 could do, after looking at the Wolf3D code for the PC. And I came up with:

16 colours, at the most

Runs in a window with doubled pixels, effective resolution something like 160x100

And 15fps framerate.

This is assuming massive optimizations and leveraging of assembler, doesn't include music or sound routines, and some other general optimizations.

No, your expectations are impossible. It's just not a thing we can do on this hardware. I'm not being mean. I'm not trying to crush your dreams. You just can't really do it.

The Amiga was a neat piece of tech for its time, but it wasn't revolutionary. None of the home computers were. They were about 3-5 years behind the stuff being used in the high end, such as VAX, for example, or later something like PA-RISC or Alpha AXP. Emotion and faith doesn't boil down to raw numbers.

Your dream could probably be done on an A3000, for example, without any issue and with basic optimizations, but you don't have realistic expectations for that.

Well actually 80286 was quite slow procesor and overally inferior to MC68000.
The problemm lies elsewhere. Wolf3d was designed as VGA only which had special Chunky pixel mode.
3d games like this are based on chunky pixel calculations, then the CPU or blitter must perform Chunky2Plannar conversion which costs almost single frame!!!
This way superior Motorla procesor looks quite weak compared to 80286.

This could be resolved if someone would find an algorythm which would operate directly on plannar graphics...

I made 16colour textures conversion some time ago and you can use it in this game.

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by Trachu

I made 16colour textures conversion some time ago and you can use it in this game.

They look almost nice, and alot better than the attempts i have been trying out. What program/method did you use for this?

With almost, i mean that some of the textures still look pretty bad, esp. the doors, and some of the purple walls. but i guess that you did not do any manually pixel corrections on any of them?

[johannes]

Originally Posted by Akira

It'll probably only be a matter of time before you revert to namecalling again, because that's how a brat acts when they don't get the thing they demand.

Calling someone a "brat" is clearly namecalling.

[gimbal]

You're right to sign up to say that Johannes, that really needed to be said more than a year after the fact.

[utri007]

Originally Posted by britelite

Indeed, and that's why I said _IF_ I ever continue working on it

Of course it's a big job, but then again, even for a port the graphics would pretty much have to be redone anyway to suit the 16 color palette. And to be honest, if I'm spending a lot of time getting something to work on the A500, then why not spend some extra time and make it something of my own.

The fps will definitely be worse with realtime raycasting and sprite rendering added, which is also a reason for why making my own game would be more attractive, as I could scale down the complexity to a level that still retains a reasonable framerate.

I wish that you could do at least few levels demo or mini game, if nothing else, as proof of concept.

I ques you could ask help for level maps and gfx. Just upload palette somewhere and tell size limits for sprites. Maybe what kind of graphics you want? Monsters? Soldiers? Would it be like realistic or fantasy world? etc.

[nobody]

Noob's question
I read EGA is using planar, so wouldn't be easier to port something like this? (Supposing source code exists)

[ Show youtube player ]

Edit; I see there is a version of it already. I wonder if it's using planar (?)

[ Show youtube player ]

[britelite]

Originally Posted by utri007

I wish that you could do at least few levels demo or mini game, if nothing else, as proof of concept.

A preview of the game is coming up in the near future

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by britelite

A preview of the game is coming up in the near future

Sweet, can't wait to see what you have made of this.

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by nobody

Noob's question
I read EGA is using planar, so wouldn't be easier to port something like this? (Supposing source code exists)

[ Show youtube player ]

Edit; I see there is a version of it already. I wonder if it's using planar (?)

[ Show youtube player ]

The 2D part of the display uses planar graphics, but on PC the 3D view is drawn using EGA write mode 2, which does "on the fly" chunky to planar conversion as you write the memory. I wish the Amiga chipset had something like this. For the Amiga port I drawn the 3D view into a separate chunky buffer, and did a C2P conversion from there.