Discussion: Rygar AGA Edition

[mcgeezer]

Here's my entry as I started work on this last night...

Title:
Rygar AGA Edition

Genre:
Arcade Action Platformer

Original concept:
No - This will be an arcade port of the original Tecmo game to the Amiga A1200.

Expected game size:
Game has 27 levels about 30 mins to play. I will develop as many as I can time allowing for the competition.

Team members (Real or forum names):
At the moment.
mcgeezer (coding/gfx formatting & extraction),
dflrsilver (gfx extraction)

Targeted spec:
A1200 stock Amiga with 2MB Chip Ram (memory requirement may change).

Tools to be used:

• Devpac 3
• VASM
• Notepad++
• WINUAE
• Paint.net
• Personal Paint
• Windows 10
• VGMAPS.com
• XConvert
• MAME 0.180

Description of game:
Well known classic arcade action platformer

Other notes:
Like I did with Bomb Jack I will start full development in October 2018, between now and then I will be arranging tiles/sprites into correct order/sizes. I will provide development updates as I go in the form of YT videos.

[DamienD]

Oh yeah!!! Legend!!!

[DDNI]

Looking forward to this!

[roondar]

Nice!

I like that it's stock A1200. Not that many AGA arcade conversions around, so it'll be interesting to see how it copes

[StingRay]

Nice project, I think you may need more than the 2MB chip of a standard A1200 though.

[NeoHippie2016]

Wow! Wonderful Project!

[fryguy]

Cool!

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Nice project, I think you may need more than the 2MB chip of a standard A1200 though.

Thanks. You might be right but here are my rough calculations...

I need 3 * 45KB screen buffers in chip ram based on.

• 40 bytes scan line width (32+256+32)/8
• 224 scanline height = (40*224)=8,960 bytes
• 8,960 * 5 Bit Planes for 32 colours = 44,800 bytes

44,800 bytes per screen buffer of which I need

• 1 Front Buffer
• 1 Back Buffer
• 1 Restore Buffer

134,400 bytes for Foreground scrolling buffer

I also need a front and back 5 bitplane buffer for the background scrolling so thats another ...
89,600 bytes

Each background is 8 colours and is (1024 * 184) in size so that's another
70,656 bytes

In the arcade there are 1024 * 16x16 tiles. I need those in 32 colours so...
2 bytes (wide) * 16 (depth) * 5 (bit planes) = 160 bytes per tile... * 1024 = 163,840 bytes

The arcade has the same amount for sprites as it has 4096 * 8x8 objects... so that's another
1 byte (wide) * 8 (depth) * 5 (bitplanes) = 40 bytes per object * 4096 = 163,840 bytes

Now I need to double those sprites for the masks... so another 163,840 bytes

So a summary breakdown...

• 135K Foreground screen buffers
• 90K Background screen buffers
• 70K for Background image data
• 164K for Foreground Tiles (
• 164K for Sprites Objects
• 164K for Sprite masks
• 50K for 1 plane collision screens
• 200K for music and samples
• 300K Other stuff...(HW Sprites/Titles/Charset/Copper/Stack/Flipped tiles)

1,337KB.... It should fit in 2mb Amigas.

[ovale]

Off course you know of the OCS version?
https://www.retrogaminghistory.com/c...?postid=138040

[hipoonios]

Looks like a big project. Looking forward to follow your progress and I'm more than happy to help with playtesting

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by ovale

Off course you know of the OCS version?
https://www.retrogaminghistory.com/c...?postid=138040

Sure I do...
Developing the game for OCS is a stretch too far for my capabilities (and the platform in my opinion).

[Retro-Nerd]

Great choice, Geezer.

Yeah, tested the OCS version (which was never more than a first level tech demo) a lot a few month ago. An Amiga 500 can't handle it without too many compromises and slowdowns. Should work smooth (hopefully in full 50fps) on AGA hardware though.

[dlfrsilver]

I think it's time to bring in some great titles to the A1200.

[jotd]

That would be awesome. Are you aware that some talented people here already tried in targetting A500? maybe there are stuff to get hold of.

AGA is a good choice. Why limiting to a stock A500? Rygar is clearly off the A500 league.

If it's as faithful as Bombjack that'll be ... well, I don't have words for this.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

That would be awesome. Are you aware that some talented people here already tried in targetting A500? maybe there are stuff to get hold of.

AGA is a good choice. Why limiting to a stock A500? Rygar is clearly off the A500 league.

If it's as faithful as Bombjack that'll be ... well, I don't have words for this.

Graphically and as a whole, yes.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Sure I do...
Developing the game for OCS is a stretch too far for my capabilities (and the platform in my opinion).

Well, before Sandruzzo did start with try to use EHB in my opinion speed was fine; it CAN be done in OCS/ECS but a lot of work in optimising assets and probably speed down to 25fps

[mcgeezer]

As actual proper coding won't fully start until around 15th October I wanted to show some of what I'll be doing up and around until that point with preparing the graphics for the game.

The sprites that dflrsilver provided were not in any sort of structured format so they all need to be accurately aligned so that the blitter can pick them up and display them, most of the sprites are 32x32 in size so they all need to be put in a 32x32 grid. In the lower part of the screen shot that follows you can see this process... which... is very time consuming as there are alot of sprites in the game. The other thing to note about this is that some sprites need to be mirrored so I need to have flipped copies.

On top of that the sprites need to be ordered in a specific way depending on if they are enemies/collectables etc so that when I come to coding the game I can do efficient collision detection.




In the upper part of the screen you can see how I'm extracting the background on the Rygar levels. For doing this we need MAME and the internal debugger with some cheats. What I've done is disabled the front tile map and sprites which allows just the background showing through. I then move across the level with infinite lives and time set and screen shot the backgrounds, stitch them together to make up the whole scene.

This whole process will probably take me all of August, I will try to keep things updated but rest assured I'm working on it unless you hear otherwise (here).

Exciting times.

Geezer

PS. As requested by Ian if you want to discuss then please post in the discussion thread and reference this post number.

[Retro1234]

Currious what map editor your using?

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Currious what map editor your using?

None at the moment - but will be using tiled for foreground.
Happy to discuss further in the other thread.

[dlfrsilver]

i've use tiled for making the sprites