Amiga - the King of Parallax

[lionagony]

Just came across T-Racer for the OCS Amiga last night and was blown away by the gorgeous parallax. [ Show youtube player ] Growing up I always really loved the parallax effect in games like Shadow of the Beast, Lionheart, Kid Chaos, that do parallax so smoothly. I see that upcoming Boss Machine has 26 layers of parallax. To me the consoles were good at 2 big layers of parallax but the fine multi level parallax style always looked so much better on the Amiga. Was there a technical reason for that or just my perception? On Mega Drive and SNES I found the parallax usually looked more cookie cutter, like you could see the division sort of like a cardboard cutout whereas the Amiga can do it so smoothly.

Anyways just wanted to crown our machine as king and maybe understand if there was a reason the Amiga is so good at it.

[alkis21]

You are very wrong. Amiga has always been, and will always be, a queen.

[gimbal]

The parallax is very good. But I am going to congratulate the graphics artist for that good work, not the hardware.

[Toffee]

Technically it looks like 1 layer with line scrolling. Still looks very good for a machine designed in 83/84!

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by Toffee

Technically it looks like 1 layer with line scrolling. Still looks very good for a machine designed in 83/84!

Yeah.. I was also of the impression that parallax is layers behind each other, which this is not...

[Tigerskunk]

Yep. This is not parallax, but line scrolling.

[Retro1234]

How is this effect done then?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

How is this effect done then?

Not sure if it's beam raced or not, but as others have said, it's "line scrolling", where individual lines are scrolled, rather than having overlapping playfields that scroll independently.

[Retro1234]

So it's not hardware scrolling?

[rothers]

So the hardware is doing that effect, but it's not using the usual parallax tricks/features. (from the sound of it, I'm on a train and can't watch the video ??)

[kremiso]

almost an Amiga trademark, lovely effect

wasn't that on T-Racer an attempt to replicate the Lionheart flying sequence one?

[vulture]

I seem to recall there was a very good video on youtube (which I can't find anymore) explaining how line scrolling is achieved taking as an example the floor from Street Fighter 2. But for SNES in particular, I think it was easier to do with mode 7.

[ImmortalA1000]

Not sure about the SNES or PC-E but the Mega Drive does not make it easy to do raster palette swaps.

Sometimes the Nebulus bonus stage type parallax gets the job done, sometimes you need console/arcade style full screen parallax. You could never do Thunderforce 3 in 32 colours on an OCS Amiga, you have to go all the way to 1992 £400 A1200 to even attempt converting that 1990 game to any Amiga model.

Swings and roundabouts as usual, the best Amiga games always made the best of what the chipset offered and pushed it hard with chipset banging 68k machine code that bypassed Kickstart C based libraries.

[saimon69]

The arcade game king of line scrolling is MagMax, no ports tried to replicate that and i wonder if something on that size would be feasible on Amiga
[ Show youtube player ]

[vulture]

@ImmortalA1000

But why would you go for 32 colours instead of dual playfield and copper changes? Regardless, the OCS would still have trouble moving all those things with parallax going on, not without extensive redesigning to suit its own sprite/bobs system.

EDIT:
Just took a quick look at Thunderforce 3 and 4 and they don't seem to use all that many colours themselves so I don't think it'd be that much different under 16c with a well chosen colour palette and a few copper changes. Also, the player's bullets are using a very clever illusion of blinking along and seem 3 or 4 times more the amount than they actually are in every frame.

@saimon69

Not an asm programmer, but I seem to recall from discussions that line scrolling is actually much lighter than proper parallax and as far as I can see from the video, MagMax doesn't employ both at the same time (like Lionheart does, for example), so, maybe it is feasible.

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by Toffee

Technically it looks like 1 layer with line scrolling. Still looks very good for a machine designed in 83/84!

Yes, I guess it is line scrolling but it still creates the same parallax effect. I agree coming from a machine created 40 years ago is mind boggling!

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by saimon69

The arcade game king of line scrolling is MagMax, no ports tried to replicate that and i wonder if something on that size would be feasible on Amiga
[ Show youtube player ]

Cool, never seen that before, would be great to see it done on the Amiga.

[saimon69]

We have also the line effect in steroid together with vertical scroll here:
[ Show youtube player ]

[gimbal]

Oh man. It hurts my brain but that is quite a trick.

[Toffee]

Overkill AGA used the AGA feature of super hires scrolling on a low res screen.

I always thought level 5 (I think) showed it off the best.