Tiny Bobble

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Jobbo

This looks incredible! I played the heck out of the ST version and that was already quite good, this looks perfect!

I'm curious what approach you've taken, it seems harder than necessary to recreate all the mechanics by hand as was normally the case for ports back in the day. Did you use the original code for reference?

Rainbow Islands was another great port on the ST and Amiga. I've always hoped someone would take the Amiga version and update it with a taller screen, more colors and better use of the Amiga hardware. Or you might just rewrite it by hand as a tiny version for us

Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands were not complete.

Bubble Bobble is a game the ST is not the best machine suited for, and for RI, same problem, plus they did not included the whole game, with 3 islands missing as well as the endings.

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Various websites explain aspects of the games inner workings, like bonus spawns or scoring system. Reverse engineering the Z80 code for the inner workings like collision detection and game physics etc is well beyond my abilities. Even if you would reverse engineer the orignal code and reimplement it on 68000 it would be much too slow i guess. The arcade uses 2 x Z80 at 6Mhz and 1 x Z80 at 3 Mhz. Despite the 68000 has much more power then a single Z80 it get easily outpaced by those three CPUs because those run in parallel and also dont need to take much care about the gfx because the hardware features tilemodes, hardware sprites and hundreds of colors. Also sprites can have different palettes on the arcade while in the amiga version everything has to have a seperate gfx when the palette is changed. So your data also explodes. Just to process all the blitter objects on amiga already steals most of the available DMA cycles and using 5 planes slows down everything further. So to get this all running on Amiga in 50fps you would need to have much more efficent code then the arcade needed. You would need different algorithms to solve the collisions and physics more efficent. At least that's what i believe, but i'm not a Z80 or arcade board expert

This is not a problem per se. Just pick the X68000 program of Bubble Bobble, it's a conversion line by line of the original Z80 Bubble Bobble source code in 68000.

The programmer was given the original arcade source, and he converted it for X68000. I can send this program to you if you want.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

It's certainly not better then the original amiga music (which is very good imho) but it fits the game. The 4th channels is used for dynamic 'reverb' or soundfx. Well, i guess most people will like the original amiga music better but this is as good as it gets from me

I actually really rather like this version, the reverb is done very well it really adds something.

Love me a good chiptune

[Konrad]

Looks and sounds fantastic. Keep up the good work !

[Viceroy]

Well done man ;-)

[nikosidis]

It is looking good Can not wait to play it. It is a fun game.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands were not complete.

Bubble Bobble is a game the ST is best suited for, and for RI, same problem, plus they did not included the whole game, with 3 islands missing as well as the endings.



This is not a problem per se. Just pick the X68000 program of Bubble Bobble, it's a conversion line by line of the original Z80 Bubble Bobble source code in 68000.

The programmer was given the original arcade source, and he converted it for X68000. I can send this program to you if you want.

Thanks for the very kind offer, sounds really interesting but i'm already finished with my conversion (beside of bug testing).



X68000 is really perfectly suited for a 1:1 asm conversion. It has 128 sprites, 10Mhz 68000 etc. If the X68000 version idles most of the time then i could be fast enough to try to port to Amiga.. would be interesting to see if it could work. Volunteers needed

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Toni Galvez

There are many examples of FM music translated to the Amiga:

Ninja Warriors and Saint Dragon games.

HangOn demo (the music is 95% similar to the original)

Coppersky musicdisc, (Bosconian theme from X68000 computer) We used MDXdrv windows player to listen x68000 music that sound 100% like the arcade, we can mute the channels and get the FM samples from it.

But pink likes to use Pretracker and it's something to respect.

I found that SID can do a kind of metallic/bell sound, take a listen:
[ Show youtube player ]

One game i know that nailed FM sound on amiga was Rodland. It was created by a genius coder.

As i try to keep the games 'tiny' i don't use samples. I'm also more interested to get 'new' timbres out of Paula by programming instead of sampling. Its also quite fun to recreate the original arcade fx within the limits of PreTracker. Another nice benefit is that i have much more chipram on A500 to use without samples

The bell sound on C64 is done by ring modulation. Always liked that sound. It can be emulated to a certain extend in PreTracker, but not that pure.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Looks and sounds fantastic. Keep up the good work !

Thanks Konrad!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

I listened to the game music. It is very well done, in my opinion, the only thing is the bell, the main instrument slightly different from the arcade, maybe modifying only this instrument would be even more faithful to Bubble Bobble. Assuming you can make it sound like the original with minimal modification.

Thanks! First i tried to make it sound more like the Arcade, but the main problem was not enough chipram. I only had 4kb left for audio, so i decided to emulate a bit of the arcade FM timbre (like in the bell lead) and use a similar approach for the rest as the original amiga version (with arpeggios, modulated square bass, etc).

[Silverstreak]

Amazing looking, can’t wait!

[wizball71]

Looks good ... pls keep up with your good work

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Thanks for the very kind offer, sounds really interesting but i'm already finished with my conversion (beside of bug testing).



X68000 is really perfectly suited for a 1:1 asm conversion. It has 128 sprites, 10Mhz 68000 etc. If the X68000 version idles most of the time then i could be fast enough to try to port to Amiga.. would be interesting to see if it could work. Volunteers needed

What do you mean by volunteers ?

[m4d]

Wow, this looks amazing!

[kriz]

Really nice news, keep on rocking Pink!!

[nikosidis]

I now tried the 2 original Amiga versions on my A1200. PAL and NTSC. I felt the NTSC version played, looked little better.
After that I went for the C64 version on real C64. It is much better. Looks better and better controls.
more like the arcade version.
This game needs an update so this will be exiting to try out.

[Predseda]

This game never gets old. I have just tried a quick search in ebay UK and...

1,824 results for bubble bobble

There is never enough Bubble Bobble!

[Foul]

i'm a huuuuuuugge fan of Bobble Bubble !

a little part of my collection :



i'm so happy

[DamienD]

Many, many, many moons ago... my friend made a CloneCD image of his original FM-Towns version for me:



The front / back of the box is where my previous, and current avatars come from

[malko]

[small OT]
@Damien : even if your actual avatar has nice back haircut, I much prefer the front faced one
[/small OT]

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Foul

i'm a huuuuuuugge fan of Bobble Bubble !

a little part of my collection :



i'm so happy

I am very envious as I only have plush Bub. Blue Bob is super rare and impossible to get.