I know very well gradius and even if it's playable, the game doesn't react like the original, the playability isn't as good as the original.
That's why it's 02b, i suppose.It can be improved in the playability domain. The rest is near perfect if not perfect : gfx snd etc... :great

I like this port. It’s a tiny bit easier and that’s good for me. Any reason why this wasn’t updated for more than a year?

I like this port too, but without the game sources difficult to do better.

I think it’s better to play because it’s running in 50 Hz so it’s slower than the original game. I like it that way.

I'm too used to the original, the amiga version is really good, but harder for me.

I randomly ran into a video of this game on Youtube. There is something oddly satisfying about the game, I can't exactly pin down what does it.

Perhaps its the fact that it blends the spirit of the Amiga and the MSX or something :)

+1
For some reason I have less trouble playing this than the original.
And it feels great ! Could really be labelled as 1.0 IMHO.

But that's just my average shmupper feeling.

Thanks. I also feel its a good bit easier then the arcade.. :great

I just played through this, keep in mind all I own is an A600 with 2mb Chip, so its running on an 68000 7mhz CPU.

One lifed it on my first try. It was nice to add an ending to it, something that was missing from the arcade original (it just looped), though I was expecting to play a 2nd loop. I'm used to finish the Arcade version easily too (though I haven't played it in ages), but the slowdown helped a lot, even the laser wall section at level 7 which even today gives me trouble on the original was easy here (and I'm glad when you die there on the arcade you are actually sent AHEAD on the level so you don't have to face that thing again :D )

I just *loved* this thing so much. The slowdown on a stock machine is really... kinda sad, but I mean, we played R-Type 2 back then like hell, and it never goes worse than R-Type 2 (and I feel it slowdowns but it never gets jerky or unplayable, like it happens in a lot of Amiga shmups)

The soundtrack of this is SO DAMN amazing, you replicated so faithfully from the original.

If this was released back in the day, even with the slowdowns and all, it would've been SO well received, and I would've played it so much.

I crossed through a few bugs... the (?) power up stayed lit after I looped through the power ups. On the arcade version I usually don't activate the shield because the difficulty goes crazy when you do it, so I didn't do it here.

Level 6 boss died in like half a second, and I don't think it was supposed to die so fast.

And "original" is mispelled on the staff rolling credits at the ending :)

One question/suggestion: Would turn off the starfield (and the green background on last level) speed up things so we could get less slowdowns on a stock machine? I would happily trade the starfield (or maybe have less stars? I dunno if it would make any difference) for a smoother experience.


But the way the game is right now is really impressive and I loved it. Thank you for making this game. Is awesome. I wish we had this back in the day :)

Thanks a lot for your kind feedback Shatterhand. The soundtrack was a big motivation, because back in the day it inspired me to create music myself :)

Thanks for reporting the bugs. If I ever come back to the game I will remember.

Regarding disabling the starfield: I think it took around 10 rasterlines, so no real use in disabling it.

With a lot of work, the slowdowns could be made a bit less, but when considering that even the Arcade version had some
slowdowns (and the hardware is easily 5 times faster for that kind of game then an A500) I'm quite satisfied.
Using 4bpl instead of 5 would have had the most effect on A500, but I tried to stay really close to the Arcade gfx.


Thanks again.

But it remains a small masterpiece of conversion :)

Thanks Dany :)

It was also only possible with the support from Bartman/Abyss who got into the original Arcade code to see how certain things worked,
and also ripped the original music which was a big help to bring the music to Pretracker on Amiga.

I was going to ask how feasible this kind of port would have been back in the day. From what I've heard it was rare for the people doing ports to have access to the source code or any of the graphics and sounds from the arcade original. They often just got a PCB, sometimes made their own ROM dumps and decodes, sometimes just recreated everything.

They usually had very little time to do it too, only some months, and were expected to port to both the Amiga and Atari ST so just ignored the blitter and used samples from the ST music. Atari was the reason for many crap Amiga ports.

C compilers were not nearly as good back then either, and of course no emulation for fast testing or checking DMA allocation.

I'm not trying to minimize the incredible achievement here, it's actually staggering to me. Just making excuses for the crap quality of ports back in the 80s and 90s :)

I think if people got back then a bit of documentation for the game to port, the original gfx and would have focused on Amiga instead of ST ports then things would have been much better in most cases. For instance, Rainbow Islands (like Bubble Bobble) could have run on A500 at 50fps, but it was targeted for ST... so everyone only got ~20fps.. still a good game :)

Using C is of course a nice time saver, especially for gameplay coding. For the game engine itself it doesn't help too much, as you still operate directly on the hardware. So writing code for the Blitter, Copper and Paula code is (nearly) identical to asm.

Fantastic. Back in the day this would have had many magazine awards.

https://ibb.co/VDhTmdC

It gets stuck after the first boss. Tried two times in a row now.
Music plays and i can move/shoot but it doesn’t advance from here?
This is the whdload version.

I uploaded an image here but it seems gone..

Hi ! Is there an issue with the WHDLOAD version ? (17th of November 2022)
Nothing occurs after defeating the 1st boss (no more music, I can still move the ship and crash it, and defeat the boss again, and it happens again).

I tried several times in a row even after quitting / relaunching.

Configuration : A1200 Blizzard 1230-IV OS 3.2.1.

Edit : OOPS, duplicate :D Same as SpoUP indeed :)

Please, try also without WHDLoad...
EDIT: tested myself and confirmed the bug happens only running with WHDLoad slave.
EDIT2: added to the Zone a working generic WHD version without the bugs, while waiting for a slave fix...