Amiga StreetFighter2
 

Im sure this has been discussed more than a few times before. I myself have started a few threads over the years about it, but for me it's not only a shame, but a demonstration of how the amiga was often neglected vs. other formats.

What am I talking about you ask? Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga. Three different versions, none of them quite what they could/should have been.

The original US Gold conversion looked ok, but despite graphics moving somewhat faster with a faster machine it's never what a person would consider smooth (compare it on a stock 1meg a500 and an upgraded a1200 for example,... almost chalk and chees speed wise). Not only this, but it didnt play a lot like the arcade parent. In my humble opinion not a terrible game, but not great, but okay-ish. This said it *is* a terrible conversion.

Next we have Super Street Fighter2, which is both easily the best conversion, but whose graphics are both small, and in my opinion pretty badly colored. I feel bad for putting down someone elses work, but it really doess like a 10 minute job of simply letting a paint package reduce colors and resize all by itself. Not suggesting this is how it was done, but it's how it looks to me. There's artifacts within the "sprites" themselves even sometimes. AGA version fares a little better here, but for a commercial product a person is justified in maybe expecting a little more. Pretty good game, pretty good conversion gameplay wise, but the wasted potential to be a completely satisfying version does gnaw away at me when I play it.

And lastly, Super Street Fighter2 Turbo X, looks fantastic until it moves. It's like the simply removed every second frame of animation, which not only makes it look a bit unusual when it moves, but completely throws off the gameplay mechanics. As the StreetFighter2 fans amongst you will know, timing and tactics are key elements to the gameplay, but with this version all that is destroyed.

After speaking to a friend on IRC Im back in a frame of mind that I'd like to have a crack at porting it myself. I actually have a few VERY early versions Ive tried to make over the years, but Im more of a mind to want to start again and try to do it properly (previously I just wanted to get things onscreen and moving). Im pretty easily distracted, so who knows how long I'll keep at it, but I've got some "amiga-fied" graphics from work on previous versions still, so at least the tedious stuff, (creating palettes, downscaling colors, etc.) wont discourage me the way these sorts of things sometimes can.

I found this incomplete Ryu backdrop "conversion" with 2 of the completed characters pic on my harddrive too:
http://oi44.tinypic.com/1ypyyp.jpg

Please excuse the Ken graphics, Ive yet to remove them from the background image :)

Unfortunately tinypic converts images to jpgs, but the actual picture only uses 30 colors. Ive created a 16 color palette that makes up all the sprites (downscaled from 16 colors per sprite), plus each backdrop has a unique 16 additional colors (32 color screens). Yes, Ive used ripped graphics, but I think Ive done a pretty decent job downscaling them. I still have a color free for improving the backdrop too (or for a gradient perhaps). Apart from being a little blue it doesnt lose a great deal vs. the arcade version and being only 16+16 colors is handy when there's so many graphics.

Hopefully I can maintain interest long enough to at least end up with a demo with a few playable characters. For now though Im just having fun :)

Hopefully I'll have some frequentish updates as it progresses, so if youre an amiga and sf2 fan, watch this space as they say :)

p.s. Im also more than happy to help anyone with better coding skills than myself if they share my interest in a better streetfighter2 version for amiga.

Go and do it I say! :)
I guess they made "some" compromises with SF2 that it would run on an A500. Being quite different gameplay-wise from the arcade version I still loved it!

Thread subscribed btw. and waiting for updates :great

Just remember getting a screen with 32 colors is usually not just the whole job, you need a single palette that works throughout the whole game with few changes involved. So you'd have to use the same 16 for background and the same 16 for sprites throughout (or something among those lines)

I would like a conversion with as many of the original animation frames in, i don't care about the colors as long as stuff looks OK, and I don't care about parallax.

@Akira

Actually if you re-read what I wrote Ive already taken this into account. The sprites use a shared 16 colors palette and Im using those, plus 16 unique colors per backdrop.

To demonstrate, here's another screenhot, still 30 colors (16 "sprite" colors + 14 unique backdrop colors), but with 4 characters onscreen:

http://oi43.tinypic.com/2quoqae.jpg

Nice one! :)
I would make a little bit more contrasted palette, the skins look pale, specially Blanka.

Be aware of the "HUD" stuff, like the health bar and text too. There will be even higher restrictions over there.

How did you downscale the graphics? That's some mad work!

The graphics downscaling, despite being ripped graphics was actually quite a lot of work.
I made the decision from the start that I want to keep all the detail, but this means some characters or backdrops might end up with different colored costumes/details.
I looked at quite a few different sprite character rips and found that 5 or 6 skin tones is the most any character uses, so I made a range of 7 skin tones, which covers everything and has a little room for variety amongst character skin tones. On top of this the "white" Im using also works in with the skin tones, as does the grey.
Blue is the most prominent color apart from the skin tones, so I gave that 4 tones (+ dark grey and white also work in that color "range"). This left me with a few colors left to try to cover the rest. There's actually only one yellow, but it was also chosen to tie in with some of the skin tones, as is the red.

The big "trick" to downscaling graphics to lower color depth in my opinion is making sure youve got enough colors that work within a particular "range". From a palette of 16 colors its entirely possible to get 4 or 5 colors with at least 4 or 5 colors within it "range" and a range with 6,7, or 8. Obviously there's no exact rule here, but its how I go about things.
Backdrops are done the same way, only with an extra 16 colors to hand pick. When something cant be recreated exactly then I'll change its color as discreetly as possible.

As for the practical side, PaintShop Pro is my 2d art program of choice. A lot of the work is using the color select tool and selecting the right color in the my palettes "range" Im using to retouch the original graphics with.
A peron will get much better results this way than letting the software downscale itself as they have complete control on how things end up, and you dont lose detail.

Anyway, long winded explanation, but it's a long winded process :)

I miss some green in the pictures. Especialy in the Blanka picture.

Hmm, with downscaling, I thought you scaled down the sprites to a size.

Nah, graphics are only downscaled in terms of colour depth.

@Lord Riton

Unfortunately its just not possible to keep everything identical when going from 16 colors per sprite, to 16 colors in total for all sprites. I opted to keep all the detail and use a little artistic license with costume/skin tone colors than to match them with the arcade parent as this would have meant a loss in detail, and still wouldnt have been exactly right color wise anyway.

Good luck with this!

As a massive Street Fighter fan I was always pretty disappointed with the Amiga versions. I remember getting really excited after seeing the screenshots of the AGA Turbo edition for the Amiga. There I was thinking that with CD32 pad support you couldn't go wrong, and the pics in the magazines looked beautiful. The reviews were pretty low, but I thought, "how bad can it be?" and bought it anyway. It was so bad. Like you said fishyfish, the missing frames just completely destroyed the gameplay.

The worst thing was I invited my friend round to play it when it arrived. We used to play the Megadrive Special Championship Edition all the time. He had a PC and had been mocking my aging Amiga. It was embarrassing.

Expanded Amigas weren't too uncommon at that point and after seeing what the Amiga was capable of with things like Capital Punishment, it just made the Street Fighter conversions look all the more shoddy.

This sounds interesting.The original a500 sf2 was a poor conversion even though i played it to hell.The ssf2 games made the sprites too small and yes the graphics were poor.Looking at final fight on the amiga id think the a500 could handle a better conversion of sf2.Keep it up.It would be interesting to see a proper sf2 on the amiga.

why not using halfbright mode ? With well choosed colors you could get 32 colors for your sprites and 32 for hinderground.

But well, maybe i don't see some problem that would come with that mode, i rarely used it myself.. er well, never in fact i think :D But seeing how well Black Crypt looked in this mode, this maybe could be an option (?).

I also thought of EHB but assumed that the game is in hires where 16 colors is the max for ECS. I believe EHB in lores would allow for 64 colors and is easier to use than HAM. A smart palette selection of the colors (i.e. Black Crypt) is almost as good as a true 64 color mode. Maybe lores with 64 colors would look better than hires with 16? Personally, I think an AGA version (maybe RTG support also) of SF2 with near arcade quality would be better. The FPGA Arcade and Natami should shift the percentage of AGA owners into the majority. A 68020+ and several megabytes of ram is probably going to be necessary to do the animations and speed justice so it's probably not going to run on stock ECS systems any way.

Why not ehb or 64 colors?

Chipram limitations and speed. No other reason. I dont think many people realise the sheer volume of large graphics sf2 contains.

I don't think it's a good idea to do it in Hires mode. Such a game needs to have at least 25 ips (Images per second), and with large graphics in Hires this could be to difficult to achieve. Chip Ram is really slow, but if the Hires mode is activated, it's even slower, and this not only because of the screen taking 2x as much memory as a LORES screen, but also because in that mode processor and blitter gets less cycles to work with each second. If you want the sprites as big as in the real Arcade game, and well working on an original Amiga 500, then you better do it in 320X256 (LORES) with 32 or 64 HB mode.

But this is of course just my opinion, and you would really surprise me if you manage to do it in HIRES :p

Edit: Maybe you could also use real (hardware) sprites to help you get more colors. I mean, a mix of bitmaps with sprites. If i'm not wrong, sprites can be as high as 256 pixels !

Just curious, but what language are you intending on creating this game in? The more colours, the slower the game will be and of course more memory required for all the graphics. What minimum spec machine are you targeting in terms of memory?

As for the status panel at the top of the screen, I'm sure you could easily borrow a few colours from the background palette, after all only the very top will need them. And switch them back when the background needs the extra colours. And you can use copper splits down the screen anyway to give more colours for the background.

It would be interesting to see a pic of all the fighters on the one 16 colour palette.

This explains why there are no Amiga games with hires or laced with a few exceptions.For that reason Syndicate was not done in hires on Amiga unlike the hires PC version.

It's done in low res. Arcade version is a low res pal overscan (360x288 or thereabouts, cant recall off the top of my head), so there's no reason to do my port in high res. High res is also somewhat slower, not to mention graphics would need to be twice the size. Did I miss something though? Im not really sure where the high res talk even came from :)

As for what Im coding it in, Blitz Basic, with a little asm here and there hopefully (I say hopefully as my amiga asm skills are somewhat humble, although Im currently trying to redeem that). I know some people see the "Basic" portion of the Blitz BASIC monikor and automatically assume it cant be much good, but it's actually probably the 2nd best langauge to do something like this on for custom chipset based amigas (in my opinion). Great language that a person would be naive to underestimate.

Hardwre requirement wise, Im targetting 2meg chip +'020 or upwards. Id love to make it work on a stock 1meg ecs/68000 machine, but I doubt my abilities to do it justice on such a machine.
As for hardware sprite, given the fact its targetting ecs they offer no additional colors, although I am using them for speed. I played with some proof of concept code a little while ago that uses sprites when theyre available, and supliments with bobs when theyre all in use, and I plan to use this system with SF2 to help with speed. The taller portions of characters obviously will get a preference here for the largest benefit.

My plan of attack thus far is to try to get an accurate ecs version sans parallax and with the occasional costume color changes (although the costumes colors that Im changing actually do exist still in other sf2 versions, so theyre not completely "new"). Later on, if Im still interested I'd like to try a more aga specific version that's as near to a 1:1 port as possible. This is a fair way down the track though, even the current version is far from a real game yet :)

I wonder if either team from SSF2T or SSF2 played about with more frames or bigger Sprites - I guess they would have and something like 030 - 32 mb would have no problems.

I still think SSF2 can look realy cool the only thing still bothering is some of the Characters like RYU still looks shit.

Also it would be intresting to look at the Sprite Sheets from all Amiga conversions see what stuff is split and resused if any.

Blitz Basic is great, no doubt about that. Skidmarks was done with it after all and that's a cool one. But I have to say I have never seen anything like a fast-paced scroller or a beat em up done in Blitz.

Will be looking at your progress with much attention!