Atari ST to Amiga Conversion: Ranarama
 

Fear not, Starquake is not forgotten, and 'should' be ready for release at the end of this month.

As a diversion from all things Starquake, and Christmas, and kids, and shouting, and building FUCKING Lego sets, I thought i'd take a look at Ranarama.

I say take a look, but an hour later it was ready for its first trial run......and bugger me, it was working first time :)

A few bug fixes later and a working joystick routine and the Frog is moving around the game.

Still plenty of work to be done, but just an example of where we are right now.

https://youtu.be/zlcZyFmZCXU

There is nothing like taking a rest by doing more things :)
Lazing infront of the TV just does not cut it!

Looking forward to seeing the finished game.

Good job! Whats the min spec Amiga needed do you reckon?

Thumbs up, hopefully 68000 will be OK to play it.

Nice... slowly we are getting all the forgotten classic on the miggy :) thanx Galahad !

Never liked Ranarama as a game, but always liked its C64 box art.

A comment from Lemon64:

And I think this is valid also for this ST version.

Good stuff sir Galahad, will give it a bash :great

And there is an ST port of Thrust too. Just sayin'.
(Though I think it was perhaps not that good.)

Oh my yes! I can't wait for this :)

Will be doing well to test this one thoroughly. I /destroyed/ this game when I had an actual ST to play this on.

Good job!

I liked it on the c64 but couldn't ever determine why.

Had never heard about this game before. Took a look at a longplay video of the Spectrum version, it seems to be rather complex... it took more than 2 hours to be finished, it has spells and some other things.

Looking at Galahad's video I thought it was a simple arcade game.

The game is a lot like Paradroid (or Paradroid'90 on Amiga)... it is complex yes :)

You don't like building Lego sets... ? :confused

I know, there are some grumpy bastards around :D

Great work fella. Keep us updated with the great progress :)

Not 5 fucking sets that take an hour and a half each to build i dont :mad

Ha ha! Good point.
So how does this St conversion thing work then? Do you make a patch and leave the original disk image/files intact? Or do you have to take the game all apart and fix it then wrap it in some kind of custom interpreter that is different every time?
Just wondering if this one is so straight forward,maybe others are as well and you could have a sort of whdload style system for St games.

Theres no universal system you can employ to do these conversions, has to be done by hand and each game is individual.

Ranarama is very ST system intensive, you just need the knowlege or access to the knowlege of what each TRAP #1/TRAP#D/TRAP#E function does, what to emulate, what to remove, and what to Amigafy.

The screen conversion routine is the same each time, the joystick routine is the same, but their implementation isn't.

Its not overly difficult, just time consuming.

Ranarama took me an hour to sort before i could even remotely try and run it.

I guess the sound part gotta be really different though, isn't it? Someone must compose a .mod music to go along, and then you have more memory usage and stuff, am I wrong? :D

By the way, thank you for all this work :)