[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by jotd

@Old Bob I did the same "move the score trick" in my Bagman remake. And check Elite "effort" on Bombjack! what a waste...

Yep, the port that Elite released is nothing short of a disgrace. My own early efforts show that an A500 is easily capable of an almost perfect reproduction of the coin-op. As soon as I can figure out how to control that damned mechanical bird. Much like the Pacman ghosts, it's central to how the game plays but i'm damned if I know what that code looks like.

I'll get back to you on that...

Originally Posted by jotd

I had it finished, but that was slightly easier to do: using C++ & SDL on a "modern" PC gives a perfect rendering. I tried to port it on amiga, and it was darn slow even on a 68060. Probably runs ok on Vampire but what a waste. Dropping SDL is then a big step ahead in trouble, doing it old-style in assembly with blitter (maybe now with modern gcc it would be fast enough to use C++ code).

I really wonder how hard it would be to drop SDL for hardware banging but keep C++ code with all the A.I. etc, and how fast it would be. Not a job for me as I don't know enough about blitter & sprites & audio on the miggy.

Having a brief look in MAME, it seems like something that an A500 should be able to do without too much trouble. I've got no idea at all about this mysterious SDL, C++ business but a mixed code sort of thing where you could call asm routines controlling the blitter and stuff might be possible?

Originally Posted by jotd

Those kind of projects are unlikely to be a one-man job. One has to resource/code the exact behaviour of the arcade game (Mrs Pacman uses random for Ghost moves, even in "chase" mode, Pacman doesn't, only uses random when ghosts are scared BTW), and one has to code using the most efficient method on the miggy.

Indeed. As it quickly became apparent to me when hacking away at even a fairly simple game like Bombjack, beyond the merely mechanical aspects of getting the graphics engine going and stuff, there is a order of magnitude more work in doing everything else.

B