Crappy C64 screen resolution

[Megalomaniac]

Maybe this needs splitting into a new 'What games did early Amiga owners want and expect when they bought it' type thread, as it has nothing to do with the C64 or screen resolutions, but...

I think this is one of those cases where you have to separate your own opinions from a wider perspective. True that I only speak for myself, but I can form an argument based on data and wider opinions. "Have $1500 to spend on a computer [or a dad who does]" and "want to play Defender more than Defender of the Crown" sounds to me like a very small Venn diagram overlap.

You may not like Cinemaware's games, they're not necessarily favourites of mine, but they're hardly 'slop'. Look at their averages and vote counts on LemonAmiga for evidence. Comparing Wings to Knights of the Sky and Red Baron suggests a minimal understanding of what they were trying to do - presumably you think the Indiana Jones graphic adventures are the same genre as Rick Dangerous? Unless by 'joke' you meant 'intentionally less serious and more relaxed' (though even that understates the emotion of some of the death-related cutscenes)? That brand statement might have overegged the pudding a little, but company slogans always do. Nobody used "our games are exactly the same as what everyone else was doing five years ago on earlier machines - but slightly better".

We can only speculate on how well official versions of Defender, Robotron et al would have done in 1986, but considering the price of the machine I'd be surprised if they would have been huge sellers. StarRay and Datastorm (based on Dropzone rather than Defender, but close enough) did moderately well in 1988 and 1989, though less well than things like Ikari Warriors or Hybris, and Llamatron found some fans in 1991, though surely because it was £5 (if you bothered to pay the Shareware fee, which I sadly suspect most people didn't) rather than £25. But, yes, most pre-1988 Amiga shooters were pretty bad, so perhaps something simple but well-made and enjoyable would have found a niche?

What does everyone else here think?

[Zak]

It's on topic. The thread is about the C64 resolution and then I asked why there are not more Amiga games in C64 resolution. It's still all about the 160x200. And when we came to the consent that high resolution is not important, why so few games in C64 resolution on Amiga? Or is high resolution important to Amiga users but not so to C64 users?

And to answer your question (with a counter question): "Leisure Suit Larry" in C64 resolution is what I consider a successful game and why shouldn't Defender or Robotron be as successful?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Zak

...why so few games in C64 resolution on Amiga?

You are aware that you can't just take C64 assets and use them on the Amiga?

[Zak]

Originally Posted by TCD

You are aware that you can't just take C64 assets and use them on the Amiga?

As a software company you could totally take all the graphics designed for a C64 game und reuse it to make an Amiga version? Or not? My example is Leisure Suit Larry which has what saimo called wide pixels. It's completely C64 graphics, done on Amiga.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Zak

As a software company you could totally take all the graphics designed for a C64 game und reuse it to make an Amiga version? Or not? My example is Leisure Suit Larry which has what saimo called wide pixels. It's completely C64 graphics, done on Amiga.

Sierra is a special case. The games were made with AGI so those weren't 'C64 graphics' (those games don't even exist on the C64), but assets made specifically for the AGI.

[Zak]

Originally Posted by TCD

Sierra is a special case. The games were made with AGI so those weren't 'C64 graphics' (those games don't even exist on the C64), but assets made specifically for the AGI.

However, you could just draw double pixels on a 320 resolution and make it look like 160 pixels? And this wouldn't be rocket science to do?

Edit: and by this you wouldn't have to redesign the graphics from scratch.

[Megalomaniac]

The Amiga had so much more performance than the C64, with a 320x200 mode that could place either 16 or 32 colours anywhere, with potentially multi-directional full-screen 50fps scrolling and lots of objects on screen at once. Would there have been enough performance benefit in halving the horizontal resolution? It might have been an option on the ST though, to offset that machine's lack of custom hardware?

My understanding is that Sierra had a grievance against Commodore, and against the home computer infrastructure of multiple different formats which could be orphaned by their publisher at any moment, after losing money in the 1983 crash in the US. Hence why they never ported AGI to the C64, and were reluctant to port it to the ST and Amiga.

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

You may not like Cinemaware's games, they're not necessarily favourites of mine, but they're hardly 'slop'. Look at their averages and vote counts on LemonAmiga for evidence.

I don't care how collectives rate games. Those who rate Cinemaware games highly care more about cinematization than gameplay, and thus have bad taste, period, and should be taken to task.

Comparing Wings to Knights of the Sky and Red Baron suggests a minimal understanding of what they were trying to do

All three are 1990 WWI computer games with dogfighting. Thus, comparisons can be made. Difference is Red Baron and Knights of the Sky are ELITE WWI dogfighting sims whereas Wings is a casual and cinematized half-assed wannabe. Because guess what? Cinemaware could not code to save their lives. They are not in the same league as Dynamix or MPS Labs, who were MASTERS at designing and coding serious computer games. To put it another way, Cinemaware are the Sierra of the Amiga. And so as to not leave the full sentiment unexpressed: their "games" were bad.

and Llamatron found some fans in 1991, though surely because it was £5

Or it could have been, you know, because it was a bloody good game.

And while this "off-topicness" was organic, it is nevertheless off-topic and thus I will not continue the exchange. But if someone responds, I will respond to them on my own site. Because I'm not sure how much moderators here care about off-topicness. It could be, for instance, that if someone makes an off-topic claim, you can't argue it. Which is not the kind of community I'd want to be a part of.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Zak

However, you could just draw double pixels on a 320 resolution and make it look like 160 pixels? And this wouldn't be rocket science to do?

Edit: and by this you wouldn't have to redesign the graphics from scratch.

No idea how that is related to the fact that Sierra adventure games didn't use C64 graphics.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Zak

However, you could just draw double pixels on a 320 resolution and make it look like 160 pixels? And this wouldn't be rocket science to do?

Edit: and by this you wouldn't have to redesign the graphics from scratch.

But there's no real benefit to that, other than being able to use much lower quality assets than you could. On 8-bit machines you were trading resolution for more colours or lower memory usage or performance on some way.

But that's not really a tradeoff you make on the Amiga. There you tend to sacrifice colour depth for additional performance (or to allow DPF). And you have to bare in mind that "retro gaming" wasn't really a thing back then, people were buying better gaming hardware because they wanted better graphics: you'd be a bit miffed if you sold your C64 and games, pooled it with your savings and bought an Amiga, only to have an identical game there.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

No idea how that is related to the fact that Sierra adventure games didn't use C64 graphics.

They used CGA in 320x200 (4 colors) or 640x200 (2 colors). In 640x200 groups of 4 consecutive hires pixels generate 16 NTSC composite colors, for an effective resolution of 160x200.

Here's an example. The actual screen resolution is 640x200 in 2 colors (white/black) but NTSC artifacting causes the pixel groups to appear in different colors depending on their position relative to the 3.579454Mhz color clock.



And here it is on the Apple II, which has a monochrome resolution of 280x192 (40 bytes per line, each with 7 pixels). The 8th bit of each byte selects one of two sub-pixel shifts, giving an artifact color resolution of ~140x192. Note the quite different colors this scheme produces (in this case better than CGA, IMO).



Other platforms got the same low resolution because Sierra couldn't be bothered redrawing the graphics for them. This included the Amiga.

The C64 didn't get King's Quest for two reasons. Firstly it needed more than 64k RAM. Secondly the C64 can only put 4 colors in each 8x8 block, so the graphics would have to be painstakingly converted.

[Lilura]

Here is King's Quest in 16-color EGA 320x200 in 1986 (original release was CGA/+ 1984).

Here is King's Quest 4 in 16-color VGA 320x200 in 1988 (drawspace of 320x190).

And here is King's Quest 6 in 256-color VGA 320x200 in 1992 (still a 320x190 drawspace).