Which are the most accurate Amiga arcade conversions?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Holy kitty! You are right!

Look at YouTube videos of the ST and MegaDrive versions and they are perfectly normal. I cannot believe they forgot to shift the color palettes when going from the ST to the Amiga but it really looks like they did.
Just incredible...

i wonder if it is possible to fix this with a WHDLoad slave

[dlfrsilver]

it is actually, Midnight Resistance and After the War are actually corrected in whdload, the colors appear now correctly.

[Shatterhand]

I was playing Mortal Kombat these days...

It's far from being a perfect port, but it's better than the Mega-Drive one in many aspects.. for starters, it seems to run smoother, and the voices are all there.

It's a very solid port, the gameplay is very similar to the arcade one (sans the lack of buttons, but the control scheme is pretty good even with just 1 button). I just remember having horrible loading times, but with WHDLoad this isn't a big problem.. even with just 2mb and OS Flashes the game takes a reasonable time between fights (But it does take a while for the first loading)

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

It's far from being a perfect port, but it's better than the Mega-Drive one in many aspects.. for starters, it seems to run smoother, and the voices are all there.

It's a very commendable port. I remember it being better to play with one button than it ever was with 3 on the Megadrive, probably because I always hated the BLOCK button and much prefer the SFII style blocking, by pulling back on the joystick!
Anyway, it doesn't look great, but it plays alright. And we had blood by default, which console versions didn't !

[Shatterhand]

I don't know if it's an accurate port, but I just played Saint Dragon, and it's a very good Amiga game on its own.

I have zero experience with the arcade game, so I have no idea of how accurate it is. But if I had this game back at the time, I would have played the hell out of it. It does some heavy frame skipping when the screen gets busy but, other than that, it's a very solid game technical-wise, and very enjoyable to play.

Having this, a pretty good port of Dragon Breed, Apidya, the reasonable ports of R-Type 1 and 2, Disposable Hero and Uridium 2... why the hell people wasted time with Project Blergh?

[s2325]

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[Fiery Phoenix]

Pac-Mania was a great conversion

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Fiery Phoenix

Pac-Mania was a great conversion

I agreed until I saw the X68000 version.
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With all the coders out there, have you ever thought of a remix with 128 colours for example ?
The Amiga seems to be tailored for this type of games ... I am surprised it has not been done, yet.
Their is a rather nice Falcon version, but it is more an emulation IIRC :
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[Amiga1992]

Even if you increase the amount of colors of Pac-Mania on the Amiga, like they did on the Archimedes version, it looks like absolute shit compared to the original.

Not a good port, both those (done by the same guy if I am not wrong).

[Shatterhand]

Badlands

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Great port of a bleh arcade game. Still, shit, its 3 small sprites moving on a static screen, if they had botched THIS, they should just give up making any games.

Ninja Warriors
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This port has some interesting things.

I really think the music is BETTER than the original arcade music, it has more punch and sounds awesome. Zuntata's track was already incredibly good and it just got better on Amiga.... but.... OH HELL WHY THE *$!@*$!*&$*!&@%*&@! GOD THIS ONLY PLAYS AT THE TITLE SCREEN? Shit, this was Level 1 music, it sounds amazing... the game has some great SFX but the music is JUST SO FUCKING AWESOME why I can't have it during game? I could even live without the awesome SFX if that was necessary to have music playing during game...

Then the game has controls that are just like the arcade with 2 buttons... when played on keyboard. With joystick you have just 1 button and then its the old "Oh how I wished it supported 2 buttons". But to be quite honest the solution here isn't bad and I think the game plays rather well...

... except the arcade game was a cheap-fest quarter-stealer unfairly hard, and this is incredibly well translated into the Amiga version. So even this part is very accurate

[nobody]

Top 5 based on quality/accuracy:

1. Pang
2. Arkanoid 1
3. Ghosts n' goblins
4. Rainbow Islands
5. Rodland

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by nobody

Top 5 based on quality/accuracy:

1. Pang
2. Arkanoid 1
3. Ghosts n' goblins
4. Rainbow Islands
5. Rodland

Great choices.

I'd add Toki, as well as Snow Bros.

[Photon]

Most of the walk right press fire to beat/shoot will be accurate cos they were crap on arcade Ninja warriors was touted for accuracy at the time, one of the better ones.

Also racing type games should be np.

This guy covers some (that are probably already covered).
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Just came to say Silk Worm, and Rainbow Islands is a cracker albeit half framerate. Graftgold actually did a couple accurate ones.

Hard Drivin', S.T.U.N. Runner mentioned? Obviously bog standard code, so they couldn't compete with specially made hardware. But for accuracy they'd match I think? Though if you made the same concessions, Afterburner II and Thunder Blade would match too.

[Shatterhand]

Rainbow Islands is great, Parasol Stars is great...

It's a shame Bubble Bobble isn't that good on Amiga :/

Graftgold also did Super Off Road which is also very spot-on and pretty good.

The Sales Curve made Ninja Warriors, Silkworm, Rodland, Indy Heat, Saint Dragon and Final Blow which are all great ports ( Final Blow *is* a great port, the arcade game is pretty shitty to be honest, and the I think the Amiga game actually plays better.... in a recent Retrocomputing fair we put the Amiga and FM-Towns versions side by side, everyone agreed the Amiga version actually played a lot better)



They also did Shinobi which nearly kills everything good they did

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Akira

Even if you increase the amount of colors of Pac-Mania on the Amiga, like they did on the Archimedes version, it looks like absolute shit compared to the original.

Not a good port, both those (done by the same guy if I am not wrong).

I like the Archimedes as you all know but I do not lie.

The Archimedes version has actually less colours than the Amiga version.
On the Archimedes, mode 9 is used.
320 x 256, 16 colours.
On the Amiga, I **think** and please do not answer with caps as idiots do if I make a mistake, it is 16 colours and the hardware sprites have their own palettes, so the ghosts and the main character add some colours.

What is a pity on the Archies, and it would have been not difficult at all, is that no use is made of the hardware sprite to have some hues of yellow for the Pacman character.
Also, after reading Shaun Hollingworth comments, it seems there are still some cycles left per frame, so the game could **possibly** have been overscan.
When Pacmania was 1st released, believe me or not nobody (or only the happy few !) had a copy of the VLSI ARM chipset documentation.
It is this documentation and only this one, that lists all the registers of the video and sound controler, and the memory controler.
It was Acorn's policy not to use other screen modes than those offered by RISC OS, for later compatability for the new machines to come ...
I remember very well the very 1st overscan screen mode was demonstrated by demomakers, after, I believe, having disassembled RISC OS to understand which values were written into the VIDC registers when RISC OS changes screen modes.

Furthermore the Archie version of Pacmania works at 50 fps, even on the early Archies with the original memory controler MEMC.
In 1989 IIRC the MEMC1A, necessary to have the ARM3 work, was made available and superseeded the MEMC in all Archies (starting with the BBCA3000) and this chip, alone, gives a 10% boost over an 'old' MEMC equiped Archie.
The MEMC1A could be bought as an upgrade for existing MEMC equiped Archies (A300 and A400 series) and fortunately, fitting it was not difficult since this chip is socketed, not soldered onto the motherboard.
This 10% 'boost' alone (without taking into account the cycles unused per frame by the game) is much more than enough to have overscan and more data moved on screen and still run at 50 fps.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

It's a shame Bubble Bobble isn't that good on Amiga :/

Bubble Bobble is the perfect example of a game that should have got a 1:1 arcade conversion with ease. Fixed screen, few bobs, pah... you could even run it in more colors than the arcade Pesky ST conversion etc, bla bla. This is all known by now.

[nobody]

Silkworm is zoomed out on the Amiga and has a smaller sprite so a lot easier. Not very accurate. At least not at the top with the rest. About bubble bobble you need the source code to make a perfect conversion, and taito had lost it so they couldn't recreate the game since then. If you look at later ports they were either emulated or played differently than the arcade. But Graftgold had the source code of rainbow islands that's why it's so accurate.

[Retro-Nerd]

Maybe. But Silkworms (Amiga) playability is very good. I prefer it anytime. Perfect arcade port doesn't mean it has to be an 1:1 conversion in every aspect. If it matches the original game core and uses the port hardware technically properly it's good enough for me. Super Hang-on e.g. is great too and it doesn't look exactly like the arcade. Midnight Resistance is even better than the arcade in terms of playabilty. This arcade 8-way rotary stick sucks big time.

But Graftgold had the source code of rainbow islands that's why it's so accurate.

I don't think that it's true. According to this Amiga Lore interview they had game design documents and the arcade machine. The Japanese companies never gave away their source codes. Often the coder/graphic- and soundartists had to change their real names into aliases for the game credits, so that other companies couldn't headhunt them.

http://www.abime.net/interviews/view/interview/id/2

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

I like the Archimedes as you all know but I do not lie.

I'm not a technocal [erson so I cannot get into any of what you said after this, so I won't, or discuss it. You should know what you are saying.

My point was, however, that both the Archimedes and the Amiga port, which as I said I believe are made by the same person, share most of the same problems, mostly related to the relation between sprite size and game area size, and probably by lack of access to the original arcade's source code and therefore, the game logic.

Why have a full overscan screen game if your main characters are so tiny? I would have preferred a smaller game area to be able to increase speed and color use. It would have also made the smaller characters "bigger" in comparison. Look at Toki for a good example of reduced game area but proportion maintained.
Then there are all the game faults that do not work like the arcade at all, unlike on the X68000.

As I said, both a terrible port. This was very normal of many european-made arcade ports, where they didn't even get access to source code to look at game logic (like Final Fight).

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Akira

I'm not a technocal [erson so I cannot get into any of what you said after this, so I won't, or discuss it. You should know what you are saying.

My point was, however, that both the Archimedes and the Amiga port, which as I said I believe are made by the same person, share most of the same problems, mostly related to the relation between sprite size and game area size, and probably by lack of access to the original arcade's source code and therefore, the game logic.

Why have a full overscan screen game if your main characters are so tiny? I would have preferred a smaller game area to be able to increase speed and color use. It would have also made the smaller characters "bigger" in comparison. Look at Toki for a good example of reduced game area but proportion maintained.
Then there are all the game faults that do not work like the arcade at all, unlike on the X68000.

As I said, both a terrible port. This was very normal of many european-made arcade ports, where they didn't even get access to source code to look at game logic (like Final Fight).

I prefer the Archie version where the sprites are not tiny, so it doesn't look 'weird' as on the Amiga version (where I like the overscan, though, and yes it is nice to have a Pacman where you don't see hard transitions of yellow) and the dots in the Archie version have a shadow, strangely missing on the Amiga.
To me both ports are good, the game is very enjoyable to play on both machines.
The tunes are great, too.
The real shame is the ST version ...

I must admit I never played or even saw the original arcade version, and the x68000 version is, to me, much better.
For various reasons I believe a 256 colour version was possible on the Archie, still at 50 fps, but surely it would have needed a 1 Mbyte machine (the 512 kbyte Archie was, fortunately, only sold for 6 months and then all Archies had minimum 1 Mbyte. Pacmania runs on a 512 kbytes Archie, it is a very early game).
But not with the realtime shifting of data as explained by Shaun Hollingworth (mandatory if you don't have much RAM) but with preshifted graphics.