Beats of Fire

[dlfrsilver]

thanks good to see that my rips are seen as awesome (that's what i intended from the beginning).

[leathered]

By the way, I think it's fine if you make the arcade rips available for users here - I'm sure someone will enjoy seeing them. Just be aware they may surface on the next mugen street brawler mash-up 7, or whatever! I think Turri just wanted to keep the Amiga specific stuff for a surprise, which I can relate to.

[dlfrsilver]

i will keep them private This will only serve to our project

If the mugen guys want to have them, they rip them. i'm not working for them , only for this amiga project

[Konrad]

Seriously ? You're really ripping all the sprites by yourself ?
Here, let me help you.
http://spritedatabase.net/game/608
Did you really think you're the first to do this ?

[leathered]

Have a look for the arcade backgrounds - ages ago I couldn't find them.
But this is what I mean re. the sprites. It is of course very nice to have all the accompanying data. I imagine dlfrsilver wants to catalog all of it in his own way for completeness.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Seriously ? You're really ripping all the sprites by yourself ?
Here, let me help you.
http://spritedatabase.net/game/608
Did you really think you're the first to do this ?

I'm sorry Konrad, but the sprite rips i saw on the net are all incomplete.

Just to give you an idea, in Final Fight Damnd use 40 sprites frames, Guy use 80 frames.

Most sprites rips are made by using an emulator. I do it the real way, by reversing the arcade machine rom program tiledata.

[leathered]

It's true there are some missing frames, I had to do some dirty rips to complete Haggar - and there's no denying that Denis's method is the best way to ensure getting all the frames.

There are actually a couple of frames in the new rip I'm not sure about - at first I thought it was a 'hopping' animation, but I can't actually see what they do atm.

[dlfrsilver]

don't worry Paul, once done, you'll have no doubt at all about what is where is who.

EDIT : i have checked the backgrounds, the guy has mixed up playfield 1 and 2. It's useless for us, because playfield 1 is animated, and must be ripped apart. The other reason is that if paul decide to not use them, we then won't have to "loose colors" because of them already in the level scene.

[Konrad]

Seems like a lot of work. Isn't there a tile ripper in the debugger of mame ?
EDIT: Holy sh**, forget that. Not very helpful...

[dlfrsilver]

I'm using 3 different tools to make things very properly

I use the arcade coin-op rom code (tile data), mame tilemapper (mamed_ts), mappy32 (builder).

[Amiga1992]

Who cares about the method if all the content is there? And ultimately, all frames cannot be used in the Amiga because of restrictions, so a compromise has to be done anyway.

[dlfrsilver]

all the frames can be used An Amiga 1200 is powerful enough to animate big sprite.
Even the A500 official release has less frames, the amiga is doing really well.

It's just that with duplicate frames, i just pick one and if there was 3 consecutively to display, Paul will simply ask 'display 3 times frame XX'.

Today we have the memory and the colors

[dlfrsilver]

i have just sipped Edi.e, the corrupted cop of the game, and this bastard is made of 42 sprite frames, way more than what we have in the actual sprites rip.

[Reynolds]

What about including SegaCD(-alike) soundtracks?

They're really cool

[ Show youtube player ]

[Bamiga2002]

Originally Posted by Reynolds

What about including SegaCD(-alike) soundtracks?

They're really cool

[ Show youtube player ]

Sounds cool, but would it be a "feature creep" thing and also difficult to implement performance-wise? I like the Amiga-music even if it's not so refined as the Sega-cd version.

[dlfrsilver]

it would be hard to get the mega-cd sound to work on the amiga.....

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

it would be hard to get the mega-cd sound to work on the amiga.....

It will be for the CD32 version then

[Reynolds]

[leathered]

It's overall just got to be a lot more fun to do the Amiga tracks from scratch, even if the mega cd tracks are really great. I think the only way to really compete with them is to do it within a way that the Amiga is most comfortable with, which means protracker for ease of use although some 'proper' chiptunes via ahx would be amazing. I have absolutely no clue really as to how to integrate cd tracks - I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

Things have maybe quieted down a bit after the end of year excitement which saw some great releases so a quick update. I spent some time at the end of the last demo and earlier this month trying to learn a few new things.

The parallax scrolling is back - thanks almost entirely to de-bugging Fantastic Dizzy with the WinUAE debugger and this thread http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=19676.
Maybe not really multiplexing - more of an AGA fake but it does the trick!

Swapping of characters in memory is being handled much better, there is almost double the amount of chipram left compared to previously and the engine can swap in new characters very nicely during gameplay. This is basically down to the use of Incbin functions within Blitz. Palette/head swap characters have started to go in. I want soon to try using a method which uses more frames e.g. torso+legs to render some characters, using less memory still and will contribute more of the missing arcade frames, akin to some of the suggestions by dlrfsilver.

Several new backgrounds are ready to go in (up to the middle of stage 3) and have been successfully re-coloured within the constraints of the 32 colour palette. There is a new character palette of 23 colours with the remaining 9 being exclusive to the backgrounds and re-used by the copper vertically. The most colourful background uses 39 colours (including some of the character colours re-used), which is enough to render the new version satisfyingly.

I managed to get 1 pixel per vbl (50fps) scrolling working with 2 pixel per 2vbl (25fps) updating of Haggar. Which worked very nicely until the display gets busy, at which point the scrolling updated at 1 pixel per 2 vbl - slower than Haggar. This made it scroll like Golden Axe and changes the way you can play as you can no longer 'outrun' the goons to the end of each scrolling section.
I've decided for now that the forced 25fps scrolling is adequate, and the game plays more like the original this way.

So really just a few tools that can will be used to push the development of this, and in between I've just been having a break. Still some fairly pressing restructuring to do before pushing on. I'll get back to you in a couple of months or so with another update, and we'll see how far it gets this time! I've put together a little demonstration of the parallax scrolling and copper cols - just 5 cols changed on one line here (yellows becoming greys for the floor) and maybe the background could be a lot better.

Finally I changed my user name as you can see to something I may not be shy to tell others. Lielo was my old lavabit email name which went down with it you could say.

Cheers!

Paul

[B14ck W01f]

I just checked FFAGA, and it is quite impressive. The status bar doesn't match the final game, and there are only 2 levels, but I have a feeling that you are going to give us more. Keep up the good work!