13 November 2023, 13:37 | #41 |
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Many games converted from the ST to the Amiga had that issue and WHDLoad slaves have fixes for that. But Wings of Death, as claimed by dlfrsilver, was not one of such games.
Also keep in mind that this most likely never was due to lazyness. People had CRTs back then. When a game was too dark, you simply turned the brightness of the monitor up without thinking about it. Colors were not calibrated (analog RGB has no absolute color values anyway). Last edited by derSammler; 13 November 2023 at 13:43. |
13 November 2023, 14:14 | #42 | |
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13 November 2023, 20:42 | #43 | |
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I've always had impression that ST coders trying to achieve same visual effect as you can see on Amiga, perhaps my impression is distorted but i think at some cases they was very close knowing fact that how limited is ST HW. But this still don't change my overall impression that ST required higher degree of creativity how to use CPU with crap to get something decent. |
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14 November 2023, 02:46 | #44 |
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The Amiga vs the ST is a lot like the C64 vs the Anstrad CPC( im excluding the Spectrum simply because of how it handeled colour and didnt have raster splits etc.)
The C64 had all that wonderful hardware and the CPC only has rudimentary hardware for scrolling and rasters. All screen drawing on the CPC has to be done by the CPU same as ST. Similarly split rasters are CPU controlled like the ST. The only difference on the CPC is its not really bitplane driven, its more chunky based. The CPC can rarely match the C64 in smoothness but(moreso recent releases) games like Pinball dreams show how the machine csn be tsken advantage of, similar to the ST. Another advantage of the CPC vs ST is that it can hardware scroll 2 wide pixels in mode 0 in hardware. I only bring up the comparison as its essentially the same in terms of brute force CPU vs hardware. |
14 November 2023, 02:55 | #45 | ||||
CaptainM68K-SPS France
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I did the compare between the game running on my STE sided with my A500, the graphics are shining on STE and dark on the Amiga. The Swamp level is the confirmation of that. It looks good on STE, and it looks nasty on Amiga. Quote:
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14 November 2023, 03:16 | #46 | ||||||
CaptainM68K-SPS France
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The real chain for the CPC for good games is CPU+Gate Array+CRTC. This is why Batman the movie and Robocop are top class on CPC and a pile of junk on the C64. Games on CPC are 2 classes : Those who were ported from oldish and inferior C64 and ZX, that looks awful and plays very bad, and the second class, of games that are simply better as a whole compared to their C64 counterparts or even ZX. Chase HQ is another that spring to mind. Jon O'Brien was one of the best CPC/ZX coders at ocean, as good as Mike Lamb. The other thing is the development system used to make the games. Converting or making a game from an Amiga or an ST to a CPC gave much better result than doing it from a C64 or a ZX spectrum. It always works much better from a superior machine from a lower machine, not the other way around. Quote:
The CRTC on CPC can be used to make the equivalent of copperlists, like on the Amiga. You can change colors per lines and also per portion of a line, this thanks to the CRTC. It seems that you don't know well the CPC hardware..... The CPC is more complex than a ST. With an ST you do everything with the CPU, and hard scrolling are very hard to implement ingame. The CPC has hardware scrollings, and software sprites. This means that you can have huge sprites on CPC that a C64 just could not cope with. Just look at the blinking sprites for example in Dragon Breed C64 Quote:
And Pinball Dreams uses only 40% of the CPC abilities, while most Commercial CPC games used at best 6% of the CPC capacities.... The CPC was a badly exploited computer back in the day with lots of possibilities that were only waiting to be discovered and used. Quote:
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14 November 2023, 03:31 | #47 | ||
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The very first time i bought Wings of death in original on Amiga, and on ST, i played the Amiga version from start to end in order to compare both version. The main thing i noticed is that the Amiga graphics were simply dark, like if the brightness from the ST version was removed. Quote:
I remember the game Iron Lord. The game used a mix of Atari ST pictures and Amiga pictures. The programmer did not convert the ST pictures to Amiga palette format. The end result is that some pictures are very dark. Some games with the "ST palette bug" had graphic marks reduced in the magazines tests : "for an unknown reason, the amiga version has dark graphics, so we lower the graphic notation compared to the ST version". It has been the case for Wings of death in France for example. |
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14 November 2023, 04:00 | #48 | |||||||||
CaptainM68K-SPS France
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Ingame i found 29 colors only. Quote:
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In the end, when the game is marketed, The ST shovel port will crash in term of sales, on both computers, no one wins. By using the Amiga to ST port, you get a very good game on Amiga and a good game on ST. Both wins. Look what happened on the market : the ST to Amiga "quick porting" failed. The publishers had to stop pushing shit games. Quote:
For 1 original soft sold on ST, 10 originals were bought on Amiga (even with piracy!). This is why the publishers stopped with the ST completely. Quote:
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for Crackdown, i would rather say that it an error made at the mastering plant. Because from memory, the faulty tracks are here, but they were incorrectly mastered. It looks like the guy messed up when preparing the master disk to be described to then be written on the final disks. Istvan Fabian restored the missing or damaged parts of the tracks to make the IPF version of the game. Quote:
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WJS did some very overated games. One of them is Spellbound. It looks good in the magazines, but was in fact appaling and a deception when played, even with a trainer.... The other one i think of is Ork.... |
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14 November 2023, 06:54 | #49 | |
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14 November 2023, 10:20 | #50 | |||||||
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All the fancy CRTC tricks are the result of precisely timed CPU code modifying CRTC registers at specific times. Colour changes are also CPU based, in that case fiddling registers of the Gate Array at appropriate times. And lots of the timing of that is complicated by the fact there aren't really any timers in the system, except six evenly spaced interrupts per frame. Quote:
In general I'd say comparing C64/CPC is pretty similar to Amiga/C64. One of them relies a lot of hardware features, the other is mostly a software solution. Probably the only real difference is that the Amiga is a lot more capable at also running the software solution that the C64, which struggles a lot more when everything is done by the CPU (hence almost all 3D games being a lot weaker) Quote:
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Opwolf and Opthunderbolt are just raw CPU grunt, no hardware scrolling involved at all. They're certainly good examples of what the CPC can pull off when you put the effort in. |
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14 November 2023, 10:51 | #51 |
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14 November 2023, 10:53 | #52 |
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Lots to pick apart here.
Ordinary players never say the bootblock (even if written 'in clear'), even on pirated copies. Only the pirates saw them. On what evidence do you make this claim that programmers preferred the ST to the Amiga? I'm not convinced of some sort of industry-wide bias in favour of a less capable machine. Maybe each individual programmer preferred the one they used first, which may well have been the ST as it was an affordable machine so much earlier (late-1985 compared to late-1987 for the A500). Spectrum R-Type (a lovingly made technically impressive port) and Amiga Crack Down (less so) were indeed mastered by entirely separate people to the programmers, so why blame the programmers for mastering errors? It's so frustrating that sales figures are so hard to find, even monthly charts aren't as common in magazines as we'd like, but I'm not sure Amiga owners didn't buy ST ports, at least until 1990 or so. You certainly see a lot more copies of Amiga Xenon 2 (an ST port that probably took a few weeks) than you do of Hybris or Battle Squadron (Amiga exclusives developed from the ground up as Amiga code) put together in the UK at least, despite Xenon 2 being now generally considered the weaker game. Amiga games selling 10 times as many as the ST version is an exaggeration at best - ST Dungeon Master is said to have sold 40,000, what Amiga game sold 400,000? Wikipedia mentions that for the flight sim Falcon in 1988 "the Amiga version sold in six weeks twice as much as the ST version in nine weeks" (in the context of the quote mentioned, I assume that's for the US only - globally it was probably closer than that, but it might be a good ballpark figure for that time). ST Civilization sold over 20,000 in 1993 (in the UK alone, I think), and that was one meg only and nine months after the Amiga version (and 18 months after the PC one), so in the right circumstances (ideally having both 16-colour graphics from the PC and 'clean' 68000 code (that didn't use Amiga hardware trickery) from the Amiga to combine) ST game stayed profitable long after some people think As for the Amstrad CPC, one issue I've seen mentioned elsewhere with the CRTC is that different CPCs had different, slightly incompatible CRTCs, so games coded to exploit the better ones would fail on the weaker ones. It wasn't on a predictable 'model X has one type, model Y has the other' kind of way, at least with A1200/STe/128K Spectrum its easy to tell buyers whether a game will work on their machine. Have any CPC coders made any games that fully exploit Longshot's scrolling trickery? Until you've made a game with it, its advantages and potential is purely theoretical. Comparing Amstrad v Spectrum to Amiga v ST is interesting - in each case the latter has more advanced hardware but a (roughly) 10% slower processor. However, my non-technical impression is that converting good Spectrum code to get adequate Amstrad code was more work than converting good ST code into adequate Amiga code, for a few reasons (correct me if I'm wrong). The Amiga did at least support the ST's screen mode and colour depth, so a lazy conversion from ST to Amiga could still be as good as the ST version, albeit much further from system potential than it was on the ST. The Amstrad couldn't do the Spectrum's 256x192 screen mode, you had either 320x200 in 4 colours or 160x200 in 16, so massive rewriting was needed to avoid everything looking squashed or the screen area being too small. Also, the Spectrum's screens took up a lot less memory, hence most Spectrum games scrolling smoothly. What scrolled smoothly on the Spectrum needed reworking to do so on the Amstrad, whereas anything that scrolled adequately on the ST would automatically scroll adequately on the Amiga. Last edited by Megalomaniac; 14 November 2023 at 11:10. |
14 November 2023, 12:52 | #53 | |
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Spectrum games typically store a sprite as a single bitplane and a single bitplane mask, but that's not optimal for the Amstrad. If you treat it's chunky representation of screen data as 3 colours+transparent, you can more optimally store sprite data in the same amount of memory and with less CPU overhead. So lazy ports are typically keeping the data in a Spectrum style format and then remapping it on the fly whereas more carefully handled ports reprocess all the data at least so that it's more aligned with the screen format (and ideally actually recolouring them to either 3 colours or even the full 16 colour Mode 0). |
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14 November 2023, 20:36 | #54 | |||||||||
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running also on Atari ST. The Enemies in the CPC version are as nasty as in the Amiga or ST version. When you look at the ZX version, you see the IA is weaker, as is the C64 version of batman the movie (stupid enemies, no IA, shoot in 4 directions only, etc). Quote:
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Next, how do you think the CPC demos are done ? They're not done with only the CPU. When the CRTC emulation is not correct, the colors and positions are fucked up. This is why saying the CPC only use the CPU to display things is incorrect. I'm in contact since long year with CNGSOFT, he is a friend of mine, and i have sided with him regarding CPC emulation support. So i'm well aware of the CPC internals. Quote:
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The CPC has more grunt, the C64 is too much assisted with its weak CPU. Quote:
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14 November 2023, 21:22 | #55 | |||||||||||||
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Exactly like in the users base of each machine. And of course, they did their best to make shine the machine they prefered, and make the game less good on the machine "not in their heart". To be honest, that's a normal human reaction Just to illustrate with an example, publishers were ordering games to the dev teams as an "order". When they asked for ST games as lead, devs were ok. When the publishers started to ask games with Amiga as lead, Devs in interviews were already pointing that they were not keen to that, but since they had no choice, because the one who pay is the one who decide, you got some silly messages either on the bootblocks or hidden in the game code regarding that matter. Quote:
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This is why games released between 1987 and 1988 on Amiga are for some very hard to find : they sold badly at the time, because it was the ST shovelware era, and Amiga users did not wanted them. Even a great dev like Jez San said it in interview : "Amiga users are buying more softwares than ST users". Quote:
Lemmings Amiga sold 500.000 units alone. I don't even speak about the data disks and the sequels released afterwards. Most ST games sold between 10.000 - 40.000 copies at best. You average amiga title sold between 40.000 - 80.000 copies. You see the difference in term of benefits at the end of the day for the publishers ? This is the reason why they stopped developping on the ST and making commercial games on it. Quote:
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As i said above, imagine, Civilization was a top class game and it only sold 20.000 copies on Atari ST. Civ Amiga requires 1mb of ram too. Civilization most probably doesn't use the Amiga hardware. It's a game coded in C ported from the PC version with ASM parts. 20.000 copies is not profitable, it's very average. Just for the record, Maupiti Islands sold 15.000 copies on Amiga, ST, PC. the game is cult, but it was not a best seller. Quote:
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[/quote].....albeit much further from system potential than it was on the ST. The Amstrad couldn't do the Spectrum's 256x192 screen mode, you had either 320x200 in 4 colours or 160x200 in 16, so massive rewriting was needed to avoid everything looking squashed or the screen area being too small. Also, the Spectrum's screens took up a lot less memory, hence most Spectrum games scrolling smoothly. What scrolled smoothly on the Spectrum needed reworking to do so on the Amstrad, whereas anything that scrolled adequately on the ST would automatically scroll adequately on the Amiga.[/QUOTE] You're kidding ? The 256x192 screen mode the CPC can do it in its sleep. There's not enough Speccy port in the wild ? Anything that scrolled fine on the ST would do on the Amiga ? ahaha No way, Hosé ! It doesn't work like that. The Amiga is not made to run games with "software shit scrolling". It was a recipe for catastrophy. Just look Black Tiger. I digged the code and ressourced it, and the only hardware access it does on Amiga is the Vblank register, and the potgo register for joystick access/support. Everything else is an insane shit done in software. |
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14 November 2023, 22:44 | #56 | |
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(the guy that tried to rewrite from scratch seems undefinitely swamped) |
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15 November 2023, 00:05 | #57 |
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Interesting explanation on the CRTCs. If 0 and 1 perform differently, does that mean that the game that scrolled perfectly on your mate's CPC might scroll badly on yours? Was one better for all games, or did it vary depending on which was being targetted by the programmer? Was CRTC 2 a later design that was the best of both worlds, did games designed for either 0 or 1 work perfectly on it?
Upgrading an ST to 1Mb was a bigger job than on the Amiga, and a far smaller proportion of STs or STes left the shops with 1Mb or more than Amigas did, that's why I mentioned ST Civ selling quite well (long after the machine's commercial peak) despite being 1Mb only. Can the CPC do the Spectrum's 256x192 in 8 colours (let alone the 15 that the BRIGHT mode allows for)? A lot of (lazily) converted games can look quite squashed and not use the full screen. Obviously there's no colour clash on the Amstrad, but 160x200 is the maximum resolution for more than 4 colours. There are ST games which scroll well enough, vertical scrollers mostly. If the code that's already there to do that on the ST does basically work, it can be reused on the Amiga. My point was that it's quicker to get ST code to work on the Amiga, than to get Spectrum code to work on the Amstrad. |
15 November 2023, 00:15 | #58 | ||
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But everything to do with on screen colours or pixels is a result of changes to gate array registers. And only the CPU can change those, so mid screen colour changes have to be done with timed CPU code. Even on the Plus machines (which so have a form of copper-like DMA-based processor, that is intended for audio but can be abused to generate frequent line interrupts) there is no way of changing colours other than the CPU doing it. I know this not because someone explained it to me, but because I've coded for these machines for decades and I'm well aware of what they can (and can't) do. |
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15 November 2023, 00:22 | #59 | |
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15 November 2023, 01:54 | #60 | |
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And yes, he is missing completely |
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