What if any Japanese developers got on board with the Amiga?

[dmacon]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Ouch.
By the way, these french wikipedia articles are sourced by that web site : http://arcadehacker.blogspot.com/201...s1-part-2.html

Maybe you should post them a comment, dmacon.

They just need to re-assess their own article and draw some logical conclusions from their own findings.

Originally Posted by saimon69

Ok, one thing though make me wonder if japanese programmers would have really squeezed out the most from Amiga: do japanese coders do extreme beam-riding as coding style? Do they use multiplexers? That is an essential part of western style game coding AFAIK

Well, I wouldn't define "extreme beam riding" as a coding style on the Amiga, because its usage is, to the fullest extend, being supported automatically by the HW (via Copper).

So I suppose japanese developers would have used the Copper the same way, as for example, HDMA was extensively used on the SNES (similar, but more primitive mechanism).

Konami, for instance, used quite a lot of raster-based effects in their 8-bit and 16-bit games.

Axelay game design was based on a raster effect you can do on the SNES:

[ Show youtube player ]

On the other hand, if Konami would have been an Amiga developer, they probably would have created their own unique game variant on this platform, which somehow utilizes the platform strengths.

This is one reason why the Konami game library is so collectible.

Because, even if it is supposed to be the same game, they usually did not do conversions, but re-design the game to a certain extend to fit the platform.

Something like this:

[ Show youtube player ]
[ Show youtube player ]

Same franchise, both platformers, came out at the same time, but completely different games.

There are lots more examples...

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Playing through Policenauts right now (Saturn fan translation),

And it strikes me that the PC98 version would have been a good example of what you could do on Amiga if a HDD and some extra memory was used expected as baseline.

...And also, great game

Yes Snatcher and policenauts are games i would love to see on the amiga.

[tpgb12]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Yes Snatcher and policenauts are games i would love to see on the amiga.

Time to make them both in AmigaVision, then. lol (jk)

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by tpgb12

Time to make them both in AmigaVision, then. lol (jk)

Did Policenauts come out for Sega CD? AFAIK that should be a good base to get assets (and if someone need music ported in mod i can help)

[Locutus]

No, Policenauts came out on PC98, 3DO, PSX and Saturn.

The PC98 and 3DO/PSX/Saturn set of games are quite different.

PC98 has all handdrawn pixel art. The PC98 it targets is i think a 386SX and 640x480 8bit colour modes.

The later console releases have digitized handdrawn art, quite a bit of FMV animation and voiced dialogue.

As for Sega CD, you are thinking of Snatcher which had a release on that platform.

[ Show youtube player ]

[tpgb12]

Yeah, the PC-98 version uses pixel art at 640x400 with 16 colors shown at once out of a total of 4096 to choose from. The Amiga just happens to have basically the same graphics mode, though it wasn't used too much because I assume it's somewhat resource intensive.

[Locutus]

I think the bigger problem might be that the mode would be interlaced on Amiga (Highres Laced).

And the artstyle is full of single pixel width lines, flicker is probably really really bad for that kind of material.

[Leffmann]

AGA can output proper 31 kHz 640x480p video, but how many people have screens that can handle it, even today?

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Playing through Policenauts right now (Saturn fan translation),

And it strikes me that the PC98 version would have been a good example of what you could do on Amiga if a HDD and some extra memory was used expected as baseline.

...And also, great game

I think the only NEC PC-xx ports that the Amiga got were the Koei games, which were PC-88 games (which means 640x200 8 colors). I haven't figured out which version exactly they used for the ports.

There's also Thexder (Teguzaa in Japan, no idea how the western publisher got "Thexder" out of that), which is a PC-88 original, but I'm fairly certain the Amiga port is not based directly on the PC-88 version (moreover it was done by a European programmer I believe).

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

I think the only NEC PC-xx ports that the Amiga got were the Koei games, which were PC-88 games (which means 640x200 8 colors). I haven't figured out which version exactly they used for the ports.

There's also Thexder (Teguzaa in Japan, no idea how the western publisher got "Thexder" out of that), which is a PC-88 original, but I'm fairly certain the Amiga port is not based directly on the PC-88 version (moreover it was done by a European programmer I believe).

It was done by an European Dev, it was licensed by Sierra.

But even some of the original Game Arts versions were named Thexder. The MSX one developed by Compile and the NES one developed by Square both had "Thexder" on the title screen

[donnie]

Snatcher for msx/megadrive has to be a better fit. It is a better game as well.

[ImmortalA1000]

I think the problem was always the Amiga is horrendously complex to get 99% performance out of, and by 99% I mean the intro/above ground level of Shadow of the Beast 1 that used a lot of lateral thinking to make the best use of what OCS offered by Martin Edmondson/Paul Howarth to replicate the sort of simple to code for hardware of the Rastan Saga arcade motherboard.

Yo Joe is by Hudsonsoft and it is nowhere near as elegant a piece of coding as Beast 1, Lotus II and other top notch A500 compatible game engines, nothing amazing going on with the coding in that game. There is no guarantee just handing something over to Japanese developers. Castlevania for Amiga makes me sick looking at it.

FM Towns Shadow of the Beast and Chase HQ are really good developments. The FM Towns is not like the Sharp X68000, it is not exactly the same as many 68000 based arcade motherboards. Easier to code to the max than the Amiga but still not a walk in the park and both those vastly different FM Towns games were done very nicely, as were things like Turbo Outrun and Afterburner and many others for Fujitsu. Now compare that to the piss poor joke of a release of Chase HQ on the Amiga, from the very beginning that pathetic Continental Circus game engine had no business being used for that game, it was the attitude of western publishers and their very low standards and unprofessional methods in dishing out developments to people who should only be working in supermarkets stacking shelves. This just made the problem of the Amiga's complexity to extract arcade levels of performance even worse, they didn't even try by improving the driving section of Batman The Movie (another ST port job+DAC based audio routines tacked on by the way)

There was also a lot of bullshit fanfare in the 16bit computer game development scene, who can forget the bulletins put out by Argonaut about the so called cutting edge performance of their upcoming Afterburner engine for Activision........I wipe my arse with ST Afterburner let alone the horrendous port job that is the Amiga. Uncle Art can also GTFO with his pathetic 'music' the talentless loser that he was.

Reality is Amiga was very complex, just as the Saturn was, to get the same sort of performance as simpler systems, like Konami sprite and multi-parallax 1985/86 arcade technology and PS1 simpler GPU design respectively required expert game engine design AND 100% machine code programming. Both Amiga and Saturn suffered, only Sega sometimes pushed the limits to Shadow of the Beast 1 on Amiga levels with their ingenious VF2 and Sega Rally developments (custom written machine code graphic libraries for Sega Rally to boost performance past lacklustre Daytona USA port).

There is no guarantee Japanese developers could have pushed the Amiga to the limits with their game engine coding but they would have tried. Their artwork and musical attempts to replicate arcade counterparts would have been less "I just left art college' or '20 tea breaks/fag breaks a day' British style of game development too. Waaaaaay too many games on Amiga are 16 colours (NZ Story, Xenon II, Batman the movie etc etc)

There is also a complete lack of consistency in home computer publisher's standards for what they would release. Elite did an awesome job with Ghosts n Goblins on ST and Amiga but WTF happened with Ikari Warriors, a much simpler set of pixel art to translate surely. Ikari Warriors has pixel art that is like a child messing with Neochrome, Commando had arcade quality graphics transplanted. WTF happened with Ikari?

Lack of respect for the hardware and my wages was ALWAYS a problem for both ST and Amiga owners for sure though. Decent games that pushed either machine were very rare indeed. Decent game engines that pushed the Megadrive and PC Engine from the early years were common, Thunderforce III MD and Salamander PC-E were works of art on those consoles. Shadow of the Beast 1 is the first Amiga 1000 compatible game that actually makes your jaw drop, that came out 2 years after A500, 4 years after A1000.

Didn't help when assholes at Amiga Format gave beast 1 65% and £28 Deluxe Scrabble 20% higher rating in the same issue of that toilet rag. What a bunch of clueless asswipes writing reviews, if you don't like games like Rastan Saga in the arcade WTF are you doing writing a review you stupid bastard?

[kremiso]

good post @ImmortalA1000

----

What if any Japanese developers got on board with the Amiga?

maybe some j-rpg serie would have appeared also on the miggy, or some more action-rpg Zelda/Alundra/Soleil style;

Strider and Forgotten Worlds much closer to the Megadrive/PC Engine versions?

[ImmortalA1000]

I think personally it's two problems.

The Amiga is a lot more complex than sprite based consoles like PC Engine/Megadrive and the Megadrive has lots of hardware parallax layers (4?) so that does take more time to get right for developers. Every time a top end Amiga game was developed it was a coding miracle

Most people developing games had a poor attitude, between 1986 Marble Madness and 1989 Shadow of the Beast 1 there isn't too many arcade quality games of that sort of quality. It's not Atari's fault they put a 68000 in the computer, it is the greedy publishers with no standards putting out rubbish like US Gold.

I don't think the Amiga sold enough for Japanese developers to really care about properly developed Amiga games. Konami USA released the horrendous Amiga titles like Contra and Castlevania too, they farmed out the project to any old developer and put it up for sale even though it was worse than many Atari ST properly programmed games. Afterburner by SEGA USA is also not great, nowhere near the full potential of the machine.

Sega had their own console so they didn't mess about, Konami and Capcom didn't really do crap conversions for their Japanese console developments either. Maybe Sega USA and Konami USA had poor 'western' money grabbing low quality attitude like US Gold/Ocean etc in the UK?

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

...Sega had their own console so they didn't mess about...

i remember their approach, also adapting/reprogramming internally some titles bitd
Forgotten Worlds was one ie;

you must consider also the number of peoples involved btw, jappo development teams were surely bigger than the little European counterpart;
maybe in USA it was better (EA, Sierra, prolly Cinemaware)

---
reading some old posts here, seems no Neo-Geo references

ok, monster console, but wasn't based also that on 68000?
time fast-forwarding, wondering if a game like Magician Lord could be adapted to 'fit' in some hypervitaminized AGA hardware?

the original have some Amiga feeling into imo

[ImmortalA1000]

I didn't read all of the thread, I was simply doing a google search for the subject and the eab thread here was the first result so I just added to it. Neo Geo games have obscene sized ROMs hence the high price back then before the Neo-Geo CD came out. The Amiga has to fit everything into RAM a level at a time but the Neo Geo arcade/home games probably can access the full ROM in their memory map. Neo Geo also has some sort of hardware scaling/zooming too which is highly CPU intensive.

I think Sega is a unique case, they obviously made the best of their machines. It is also a lot easier to write to a few registers to make huge sprites do things than juggling CPU/Agnus DMA slots for blitter based coding, and Amiga machine code to do that makes it even more complex. In a way it's a lot like Commodore Japan/HAL Laboratories for the VIC-20. They did 3 stunning games for the VIC-20 that really made you think twice about getting a VCS or Intellivision. Star Battle, a Galaxian clone for the VIC-20, is better than almost all C64 Galaxian clones. Jelly Monsters was a lot better than even VCS MS Pac-man etc etc. They took that work ethic with them into the Famicom era, the Famicom having an awesome port of Popeye vs the 'that will do' port for the C64 by Parker Bros.

My Attitude always was Amiga disk games cost £20 less to produce than Megadrive cartridges, the games were about the same price if you factor that into the equation. It was their job to write the best possible code for things like OutRun or Chase HQ Amiga.

People like Ocean and US Gold were protected by the law in the UK, you were NEVER allowed to return software. Compare this with what happened with Atari VCS E.T. where millions of cartridges were sold before Xmas and then millions were returned to the shop after Xmas for a full refund and those carts had to be sent back to Atari as 'used goods'. THIS is one of the biggest problems computer gamers had, IF assholes like Gary Bracey or that little premature ejaculating prick who started US Gold had to take back EVERY COPY of OutRun/Turbo OutRun/SF2/Chase HQ etc returned to shops for a full refund by unimpressed purchasers and eat the loss (illegal to sell them as new in a shop as they are now used goods) only then would they take their responsibility seriously and make sure decent conversions were possible and development teams would have to supply actual examples as proof they could do their jobs too!

As console developers you have to order huge batches of cartridges to be manufactured in advance, this forces you to make a decent effort as you had to sell them all to make a profit. All US Gold had to do was ship OutRun to all the shops BEFORE any magazine reviews hit the shops, which they indeed did because OutRun holds the record for number of copies shipped before launch, something like 200,000 copies in 2 weeks of distribution nationwide. Every home computer version of OutRun is a shitstain on that machine's software library. It's not like you could take it back to the shop and demand your money back THIS is why piracy was so high in the ST/Amiga scene, these machines all came with disk drives unlike the 8bit gaming generation before so we all got fed up and got our games to try out for free.

US Gold's ST/Amiga OutRun IS the reason 'Amiga penpals wanted to swap disks' adverts filled the magazines. 3 days wages for that bullshit is not funny at all. The law was an asshole and designed to protect scumbag software publishers. Turbo OutRun == proof US Gold would never change, 3 frames per second conversions are unacceptable on the ST port let alone the Amiga, the C64 version was faster lol

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I didn't read all of the thread, I was simply doing a google search for the subject and the eab thread here was the first result so I just added to it.

eab is definitely also the first google result of my general retro searches;
i'll be banned for necroposting probably

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

People like Ocean and US Gold were protected by the law in the UK, you were NEVER allowed to return software. Compare this with what happened with Atari VCS E.T. where millions of cartridges were sold before Xmas and then millions were returned to the shop after Xmas for a full refund and those carts had to be sent back to Atari as 'used goods'. THIS is one of the biggest problems computer gamers had, IF assholes like Gary Bracey or that little premature ejaculating prick who started US Gold had to take back EVERY COPY of OutRun/Turbo OutRun/SF2/Chase HQ etc returned to shops for a full refund by unimpressed purchasers and eat the loss (illegal to sell them as new in a shop as they are now used goods) only then would they take their responsibility seriously and make sure decent conversions were possible and development teams would have to supply actual examples as proof they could do their jobs too!

didn't know about these UK laws

good post again, many interesting points into
where's the like button? ok let's try this 'Post Icons'

[Torti-the-Smurf]

About the Topic: That would have been super sweet

About that the Amiga was "so hard to get the results" :
(i dont know about that; i am not really a Amiga programmer)

I just know that Lionheart was the best game ever made for the 16-Bit Amiga. imho
(Turri2 as close second) imho

But this is what Erik Simon of Thalion said about Lionheart:

According to Simon, the game's parallax scrolling didn't require any demo-style programming, "Erwin and Michael were just very skilled 68000 programmers who knew exactly what they were doing", adding that "much of Lionheart's routines, where processing speed was of minor importance, were even written in C"

(i recommend the hole interview of course)

Back to the Topic: Too bad that Japan never really got (into) the Amiga,
that would have been incredible, i think

[ImmortalA1000]

There were quite a few Amiga games that work with my A1000 I played over the summer that make you think "wow" and Lionheart was indeed one of them. Lotus II, Beast 1, Soccer Kid are 3 more that just make you wonder how they are doing it, what sort of chipset/CPU DMA juggling is going on there.

CPU + powerful sprite based systems are always easier to code for compared to juggling DMA slots on multiprocessor systems like Amiga. It is indeed the difference between juggling 4 balls or just throwing a tennis ball up against a wall and catching it. The Megadrive adds 16+15+15+15 colour quadruple playfield parallax to the mix too which is also very easy to use, even AGA only manages 2 playfields and 31 colours and that is 3 years after Megadrive.

People also blame the ST but let's be honest Chase HQ, [Turbo] OutRun and Afterburner were technically rubbish for the ST let alone Amiga so you can't blame the ST, as an ST and A1000 owner I was equally disappointed with both when it came to arcade conversions.

Thinking about it though I think the UK publishers, probably French ones too, were protected by copyright laws which meant if you bought a crap game you could never return it to the shop, not even for store credit.

If this wasn't the case and US Gold had to bury 100,000s of copies of OutRun returned to shops because they were crap just like VCS E.T. carts returned to Atari as used goods they would have been bankrupt if they kept making that rubbish. Ditto for Ocean, Activision, Domark etc etc. But after OutRun there was Turbo OutRun, after Afterburner there was Galaxy Force they all kept on farming out the projects to low rent talent devoid developers who clearly should have been working at supermarkets stacking shelves not doing arcade conversions.

Console developers had to do a good job I guess, they had to pay up front for the cost of manufacturing 100,000 cartridges at a time @ £15/$20 each. That's $2,000,000 for an initial production run. If word got out a game was rubbish it was coming straight back to the company as a huge loss in profits. Perhaps this is why disk based Konami Amiga games are so horrible, disks cost pennies to master and you couldn't return crap games for a refund even in the USA I bet due to 'copyright laws' which was bad news for us. It became a niche business for home computer games publishers in the UK for sure as they could get away with it. America had the famous 'lemon laws' for cars to protect consumers, we needed the same in the West to protect our wages/pocket money spent on crap games.

Doesn't help when magazines do not stick the knife in and give games like OutRun 0/10 as a rating, because that is all these sorts of games deserved. I have seen many magazines give OutRun about 7/10. You couldn't rely on magazines. Thank the lords of silicon for free crack disks in jiffy bags landing on the doormat, I never bought a crap Amiga game ever again once I started swapping disks. I went out and bought the nicely done games only and skipped rubbish like Chase HQ or Galaxy Force.

[Megalomaniac]

AF gave Shadow of the Beast 78% (http://amr.abime.net/issue_160_pages) which to me sounds about right for its actual entertainment value by 1989 standards (though they did give Strider and Ghouls N Ghosts over 90% around the same time, which was misguided at best). Technically marvellous games aren't automatically more fun than a technically ordinary but well-designed game though. Hindsight tells us how bad the OutRun port was, but it launched into a world before Lotus - aside from Buggy Boy and Super Hang-On, were there really many better racers than OutRun on the Amiga, or ST for that matter? But yea, I wish more mags had been willing to give low scores. The really negative reviews were often the most entertaining to read as well.