in which way the amiga beat the megadrive

[Belgarath]

It seems the watermarking is confusing things, being a hol admin I can see them withoutthe watermarks and the 1082 colour screenshot actually has 31.

[Calgor]

My understanding of copper was you could get theoretically all 4096 colours on screen at once (e.g. having 16 colours and changing each of them for every new vertical line - similar to a copper effect but doing it for all 16 colour registers... or even for 32?).

I never got to coding much extra with copperlists so I don't know the full capabilities.

But I also seem to remember you also could change a colour register's colour not only every line, but also after a few horizontal pixels.

One of the experienced coders can correct me on this if I am wrong.

I have no idea why some games didn't use copperlists more - did it slow things down a lot? (or even at all if it is only a small copperlist?)

[Amiga1992]

From what Galahad says, making a copper list is a big pain in the buttock.
So that's probably the reason why it was not used.

[spiff]

Who cares about copper lists colour++, SOTB, jim power, elfmania.. all of them where mediocre games with tiny screens.

Most of the good amiga games would have gained more from having the megadrives 64 colours and actually scrolling functionality. Cannon fodder, sensible soccer, alien breed, Xenon 2.

The thing that made amiga beat the megadrive wasn't specifc copper tricks games with theoretical color advantage but 4 color sprites. It was the fact that smaller publishers could create games without payning a lot for expensive dev-kits and licensing. Games like Sensible soccer, Pinball dreams, Civilization, Wings, Lemmings would not have been published on a console platform.

[lilalurl]

Originally Posted by s2325

also Steel Talons http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ScYC8hFzuRU

Add LHX attack chopper to that:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VXuY6vks3_o

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by Belgarath

It seems the watermarking is confusing things, being a hol admin I can see them withoutthe watermarks and the 1082 colour screenshot actually has 31.

[frikilokooo]

Originally Posted by spiff

Who cares about copper lists colour++, SOTB, jim power, elfmania.. all of them where mediocre games with tiny screens.

Disagree.Jim Power is AWESOME for the little A500:full screen,great parallax,some sprites bigger than the screen...anyway I don't think that it uses more than 64 colors.

[blade002]

We lets just put it this way! A friend of mine back in 1990 got a Megadrive & i got an Amiga. After a few months of playing around with his console and grabbing every game he could for the year thereafter.. have a guess which machine he was playing the most!??..

THE AMIGA !!!.... He thought the games looked better, sounded better, just plain "better". And he used to always say to me that he wished he had an Amiga and not the MD .... And after playing games on his MD, i could not have agreed more!

@Spiff: I don't understand? Jim Power & Elf Mania used virtually the WHOLE screen! .. and if memory serves me, i think JP is overscan!?.. i will need to check that one. And as for the copper list... well that was a beautiful little trick the Amiga could pull off, and it made the demo scene back then ever MORE interesting and its like saying to a SNES owner "who cares about Mode7"

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by frikilokooo

Disagree.Jim Power is AWESOME for the little A500:full screen,great parallax,some sprites bigger than the screen...anyway I don't think that it uses more than 64 colors.

Hi friki

Yes Jim power use much more than 64 colors. the main title screen where the coder names are displayed is 106 colors alone !

[Fred the Fop]

Originally Posted by Ian

Yeah, no match, it's better.

I agree. What game are you talking about?

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by spiff

Who cares about copper lists colour++, SOTB, jim power, elfmania.. all of them where mediocre games with tiny screens.

I do agree with this point (though I haven't really played Jim Power so I can't comment on that)... you can have all the technical tricks in the world but if the game plays like a brick who cares? Shadow Of The Beast and Elfmania are two particularly good examples of this (although Elfmania does use the full screen).

I've never paid much attention to all this stuff - yes, it can look and sound very impressive but if that's all I wanted I'd just watch demos all the time instead.

[spiff]

Originally Posted by blade002

@Spiff: I don't understand? Jim Power & Elf Mania used virtually the WHOLE screen! .. and if memory serves me, i think JP is overscan!?.. i will need to check that one. And as for the copper list... well that was a beautiful little trick the Amiga could pull off, and it made the demo scene back then ever MORE interesting and its like saying to a SNES owner "who cares about Mode7"

Yup, got back and checked, JP does actually use the "full" screen, impressive... it's off the small screen list and I hang my head in shame

My main point is still that most of the supercolour++ copper games where average games, some of the best amiga games would have benefited more from being able to push 320x240 16x2x2 playfields/colurs (if I understand the megadrive correctly), and that independent publishing brought out the real gems.

Coppers are a part of what gives stuff the amiga feel, and it works pretty well for battle squadron and Gods, a nice balanced palette and coppers used for hi-lights. But gradient backgrounds only gets you so far, the game design still suffers from being very colour limited in the sprites/front playfield. Jim power almost feels like quake for amiga, the same texture colour limitations.

[Cammy]

Use the screenshots from Lemon Amiga for pure, untouched graphics all saved as PNG. NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER save pixel art (2D screenshots) as JPEG. It ADDS its own colours and removes and changes others.

[manicx]

I was not too keen on consoles back then. I always preferred the Amiga. You could play more games like Flight Sims, Adventures. Even some games felt so much better on the Amiga. Take Kick Off 2 for example. This game took advantage of the Joystick whereas on the Megadrive it sucked.

[laffer]

Yes, the Amiga had a good mix of varied games and as someone mentioned, it wasn't as hard to publish games for it so many smaller developers could do so.

It's just too bad most games didn't really take advantage of the machine as much as they could have, too many lazy ports.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by frikilokooo

I cannot avoid to compare Goal!(Amiga) Vs. Dino Dini Soccer(Megadrive).In this game Megadrive handles more colors in the sprites than in the Amiga.Amiga version only has 4 colors for each sprite!I guess that it is for being able to use more hardware sprites at the same time,the blitter(bobs) could have used but they are slower than the sprites.The conclusion is that the Megadrive seems to handle more colors in the sprites although the Amiga can use the blitter but is slower.

Attachment 16885 VS Attachment 16884

Can't agree with you, since there is no hardware problem blitting 23 64-color bobs and scrolling fullscreen in full framerate, with tons of time left for "AI".

About the comparison, yeah it's apples and pears. A brilliantly designed general-purpose chipset vs. a standard sprites-and-overlays chip (ho hum).

With the OCS, you could do 64 colors, but performance slowed to a crawl -- 16 colors is better and "visually acceptable" (Bitmap Brothers did a lot of awesome graphics with very few colors!)

The Megadrive ofc came 5 years or so later (!!!) and could have lots of sprites plus scrolling layers. But the chip wasn't as dynamic, so most of the MD games have the same visual style, whereas there was all manner of weird and wonderful things on the dynamic OCS.

What was Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Exile, flight sims etc like on the MD? (I really should look at more games on the MD, to me it was a few platformers and some race games and not much more, so I never got one at the time.)

Special-purpose chips are ofc better at what they do, and you can do a TON of different game ideas using just sprites-and-layers chips!

[laffer]

This has probably been mentioned but one thing the Amiga had that the Genesis (or any console had back then) was the demo scene. I always loved demos so this was a huge plus in my book anyway.

[MazinKaesar]

I think Amiga's audio is better than Megadrive's and SNES'!

[s2325]

I think Megadrive version of Skeleton Krew have different and better music than Amiga. SNES version of Chaos Engine have good music but lower resolution and too much colors.

[frikilokooo]

Skeleton Krew in Amiga version has awesome music! I wonder how is Megadrive version music...