PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

As I understand it most MegaDrive games used two layers for parallax backgrounds and the other layer is the 16 colour sprites. My thinking was writing into a block of 64 pixel wide 16 colour screen height AGA sprites as a third layer using the blitter. I did say similar not identical

Yes they use 2 layers of parallax plus sprites, but none of those layers (or sprites) are necessarily limited to 16 colours. And there's a lot of flexibility in terms of being able to fiddle around with tile priorities to give the impression of more layers. For AGA you're more likely to use the sprites for a repeating parallax background layer and then one of the DPF layers for drawing bobs into, but an 8 bit plane DPF is pretty DMA heavy (and obviously requires more blitter time to draw to). And unfortunately you can't have unbalanced colour depths with DPF, which would help a lot.

[rKickrkds]

Originally Posted by TCD

Not only possible, but very likely. Somebody would have to check US gaming magazines to confirm when it was first reviewed there (been there, done that, not doing it in this case ).

Sources on the web show December 1991, around the same date as the SNES version was released. (cracked PC versions were released on BBS earlier than this.)

It was very common back in the late 80's and < 1991 for IBM-PC US based games to be released a year later in Europe under a different publisher after their US release, especially non blockbuster titles. PC games were much rarer in general across Europe and the UK pre 1991.


Also US gaming magazines coverage for IBM PC is really strange, they seem to not review any big arcade conversion games during 87-1991 era. Again strange as the US was by far the biggest PC market.
Try finding reviews for e.g "Double Dragon 2" on PC in ANY US game magazine in 1989/90, doesn't exists.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Yes they use 2 layers of parallax plus sprites, but none of those layers (or sprites) are necessarily limited to 16 colours. And there's a lot of flexibility in terms of being able to fiddle around with tile priorities to give the impression of more layers. For AGA you're more likely to use the sprites for a repeating parallax background layer and then one of the DPF layers for drawing bobs into, but an 8 bit plane DPF is pretty DMA heavy (and obviously requires more blitter time to draw to). And unfortunately you can't have unbalanced colour depths with DPF, which would help a lot.

I really need to read up on the Sega hardware, forgotten most of what I knew about it since the dawn of AI text to video fascination I've had for the last 18 months lol.

EDIT: I just found my Gauntlet IV assets, the backgrounds are approx 30 colours and the sprite sheet is 30 odd colours indeed. I guess they just combined two background layers for the mazes and two more for the sprites. On stuff like Thunderforce 3+4 it's 16+15 for the each layer of the backgrounds.

One thing the PC didn't have in the time of the A500/600 was a decent f^$£ing joystick lol they were all a bit um Amstrad/Sinclair/C64GS first party shit quality. Without a Zipstik arcade gaming on any system is going to be shit...especially if it feels like some crappy 1983 joystick you got for Xmas to use with a VIC-20 or some rubbish Whilst DOS SF2 looked great vs Amiga/ST..........you were still better off with the MegaDrive/SNES/PC-E port IMO regardless of how good the DOS game ran/looked.

My friend had a weird interface that let you plug in 2 Sega MegaDrive pads (or anything with Atari style D9 joystick plug) and map them to individual keys on the keyboard, that helped a lot. Couldn't tell you what year that was though.

I thought the Gravis gamepad was rubbish, YMMV.