06 October 2021, 01:30 | #1 |
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Robocop AGA
Initial Update / Background
As I've enjoyed following the development threads for the likes of Rygar, Kung Fu Master, Pacman, Turrican 2 AGA etc. I thought I'd create a thread to document progress of my Robocop port for AGA Amigas. Although I've been a high-level programmer for 20-odd years now, this is my first delve into 68k ASM and utilising the Amiga hardware by "banging the metal", and I must say it's bloody hard work! I started with Photon's startup code and tutorials, and over the past 18 months have tinkered on, bent more experienced coders' ears (quite a lot) and through experimenting with various other ports and ripped graphics, settled on Robocop and came up with what we have today. Now, please don't expect updates or the general development progress that you're used to seeing from the likes of mcgeezer, jotd or Muzza... I have nowhere near the experience that those guys have but I'll try and keep on top of this and post progress when I can. The current engine is nothing special; it runs in 64 colours, utilising 64 pixel wide sprites for the background parallax on level 1, and a 4x fetch mode. Graphics were converted from the arcade originals, and reduced down with Paint and Photoshop into various banks of 16 colours; Robocop is 16 colours and I think the background right now is 32 colours although I could be wrong. I use PPaint and PicCon on the Amiga, and Photoshop, Tiled and Aseprite on the Mac. Emulation is with FS-UAE. My first test engine was an initial attempt at scrolling through a map using the hardware, and blitting into an offscreen column: [ Show youtube player ] This worked well, but I still had to implement the blitter restore routine for the main sprite. I was happy with my progress up to now though, so that head-scratcher could wait! |
06 October 2021, 01:33 | #2 |
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Update #1
So that was a quick update! I've picked up my code again recently and implemented the dreaded blitter restore routine, which wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It seems to work well. I also updated the scrolling routine and fixed a few bugs in there relating to Robocop's position when he reaches the end of the level. All simple stuff really, but it needed doing. The video here is pretty much the same as the last one, obviously with the restore routine implemented, Robocop now doesn't leave a trail behind him! Ahhh... simple things [ Show youtube player ] |
06 October 2021, 04:58 | #3 |
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Fantastic ! looks like the arcade, really impressive. It was one of my favorites!
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06 October 2021, 08:11 | #4 |
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Amazing! Watched the movie a couple of nights back to. Looks like you have nailed the visuals. The potential in the AGA was never fully reached back in the days, hope you pull this one off
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06 October 2021, 09:41 | #5 |
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Looks stunning, more quality northern programming like with mcgeezer lol. They have the arcade cab at Leeds Arcade Club btw.
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06 October 2021, 11:35 | #6 |
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it really looks great! AGA is definitely the proper target with that one
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06 October 2021, 13:18 | #7 |
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Looking very cool. Am I correct in seeing the scrolling looking a little slower or 'steppy' in the second video?
I am looking at some ASM coding after years of JS and Python. Any suggested books to read? |
06 October 2021, 13:42 | #8 |
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This looks great and I'm happy it's being done now by 2 people, but Robocop is 100% possible on an A500, the game is pretty simple, I'd say Robocop2 on Amiga is actually beyond the arcade engine.
[ Show youtube player ] I am still tempted to do an A500 port, just waiting on the A500 thread to be updated to see if the port there is abandoned or not... |
06 October 2021, 14:15 | #9 | |
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Thanks for the positive comments everyone
Quote:
Getting into ASM coding? Coming from a high-level language too, maybe go down the same route I did with Photon's tutorials: [ Show youtube player ] and it's wonderful "Hello, Amiga Coders" line. |
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06 October 2021, 14:25 | #10 |
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you can use my Pacman Amiga port source code and try to rebuild it, then hack into it. It's pretty simple actually (Mspacman WIP source code is better because it has blitter cookie cut routines too)
There are also python scripts to generate assets in amiga raw format. |
06 October 2021, 14:31 | #11 |
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Also, if you're using macOS then I wrote a small tool to help with a few problems I came across whilst starting: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=97698
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06 October 2021, 15:24 | #12 |
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Awesome, thanks DanielAllsopp and jotd. checking it out now
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06 October 2021, 19:32 | #13 |
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07 October 2021, 10:48 | #14 |
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07 October 2021, 10:58 | #15 |
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07 October 2021, 11:41 | #16 |
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Agree with the above, robocop 2 looks inferior to first one, think the kung fu master remake looks way better than robo2, which is a fair-ish style comparison.
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07 October 2021, 13:30 | #17 |
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07 October 2021, 15:32 | #18 | |
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Quote:
I mean you can have a great engine that can quickly move things around calculate physics etc etc, but if the graphics are then mode O amtrad cpc |
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07 October 2021, 17:16 | #19 |
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it's pretty tough to separate an engine from the actual game. The engine is built around the game and not the other way round.
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08 October 2021, 10:35 | #20 |
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