Tiny Bobble

[xboxown]

Here is some criticism from this end: "Eeek! My eyes hurt! The graphics color and brightness causing me a headache and dizziness.! O_O"

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Jobbo

This looks incredible! I played the heck out of the ST version and that was already quite good, this looks perfect!

I'm curious what approach you've taken, it seems harder than necessary to recreate all the mechanics by hand as was normally the case for ports back in the day. Did you use the original code for reference?

Rainbow Islands was another great port on the ST and Amiga. I've always hoped someone would take the Amiga version and update it with a taller screen, more colors and better use of the Amiga hardware. Or you might just rewrite it by hand as a tiny version for us

Various websites explain aspects of the games inner workings, like bonus spawns or scoring system. Reverse engineering the Z80 code for the inner workings like collision detection and game physics etc is well beyond my abilities. Even if you would reverse engineer the orignal code and reimplement it on 68000 it would be much too slow i guess. The arcade uses 2 x Z80 at 6Mhz and 1 x Z80 at 3 Mhz. Despite the 68000 has much more power then a single Z80 it get easily outpaced by those three CPUs because those run in parallel and also dont need to take much care about the gfx because the hardware features tilemodes, hardware sprites and hundreds of colors. Also sprites can have different palettes on the arcade while in the amiga version everything has to have a seperate gfx when the palette is changed. So your data also explodes. Just to process all the blitter objects on amiga already steals most of the available DMA cycles and using 5 planes slows down everything further. So to get this all running on Amiga in 50fps you would need to have much more efficent code then the arcade needed. You would need different algorithms to solve the collisions and physics more efficent. At least that's what i believe, but i'm not a Z80 or arcade board expert

[VincentGR]

At last, justice for the Amiga.

Thank you.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Antiriad_UK

Wow you are really coding at speed!

Have you done a pretracker version of the music? - I loved that in the arcade and imagine pretracker would be well suited.

Yeah, all music was remade in PreTracker. The music data takes ~17kb in 'fastram' and around 2kb of chipram. It's certainly not better then the original amiga music (which is very good imho) but it fits the game. The 4th channels is used for dynamic 'reverb' or soundfx. Well, i guess most people will like the original amiga music better but this is as good as it gets from me:

http://abyss-online.de/eab/tinybobbleingame.mp3

I also implemented most of the soundfx. On Amiga even some of the most basic sfx were missing.

[Toni Galvez]

@Pink, the music is really nice, congratulations for the effort. Make a good Bubble Bobble conversion to the Amiga is really a hard job.

I love all the specifications you mentioned. I think, you got all the sound effects for the game made on Pretracker, that's nice, I suggest you cut the echo or maybe the chords notes to play the sound effects, not compromising the lead channel of the music.

We are working on a videogame for Amiga, and we are using this amazing sound effects mixer, it works on OCS machines and it takes very little CPU, you can play up to 3 sounds mixed in one channel, samples can be in fast memory and they got to be fixed frequency.

Check here [ Show youtube player ]

[Havie]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Yeah, all music was remade in PreTracker. The music data takes ~17kb in 'fastram' and around 2kb of chipram. It's certainly not better then the original amiga music (which is very good imho) but it fits the game. The 4th channels is used for dynamic 'reverb' or soundfx. Well, i guess most people will like the original amiga music better but this is as good as it gets from me:

http://abyss-online.de/eab/tinybobbleingame.mp3

I also implemented most of the soundfx. On Amiga even some of the most basic sfx were missing.

Music sounds really good and I think you've nailed the 'plinky' sound perfectly...

Currently playing Rodland so this better be out when I have got to level 100...(that potentially gives you a lot of time ).

[VincentGR]

I think Rodland has 40 levels :-D

[Predseda]

I love Bubble Bobble so much that this announcement is a News of the year for me!

[Havie]

Your right - have got to level 25 so not as much time as I thought!

[tarr]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Yeah, all music was remade in PreTracker. The music data takes ~17kb in 'fastram' and around 2kb of chipram. It's certainly not better then the original amiga music (which is very good imho) but it fits the game. The 4th channels is used for dynamic 'reverb' or soundfx. Well, i guess most people will like the original amiga music better but this is as good as it gets from me:

http://abyss-online.de/eab/tinybobbleingame.mp3

I also implemented most of the soundfx. On Amiga even some of the most basic sfx were missing.

Great track!

[ransom1122]

Looking Fantastic.. Can wait to try it

Well done.. pink^abyss

[MisthaLu]

Awesome project!!!
Looks awesome, and the music is great too.
Although I must admit I'd love to have something a bit less chippy, but rather with samples and a bit more similar to the original track. But the chip version is great, and I suppose any other kind of music would require the title to change from "Tiny" to "Not so tiny".

Originally Posted by Havie

Wow - one of my all time favourites and always been disappointed with the Amiga version - no more! Great work.

All is relative.
Try growing up with the Amstrad CPC - and experience the Amstrad CPC version after having played the arcade version a lot.......
Now that is disappointment.
Childhood trauma even.

[manossg]

Originally Posted by MisthaLu

Try growing up with the Amstrad CPC - and experience the Amstrad CPC version after having played the arcade version a lot.......
Now that is disappointment.
Childhood trauma even.

I hear your pain, mate...
But at least we got our revenge some years ago, with the excellent bb4cpc, the best Bubble Bobble conversion on any home computer.

[MisthaLu]

Originally Posted by manossg

I hear your pain, mate...
But at least we got our revenge some years ago, with the excellent bb4cpc, the best Bubble Bobble conversion on any home computer.

That is true. Definitely deserved!

[microfinne]

Looks awesome! So many improvements over the original port - really looking forward to play this enhanced port, especially as it's one of my favorite 2p games on any system.

[skyzoo73]

I listened to the game music. It is very well done, in my opinion, the only thing is the bell, the main instrument slightly different from the arcade, maybe modifying only this instrument would be even more faithful to Bubble Bobble. Assuming you can make it sound like the original with minimal modification.

[Toni Galvez]

There are many examples of FM music translated to the Amiga:

Ninja Warriors and Saint Dragon games.

HangOn demo (the music is 95% similar to the original)

Coppersky musicdisc, (Bosconian theme from X68000 computer) We used MDXdrv windows player to listen x68000 music that sound 100% like the arcade, we can mute the channels and get the FM samples from it.

But pink likes to use Pretracker and it's something to respect.

I found that SID can do a kind of metallic/bell sound, take a listen:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Gzegzolka]

Awesome game

[Tigerskunk]

Amazing stuff, P!nk!

[seb132]

Excellent! What will be the channel for sales?