Final Fight: Enhanced

[jotd]

Crazy it is!! Great, really great project! It reminds me (in spirit) of the transcode of Xevious, except that here no need to transcode.

However, resolving the "placeholder stuff" naively is going to lead to 1 frame per second... But then, special cases could be built to bypass the original game display logic in some places and do then things the amiga way.

[Retro1234]

Love to see that running with the placeholders on Amiga

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

- 2MB of Chip RAM is needed. I'm not sure if it'd work with modded A500s which can access 2MB Chip RAM, but I'm not using anything else which is ECS specific (yet), so I don't see why not (I'm not really knowledgeable enough to say though).

Well that puts me bellow hardware requirements with my Aca 500 plus, 1MB chip, 7 MB Fast, and processor up to 42Mhz speed.
Oh well, I'll play it on emulator.
Or this would be a good excuse to purchase some nice A1200.

Have you asked Richard Aplin how he managed to make it run on unexpanded A500, with just 512kb chip ram?

Thanks for other answers.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well that puts me bellow hardware requirements with my Aca 500 plus, 1MB chip, 7 MB Fast, and processor up to 42Mhz speed.
Oh well, I'll play it on emulator.
Or this would be a good excuse to purchase some nice A1200.

Have you asked Richard Aplin how he managed to make it run on unexpanded A500, with just 512kb chip ram?

Thanks for other answers.

We need to ask him about Double Dragon II as well, he really managed to pull off some programming magic at times

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Have you asked Richard Aplin how he managed to make it run on unexpanded A500, with just 512kb chip ram?

Realtime character frames flipping and just a few frames included per character.

[Brick Nash]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Have you asked Richard Aplin how he managed to make it run on unexpanded A500, with just 512kb chip ram?

He'll be able to tell you in more detail than me, but the game had its own custom memory manager which would decompress graphics and defrag memory on the fly. This allowed the program to load in new baddies from disk in real-time while the game was still running, so it appeared that there was more data stored in RAM than what actually was.

Also, a custom CPU sprite-flipping routine was used, which, when I was writing my own for the 1Meg version, discovered that's where most of the slowdown comes from. The CPU has to drop what its doing to go and flip bits in graphics data using a lookup table and place it in a buffer, but it's so much slower than doing it with dedicated hardware (which the Blitter can't do), and to add insult to injury, the Amiga's planar screen setup means it has to do this for each Bitplane, so it's 4 times the work (all on multiple massive sprites).

The memory managing stuff is way beyond my skill set. I'm just using stock OS Allocation/Deallocation functions between levels, but what Richard did was next-level stuff!

[gian2k]

32 colors on screen..

[jotd]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

Also, a custom CPU sprite-flipping routine was used, which, when I was writing my own for the 1Meg version, discovered that's where most of the slowdown comes from.

Yes, using the cpu to flip memory in chipmem is just so slooow. Now try to run code from chip memory...
I think even if you flip then blit then flip the second plane while the first plane is being blit it's still slow.

Using a 8 bit lookup table is slow, using a 16 bit lookup table would take 128kb and would be slightly faster... but that's 128k you could have used for graphics...

[Howardphilips]

From Brick Nash's twitter https://twitter.com/Brick_Nash:

That's a big sprite!

Moveset is in for all characters. Had to cut the stun/splash move, but some sacrifices have to be made.

Barrels are single Blits.

Struggles a teeny bit when there's 4 enemies onscreen and 1 get grabbed, but a little slowdown is fine...considering.

[Howardphilips]

From the usual account of the author:
"Syncing up weapons with walk cycles is one of the more tedious things that needs done.

This is literally the last gameplay thing left though.

Just need to do the rest of the spawners , sort disk swapping, and about 10 years of testing/optimising. Then it'll be done."

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Howardphilips

From the usual account of the author:
"Syncing up weapons with walk cycles is one of the more tedious things that needs done.

This is literally the last gameplay thing left though.

Just need to do the rest of the spawners , sort disk swapping, and about 10 years of testing/optimising. Then it'll be done."

Let's just hope someone else will offer help for testing and quality assurance

[sokolovic]

Sort disk swapping ?
Is he aware that Amiga can manage an HD since the day one ?
Making an OCS 2Mb of Ram only version but struggling with disk swapping seems a little absurd to me.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Sort disk swapping ?
Is he aware that Amiga can manage an HD since the day one ?
Making an OCS 2Mb of Ram only version but struggling with disk swapping seems a little absurd to me.

Yeah, his priorities are really weird. Why even bother with floppy disks?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

Why even bother with floppy disks?

It's kind of a thing that Amiga fighting games feature a huge number of disk swaps I agree that I could live without it though (lets hope there will be an option to install it...)

[Master484]

Some 3 years ago I made an attempt to recolor the Amiga Final Fight graphics in 16 colors, but I'm not sure how many of you have seen it, so I thought I might post it again.




The characters in the re-color are actually from the arcade version, while the background is from the Amiga version.

This shows that it's possible to get the characters at least to an unified 16 color palette, without any noticeable detail loss.

But this image of course wasn't a simple re-color, one color swapped to another. It's selective re-coloring, with manual work needed for everything. And recoloring the entire game, and every single animation frame, in this way, would take lots of time, more than what I now have. So unfortunately I can't help, but if someone wants to do it, then feel free to use this palette (the RGB values are non-OCS at the moment, but it should look almost the same when converted to OCS color space).

Although the weakness here is the lack of greens. The green objects in the levels can of course be simply re-colored to something else. But on the last level, on the rooftop section there is grass and palm trees. So there we would need some compromises. So either re-design it (replace the palm trees and grass with something), or try some copper tricks (which would also somewhat affect the character colors), or when this section of the game is reached, switch the darkest brown and the lightest blue to greens (Cody's jeans will suffer slightly, but that's it). Or use sprites for the palm trees (sprites behind playfield, punch a hole into the bitmap).

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Master484

Some 3 years ago I made an attempt to recolor the Amiga Final Fight graphics in 16 colors, but I'm not sure how many of you have seen it, so I thought I might post it again.




The characters in the re-color are actually from the arcade version, while the background is from the Amiga version.

This shows that it's possible to get the characters at least to an unified 16 color palette, without any noticeable detail loss.

But this image of course wasn't a simple re-color, one color swapped to another. It's selective re-coloring, with manual work needed for everything. And recoloring the entire game, and every single animation frame, in this way, would take lots of time, more than what I now have. So unfortunately I can't help, but if someone wants to do it, then feel free to use this palette (the RGB values are non-OCS at the moment, but it should look almost the same when converted to OCS color space).

Although the weakness here is the lack of greens. The green objects in the levels can of course be simply re-colored to something else. But on the last level, on the rooftop section there is grass and palm trees. So there we would need some compromises. So either re-design it (replace the palm trees and grass with something), or try some copper tricks (which would also somewhat affect the character colors), or when this section of the game is reached, switch the darkest brown and the lightest blue to greens (Cody's jeans will suffer slightly, but that's it). Or use sprites for the palm trees (sprites behind playfield, punch a hole into the bitmap).

I think it's just me, but as much as people try to enhance the 16 color palette, reaching a sweet spot is simply not feasible. The game will always look off in some aspects, like the aforementioned lack of greens. 32 colors would be much better, but I'm not sure it would even work on OCS and ECS without other compromises

[Retro1234]

Still amazed Mr Aplin got all those large sprites(Bobs) and frames on 512kb

[Retro1234]

I disagree have a go at the Snes background a think 2 or more colours can be saved and done with the copper.
Master484 does a good job.

[Howardphilips]

Yes, Master484's palette test just looks awesome for the limited number of colour it uses while being so much closer to arcade quality. It looks way better than the original Amiga conversion! Yet, who would be able to convert all the graphical assets given the additional work it represents?

[Master484]

I looked at the colors in my palette, and in the characters the darkest brown can be replaced by the darkest gray. So doing that would give us one "background only" color.

And also I forgot that this is 15 colors + transparency. So the transparent color (color 0) can act as the second "background only" color. It can be used as a sky copper, but also as a general extra background color.

So with these adjustments we would have a similar setup as in the Metro Siege palette, 14 colors for the characters + 2 unique background colors, giving us those 2 greens, or any colors we need.

Could look quite awesome indeed, if someone has the motivation to try it out, and do a lot of manual re-coloring.