Flying Shark new Amiga port [was: Going to Drop this here :)]

[saimon69]

Credit due to Magnus T, and hope he will be able to finish it

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[dlfrsilver]

Good initiative. However the graphics are the terrible ones coming from the ST

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Good initiative. However the graphics are the terrible ones coming from the ST

He was looking for someone to help with the port of the arcade assets; it seems he might have found someone, else you could help;
However, since code is still behind, the placeholder graphics might stay for a while

[Arne]

16 colour global palette? Might be tricky to reduce to that for the entire game without making a stylistic choice (reductive colour grading). You'd probably want quite muted background terrain and then vibrant enemies/bullets. I suppose it might be possible to modify some colours depending on enemy wave/boss and level region, with only the player plane being static. 32 colours could be too slow but I'm guessing it'd allow for quite faithful graphics.

[saimon69]

If we go 16 for background/enemies and 15 for player sprite/bullets - as stated on the youtube comments - that should be a decent compromise

[Arne]

Yeah, it seems the player and bullets won't go under the trees, unlike some enemies. Menace ship was a sprite iirc. Then in a vertical shmup like this you can reuse bullet sprites a lot since they won't overlap scanlines.

I suppose making most enemies a military/earthy/terrain colours (greens-browns-grays and persistent crater glow/flash) would allow for smoother colour ramps, at the cost of readability. Then you value match against the arcade gfx, kinda ignoring/discarding hue.

There's seemingly an existing Amiga version based on the ST source?
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga...ShotId,799922/

[CaptainPlanet]

As others have said, there's already the ST->Amiga port in existence. I actually really like that version even though it's not really anything like the arcade game. So I was wondering why you are doing this...not that I'm complaining! I love seeing new stuff for the miggy!

[Arne]

I had to do a little quick test:
http://androidarts.com/Amiga/Skyshark.png

I made a 16c pal for the bottom screens (arcade is on top). This is Photoshop's dumb indexing so if you hand pixel the BG blocks you can push more colours into the shading gradients. Even if not the correct hue it usually looks alright. My colour ramps here do double duty, like trees & swamp, grays and ocean. Can't really push saturation too much because then roads might turn blue etc.

Made a little sprite palette for the plane too. With 16c there's hardly any loss.


There are a few instances where you could improve on the original gfx, like, in the swamp at the bridge there's what might be tent cloth stretched into a square... some droops and folds might add some dimension there.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Arne

I had to do a little quick test:
http://androidarts.com/Amiga/Skyshark.png

I made a 16c pal for the bottom screens (arcade is on top). This is Photoshop's dumb indexing so if you hand pixel the BG blocks you can push more colours into the shading gradients. Even if not the correct hue it usually looks alright. My colour ramps here do double duty, like trees & swamp, grays and ocean. Can't really push saturation too much because then roads might turn blue etc.

Made a little sprite palette for the plane too. With 16c there's hardly any loss.


There are a few instances where you could improve on the original gfx, like, in the swamp at the bridge there's what might be tent cloth stretched into a square... some droops and folds might add some dimension there.

I would advice to capture the color graphics from the arcade and to compute what is called a 'superpalette' - actually more than one so to have it change every stage - for the first 16 colors - there is a program called Debabelizer on pc and old mac that can do that, and actually i think even AD Pro or Image FX could do something similar

[Arne]

In my experience, palette programs are useful when working with larger palettes. With 16 colours the truncation is so hard it requires human awareness of colour context, crossramping, frequency use, misuse/superfluous-ity, accent importance, and artistic choices in regards to colour grading etc. Scrolling thru a let's play, it seems most levels are similar in colour tone and spread, i.e. there's no "level 3 pink candyland" or "subtle snow fields".

I have a System 16B dumper, but Flying Shark is some sort of Toaplan board. Sometimes the gfx is in plainpixels, but not always. Looking at the mame twincobra driver at github (similar TP board), gfx tiles are 4bits and 8x8px. Don't have the ROMs myself though.

[saimon69]

Cannot exclude a discrete level of retouching, but a base palette helps

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Arne

I had to do a little quick test:
http://androidarts.com/Amiga/Skyshark.png

I made a 16c pal for the bottom screens (arcade is on top). This is Photoshop's dumb indexing so if you hand pixel the BG blocks you can push more colours into the shading gradients. Even if not the correct hue it usually looks alright. My colour ramps here do double duty, like trees & swamp, grays and ocean. Can't really push saturation too much because then roads might turn blue etc.

Made a little sprite palette for the plane too. With 16c there's hardly any loss.

Looks very nice - even better than the original in some places. 16 colors is plenty!

[Arne]

Thanks! Sometimes I wish 24 colours was a binary thing though. 32 can feel like too much for some projects.

Anyways, I wrote a quick tool to peek around in the ROM. It seems like 8x16 px tiles, but, one bitplane is stored per ROM chip, i.e. not sequentially like on the NES. They're also sort of arranged in larger blocks (2x1tiles to make a 16px block). A raw dump seems possible. The twincobr.cpp mame github file has some addresses for palettes and clues that might be usable.

I was wondering why the tiles were rotated, as then only 1 bit per byte would be usable per scanline, but then I realized that the monitor sits on its side as it's a vertical game...

Edit: I managed to extract the FG&BG tiles, arranging the 16*16px blocks into 512*512px blocks. Each of those are 128KB as 4bp, but the foreground one will also need a 1-bit mask I suspect (unless dual playfield but that's beyond OCS afaik). Additionally there are some sprite and character ICs. Might be hard to extract the palette. It's likely set in a 555 format, then an attribute per tile or in the level data. Might be easier to just write an automatic colour associator using a few ripped tiles.


Edit2: Probably no more time for this. Plopped the WIP tile sheets in The Zone. Edit: Seems Mame can bring up some palettes. Maybe F4.

Edit3: Couldn't keep my noodles off that cliff that was kinda jarring. It's a big asset so I rushed it. Didn't have the grays so I changed the detailing.
http://androidarts.com/Amiga/SharkHill.png

[dlfrsilver]

Arne, Flying Shark (Hishou Zame) and Outzone were made and developped on Sharp X68000

And the arcade source code was made under Microware OS/9 for X68000.

[saimon69]

Outzone is one of those games i did drool most on the arcade, wish on a port some time in the future

On a second note, i started porting the music by capturing instruments with hoot; some adaptations had to be made to fit music in three channels and save space, like using a chord C1C2C3 rather than all different chords: sound polyphonic enough and use only one channel. If i keep all tunes together final size might be around 140k, hope is not too big. Else will need to split each level but there has to be end level and game over included.

I emphasize that my target is not absolute fidelity but to have a soundtrack that sounds similar to the arcade but keeps its own identity due to tech limitations.

[saimon69]

Have a proof of concepf for the first stage, plus interactions (level start, stage end, game over); where should i send it?

[saimon69]

New progress video [might be deleted later on]
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[saimon69]

Can some mod please change the thread title to "Flying Shark new Amiga port [was: Going to Drop this here ]" ? Appreciated ^^

[saimon69]

Another update that might disappear, this time with audio
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[saimon69]

Do anyone know how to enable the sound test on Flying Shark ROM on MAME 0.100? (is old but the only one i have that runs on XP)