Turrican 2 MS-DOS AGA conversion

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by skan

Argh...my eyes!

Well, I wouldn't dislike a reboot/makeover like these for both cover and in-game assets... but I'm getting OT now!

I would also love that but I'd feel very sorry for the artists who had to scale up that style of graphics to an entire game with the amount of animation it'd require to do it justice lol. That'd take forever.

[CFou!]

Originally Posted by skan

Argh...my eyes!

Well, I wouldn't dislike a reboot/makeover like these for both cover and in-game assets... but I'm getting OT now!

inpressive

[CFou!]

Originally Posted by Muzza

Hi,

I've shared my work in progress conversion of MS-DOS Turrican 2 in the zone. This is basically the same as the Turrican 2 we know and love, but with more colours.
This is a project I started initially to learn Amiga ASM, although much of it is written in C in the end. I also wanted to create an AGA game - something I couldn't do in AMOS back in the 90s.

It is only the first level, and various features are missing - most notably the bounce weapon does not bounce, there is no mid-level boss and the player cannot die. However most other features are working - even if many require extra polish.

It requires Fast RAM to run at 50hz on an A1200. From testing I found it can run at 50hz on a base A1200 but only if I reduce the number of bitplanes. I may do this eventually, but for now I'd rather get it working without modifications to any of the source artwork. Currently it uses 8 bitplanes.

I've tested on my real A1200 with Blizzard 1220/4 plus various WinUAE configs, but as this is the first thing I've released on the Amiga in the last two decades there may be unknown compatibility problems. Please let me know if it has problems on your machine.


Cheers

good job, i test it with pleasure:génial:génial

[JoeJoe]

I love Turrican and the whole thing in AGA.... Really impressive!

[Torti-the-Smurf]

ewww, disgusting

I still remember when Julian Eggebrecht gave an interviewer shit for liking the PC look
Well deserved, of course hahah. But seriously, nothing is more beautiful than the Amiga version.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Muzza

On the code side, I use roondars audio mixer (thanks roondar!). TFMX player code came from a music player that had ripped the code from the Amiga version (this took a lot of work to get working, but I'm glad I did as the music is so important to Turrican).
All the code for scrolling, blitting and gameplay is new and original.

Cool project, it's way further along than I had guessed from your OP

Nice to see others use my mixer, that was really what I was hoping for when I made it

[jotd]

yeah, like "i've started a remake of turrican for AGA machines"... yeah right...

then posts full remade game without further warning

keep up the good work. that is great.

[fryguy]

Really impressive work!

[pink^abyss]

The first level looks really smooth. Also the games feel is quite original. Very well done!

May i ask how you cull/activate the entities? I think the original T2 stored them in 256x256 bins, and then processed the 8 bins around the current camera pos..

[Muzza]

Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments.

A few people commented on fire buttons. Yes I will support multiple button joysticks (I just wish I had one for my own Amiga!).

Original Turrican pretty much requires you to use Auto-Fire for the main weapon. In my version, I had it so you can just hold fire whilst moving to auto-fire your normal weapon. This was to make it easier to test, and is why it takes longer to activate the beam/lightning weapon.

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Could it be possible to use AGA dual playfield and add a parallaxed background ?

AGA dual playfield is 16 colours x 2, so it wouldn't really work as the tiles have a lot more colours than that. I'll have more luck using HW Sprites for the parallax.

Originally Posted by AMike

How much time have you invested so far?

Enough to question what the hell I'm doing a few times.
It is part of a larger project. A lot of time has gone on PC tools that I intend to use for other games in the future, so its hard to say how long I spent on the Amiga code itself. The game also runs on Windows.

Originally Posted by AMike

Would it be theoretically possible to change some other game assets? For example backgrounds, parallax scrolling or the CD Music from Chris? No pressure - only a question, only a "simple" port of the MSDos version would be great. Thanks.

It would be pretty easy to swap assets, or create new maps. I'm not hard-coding anything and there are PC-side tools to generate the data. I'll post about these in the future when they are more mature.

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

May i ask how you cull/activate the entities? I think the original T2 stored them in 256x256 bins, and then processed the 8 bins around the current camera pos..

I'm using 256x256 bins (I have no idea how the original did it), and process the ones that overlap the camera (which is always either 2 or 4 bins). Currently I only spawn individual entities as they enter the screen area, but I think perhaps I should change this to spawn an entire bin, as sometimes enemies either group up or are divided more than in the original.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Muzza

I'm using 256x256 bins (I have no idea how the original did it), and process the ones that overlap the camera (which is always either 2 or 4 bins). Currently I only spawn individual entities as they enter the screen area, but I think perhaps I should change this to spawn an entire bin, as sometimes enemies either group up or are divided more than in the original.

And you store entities that go out of view into the other 2-4 bins, right?

I assume T2 did not insert whole bins because it would often mean spikes of too many entities at ones. I guess they used a distance threshold within the bin (maybe something like 64 pixels).

A more simple yet fast method how to cull entities is to go through the inactive entity array, but only a few items each frame. For example your world has 256 entities, and you go through 16 entities each frame then you have all entities culled in 16 frames. However, i think T2 used bins.

[AMike]

Originally Posted by Muzza

Enough to question what the hell I'm doing a few times.
It is part of a larger project. A lot of time has gone on PC tools that I intend to use for other games in the future, so its hard to say how long I spent on the Amiga code itself. The game also runs on Windows.

Impressive - is that the first time that you code for the Amiga?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by skan

Holy f*ck! This is beyond cool indeed!
And once again, the proof that 1200 should have come with 2/4MB Fast out of the box...

is it? why?

on topic:
Really love how just having those smaller intervals inbetween colours on AGA gives this an aesthetic that's totally different from an OCS game.
In my opinion gfx artists didn't and still don't take this into account enough to separate it and give it a different and superior look.

Most AGA games I have seen look like OCS games with a parallax layer added.

[jotd]

that's because it's way easier to add a parallax layer than redesigning all the graphics and possibly all memory layout and data format because of the extra bitplanes.

If you remove parallax crap (which can make a game unplayable ex Zool), a few games really got an AGA conversion actually

[nikosidis]

Most AGA versions of Amiga games where just a tweak, different palette with more colours.
Some really nice AGA games where Banshee, Super Stardust, Simon the sorcerer AGA and of recent times Reshoot R. They look stunning and show how the AGA chipset can be used.
I did not now about the DOS version of Turrican II before now. I think it looks much better than the OCS version. I hope you will finish this.

[jotd]

I was talking about ECS games that went "AGA" just to re-sell the same game when the A1200 came out.

Banshee doesn't qualify as there's no ECS version (but the graphics are great, yes, reminds me of the Bitmap Brothers graphics, but in 256 colors...)

[VincentGR]

Banshee was good, the framerate was not.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by jotd

I was talking about ECS games that went "AGA" just to re-sell the same game when the A1200 came out.

Banshee doesn't qualify as there's no ECS version (but the graphics are great, yes, reminds me of the Bitmap Brothers graphics, but in 256 colors...)

Yes, I know. That is what I said too. They just changed to palette. Most of the time it looked worse than the original. Example is Chaos Engine and Speedball II.

Agreed! Bitmap Brothers in 256 colours

The fps in Banshee could have been better but it is not bad at all.

[Gzegzolka]

Wow, so many great ports and other projects It looks like 2021 will bring many good games for amiga.

[jotd]

I wouldn't say that Chaos Engine AGA is worse. I like it with more colors. But like in Speedball 2 CD32 it's obvious that they just completely changed tones of some monsters, and kept others unchanged, instead of reworking the palette globally.

I must say this is probably difficult to rework a 16 color palette to another non-true color palette even with more colors. I don't know how many bitplanes are used but probably not 8 (else it would crawl) so they were stuck with 64 colors, and it would have been a great deal of work to rethink the whole palette of all assets (tiles, monsters, characters)

Speedball 2 AGA isn't so good because of all this copper/brass shit that breaks the steely look.