Outrun Port using Lotus engine? Possible?

[sokolovic]

Again, same discussion. Adding RAM isn't modifying the machine since the Amiga is a computer designed to have extra RAM.
And many many games does recquires a 512Kb extension to work on the A500. Does it means that these games aren't genuine Amiga games ?

With the vast majority of Amiga users having now extra ram and a HD, why would it be cheating to make an HD only game recquiring extra ram ? Back in these day, absolutely no one was recquiring PC games to work only on a 286 machine from floppies to be considered.

[bartread]

Not even a chance you could do an arcade perfect OutRun on a Amiga 500, even with all the RAM in the world and a hard disk drive.

The OutRun arcade machine had *two* 68000 processors both running faster than the single 68000 in the Amiga 500, not to mention two sound chips (one for synthesis/music, one for SFX/samples) and a separate Z80 CPU to control them, along with Sega's insanely-powerful-for-the-time super scaler chipset for the graphics. Yes, the Amiga had some custom hardware, but it was nowhere close to Sega's arcade board in terms of performance or capability.

Don't get me wrong, the Lotus games are fantastic, and my best mate and I played the first two to death as teenagers on my A500, but they're so stripped down compared to the OutRun arcade machine in terms of graphics and sound it's not even funny.

With that being said the US Gold conversion for the Amiga was *shockingly poor*: bad graphics, terrible framerate, awful controls, and the music was too slow and had incorrect rhythms in various places throughout. Just inexcusably bad for a machine of the A500's calibre.

Could they have done an arcade perfect conversion? No.

But they could have built a game that captured the essence of OutRun on the Amiga: the playability, the flowing sense of speed, the music and the atmosphere. Games like Lotus and Jaguar XJ220 prove that arcade racers on the Amiga could be great: it's just a shame that US Gold lazily churned out the chugging monstrosity we got.

I'm not sure the Lotus engine is the right engine to build the best version of OutRun possible on the Amiga, but I do believe it would be possible to build a *great* version of OutRun on the machine. It won't be arcade perfect, nor even close, but it could be a great game.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by bartread

Not even a chance you could do an arcade perfect OutRun on a Amiga 500, even with all the RAM in the world and a hard disk drive.

The OutRun arcade machine had *two* 68000 processors both running faster than the single 68000 in the Amiga 500, not to mention two sound chips (one for synthesis/music, one for SFX/samples) and a separate Z80 CPU to control them, along with Sega's insanely-powerful-for-the-time super scaler chipset for the graphics. Yes, the Amiga had some custom hardware, but it was nowhere close to Sega's arcade board in terms of performance or capability.

Don't get me wrong, the Lotus games are fantastic, and my best mate and I played the first two to death as teenagers on my A500, but they're so stripped down compared to the OutRun arcade machine in terms of graphics and sound it's not even funny.

With that being said the US Gold conversion for the Amiga was *shockingly poor*: bad graphics, terrible framerate, awful controls, and the music was too slow and had incorrect rhythms in various places throughout. Just inexcusably bad for a machine of the A500's calibre.

Could they have done an arcade perfect conversion? No.

But they could have built a game that captured the essence of OutRun on the Amiga: the playability, the flowing sense of speed, the music and the atmosphere. Games like Lotus and Jaguar XJ220 prove that arcade racers on the Amiga could be great: it's just a shame that US Gold lazily churned out the chugging monstrosity we got.

I'm not sure the Lotus engine is the right engine to build the best version of OutRun possible on the Amiga, but I do believe it would be possible to build a *great* version of OutRun on the machine. It won't be arcade perfect, nor even close, but it could be a great game.

Definitely agree with that sentiment. Although I recon the game engine from Prime Mover might be better suited. it's more technically advanced, It's very smooth (smoother than lotus) and features a larger play area.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by bartread

Not even a chance you could do an arcade perfect OutRun on a Amiga 500, even with all the RAM in the world and a hard disk drive.

If you had all the ram in the world and a hard disk, i'm pretty damned sure it would be very close to arcade perfect

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

If you had all the ram in the world and a hard disk, i'm pretty damned sure it would be very close to arcade perfect

You'd need an insane amount of RAM, but yeah. It's cheating though

[malko]

what about the 8MB the Amiga can handle? ($200000-$9FFFFF)
still not enough?

[BarryB]

Weill, if Jim Bagley can get Dragon's Lair running on a ZX81 with a bit of trickery, why not Outrun on the Amiga?

[dlfrsilver]

Outrun can be done... but..... Lots of optimisation required to gain max memory and speed.

ARCADE --- AMIGA
---------------------------------------

Program :
------------
1x68000 Logic 1x68000 (the road must be done with the blitter ?)
1x68000 Road

Sound :
---------
FM sound system Paula (need to convert the music & SFX in MOD and 8svx

Graphics :
------------
8192 colors dyn. 32 colors or 16 colors but tons of copper tricks
Bitmap chunky Convert to Planar graphics

RAM:
------
4-8mb of PC ram 1mb but 2mb of RAM preferably (or need to use a system like
dynamic loading system like in ninja Warriors)
equivalent

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by BarryB

Weill, if Jim Bagley can get Dragon's Lair running on a ZX81 with a bit of trickery, why not Outrun on the Amiga?

He cheated though, and streams the graphics from a (very large) animation file stored on a hard disk. I personally would love to see a 16Kb Stock ZX81 play DL though

[vulture]

But for an A500, an HDD game shouldn't be considered cheating. It's well within its specs to load a game from a Hard Drive (unlike a cartridge).

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by vulture

But for an A500, an HDD game shouldn't be considered cheating. It's well within its specs to load a game from a Hard Drive (unlike a cartridge).

No, I would be fine with an A500+HD requirement. Might as well go for an A1200 though while you're at it.

What we could do is create a hash table - from player position on the road, player animation frame, level position (frame by frame). All the possible permutations when run through each of the levels could probably be done in a 64 bit integer. Then render each of those as an image, and while the game is playing load that image from HDD - or pre-cache each level's images to RAM when you start the stage.

The benefit of this is that you don't have to do any graphics rendering besides a screen-sized image. The graphics can be full 256 colour AGA if you like, sprites can be full size - in fact, no matter how large or complex the scene, it won't slow down.

Of course, you'll need about half a terabyte of storage space but that's cheap enough these days.

[bartread]

I don't think the 8MB of RAM *would* be enough on the A500 with either OCS or ECS - you just don't have enough chip RAM for scaled versions of all the scenery and cars; not at decent bit depth anyway. You'd have to keep copying bitmaps in from fast RAM so the blitter could access them. Even if you did have enough chip RAM you'd still be absolutely hammering the blitter so I doubt you'd get a smooth 30fps. Like I say, Sega's super scaler hardware was a beast compared to what was available in the Amiga, and it could do the scaling in real time so you don't have to have tons of extra RAM just to hold scaled bitmaps.

If you want something to compare to, look at how the framerate suffers on Jaguar XJ220 on the Italy levels with the cliffs on one side of the track - similar issues with scaling there.

Given my era of A500 was 1990, with Kickstart and Workbench 1.3, where 1MB RAM upgrade was pretty standard for most owners I knew at school, but almost nobody had a HDD (one guy had two extra floppy drives though), I'd say the HDD is cheating if you wanted to build an era appropriate version of OutRun. Especially since US Gold's conversion was released in 1989.

Still, if you want the best version the A500 could run you probably do want to go to 8MB RAM + HDD because copying stuff around in RAM, or loading from a hard drive, is much faster than loading from floppy.

If you wanted something era appropriate you could clearly do a *lot* better than U.S. Gold did simply by taking advantage of the Amiga's custom hardware rather than doing a lazy ST port that appears to use the CPU for just about everything (no wonder it grinds). I mean U.S. Gold were too effing lazy to even implement any copper list effects for the sky, which would have been super cheap to do. Very shoddy indeed.

[saimon69]

If you want something to compare to, look at how the framerate suffers on Jaguar XJ220 on the Italy levels with the cliffs on one side of the track - similar issues with scaling there.

Actually a best comparison is mountain level of Lotus III, was abmismally slow in my 500 1.2 :/

[bartread]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Actually a best comparison is mountain level of Lotus III, was abmismally slow in my 500 1.2 :/

I've only ever played it on the 1200 I bought last year and it seems OK, but will have to try it on a 500 as well when I reacquire one.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by bartread

I don't think the 8MB of RAM *would* be enough on the A500 with either OCS or ECS - you just don't have enough chip RAM for scaled versions of all the scenery and cars; not at decent bit depth anyway. You'd have to keep copying bitmaps in from fast RAM so the blitter could access them. Even if you did have enough chip RAM you'd still be absolutely hammering the blitter so I doubt you'd get a smooth 30fps.

No no no no no! You're not getting it. I'll try and explain again.

You don't store anything - while developing the game, you create a series of screenshots, 320x256 or whatever res you're using. One for each possible permutation of where the player's car can be, for each possible frame of the level, for each possible animation frame of the ferrari, for each possible position of the NPC cars/scenery etc. So that you have a screenshot of the game for every possible situation that can arise during the game. Their filenames would be a hash of the permutation.

You'll need a phenomenal amount of storage. Possibly terabytes. But then you just, instead of scaling, blitting individual sprites/bobs etc, just calculate which screenshot represents what's going on and load it. You just ship the game on a few DVDs or so. It's all pre-calculated.

You will probably still need a fast Amiga though; loading and blitting frames like that will be quite taxing on the CPU, I expect. You would probably want to cache each level to RAM, so inbetween stages there may be a short "loading..." pause of a day or so.

This is exactly how Dragon's Lair on a ZX81 was done btw. When you have fast unlimited storage, the world's your oyster and any game can be done.

I feel this is out best shot at a faithful Outrun game on the Amiga.

[dlfrsilver]

Well, to be honest, the sprite scaling takes not this much sprites.

The main problem is the memory needed. Each course has to be split, with each of them its own bank to car sprites, etc.... The Ferrari alone, uncrunched is around 500kb.

[LongLifeA1200]

Don't know why HDD keeps being mentioned for the A500. It has a 68000 (24-Bit addressing = 16 MB at most). A tiny/expensive/slow mechanical hard drive is not worth it.

Can't see why a ROM cartridge is off the table.

If cartridges were good enough for AGES and Nintendon't, then it's good enough for the A500.

Case closed.

Originally Posted by vulture

It's well within its specs to load a game from a Hard Drive (unlike a cartridge).

You know the A500 has a side port. Right? That's where the hard drive goes. That's also where a 14 MB cartridge could go. More if bank switching is implemented.

[005AGIMA]

Still keeps getting side tracked by "Amiga can't do an Arcade Perfect" rather than focusing on giving the A500 the version it always deserved.

The 2 are VERY different objectives.

But meh it's just a conversation.

[gimbal]

Very right, it'd already be a major improvement to have the current Amiga version at double the framerate

[mcgeezer]

I reckon an A1200/CD32 could produce quite a decent port of Outrun when I think about it.

Toward the end of each stage I recall very little happens as the roads fork off, at this point you could pretty much load all the graphics data required for the next stage during that little section between choosing left or right and hitting the check point.

I'll have a think about how I'd go about doing it and run through some calculations.