[request] Not exactly an ST port.... Black Tiger Redux?

[chadderack]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well to be honest they were more publishers than a software house so they outsourced ports to several companies (Tiertex, Software Creations and Arc Development among the main culprits), hence a similar modus operandi to the infamous LJN for NES of JamesRolfian experience...

Interesting info. Thanks for that

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by chadderack

Just a guess, but I'll bet US Gold was a relatively small operation that acquired arcade licenses and did as many ports of those games as possible. When the architectures of the target machines were similar, I'll bet they decided to develop the game on one and port it to the other(s).

(Not sure how accurate that is)... but it would explain why the port was so bad. Not sure how anyone would have accepted 6fps for a $40 game.

Anyway... we'll leverage everything the Amiga can give us. In the spirit of mcgeezer's work, I'd like to first target the lowest A500 (with maybe only the first 0.5MB of expansion) and see if it can be done. If not, we could move it to a more AGA architecture.

Since I have an A500, I'd really love to have it work on that machine. But only if the graphics and music are on point.

well.... the main problem with capcom games, is that they use tons of 16 colors palette. And those are very hard to reduce in 32 colors. Otherwise, the solution would be make a 32 colors palette per level+level sprites.

It reduces much better than having to tweak the big palette into a smaller one.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

well.... the main problem with capcom games, is that they use tons of 16 colors palette.

AND capcom games use also palettes as language: a boss with a different palette is a demoted boss, mean a bit easier version of what was in the earlier gameplay either a end-level boss or a mid level semi-boss...

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by saimon69

AND capcom games use also palettes as language: a boss with a different palette is a demoted boss, mean a bit easier version of what was in the earlier gameplay either a end-level boss or a mid level semi-boss...

Yes, correct.

[jotd]

Not capcom but I remember DragonNinja uses alternate palettes for demoted bosses too.

Probably cheap way to add diversity to a game.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

Not capcom but I remember DragonNinja uses alternate palettes for demoted bosses too.

Probably cheap way to add diversity to a game.

Dragon Ninja, tons and tons of colors. I have all the sprites with the right palette, they use 350 colors alone. ouch.

[lmimmfn]

US Gold were great importing US games to europe but when they started releasing their own games they were thrash. Capcom games were amazing for the day, its such a shame that US Gold got all their licences resultibg in junk ports.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

US Gold were great importing US games to europe but when they started releasing their own games they were thrash. Capcom games were amazing for the day, its such a shame that US Gold got all their licences resultibg in junk ports.

Well not all, Commando and Ghosts'n'Goblins were saved

[skyzoo73]

I'm a big fan of OCS / ECS ports, and I think it's the ideal platform for older arcades up to a point of complexity. Instead for the more complex and recent ones or in any case where the work is more feasible, I think it is a very sensible choice to have the 1200 as a target machine (perhaps with a bit of fastram). After all, AGA machines are the final evolution of that technology and I don't see why not to benefit from it

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

I'm a big fan of OCS / ECS ports, and I think it's the ideal platform for older arcades up to a point of complexity. Instead for the more complex and recent ones or in any case where the work is more feasible, I think it is a very sensible choice to have the 1200 as a target machine (perhaps with a bit of fastram). After all, AGA machines are the final evolution of that technology and I don't see why not to benefit from it

Is because Black Tiger is perfectly doable on OCS/ECS and a sacrifice of some colors is IMO not a big deal: the US gold conversion code did indeed suck, and graphics was just 16 colors however well chosen so a 32 colors port should be good enough; it does not have a huge amount of enemies, too fancy animations nor special feats like parallax scrolling - everything is doable on an OCS/ECS machine, and THAT is why it hurts so much how was done!

Is like the 'squeeze every drop of life from this hardware and do the impossible' way of doing things is almost dead on the Amiga coding style of nowadays, and that is a shame because limitations breed creativity!
Why do you think am trying to convert songs in two or three channels, in example, when i can? (not in BT though because are too chord rich for two channels) Because is a hard limit, and that forces me to find ways to go around it!

[sparhawk]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

I'm a big fan of OCS / ECS ports, and I think it's the ideal platform for older arcades up to a point of complexity.

From what I have seen in MAME I think what is "below" NeoGeo might be able to be ported quite accurately.

[touko]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Dragon Ninja, tons and tons of colors. I have all the sprites with the right palette, they use 350 colors alone. ouch.

Maybe if you add all the sprite colors, but each sprites sheet has a 15 colors palette,and all sprites are not displayed at the same time,so in this game you have max 100 colors on screen,like shinobi,and i'll don't call this "tons and tons of colors" .

[saimon69]

Am working on a proof-of-concept for round 1 music, will post once have satisfying results

[chadderack]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Am working on a proof-of-concept for round 1 music, will post once have satisfying results

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by touko

Maybe if you add all the sprite colors, but each sprites sheet has a 15 colors palette,and all sprites are not displayed at the same time,so in this game you have max 100 colors on screen,like shinobi,and i'll don't call this "tons and tons of colors" .

on level 1, with backgrounds, foregrounds, sprites and hud you have 175 unique colors.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by touko

Maybe if you add all the sprite colors, but each sprites sheet has a 15 colors palette,and all sprites are not displayed at the same time,so in this game you have max 100 colors on screen,like shinobi,and i'll don't call this "tons and tons of colors" .

Shinobi arcade use 256 unique colors. That's why it's very hard to make it in only 32 colors, never mind 16.

I did many tries, and it's awful....

[chadderack]

Welp; I bit the bullet and sent Mr. DMP Soft an email. Hope he agrees to share some src code.

I'm probably going to switch back to reversing the rest of the maincpu code and finish what graphics stuff is left. Kinda stubborn; I don't like to leave stones unturned, but I can't do too much with the audio at this point. I'll have to engineer a better understanding of how the arcade's byte codes for audio are transformed into actual YM2203 and SSG data.

I still have to figure out how the map tiles are indexed by the app. I know the size of the tiles and the screen positions; but I need to understand how the arcade's tile indexing relates to gfx1/gfx2/gfx3 ROM addresses. I can probably still work with the map tiles without that understanding, as all you have to do is piece the map together by hand. MAME is kind enough to give you the tiles.

The thing about the tiles in Black Tiger, though, is that in Level 3... some of the tiles are animated (palette animation).

I think giving my brain a bit of a break on the YM2203/SSG audio stuff for a bit might be a good idea.


Chad.

[chadderack]

Originally Posted by chadderack

Welp; I bit the bullet and sent Mr. DMP Soft an email. Hope he agrees to share some src code.

Hopefully I won't require hoot's src code to figure out how it is able to leverage the MAME Black Tiger rom itself to stream the data back into hoot in VGM format.

Decided to knuckle down and read Aaron Giles' source for understanding. I'm understanding what's going on better with the YM cores now... hopefully BT uses the YM2203 core (and not the AY8910) because it seems straightforward and maybe I could even build a debug version of MAME that spits out a VGM format data stream.

I'm still hoping to implement FM tone generation on the Amiga so that we don't need to use discrete samples. This would be done via a tracker (ideally)... and I'd have to experiment with the wavlets (small samples) to create instruments (the YM2203 doesn't have "instruments")

As a quick test, hoot output the "enemy injured" WAV today at 930K (!). It had plenty of blank space at the end to clip out, but it is still likely way too big. Down sampling to 11050 or 8K might be OK, but would probably sound very bad for the music.

salmon69 is doing this via samples and it may work out in the end. In the interest of using the least number of bytes, however, I'm going to pursue the FM thing too.

This game would be much easier to port to a 32-bit environment. No worries about space or CPU cores or power much at all. We might even be able to upgrade graphics. But this is an Amiga port... which is its own unique challenge of course.

[touko]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

on level 1, with backgrounds, foregrounds, sprites and hud you have 175 unique colors.

No, i have all the gfx converted for a future PCE conversion of those both games, and i confirm that there is max 100/110 colors on screen, not 256 .
shinobi is the most colored with 100 colors MAX at the same time,even if all the level gfx have more than 100 colors,and i confirm that all sprites have only a 15 colors palette,and some backgrounds use up to 3/4 sub palettes .

Shinobi arcade use 256 unique colors. That's why it's very hard to make it in only 32 colors, never mind 16.

it's because some backgrounds use up to 3/4 15 colors sub palettes .I can post my PCE conversion if you want,you can judge by yourself

here 125 colors:


You can see here, some of my converted GFX
https://www.edition-limited.net/t262...sur-supergrafx

And by the way 100 colors downgraded to 32 is a hughe lost, even the Md with his 4 sub palettes has a massive lost in term of colors fidelity for shinobi .

[malko]

I find this MD demo is Shinobi quite good. "Massive lost" seems to me a bit incorrect...
[ Show youtube player ]