Turrican 2 MS-DOS AGA conversion - Page 10

gimbal · 08 September 2021, 15:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neil79

Use the new palette while keeping the space ship of the original Amiga version!

This, I think the greyish background with the Amiga ship would look pretty slick. The new ship looks pretty... well it just doesn't look like a spaceship. More like a space... boot?

TheNamec · 03 October 2021, 12:23

Hey Muzza! I subscribed just to thank you for the huge effort and sincere enthusiasm for this conversion.

It's really incredible to see 60 fps with such great graphics, the future inclusion of Amiga sprites makes this the definitive Turrican II experience.

I was so delighted by the demo, I had to share a gameplay with my community on Libretro, I hope you're happy to see your work with my own custom Mega Bezel Commodore Pack overlays and CRT project https://retrogamingpacks.blogspot.co...c2-is-out.html (as you can see, my RC2 cover is from your conversion intro, not included in original Amiga version)

[ Show youtube player ]

Can't wait for the final version of The Final Fight!

Muzza · 04 October 2021, 05:31

Thanks TheNamec, nice to know my work is enjoyed, that CRT looks great.

Just as an update:
I've recently finished work on the World 3-2 boss (the big spaceship that splits itself into three sections), so world 3 in its entirety is not too far from completion.

World 3-2 also has parallax working, including during the boss fight. Parallax was missing completely from the PC version, and the boss fight was static which looked weird. The original Amiga version also lacked parallax, but did at least have fast scrolling during the boss fight.

I've added some CPU assisted blitting to help with the size of this boss, but its only used when clearing a region of the screen rather than copying or cookie cutting.
A bunch of time also went on handling the change in screen modes (the spaceship levels use 7 bitplanes and sprites for parallax, whereas the other levels use 8 bitplanes and sprites for the player & special weapon). Supporting both could have been trivial but I didn't want to lose some of the performance benefits of having certain constants 'hard-coded', so the time really went on retaining the small optimizations whilst still allowing a change of screen modes.

I also spent time with alternate approaches to asset compression. All those 8 bitplane sprites/tiles were mounting up. I expect it will be at least 3 floppies when it is done, maybe more. Images are now stored in chunky mode (gets better compression using NRV2X) and converted to planar on load. This was also needed because as I mentioned, some levels are 7 bitplanes, some 8, and sometimes (although rarely) you want the same assets for both.

NovaCoder · 04 October 2021, 07:08

Looking good, must try the latest version on my MiSTer FPGA computer

nikosidis · 04 October 2021, 08:05

Muzza: Thanks for the update. I never thought you would finish this. Now it seams like you will

apex · 04 October 2021, 14:10

3 disks? No problem, I am used to handle 11 disks and 1 drive.

vroom6sri · 04 October 2021, 19:01

Thanks for all your hard work on this. I’m loving it!

Are we able to download this latest version now or is it still a work in progress?

AMike · 04 October 2021, 21:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muzza

Thanks TheNamec, nice to know my work is enjoyed, that CRT looks great.

Just as an update:
I've recently finished work on the World 3-2 boss (the big spaceship that splits itself into three sections), so world 3 in its entirety is not too far from completion.

World 3-2 also has parallax working, including during the boss fight. Parallax was missing completely from the PC version, and the boss fight was static which looked weird. The original Amiga version also lacked parallax, but did at least have fast scrolling during the boss fight.

I've added some CPU assisted blitting to help with the size of this boss, but its only used when clearing a region of the screen rather than copying or cookie cutting.
A bunch of time also went on handling the change in screen modes (the spaceship levels use 7 bitplanes and sprites for parallax, whereas the other levels use 8 bitplanes and sprites for the player & special weapon). Supporting both could have been trivial but I didn't want to lose some of the performance benefits of having certain constants 'hard-coded', so the time really went on retaining the small optimizations whilst still allowing a change of screen modes.

I also spent time with alternate approaches to asset compression. All those 8 bitplane sprites/tiles were mounting up. I expect it will be at least 3 floppies when it is done, maybe more. Images are now stored in chunky mode (gets better compression using NRV2X) and converted to planar on load. This was also needed because as I mentioned, some levels are 7 bitplanes, some 8, and sometimes (although rarely) you want the same assets for both.

Thanks for the update - sounds great so far.

Muzza · 04 October 2021, 23:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by vroom6sri

Are we able to download this latest version now or is it still a work in progress?

I'm going to finish the three levels of World 3 and then release them.

wairnair · 05 October 2021, 00:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muzza

I'm going to finish the three levels of World 3 and then release them.

yay! amazing work

haynor666 · 31 October 2021, 15:11

Unfortunatly I cannot start both demos on A1200 EC030 with 32 Mb Fast :/

Muzza · 31 October 2021, 22:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by haynor666

Unfortunatly I cannot start both demos on A1200 EC030 with 32 Mb Fast :/

Can you be more specific about what happens (how long does it load for? just black screen, or something else?)
Also what is the model of accelerator you are using? And have you tried unplugging all other peripherals?
I tried a few variations of your config in WinUAE, but they all ran.

haynor666 · 01 November 2021, 12:50

Both demos start loading (black screen) but after couple of seconds I have guru meditation - 8000 0004 task 00002768

This is real Amiga 1200 turbo card EC030 supplied with 32 Mb RAMmade or distribute by polish company Elbox.

Muzza · 01 November 2021, 23:13

I would guess it is a memory related problem. I'd very much like to fix it, but without any way to reproduce it is difficult.

The first build I put out had the common Amiga problem of not checking if the vector base had been moved (actually my code did check, but the TFMX player did not), but I fixed that for the later builds.
I'm also flushing the cpu cache after loading code sections, and after the bootblock loads the main exe. I think I got the flush code from Solid Gold.
Those are the main things I know can cause problems with higher end processors.

For the first build, some people reported it did not run on 040s or 060s, but did if they disabled the MMU and NoVBRMove. I had hoped my TFMX fix addressed that but I didn't get any further feedback from people with 040/60s so I don't know for sure.

I'm reliant on suggestions from this forum as to what common incompatibilities there are with certain accelerator/RAM cards, or if anyone knows of a way to set up WinUAE to recreate the problem.

Muzza · 16 November 2021, 05:49

New release: World 3 has been added to the zone and to dropbox.
(EDIT: see next post - there is likely a serious bug in this release)

This one contains all 3 levels from World 3 (all the spaceship levels).
All enemies and bosses are working. The player can now die, but has infinite lives. There may be some balancing issue, veteran Turrican 2 players, please give feedback about whether it is too hard/easy.

Features that I know to be missing:
-The mines are supposed to emit some kind of energy weapon after being destroyed.
-The bounce weapon still only has 1 level of upgrade.
-The short success music track at the end of a level does not play.

Features that I've improved from the MS-DOS version:
-World 3-2 has a parallax layer (although it is a bit boring due to the source background graphics having only two colours)
-World 3-2 boss battle is played over a fast moving background. (Amiga version has this but PC version was static)
-World 3-3 boss battle is played over a fast moving rotating background. (again the Amiga version has this but not the PC version)

Some info on the development:

Normally the game has separate code modules, so the code that controls the enemies is only in RAM for the levels that need it. I've made the mistake of not testing on real hardware recently and discovered today that something has broken it (works fine under emulation). So this build has the code modules turned off - the only difference to the end user is the loading times and how much Fast RAM it requires. But I do need to fix this next and I'm not particularly looking forward to painful debugging cycle of transferring files between PC and Amiga, running it, crashing it, rebooting, etc.

If you read one of my previous posts, I had 95% of this demo ready more than a month ago. So why has taken so long? One reason is real life getting in the way - dealing with lawyers and a neighbour dispute has zapped a lot of time. The other reason is that I've made a large change to the way I develop the game. I had created a tool that allowed you to change everything - you could redo all graphics, music, maps and enemy behaviour and then have it output a completely different game. I thought this was a good idea when I started, but in the end it resulted in spending 90% of my time working on the tool, and the complexity was growing out of control. So I've completely cut down the tool to the basics that I need to get the game done and hopefully going forward I can put 90% of my time into the game and only 10% into the tool.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy this, and that it actually runs on your hardware!

Muzza · 16 November 2021, 06:41

I've just discovered that the above build does not seem to run with the AROS ROM under emulation, so I expect there is a serious bug in it.
I'll post a new build once I get to the bottom of it.

Muzza · 16 November 2021, 07:34

If I run the game using an A1200 rom in WinUAE, it runs.If I run it using the in-built AROS rom, it comes out with a series of memory errors as soon as I execute the program from the command line. It does not even reach the first line of my program as far as I can tell.

I'll have to look at this more tomorrow, but something very weird is going on. If anyone knows what might cause this, please let me know!

haynor666 · 16 November 2021, 08:34

Thanks Muzza for all the work - this game really needs amiga AGA version. Original version from 1990 is great but updated version really deserves to be ported.

zzbylu · 16 November 2021, 09:29

and gameplay: [ Show youtube player ]

DanielAllsopp · 16 November 2021, 10:24

Absolutely insane how good this port is; the level of detail going into it astounds me. Great job Muzza!

03 October 2021, 12:23	#182
TheNamec Registered User Join Date: Oct 2021 Location: Italy Posts: 10	Simply jaw-dropping! Hey Muzza! I subscribed just to thank you for the huge effort and sincere enthusiasm for this conversion. It's really incredible to see 60 fps with such great graphics, the future inclusion of Amiga sprites makes this the definitive Turrican II experience. I was so delighted by the demo, I had to share a gameplay with my community on Libretro, I hope you're happy to see your work with my own custom Mega Bezel Commodore Pack overlays and CRT project https://retrogamingpacks.blogspot.co...c2-is-out.html (as you can see, my RC2 cover is from your conversion intro, not included in original Amiga version) [ Show youtube player ] Can't wait for the final version of The Final Fight! Last edited by TheNamec; 03 October 2021 at 12:28.

16 November 2021, 05:49	#195
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	New release: World 3 has been added to the zone and to dropbox. (EDIT: see next post - there is likely a serious bug in this release) This one contains all 3 levels from World 3 (all the spaceship levels). All enemies and bosses are working. The player can now die, but has infinite lives. There may be some balancing issue, veteran Turrican 2 players, please give feedback about whether it is too hard/easy. Features that I know to be missing: -The mines are supposed to emit some kind of energy weapon after being destroyed. -The bounce weapon still only has 1 level of upgrade. -The short success music track at the end of a level does not play. Features that I've improved from the MS-DOS version: -World 3-2 has a parallax layer (although it is a bit boring due to the source background graphics having only two colours) -World 3-2 boss battle is played over a fast moving background. (Amiga version has this but PC version was static) -World 3-3 boss battle is played over a fast moving rotating background. (again the Amiga version has this but not the PC version) Some info on the development: Normally the game has separate code modules, so the code that controls the enemies is only in RAM for the levels that need it. I've made the mistake of not testing on real hardware recently and discovered today that something has broken it (works fine under emulation). So this build has the code modules turned off - the only difference to the end user is the loading times and how much Fast RAM it requires. But I do need to fix this next and I'm not particularly looking forward to painful debugging cycle of transferring files between PC and Amiga, running it, crashing it, rebooting, etc. If you read one of my previous posts, I had 95% of this demo ready more than a month ago. So why has taken so long? One reason is real life getting in the way - dealing with lawyers and a neighbour dispute has zapped a lot of time. The other reason is that I've made a large change to the way I develop the game. I had created a tool that allowed you to change everything - you could redo all graphics, music, maps and enemy behaviour and then have it output a completely different game. I thought this was a good idea when I started, but in the end it resulted in spending 90% of my time working on the tool, and the complexity was growing out of control. So I've completely cut down the tool to the basics that I need to get the game done and hopefully going forward I can put 90% of my time into the game and only 10% into the tool. Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy this, and that it actually runs on your hardware! Last edited by Muzza; 16 November 2021 at 06:42.

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04 October 2021, 05:31	#183
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	Thanks TheNamec, nice to know my work is enjoyed, that CRT looks great. Just as an update: I've recently finished work on the World 3-2 boss (the big spaceship that splits itself into three sections), so world 3 in its entirety is not too far from completion. World 3-2 also has parallax working, including during the boss fight. Parallax was missing completely from the PC version, and the boss fight was static which looked weird. The original Amiga version also lacked parallax, but did at least have fast scrolling during the boss fight. I've added some CPU assisted blitting to help with the size of this boss, but its only used when clearing a region of the screen rather than copying or cookie cutting. A bunch of time also went on handling the change in screen modes (the spaceship levels use 7 bitplanes and sprites for parallax, whereas the other levels use 8 bitplanes and sprites for the player & special weapon). Supporting both could have been trivial but I didn't want to lose some of the performance benefits of having certain constants 'hard-coded', so the time really went on retaining the small optimizations whilst still allowing a change of screen modes. I also spent time with alternate approaches to asset compression. All those 8 bitplane sprites/tiles were mounting up. I expect it will be at least 3 floppies when it is done, maybe more. Images are now stored in chunky mode (gets better compression using NRV2X) and converted to planar on load. This was also needed because as I mentioned, some levels are 7 bitplanes, some 8, and sometimes (although rarely) you want the same assets for both.

04 October 2021, 07:08	#184
NovaCoder Registered User Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Melbourne/Australia Posts: 4,400	Looking good, must try the latest version on my MiSTer FPGA computer

04 October 2021, 08:05	#185
nikosidis Registered User Join Date: Jan 2020 Location: oslo/norway Posts: 1,607	Muzza: Thanks for the update. I never thought you would finish this. Now it seams like you will

04 October 2021, 14:10	#186
apex Registered User Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Amigaplanet Posts: 645	3 disks? No problem, I am used to handle 11 disks and 1 drive.

04 October 2021, 19:01	#187
vroom6sri Registered User Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Peterborough Age: 47 Posts: 841	Thanks for all your hard work on this. I’m loving it! Are we able to download this latest version now or is it still a work in progress?

31 October 2021, 15:11	#191
haynor666 retro maniac Join Date: May 2002 Location: Tarnobrzeg/Poland Age: 45 Posts: 1,748	Unfortunatly I cannot start both demos on A1200 EC030 with 32 Mb Fast :/

01 November 2021, 12:50	#193
haynor666 retro maniac Join Date: May 2002 Location: Tarnobrzeg/Poland Age: 45 Posts: 1,748	Both demos start loading (black screen) but after couple of seconds I have guru meditation - 8000 0004 task 00002768 This is real Amiga 1200 turbo card EC030 supplied with 32 Mb RAMmade or distribute by polish company Elbox.

01 November 2021, 23:13	#194
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	I would guess it is a memory related problem. I'd very much like to fix it, but without any way to reproduce it is difficult. The first build I put out had the common Amiga problem of not checking if the vector base had been moved (actually my code did check, but the TFMX player did not), but I fixed that for the later builds. I'm also flushing the cpu cache after loading code sections, and after the bootblock loads the main exe. I think I got the flush code from Solid Gold. Those are the main things I know can cause problems with higher end processors. For the first build, some people reported it did not run on 040s or 060s, but did if they disabled the MMU and NoVBRMove. I had hoped my TFMX fix addressed that but I didn't get any further feedback from people with 040/60s so I don't know for sure. I'm reliant on suggestions from this forum as to what common incompatibilities there are with certain accelerator/RAM cards, or if anyone knows of a way to set up WinUAE to recreate the problem.

16 November 2021, 06:41	#196
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	I've just discovered that the above build does not seem to run with the AROS ROM under emulation, so I expect there is a serious bug in it. I'll post a new build once I get to the bottom of it.

16 November 2021, 07:34	#197
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	If I run the game using an A1200 rom in WinUAE, it runs.If I run it using the in-built AROS rom, it comes out with a series of memory errors as soon as I execute the program from the command line. It does not even reach the first line of my program as far as I can tell. I'll have to look at this more tomorrow, but something very weird is going on. If anyone knows what might cause this, please let me know!

16 November 2021, 08:34	#198
haynor666 retro maniac Join Date: May 2002 Location: Tarnobrzeg/Poland Age: 45 Posts: 1,748	Thanks Muzza for all the work - this game really needs amiga AGA version. Original version from 1990 is great but updated version really deserves to be ported.

16 November 2021, 09:29	#199
zzbylu Saberman Join Date: Dec 2016 Location: Kielce/Poland Posts: 327	and gameplay: [ Show youtube player ]

16 November 2021, 10:24	#200
DanielAllsopp Registered User Join Date: Feb 2018 Location: Northumberland, UK Posts: 272	Absolutely insane how good this port is; the level of detail going into it astounds me. Great job Muzza!

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