Thimbleweed Park Amiga Port??

[Aezeroony]

Hi all,

Been playing the wonderful Thimbleweed Park after it got released yesterday and was wondering how easy it would be to port this to the Amiga 1200 minus the audio speech of course so it could run off floppy or HD install? The game isn't that big memory wise or file size so that's what got me thinking? Thoughts anybody?

Aaron.

[Leffmann]

The graphics have this "256 color look", but there are lots of layers, color blending, and other effects going on, and we have no idea what tools and third-party libraries were used, but they're definitely not going to be available for Amiga.

Even given all the source files, it would take several boat-loads of work, and wouldn't run on anything less than an accelerated Amiga with RTG.

[clebin]

With the assets, I guess a team could rebuild it with the scumm engine, minus some of the effects. I get the feeling Ron Gilbert would think it a cool idea if he could guarantee the quality (that TP is DRM-free says a lot). But the work involved would be huge. Maybe in the wider retro community there's enough experienced people to put together a proposal but not in our little pond.

Would it be more than a curiosity though? Like Stranger Things on Netflix, the blend of the modern and retro makes it what it is and maybe it's better that way.

I do agree that it's wonderful! Great atmosphere and plenty of laugh out loud moments.

[Galahad/FLT]

How big is the game to play and physically?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

How big is the game to play and physically?

After installation it's roughly 840MB...

Main files are these:



... ThimbleweedPark.ggpack1
... ThimbleweedPark.ggpack2

[Jope]

That's probably mostly speech though. The music is probably also streamed instead of samples+track data.

The game itself would have to be redone completely for scummvm, it is done with a completely new engine and uses the Squirrel scripting language.

[nobody]

original game resolution is 420x236
2300 colors on screen due to some light effects, but looks like 256 colors in general.

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Aezeroony

... minus the audio speech of course so it could run off floppy or HD install?

The speech is not the difficult part, Don't cut the speech! The Amiga should have no problems loading relatively small samples into memory when needed.

Getting the graphics into a format which can be displayed on a standard PAL or NTSC AGA screenmode is the bit the classic Amiga would have trouble with. And the multi-channel sound routines, and probably the advanced game logic too.

Making the actual game engine run on AGA+020 would basically require you to begin working on code, graphics and music from scratch. At least the plot is already done.

I have not played this particular game, but I have played a few more modern recently released adventure games and it's quite possible that it uses some more complex game logic than the typical SCUMM adventure from the 90's. Which means that even a SCUMM port may require a pretty beefy Amiga to run.

Maybe this is viable if you were targeting users of the Vampire or OS4 PPC machines, but for classic Amiga? Forget it! I won't say it's impossible, but I will say you might as well start your own project from scratch with the amount of work involved in porting this to a classic Amiga, even an accelerated one.

And coming back to both the speech and the idea of a floppy or Amiga HD version. Having over 1GB hard disk space is something that a modern Amiga user can reasonably be expected to have. So having enough room on your hard disk for all that audio is not a problem. Also 22KHz 8-bit samples are obviously going to be far smaller than 16-bit 48KHz samples.

The idea of playing a commercial adventure game from floppies is just, well, I won't describe this in terms of what could be considered an ad-hominem attack, but I will say that such an endeavour was ill-advised back when floppies were a thing which Amiga users had to use!

And now that we have affordable removable storage PCMCIA options does anyone seriously want to play a game that comes on over 2 dozen floppies from the floppy drive?

Ok, maybe some people might enjoy spraining their wrists constantly swapping media with the disk drive or Gotek, but then some people might enjoy having powerful electrodes attached to their nipples. I can assure you such people are very much a minority. I don't deny you your right to be you, but I might remind you that there are very few other people who share your passion for a painful experience.

Oh and if you're going to convert a modern adventure game then why not try converting Dropsy instead? I like Dropsy. Also, Dropsy has no speech.

[Galahad/FLT]

An AGA Amiga could handle most of Thimbleweed Park quite admirably. Of course it would have to have elements cut down and altered, the main one being the big parallax sections, it would simply be easier and quicker to just all parallax elements stop and use a big mask for each screen so you could have the characters walk behind and in front of those usually scrolling elements.

As for game logic, some are under the impression this is a complex game, it isnt.

Moving all those graphics around at an acceptable rate would be the biggest overhead

Even an A500 version could be done, but it would have limited appeal, because to try and play TP from floppy is simply nonsense, it dwarfes Monkey Island 2, would have to be hard drive/CD only, and the effort would be better spent on AGA as it would look quite favourable in comparison to other modern versions.

But its a BIG task, would take months to do even if Ron Gilbert handed over all the files and game design to make it happen, its possible, but the kind of effort needed to do this (for free!!) Would impact someones family life quite considerably.

[KONEY]

I think an ECS version @64 colors could quite match the original, at least losing all the lighting effects. It would be my version of choice because I'm quite disappointed by the original as it lacks in pixel dimension consistency.

[nobody]

Right now i am playing it. Superb game. Could it be done on an Amiga? Surely i say YES:

1. Redesign it and make a new engine for it.
2. drop all parallax.
3. use only still images of the game and some blitter objects for some effects.
4. drop the speech.
5. reduce color & rework all graphics for 32/64 colors.

[idrougge]

I don't see why it would need to drop speech. There have been Amiga adventures with speech before.

[demolition]

Many objects and characters would also have to be redrawn in different sizes as they are just resized/rotated in high res in the new engine. Doubt it can be made to look good without redoing it by hand if you need true low res.

Would be cool to have it redone for ScummVM though so it could work on a real Amiga.

[Retro1234]

Id be interested in making a new leisure suit larry for Amiga if someone came up with a plot and graphics.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by nobody

4. drop the speech.
5. reduce color & rework all graphics for 32/64 colors.

If you make it for CD32 you don't need to do either of these. Speech is possible and more colors probably too.

[nobody]

The ideal machine for this game would be an Amiga 1200 with 68030, CD ROM and some memory. Then you could have almost intact graphics and speech.

[Amiga1992]

A 1200 doesn't need a CD ROM, just install it in the hard rive.

[nobody]

It's an 800 MB install, I bet most data will be about speech. If you strip the speech it's your usual 20 mb VGA adventure with some cool parallax scrolling.

[Amiga1992]

It's 2017, hard drive space has stopped being an issue. 800MB don't even fit in one CD. Also if you reduce the sample rate of the speech (probably necessary, you can't play 44.1k samples) size will be greatly reduced.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Akira

A 1200 doesn't need a CD ROM, just install it in the hard rive.

Depending on whether the talking or music is streamed from the CD you might need a CD ROM version.