soo... what about Final Fight?

[jotd]

bitplane modulo trashed gfx I remember that.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by jotd

bitplane modulo trashed gfx I remember that.

Yeah, that was it. I couldn't quite remember, I recalled the copy protection also causing some issues but seems like that was on AGA machines.

[touko]

For DD2 it was a kickstart version problem if i remember correctly .
It worked fine on 1.2 .

[jayminer]

I played around a bit with trying to get Final Fight down to 32 colors. Sure it's just a picture and doesn't take into account things that could scroll in which might need colors not in the palette currently, and some things could definitely be improved, but I definitely think a great looking version could be achieved with 5 bitplanes.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I played around a bit with trying to get Final Fight down to 32 colors. Sure it's just a picture and doesn't take into account things that could scroll in which might need colors not in the palette currently, and some things could definitely be improved, but I definitely think a great looking version could be achieved with 5 bitplanes.

the problem is the amount of ram needed to get a good version of this game.

toying with a single screen and with a whole level + sprites is another story.

the A500 is 10 times less powerful than the X68000 for this game, 32 colors in 5 bitplans requires more chip ram than an A500 has to offer.

The X68000 runs Final Fight in 2mb of ram only, but it has tons of hardware assistance to make things easier that the A500 would have to compensate with its CPU......

[jayminer]

Yes, ofcourse. It would be very hard to try and fit enough to make a decent looking version with 512kB chip, but it would be interesting to try Not that I'm a huge fan of the game but it's an interesting project.

I guess things could be loaded in chunks, enemies and level data swapped in and out as they are needed, it will ofcourse lead to pauses when the game loads (or even cooler would be to stream in data).

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jayminer

Yes, ofcourse. It would be very hard to try and fit enough to make a decent looking version with 512kB chip, but it would be interesting to try Not that I'm a huge fan of the game but it's an interesting project.

I guess things could be loaded in chunks, enemies and level data swapped in and out as they are needed, it will ofcourse lead to pauses when the game loads (or even cooler would be to stream in data).

thinking about CPS games with 512kb is a foolish idea. 2mb of chip would be the very minimum.

You can load thing per chunks, but even as it is, you'd quickly ran out of memory.

Those game are made to be run from hard drives, not floppies, and machines with soupped up hardware and lots of RAM.

[jayminer]

I think you're thinking of a 1:1 port while I'm thinking of a conversion, as good as possible given the hardware it's converted to. Ofcourse things would have to be cut down, but with careful planning and clever programming and artistry - I'm sure it could still look great and play great.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I think you're thinking of a 1:1 port while I'm thinking of a conversion, as good as possible given the hardware it's converted to. Ofcourse things would have to be cut down, but with careful planning and clever programming and artistry - I'm sure it could still look great and play great.

a 1:1 port on A500 ?

Surely not. The A500 can't even with an accelerator reproduce what even the X68000 version push on screen.

You can't cut down on CPU power, and can't cut on color palette reduce.

just to illustrate, FF CPS1 with a palette reduced to 32 colors for everything, sprites and background would still require 4mb of ram, and a soupped up 68000 running at least at 10mhz.

The A500 is way out of spec.

[Solo Kazuki]

True, only A1200 is able to handle version close to 1:1. And i suppose it should be hard to "vanilla" A1200, at least some FastRAM should be added.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

True, only A1200 is able to handle version close to 1:1. And i suppose it should be hard to "vanilla" A1200, at least some FastRAM should be added.

even a 1200 vanilla will have troubles. It has the grunt but not the memory.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

The original version of DD2 had a bug which caused it to not work on ECS machines.

If there was a bug then this must be true, the game worked just fine on my 1.2 OCS machine.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I played around a bit with trying to get Final Fight down to 32 colors. Sure it's just a picture and doesn't take into account things that could scroll in which might need colors not in the palette currently, and some things could definitely be improved, but I definitely think a great looking version could be achieved with 5 bitplanes.

Pic looks great, Can the A1200 easily update 32/64 colours low res overscan with scrolling at 50fps? Trying to update those characters over the background would be a lot of cpu power??

What software did you use to reduce the colours? What does it look like in 64/128 colours?

[Samurai_Crow]

@RedBlade
The limitation of the A1200 is neither color depth nor CPU. It's RAM. With 4 megs of Fast RAM and a hard drive it can do just fine. Without fast RAM it'll suck donkey balls as badly as a 1 meg ECS system would.

[lordofchaos]

Could always shrink the assets in size by half, would free up lots of RAM and CPU.. If you can't go big then go small.

[d4rk3lf]

I can't get rid of impression, that if Ruff'n'Tumble was strictly an arcade game, many would claim that only AGA could achieve it (with compromises).

[Tigerskunk]

Not if you know a bit about coding for OCS...

[malko]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

Could always shrink the assets in size by half, would free up lots of RAM and CPU.. If you can't go big then go small.

Don't know if it's half but this is what they did for Ninja Warriors. An excellent arcade conversion.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by malko

Don't know if it's half but this is what they did for Ninja Warriors. An excellent arcade conversion.

Ninja Warriors also used the DLS : dynamic loading system. and even with this, they had to reduce x2 the graphics. ninja warriors run with 512kb of ram.

Imagine this system with 2mb of ram chip !

[jayminer]

Originally Posted by redblade

What software did you use to reduce the colours? What does it look like in 64/128 colours?

I did it all in Grafx2, it involved quite a bit of manual work, I started out with combining colors that were similiar and didn't affect the image as much, and after I was down to 32 colors I started changing a few things into another palette to still make it feel atleast quite colorful. I probably spent an hour or two on the conversion, but for sure it could look way better with even more time.

But if something like this was to be used in an actual game I guess it would have to be reduced even more, to allow for things of other palettes to show up on the screen, different enemies and scenery. It would be a fun challenge to try and get everything from the first level into a shared 32 color palette.