Could Shaun Southern have come close to FM Towns Afterburner port?

[ImmortalA1000]

Simple question, seemingly absurd, but looking at everything being thrown around in the best Lotus II tracks and then watching how wobbly the game engine is for the FM Towns port what is actually possible for an expert scaling bitmap coder? Let's assume the 360 degree roll routine is not implemented and stick with 45 degree left and right banking only for sake of simplicity. Reality is if that was missing but everything else in the Weebee/Activision was done to Shaun Southern standards then who really would have cared?

There is no great Afterburner style game engine on Amiga to see what sort of pure bespoke 68k and OCS working side by side could achieve like Lotus II for Outrun and Drivin Force for Powerdrift done well.

The FM Towns looks great in screen shots, but it is only a 386/16 with sprites not blitter for assistance. In screenshots you think it will be as good as the Saturn/32X ports but it is nothing like those. Ditto for x68000, bugger all ground objects compared to 32X. In some ways the Weebee games version is surprising (landing on road to refuel) BUT the PD quality graphics are a turn off, but the FM Towns version wobbles in the same way!

Note to mods, I am very sorry this is probably the wrong place for this question.

[saimon69]

Well, i know that after seeing Power drift running in the A1200 made me think a decent Galaxy Force port might be possible on AGA, with less sprites of course but more similar to the original

[Galahad/FLT]

Shock wave from Digital Magic gave a hint of what could have been

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well, i know that after seeing Power drift running in the A1200 made me think a decent Galaxy Force port might be possible on AGA, with less sprites of course but more similar to the original

Drivin' Force on the Amiga proved how terrible Activision Sega conversions were turning out I always thought back then. But I already knew ZZKJ was an average ST coder at best and his Amiga coding was truly god awful so I never ever bothered with Amiga or ST Power Drift....plus Activision's 16bit conversions were always crap technically and artistically, Uncle Art was a lazy tonedeaf TWAT! who should have been on the dole getting unemployment.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Shock wave from Digital Magic gave a hint of what could have been

That engine might be good but artistic choices make it difficult to tell visually. I did have that game mainly to check out the graphics in action but it was pretty unplayable lol. As bad as most people think Shadow of the Beast 1 is in graphics vs playability.

What we needed was the Weebee Games NTSC port of After Burner but with all the rubbish PD quality hand converted bitmaps replaced (simple enough with tools from even a decade ago) but also it needs to be drawing 2 to 3 times as many ground objects and be scaled/speeded up 2 to 3 times faster. So probably looking at 5 times faster or 500% better coding talent in total. The X68000 version has even more spartan ground objects drawn than the FM Towns version.

Of course if it worked on CDTV in 1mb you get arcade music from CDDA tracks as an option with a bit more DMA time for the game engine perhaps?

The Megadrive conversion is definitely possible I reckon on any Amiga with the best of the best on the case back in 1990s, if you apply Lotus II levels of OCS coding magic to the problem (with some compromises on tilt angles perhaps) it doesn't look impossible given just how amazing Lotus II runs on an NTSC Amiga vs more choppy Megadrive conversion of OutRun/Turbo OutRun. It does actually look like 400-500% better chipset/CPU utilization going on compared to Weebee Games After Burner.

Oddly the landing on the road to re-fuel bit looks more impressive for chipset bandwidth utilization than the rest of the game before it, that bit just needs some tweaking to bitmaps used perhaps. Will have to check out the canyon level now.

[saimon69]

Hey, wanted to do a Power Drift restoration project but sources are lost, and am trying HARD to convince sandruzzo to do a scaler kart game with a similar engine, but to no avail...