Rescue on Fractalus!

[Gryfon]

Still love playing this game to this day. Lucasfilm Games never really looked back when moving to 16-bit formats, except for Masterblazer which I never played. We never saw Amiga versions of The Eidolon or Koronis Rift.

I would love to see an Amiga port of Rescue on Fractalus! - I know very little about programming, but a decent frame-rate should be possible.
There's a home-brew PC version available called "Fractalus!" available from:

https://www.lsdwa.com/projects/fractalus/

It's almost complete - no Jaggies yet.

[VladR]

How would you account for vast scale of HW ?

One one hand you have 512 KB RAM, 7 MHz 68000
On other one you have 512 MB RAM, 85 MHz 68080 with AMMX.

The terrain engine would have to be fully scalable to account for this. Everything from view distance, supporting 4-bit/8-bit/16-bit/32-bit shading, skewing instead of rotation, etc.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Gryfon

I would love to see an Amiga port of Rescue on Fractalus! - I know very little about programming, but a decent frame-rate should be possible.
There's a home-brew PC version available called "Fractalus!" available from:

https://www.lsdwa.com/projects/fractalus/

It's almost complete - no Jaggies yet.

UGH. How horrible and sanitised the PC version looks.

I may call Rescue on Fractalus a glorified tech demo and inferior to games that came out the same year like Novagen's Mercenary, but even I would prefer it if games like those were only played on their original formats and no others, whether emulation be forced on the player or not.

There's just something so lacking about modern ports of old games, they lose their character and the joy of experiencing them on such limited platforms. I mean, I played MasterBlazer on Amiga after many hours of playing it on my Atari 8-Bit, and the extra graphical gunk added on the Amiga version ruined the game, when just the plain simple purity of the Atari 8-Bit graphics and sound enhanced the gameplay.

It's like Mercenary on the Amiga compared to the Atari 8-Bit, it may be faster and smoother, but it just doesn't FEEL right. However, the sequel to Mercenary, Damocles, designed for the 16-bits, DOES, because it utilised the strengths of the 16-bit platforms and had more detail and colour to begin with.

What I'm basically saying is that games that came out on certain platforms should REMAIN on those platforms. I don't care much about the endless stream of inferior conversions of arcade games that were constantly heaped upon home computer users during the 1980s and 1990s for the same reason.

[Gryfon]

Originally Posted by Foebane

UGH. How horrible and sanitised the PC version looks.

I may call Rescue on Fractalus a glorified tech demo and inferior to games that came out the same year like Novagen's Mercenary, but even I would prefer it if games like those were only played on their original formats and no others, whether emulation be forced on the player or not.

There's just something so lacking about modern ports of old games, they lose their character and the joy of experiencing them on such limited platforms. I mean, I played MasterBlazer on Amiga after many hours of playing it on my Atari 8-Bit, and the extra graphical gunk added on the Amiga version ruined the game, when just the plain simple purity of the Atari 8-Bit graphics and sound enhanced the gameplay.

It's like Mercenary on the Amiga compared to the Atari 8-Bit, it may be faster and smoother, but it just doesn't FEEL right. However, the sequel to Mercenary, Damocles, designed for the 16-bits, DOES, because it utilised the strengths of the 16-bit platforms and had more detail and colour to begin with.

What I'm basically saying is that games that came out on certain platforms should REMAIN on those platforms. I don't care much about the endless stream of inferior conversions of arcade games that were constantly heaped upon home computer users during the 1980s and 1990s for the same reason.

I feel the same way about some other games too - Alternate Reality for example. Some games catch that lightning in a bottle. On the other hand I still believe the concept could be done “just right” on an Amiga and it doesn’t need RTG or 120 frames per second. The original Mercenary felt laggy to me then and still does now, I much prefer the MDDClone version; I take nothing away from the remarkable achievement it represents then and now. But not all remakes are soulless, some do capture that original lightning again.