New game: Droid Special Edition (Atari STE conversion)

[junosix]

In 1992, ST Format magazine published a coverdisk game called Droid, a decent run-and-gun style platformer with Metroid-ish elements. A nice game but I always thought it would be better if it used the extra blitter, hardware scrolling and audio features of the STE. A few years ago I did just that and from scratch wrote an STE-specific version with full screen 8-way scrolling, sampled sound, and music, and came up with Droid Special Edition.

I thought I'd have a crack at porting it over to the Amiga - so I did!

31.07.24 - final version 1.0 released. The game is PAL only, and some fast Amigas may need CPU caches to be disabled to avoid corrupted graphics.

10.08.24 - added trained version by ABG.

Controls are:

Control type 1
Left/Right - move left/right
Up - jump
Down - crouch
Down then Up - power jump
Button 1 - shoot weapon
Space or Button 2 - enter doors
Alt or Button 2 - cycle collected weapons
P - pause/show map
Esc - quit to title screen

Control type 2
Left/Right - move left/right
Button 2 - jump
Down - crouch
Down+Button 2 - power jump
Button 1 - shoot weapon
Space or Up - enter doors
Alt or Up+Button 2 - cycle collected weapons
P - pause/show map
Esc - quit to title screen

[ Show youtube player ]

beta2 changes:
- boots on Kickstart 1.x machines
- stop drive motor spinning after boot
- fixed map screen not always centered
- fixed game ending animation speed too fast on A1200
- slight musical tweaks

beta3 changes:
- should run at correct framerate on faster machines
- fixed clamping of player energy when losing a life

beta4 changes:
- revised control system, added option for two control layouts
- fixed incorrect position of player location on map

final version 1.0:
- added Esc to quit ingame

[ransom1122]

I've never come across this game before, does seem like a wise desicion to port it to Amiga as it seems fun...

My only gripe would be the having to press down and up for power jump. It's a bit tedious...

Other then that, well done and great work

[Thorham]

Very nice

[DisasterIncarna]

looks nice, its 1 of those games where i cant say its like any 1 other game we already have, the droid part reminds me of The Killing Game Show, the map side of things reminds me of Turrican, the visual theme/colours kinda reminds me of PP Hammer and probably many other games.

Point is it looks new/different to what we have yet has detached similarities to various games, cant think of any 1 game its similar to, as i mentioned above i would have to rattle off a long list of games parts of it resembles.

[kamelito]

Kudos

[alexh]

Looks great. Thanks for porting it. It would be nice to read a "diary" of the ST->Amiga conversion process. Helps you wrote the original and have the source but would still very interesting story.

Maybe support 2nd fire button for jump?

I wonder if you could go one step further? Make an AGA version in dual playfield mode so the background can parallax?

[zzbylu]

A bit of gameplay:
[ Show youtube player ]

[jotd]

great port! It looks smooth and has this "back in the days" vibe.

I can help with the system/disk spinning issues. And whdload slave if needed.

[Amigajay]

Looks very nice! Thanks for porting it!

I hope someone can help you with the disk issues.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jotd

I can help with the system/disk spinning issues. And whdload slave if needed.

I think it has been noted as working with the WB3.1_1Mb generic slave.

[Cobe]

Originally Posted by junosix

Presented here as a beta version, it is 100% playable but I'm stumped at making a bootable version that works on Kickstart 1.x. Runs fine off a hard disk with Kickstart 1.3 but when I make a bootable disk it seems it works with anything with 512K ChipRAM but only on Kickstart 2.0+. Can only assume I need some library files and have tried copying them from Workbench 1.3 but it makes no difference - would very much appreciate some help from anyone with the answer.

Doesnt boot at all on ks1.3? Have you formatted disk with OFS? And did "Install DF0:" to make it bootable? FFS is 2.0+ if I'm remembering correctly.

[junosix]

Thanks for the encouraging feedback!

I agree that the down-then-up action for the power jump takes some getting used to, though it's how the original coverdisk game did it and I wanted to stay true to that. Did think about using the second fire button for jump but assigning it to act as a substitute for most of the keyboard commands means the game can be played without having to lunge towards the computer all the time.

Will put some thought into adding support for CD32 pads though so all of the functions can be carried out with it. Cool idea about AGA/dual playfield too, it's not totally out of the question to do something like that.

It would be cool to write something about the process, but I tend to just zone in to a blur of coding until things are done so don't keep much in the way of notes to look back on!

zzbylu - thanks for the video, it's great to see someone play it and watch them learn the level layout in realtime. I'm assuming you're running it on an accelerated (at least A1200?) configuration as the framerate seems to go between 50/25fps. I'll change it so that it waits another frame if it's built up the next frame too quickly, which should sort that issue.

Cobe - you might be on the right track with the formatting of the disk, I'll have a look. FFS indeed if that's all it is

Otherwise jotd - that would be incredible if you could give me a hand with the disk stuff. I'll send you a PM later if I don't manage to nail it. Good to hear it works with a generic whdload slave but happy to see a custom one get done if needed.

[manicx]

One of my favorite STE games. Although I will say that I like a liiiitle bit more the STE audio. Great port!

[gingerbeardman]

Impressive to not only rewrite this from scratch but also to port it to Amiga

Bravo!

[TCD]

Looks really nice I'll try to give it a try this weekend

[swoslover]

Impressive. Lovely to see new games.

[offog]

On 1.3, it's getting stuck in dos.library's Open("mod.title"), because you've already turned interrupts and DMA off by that point in the code. Can you load up all the data files before doing the hardware setup?

[TCD]

HOL entry: https://amiga.abime.net/games/view/d...pecial-edition

[Pyromania]

Very nice, thanx so much!

[junosix]

Noticed that both the music files shared a lot of samples so I was able to combine them (and fix a couple of things in the music while I was at it) to take up a lot less space, which let me include them as part of the main code instead of loading them from disk, boots on a Kickstart 1.x A500 now. Sorted the drive motor spinning too.

There was a small issue with the map screen not always being centered and the game ending ran too fast on an A1200, now fixed.

Tested on both A500 and A1200 configurations, toyed with getting it to work on NTSC but the graphic corruptions were too frequent, so it's resolutely PAL-only. Success on non-standard wild and weird configurations will vary. Referring to it as beta2 incase anyone finds anything egregious but otherwise I'm pretty sure this counts as a final version. Have updated the link in the first post with the new download.