Trojan arcade Amiga port

[albino]

Originally Posted by jotd

In 1986, arcade machines were really beginning to be monsters. Remember: A500 was made in 1987.

OCS is 1985...

Originally Posted by jotd

Remember Outrun... So AGA is the best choice for those. The conversion looks great.

Shadow of the best looks more impressive, for exemple.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by albino

Even a 1986 game cannot get an ocs port rather than a 1992 aga hardware?!.

Of course it can. This game was also released on NES.

Its just that the author is more comfortable with AGA which seems understandable. But that doesn't prevent anyone to make an OCS port.

[albino]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Its just that the author is more comfortable with AGA which seems understandable

Of course AGA offers better technical choices, i'm a bit too OCS fan, that's all, never the less well done to him.

[jotd]

I'm tired about people claiming that such or such title can be done in ECS or OCS

Simple steps to make up your mind efficiently:

1) Check hardware spec of arcade machine vs hardware spec of A500.
2) Code a ECS game which respects the arcade graphics

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'm tired about people claiming that such or such title can be done in ECS or OCS

I'd book it under 'looks can be deceiving' (as in 'This looks like it should be possible with only 512k RAM and an OCS chipset').

That being said: Well done skyzoo73 Looking forward to more updates

[logo]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'm tired about people claiming that such or such title can be done in ECS or OCS

Simple steps to make up your mind efficiently:

1) Check hardware spec of arcade machine vs hardware spec of A500.
2) Code a ECS game which respects the arcade graphics

So true ! I wonder if they are the same ones who refused AGA machines, because as they say: "AGA isn't powerful enough and it's better to stay with OCS/ECS Amiga computers". Now they're raging each time someone is making a great AGA game. It's a lot of fun to hear them crying.

[Predseda]

I have never played Trojan, but looking at the video, I see a really hillarious aspect:

Flashing carpet on the floor with big sign "JUMP" to allow the player kill the enemy

[jotd]

I mean, if it's not too much hassle to go ECS well yes, as there are a lot of ECS users that dug out their A500 to add ACA or pistorm, but sometimes you have to be realistic

Arcade games often have layers of parallax with a lot more than 8 colors, and don't use copper tricks to change colors on the fly. Great ECS games are coded around amiga hardware.
They also use 8x8 tile engines that doesn't fare well with the blitter which requires at least 16 bit width, and myriads of 8 or 16 color sprites that blitter can't cope with (even in AGA sometimes) and sprites can't display either. It's not just a question of fast CPU.

With AGA, you can use dual playfield with 16 colors on each playfield. Combine that with copper tricks, combined sprites with individual palettes, and you can try to approach arcade games of that era.

[Predseda]

AGA is something that should have been released around 1988 to begin with...

[jotd]

consoles/arcade machines and amigas are different beasts. It's like with an emulator, you need more power to achieve the same thing on a different machine.

Most Arcade machines weren't capable of HAM8 or even OCS HAM6, bitmaps, 3D, but that's not why they were designed. Most of them were monsters of multi-layer tiles & sprites.

[skyzoo73]

Thanks for the encouraging messages folks!

For Trojan, initially i tried to do it for OCS/ECS but the compromises were too many, and I wouldn't have liked it. Keep in mind that for the colors alone I'm using a 128 color palette + 16 for the parallax background, plus wanting musics as faithful as possible to the originals, I preferred to have really big but quality .mods. And anyway with all the character animations, sounds, etc I am already living at the 2 mega chipram limit, so anyway a version for stock ocs/ecs, would not be possible.

[Toni Galvez]

AGA machines are the true powerhouse for this arcades.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

consoles/arcade machines and amigas are different beasts. It's like with an emulator, you need more power to achieve the same thing on a different machine.

Most Arcade machines weren't capable of HAM8 or even OCS HAM6, bitmaps, 3D, but that's not why they were designed. Most of them were monsters of multi-layer tiles & sprites.

in fact they can do more than HAM6 or HAM8 at 60fps with 3 or 4 layers and tons of sprites.

a machine like Rygar arcade push more than 800 colors on screen.

[jotd]

which makes me think of another limitation on the amiga.

Arcade machines often have the ability to flip sprites horizontally. Amiga can't do that, so we have to duplicate the data or flip on the fly

For Karate Champ I could not flip on the fly as both directions are needed for all characters simultaneously. With all move tiles, I could not go below 1MB I had to require 2MB for that game... even if those tiles only needed 2 bitplanes and that clever color palette allowed to display red & white with the same bitmap data...

a machine like Rygar arcade push more than 800 colors on screen.

impressive for a 1986 game! Sometimes it's just wasteful to have all those colors, though. Xevious could display 64+ colors but I could reduce colors to 16+16 dual playfield + sprites (total 30 colors max) without any noticeable difference.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

which makes me think of another limitation on the amiga.

Arcade machines often have the ability to flip sprites horizontally. Amiga can't do that, so we have to duplicate the data or flip on the fly

For Karate Champ I could not flip on the fly as both directions are needed for all characters simultaneously. With all move tiles, I could not go below 1MB I had to require 2MB for that game... even if those tiles only needed 2 bitplanes and that clever color palette allowed to display red & white with the same bitmap data...

this also. Since flipping is too slow, you need the frames left, right, up, down.
it raises up the RAM size used.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Predseda

AGA is something that should have been released around 1988 to begin with...

Reading this, I asked myself a question, that has never been asked:
"Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?"
--------

@skyzoo73

Great job bro!

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Reading this, I asked myself a question, that has never been asked:
"Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?"
--------

@skyzoo73

Great job bro!

[skyzoo73]

short answer: no.

[Predseda]

If AGA was released years earlier, people would not have been still complaining like "make the game for OCS, AGA is not classic enough"

I am absolutely satisfied with Trojan being AGA exclusive.

[Retro1234]

Looks good

Didn't Final Fight only store the sprites flipped in memory when there was 1mb but you can't even notice a difference on 512kb - I might be wrong about this

Another trick I heard is you store the sprites in alternative directions so the it works out about even.