Turrican 2 MS-DOS AGA conversion

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Alpha One

The remake is fucking awesome! Would be cool to have this engine running a totally new Turrican like game for the Amiga.

Find me a dedicated artist and skilled musician and I'd love to do it.

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Zarnal

i had a freeze in 2-2 ( the part with the leaves and the wind to climb on the platforms. There is a small passage on the right to recover the objects and after a few moments, there had a freeze ( pic 1, moment of freeze ).

I've tried and tried to reproduce, but it can't be something that happens every time. If anyone else encounters it, please let me know.

[Muzza]

Because Palettes were mentioned, I thought I'd share a 'behind the scenes' on the tool I use to make the game.

The palettes are all automatically generated from the assets. Each level builds up a dependency list of sprites, images, sound effects etc. The palette code examines the sprites for all levels, taking into account that some will be displayed as BOBs and others as Hardware Sprites (and so need specialised placement in the palettes). Sprites that are reused across multiple worlds need to share the same palette positions across every world they appear in. So if you look at the palette in each world, there will be some common entries and other regions that differ from one level to the next.

I did it this way because with a 256 colour palette (some are 128 colour) it was becoming a logistical nightmare to manually manage all the colour indices.

[jotd]

even in ECS it's very difficult not to have tools like that. That one seems very professional.

I personally use custom python scripts. I fix some palette entries, and rely on the PNGs of the ripped assets to fill in the blanks. Then the raw assets (bitplane BOB & sprite data) are generated, with mirrorring if needed.

Same for sounds: I amplify each sound to the max and provide replay volume for each sample in a table (no9 advised me again maximum replay volume to maximize SNR)

The scripts generate a lot of .s files linked with the main manual file. I prefer python scripts because there's less work, and a GUI is rarely needed for me.

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by Muzza

New release - sorry it has taken a while, but this one does deliver more.

Originally Posted by jotd

the number of colors & palette is sooooo great.

amazing, a true gem is coming out
the gfx sooooo clean too

tried to explore into levels, secrets and bosses seems are all already there

picky things :

-if you listen the intro music with headphones, seems something not right, just at the beginning of the tune

-you can walk in some zones that should require the gyroscope to access

-about the main sprite walking itself, seems that it 'stumbles' during each walking frames cycle;
i can't explain better, it could be some little frame junction issue?

[roondar]

This game is getting better every day, love the parallax effect too

[Stevo2k]

Some parallax on lv1 one would be great too...not overdone or too busy though.

[vroom6sri]

This is great.

I had a quick blast on the WHDload version yesterday.

Do you want us to specifically feedback any bugs/issues/observations to (hopefully) help with the fine-tuning or have you just released these versions so we can get a feel for the amazing work you’re doing?

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by vroom6sri

Do you want us to specifically feedback any bugs/issues/observations to (hopefully) help with the fine-tuning or have you just released these versions so we can get a feel for the amazing work you’re doing?

Yes please. There is a lot to test and compare against the original for one man. So any feedback on problems or differences is much appreciated.


I don't aim to make everything a pixel perfect conversion (that would be next to impossible without the source code), but I want it to 'feel' like it.

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Stevo2k

Some parallax on lv1 one would be great too...not overdone or too busy though.

I had given thought to this in the past, and concluded it wasn't going to work.
The Parallax on World 2 works because the tiles and bobs use just under 128 colours, so I have the 8th bitplane for a mask (to mark the areas where the parallax needs to be). This doesn't work on World 1 because they use about 175 colours for tiles and bobs.

On World 3 I use hardware sprites for the parallax effects. Each level in World 3 has a slightly different method of implementing the parallax. One combines copper colour changes and multiple sprite changes but only scrolls horizontally. One is a simple repeating pattern but scrolls 8 ways. One is an animated repeated pattern, but only scrolls horizontally.


On World 1 I need hardware sprites 0/1 for the main player and 2/4 power line effect. Without them, the framerate would suffer. I have hardware sprites 3 and 5 available, but due to Amiga hardware limitations they would be 3 colour only, and have to share the palette of player (and not even the same 3 colours). Then the final nail in the coffin is that you cannot set up a display so that sprites 0/1/2/4 appear in front of the playfield, whilst 3/5 appear behind the playfield.

If I sacrificed some colours in World 1 (merged some together), I could maybe do what I do in World 2 and have a 1 colour parallax background. Personally I don't feel World 1 needs it as much as World 2 did. I like the pure sky colours.

Anyway, never say never, but as you can appreciate, it is not trivial to do.

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by Muzza

Find me a dedicated artist and skilled musician and I'd love to do it.

If You like conversions, then maybe Rendering Ranger R2?

[ Show youtube player ]

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by kremiso

-if you listen the intro music with headphones, seems something not right, just at the beginning of the tune

I can't hear anything that sounds wrong myself.

[wairnair]

Bit of feedback..

On the first level there's a 1-up after climbing the black warrior (I guess). After picking up that 1-up the left audio channel kind of broke and never recovered. It was heavy digital distortion sound that reminds me of playing a random chunk of memory as audio.
This was under WinUAE, CD32 config, 64MB fast, 030+MMU, playing from whdload.
I'll hopefully be able to try the demo on real hw this weekend.

Thanks for your work, I'm absolutely loving everything about this port.

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by Muzza

I can't hear anything that sounds wrong myself.

and you are right sorry
i have tested again, all ok

the other day i was testing different memory configurations, prolly i've messed up winuae

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by wairnair

On the first level there's a 1-up after climbing the black warrior (I guess). After picking up that 1-up the left audio channel kind of broke and never recovered. It was heavy digital distortion sound that reminds me of playing a random chunk of memory as audio.
This was under WinUAE, CD32 config, 64MB fast, 030+MMU, playing from whdload.

This sounds unusual. I doesn't happen for me, but if anyone experiences similar, and especially if they capture it on video, please let me know.


When it comes to sound effect problems the most likely culprit would be a problem with looping sounds, like the lightning weapon or the sound effect that goes with the screen reveal when you die and respawn. So it is useful to know if these things were associated with the bug.

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by Muzza

Find me a dedicated artist and skilled musician and I'd love to do it.

I’d happily ape Huelsbeck’s style and write some kick ass Turrican tuneage

[TjLaZer]

Tried it on my A1200 and it would not run. After a while I figuired out I needed to add the PAL tool type. Since the game doesn't use the whole screen can you make it run in NTSC?

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

Tried it on my A1200 and it would not run. After a while I figuired out I needed to add the PAL tool type. Since the game doesn't use the whole screen can you make it run in NTSC?

This came up earlier in the thread. It is on my list to look at. It will likely result in the same problems the original had, which is that everything would run a little faster and be more likely to experience slow-downs (because there is less available time per frame).

[Muzza]

I decided to have a quick go at getting NTSC working, and generally things are ok, although it does slow down in the boss fights as I feared it would.
Technical question:
I've struggled to get good values for vertical DIWSTART/STOP. On PAL I use 0x2C/0x2C. For NTSC I started with 0x2C/0xF4, but it results in things being cut-off. If I reduce DIWSTART too much, I get strange crashes in copper lists under certain circumstances. I haven't investigated this in great detail yet, but I have found that if I use 0x20/0x4, it does seem to work in WinUAE and without cut-off.
I haven't got a good understanding on how these values work exactly, so can anyone confirm, is this an acceptable display window setup for NTSC?

[ross]

Originally Posted by Muzza

I haven't got a good understanding on how these values work exactly, so can anyone confirm, is this an acceptable display window setup for NTSC?

Yes, acceptable.
Better values should theoretically be 0x1e/0x02 because they should better center the display.