Next game to port?

[jotd]

I already had issues adding 64MB to my A1260. I had to attach the double sided SIMM that went on the SCSI controller with some plastic/metal wire

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by jotd

what about porting MAME properly with gcc 10 and optimizations so at least Pacman and other not too demanding games work on a classic amiga?

That's great idea.
Especially now, when Buffee is close to be released and tested.
With 1GHz and 512/1GB Ram, we should be able to run even more demanding Mame games then PacMan.

Still, it won't be as nearly interesting as ports done for original hardware.

But it's great to have one more option.

[Arne]

I'm not a DOS-gaming person, but one of my favourite games is Master of Orion 1, and I realized a while ago that perhaps, maybe it could've been ported to the venerable A500 (+512 & DF1: ), so I spent a few days mainly looking into the asset side of things (unsure about code size). It really helps that it's not an action game (with large moving enemies etc). Adapting the still-pic GUI to something that the Amiga is good at (rather than attempting a straight port) goes a long way and some improvements might even be possible with PAL mode (extra lines). Much of the game logic happens between turns since it's a TBS game, or when pulling sliders, setting paths.

Page: http://androidarts.com/Amiga/MoOmiga.htm

Conclusion: Does seem just about possible if taking some liberties, but porting the big mass of game mechanics is likely the biggest obstacle. It's mostly behind the scenes database'y manipulation, but there's a whole lot of it. There has been a few opensourcey type attempts.

[d4rk3lf]

Thanks Arne for the nice read, and all tests you made.
We already spoken in this thread about Master of Orion, and I think Master of Magic would be even more suitable.

Although, in all honesty, I don't think any coder would be interested in porting these titles, as the audience for these games is quite small.
Unless, of course, coder himself is a big fan of above games.

What about Master of Orion 2?
That game is on my top 5 games I ever played in my life.
Of course, that game had to be ONLY HD version... maybe even 2-4MB of ram as minimum.
If you are worried if A500 can not display properly MOO2 graphics, let me remind you of Reunion game, that have very similar graphics as Moo2. Even from the design point of view is very similar. You even have these 3D rotating wireframes of the devices you researched as in MOO2.

Other games that I think won't be big trouble for Amiga (except for Ram requirements), are Disciples 1 and 2.
It's sort of the clone of Heroes of M&M, but very simplified, and units don't even move on battle screen... I like it more then Heroes... because it's much simpler to play, but offers same strategic depth as Heroes.

[Girolamo85]

I voted for Shinobi

[sandruzzo]

What about starting some kickstarters' projects, and do what it will be funded?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Although, in all honesty, I don't think any coder would be interested in porting these titles, as the audience for these games is quite small.

I don't know about that. Could be that people who like them are quiet because there isn't much to talk about. But modern games in this vein (Civ, XCOM, etc) are still immensely popular.

[Orcish75]

Voted Shinobi, wasn't really one of my favourite games, but did play it a lot. I'd really like to see Double Dragon, but that's already being done elsewhere, so Shinobi got my vote.


As to the whole "What is stock?" debate, I'd say an A500 with 512K ram as that is what you got when you bought the Batman or Cartoon Classics etc bundle back in the day.


However, I would love to see what the A500 is truly capable of when maxed with 8MB fast and 1MB chip ram. I feel this is a valid config (obviously not stock) as you're not changing anything in the A500, just adding to it. When you put in accelerators or a 2MB Agnus, you're changing the original chipset and it's "not really" an A500 any more.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Orcish75

As to the whole "What is stock?" debate, I'd say an A500 with 512K ram as that is what you got when you bought the Batman or Cartoon Classics etc bundle back in the day.

This is a side note, but I seem to recall some late A500 packages that came with 1MB (not A500+ mind you, standard ones). I can't put my finger on which packages those were though, so maybe I'm mistaken.

Ahh, would be nice to see those old adverts again. I always loved looking at stuff like the Silica adverts and dreaming about my next Amiga

[d4rk3lf]

@mcgeezer, or anyone

How about Green Beret?
I never played arcade version, but spent some hours on my C64 (and never even come close to beat it)...
but I think it's nice game, and I assume it has a lot's of fans (in my env it was almost popular as Kung Fu Master).
C64 port was really good... very responsive, nice gfx, nice sound..
My guess is that A500 could go arcade perfect for this game?
----------------------------

Another idea is:
Express Rider
Again, very good C64 conversion, but looking at these huge moving Bg's. can we assume that A500 perfect port is possible here? Or we need to make compromises?

[roondar]

I'd say a 1:1 port of the C64 version should definitely be doable. As for the Arcade version, my guess would be that a reasonable version can be made for A500 using either Dual Playfield (and accepting the lower colour count), using some form of Sprite layer or even going the Toki route and using a small screen and brute force to get the parallax done.

[sandruzzo]

Like I said many times, a little bit of fast ram will be like candy. What will change Amiga stocks' heart is using faster cpu, I never liked that for gaming.

- OCS-ECS 1mb chip-ram + 512k fast ram
- Aga 2mb chip mem + 1/2 mb fast ram

Thats will suffice.

[skan]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Like I said many times, a little bit of fast ram will be like candy. What will change Amiga stocks' heart is using faster cpu, I never liked that for gaming.

- OCS-ECS 1mb chip-ram + 512k fast ram
- Aga 2mb chip mem + 1/2 mb fast ram

Thats will suffice.

I'd say more 512+512 regarding OCS/ECS anyway.
I agree about AGA and faster CPUs in general.

That said, I think games should always target the lowest common denominator and add features (additional music/sfx, gfx, whatever) on expanded machines IMHO.

[RoniWorlds]

That would be something to play on the Amiga in Raiden or Raiden II.

[lmimmfn]

I think Rastan could have a decent A500 port. AGA wise i just watched a Prehistoric Isle longplay, very cool shoot em up, would be tight but AGA machine with some fastram could do it

[PortuguesePilot]

There are PC games contemporary to the Amiga (1994-ish) that would have a solid place on the Amiga's library.

Prehistorik 2, Pinball Dreams 2, The Blues Brothers 2 - Jukebox Adventures, that sort of thing.

The conversions would have to be based on reverse engineering and then programming in 68K ASM to be any good at base configs (stock 1MB A500 or stock A1200), which seems to be a herculean task, if a feasible one at that...

[ExiE]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Like I said many times, a little bit of fast ram will be like candy. What will change Amiga stocks' heart is using faster cpu, I never liked that for gaming.

- OCS-ECS 1mb chip-ram + 512k fast ram
- Aga 2mb chip mem + 1/2 mb fast ram

Thats will suffice.

Making games for lowest configuration slowed down progress. More demanding games make people upgrade their computers. It worked quite well for x86 PCs after all.

Anyway if there should be minimum A1200 configuration with FAST RAM it should be 4MB. How many expansions offered only 1/2 MB of fast ram? Most memory cards had possibility expand the fast ram up to 4/8/9 MB.

[RichAplin]

Hi,
[ sorry to dredge up Final Fight again, I know you were trying to get away from it, but.. ] Hacking the existing A500 FF code to make it a significantly more playable/fun/authentic game would not be that hard; a lot easier than starting coding something from scratch - not a trivial job by any means, but one would be able to focus on fixing the rather tedious enemy AI and so on. There's a ton of stuff in that engine (background loading/decompression of sprites, dynamic memory defragging, etc) that was hard work at the time and would still be hard work to do today.
It did as much with the extra 512k of a 1MB A500 [if present] as it reasonably could - IIRC I used 128k for a 16bit ->16bit lookup table for flipping sprites, the rest for buffering etc. If I recall, on a 1MB amiga you would actually see different (larger variety) of baddies during the game because it was possible to keep more gfx in ram at the same time, and if it couldn't allocate space to load a new one (while you were playing) it fell back to reusing a baddie that was already in ram. However, that stuff is kinda cosmetic and not that important compared to making the gameplay mechanic feel really good.

Anyway.. personally I'd like to see someone hack the original FF code and make it a more fun game

[jotd]

Richard you are right. I have enhanced an ECS game to AGA but I used the source code.

So if you still have the source code it could be much easier for someone to do something

[skan]

Originally Posted by Arne

...
Page: http://androidarts.com/Amiga/MoOmiga.htm
...

Whoa Arne, what a nice analysis! Kudos!
Offtopic: I love you pixel works, those Amiga case mock-ups are just awesome!