Turrican 2 MS-DOS AGA conversion

[Alpha One]

Just came across this conversion of my all time favourite game! :-)
Wow, really impressing, plays very smooth. Hope this will get a final release some day!

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

Everything's ok... except intro. Ouch!
It's completely different style than in original and, to be honest, I don't like it.
And also, btw, original Turrican sprite looks better than this Franken-monster in tin can.

I warned that the intro wasn’t great although I wouldn’t say it’s a different style - it’s just worse artwork. It’s a shame. It would have been nice if it pushed AGA Amigas capabilities some more.

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by AMike

• The beam upgrade doesn't work yet.
• The fish in the second level move a bit too fast and the water animation is missing when Turrican dives into the water.
• I'm not sure, but I felt that some enemies needed a little more firepower than in the OCS version. I didn't find that negative at all, but it was my impression.

Yes the beam isn’t upgradable yet.
The fish was a quick addition without proper behaviour. I’ll come back to it later.
The DOS version doesn’t have the water over the players head when you go in a waterfall. I may add it anyway.
I’m not sure if you meant the enemies are too tough or too easy but either way they will need some more balancing once the player can take damage and die.

[Zarnal]

@Muzza

Hello,

You haven't changed the graphics but have you changed the resolution ?

Is the original resolution of the PC game 640 * 480 or lower ?

Have the graphics of the Amiga version been reduced (the question was asked on a French forum and i don't know what to answer) ?

Thank you.

[roondar]

As far as I know, the DOS version uses either 320x200 or 320x240 for it's GFX, in 256 colours. But Muzza will know for sure

[Wesker]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

Everything's ok... except intro. Ouch!
It's completely different style than in original and, to be honest, I don't like it.
And also, btw, original Turrican sprite looks better than this Franken-monster in tin can.

What's the point of having the PC MS-DOS version converted to the Amiga if people are persistently going to dislike its features and/or request changing them? That's what the original 1991 OCS/ECS Amiga version is for. I'd rather this new homebrew AGA Amiga version stays as much faithful to the PC MS-DOS version as it can be, otherwise it would completely defy the point of the conversion at all.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Wesker

What's the point of having the PC MS-DOS version converted to the Amiga if people are persistently going to dislike its features and/or request changing them?

Will summarize: because WE are AMIGANS, we have the original and we gotta have it BETTER ^^

(personally i dislike the dos version of the main sprite too but since is not my game i usually abstain to say it)

[Mixel]

I’m in the “if you’re removing key things from a port it should be optional” camp.

The entire game’s graphics aren’t better, it’s a creature by creature, tile by tile personal choice. It doesn’t matter if he defaulted to the Amiga Turrican you’d still keep running into really weird, potentially dumb looking enemies. It’s a different pixelling style and sometimes less detailed / chunkier despite having more colours.

Look at the spaceship levels, haha. The absolute weirdness of the MS-DOS version is one of its key features for me. We already have the Amiga version, which is already what the overwhelming majority would consider the best version. It doesn’t get improved mixing two different styles in a weird mashup.

—
This project is amazing and really impressed at all the progress that’s being made.

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Zarnal

You haven't changed the graphics but have you changed the resolution ?

Is the original resolution of the PC game 640 * 480 or lower ?

Have the graphics of the Amiga version been reduced (the question was asked on a French forum and i don't know what to answer) ?

The gameplay area is 304 x 192, this matches the original Amiga version and the MS-DOS version. I haven't modified any art in any way.

[Quagliarulo]

Hello!
Out of curiosity, how exactly does fast RAM help in achieving steady 50Hz screen updates? Do you use the CPU for blitting?

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Quagliarulo

Hello!
Out of curiosity, how exactly does fast RAM help in achieving steady 50Hz screen updates? Do you use the CPU for blitting?

No CPU blitting.
Put simply if you only have Chip RAM, the CPU and the blitter (plus other systems) are all competing to access the same RAM, leading to CPU delays.
With Fast RAM, the CPU can get on with doing something else whilst the blitter is doing all those 8 bitplane blits. (and remember that the blitter is the same speed on the A1200 as the A500 - meaning we have to blit twice the amount of data as the original Turrican).

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Muzza

No CPU blitting.
Put simply if you only have Chip RAM, the CPU and the blitter (plus other systems) are all competing to access the same RAM, leading to CPU delays.
With Fast RAM, the CPU can get on with doing something else whilst the blitter is doing all those 8 bitplane blits. (and remember that the blitter is the same speed on the A1200 as the A500 - meaning we have to blit twice the amount of data as the original Turrican).

Yeah, even with 4x fetch mode that's still a lot to do. It's quite cool to see it run at full speed with Fast RAM though, there's not that many 50Hz games in 256 colours on the system

[Muzza]

It’s actually using 2x fetch because I need hardware sprites.

[roondar]

Makes sense. And makes it even more impressive

[Zarnal]

Hello,

little issue with a fish on level 1-2.

And thank you for your additional information.

[Muzza]

Originally Posted by Zarnal

little issue with a fish on level 1-2.

Stuck fish and bees are not uncommon in the original game, but I was planning on going through all the spawn placements and shifting any that aren't quite right to 'unstick' them.

[dlfrsilver]

I absolutely love this AGA version of Turrican 2. This shows we can have great games in 256 colors AGA and 50hz.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Muzza

Stuck fish and bees are not uncommon in the original game, but I was planning on going through all the spawn placements and shifting any that aren't quite right to 'unstick' them.

In the PC version too? Lazy gits!

[vroom6sri]

WOW! I finally got around to giving this a go and it looks and plays great on my A1200 ACA1230/56.

Thank you so much for your efforts.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Muzza

I've uploaded the latest version to the zone and to dropbox.

New features:
-The story intro plays at the start (including the terrible writing and dodgy character art)
-Level 1 Boss now working.
-Level 2 is working, including secret cave and the two bosses, but the last boss is missing some features.
-Bounce weapon works (but has no upgrades).
-Various bug fixes.
-Controls modified to be closer to original Amiga game.

Not yet done:
-Still no option to choose the character sprite.
-Still no CD32 pad support.
-You still cannot die.
-Weapon upgrades are lost between levels.

It has been quite exhausting getting this far. This game really has a lot of unique features, no enemy is just a clone, they all do something different. You don't really notice it as much playing when they all die so quickly, but writing the code for all the enemies, weapons and map features really revealed it for me.
An uncomfortable amount of time has gone just on getting the loading transitions working with audio/display/disk routines playing nicely together. I thought I had it all nailed, but just today found there is still a brief display bug transitioning from level 1 to 2, but only if you play do a proper playful (it doesn't happen if I cheat to skip to the end of levels)

Anyway, please let me know if it works, or doesn't work. I'm interested to know if there are still problems on 040 machines or not. I did make some potential fixes, but I really have no idea whether they worked. I thought I'd found a problem with the music on 040s using WinUAE, but then found that three different versions of WinUAE (including two that were the same version but 32bit/64bit) all gave different results, so I don't think its something that is easy to find under emulation.

I don't know how much Fast RAM this one requires, but the program size has gone up significantly. One of the next tasks is to make it load code per-level instead of being a monolithic exe which will bring RAM use back down.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy it. Feedback is appreciated.

Impressive work, no lag on stock A1200 with 8mb fast ram, runs great.