/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.561643]

Amiga thread...go!

[Anonymous No.561662]

>>561643
>Amiga
>Genesis
>both 68000 machines
The idea of doing a Sonic port on the 'Miga sounds highly cool

[Anonymous No.561672]

Best artillery game of all time.

[Anonymous No.561673]

>>561662
It would, but I'm not sure how well the Amiga could pull off that super-fast scrolling since the method by which you move the screen around is much clunkier than the Genesis.

[Anonymous No.561678]

>>561673
Elaborate?

[Anonymous No.561685]

>>561678
Pretty much all consoles since the NES scroll the same way: Set up tile data similar to ASCII characters on a PC and adjust the X/Y registers

Amiga doesn't work this way. Instead you have a bunch of pointers to each scanline that have to be updated when you reach the end of the scroll data (which doesn't automatically wrap like on consoles).

[Anonymous No.561686]

[Anonymous No.561692]

>>561673
>>561662
In general it would have to be totally rewritten since the Amiga doesn't have anything in common with the Mega Drive except the CPU. The most you could recycle from the original source code would be algorithms for enemy AI or whatever.

[Anonymous No.561706]

Heyyy I remember I had a sci-fi top-down shooting game for the Amiga. You shot lots of freaky shit for a while and then a giant red bug would come out of nowhere and start chasing you around, I guess it was a boss but I never beat it. Anyone know what game it could be?

[Anonymous No.561715]

>>561692
Also of course stock Amiga 500/1200 models have either 512k or 1MB of RAM while Mega Drive games range from 256k (I think) all the way to 6MB, thus you'd have to be doing quite a lot of disk access.

[Anonymous No.561716]

>>561678
I think he means the VDP and Amiga's chipsets both cater to different things, and while Amiga's scrolling isn't the slowest out of the 80's machines (PCs didn't have chipsets at all), it would be an hard task to move the screen at a certain speed pixel wise. I think I read you have a set speed for scrolling and you're pretty much stuck with that.

[Anonymous No.561729]

>>561716
>I think he means the VDP and Amiga's chipsets both cater to different things

The VDP was done on the same basic design philosophy as Nintendo's consoles, which was on using tile graphics ala arcade machines.

Amiga is a computer, so it was designed with a somewhat different set of priorities. Of course since the design team consisted of Jay Miner and other ex-Atari people, it works much more like the Atari 8-bit computers than the NES or Mega Drive.

[Anonymous No.561732]

>>561678
The Amiga could do very "fast" scrolling, look at Uridium 2, which from a technical standpoint was at least 0.333 times faster than what the Genesis did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjprwy6SoJM

However, due to the Amiga500 being slightly slower I would suggest to have an Amiga1200 to have Sega Genesis games. Now that would be awesome.

Seriously, I would like Vectorman to be playable for the Amiga system.

Note that many console games aren't as brilliantly programmed as games for the Amiga were. But it wasn't really as strong as the Genesis and SNES in comparation. Having 80 simultaniously rendered sprites moving smoothly was fucking magic in the early 90's.

So technical archivements rely solely on programming on that regard. It might be possible to have Sonic for the 500 if you do it in binary asm.

[Anonymous No.561737]

>>561732
>But it wasn't really as strong as the Genesis and SNES in comparation. Having 80 simultaniously rendered sprites moving smoothly was fucking magic in the early 90's

Consider of course that the Amiga predates the Genesis by three years and the SNES by five, which in computing terms is an eternity.

[Anonymous No.561740]

>>561643
I read that as "Amiga ready... GO!" in the style of the Go-Busters rollcall. What is wrong with me?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBFuqUdhT7g

[Anonymous No.561743]

>>561732
>It might be possible to have Sonic for the 500 if you do it in binary asm

OTR, most games on the Amiga/MD/SNES were coded in straight assembly language since it was the only way to get acceptable performance out of them.

[Anonymous No.561753]

>>561737
The original 500 was rather obsolete by the start of the 90s and they had the 3000/4000 models during that time, although those never succeeded in the UK where most people continued using 500s with no hard disk to the end in the middle of the decade.

[Anonymous No.561762]

>>561729
>Amiga is a computer, so it was designed with a somewhat different set of priorities

It's similar to the C64 vs NES debate. The former can do bitmap graphics but the latter can scroll better and can put more sprites on screen without raster tricks.

[Anonymous No.561763]

>>561753
Weren't 32-bit Amigas only popular in Germany or something?

[Anonymous No.561790]

>>561753
Commodore didn't have anything close to Apple's resources or willpower to push an alternative architecture to PCs

[Anonymous No.561792]

>>561790
That was probably why they preferred to focus on the European market where PC clones weren't a significant factor.

[Anonymous No.561815]

>>561790
They gained huge ground in the video production market, until commodore squandered the lead.

[Anonymous No.561820]

>>561737
Indeed, I only wrote that down with that in mind.

People weren't even expecting to have things like that back then. Look at the brilliance of Lemmings or Serf City. Look at all the stuff being animated smoothly. Also look at this:


Robocop 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYFdgyuv6fU

Compare it to Starfox:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED89kalfX4E


Another World:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw

Compare it to a rather bad port of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw

It makes the SNES look like fucking shit. Which is unfortunate because the SNES had brilliantly programmed games such as Yoshis Island. Starfox is a brilliant game but it lagged badly at times though.

This was the graphical ultimum that the Amiga500 could do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY39_a1DMMA

So we can say that the SNES and Amiga are kinda even.

I have only experienced the SNES Lemmings from GCCX and it kinda lagged though. That game was a marvel on the Amgia500. So it also depends on the overall design of the game.

The Amiga 1200 did have a lot of DooM-like games though, such as Gloom or the 3D Alien Breed games. The SNES DooM was great enough to not consider it shit when compared to the far superior PC.

[Anonymous No.561829]

>>561815
Even so, wasn't most of that in Europe instead of the US market?

[Anonymous No.561834]

>>561820
Im sorry, the comparation video of Another World for SNES was this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDkDpb4m9zo

[Anonymous No.561837]

>>561820
I'm sure if you used a 1200 and were an expert in 68000 asm, you could pull of an acceptable Sonic port.

[Anonymous No.561840]

>>561837
Yes, even without marvelous programming you can probably run Sonic 1 and 2 and even 3 on a 1200 with ease. It was like twice as fast as the Amiga500 and the AGA chip was good, but not for its pricing.

[Anonymous No.561843]

>>561790
Image as well. Apple weren't perceived as "those guys who made little toy computers for playing games on". This also affected Atari negatively. They could have come out with a 68000 machine in 1982 and still would not have been taken seriously.

[Anonymous No.561848]

>>561840
The MD and A500 both run at the same clock speed (8Mhz), do they not?

[Anonymous No.561856]

>>561843
Meanwhile IBM could sell a serviceable, but completely mediocre computer and it sold by the millions all because of those magic three letters on the case.

[Anonymous No.561860]

>>561848
Yes but as I pointed out, the Amiga's scrolling is more CPU-intensive than the Mega Drive which is why you'd need the faster 1200 to pull off Sonic properly.

[Anonymous No.561862]

>>561848
I don't think so, I remember that the Genesis runs like 7.5 mhz while the Amiga500 runs on 7.0x mhz or so. It may be not much looking but its still a lot.

Also note that the C64 was like the same clock as the NES and it was godlike so even a 0.1x difference in speed can mean lots.

[Anonymous No.561865]

>>561860
But heck, you could even do Sonic on the C64. I mean, they had versions for the 8-bit SMS/GG, amirite?

[Anonymous No.561869]

>>561860
This is not me btw, the Amiga can do fast scrolling, but it might lag when there are many larger sprites moving around.

Uridium 2 worked flawlessly on a Amgia500.

[Anonymous No.561872]

>>561865
wat

[Anonymous No.561880]

>>561862
>Also note that the C64 was like the same clock as the NES and it was godlike so even a 0.1x difference in speed can mean lots

C64 is 1.23Mhz and NES is 1.79Mhz, a full 75% faster. As soon as you play games on the two systems, you notice that speed difference immediately. C64s are a slug especially when doing scrolling.

[Anonymous No.561883]

>>561872
I mean if you were completely insane, you could port the 8-bit Sonics to the C64

[Anonymous No.561889]

>>561883
Probably. The SMS is nothing special hardware-wise. Only thing it has over the NES really is more colours.

[Anonymous No.561893]

>>561880
And any code executing in the VIC-II's address space will run more slowly than code outside of it, while the NES has separate VRAM outside the CPU's address space.

[Anonymous No.561894]

>>561865
No, this would only work with a redesign of the entire game.

However, there was Lemmings for the c64 and it played flawlessly.

[Anonymous No.561902]

[Anonymous No.561907]

[Anonymous No.561906]

>>561894
>No, this would only work with a redesign of the entire game
Are we referring to 8-bit or 16-bit Sonic? Because of course they did completely redesign the game to get it on the SMS.

[Anonymous No.561910]

[Anonymous No.561917]

>>561889
More colours and a better attribute system (colour values are RGB instead of NTSC/PAL). Plus SMS's graphics data can be compressed while this isn't possible on the NES.

[Anonymous No.561914]

>>561829
There was a time when every wedding video made in the USA was chock-full of video toaster kiki-wipe effects... but that's not /vr/.

[Anonymous No.561924]

[Anonymous No.561926]

>>561889
Roughly 80% of NES games were enhanced by special workings in the cart, like MMC chips, while I think SMS games only relied on the console itself.

[Anonymous No.561927]

[Anonymous No.561928]

>>561829
>>561914
Amiga did have at least some popularity here for video editing; I know that Dick Van Dyke used to do that on one.

[Anonymous No.561937]

>>561926
SMS had mappers, but they generally only added support for battery saves and ROM banking.

[Anonymous No.561943]

[Anonymous No.561942]

>>561893
Yes indeed, but the c64 had games that scrolled smoothly, like TGGS. A game which displayed the capablilities of that computer well enough.

The biggest drawback were the use of only a few colours for the c64. There were a lot of games which had like only 8 colours in use.

I agree that the NES had a lot of power overally and games played well enough. The c64 didn't have that ugly "sprites disappearing" problem though.

[Anonymous No.561947]

[Anonymous No.561949]

[Anonymous No.561979]

>>561942
>The biggest drawback were the use of only a few colours for the c64. There were a lot of games which had like only 8 colours in use

NES games look much less colorful despite the bigger palette because it can only use 13 for the background and 12 for sprites, and each block of four tiles has to use the same colors.

>the c64 didn't have that ugly "sprites disappearing" problem though

NES has 64 sprites total, but only 8 per scanline. On C64, you have to write a sprite multiplexer to get more than 8 on screen (but still same amount per line). In fact the main difference is just that the PPU does multiplexing in hardware while the VIC-II it's done in software.

The disappearing sprite problem occurs because the PPU will gladly put more than 8 sprites on a line, but the excess ones get cut off. Also NES sprites are very commonly used for score counters and energy meters while this is not the case on the C64.

[Anonymous No.562016]

>>561979
Ah it makes sense now. This explains why games on c64 where there were many sprites were drawn in a lower resolution than other games with bigger, but less moving sprites.

However, I found - compared to the games on the c64 that i've played - that the NES had more colourful games. But thats just me then.

Thanks for explaining that to me.

[Anonymous No.562023]

>>561979
Overall though, they're quite different systems despite some superficial similarities (CPU, three color sprites and tiles, etc) and the way games are programmed requires a quite different approach.

[Anonymous No.562059]

>>562023
One of the big differences obviously is that sprites are a limited resource on the C64 while the NES they're used freely for background graphics and score counters.

A lot of NES games don't even have any raster interrupts and instead just use sprites for a floating score counter. C64 virtually requires you use raster tricks, at least on scroller games, one reason being that the scrolling is so clunky and CPU-intensive that covering 25% of the screen with a score/status box means that you don't have to move as much stuff around.

[Anonymous No.562068]

[Anonymous No.562071]

[Anonymous No.562075]

>>562023
C64 is multipurpose microcomputer, it has to be able to do wordprocessing, accounting, spreadsheets and whatsnot in addition to games.
NES was designed from ground-up to be only used for games.
It's obvious that Nintendo would focus more on the graphics than Commodore. Having same CPU doesn't make it similar, Gameboy and typical scientific calculator have the same CPU, too.

[Anonymous No.562090]

>>562075
>C64 is multipurpose microcomputer, it has to be able to do wordprocessing, accounting, spreadsheets

>implying people used C64s for productivity except maybe the occasional word processor

Also see >>561762

Bitmap graphics were definitely a more important feature in a computer than a console, which rather unfortunately means that the NES can't really do good pixel art.

[Anonymous No.562096]

[Anonymous No.562108]

>>562090
Business was all Apple in US, but in UK it was all Commodore. And Commodore was always trying to make their computers more appealing to business users.

[Anonymous No.562118]

>>562108
>Business was all Apple in US

Don't you mean IBM?

>but in UK it was all Commodore. And Commodore was always trying to make their computers more appealing to business users

I know that the Amiga was not uncommonly used as a productivity machine in Europe, but C64 I would think was quite limited in that use when one only had cassette tapes.

[Anonymous No.562131]

>>562118
Disk drives were expensive in UK (not so much elsewhere) but obviously corporate users or small offices used those instead of tapes which were almost exclusively used by home users.

[Anonymous No.562141]

A bit pre-C64, but the 80-column PETs were a common business computer in Europe. They largely did not succeed in the US as they couldn't run CP/M.

[Anonymous No.562160]

One of my biggest regrets is selling my Amiga 2000 for next to nothing in 1998.

When I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house a couple of years ago, I found ~50 disks of Amiga software I forgotten about, including disks full of papers I wrote in my senior year of high school and first couple years of college.

[Anonymous No.562170]

>>562141
There were a lot of other factors working against the PET 8032 such as only 32k of memory, booting into BASIC (not acceptable of a serious computer), and nonstandard device interfaces. Whereas stuff like the TRS-80 Model II had more RAM, CP/M capability, standard Centronics/RS-232 ports, and no BASIC in ROM.

The Model IIs were actually a quite state-of-the-art business computer for 1979 that was one of the machines the IBM PC design team studied. Rather unfortunate that Rat Shack's name wasn't very saleable to the corporate world.

[Anonymous No.562176]

>>562141
You could run CP/M on a PET, but it was very, very expensive and better implemented on other platforms (at the time).

[Anonymous No.562183]

>>562176
There might have been some add-on Z80 boards, but I don't know too much about that.

[Anonymous No.562192]

>>562160
>fellow who appears to have graduated HS back in the 90s

Uh oh. Incoming age war from /v/ trolls. You shouldn't have said that.

[OP No.562204]

>>562192
Don't worry; I'm still here. If shit goes down, I'm pulling the plug on this thread.

[Janitor !!yN7QKs5XFTK No.562209]

>>562204
me too

[Anonymous No.562213]

>>562209
Get fucked.

[Anonymous No.562216]

>>562192
huh?

[Anonymous No.562218]

>>562216
Never give your age away on /vr/ if you don't want to bait trolls

[Anonymous No.562224]

>>562218
Ooookay although I never actually did that