New Sonic the Hedgehog Amiga Fangame Project

[uncharted]

bloodline wrote:

Well they were sort of right... you need a massive CPU to do all the GFX work and then pump the GFX into the Frambuffer... I remember Gloom was OK on my 030 A1200... but to be really honest, by that time, A cheap PC was already better....

Erm, isn't that pretty much what all '3d' games did up until the advent of 3D accelerators?  That 'Massive' 030 CPU had been standard in big-box models since 1990, so what isn't 'Amiga' about it?  We're not talking about Wipeout's PPC+GFX card (effectively bypassing the Amiga in every way) requirements here.

And just to give a little context here, this is 1995 we're talking about -  Average PC prices on the high street were still over a grand.  Hardly 'cheap'.

[Piru]

@uncharted

The other platforms had chunky framebuffer to render to. Amiga had the extra step of chunky-to-planar conversion. Doing texture mapped 3D on anything below 030@50 was painfully slow because of this. Or you had to simplify the actual 3D effects to compensate for the amount spent just converting the chunky to planar... In short: PC had faster and more detailed texture mapped games, even if the CPU performance was relatively equal. It didn't take PC long to overtake amiga on CPU side aswell, and it never looked back.

For a time Amiga had an advantage on platformers and things requiring very precise scrolling and beam synced animation. It wasn't until later that PC really caught up on this side aswell, but before that game consoles provided it.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
For a time Amiga had an advantage on platformers and things requiring very precise scrolling and beam synced animation. It wasn't until later that PC really caught up on this side aswell, but before that game consoles provided it.

I never found any computer as smooth scrolling as the amiga. Not even the Sega, or any modern todays gameconsole or pc. With the amiga it really feels like the bitmaps are independant from each other. I am not originally an Amigan (as being a pc user back in those days), and I collect vintage computers, so I am not prejudiced.

Btw. spoken about required megaherzes and megabytes of RAM, the requirements are kind of the same for Amiga and PC.
Doom didn't run very nicely on a 66mhz+4mb system either...
And considered that, they did a real nice job running Alien Breed 3D on a 14 mhz system with 2mb mem.

As if at the point the Amiga doesn't outperform the PC, it's immediately inferior...

[Piru]

@Speelgoedmannetje

Doom didn't run very nicely on a 66mhz+4mb system either...

I played Doom on such a setup (DX2 system), and it was very smooth. Resolution was 320 x 240 or so.

Alien Breed 3D on a 14 mhz system with 2mb mem.

AB3D was ok with 030@50, but stock A1200 was really painful.

Resolution: 96 x 80.

[Gav]

I never liked zool really,thought it was cool for five minutes then i thought it was a bit of a boring game..The best sonic games were sonic 1 & 2,sonic and Knuckles was pretty good aswell.

[motorollin]

@Gav
I have to say, I got bored of Zool when I got stuck on the music level. Zool 2 was much better IMO. I spent many hours playing that!

[A4000_Mad]

The likes of Zool and Superfrog are great, but there is something extra special about Sonic The Hedgehog IMO. My eldest daughter played it when she was little and I thought it would be nice if my other daughter (6) could play it on her Amiga if possible.

Personally, I really enjoyed being the yellow Super Sonic and flying around on the Wing Fortress level of Sonic 2 :-D

I've just dug out the cheat on the page of a mag that I had stored inside the Sonic 2 cartridge in case anyone is interested.


Level select:

Go to the options screen and select Sonic on his own. Now go to the sound test and play the tunes 19, 65, 09 and 17. If you've done it correctly you'll hear a ping on the last tune. Return to title screen and select a one player game while holding down A. You'll now go to a menu with all the levels.


Super Sonic:

Get to the level select as above and go to the sound test. Play 04, 01, 02 and 06. Now when you collect 50 or more rings on a level, press B and C together and you will become Super Sonic.

 :-)

[pan1k]

I tried the CD32 version.. it's playable but slow.. and it's hard to see whats coming up the screen is very short.. playable tho! I'd like to see more!

[Hattig]

Megadrive: 8MHz 68000 and game-oriented graphics chip (tile based in particular, all pre-defined, means little-to-no CPU effort in drawing new graphics on the screen)
A500: 7.14MHz 68000 and planar-bitmap graphics

Not only is the CPU a little slower on the Amiga side, but to try to do all the Megadrive effects would be counter-productive on top of that.

However you can cut out some Megadrive features, and add in Amiga capabilities to compensate. Decent overscan, for example.

What makes Sonic is the really fast scrolling sections. If you can pull that off on the A500, in 32 colours, then you have something to build upon. That probably means being able to scroll the screen by up to 64 pixels per frame in any direction (including the drawing of the new section of the map) in addition to animating the spinning rings, sprites, etc.

In addition, I'd be a bit dubious about ripping the Sonic graphics, as the franchise is still very active.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje

Doom didn't run very nicely on a 66mhz+4mb system either...

I played Doom on such a setup (DX2 system), and it was very smooth. Resolution was 320 x 240 or so.

Probably because it had enough RAM.

Alien Breed 3D on a 14 mhz system with 2mb mem.

AB3D was ok with 030@50, but stock A1200 was really painful.

Resolution: 96 x 80.

It's not smooth, no, but still playable.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Hattig wrote:
Megadrive: 8MHz 68000 and game-oriented graphics chip (tile based in particular, all pre-defined, means little-to-no CPU effort in drawing new graphics on the screen)
A500: 7.14MHz 68000 and planar-bitmap graphics

Not only is the CPU a little slower on the Amiga side, but to try to do all the Megadrive effects would be counter-productive on top of that.

However you can cut out some Megadrive features, and add in Amiga capabilities to compensate. Decent overscan, for example.

Oh come on! has this become an Amiga bash forum, or? Have you ever played Mr. Nutz, or Kid Chaos? Those are blatant Sonic clones, with the same speed and graphics. (though I think the Amiga has somewhat more independant bitplanes)

[SamuraiCrow]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje

Doom didn't run very nicely on a 66mhz+4mb system either...

I played Doom on such a setup (DX2 system), and it was very smooth. Resolution was 320 x 240 or so.

Probably because it had enough RAM.

To access Doom within the constraints of an operating system required more memory.  IIRC the Mac version of Doom and even Wolfenstien 3D ran slow and required 8 megs of RAM to run them.

The original Doom on '486 under MS-DOS banged the hardware mercilessly and had highly optimized assembly code sections to speed things up.  It was even playable on a '386 but was kind of slow.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

On my 486DX with 8mb mem, it ran exactly like Alien Breed 3D on a plain A1200.

[SamuraiCrow]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:

Hattig wrote:
Megadrive: 8MHz 68000 and game-oriented graphics chip (tile based in particular, all pre-defined, means little-to-no CPU effort in drawing new graphics on the screen)
A500: 7.14MHz 68000 and planar-bitmap graphics

Not only is the CPU a little slower on the Amiga side, but to try to do all the Megadrive effects would be counter-productive on top of that.

However you can cut out some Megadrive features, and add in Amiga capabilities to compensate. Decent overscan, for example.

Oh come on! has this become an Amiga bash forum, or? Have you ever played Mr. Nutz, or Kid Chaos? Those are blatant Sonic clones, with the same speed and graphics. (though I think the Amiga has somewhat more independant bitplanes)

Using the routines defined in 8wayscroller or ScrollingTrick limits the number of blitter accesses required to do the scrolling.  The hard part was getting the BOBs on the Amiga to be as fast as the 20 hardware sprites the Genesis/Megadrive had.

[Hattig]

Yeah, games that made use of the Amiga's strengths.

I don't think a game created using a game creator written in Amos is actually going to match what professional full-time assembler/Amiga programmers could achieve. Of course a lot of the Amiga hardware features were available in Amos/BB2 and were thus still fast, but there's a reason that Zool, Superfrog, etc, weren't written in Amos.

[SamuraiCrow]

Amos needs a better compiler, that's for sure.