Nightlong?

[6]

I've noticed a 3 CD game out - Nightlong.

Does anyone have any comments about it?  Is it worth purchasing a gfx board to play it?  Worth towering an A1200D?

I'm posting these hardware questions on the hardware forum.

Thanks,

6

[odin]

Not too sure really, from what I remember it was dogslow on my  040. The PPC exe helped a bit I think.

[KennyR]

It's a nice game, if you like adventures. Good graphics, cut scenes, and a well thought out puzzle element. It is slow on anything short of an 060/66 or a PPC though.

It's not worth spending all that money towerising and getting a GFX card though. That brings its own benefits, but I wouldn't do it just for Nightlong.

[6]

Thank you and thank you.  It looks like I'll be foregoing that expense for a while.

be seeing you,
6

[Argus]

This is probably heresy, but isn't Nightlong a port from the PC or Mac version?  If you really want to play it now and the Amiga version is dog-slow (no doubt not unlike Clickboom's Amiga Quake), you could probably buy a complete second-hand pc setup suitable to play it for much less than an A1200 68040 accelerator card alone.  Heck, brand new complete Athlon XP systems are going right now for around $350.  A novel idea would be to put your A1200 in a big tower with the pc and then network them together like Eyetech used to do or simply toggle between displays with a monitor switchbox.  Then you could have your A1200 tower and still play the occasional older game on pc.  Or, if you don't already own an A1200 accelerator card, buy Amiga Forever and have your 68020 A1200 virtually in emulation on the PC.  The choice is yours, but unless you're a hardware purist, rather than plop down $400+ on a five-year-old-overheated-second-hand BlizzardPPC off eBay, I'd be saving my real pennies for a brandy-new Micro-A1 and OS4.  There will likely be some kind of useable 68K and PowerUP/WarpUp emulation in OS4 to play the older 68K and PPC amiga games on the newer G3 and G4 chips.

[odin]

My thoughts exactly, you can probably find the PC version of Nightlong for 2 cents and a dirty sock on ebay.

Hmm, wouldn't the PPC executable be usable on OS4?

[Argus]

odin wrote:
My thoughts exactly, you can probably find the PC version of Nightlong for 2 cents and a dirty sock on ebay.

Hmm, wouldn't the PPC executable be usable on OS4?

Here's a good example of what I mean.  I just played and rather enjoyed finishing Hyperion's QuakeII on my A3000 with CyberstormPPC and CybervisionPPC card in 640x480 resolution(w/ WarpUP4.x, Warp3D, etc.)  It looked pretty nice on a 17" monitor at maybe 15+fps during combat. I chuckled to myself thinking this A3000 was manufactured in probably 1990 and here I'm playing a game released a decade plus later on it (albeit with an accelerator manufactured in 1998).  Then just this week my brother gave me for free an old Dell dual 233MHz PII server with 512MB ram and 'merely' a 16MB PCI TNT2 video card (servers don't generally have AGP slots I'm told).  Just for kicks I installed the same QuakeII with DirectX and kicked her up to a whopping 1024x768 resolution (this would crawl a few frames a second on the CyberstormPPC).  The shocker: it runs unbelievably fast in OpenGL 3D mode (30+fps)!  Now not everybody has a kindly brother who works in IT and gets old stuff for nothing, but he said these old server boxes go for $50 on eBay.  Hell, I bought an old 1MB A500 for more than that less than a year ago (that was bought by my hardware purist side).

From what I've read, Hyperion have promised a useable JIT (just in time) 68K emulator and WarpUP PPC emulation for OS4.0.  Presumably this would allow you to play old Amiga 68K/PPC hybrid games like Nightlong, Wipeout2097, QuakeII, HereticII, etc.  I'm not one of the brave few (yet) with an AmigaOne and the 4.0 pre-release as I understand it's (JIT/WarpUp emulation) not quite ready yet.  But I'm willing to wait.

And then again if you can't wait there's always MorphOS on the Pegasus....