Alone in the Dark

[XDelusion]

I was reading up on Sega Dreamcast news and happened upon an article about a new release called "Dream in the Dark"

http://www.dreamcast.es/news.php?readmore=649

 which  is based upon "Free in the Dark", a legal reverse engineering of the original Alone in the Dark executable.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fitd/

The engine aims to support both Alone in the Dark 1 as well as the less Lovecraftian 2, though there are still a few bugs that need worked out before 2 will be ready for prime time.

What this made me wonder about was the possability of getting something like this going on a classic Amiga, cracked out 060 or less. Oddly enoguh though, the Free in the Dark sources seem to be missing from the Sourceforge site.

[phoenixkonsole]

Depends on how much power the engine needs. Maybe based on slow sdl stuff. Dreamcast cpu was was nice roughly 200Mhz equals a Pentium 3 700

[NovaCoder]

Depends on how much power the engine needs. Maybe based on slow sdl stuff.

The 68k SDL isn't slow

[youtube]IAX4TZxI1jg[/youtube]

[phoenixkonsole]

Correct but maybe DOOM SDL is already optimized whereas the Engine for Alone in the Dark may not. If you compare original requirements of both games i would say...yep should work.

[Crumb]

What this made me wonder about was the possability of getting something like this going on a classic Amiga, cracked out 060 or less. Oddly enoguh though, the Free in the Dark sources seem to be missing from the Sourceforge site.

Alone in the Dark runs perfectly on a 040/25 with Shapeshifter+AGA (I didn't test it with anything less but on PC it ran fine with a 286/16Mhz, so no reasons for it to be slow). A 030 with MMU should run it smoothly.

[psxphill]

Alone in the Dark runs perfectly on a 040/25 with Shapeshifter+AGA (I didn't test it with anything less but on PC it ran fine with a 286/16Mhz, so no reasons for it to be slow). A 030 with MMU should run it smoothly.

It looks a bit like a stencil vector and vector bob demo.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErUT8vE1RRI
 
I'm sure you could do an Amiga version of it, I suspect you could even do a 68000+ECS version if you really wanted to. The frame rate might be a little poor, but the number of polygons isn't that high. The problem would be the amount of data, each room needs bitmaps for the two layers. Although you'd be using 320x256 32 colours maximum on ECS. If we had the original source of the game then it would be doable.
 
Porting a new engine from the PC is less likely though, it appears to use sdl + opengl. Doom source was already optimised to get it to run on low powered hardware (in comparison to todays) and then further optimised to run on 68k hardware. Doom on a 50mhz 68030 wasn't a great experience.

[NovaCoder]

I wouldn't even try and to get this game running on 030 anyway, I guess it's technically possible but it would be a huge amount of effort and would take a lot of skill.   Much easier to just port the SDL version and target 040/060.

I actually had the original DOS code on my HD once, probably lost it by now.

Anyone feel like attempting a 68k SDL port?

[Crumb]

I wouldn't even try and to get this game running on 030 anyway, I guess it's technically possible but it would be a huge amount of effort and would take a lot of skill.   Much easier to just port the SDL version and target 040/060.

I actually had the original DOS code on my HD once, probably lost it by now.

Anyone feel like attempting a 68k SDL port?

DOS code? you mean original Alone In The Dark sources? that's cool!

I just found this:
http://code.google.com/p/fitd-reloaded/source/browse/

but original sources would be better as FITD uses OpenGL

I guess that modifying Mac binaries like it was done with Heroes Of Might of Magic2 would result in the fastest binary, it's quite hard anyway

[NovaCoder]

DOS code? you mean original Alone In The Dark sources? that's cool!

Yep the original DOS source code.   I grabbed a whole load of old PC source code when I started to do Amiga ports a few years ago.

I just found this:
http://code.google.com/p/fitd-reloaded/source/browse/

but original sources would be better as FITD uses OpenGL

Does it actually require OpenGL though?    A lot of these SDL ports use OpenGL as an option although that's slowly changing.  It's getting even harder to port big SDL projects like ScummVM to good old 68k.

[XDelusion]

Glad to see there are others that hate this game as much as me.  

[fishy_fiz]

I compiled this for AROS a few years ago.
It does indeed use GL for more than just a display option.
While it was fun/novel playing Alone In The Dark on an Amiga-oid system, thus far the FITD engine is too unstable to bother with any real porting effort to 68k.  

As for the Dreamcast, the only time its competitive to *any* P3 is when it comes to FPU performance.
It'd be closer to a low end P2 for interger performance.