Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Gaming => Topic started by: Robert17 on July 19, 2004, 04:02:22 PM
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hey all just got myself a copy of the mentioned game and I have to say it's dissapointing... for the reasons that you can only use the horrible laced hi-res mode that flickers lots! Also the speed...! I have a Blizzard 1230 50mhz with 8mb and it runs.. well... terribly. never seen such a slow game on an amiga... anyone else had a similar experience with this game?
Perhaps this one can be added to the list of games that were better on the PC than the Amiga? :-P
Robert
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Well, there's a patch to get it to run in DblNTSC/DblPAL. So the flickery screen can be fixed. At least your retinas wont be burnt to a crisp while waiting for your budget screen to show up... But, other than that, yeah... I had a pretty similar experience to yours.
The scrolling is horrible. And you can order pizza while waiting for your water grid to show up and fill in.
I must admit, I was pretty disappointed, as well. Someone mentioned it's actually faster to get the Mac version and play it in ShapeShifter.
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Yea, that's the really stupid thing. You can emulate a mac and play it at decent speed instead of using the native version. Oh, and at a nice resolution too.
Nice port.
Sincerely,
-Kenneth Straarup.
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I was a very bad port of the Mac version. It ran crap on my 040 :-(
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SimCity 2000 was one of the games that convinced Maxis that the Amiga just couldn't cut it any more. When it was released, nobody much had more than an 020, and that combined with AGA made the game unplayable.
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I was a very bad port of the Mac version. It ran crap on my 040
Well, Mac version was only better because of faster gfx there. Apparently AGA was often faster in ShapeShifter than in AmigaOS.
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Maybe if they didn't force it to run in that horrible hi-res mode it would have been faster, I have to say though I also have simcity deluxe on the pc and amiga and the amiga version of that is rubbish too :-(
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Simcity 2000 is slooooooooooooow because it is crap coded.
Total Chaos runs in the same resolution and colors but is 8.4 GAZILLION times faster than SimCity2000.
Total Chaos Website for AMIGA! (http://Amiga-Mania.sytes.net/Jogos/Chaos/Total_Chaos.html)
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@Chaoslord
Last time I looked, Total Chaos didn't scroll. Maybe you should try implementing scrolling of 256 colour high res AGA screens and see how fast the redraw is.
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Well if you have a Graphics card you can promote the game to a 640x400 screen and it runs pretty good! Thats what I did on my 3000, 060, CV64. Runs at a descent speed now! I had to use a special mode promotion tool though.
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> Last time I looked, Total Chaos didn't scroll.
Correct. It doesn't need to scroll. It just wastes the player's time having to constantly scroll around to see the battle.
The bigger the map, the longer the game takes.
Total Chaos is meant to be a "quick" strategy game (1-8 hours) not an epic RPG Adventure of 50-250 hours.
> Maybe you should try implementing scrolling of 256 colour high res AGA screens and see how fast the redraw is.
Did that years ago. It scrolled at 50 fps.
Its dead easy to do. Amiga OS 3.x Rulez!
The fact that Shapeshifter can run SimCity2000 -while- emulating another computer and OS, and realtime translate the gfx from Mac format to Amiga format and at the same time run the game much faster than the Amiga version
Proves
that the Amiga version is crap coded.
The ppl who coded SimCity2000 for Amiga didn't really like the Amiga and didn't care if the game turned out crap or not. They weren't willing to do the work to code it correctly. The same is true for countless other ported games.
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Chaoslord wrote:
> Maybe you should try implementing scrolling of 256 colour high res AGA screens and see how fast the redraw is.
Did that years ago. It scrolled at 50 fps.
To put it politely, I'm sceptical about that. That's a lot of graphics data to be shifting around, and AGA bandwidth is tight.
The ppl who coded SimCity2000 for Amiga didn't really like the Amiga and didn't care if the game turned out crap or not. They weren't willing to do the work to code it correctly. The same is true for countless other ported games.
They had a budget and a timelimit. They didn't have the luxury of tweaking the port to work on slow and practically obsolete AGA hardware when a simple, untweaked version worked well on VGA/SVGA cards.
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The only way to play SimCity 2000 using AGA (non-emulated) is with an 060,
best at 66 MHz and a few system patches. Then it's *very* fast. I'd imagine a
quicker 040 is about minimum to make it playable. A scandoubler helps, but you
still have to deal with AGA's painfully low vertical refresh rates...that always hurt
my eyes after a while.
Well, Mac version was only better because of faster gfx there. Apparently AGA
was often faster in ShapeShifter than in AmigaOS.
I would agree with that statement...Bungie's Marathon series, Civ II, Warcraft II, Settlers II...all
ran with excellent speed. That's also when I realized that the Mac versions of games like Civilization and
Colonization were far superior (visually) to their amiga counterparts. 256 color browsing looked excellent
and was actually usable, as was browsing in HAM. IMO Shapeshifter ranks among the best amiga software
ever.
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-D- wrote:
I would agree with that statement...Bungie's Marathon series, Civ II, Warcraft II, Settlers II...all
ran with excellent speed.
on what kind of Amiga?
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>on what kind of Amiga?
A1200, 060-66 and AGA. I was especially impressed with how well the Marathon games ran.
(BTW I'm still disappointed I never got a chance to use Shapeshifter on an amiga with a graphics card...:-))
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Actually I got so upset with Sim City 2000 being released to the AMiGA so late. I got so hooked on the game that I took advantage of one of my "friends". I used to "hang" with him as much as I could, simply so that I could play Sim City 2000 on his Macintosh. Fortunately his mother realised this and forced me to do other things than only play Sim City 2000 when being at his place... which forced me to come up with a solution. The solution was Shapeshifter. On my Blizzard 1230 with 16mb of ram... run on an A1200... the game turned out to run even better than on his Macintosh... I still wonder if he ever realised what happened, since when I had installed the game at home under the emulated MacOS I never visited him again... :lol:
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Im surprised nobody told about this, but I have heard that the Amiga version of Sim City 2000 is actually the Mac version running on some kind of emulator or something. It wasnt a true port, thats why its so slow.
Dont know where I heard about it. Maybe it was Amiga Format.
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Im surprised nobody told about this, but I have heard that the Amiga version of Sim City 2000 is actually the Mac version running on some kind of emulator or something. It wasnt a true port, thats why its so slow. Dont know where I heard about it. Maybe it was Amiga Format.
Not that I question what you have heard or read... but it just sounds very doubtful? I find it strange that the coders over at Maxis had any real experience in programming emulators, but sure... the main engine of the game was what had to be rewritten, the rest of the data was probably just recycled. I find it weird that they implented some kind of emulator, which used the regular AMiGA intuition for the windows, the everything, mostly...?
Anyways... concerning the game... and the ones released in the series later on... in my humble opinion they never managed to recreate the magic of Sim City 2000. What I loved about the game was that it took an hour to learn but a lifetime to master... Sim City 4 I have played for many hours, but I still don't get everything and I am really having a hard time enjoying the game since I can't manage everything there is to manage in the cities to make them evolve properly. Sim City 3000 I simply detest, because first of all it lacks the terrain editor, second of all there are no things to "win", you simple have your 20 or so special buildings to decorate your town with and they cost nothing at all. Where is the challange? The graphics are okay, but the game does not simply play like Sim City 2000 (it was ages since I played it, but when I did I played it much and never got around enjoying it, so I might have gotten things wrong here).
Maxis have really not done much to impress me lately. Some dozen of different versions of The Sims... the upcoming The Sims 2... and the extremely slow, hardware demanding and complex Sim City 4000 (which probably is a great game once one have learned how it really works)... they all seem a bit, uhm, unoriginal and not so imaginative... kind of stuck in the concept only making more and more out of it until the bubble bursts... but, maybe I am just getting old and out of date...