Collection Low-end systems which have still users and software development

[commodorejohn]

I think cross-developing new Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and SNK Neo Geo CD games along with Amiga games would be alright, along with the Atari ST, Acorns, and maybe 68k Macs. It depends on the game, but they all use 68k CPUs and have similar enough graphical capabilities that something like a single-screen platform game might work.

There are already people developing games for all of those systems (except Mac 68k) so it might be cool to see if we could get some ported to our Amigas too.

Kinda depends on the kind of game and source platform, though. Tile-based games aren't going to be as fast on the Amiga as on, say, the Genesis, since there's no built-in hardware support for tile-maps. (On the other hand, with video memory mapped directly into CPU address space, there's a whole lot more room for optimization than with it accessed through two measly I/O ports like on most consoles.) On the other hand, a Mac game re-optimized for the Amiga's chipset could quite possibly outdo the original, since AFAIK the 68k Macs didn't really use any kind of hardware acceleration.

Still, if they were able to do this stuff back in the day, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to pull it off now

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, it's difficult to find a computer that isn't capable of running a text-adventure

I do think you could manage something a little more complex (8-way-scrolling single-layer + sprites, at least,) but it'd probably have to be designed carefully for that goal rather than ported from another platform for which it was designed.

[commodorejohn]

In my opinion, the only impossible things seem to be 3D games, although the Playstation 1 Final Fantasies all use prerendered backgrounds and only use 3D for character/NPCs and the battle screens (and this 3D isn't exactly advanced, maybe doable with some sort of Doom style engine).

Don't know if you've played GoldenSun on GBA, but this is very similar to what it does (it doesn't use a Doom-style raycaster engine, but a simple scaling 360° panorama background, IIRC,) with scaling sprites instead of 3D models for the characters. Works pretty well at GBA/Amiga resolutions.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, its just me being pedantic, but gba and amiga (even low res) resolutions are pretty different (amiga low res is more than twice the res of a gba (38400 vs. 81920 pixels).The GBA's very low res of 240x160 is a big part of the reason it appeared significantly more powerful than the snes,.... its simply wasnt moving nearly as many graphics. Yes it had a more powerful cpu too, but that was only half the story.

Depends on the game. Something that's all-software, like DOOM, certainly is going to have an advantage on a smaller screen, but most GBA and SNES games rely heavily on the hardware tiling. The difference between 80K pixels (Amiga) and 37.5K (GBA) pixels is much larger than the difference between 896 8x8 tiles (SNES) and 600 8x8 tiles (GBA.)

[commodorejohn]

Quite so. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of doing a tactical RPG/TBS game on the Amiga myself. It's a natural pick for something with a limited number of sprites.

[commodorejohn]

That'd probably be best. AI is all scripting stuff anyway, as long as you've got a capable scripting facility in with the rest of the engine you're good to go.

I'd kind of think you'd ultimately be better off trying to create an original title, tailored to the hardware, rather than a conversion, though. Still, any development is good development

[commodorejohn]

True, but you're still limited in the area of arbitrary arrangement - in a strategy/tactics game, for example, you can't have more than four 16x16 16-color sprites on a single scanline. It's plenty flexible if you can flex with it, but that's not always the case.