Simcity 2000

[Robert17]

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

[Ilwrath]

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.  

[elendil]

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.

[bloodline]

I was a very bad port of the Mac version. It ran crap on my 040 :-(

[KennyR]

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.

[itix]

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.

[Robert17]

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 :-(

[ChaosLord]

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!

[KennyR]

@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.

[TjLaZer]

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.

[ChaosLord]

> 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.

[KennyR]

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.

[Damion]

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.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

-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?

[Damion]

>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...:-))