Most annoying Amiga game in the world.

[Hyperspeed]

I was dissapointed that Chaos Engine's scrolling was so bad for A1200. It was a good game though, a bit like Cannon Fodder viewed from overhead but with full joystick control over the character!

I noticed Speedball 2 had jerky scrolling also, but Zool 2 AGA had the same trouble so I wonder if it's a problem with AGA?

Kid Chaos AGA is really smooth as are other 2D games. The Jaguar version of Zool 2 was smooth on 68000 so why not on 68EC020!?

If you don't like Xenon 2's scrolling there's a newer style version called XP8. Stardust-style rendered sprites!

(Oh, by the way - Stardust's tunnel stages have smooth scrolling!)

[Legerdemain]

I noticed Speedball 2 had jerky scrolling also, but Zool 2 AGA had the same trouble so I wonder if it's a problem with AGA?

Hm, is it so? I can't recall I ever noticed any jerky scrolling in Zool 2 AGA when I ran it on my 030, but it was rather long ago, but when I plugged in my 060 it became unplayable. The same goes for when I try WHDLoadinstall the game, and I've tried all the different combinations of settings I can think of. It is just TOO jerky to be playable at all (especially considering how fast the game plays at times).

[Hyperspeed]

Hmmm, maybe it's to do with the CPU then?

I think I tried Zool 2 AGA on '030 but it may well have been standard A1200 '020.

Syndicate behaved strangely even on the highly compatible Blizzard 1230-IV, everything seemed turbo-charged.

The demo of Elite went berserk on '030, I'm going to try it on '060 soon.

:-D

It's a shame TFX won't run on '060. The best it could make use of was '040 for some reason.

One thing I found very annoying with games (particularly Mortal Kombat 2) was that some came on 4 disks and required swapping between every round. Loading at 10k/s didn't help either!

;-)

[KThunder]

yeah floppy swapping was an annoying feature all right. some games didnt even seem to sort stuff so it was in order, insert disk 1 then 3 then 4 then 2 then 4 bah

[Hyperspeed]

I bet if you bought yourself a few extra disk drives to get DF1: DF2: DF3: it would still say "Insert disk into DF0:"...

DOH!

:-D

[Morax]

Legerdemain wrote:
Oh, I have to add... the jerkyness, to me, is just that it doesn't have perfect 60Hz scroll, it feel like the game is running in 20 FPS or something (not slow, just not smooth), though, it might very well be that the OCS/ECS version doesn't suffer from the periodical slowdowns that the AGA version suffers from (when too much is happening at once).

I just tested the OCS version, both in PAL and NTSC, when in PAL-mode everything seems to be the same speed, but when in NTSC-mode there are indeed some minor occasional slowdowns (but everything is faster overall). Or maybe I'm just seeing ghosts.

I might add that I live in Holland, and that's somewhere in Europe, and 8 years ago when I still played on my Amiga 600, I had my own small TV (Still have it, and I still can't afford a bigger one :p ), and the weird thing is that that thing can't display NTSC (like most can), so I never bothered using it. Only some years later when I only had an Amiga 2000, I somehow found out that the 1084S IS capable of displaying NTSC, and then found out that some games played faster (or in the case of SotB 2, at the speed it was probably ment). Never bothered to check on Chaos Engine though.

[Morax]

KThunder wrote:
yeah floppy swapping was an annoying feature all right. some games didnt even seem to sort stuff so it was in order, insert disk 1 then 3 then 4 then 2 then 4 bah

And the most annoying thing about such games was that a lot of them weren't even harddisk installable :s grrrr...

[Hyperspeed]

Someone has mentioned this before that when you use Screenmode Prefs or the Early Startup Menu to switch into NTSC mode on a PAL machine it is outputting 60Hz PAL and not 60Hz NTSC.

I'm not totally sure what the difference is as I've mainly used RGB (which is bypassing PAL/NTSC transmission).

[Legerdemain]

Only some years later when I only had an Amiga 2000, I somehow found out that the 1084S IS capable of displaying NTSC, and then found out that some games played faster (or in the case of SotB 2, at the speed it was probably ment). Never bothered to check on Chaos Engine though.

Actually there's not much more than a handful of games on the Amiga originally designed for NTSC (I base this on actual NTSC releases, and those are not many). Thing is, for some reason many developers only used 320*200 of the 320*256 available pixels on the PAL screen. Many games will run in NTSC, but chances are they were never designed to do so. Brian the Lion, for example, runs way too fast when in NTSC, even though the entire game looks like it was designed for NTSC. Many games that looks like they are designed for NTSC even do have title and introduction screens in PAL.

Furthermore, in many cases, if running a game which looks like it was designed for NTSC but actually wasn't, in NTSC mode can make things behave really odd. Jerkyness in the scroll can appear, if the game uses long samples in their modules (if modules is used for the music) the music can sound really bad... and so on...

I have no clue as of why they did it this way, but when talking about games like Eye Of The Beholder and such, it was probably not more complicated than the fact they were ported from a system which used 320*200 as default resolution. Another theory can be that only using that part of the screen could speed things up...

Someone has mentioned this before that when you use Screenmode Prefs or the Early Startup Menu to switch into NTSC mode on a PAL machine it is outputting 60Hz PAL and not 60Hz NTSC.

PAL 60Hz is actually the best of those kind of modes available, as far as I know, because it really is 60Hz and not 59.98Hz which NTSC is. Furthermore, it handles colours way much better than "NTSC - Never The Same Colour". It probably is the way which you've heard... otherwise I would have had real trouble getting anything but an out-of-sync and black & white screen when running my A1200 in the, so called, 'NTSC' mode back in the days when I ran the computer without an RGB cable on a TV which didn't support NTSC.

But, then I must admit that I am curious as of how to get Amigas running on a TV in the US? Are there true NTSC-based Amigas out there? (Besides the A1000)?

[Hyperspeed]

The Sega Dreamcast games usually allowed you to use 60Hz from the software's main menu, probably in response to half the Saturn users getting a 60Hz switch!

:-)

I think maybe all Amigas could be modded to switch between 50/60Hz PAL and 59.98Hz NTSC with a hardware dongle on the rear. This would be the best method for people in North America/Japan who wish to play PAL Amiga games.

That or getting a Philips/Commodore/Microvitec monitor. Although an LCD panel might be a good option to avoid the more flickery 50Hz PAL screenmodes... without needing to buy a less-than-perfect scandoubler/flickerfixer.

[tonyvdb]

"Are there true NTSC-based Amigas out there? (Besides the A1000)?"

All if not most of the Amigas sold in Canada and the USA were NTSC machines. If you wanted to play Pal games you had to force it to do so in the boot menu. (for example a Video Toaster that was made only for the NTSC Amigas will not even run on a pal machine) You have to remember that true Pal is 50 Hz not 60 and NTSC is 60 Hz you are thinking of the frames per seconds in NTSC its 29.97 Pal draws more lines on the screen but slower at 50 times per second then NTSC so whan you play a pal game on a true NTSC Amiga you usualy cut off a small portion of the screen on the bottum and it will run at a different speed because the refresh rate is faster (60 times per second but less lines to draw).

[Morax]

Legerdemain wrote:

Actually there's not much more than a handful of games on the Amiga originally designed for NTSC (I base this on actual NTSC releases, and those are not many). Thing is, for some reason many developers only used 320*200 of the 320*256 available pixels on the PAL screen. Many games will run in NTSC, but chances are they were never designed to do so. Brian the Lion, for example, runs way too fast when in NTSC, even though the entire game looks like it was designed for NTSC. Many games that looks like they are designed for NTSC even do have title and introduction screens in PAL.

Furthermore, in many cases, if running a game which looks like it was designed for NTSC but actually wasn't, in NTSC mode can make things behave really odd. Jerkyness in the scroll can appear, if the game uses long samples in their modules (if modules is used for the music) the music can sound really bad... and so on...

I have no clue as of why they did it this way, but when talking about games like Eye Of The Beholder and such, it was probably not more complicated than the fact they were ported from a system which used 320*200 as default resolution. Another theory can be that only using that part of the screen could speed things up...

That's very odd... More logical would be when American-made games were programmed with NTSC in mind, and European with PAL, but I've seen a lot of European-made games (or even games in the German language) which don't use the bottom lines... Another (weird?) thing is that a lot of CD32 games does seem to have been made with the region in mind, and most of those PAL-games also use the lower 56 lines.
By the way is the Amiga the only computer which has those differences in resolution between PAL (320/640x256) and NTSC (320/640x200)? Because other machines and consoles  seem to have the same height in both the display modes...

And to add I indeed noticed that some games switched to NTSC to speed up things (in emulation though, but my PC is fast enough, so it could easy have been on a real Amiga), Those games seem to be jerkier in points when a lot of action goes on at the same time, then when played in PAL. Also the music and/or sound skipped a bit sometimes.

[itix]

@Morax

By using 320x200 instead of 320x256 you could make software faster. Less pixels simply meant less work for the blitter and CPU. Although it is not always significant it reduced design problems when games had to be usable for NTSC users too.

Some games (Settlers IIRC) could use an advantage of PAL machines and use all 256 lines but for example for games like Xenon II it is lot more complicated.

For NTSC jerkyness... it could be because there are less CPU cycles per frame and if the game was finetuned for PAL refresh it could skip every 2nd frame then. (I guess...)

[KThunder]

Morax wrote:
 (in emulation though, but my PC is fast enough, so it could easy have been on a real Amiga), Those games seem to be jerkier in points when a lot of action goes on at the same time, then when played in PAL. Also the music and/or sound skipped a bit sometimes.

dont base your feeling of how amiga games run on how well they are or arent emulated. i have played many many games on real amigas and many many games on emulation many of these the same games and i can tell you most of them arent exactly the same. timing, screen refresh and gameplay feel arent always perfectly translated in emulation.
timing really gets messed up between systems because so much of the amiga is based of the timings of the video system. pal if 50hz ntsc is 60hz so pal has more lines of res but slower speed. and it is more than just screen refresh that is affected by this.
i use fellow for games alot v3.6 thats the old dos version. it seems to do a really good job of syncronizing everything a bit better than even the newest versions of winuae. although screen smoothing is nice.

[Morax]

@KThunder: You're right ofcourse, I know emulation isn't exactly the real thing (Happy I still have good two amiga's :-) )

[Legerdemain]

You have to remember that true Pal is 50 Hz not 60 and NTSC is 60 Hz you are thinking of the frames per seconds in NTSC its 29.97 Pal draws more lines on the screen but slower at 50 times per second then NTSC so whan you play a pal game on a true NTSC Amiga you usualy cut off a small portion of the screen on the bottum and it will run at a different speed because the refresh rate is faster (60 times per second but less lines to draw).

I've read your post through a couple of times and I don't really see what you are trying to say, maybe it is because I'm missing the .'s defining the sentences? I'll try to break it down into pieces...

Yes, I know that 'true' PAL is 50 Hz and not 60 Hz. Yes, I know that PAL 50 Hz draws more lines on the screen but at a lower pace than NTSC. Yes, I do know that running a PAL game on an NTSC Amiga means cutting off a bit of the bottom of the screen. And, in my post I did never state otherwise, rather, I did state exactly the same as in your post.

That leaves us with the FPS. You say that the FPS in NTSC is 29.97? Odd. On my TV running the Amiga and/or other consoles in what often is refered to here as 'NTSC-resolution' (or, to be correct, PAL 60 Hz) means getting an FPS of 60.0. I am pretty confident that the FPS in the US on an NTSC television set isn't half of that. So, what am I not understanding here?