How do you port games from PC to Amiga?

[Starrfoxx]

I feel like I may be biting off more than I can really chew, but I thought I'd ask.  (Never hurts to ask.)  I think it is neat to see some games like Quake 3 make it to the Amiga, and Freescape looks really good too.  I was hoping I might be able to make my own contribution.

The problem is, I know nothing about programming with exception of using Basic on a Commodore 64 many, many years ago.  What I would like to do is make a port of my favorite PC game "The Sims" to the Amiga.  I was wanting to make that AGA compatible, and minimum to run would be a 68040.  I don't know how realistic that is.  The graphics on the original "Sims" is pretty basic, so I don't think it would be too bad.

I don't even know where to begin.  I assume I would need to get permission from EA Games.  Then I would need to get the programming code, which I'm not sure how to go about that.  I'm not even sure if they'll charge me for it.  And then there's the task of actually porting the code to the Amiga, and I have no clue on how to do that either.

I did see this over on Amigakit:

StormC v4 (Amiga CD)


Would this be useful, or is this for experienced programmers?  I'm more of a beginner, and like I said I'm probably biting off more than I can really chew here.  But I thought it would be nice to port the most popular PC game over to the Amiga community.

The Mac versions of "The Sims" and "The Sims 2" are done by Aspyr Media.  I'm not sure what they had to go through to do a port, but I'm interested to find out.

I suppose if a port of this game is way out of my league, I could always do a clone based on The Sims.  Perhaps it can be Amiga specific and we can call it "The Migs"?   :-P

[motorollin]

You can only truly port software if you have its source code. Then you have to adapt the code so it will compile and run on the target environment.

Since you don't have access to the source code for The Sims, you would have to write a clone from scratch (a reimplementation, not a port).

--
moto

[Lando]

You'd be looking at seven figures (millions of dollars) to even get EA to consider allowing a license of a port of the Sims to another platform, and you'd have to provide them with background on your game development history (as in a catalogue of previously successful published big-name titles by members of your conversion team) so that they can be reasonably confident you will do a decent job of the port and not bring the whole 'Sims' brand into disrepute with a shoddy release.  They'd also assign an external producer to the project, to oversee the conversion, and it would have to go through EA's QA process.

In short it'll be about as easy as getting George Lucas to let you make a new official Star Wars movie.

[odin]

Licensing impossibilities aside, I doubt 68k CPU's would be enough for The Sims. I presume this is a 3D game?

-edit-
EA has a QA department?

[koaftder]

EA will not allow you to use their brand even if you coded a 100% clone from the gound up. An independent clone is the best you can hope for.

But why bother on the amiga? It's vastly more satisfying putting together games on modern platforms. Fast hardware, no more writing your own freakin raycaster, etc. You can write some cool graphics effects in less than 40 lines in c# with xna that would be impossible on any amiga.

Even if you did a nice sims clone on amiga all proper and stuff, only like some 2000 people would even be able to run it.

[SamuraiCrow]

Learn to walk before you run.  If you only know Commodore Basic then you'll need to get an Amiga Basic first.  If you want to program for classic Amiga, I'd recommend getting AmosPro even though it doesn't support AGA yet becuase when you first write games you'll probably need to do your own artwork anyway.  There is an effort in progress to make an AGA, PowerPC and PC compatible sequel to Amos tentatively called Mattathias.  Using Amos to write games will soon become portable.

If you're writing games just for classic Amiga and don't care about getting them to run well on PowerPC or better, then download AmiBlitz instead.

Quake3 is out for the AmigaOS version 4 on the PowerPC processors but it has bugs due to the poor implementation of OpenGL currently available.

As for learning C, that's a good idea but a difficult task.  StormC 4 is good for classic Amigas but I currently am using a cross-development environment on both Linux and Windows.  See Zerohero's website for free downloads to the GCC cross-compilers and if you want a graphical environment for them, see AmiDevCpp instead.  Of course you'll need to run WinUAE to test your code but that's not a huge problem if you have both a PC and a classic Amiga.

If you have another platform besides classic Amiga, I'd recommend learning sdlBasic since it has been ported to both AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS on the PowerPC.  Program games using SDL and OpenGL which can be easily ported to AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS.  Unfortunately these programs slow to a crawl on AmigaOS 3.x due to the old 680x0 processors.

[Starrfoxx]

Lol!

Yeah, I didn't think it would be easy.  Well, I'm glad I asked.  It gave me a dose of reality there.  I did see Quake 3 ported, or actually a patch made for it so I wasn't sure.

As far as another Star Wars movie, actually there are some really good "fan films" out there that are quite impressive.  Has anyone seen "Reign of the Fallen" and/or "Dark Alliance"?  Excellent stuff.

Ok, well, let's move away from the subject of doing a port and talk about actually building a game "based" on The Sims.  I'm not sure if there would be any interest in a project like this.  If not, I think my daughter would get a kick out of it since she loves playing the original Sims.  It would be a fun pastime also.

I think what I would want to do is get myself an A1200 to program on, or perhaps I could use WinUAE on my laptop.  Now what I need is the knowledge.  Are there any programs out there to make games for the Amiga or do I need to write it all in code, Amiga Basic, C?  I actually have a book somewhere on AmigaBasic.  It's a thick book.  I think what I need is Amiga Basic for Dummies.   :-D

[SamuraiCrow]

Don't use AmigaBasic.  It has too many bugs and is written by Microsoft.  Use Amos or AmiBlitz instead.  See my previous post for information.

[alx]

As others have said, a clone could be possible, not a direct port.  However I think that you're underestimating the amount of effort needed to create a game like that (even one now as relatively old as the original Sims).  I'm no programmer myself, but the advice everyone seems to give is to start small: write a few trivial apps, then a game of noughts-and-crosses, then chess, then a simple turn-based strategy game etc.

You might want to have a little look into the SDL library - if you were to write a game with that then it would be easily portable onto the Amiga/PC/anything.  Here's my experience:  I wrote a nice little isometric engine in C++ and SDL that could do smooth-scrolling, multiple heights, seperate user-placable buildings etc and looked identical to C&C: Red Alert.  It ported onto the Amiga with no real modifications, which was very satisfying.  The aim was to use it as the basis of a C&C-type RTS game, however that was way to big for a first project, and the code's been in storage for a year or so now.  On the other hand, I'd never used anything other than AMOS and Visual BASIC before, having always assumed C/C++ the realm of professionals.  After reading a book a book ("teach yourself C++ in 24 hours") it turned out to be a lot easier going than I'd imagined at first.

BTW I don't know how realistic it would be to get something like The Sims working nicely under AGA.  While it can display 256 colours, it's dog-slow when doing that.

[koaftder]

Listen to Alx. SDL is nice and ports are for amiga. Skip the basic, c/c++ is nice and sets you up to being able to develop for any platform you like.

And don't forget to give XNA a shot. Stuff written with XNA runs on windows and xbox360. Looks like there is going to be an indie games markit on xbox live, so if you come up with a neat game you could make some coin as well as having fun.

[skurk]

Hi, first off let me say: great initiative!

Before you get your hands dirty with commercial C compilers, you can try free alternatives like dice, vbcc and gcc. It will save you a few bucks in case you decide it's not your cup of tea.

Porting is unfortunately not just "recompile and run", you may have to rewrite some parts, like the graphics and audio routines, IO handlers (keyboard, mouse, etc) and so on.  The audio and graphics may have to be converted to Amiga-friendly formats.

I recommend that you download a free C compiler and start with something extremly easy, just to get the taste of what to expect.  Find something that's already multi-plattform, like a command-line utility from the UNIX world.  Odds are you'll something like that working with the least amount of work.

[Amiduffer]

Hi StarrFoxx. I like the name "Migs" and it sounds like a fun game. I'd play it since the little I played of the Sims was rather interesting.

To program something like that myself, though. geeeeeeez  :-o What a frightening idea.

For those who might remember, what was that program featured a little person that lived in a house with a dog (or was it a cat), and you "interacted" with it as it went through the motions of doing household activities? I can remember it on the PC a long time ago, as someone had it playing on a store computer. Was the name "little people"? Maybe you could start with something along those lines and build it out from there.

[koaftder]

Amiduffer wrote:
Hi StarrFoxx. I like the name "Migs" and it sounds like a fun game. I'd play it since the little I played of the Sims was rather interesting.

To program something like that myself, though. geeeeeeez  :-o What a frightening idea.

For those who might remember, what was that program featured a little person that lived in a house with a dog (or was it a cat), and you "interacted" with it as it went through the motions of doing household activities? I can remember it on the PC a long time ago, as someone had it playing on a store computer. Was the name "little people"? Maybe you could start with something along those lines and build it out from there.

Would that be "AllyCat" ?

msdos game in CGA?

[B00tDisk]

Amiduffer wrote:
Hi StarrFoxx. I like the name "Migs" and it sounds like a fun game. I'd play it since the little I played of the Sims was rather interesting.

To program something like that myself, though. geeeeeeez  :-o What a frightening idea.

For those who might remember, what was that program featured a little person that lived in a house with a dog (or was it a cat), and you "interacted" with it as it went through the motions of doing household activities? I can remember it on the PC a long time ago, as someone had it playing on a store computer. Was the name "little people"? Maybe you could start with something along those lines and build it out from there.

"LIttle Computer People", from EA

[Amiduffer]

Oh yeah! Little Computer People. Never got the little guy to do anything except stare at me.  :lol:

Think thats do-able StarrFoxx?