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Post by spector on Feb 9, 2023 0:19:24 GMT
It’s a bit much to imply that I’m bitter about it - I just think it’s regrettable that so much software came out that didn’t use the machine to the best of its abilities. Much the same can be said about the Amstrad. The argument you make about commercial expediency is true, but I’m sure that you would have had a better experience had developers made the most of its capabilities. The reasons why are perfectly understandable, but the irrefutable fact is that there is a vast range of poor quality ports for the machine and its potential was frequently not realised. So you think that the ST was a 'terrible gaming machine' and a 'blight on gaming' but you're not bitter? Sure. That's a very un-mattb comment- with the smiley at the end it reminds me more of halcyondaze!! Let's remember the cost in 1989: the ST was about £250 and the Amiga £350 in C&VG adverts. That must be close to a grand in 2023 money, so surely the Amiga scene in the 80s wasnt relevant because the ordinary Joe couldn't afford machines with a price point like that.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 9, 2023 6:44:14 GMT
Yeah, I know! Look, feel free to disagree, MattB, and I have nothing but respect for your superior knowledge of the way hardware works. But don’t make judgements like that based on a bit of spicy language. It’s just a bit of poetic licence. I haven’t played Amiga games regularly for years and it’s not like it burns away at me.
As to the poor ST ports? Are you really doubting me on that, to the extent that I need to go and find you evidence?
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Post by oldtimer on Feb 9, 2023 7:33:11 GMT
I like my Atari ST Although ive not used it for a year or two but my Amiga 1200 does kick its ass .......
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Post by mattb on Feb 9, 2023 11:17:35 GMT
Yeah, I know! Look, feel free to disagree, MattB, and I have nothing but respect for your superior knowledge of the way hardware works. But don’t make judgements like that based on a bit of spicy language. It’s just a bit of poetic licence. I haven’t played Amiga games regularly for years and it’s not like it burns away at me. As to the poor ST ports? Are you really doubting me on that, to the extent that I need to go and find you evidence? Fair enough then.
And no, I don't doubt you. You obviously must have felt strongly to say it in the first place. I was just wondering if there were games you had in mind.
If I had to make some guesses, I know Peter Johnson (Arkanoid/Robocop) had a bit of a reputation for barebones ports but I'd hardly say that his work was downright bad, as those two at least are still pretty good games. Similarly, those early Bitmap Bros and Sensible Software games before they made the Amiga the lead platform don't have a lot of Amiga enhancements but they're still highly regarded by many on both platforms. Most of the really bad stuff - Out Run, Final Fight, Street Fighter, etc. - wasn't great on the ST to begin with though; you can't polish a turd, so the saying goes.
Also, I'm glad that the the Amiga homebrew community, who've been busily porting many of the ST games that never made it back in the day, don't feel that way. At least, I doubt they'd bother if they thought the games were all crap.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2023 6:24:34 GMT
That’s cool. I was over exaggerating and being a knob, I realise that!
It’s been a general observation looking at retrosutra’s comparison videos over the last few months that a lot of the Amiga/ST comparisons show precious little between them. To be fair, the audio is nearly always different, which I suppose is down to the fact that you can’t just port audio that’s designed for the AY chip over to the Amiga hardware.
It’s in the graphics department that the Amiga enter up being under used. No doubt because changing graphics is labour intensive and big alterations could change game mechanics. However, it’s a shame poor scrolling and low refresh rates aren’t tackled.
So the first video I tried looking at again in retrosutra’s recent ones was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is a typically fairly bare bones effort, with the only concession to the Amiga’s higher allocation of on screen colours being a copper listed sky on the ‘outside’ areas. Otherwise all of the objects are shaded in the same way. If it seems a bit much to ask that all the graphics were overhauled, which is admittedly time consuming, I have less sympathy for the fact that the game obviously runs slowly. Admittedly, YouTube videos aren’t ideal for this because jerkiness can come from the playback, and perhaps there’s an issue with frame rates generally (I mean, some of these must be games running in PAL mode at 50Hz within a 60Hz YouTube wrapper?) I don’t know, but games that I remember running smoothly do sometimes look jerky here.
Another one to add is Mr Heli - this was criticised in Zzap at the time for being a bare bones port.
Whilst reflecting on this, I did remember actually playing Railroad Tycoon on a friend’s ST. Obviously that game was an absolute classic and the ST was in no way disadvantaged with a game of that sort. Obviously I got it for the Amiga shortly afterwards and loved it, and I would have enjoyed it just as much on the ST. I imagine it would actually have run slightly faster due to the ST’s faster CPU clock speed, but I expect this would have been largely imperceptible in the real world.
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Post by mattb on Feb 12, 2023 3:58:17 GMT
Re-making the sound and music, adjusting the colour palette and adding a few copper effects are relatively easy things to do. None of them need much CPU time and they're usually independent from the rest of the game code. You could feel rightly aggrieved if an Amiga port got none of those things, although they're not really going to enhance the gameplay much.
Adding extra bitplanes, hardware scrolling and getting games to run faster is the sort of thing that requires a top to bottom re-write though. That just wasn't going to happen unless it was the lead platform and it wasn't really until 1989 that we were even getting many Amiga games using all of those tricks together anyway. Just to add to the picture, the Atari STE from 1989 also had hardware scrolling and a blitter but even they didn't get used much because going to the trouble of rewriting games to use it wasn't commercially viable in most cases.
Even getting ST games to run at the same speed on the Amiga isn't necessarily trivial as the CPU is slower and more prone to getting interrupted by the hardware. Some latter day ports of ST games to Amiga (e.g. Oids and Super Sprint) require a significantly higher spec machine to run on because the developers didn't have access to the original source code and couldn't make those kind of optimizations. Going by that, there was probably a lot more work that went into a lot of such ports than is given credit for even if the end results were somewhat disappointing.
Looking at both Mr Heli and Monty Python's Flying Circus, they're not exactly great games to begin with, and could probably have been done a lot better on the ST with a bit more time and developer knowledge. Just take a look at them compared to Wings of Death and Enchanted Land, for instance, both of which came out at around the same time and it should be clear enough that they're not exactly pushing the ST's potential.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 12, 2023 9:15:18 GMT
Yep, I take all those points. My example of Monty Python was no more than one of the first videos I came across flicking back through retrosutra to exemplify the point. I found an example more or less straight away without having to hunt it down. The point really is that examples are so numerous that it takes little effort to find one.
Another one I found shortly afterward was Atomic Robokid. I find this one particularly interesting, because clearly the graphics are just a straight port on the Amiga with no extra colours, and the scrolling looks like half-refresh rate. As I said before, judging the smoothness of these games on a YouTube feed isn't always that easy, but even the C64 version looks like it's running at 50Hz. Maybe that's largely because C64's backgrounds are bland and the screen area is quite restrictive, to limit the amount of character and colour data it's having to shift around. But the fact is that playing the C64 version might actually have felt more responsive. And I have to say, even back in the day it seemed noticeable that a lot of Amiga games seemed a bit sluggish from a C64 owner's point of view. That is, until you got to those really good titles such as Superfrog and Project X that were designed with the Amiga's strengths in mind from the beginning. And it was at that point that the quantum leap from the C64 to the Amiga was really obvious. With the ST, games still seemed to have one foot in the 8-bit era - at least when it comes to arcade games (flight sims and strategy games were areas where the ST did flex its 16-bit muscles).
One more thing on Atomic Robokid, though - although it looks identical to the ST, I do wonder whether there are some changes under the hood. The ST seems to have more slow down when the really large fan thing comes on the screen - so maybe there are alterations under the hood that leveraged the Amiga's graphical power to deliver a smoother experience? Or maybe I am just imagining things (the problem with YouTube videos is that you're never really comparing the versions side by side, so things like smoothness are harder to gauge than e.g. number of colours). To be fair, if the developers only had the chance to enhance one thing for the Amiga, I'd rather it was using the hardware to improve speed than just add an extra splash of colours.
A more interesting trio of comparisons, all late 80s games, all certified top quality games, sits side-by-side on retrosutra's channel from a couple of years ago - R-Type, NZ Story and Pacmania. R-Type and Pacmania are really very good conversions. Pacmania is a standout, for me, because it is seen as a genuine Amiga game designed from the ground up rather than a commercially-expedient bodge. And you can see the difference - more colours and full-screen scrolling which would have been unfeasible on the ST. R-Type is arguably the most interesting comparison of all, because I think it shows not only the aspects in which the Amiga was superior to the ST, by having smoother scrolling and more subtle colours, but also the superiority of the Sharp X68000 over the Amiga - the sprites all look a bit smaller, which I guess means a higher resolution, plus on the Sharp you have those nice interior backgrounds which are lacking on the Amiga version. And actually, the ST conversion looks to be about as good as it could have been, and looks pretty playable. So overall, it seems closer to being a decent yardstick of the relative merits of these 16-bit computers. NZ Story is interesting because while it is clearly a joint ST-Amiga project, and understandably some ST "features" are present on the Amiga - it retains the ST's colour palette. Nonetheless the programmers seem to have leveraged the Amiga's stronger graphical oomph to give us a bigger screen area. And I imagine they must have decided at a relatively early phase in development that the versions were going to diverge in that respect. So as an Amiga owner, you wouldn't feel too hard done by, because the larger screen area improves the playability and the colour depth is just a superficial thing (really, you're reduced to comparing the amount of greens on the bushes, for example. Damn, the Sharp X86000 gets THREE shades of green on those bushes ...!).
The commercial reasons for simple ports are obvious, and it's not difficult to comprehend that these things require a top-to-bottom rewrite. These three games, being big names and highly successful in the arcades, would all have been hotly anticipated conversions and likely big sellers - the weakest of the three conversions on the Amiga, NZ Story, is probably a step below the other two in terms of the reputation it had, and that is perhaps reflected in the slightly greater degree of compromise. The bigger the game, the more development resources for bespoke conversions can be not only justified but anything less really would look cheap.
But my point is a simple one! Amiga owners would have been better served by more Pacmanias and fewer Monty Pythons, Mr Helis, etc. Even the lesser lights amongst those would have been better, more enjoyable games. Mr Heli, I'm sure would have been a real blast on the Amiga if it had been given the attention of an R-Type. Yes, it's obvious that Mr Heli wouldn't have sold the units R-Type would so there are commercial reasons why that wasn't the case. Think about it from another perspective: isn't it nice to when a really good Amstrad game came along, which wasn't an absolute stinker of a Speccy port like Pacmania or Salamander? Like a Prehistorik 2? Hell, Arkanoid is a great example, as that was released at a time when Spectrum -> CPC ports were de rigeur - but on the CPC it looks fantastic.
And I think the point you make about getting ST code to run on the Amiga is an interesting one. Only coming from the ST to Amiga and having to port the code lock, stock and barrel could you be concerned that the custom chips are interrupting the CPU. Isn't that the whole point of custom chips - that they steal CPU time but the trade off is worth it because they do task-specific things that really ought to save an enormous amount of time in the right circumstances? Scaling down to hardware I actually half-understand, the C64's CPU speed was downclocked, as I understand it, to allow the VIC-II access to RAM. But the point is, that if you have games that rely on moving objects, sprites save you a huge amount of time because you don't need to write code to clean dirty areas of the screen; you don't have to have memory tied up in different offsets of UDGs as you might do with software sprites to make them appear to move smoothly; you have independent colour registers so you can get more colours on-screen without having to use colossal amounts of RAM for colour memory; and so on. Port a game from a machine that doesn't have those capabilities and you have a mess. The C64 world was up in arms when Karnov showed up - I realise that that's actually a particularly egregious example because it was ported from Z80 code which is an even bigger mismatch. But imagine Karnov had been coded on the BBC and ported to the C64 and therefore had to use software sprites because that was what would have been in the original code. It would run much slower, much more so than in ST -> Amiga transitions because the BBC's CPU is twice as fast, whereas the ST's advantage is something like 12%. Obviously if you're starting from a codebase that wasn't designed to work with the custom chips, but rather to do more work on the CPU, it's going to run worse that when something is designed with the benefit of the machine's architecture in mind.
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Post by mattb on Feb 13, 2023 2:24:37 GMT
It's easy to pick out straight ST to Amiga ports and name them individually. However, in the context of an Amiga games library that runs long into the thousands I'd still think that it's proportionally not that many. I'd also repeat that most of those games aren't really worth caring about either. R-Type and NZ Story are the only ones you mentioned that I spent much time on with the ST and, as you mentioned, they got at least some enhancements to their ports. I'll throw in Xenon II and Rodland for a couple more that I did like, and could definitely have been written more to the Amiga's strengths; they don't exactly seem terrible for that not happening though. Rather, I've always thought that many of the Amiga's most highly regarded games were developed in parallel with the ST using a common codebase, and they're also highly regarded on the ST even though not quite so impressive graphically. Just off the top of my head, you've got Turrican II, Sensible Soccer, Speedball II, Lemmings, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Cannon Fodder, The Chaos Engine and that's just the arcade-style games. Throw in all the 3D flying/racing/space sims, strategy games and SCUMM-style adventures and the list would grow even longer. When there's so much in common between the cream of the crop for both machines, I'd think you could make a better case for the ST having had a net positive effect on the Amiga. Meanwhile, the Amiga has plenty of crap games that never even saw the ST. If you want to talk about blights on gaming, Rise of the Robots and Kick Off '96 should be pretty high up your list. Developer talent, time and resources are always going to be bigger limiting factors than what the hardware is capable of. So far as sprites go, the Amiga's hardware implementation of them is rather limited. You've only got four in total (rising to eight if you reduce the number of colours to three, but who wants that?) and they're only up to 16 pixels wide. That's not really adequate for mid-80s arcade games, let alone anything past that point, so games tend to draw their graphics with the blitter; this writes data to the screen which subsequently needs to be erased, and is most efficiently used when running asynchronously to the CPU, so it's not at all like using hardware sprites. Meanwhile, the X68000 pretty much works just like the arcade hardware does with 128 sprites, of which up to 16 can be on a single scanline; I don't think there's any game of note that actually used it for the arcade but the code and techniques would be a lot more transferable. Funnily enough, the Amstrad CPC got an excellent port of Mr Heli. There aren't many games where you can say it looks better than the Amiga version but that's a top candidate.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 13, 2023 8:01:40 GMT
Okay. I think you won me over to the ST! I had no idea the sprite capability on the Amiga was quite so limited. It's pretty clear that the X68000 was a bit of a powerhouse and no wonder the games look much better.
And I must admit that in my previous post I only added the bit about the ST being good for flight sims and strategy games as a bit of an afterthought. It wasn't something I was looking for primarily in a gaming machine. If it hadn't been my use of the Amiga for word processing and playing Sid Meier games I'd have been better served with a Megadrive. But many were quite the opposite. It was a really big selling point for some people and the ST as much as the Amiga (if not slightly more) were THE place for 3D polygonal games in the late 80s. A friend of mine played nothing but flight sims on his Amiga - if you'd put an ST in front of him instead, he would have been just as happy (or even 12% happier!)
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Post by Mr_Horizon on Jul 20, 2023 8:48:44 GMT
I bought the Atari 50 compilation for my Switch, but even though I really like how they made it (much, MUCH better effort than the Atari classics from some years ago), I have played it very little.
My main reason for getting it is a love that I don't fully understand myself - for the game "Lunar Lander". I don't even remember playing it as a kid, but it always pulls me in.
I wanted to have a good version for my Switch, and now I finally have it.
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Post by kerr9000 on Jul 21, 2023 17:23:33 GMT
I bought the Atari 50 compilation for my Switch, but even though I really like how they made it (much, MUCH better effort than the Atari classics from some years ago), I have played it very little. My main reason for getting it is a love that I don't fully understand myself - for the game "Lunar Lander". I don't even remember playing it as a kid, but it always pulls me in. I wanted to have a good version for my Switch, and now I finally have it. I grabbed that for my Switch but it was more for the Jaguar stuff really, its a nice collection.
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Post by megamixer on Aug 3, 2023 20:10:02 GMT
Completely forgot about that compilation. Every time I look at what's available on Switch I see ten more games that I didn't know about and the mental shopping list (which I will never scratch the surface of) just grows. There's almost TOO MUCH choice for Switch games imo.
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Post by sephiroth81 on Aug 4, 2023 18:29:48 GMT
Did Mattb and havantgardeaclue patch things up in the end? Things seemed quite heated there for a moment.
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Post by mattb on Aug 4, 2023 22:29:23 GMT
I think we agreed that the ST was actually good, even if the Amiga was better, in the end.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2023 20:03:05 GMT
Yes, I think that's pretty fair. Shortly after our debate there was a column by Iain Lee in RG magazine talking about when he rubbished the Vic-20 online, only to be met by, shall we say, firm rebuttal from its fans. Presumably he'd meant to be funny, but this is stuff that people spend time and energy on, so it was fair enough for them to put him in his place, I think!
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