There's one type of genre that I loved playing in the arcades and more so on my home console, and that is the shoot em up genre! You know the type, enemy waves coming at you at all sides, your ship blasting across the landscape with adrenaline flowing as you try to survive and wipe them out. Well there's one such game that I have fond memories of and that was Namco's 1982 vertical scrolling arcade shoot em up of Xevious. A game that we are pleased to announce may well be coming to the Commodore Amiga, thanks to the hard work of JOTD!
Here is what JOTD says in regards to the first video posted above " Well, it's not that easy for a 1:1 port because of the strange local palettes the game uses. Game uses 128 colors, which could be reduced but it also has an OSD. ATM I'm focusing on an AGA port which should run on bare A1200. There are also memory constraints because of all the lookup tables and various palettes to emulate. This project was initiated by Mark McDougall, a talented coder who is doing the NeoGeo version which is way beyond the amiga version, but the cool thing is: I don't have a clue about how the game works. All Z80 to 68k reverse of the game logic is done by Mark and I "just" have to implement the hardware dependent calls that he designed".
So more like an emulator, but not as slow as MAME, else it would be useless.
http://retroports.blogspot.com/
In regards to the second video however, JOTD also went on to say "new video. You may think that it's worse than the first one (which is true color-wise) but palette optimizations haven't been applied yet, hi score font color is also off, and deleted by shots and all. This is a 180 degree turn vs the previous approach which used the actual 128 colors for tiles & sprites, and was pretty wasteful in terms of resources. With that new approach, a ECS version could be done, but with 8+8 colors (+ sprites) it would be really bland. the title tiles aren't included in this map and they probably use different colors.
This night I figured it out: as the title can't be displayed at the same time as the scenery, I could switch palettes when the title is displayed Made good progress yesterday. Now game is playable. It's going to be real!"
And there's all there is to say at the moment especially as the game is so early in development, but for further discussion or another heads up via Earok please see the link (HERE).
It says a lot about the ingenuity of arcade makers back in 80s when an A1200 is having trouble doing a 1:1 port of an arcade game released in 1982.
ReplyDeleteEach machine at the time had very specific characteristics, game development was profoundly tied to the way the underlying hardware worked. More modern machines didn't have some improved version of the same functionality, they had fundamentally different functionality. Using tiles for graphics was very common with consoles and arcade machines, Amigas had a fundamentally different graphics architecture which was significantly more flexible but which wasn't a great match if you had to port titles over.
DeleteThe NES version and its sequel looked very watered down compared to the arcade versions. Most of it was the color palette. Good to see it coming to Amiga.
ReplyDeleteAtari st version is good
ReplyDeletewow, looks nice. Xevious will always be in my heart, because if was one of the first games ever, that i played regularly in a local Arcade here in my city, back then in the 80's.
ReplyDeleteMSX2 and Pc-Engine are the very best port of Xevious (non emulated)
ReplyDelete