Hamulet - This Commodore Amiga Demo looks super impressive!

We've been flooded with new game updates over the last few weeks, with games being mentioned such as Galaxian 500, Zedex Tanks, Savage Princess and even our personal favourite Tenebra 2. Well it's time for the Amiga to get a news update, as thanks to Saberman contacting us earlier today, he has told us to check out this rather impressive looking demo of 'Hamulet' by remi "Remi Veilleux" for the Amiga. A demo in which people given very positive feedback such as "I thought HAM was only good for still pictures. This is insane" and "Awesome music. Now THIS is Amiga".

Here is what is described about the tech demo "Hello everyone! I have assembled an ADF image on my little game/tech-demo I have been working on for the past few months. This is my first C/ASM Amiga game, so it took a fairly long time and was very challenging and fun to work on. I would be extremely grateful to have your input, comments, suggestions about it. Should it be useful to others, I could put the whole project and source code on GitHub, but otherwise I would be happy to answer any questions too. As I mentioned, this being my first serious game project on an Amiga, it is certain that a lot of things could be done better, safer, more compatible, more efficient, etc".

The technical specs:

• - Detects PAL and NTSC, so it should work on both systems
• - Runs at full frame rate (50Hz or 60Hz), scrolling in 8 directions
• - Uses lowres HAM 6-bitplane mode
• - Dynamic sprite management system: it groups sprites by pair, and recycles sprites across the screen vertically: the system can display a maximum of 104 sprites.
• - On an example screen like the one in the screenshot, there is about 80 visible moving sprites, some are animating
• - Sprites are being recolored by the copper: 12 colors per scanline to be precise. This means a theoretical limit of 2880 colors could be displayed just for the sprites. With the current sprite sheet I used, the sprites are using 265 colors.
• - The background tiles are in HAM, which means up to the full palette of 4096 colors, and arranged in such a way show fringeless horizontally scrolling
• - The tiles are shaded at runtime according to light sources (i.e., torches) with a scanline-dithering technique to allow approximately 30 level of darkening
• - There is a single bitmap buffer (i.e.: no double buffering), so everything is rendered with carefully timed 'racing-the-beam' blits.
• - The copper list is also a single list, so all real-time modification of the copper list is done with careful timing
• - joystick control (port 2) and keyboard are supported
• - I tried to make it as system friendly as I could: the game can be directly booted from floppy or installed on RAM: or hard drive or anything else and should work correctly.
• - It works on kickstart 1.2 and anything above. However, on Amiga 1000 with a kickstart older than that, my startup-sequence is doing run <NIL: >NIL: RemGame.exe >NIL: which is not supported so it fails to start; but removing that and it works fine (tested in WinUAE)
• - So far, I've only tested it on WinUAE: my only attempt to run it on hardware was on my Vampire V4, and it crashed horribly. I cannot fully trust that the V4 implementation is 100% compliant with a real Amiga, so for now I do not know how well my game would fare on real hardware.
• - Technically it should boot and work on a real CDTV and Amiga CD32, but I've only tested on WinUAE for now.
• - It runs on OCS, and requires only a 512KB chip ram Amiga, so normally any plain Amiga 500/2000, or Amiga 1000 with 512KB should work

Links :1) Source 2) Download 3) Mirror