An IndieRetroNews reader, has recently informed us in our comments feed, that JOTD is still working on a Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja Arcade conversion for the Commodore Amiga (AGA). Although it's still in a very early stage of development, and the original Amiga version of the game was regarded as terrible with one such Lemon Amiga saying "This is absolute dreck with horrible graphics, terrible backgrounds, how did this get released in this state?" Rest assured if JOTD finishes this conversion, it's sure to be another hit in the Amiga scene.
If you've been waiting for more updates on this upcoming Arcade to Amiga development. Then we have just found out, that the creator has not only updated the EAB thread with a new work in progress video ( Shown above ), but he was also quoted as saying "alpha 3 in the zone. Now all levels are playable without trashed gfx including levels 6 and 7. Helicopter boss now is displayed. Lockup on level completed fixed. Still a lot of optimizations & fixes to apply but this is great."
- Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja was NOT created using the Scorpion Engine
- Once the game has progressed far enough I'll be doing new articles but for now, this article will be updated with the latest Alpha developments.
SHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!!!!!!!!! Nice :D :D :DD:D:D:D:D
ReplyDeleteThat's wonderful news!
ReplyDeletelooking good :) looks like we could have decent ports back in the day if the developers could of been bothered.
ReplyDeleteThere were a few really good arcade ports on Amiga but also really bad ones. Some were probably rushed while others from devs really strange 3rd party companies that made cheap software. Without the same restrictions of time and disk space many of these homebrews have been fantastic. Making games that took up memory and space were really expensive back in the day. Now people are doing it for free.
DeleteYeah!! Now Amiga conversions are getting seriously cool! 😎 Great work JOTD!
ReplyDeleteTrue, original Amiga version was terrible, C64 version with its impressive combined sprite multiplex was better. Fingers crossed, it looks nice on the Amiga now too!
ReplyDeleteS(not H)wweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt !!!!!!
ReplyDeleteKeep the Good Work ! It's great and We need such Amiga version.
ReplyDeletelast night i played the original amiga version via whdload on my 1200! It was a broken game with bad controls unplayable even with cheats...I thought that it would be nice if there was a new version and today i read this!!! I am looking forward for this one!
ReplyDeleteComparing it to the arcade it really does look arcade perfect
ReplyDeleteGood news I love Bad Dudes Vs Dragon Ninja. I suggest adding extra features to entice video game players to play this version istead of the Arcade such a more weapons and more martial art fighting positions.
ReplyDeletenot going to happen, as with the original moves (there are a lot) it's already pretty much hogging all memory... One of the issues of this game IMHO are the weapons. The nunchuk makes a much easier and repetitive game. When I played back in the days, I only picked weapons when I was about to die. Else I found the gameplay to be dull.
DeleteI disagree with many of the comments here. The Amiga version of Dragon Ninja, while far from perfect, was a pretty decent conversion for its time. That guy on Lemonamiga was way too harsh in his comments. Sure, compared with the coin-op, the Amiga version had a smaller play area (hence, smaller sprites), less colors, didn't have all the animations and special effects of the original, but... sometimes it managed to display up to 10 large sprites on the screen at once (with some slowdown, of course), the action was fast and furious, and the gameplay was even faster (not smoother) than the coin-op version! The music was awesome, IMHO it sounded better than the synth tune of the coin-op. The game ran on a stock Amiga 500 with no expansion, but if you had 1MB of RAM, you could get some more enemy variants and music+effects at once. Not bad, I must say, for a game from 1989!
ReplyDeleteSo, respect for the developer of this new A1200 version, but if someone could make a better "Amiga 500" version, I would be much more impressed. But there were much worse conversions on the Amiga that would desperately need a decent remake: Black Tiger, Rolling Thunder, Eswat, 1943, Strider, Bionic Commando, Alien Syndrome, Renegade, Shinobi, SideArms, Tiger Road and many others... I wish someone would take the trouble (or the fun!) to make some decent versions of them for the original Amiga 500, not for an Amiga 1200.
I agree with you: the A500 version is a feat. Graphically pretty close to the arcade except for the colors but the gameplay... Horrible, and not recoverable (unlike amiga version of GhostsNGoblins which played great once the "turn back and shoot" and second button for jump was restored). A wasted great effort. For other games you're mentionning, doing them in ECS is probably going to render barely better than the originals so it's probably not worth it. In AGA on the other hand, that would be different (but still a lot compromises to be made)
DeleteI remember having much fun playing Dragon Ninja on the Amiga 500 (about 35 years ago... Oh my, I'm so old!). IMHO the "diagonal jump" was the only thing that was poorly designed, but you had just to learn how to do it: first go up with the joystick, then immediately to the right (or left). It was written in the instruction booklet too, but I guess most people had a pirated version, so they didn't know how to do it...
DeleteAs for the rest, I don't know why you say that an OCS/ECS hardware would not be enough to make some decent conversion of the games I mentioned... Of course, you could not have 1:1 pixel-perfect conversions but, with some reasonable compromises, a good coder + a good pixel artist combo should be able to get a satisfying result, certainly miles better than those shameful Atari ST ports we got at the time. For example, have you ever tried playing Black Tiger and/or Rolling Thunder on the Amiga? They ran between 5 and 8FPS! Seriously, probably one could do some better result by using Amos!
what is going on with amiga games and there are always not centered ? can someone explain technically , is there a fault in the graphics chip ?
DeleteScrolling games need to hide the first 16/32/64 pixels else the playfield isn't clipped properly. AGA fmode=3 requires 64 bits for scrolling, hence a horizontal "shift" of 64 bits at start. It can be reduced to some point.
DeleteAGA FMODE=3 is fast but comes with its constraints
Agreed. apart from the jump, (which wasnt that important in the game), it was a great conversion. i loved it. and compared the majority of the truly terrible conversions out there, it was a treat. i don't know what people are complaining about?
DeleteTotally agree! The existing A500 conversion is actually pretty decent, and runs on the stock system with 512kb of RAM! An A1200 while still very cool, just isn't that much of a flex.
DeleteMmmyeah, I used to play Bad Dudes, you know when I was younger...I then moved on to Two Crude...wauw is all I can say! Two Crude sums up the 1990's for me! It replaces the 80's Rambo never ending ammo spray with the ultimate being badass...oh,let's pick up a car and throw at someone. Two Crude is so utterly sarcastic that you just have to love it! Yet, most fellow nerdsters have never heard of Two Crude. Not yet released on an Amiga.
ReplyDeleteWow.... i think amiga is emulation so kind of arcade emulator.... its so near the arcade version... VERY GOOD !!! Great Jog.....
ReplyDeleteMusic Theme seems inspirated by Miami Vice one at some moments or is it my imagination? Anyway it's great!
ReplyDeleteI don't understand all the hate for these older arcade conversions. A lot of these were unplayable But I didn't think dragon ninja wasn't bad especially when it was released In the late '80s. sure, looking at it from a 2025 perspective it looks terrible but back then I thought it was pretty good
ReplyDeleteAwesome
ReplyDeleteSeeing a lot of the same "lazy devs" remarks that people like to trot out, but it's easy to forget what devs were up against with arcade ports in the 80s and 90s. The 8 and 16-bit computer games market was mostly confined to Europe and was relatively small. Publishers didn't have huge budgets to hire big teams to make ports. It wasn't uncommon for it to be just one or two guys, and they were often young and relatively inexperienced, with tight deadlines. Added to that, they didn't have the conveniences of modern dev environments. Compiling, testing, debugging and iterating was an exponentially slower process. The devs would be lucky to get an arcade board to work from, let alone any source code, assets or design docs. We all know the Amiga was rarely pushed to its full potential, but these guys were doing the best with what resources they had at the time.
ReplyDeleteJOTD is on fire!
ReplyDeleteI've always loved the cover for this game, looks like someone tried to draw Tom Cruise from memory.
ReplyDeleteTom Cruise which would require serious dental work then!
Deleteapart from the slowdown that destroys the gameplay its very good , hope the performance will get better
ReplyDeleteit will, rest assured. I don't know what it looks like on "simple" A1200/020 with fastmem (no accelerator). And I'm working with nice testers to try to improve things and I have ideas. But be aware that there are a lot of moving objects. The arcade machine is a monster.
DeleteFantastic , i am not a developer out of curiocity why not limit some objects ut will not change the gameplay i think and you ll get 50FPS on a stock A1200 with fast mem or even without. Stupid commodore the same mistake twice as with OCS wrong memory config slowing the amiga systems. Question if the A500 would used cartidges would have better performance at games?
DeleteIf the colors were toned down to 32 total, the game could probably run on base A1200 but would look almost like the ECS version so a lot of work for a mediocre result. The game needs at least 64 colors to look good.
DeleteAbout cartridges, no it would just speed up loading. Chipmem & blitter access are the main slowdowns on amiga. Consoles have a lot more hardware sprites & tile engines.
and No hated scorpion engine which made all games seem similar. Old good programming without strange tools
ReplyDeleteRobocop next? Same hardware
ReplyDeleteRobocop is already in development for Amiga: https://youtu.be/OIrTdgRi8ng?t=137
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