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What's an Amiga? *NSF56K*
Posts
Steam Support is the worst. Seriously, the worst
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Obviously not my copy since it's opened, but that gives you an idea of how great the packaging for that game was. I've seen complete longbox copies of SotB go for $150 alone on amibay, so this is a steal, especially since it's sealed.
The more common Bigbox re-release:
I know a guy who has the complete psygnosis big box collection for the Amiga. Every single box is a goddamn work of art. Most gorgeous boxarts in the history of gaming.
Would love to see that collection, always thought Psygnosis were just amazing back in the day, they certainly had a unique feel which surrounded their games, don't see much of that these days.
*off to google*
Here ya go: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?17260-My-Psygnosis-Psyclapse-Amiga-Collection
Towards the end, they really lost their style. But early on... jesus christ. That obliterates today's boxart, which is filled with logos, ratings, brandings, etc. Those things look like art. So gorgeous. That agony box art in particular is incredible.
edit: As for psygnosis themselves, I felt their games were usually style over substance. They were incredibly talented with graphics - everything they produced, absolutely everything, had the most gorgeous jaw-dropping graphics you'd ever see. But the gameplay was usually lacking. Shadow of the Beast is probably the best example of this - stunningly beautiful game, but terrible design. The actual gameplay isn't so bad, it's just that you have no idea what to do, and if you don't do things 100% correctly, and in the right order, the game will become impossible to complete. It's the sort of game that, with a strategy guide, would probably become a lot better.
They still produce amazing graphics though. Wipeout HD is testament to this. Also, most people don't know what the deal with their logo and that owl is - it's actually their mascot, which starred in a game called Agony:
Screenshots don't do it justice - the amount of deep parallax going on, and the way the entire screen animates - not a single pixel left unanimated - can only be appreciated through video:
I actually like Agony a lot - it's a very standard shmup that doesn't do anything extraordinary, but it's still fun and that incredible artstyle carries the game.
I miss box art of old, back when box covers were pieces of art, not just the main character looking disgruntled.
Also, I have a poster of Chrono Quest's art.
Oh and one of those boxes linked above is for Bob's Bad Day. I remember playing the demo of that to death and wishing I could get the full game. It was just about the time I was leaving the Amiga scene, so I never, ever got to play it.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Builder! Basher!
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
SEALED??? And you opened it? Heretic! I would have paid $150 just for that box.
(I've been searching, on/off for a few years now, for a sealed Speedball 3 for the CD32.)
If you buy something sealed do you also buy another regular copy to play?
Steam Support is the worst. Seriously, the worst
No, I open them
C=64 version
Amiga version
Besides the Amiga, the only console which saw all 3 games in the trilogy is the Sega Genesis, and the genesis ports are decent. What is noteworthy, however, and what I want to talk about, is the sega genesis port of Turrican 2. Look over every release list for the Genesis out there and you won't find Turrican 2's name anywhere, but it WAS released for the system. Like Turrican 1, the port was handled by Accolade, under the Ballistics brand. But, in one of the stupidest, weirdest moves in gaming history, the genesis port of Turrican 2 received a full facelift to turn it into a tie in for Universal Soldier, the Jean Claude Van Damm movie. While this likely makes it one of the best licensed games in history, the end result is tragic. It's not a very convincing face lift - doki doki panic->mario 2 this is not. Rather, they just redrew the sprites to look like either JCVD or Dolph Lungdren, which flat out doesn't work. It means that the game doesn't follow the movie in the slightest, and what's more, since all bosses were changed to some form of Dolph Lungdren, and since they were huge robots in the original, you wind up with a dolph lungdren that is maybe 8 times the size of JCVD. Comnpare C64 vs Amiga vs Genesis (respectively):
Sure, it's funny in many ways, like how JCVD can somehow, without explaination turn into a spiked ball that shoots missiles, bombs, and lasers, despite being a human in the movie, but it is essentially the rape of a classic. It's also funny reading reviews of the game at the time from journalists who were unaware of the lineage behind the original, who write off one of the most classic games in history as being "a typical movie-tie in piece of trash" (gamepro, may 1992). Especially when those same outlets praised the original (inferior) Genesis port of Turrican as being a classic.
Of all the bad things accolade ever did (and they did plenty, let us not forget bubsy) this winds up being among the worst. Such a terrible choice. And yes, this game was released as Universal Soldier world-wide, even in japan and especially europe, where the Turrican brand was giant.
turrican 2 has pretty much infinite replayability, like all good games
I spent HOURS upon endless hours on this game.
youtube.com/watch?v=hL-qtxNgoHU
Is this game playable? I've seen plenty of clips of it, but it always looks so slow and clunky... I'm a big fan of Crimson Skies on the oXbox, so if this is in any way comparable I'll keep an eye out for it.
I remember playing the hell out of it back in the day. Granted back then fps of less than 20 was generally acceptable though.
The sad thing about the entire universal soldier incident is that, besides the sprite changes, it's a pretty good port of turrican. It lacks the shmup stages, but it adds 3 more (forgettable) levels instead. It would have been a really good port, especially compared to the original. Take a look:
Skip to about 50 seconds in, that's when the normal turrican 2 level 1 begins.
Untrue. The Amiga was always a computer. Amiga the company pretended to merely be a video game company, as a method to protect against industrial espionage. KBRD PRT was always on the block diagram.
Actually we never touched consoles. The crash also deeply effected our market, though this was more due to hardware market saturation than anything else. Acorn were bankrupted and bought by another company, for example.
68000 Amigas were 7.09MHz. 24Mhz wouldn't "mesh" with the system's clock synchronous design, and would need expensive, performance sapping buffering.
68020 Amigas were 14.18Mhz for the same reason. 030/040/060 though were buffered 25 and 50Mhz due to Motorola-Commodore politics.
Module. And it was four channels, fixed two left, two right.
All amigas support hard drives. Be it A500/1000 DMA slot, Zorro II Hardcard or SCSI, or onboard IDE.
That's an embarrassing amiga setup.
32x :
up from 64 onscreen colours to 32,768.
AGA Amiga:
up from 4096 onscreen colours at 320x256 to 16.7 Million at 768i
68020, Advanced Graphics Architecture. Completely new, totally 32bit chipset design.
Games are worthless. I don't know if you're buying NOS copies or what, but even mega popular games are less than £5. Shipping is basically nothing too, because a floppy disk weighs nothing.
Someone is ripping you off, somewhere.
Whatever emulator you used for this screenshot is set up wrong.
An Amiga game sold in PAL countries only will be 320x256. This fills an entire PAL TV.
Ones sold internationally are 320x200. This fills the width of a PAL TV but leaves small borders at the top and bottom of the screen.
32-bit means the CPU, internally, when you're talking about if software is 16 or 32 bit or 64 bit or whatever. You could build a 512-bit system that wouldn't have the graphical power to play pong in real time.
And the genesis versions sucked. Awful scrolling, bad graphic conversion due to the genesis having a smaller pallete than the Amiga could display on screen. (64 out of 512 was the genesis limit, Amiga was 32+32Hbrite per line), plus the sound chip nobody learned to use, and the infamous PAL slowdown/NTSC speedup issues.
And "few games". I've got a top fifty.
The biggest flaw, however, revolves around actually obtaining and using the hardware.
Oh my god what no
NTSC Amigas can run PAL games just fine, and vice versa. 2.0 ROM introduced the early startup screen, which switches 50/60Hz which is the only game "tripping point". For earlier ROM amigas, you just used a PAL booter disk.
NTSC Power bricks for PAL amigas cost $33 brand new from amigakit. The standard video solution in your solution is either an S-Video cable, or GBS 8220 Scandoubler for $20.
I'm actually impressed you managed to find the worst way possible though. 500w? An Amiga 1200 PSU peaks at 25W.
There's nothing to register. WinUAE is open source.
I'm gonna go breathe into a paper bag now before i pass out
While I plan on responding point by point to your reply, and I appreciate the technical corrections, especially since I'm in the process of revising this for Racketboy as their Amiga 101 guide, I don't appreciate this, as it's misinformation. It's often quoted by people who seem to understand the bare technical differences between PAL and NTSC without ever having actually done the conversion.
The 50/60 hz switch is just that - a software switch. It does not work adequately. For one, a bunch of the best games flat out won't boot in 60 hz mode, or if they do, they're prone to crashing and/or other errors. But beyond that, it doesn't change the color information.
What happens when you boot up an NTSC Amiga on a NTSC TV in 50 hz mode? You either get an unusable picture, or a rolling picture, neither is of any use to anybody interested in seeing if the Amiga will do anything beyond booting up.
What happens when you put a PAL Amiga into 60 hz mode on an NTSC TV? You get a will always get a black and white image that is too tall for the screen, in addition to the rolling image, IF YOU'RE LUCKY. If you're not lucky, you get nothing but garbage on the screen.
Neither a scandoubler nor an s-video cable (did you seriously suggest this?) will solve the problem. This was the entire, the ENTIRE reason I wrote this - because people like you love to spread this myth about. There is no way around this - wanna play every amiga game, in color, with a steady picture, on your NTSC tv? Buy a PAL->NTSC converter. There is no other way. The way you wrote this suggests to me that you have never even tried what you are championing. I have. And, in fact, in my previous Amiga topic, I posted pictures of me trying what you, and several others keep spurting off. It's flat-out not true.
You might as well have suggested buying a 32" RGB monitor while you're living in fantasy land.
There are other things wrong with your reply, notably your laughable claim that Genesis versions of games are inferior, but this was the most egregious and important to correct.
I understand the technical differences just fine.
The difference between a PAL and NTSC Amiga is in a few areas:
The first is the Composite video circuit. PAL and NTSC colour encoding are different.
The second is the RF Modulator. This ties into 1.
However, both of these are External to the Amiga (500/500+), inside the A520 dongle. The A520 NTSC or PAL, doesn't care about your base machine's region because it plugs into the RGB port. It's worth £5, ebay is littered with them. It's the easiest solution to connect a PAL machine to an NTSC display.
The Main difference from a software point of view is the Angus. That's the one providing the PAL/NTSC Specific clocks, and the only chip that came in PAL/NTSC/Agnostic flavours. Generally speaking, Any amiga past 1989 is (supposed) to come with ECS Angus. Going by sales figures, 1990 was your breakthrough for worldwide amiga 500 sales, statistically speaking, you've about as much chance as seeing an atari falcon as a pure OCS Amiga.
On a pure OCS Amiga, sure. That's basically all 512K 1.2ROM A500s, which no sane person would use. 89+ is good to go.
And colour information isn't relevant. An NTSC Machine still produces NTSC colour encoding be it 50 or 60Hz mode, or even VGA mode on a full ECS Amiga. (Fat chance of getting a 31KHz monitor that can take composite though, but the signal is there if you check with a scope)
You have a very low end Television. My 15" Matsui (Dixons group store brand) is 50/60 agnostic, as is my 14" Sony Trinitron. My very old (1970s) Sovereign brand TV actually has a Manual Vertical sync control called V-Hold. I suggest goodwill. The Nice thing about the Matsui and Sony is they even adjust for line difference. My god NTSC is low res. Practically Legovision.
Actually Amiga Scandoubler boards are available for £20 on ebay (GBS-8220), and will allow you to connect your Amiga to anything with a VGA socket. That's all HDTVs, and any PC monitor made since 1987. It's hardly a super secret technology here.
You are simply misinformed. Your first piece of misinformation is that attaching a computer to a television is a sensible idea.
The second is that your walmart television represents the capabilities of other televisions. Seriously, I've not even brought up Amiga RGB > to Component RGB (which all HDTVs support worldwide, and is simply a matter of feeding composite sync into G)
The third is that a PAL > NTSC Converter is needed. Just buy an NTSC A520, boom, amiga outputting NTSC colour encoded video.
No, but I could suggest buying a 15" RGB monitor from craigslist. There's plenty of people with C128s and attached 1084's who want to "get that shit [sic] out of my garage, seriously man, just take it"
They are. The genesis uses a dual VDP system (one YM7101 which is a modified VDP, and a standard master system VDP) with a total colour pallet of 512. Of those, the total is 64 on screen total.
The amiga pallet is 4096. Onscreen is 32 Independent, then another 32 "halfbrite" colours. That's per line. The Angus Copper is capable of reprogramming this for each scanline, essentially meaning that OCS maximum onscreen colours (in 320x256) is 16384, or four times what the clut actually knows exists. Then you have sprites, which are 15+alpha colours independent from that already listed. Simply put, the Amiga is prettier. That's why the genesis SDK was actually an Amiga 2000.
Theeeen you have the Angus bit-blitter, which is animating everything without CPU involvement.
And then we go to audio, where the Genesis uses a weird FM synth chip only they really understood. The first party games sounded nice, but the rest of the Genesis' library (which was almost all ports), were made by guys who just didn't care to learn how to program a synthesizer in 68K ASM when The SNES, Amiga, and even to an extent Atari ST just let them load up some samples and bang out a tune on a midi keyboard in a couple hours.
I'd be interested to hear why you think the Genesis can do amiga games better though. It can't be the controller because the games were designed around one button in the first place. And neither genesis pad fits inside a pair of human hands. It's probably for the same reason you came up with 24Mhz. I shall leave the reason to your deductive skills.
Cute calling my TV a "walmart TV." Get your euro TVs out of here, because very few TVs sold in America support 50 hz mode.It's laughable watching you suggest importing a fucking TV or buying one from 1970 with a manual vertical hold.
And it's also laughable watching you suggest HDTVs and modern televisions which break the dithering effects - those games relied heavily on NTSC and PAL color bleed to achieve higher color counts. Unless you think the developers intended for those checkerboard transparency and color effects to appear that way, in which case lmao.
In short, your ramblings about pal to NTSC conversion are wildly narrow in scope, and your attitude is precisely the reason why several people in the other topic expressed frustration at failing in said conversion - along with the amiga communities unwillingness to help - because your idea of "help" is berating those for having "cheap tvs" instead of, you know, talking about the conversion at hand. I'll play my Amiga on a 32" screen, with proper color bleed, over my 1084s and your disgustingly small televisions any day. I take it you didn't breath into your bag.
EDIT: And, I'll note that, it's funny watching you tout around extra half-bright mode as though the genesis doesn't have an equivalent - Shadow and hightlight mode. I eagerly await your long post explaining the limitations of said mode - something i'm already familiar with, while ignoring that Extra half-bright mode is limited to one playfield and doesn't affect hardware sprites. Oops.
I mean seriously, the guy is touting 32-32 EHB mode as though it was what most amiga games used. I take it this guy likes static, single plane backgrounds, because dual playfield mode restricts you to an 8 color layer, a 7 color layer, and 15 colors for sprites. And even that isn't the most common used mode - several games use fucking 2bpp (aka 3+3+3+3 colors). Thats why amiga games often have weird color assignments, like EVERY SINGLE THING one one layer being a shade of green.
But never the less, I'm filming several games of which I own both the Genesis and Amiga version. It'll be interesting watching him explain away the obvious differences in graphics with hypotheticals not applied.
I don't even need to go into much detail about controllers and how the genesis controller is "terribly shaped" when amiga controllers tend to look like this:
Dude wants to get technical, let's get technical.
Or this -
In fact, I just went on Google and typed "Amiga controller" and found this. For most of them it's a joystick like the above, for some it's a joypad, and for others still an arcade-style joystick with base. The Amiga and Mega Drive are tied in one way at least - many Amiga users nowadays like to pick up cheap Mega Drive or equivalent joypads to use as a controller.
Falken is right - the Mega Drive's sound sucked. I have a very strong memory of Desert Strike playing on the Mega Drive one day, and then playing on the SNES the next, and the difference was like night and day. Every explosion - and the game being what it was, there were a lot of them - ended in a horrible screech on the Sega machine. True, we were playing on RF cable only, but SCART had barely made it to the market at that point, and nobody I knew had a 15" television with SCART. Same goes for Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat... practically any multi-platform game that we played back then sounded so much better, so much cleaner on the SNES and Amiga.
Sega cleaned up their act so to speak with the Mega Drive II, but not quickly enough to wipe away memories of the Mega Drive sound coming screeching through our speakers. The Amiga sounded great no matter whether one had a tv connected via RF, or setup with a dedicated monitor. As for the controller... again, they did a better job with the one that came packaged with Mega Drive II, but the original was "meh" to my friends and I back in the day. It was bulky and your hands would cramp up when using it after a while.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
I'm an Amiga fan-boy and by and large I was jealous of how the Megadrive/Snes games looked. Back in the day I'll be honest, I never much cared about how things sounded. Street Fighter 2 might have sounded better on the Amiga but good giddy God was it horrible to play. I've got the big box at home and tried it fairly recently and it feels like it runs at about 10fps.
I'm not going to wade in to the technical discussion though. I'm a big Amiga fan but no expert so I'm staying well out of that.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
For me, sound is important. Having grown up on the C64, I learned to appreciate chip music, SID being a huge influence on me. I love the Amiga's sound, but my favourite of the 16-bit era is the SNES. Such iconic sounding music, such clear midi tones. To this day I still love to listen to SNES music - the Blackhawk/Blackthorne, Link to the Past and Starfleet Academy soundtracks my particular favourites. The Mega Drive produces harsh screeching to my ears next to the SNES.
And yeah, the Amiga Street Fighter games had serious issues, blech!
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Gumshoe, Kokotoni Wilf, Gilligan's Gold and Fred on the other. It had some other games too but they were my favourite. That tape got so much use.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Hypothetical mode? You have an amiga, presumably. You could, you know, go read up what the copper does. Maybe throw together a few copper lists. Learn something.
Nobody said go import a TV. (Most TVs are imported anyway, nowhere in america makes things anymore). You could spend five minutes looking up your existing TV's service manual and read how to enable 50Hz mode, because it will have hardware support for it (because nobody designs TVs for specific countries and just slaps different decoders in there). The 70s TV option isn't laughable either, unless you're one of those people who sneers when he sees a goodwill.
No, no they didn't. Amigas in europe were mainly ran on the 1084/S RGB monitor. There was no PAL or NTSC to even have colour bleed to abuse that way.
Mostly we just say "just buy a GBS8220 and use your computer monitor". The only Amiga without a RGB port that you can plug the A520 into is the CD32, so you've no excuse there.
"proper colour bleed". No, Amiga games were expected to run on RGB monitors. a 1084 doesn't have colour bleed.
You're also distorting the image through upscaling and a different aspect ratio, and a totally wrong overscan setup where half the screen will be consumed by borders.
And the "disgusting" comment really reveals who you are. How dare people not afford the latest 92" 4D HDTV with fellatio port. Whatever.
Shadow and Highlight is HAM slow. That's why they only used it for static images.
EHB does, however, effect bobs. Which were more powerful and flexible than sprites, and thus more commonly used.
BRB, going feeding a 24Mhz clock into my A500. It's going to trip balls.
Shadow of the beast used EHB. Yeah, tell me about the static background on that. C'Mon bro, I'm dying to hear.
You're going to be filming through an overpriced Composite PAL to NTSC box, also pulling an extra 5fps out of its ass. Anything would look terrible.
Whereas you'll have an NTSC genesis already. C'Mon, you gotta get a PAL Mega drive and use the same converter box. Scientific method.
That isn't a kempston competition pro, zipstick or quickshot. Which is what actual amiga owners had.
Seriously, what's the deal with your ridiculous 500w step up transformer when the amiga has an external PSU? It even outputs standard ATX voltages, so you could just have grabbed a cheap adapter and used a PC PSU if you couldnt find a 110v amiga one. But that wouldn't have let you waste as much money.
Man, I have all my retro consoles hooked up to a 20" CRT TV. I feel like it's about the right size display for NES games and for anything newer it's on the small side. I don't think I'd want to play...well, anything on a 14" display.
Hypothetical because you're touting a mode which wasn't used for actual games which appeared on both formats. Throwing around EHB numbers when actual games operated in 6bpp mode. I'm surprised you didn't quote me the number of colors available on-screen via HAM.
Nobody said go import a TV. (Most TVs are imported anyway, nowhere in america makes things anymore). You could spend five minutes looking up your existing TV's service manual and read how to enable 50Hz mode, because it will have hardware support for it (because nobody designs TVs for specific countries and just slaps different decoders in there). The 70s TV option isn't laughable either, unless you're one of those people who sneers when he sees a goodwill.[/QUOTE]
You assume I didn't already do this. You're flat out wrong - TVs sold in the US DO have different decoders, you can't put most TVs from the US into 50 hz mode. And look at these moving goal posts - your solutions are always ass-backwards and complex. Mod a fucking TV, just for a damn amiga.
Yes, yes they did. You're goddamn retarded if you think devs used dithering with the expectation that you'd see each individual pixel, and not a smooth blend of colors. You're gonna claim that most people used 1084s monitors when most computers of the time outputted RF. Hell, there are even models of Amiga which don't support the 1084s.
No, mostly people like you claim that the 50/60 hz switch is good enough. Which is what you did.
Yes, proper color bleed, because the presence of dithering proves that color bleed was assumed. You're goddamn nuts if you think more people had 1084s monitors than televisions. The Amiga format special issue packed with the damn a1200 even claims that most will use their Amiga on a standard TV. You're projecting.
And I'm sure the hypocritical nature of calling my TV cheap and "a wallmart tv" because it doesn't support 50 hz mode in the goddamn united states while blubbering someone not being satisfied with a fucking 13" screen will go right over your head. How dare people not own european televisions and RGB monitors!
[/quote]
Oh so you don't know shit about the genesis after all. That makes this funnier. S&H is slow? Uh, no, that's not even close to the limitations of the mode. The limitation has nothing to do with speed, and everything to do with layer priority. As in, certain objects with certain priorities only adhere to certain S&H modes.
And it was only used for static images?
LAUGHING
MY
ASS
OFF.
Since SotB used it, clearly every game used it! Brilliant!
(that would be the 1 out of 10 I speaking about, btw)
I'm actually filming using a SCART->RGB cable, with a RGB->Component converter, running through my happauge HD-PVR to bypass all NTSC and PAL discussion, because I know you can't accept the truth. OOPS.
[/quote]
Because, as I stated in the damn guide, none of this stuff is JUST for the Amiga. What's wrong, can't read?
Every single one of your solutions involve either modifying hardware, building shit yourself, or using inferior shit that has to be imported from overseas. Narrow. In. Scope.
Get your poverty televisions out of this topic dude, you can't game unless you have an RGB monitor.