Amiga games that don't suck

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Originally Posted by Tom M.

I personally don't fancy Amiga games at all. I don't even have an emulator installed. From what I remember when I was trying out Amiga games, that Mega Phoenix was quite good. Generally the games felt like severely graphically downgraded Mega Drive conversions (mostly with sprite overflow and second layer issues) and lacked optimization. The lack of additional gamepad buttons and necessity of a mouse in many games that really would not need it also were contributed to my final decision to completely quit Amiga games. People like Chilly Willy will come here and tell you the theories about blitters and coppers and all that but realistically I did not see anything of that happening in real Amiga games so that I would change my view that Amiga simply did not measure up with Mega Drive's VDP. I also did not like the sound in games that was mostly built upon low resolution premade flat sounding ADPCM samples, rather than some creative realtime breathing dynamic synthesis found on the Mega Drive and all classic video gaming systems including coin ops.

I've never said the Amiga was better overall than the MegaDrive... in a few ways it was, but in many ways, the MD was better. That's as it should be given the MD was developed FIVE YEARS after the Amiga. The MD has more palette entries, more sprites, larger sprites, and better dual-layer handling. It also has a better controller with more buttons. The main limitations have to do with its tile based graphics. The Amiga used bitmap graphics, so it's better at games that rely on bitmaps rather than tiles. The BLITTER helps with bitmap graphics as well. Since the MD used tile-based graphics, a simple DMA channel was all it needed rather than a blitter.

Also, the Amiga uses 8-bit signed PCM samples, not ADPCM. Older games used really low sample rates to keep the size down to fit in the limited chipram of older systems. As newer systems either had more chipram, or expansions came out, games started using higher sample rates, which sound much better. Psygnosis in particular pushed the sample rates higher, advertising the higher rates as a selling point for their games.

When I talk about the Amiga hardware, I'm usually correcting misinformation from other members, like the one post where they claimed the Amiga had no hardware sprites at all. I then made a post all about the sprite hardware in the Amiga to correct that statement. But the MD has better sprite hardware than the Amiga.

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As for the PC and DOS Box being the replacement for the AMiga games - well if I figure out how to actually sync the games in that emulator to 60 Hz refresh, than maybe one day. Right now, they do not sync. It might be emulator related or it might be just a quiestion of PC programmers being ignorant to video gaming standards not even taking care of things like vsync. Just take that disaster called Commander Keen - why is it running at 40 fps when standard screen runs at 60 Hz? That's that "PC gaming" you know.

Don't confuse the game logic update rate with the FPS. Older games had set update rates so that the game played at the same speed regardless of the quality of the PC. It was an acknowledgement of the limitations of PCs... some people would have MONSTER systems capable of running a game at 1000FPS while most struggled to do 40 or 50 FPS. Doom set it's game update rate at 35 Hz. That was half the (then) common VESA VGA frame rate of 70Hz.

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Originally Posted by zetastrike

Does Turrican 2 support two buttons? I heard that it did, but I couldn't figure out how to enable it.

Not really. It uses the Joystick button for firing your gun (hold for the continouus circle shot), and the space bar for (limited) smartbombs. Crouch (joystick down) + spacebar turns you into a ball capable of going through narrow passages.

Turrican 2 definitely supports two buttons, as does the first game. I've played it that way in WinUAE many times. You might have to go into "game ports" and remap the controls for whatever you're using, though (I do this anyway since I like mapping a button to "up" for a dedicated jump button).

We forgot Argonaut Games when talking about European developers.