I was playing Pyron's TMNT recently and it's a sensational job, I'm going to keep a Repro in my collection.
I was playing Pyron's TMNT recently and it's a sensational job, I'm going to keep a Repro in my collection.
Pyron's new Patreon was covered in the RetroRGB Weekly Roundup this week (coverage starts at 9:20):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RQHZ3PpuCY&t=560s
WOW!
Now I was really surprised ...
I followed Bob and RetroRGB a long time and never really imagined that he liked something I did. I guess I've never heard anyone say anything generous like that about what I do before, I really am very grateful and flattered by it.
Smoke you also always support me so I leave my thanks to you here again.
I really need more time to watch the content on youtube = D
You are doing God’s work my friend
I realize thats nobody knows (or care) about this hack, so i make a small video with comparison..
i didn't zoom in the objects.. barrels and billboards to people see the differences but you can pause the video =D
i hope someone enjoys it
https://youtu.be/3RKda1Al94I
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Of course somebody knows about it... I do! :p
And I did mention it to some other people, so they know who you are. ;)
I even asked for a reprocart with it. :D
Yes, your hack also made me enjoy the MD port even more!! :ok:
One friend tonight ask me som question about mortal kombat conversion, so i did one try with digitalized stuff to test.
arcade 59 colors / MD 16
https://i.imgur.com/yR033tV.png
As we see in others games on MK series the pallete is not a big problem to characters..
the real insue is the backgrounds
Until you try to add their specials and the HUD to the palette, then it gets difficult.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Really depends what you wanna do, ugly character with good backgrounds or ugly backgrounds with good characters?
Personally I managed to somewhat properly convert Johnny Cage/Liu Kang/Kano to 16 colors with the HUD and specials present.
Rayden and the Ninjas probably aren't that difficult since their costumes are pretty close color to their specials.
But Sonya, ugh..
I missed a litle in blue tones because my laptop monitor sucks.. so it can done better in my main setup.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoVamp
Now about pallete choices you have a good call, so the goals must be set from begining and deal with limitations, what is more important ?
I think that i can remove 2 colors from each char palette and it still gonna look good and i can do a complete interface
in particular in mk 1 in my opinion sacrifice characters colors to UI and specials is a miss step,
because the characters is the main achiv of the game and is the element that you are in focus 100% of time
also almost everything can be done with regular character pallete, some cases like J. Cage and Sonya B. you have to change things..
so sonya special gonna be green instead of pink.. as cage fire ball gonna use skin colors or other trick...
now the backgrounds is a challenge.. but if we look at the md originals they did a good job.. we just need to improve and complete the miss artwork
edit: I forgot to say, post your results to us
Here's some stuff that I've been tinkering with.
https://i.imgur.com/tGvVKHZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/OI9a6M4.png
https://i.imgur.com/wsYIntJ.png
https://i.imgur.com/BNrVMtf.png
https://i.imgur.com/qPS0nxS.png
https://i.imgur.com/vrEbm7k.png
https://i.imgur.com/30hLjud.png
With this each character has not only their own colors but also colors for their specials AND the HUD.
this way the backgrounds can use the full 2 layers and palettes.
Personally I feel that the backgrounds should be priority, they are the biggest part of the screen after all.
(And Probe kinda showed us that their HUD+BG approach just gives you an ugly background)
Edit : You just know that the MD palette is gonna be a dick and ruin whatever little result I managed here.
Mid-screen color swaps are always an option. You can probably get away with 3 colours per line, so you could check some set of colours in the background that are only needed at the bottom and replace those for the HUD with enough colour changes. The HUD is very simple so this should be feasible.
The special attacks though? You really need to have them be part of the character palette, not much else you can do...
Mortal Kombat 2 though? Oh boy... good luck with that one.
I've also thought how to make MK or MK2 on the Amiga, which is even less well prepared for it, and this is what I came up with:
- No Parallax
- 25 FPS
- Blacked out, reorganised HUD (done with copper swaps)
- EHB mode (32+32 shadow colors)
- 8 colors per character (plus 8 shadow each)
- 10 colors + 10 shadow for the background, with up to 10 colors (and shadows) changed per line, Universe style.
- 3+3 colors for special effects (+ 6 shadows).
The background color swapping would look something like this (the 12 bit master palette is a huge help):
https://www.mobygames.com/images/sho...the-rebels.png
like in my sf2aplha proposal i split the ui in 2 palletes, i just need leave empty 2 colors in each char pallete, the mk1 ui is very simple,
left the back with entire 2 palletes..
but in this case also i made a try using the inverted concept to bkg.. and leaving the character with full pallete,
all depends the constrains of the project
Yeah, I think MK1 is definitely doable. You only really need red, yellow and green somehow, you could even sacrifice the yellow or the white (you can replace one with the other).
Black and white are easy to get, you can put them in pretty much any palette and they won't be a waste. So essentially you're only sacrificing 2 or 3 colors of a palette to get the HUD. Not a big deal, in some stages you can even make use of them.
The special attacks of some characters are more annoying.
Very nice, and have 2 palettes to background whould improve a lot the visuals.
Ive just take one of your sprite examples (Cage) and edited the palette to Maga Drive/Sega Genesis accurate colors, and surprisingly it looks very good. Don't know about the other characters, but look:
Attachment 14780
Edit: The image attached was a PNG, but looks like the forum turned it to compressed jpg, so I'm reposting int in other way:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qnGMKigpR...s1600/Cage.png
i was seeing about people opinion about ys3, and get suprised that's most of people takes PCE CD version as the best version on 16 bits
and i'm shocked with this..
I played it again on my console.. and my impression has the same from yeas ago..
choppy as hell, background and enemys has less detalis than the MD version that is a cartigde game against a CD release,
the strong points on PCE CD version is presetation that is outstading for the time and the CD soundtrack,
but fm music on MD realease is amazing too, energetic and some of then i prefer over CD tracks, so for me is almost a tie..
People complain about dark grafics on MD release on some areas and Adol brown hair, and its true..
i think a least it can be fixed, rank up this version..
thats for me is best than PCE CD version.
pce, md, snes, md ce
http://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_pce_01.pnghttp://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_md_01.gifhttp://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_sfc_01.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/lj8xxHr.png
http://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_pce_03.pnghttp://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_md_03.gifhttp://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_sfc_03.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/O6jJpI0.png
What you think guys, it deserves some work, or does not make difference ?
Definitely! Ys3 is one of my favourity games. I algo really, really like the music. In short, A gfx improvement for Ys3? HELL YEAH!
Looks good so far. You should look at the X68k version that the MD port is based on when deciding on color schemes.
CD games are always at a disadvantage against carts when it comes to space for content, but CD2 games like Ys III have so little space that it's a miracle that a game can be made at all.
Man this is amazing work, great job.
Continue.
OK I was looking at the PCE CD port and… oh dear fuck, I used to complain the Mega Drive port was a bit too direct but the PCE CD is straight up way too direct.
For context: Ys 3 actually was originally made for weak 8-bit computers that barely could do some blitting in software, let alone any decent scrolling. So motion in the game would be entirely tile-aligned because that's the best those computers could hope to do (and still slowed down badly). This is also the reason for the frame around the game area. Looks like the PCE CD version copied that straight up as-is :/ (yuck)
Mega Drive version at least adds pixel-level motion, but parallax is still copied too straight (cue some backgrounds staying in place instead of moving slowly), and more importantly the maps still seem to have the same kind of collision, which renders some areas harder to access than they normally would be. Oh, and they screwed up Adol's sprites when he doesn't have a shield (if you buy a sword but no shield, which is very likely in the beginning, you won't be able to see the sword when you attack which will utterly screw up your aim — that's something worth fixing if feasible).
To give an idea of what I'm talking about, here's the PC-88 version (hopefully a part that isn't any big spoiler, it's the first dungeon):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKZvy7s0TLY
Thanks BT, about x68k i know that md version follow it closer, the ost is very closer tooQuote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
but follow the color schemes i think that original already did it well
the main problem is that md odes not have the same rich pallete, because that we got some very dark areas
and it is waht everyone complains about..
i think that my version did a better job.
X68k / md / md ce
https://www.mobygames.com/images/sho...-world-map.pnghttps://www.mobygames.com/images/sho...map-screen.gifhttps://i.imgur.com/O6jJpI0.png
https://www.mobygames.com/images/sho...nversation.pnghttp://tg-16.com/comparisons/ys3_md_01.gifhttps://i.imgur.com/lj8xxHr.png
is supposed to be the opposite, they could used the internal sound chip to music and save space to content instead ?Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
I like it. :)
Even Sega/Mega-CD games are bottlenecked with up to 6 megs of space to work with. CD2 games only have 0.5 meg and half of that can be eaten up with code alone.Quote:
is supposed to be the opposite, they could used the internal sound chip to music and save space to content instead ?
The only way they could have gotten liberal with assets is if 98% of it was one screen at a time like the PS2 version, only with load times each screen. That's why it's surprising that they decided to make it work like the early computer versions.
Anyway, I hope you end up adjusting the entire game, as it is both a worthwhile title and a one that really benegits from your work.
I did it for a friend, this game can be very improved, but i don't if people gonna like changing the visuals like i did on title screen
https://i.imgur.com/H50c6Nj.png
one thing, somebodt here can do a GG code to disable the enemys invencibility ?
Nice color scheme!Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Chakan need some changes in gameplay to be fun IMO
A code to make Chakan stronger, faster and recover time (after a hit) higher.
Tony Hedstrom can help us!
omg chakan!!!! i love the new look and some tweaks would make a good game much better!
You know, stupid thought but… how does the original look using the non-linear ramp the actual console outputs? Because those shades look like an attempt to work around it honestly (in particular, the ramp gets very bright for the darkest shades, which is annoying).
https://i.imgur.com/orpUpC9.png
The console really needed 4-bit per component instead of 3-bit. I wonder if cheating with S/H to get access to the smoother shades could have been useful here as well.
EDIT: added ramp (including the S/H shades… I really need to mark those with a different color some day)
EDIT 2: imgur broke the bbCode markup lol
they tried to blend some similar tones of gray, brow and green if minor differences between the values to try mimic the lowest contrast of the original paintingQuote:
Originally Posted by Sik
but they forgot that's show the artwork is another aspect important..
@sik thaeres some easy way to activate the S/H mode in some static screen ?
If you can inject code somewhere (you want GFXMODE_320x224_SH to enable S/H):Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
https://plutiedev.com/screen-resolution#setting
This is a register that's rarely touched regularly so you should be away with strategically placing it in one place (and maybe disabling it when the screen is over, just in case).
I'm going to assume the entire image is a plane so account for priority to get the results you want:
https://plutiedev.com/shadow-highlight
thanks SikQuote:
Originally Posted by Sik
it could fits here...
https://youtu.be/7hZ48PxrR54
Amazing work my friend !Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Did you actually play the PCE port past Tigre mines though? The PCE is not as close as a port as you're saying. The original ran at like 6fps and with screen tearing. The PCE scrolls the BG at 15fps, but Adol controls at 60fps. So the play control feels vastly different than the original (you won't get that from just watching a video). The PCE port isn't doing realtime overlay of two tiles like the original is doing; it's uses a shit ton of sprites to cover up the corner/edge transitions. Hell, in the volcano level the rock wall has two sets of tiles, allowing it's animation to be 4 pixel increments instead of the cell 8pixel increments. The PCE also scrolls faster than the original. If you bumped it up to 20fps, or 30fps (integer division of 60hz), then the game would run too fast at 8px cell scrolling. Tigre Mine area looks the worst on PCE compared to other areas on the PCE IMO. But I think the approach on the PCE is pretty interesting. If you had duplicated the tileset (in vram for two offsets) for the far BG layer (the static layer), the foreground could do 4px at 30fps scrolling instead of the 8px at 15fps. It'd definitely feel smoother without losing any of the parallax. And parts of the far 'static' layer could do animated tiles for parallax part (like it already does in the entry stage of the volcano level).Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
I can honestly live with the choppy parallax, at least they tried. Would have been better to replace the backgrounds with simpler ones that could be handled by sprites, but what can you do.
Those borders however... Absolutely unplayable.
Play test 4fun
https://twitter.com/GabrielPyron/sta...418214403?s=20
That PC-88 music is pretty impressive.
Other perosnal tests
https://i.imgur.com/4LHN13o.png
To finish the year
https://youtu.be/AXfjsdCZalk
That Sunset Riders video looks great. The lack of enemies makes me wonder if it's some kind of rewrite from scratch or something, but that sounds unlikely considering how much work that would be. Looking forward to more info on this.
Those cancelled projects have great colors, too.
Yeahm sunset Riders is an entire new game build from the groundQuote:
Originally Posted by Stifu