Hardware pushed to the limits according to Sega-16 members

[Flygon]

So, they simulated rendering a fully flexible triangle by pre-rendering a tetxtured, then live rendering it as an actual Triangle through damn good planning. The crazy bastards! No wonder it's so smooth!

All this time, I was just assuming the 68k was somehow warping a texture in software. The method they used is just insane, it's awesome!

[Kamahl]

Really clever, specially how it makes you think that the flickering is to make it transparent. Killing two birds with one stone.

Jim Power on the Amiga is positively crazy. 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling (+ linescrolling on top), 50 fps, full 320x256 resolution, transparent UI, music + sound effects. I can count on my fingers the number of amiga games that have even 1 of these things, much less all of them!

The game is essentially built around Amiga hardware limitations. It's a technical showoff with a game on top.



One game that looks entirely unimpressive but is actually insanely optimized is Flimbo's Quest. Despite being one of the ugliest Amiga games it is doing brute force full color parallax scrolling at 50 fps. It's even more impressive when you consider that the game runs in 32 color mode which has a large performance hit (1 extra blit per sprite and tile plus a performance hit to the CPU and Blitter). If you switch to 64 color mode the extra hit in performance to the CPU is enough to make the game go haywire.

All that effort was unfortunately wasted in some of the most ugly artwork imaginable. The game looks like it has 5 colours at best. So weird.

Btw this is a typical Amiga game, just as a point of comparison:

[Team Andromeda]

Some of mine would be




It still looks and sounds amazing to this very day - The best showcase game ever made and to think its just the work of 6 staff using free 3D software tools downloaded from the web .



Looks so good, makes you want to by the system as soon as you see it



It looked better than most 360 racers ,



Really don't think the PS2 had anything else left to give

Factor five were smoking the Cube hardware . Miss the likes of these code heads

[Mad Moham]

It doesn't say anywhere that PC games are beyond the scope of this thread, so games that come to mind for me are Bioforge and Ultima 9. They pushed the limits of PC hardware at the time, and I had to upgrade my PC when each of those games was released, only to find that I could only just play them. Origin seemed to have a habit of making games that were out of reach to many PC users.

[Gogogadget]

The Amiga really is such a shame, a computer that in the right hands is capable of doing so much but almost no developers ever took advantage of anything it could do.

[gamevet]

Crytek did the same thing with their Crysis series. I didn't have a PC that was capable of running the 1st game with max settings at 60fps until almost 4 years after the game's release.

The Amiga really is such a shame, a computer that in the right hands is capable of doing so much but almost no developers ever took advantage of anything it could do.

There were some pretty good ports of acade titles on the Amiga. Gauntlet II was near arcade perfect.

Sorry, I couldn't get a better capture of this. My capture device wouldn't work with the signal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRrrc6EQmh8

[segarule]

The game is essentially built around Amiga hardware limitations. It's a technical showoff with a game on top.

The problem is that Amiga can use OCS and ECS video card. ECS is more enhanced.

[Sik]

Jim Power is built entirely around OCS though.

[gamevet]

Really clever, specially how it makes you think that the flickering is to make it transparent. Killing two birds with one stone.

Jim Power on the Amiga is positively crazy. 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling (+ linescrolling on top), 50 fps, full 320x256 resolution, transparent UI, music + sound effects. I can count on my fingers the number of amiga games that have even 1 of these things, much less all of them!

The game is essentially built around Amiga hardware limitations. It's a technical showoff with a game on top.

Shadow of the Beast had a few areas that had 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling, along with line scrolling of the clouds. It was also able to maintain all of its music, along with the sound effects.



Agony isn't displayed at a full 320x256, but it is still pretty impressive. It manages to maintain all of the sound effects, along with the music. It also has some nice parallax scrolling.



The Amiga also had some impressive 3rd person shooters, that could be played on the Amiga 500.

[Robotwo]

It doesn't say anywhere that PC games are beyond the scope of this thread, so games that come to mind for me are Bioforge and Ultima 9. They pushed the limits of PC hardware at the time, and I had to upgrade my PC when each of those games was released, only to find that I could only just play them. Origin seemed to have a habit of making games that were out of reach to many PC users.

Seems you and Spoony share a few opinions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mRb36-uMrc&t=2m01s

[GriskaGyoran]

The problem is that Amiga can use OCS and ECS video card. ECS is more enhanced.

ECS doesn't do too much aside from making the hires mode more manageable and making more addressable chip RAM possible. Overall advantages given to games would be minimal. AGA would be the next true advancement of the Amiga graphics modes.

However reading the Shadow of the Beast manual I found many interesting things. Maximum colors on the screen is 128 in the game. That is impressive right there which is quadruple that of the 32 advertised by Amiga hardware and double that of the 64 colors of the halfbrite mode. So how that is done is unknown, perhaps done with the copper chip using it's fancy raster tricks between frames for the background. Then we have the 220x150 maximum sprite size which is impressive, and the Blitter function is probably the reason for this impressive feat. Then we have 13 layers of scrolling, not sure if this is specific to that of purely parallax, or including playfield layer.

Now one I thought people would list was Lionheart, which has probably the most impressive use of color on the Amiga OCS.

[Kamahl]

Yeah the 128 colour stuff is just bullshit. SotB is 1+7+7+15 colours (back colour, background, foreground, sprites). It then changes those colours a bunch of times in the forest area to make it a lot more colourful. Lionheart does the same except the 15 colours are just for the main character and the other colours are changed way more often, to the point of being a bit rainbow puke in the first level.

The game Universe is pretty neat in that its art was done in 256 colours, then converted to 16 colours per line, which are switched in the game by the copper. Looks quite pretty:



It's also not surprising that this thread turned into a bunch of Amiga examples. The graphics range from terrible to gorgeous from game to game and the gorgeous ones required really clever programming.

[Mad Moham]

Seems you and Spoony share a few opinions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mRb36-uMrc&t=2m01s

But I never liked Ultima 7. Its true though, I remember having to upgrade my PC in order to play Strike Commander, Bioforge and Ultima 9, all Origin games. And I remember being told I needed a "very high performance machine" for Falcon 3.0 lol. Origin seemed to love making games that needed expensive hardware. If Noah Antwiler needed to upgrade his PC in order to play Ultima 7 he must have had a crap PC at the time.

[Kamahl]

[goldenband]

Trying a tower of doom´s video better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6YUsevzh44

Hey, thanks for trying. That one still doesn't show the flicker/color effect, though -- you can tell by comparing the enemy at 1:24 with the one at 1:35. Those two frames are supposed to be blended into a single composite color, and you'd really need a 60fps capture to get it right. The framerate's also pretty bad -- the game runs much more smoothly than that.

This one is messed up too but gives a (very) vague idea of the effect. You can see it on the steps between levels as well: