More Amiga Pixels

Various games, port mockups

Puyo Puyo Amiga PAL mockup, 256x256. Tested a Dual Playfield idea in AMOS and it feasible. The background rock playfield is an 8 colour image, and the slimes go on a foreground 8 colour playfield. A 16 or 32 colour screen can go at the top... which means the screen can be made more narrow... which means less memory fetches at the side porches afaik.

The Amiga did get a Puyo Puyo clone in 1995 called Super Foul Egg. Apparently done in AMOS, which is sufficient for puzzle type games most of the time, as long as one doesn't go overboard with effects.

While I prefer the C64 version of Laser Squad, the 256 colour (Mode13H?) DOS version got me wondering if not the Amiga version could not have pulled the same look off with just 32 colours. I'm using 31 here. PAL screen height adds 320x56 pixels of screen estate.

With the colour reduction you get some banding on the faces, but it's possible to get sufficiently close to the VGA version and one can compensate with some pixel footwork (I redid most things here). The palette has a lot of muted blue and brown ramps, which is not useful for graphical clarity, but actually works well with Alien screenshots (the DOS version borrowed a few frames from Alien and other movies).

I'm imagining this with a persistent merc squad, a Dogs of War mission map (varied risky difficulties) and an equipment store. X-COM lite.

A rather sloppy Joe & Mac colour truncation, 16 colours with copper sky, down from Arcade 100+ colours. I really rather dislike "goofy caveman" as a theme, but still felt like doing some palette truncation practice. Some loss of hues since one has to focus on three ramps pretty much. Re-detailing can reduce banding a bit.

C64 palette on the Amiga. Dividing by 16 might not be the best way to convert a 24-bit palette into OCS 12-bit, but whatevs. Sometimes it's nice to just boot up AMOS and fool around for a bit. It's like... my cabin in the woods. Threw the palette into the copper for a loading screen feel.

Bosconian is a fairly old arcade game and doesn't use that many colours. 16 colours seem to suffice, allowing for a bit of shading. The parallax background could perhaps be done using a single sheared sprite which wraps around at screenwidth+16. I think R-Type II used all the sprites for the background but it featured a big flat tech panel rather than loose particles. The radar minimap would have to be tilted to fit in the bottom screen panel. Here my playfield area is 320x223, vs 224x224 in the original which used a side panel very similar to Rally-X. Because the background is essentially a flat black in the screen memory, drawing (blitting) could perhaps be made rather fast compared to when the background has to be saved.

Rally-X pixel-over in 16 colours. I think I'd like to see a bunch nonsense props and landmarks in the empty grassy areas. I suppose the sidebar could be made using sprite columns which are graphically updated via pokes.

Old Moonstone-inspired mini people from the very early '90s. Update on the right.

Redo of an old 2D Golf game idea of mine from the early 90s. Tried programming it then... I think I intended to use colour indices for angle/bounce checking, but gave up.

I finally checked out AMOS 3D after many years and it seems like it can (predictably) only manage a few vector objects on screen. Thats sufficient for space game like Elite perhaps? Here's the car race demo. Car racing with terrain is likely off the table on a stock machine.

The Object Modeller. The program has many mystery buttons and very nonstandard interfacing. I found the manual on archive dot org, but had no success making anything sensible. Similar as with modern 3D programs then T_T. Only ever got used to Imagine (points and line modelling). On a GUI related note, dedicated tooltip bars are so much better than hover over & wait. Tooltips are instant and doesn't cover stuff up accidentally, and more verbose if need be.

I wonder if the Amiga 500 could do Wipeout. It could do Stunt Car Racer and a few racing games, and the iconic Wipeout ship can be made very low poly. A night-time wireframe for the course?

Installed Imagine 3.3. I bought this back in the day for lots of money, along with a Blizzard accelerator card.

Not sure if any of my models survived – I did tons of hard-sci-fi spaceships with radiators, fuel tanks, mushroom shields and such. My skills have deteriorated so here's just a freehanded wipeout ship. I can export as DXF... maybe it's still used?

Fooling around with the 3.1 kickstart screen. It probably uses copper gradients for the checkmark and line drawing for the disk stuff.

Oh right, here's my 1.3 kickstart hand implemented on a real living and breathing Amiga.

Amiga case mockup based on the A1000 and X68000. With rumoured A1000+ specs.

There's often speculative talk amongst us embers in the Amiga community about how the Amiga might possibly have survived. But, in an even darker timeline we're all upset that our cloud dependent Amiga terminals won't boot because of an issue with "Amiga Web Services" and boot keys being lost in the collapsing postal system.

Blood Money probably ran in 32 colours... maybe OCS only? Here I didn't change the palette but just fiddled with the heli, walker, turret and ground bits. The palette is quite focused on the subtle blue and brown ramp here. I'd spread out the colours a bit more. I don't like having to pick up coins flying off screens! In more complex arcade games they're sucked into the ship, which is more of an effect than game mechanic I guess. I do like Super Cards and Gods shops. Perhaps a dead player restarts at a shop and gets to equip the next life? IIRC, this game world is a big gameshow.

An Amiga 500 could probably run many PC-98 games, but maybe only from a harddrive due to the amount of hires+laced art. And there'd be flicker on a TV of course.

A PC-98 screen (640x400 16 colours) is 128 000 bytes in chipmem. However, it's likely not double buffered and the actual art often goes inside a fancy border/frame which helps a bit. The dither makes the IFF RLE highly ineffective, so the graphics would eat a lot of disk space. An OCS A500/2000 with a HDD and monitor might be needed. Fortunately there's no need for a big kanji character set if ported to english.

The Amiga could probably handle JRPGs well. The ones where you walk around on a world map, get enemy random encounters with somewhat static pictures. The occasional character portrait in conversation. Was there even any RPG like that on the Amiga at the time? Shadowlands was more Diabloesque. Many Amiga RPGs were first person dungeon crawlers, or eclectic and experimental. The TSR games kinda did their own thing over and over. There were a few late (AMOS Pro) JRPG games, such as Realm of Sendai.

Benchmarking switches (uncompiled) in AMOS Pro. If-Else is not that bad.

I also looked at BlitzMax's asm output (GCC afaik). I thought switches might be compiled as efficient jump tables nowadays, but no, they're just a long list of Compare and JumpIfEquals (basically ElseIf-ElseIf). So I thought doing a function pointer table could be faster, and it probably is – just two instructions – but then you have to make an actual function call which has like a 6-7 instruction overhead in setting up the stack and return (even if the function is blank). I failed to make a Goto jump table in BlitzMax. I guess in asm you can just to jump the PC with an offset or something?

I tried plotting the Workbench 3.1 256 colour palette because I wanted to see if WB has a system palette (doesn't seem to). To do this I wrote an Amiga E program, seen running here, producing a 16x16 swatch. I think WB uses colour indices 0-3 and 12-15 in 8 colour mode. Then Palette Preferences sets up some indices temporarily all over the place (for the colour wheel and intensity slider). Multiview doesn't seem to set colours when viewing IFF files (it truncates into the WB palette for the preview). In 256 colour mode WB would have left a whole lot of indices unused just for multiview so it could display old EHB files or use for this and that using some kind of allocator. Or the 256 colour system palette could've been good. There was no computer with a good system palette that I know of.

In 16 colour mode the palette just repeats. FullPalette allows for setting up to 256 colours. Not from an image though...? I'd rather load a file (e.g. a .act which is just 256x3 raw bytes) than setting up 256 colours manually.

By the way, to

Lowres Workbench!

I decided to do a few mockups of Workbench lowres icons and pointers. Since 320x256 is half of 640x256, chipmem usage halves. I just think it looks more attractive though. Though I could've gone for 8 or 16 colours I decided to stick with a nostalgic 4 for this project.

For utility programs I prefer more hardcoded custom looking interfaces over adaptable GUI stuff which tends to have that spaciously haphazard, uh, open source interface look cuz what if some button text is localised as Pizzakantenwegschneider?

If one sets Workbench 3.1 to Lowres (320x256) the desktop is actually 640 wide and can be "panned" or dragged using the top menubar as a handle. Additionally, the scrollbars are made square. So it's a supported mode. However, scrollbars are not similarly fixed in Hires+Laced (640x512) which is a shame because the stretched scrollbars are kind of unsightly.

It's difficult to say now which font is readable on a bad CRT TV set. The story goes Commodore designed WB's fonts and palette so it was legible on the worst set they could find. Single-pixel vertical bars would wobble and blur a bit IIRC, and 1 pixel letter spacing could be an issue too. With my proportional font here some 70 characters can fit per row (320/4.6), compared to 80 in hires mode with the fixed-width font. I suspect handling text width and text selection is much simpler with 8-wide characters. Though few vanilla text editors on the Amiga actually did mouse selection for text.

Solitaire. I've been thinking about Workbench "killer apps" and platform traction. It's easy to focus on the lack of cutting-edge games (DOOM) as the reasons for the Amiga falling behind, but it's probably a fairly narrow "game nerd" perspective. There was also the hardware falling behind, Commedore mismanagement and litigations, but aren't we forgetting something? Even the ageing Game Boy was revitalised by Pokémon in the latter half of the 90s. This was the era of the Playstation and flashy 3D games. In Europe Pokémon Gold was released in 2001, contemporary to Halo CE.

While there were plenty of neat PD software for the Amiga back then, it wasn't very visible or accessible. Similarly, on Windows 95 there were better paint programs available than MS-Paint but most regular users just ended up using that filthy piece of crap which sat right there in the OS menu and they even feel nostalgic about it.

So, rather than speculating about what the Amiga hardware should have been, perhaps a miracle blend of useful software would've done the trick for the Amiga in say, 1990? Something like Filemaker (database with an editable form rather than boring OS GUI boxes), an RTF text editor more for productive writing (readable, formattable), A note organiser, Hex editor, simple 3D point and flat poly editor, DeluxePaint-lite, basic spreadsheet, not-MS-BASIC or at least a better editor.

Aside from office software, games for kids are often overlooked by certain circles. I tend to check out videos of Stunt Car Racer, Space Crusade and Gods. However, I recently saw a Just Grandma & Me video with 1.4 million views on youtube. Amiga games get like 60K. Kids/edutainment games were also played well past their expiration date. Gamer nerds might have jumped ship once the hottest game could be found somewhere else, but the Amiga could still run certain other software well enough and could've has some user retention there.

Some modern game genres are kind of doable still. Casual Match-3, little farming grinding games and whatnot.... I'm completely unfamiliar with those genres as well as I don't have a phone or fb.

Match-3 in 32 pixel blocks.I have only ever played vanilla match-3 ...once, and it felt like there was a lack of meaningful choices. Maybe it's more fun at a higher level of skill. I'm sure the genre has evolved greatly, but I pulled my own ideas out of thin air here:

Dice and Chess stuff. Programming Go seems very difficult, not just the AI but also handling the various fuzzy situations which can arise. Doing a two player version would be absolutely trivial though. A real life board is just rocks on a board with no computational power so to speak. Shogi is probably difficult to do due graphically to the amount of pieces with promotion and all. Can't really draw pieces with high density Kanji, and chubby figures would need a readable back view. Doing monsters should probably work better than humans with grainy minor detail differences.

Text editor and a wider/extended font. Questron menu pixel-over. Never played it. Seems to be a bump-fight RPG with tile-sized scrolling.

WB Hardlining

• LHA (the Amiga equivalent of .zip) should be outlawed or at least have an X-COPY type interface. All lha does is to filter out potential new users. There are GUI lha versions (packed with .lha so you can't open them) and guess what they don't work anyways or have dependencies also packed with lha and then there are dependencies all the way down and no explanations on how to install anything.

• Distributing using 880kb .adf files is preferable nowadays I think. Just put related utilities on one disk if there's space over. Good old home-made utility disks.

• Installation should just be dragging a folder over if possible. Any sort of friction (finding and installing) essentially means the product doesn't exist.

• Making the user download third party cludge utilities is a dead end. A Dutch enthusiast wrote a situationally useful thing in 1998 called ZBemKM01-0395_44.lha and there are two sentences explaining what it does? Doesn't exist. I'm starting to think that redesigning Workbench properly (refencing utility programs as a wish list) and then dropping compatibility with the entirety of Aminet's WB utility software means nothing of value will be lost. Maybe just compatibility patch the worthwhile software with source and rerelease that.

• Error messages should always be verbose (wordy). What went wrong and how can it be fixed? I don't have a certain library? Where can I find one then? Where do I put it if I do find it?

• WB should list all files as default except for the .info files. I'm sick of going into the "Show All Files" menu constantly. Should've been "Show .info Files". Other than those, an OS shouldn't have the ability to hide files because it's just confusing and time wasting.

• The default tool system was not something I ever understood. When clicking on a non-executable file without an icon, WB's default behaviour should be to launch a small C/identify program which tries to ID the file from the early header bytes. Programs like this already exist and I even wrote one myself. It could be updated over time to recognise more files, but just being able to do basic text, images and sound is good enough as that's 99% of files aside from deliberately opaque proprietary game files and such. Basically this identify program could then pop up an offer to:

• Workbench GUI programs can be bland looking in comparison to custom screen programs. AMOS Pro became kind of colourful and fun while MS BASIC was awful to use. Anyways, I came across Reach for the Stars the other day and... it looks rather dry. I also don't like the compact hires font here. Additionally, when the game stuff is put into movable windows you spend a lot of time having to arrange and sort them (sometimes fighting draw-overlap bugs). This doesn't happen with a hardcoded and streamlined layout. Streamlining is particularly helpful at lower resolutions (see Master of Orion 1). Using the WB GUI does have the advantage of allowing programs to easily running in full vertical resolution though. Australia (home of the developer) is apparently part of team PAL – the best team.

Reach for the Stars is based on the Stellar Conquest board game (1974+-), just like Master of Orion 1. Hall of Light has a scan of the game manual, which notes it was done on a Macintosh with a Laserwriter, using Bookman Condensed 9pt. The Amiga version (1987/88) was the third edition, released "five years" after the first (1983). A PC-98 version with a neat Japanese cover was released in 89. According to the quarterly SSI magazine "Run 5" (issue 14) it was possible to upgrade old editions to new ones, maybe even for a different machine. It cost 20 bucks plus Australia shipping (and your old disk).

One can do pretty much the same in lowres as in hires, but maybe it's less crisp on a TV. Halls of Montezuma and Panzer Battles (around 1990, same devs) did use lowres and a proportional font. I have honestly forgotten how games used to look over RF-modulator. Developers probably had a proper monitor. Unfortunately WB does some kind of dithering in place of greying out, and it looks rather unsightly in lowres. My lowres font here is ~ 115% the width of hires topaz (~70 characters per line instead of 80). I guess it could use a line spacing of a pixel more as it looks a bit tight.

"F" and "A" class stars could perhaps be portrayed as green but they're close to bright white IRL. There are no "A" or "O" class stars in the game. Doing realistic star systems is a bit of a feature trap in 4x games anyways.

Panzer Battles for reference. It seems to be a World War 2 hex board game (SSI did a lot of strategy stuff). I discovered this title after making my RftS edit above and it's interesting to see their approach. They chose a more compact font with some serif elements, which results in more diagonals and jaggies. Curving the 3's is graphically problematic at this scale. The kerning/spacing on E seems off. It's a somewhat cute font overall though. "Woods" works well. As expected, dithering out text at this size makes it mostly illegible. It worked in hirez because the vertical "bars" were 2px wide.

Panzer Battles seems to prefer OCS/KS1.3 (will guru on an A1200). The game came with a bunch of editors. Editing the art for the terrain in WarPaint(TM) is... not practically feasible. The editor is a bit claustrophobic and the city name tags are seemingly baked into the terrain tiles themselves and not drawn separately on top, which complicates things greatly. It's always easier to edit a big tile sheet in a proper package like DP I think. Looking at the palette here, it's passable, but I'd edit the light green and light grey to something more graphically usable. I don't much like sapphire dark blue and always sneak in some green.

CHECKING OUT: Distant Armies: A playing History of Chess

"This is war without bloodshed." – al-Ya'qubi (c.907)

To be honest I've never been much for playing board games and puzzle games on the computer. Still, I decided to take a look at what's out there for the Amiga. and then I stumbled upon Distant Armies. While I might never play a single game of it, I still have to say that it's an impressive piece of software design, despite its dry look. It reviewed well, but maybe these types of games just don't sell.

Let's take a look at some screenshots.

The title screen has some sort of Space Harrier thing going on.

A world map in a chess game? Actually, here is where you choose from chess types across the world. Quite novel. Most chess games just do... well, chess.

Decimal chess. Some of the historical chess types have reconstructed or rediscovered rules. A search tells me the rules for this variant comes from Sardarnama (The Book of Commanders) by a Shir Muhammad-Khan, in 1796. Many of the pieces have have powerful moves combining Tower, Diagonal runner and Horse.

There's a help page for each piece.

3D view of the same board, showing "Threats" in red. The artist had to make separate images for 2D and 3D.

Circular Byzantine board. Sadly this game is in 320x200 (same as NTSC) for some reason (publisher was in UK PAL land) so the resolution is vertically stunted. I think in 320x200 on a CRT the picture is stretched so this board is actually circular (it would just have a finer vertical resolution in full PAL). The boards are not images but lines, circles and fills.

...and encyclopaedia-like pages. Pre-web blue links! I don't like the use of a fixed-width font here. The characters are kind of just floating like discrete dots. The Amiga didn't have a character screen-mode and if you look closely these letters are not aligned on a grid since the rows are centered. Hmmm. If two characters are combined to make a 8+8 =16-bit word then that could be blitted a bit faster in one go if done on a multiple of 16. Some games like Starfox used a 2-letter tile technique like that IIRC. Speed isn't really an issue in this static page kind of situation however.

Palette editor! The game seems to use 32 colours, but not very well. 4 colours per side. I would probably have given each piece a primary and secondary colour (for figure robes and such) with autogenerated shades, with global colours for black, white, skin tones and accents.

Configurable speech synthesis!

Some games have alternative rules. Modern chess has hundreds of variations alone but this game focuses more on ethnic spread.

Project menu. Chaturanga board.

Move menu. Courier board. It's wide. Supposedly popular from 1200 to 1800CE.

Play menu. Chinese board (Xiangqi). Note the central river.

Board menu. Los Alamos board. It's a fairly modern mini-chess streamlined to run on a 1956 vacuum tube computer with limited memory.

Information menu. Burmese board (Sittuyin) with manual piece setup.

There are even help pages for the menu options.

Loading the game from floppy with KS3.1. Lots of OS folders. Can be installed.

Art folder contains separate files for the pieces.... not sure which file format though. Might be interesting to edit.

The text files can be viewed with More. Contains some data that's interpreted by the game.

Developer credits.

Probably never happened. Maybe they planned to do Shogi? In 1989 (a year after this game) they released Chinese Chess, which appears to be a polished version of xiangqi.

Royal Game of Ur is pretty good for casual/family play. It's like a compact variant of Ludo.

Conclusion: Very nicely featured. I would've liked to see some more fun pieces though. Maybe in a simple editable format.

As a sidenote, when I looked into these games a lot of wikipedia articles in English use contemporary chess pieces for notation. I understand the need to use common glyphs, but it really smells a bit of cultural laundering to turn clearly Asian/Arab cultural role piece into Jesus-hat or upside-down-Jesus-hat. In Swedish the names make more sense because we use Farmer, Tower, Runner/Courier, Steed/Warhorse*, Dame. I think King should probably be Ruler (gender neutral) and Queen should be something along the lines of Sword, Executioner, Assassin, or General/Advisor as in Chaturanga. Infantry seems preferable over pawn (Chaturanga got it right here too). Perhaps Tower makes more sense as either a mobile siege tower, cannon, or chariot (ruhk = Persian for chariot... Chaturanga used chariots), though it's harder to draw. An actual Tower seems more like a fortification piece. Hmmm, an immobile fortress/defence piece which is built by say two flanking workers and an overseer might be fun. A Cannon or Archer seems like... it would not move where it fires. Another interesting mechanic.

* (Springare, unwise to translate as runner since Löpare also kinda translates to runner, or courier. Probably related to the French Cours -> Coursier = a light war horse.)

Pixel-over of the Sittuyin pieces, in the style of mineral carvings. Also some experiments. I got confused and drew cannons and elephants on Shogi pieces.

My Chess

I didn't even test this variant but just came up with a bunch of ideas for behaviours I thought could be interesting. I shouldn't even make this first draft public, but here we go. There are probably lockup and cheese issues. I'm not against using dice in chess to make it less competitive and more casual, but I didn't do that here.

Non-Amiga

An update to this Dragon Buster pixel-over of the Arcade version. This game is a precursor to Zelda 2 I believe.

Commander Keen pixel-overs, DOS palette. Uses my redesigns seen below.

Commander Keen art.

Fooling around with Dune II pixels (DOS). Matching units with the big store portraits. I've scaled up the wind trap and refinery (didn't touch the other buildings). Lowres is a bit too tight here, maybe overscan, 400x300 (I used this for Quake 1 back then) or 640x480 is needed. 50% larger buildings (i.e. smaller units) might be fun for a more realistic scale. I prefer SimCity+defence games over RTS... to manage a colony/outpost, the economics, infrastructure, trade, spying... basically how Utopia worked, and I guess Rimworld and such nowadays. Some off screen occasional attacks. In competitive RTSes I always feel like I'm not doing anything tangible and the game just evaporates once the match is over.

Art by Arne Niklas Jansson

AndroidArts.com