Atari-ST Longplay [001] The Great Giana Sisters

[tuegy]

Does anyone know where to find super STario land?

[jr2nd]

you can see why nintendo went ape shit over this pure mario clone! ;p;

[tombert256]

Considering that there is no scrolling, they do a decent job simulating it.

[janmansde3dede]

Who wouldn't thought that the designer of this game went on making turrican ?

[Paar86]

May I ask how did you record this footage?

[cubex55]

@Paar86

Emulator + AviOut

[ObVReboot]

@rastansaga360 - you CAN set the screen to a boundary of 2 bytes using the sync-scroll technique. Take a look at the Cuddly Demos by TCB as this was the first demo to use this trick. Alien/ST CNX then invented the 4-bit hardscroller so you can set the screen onto 4 pixel boundaries but only in overscan. Look at the Punish Your Machine Demo for the first example of this technique.

[LOveERDos]

is so nice the music in this game

[gamewizard]

@weirdproq

The big problem with the ST was to get a game to sound really good you had to do some CPU intensive tricks that made smooth side scrolling difficult to achieve while music was playing which is why the ST version of this game does not scroll smoothly like the others. The sound chip ties up the CPU. The coders had to choose between smooth scrolling and the best possible sound quality and scrolling lost.

[jamon74]

Hi guys,

i'm looking for the name of a two players plateform game with fixed screens like bubble bobble (excuse my english), many flowers to take then monsters turned evil, you could turn monsters into a bonus letter by smashing them 3 times to complete a word like bonus and then earn a bonus life. There were boss each 10 scenes and the last one was a minotaur.

Please help me!

[cubex55]

@jamon74

Sounds like Rodland ;)

[AwesomeReo]

It could be worse. What if the screen moved like the game Super Mario Bros. Special? (screen wrapping)

[fuzzywzhe]

The lack of scrolling is surprising. I guess the Atari couldn't move a video pointer around. Pity, because a pretty simple change to the frame buffer in the memory would have fixed that.

[karadok666]

@fuzzywzhe no - thats not true. its not so easy like you think. Change the pointer to the frame buffer and you get some problems with the pixel rows on the screen.

[fuzzywzhe]

@fuzzywzhe Actually, it is as easy as I think.

.

I would have implemented a frame buffer that wrapped around with off screen memory. Say you had 16 bits of 320x200 pixel resolution or 64000 pixels tha twould require 128,000 bytes for ON screen memory. 2^17 would give you 131,072 bytes. Move the pointer up 2 bytes, the screen shifts to the left by 1 pixel, and you get smooth scrolling, and you only need to update offscreen memory before the shift - entirely smooth.

[gamewizard]

@fuzzywzhe

The lack of scrolling is not surprising at all. The custom chips in the Amiga had 3 years development and Atari was left with only a few months to cobble together a competing machine when the Atari-Amiga deal fell apart. The ST isn't a bad machine considering the time constraint the engineers were under and the fact that it had to be built using off the shelf parts, no custom hardware. It still beats the crap out of any 286 PC with EGA graphics or a 68000 based Mac.

[The100thAttempt]

You should record some ST games that are actually of interest, like Sundog - The Frozen Legacy and the newer version of Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon...

Kind of useless to do crappier versions of games that exist on other systems.

[jarjar2b]

omg this is pathetic even c64 has scrolling !

[porcorosso81]

Ummm, the C64 has scrolling hardware. The Atari ST not.

[Ahle2]

This game game was before ST coders came up with good techniques for doing scrolling without fancy hardware like the Amiga, C64, Atari 800 ..etc

People have to understand that the ST had NO hardware at all to boost graphics performance, EVERYTHING had to be done with the CPU.

[billabongodrum]

but the c64 had a 1mhz cpu! was'nt the ST's cpu about 7mhz?

[consoledev]

I love the game and used play the C64 and Amiga version a lot in the 80s.

I've never seen the Atari version before though. It looks pretty good! Interesting to see the Atari version does not feature smooth background scrolling, but does it somewhat pagewise.

Anyway, well played but you could have collected more diamonds :-)

[Cyberspammer2000]

its great you do these kinds of things.

But one thing i NEVER understood. My bigger brother pointed this out: look in the intro, it is called the great gianna sisters - with 2 N´s. Gianna not giana as we all know it. I dont get it!

[LateTheMan]

Nice crack intro :)

[thisWinglessAngel]

this is like a bootleg Mario.

[billabongodrum]

that is why it was banned

[OpticalFascism]

Eww... Atari longplays ;)

[kojiki1976]

I also love the ST!! It's great to see this...

[cubex55]

Request them on the forums - so all recorders can see them :)

[randomforum]

I love the static sound in Atari ST, so awesome!!! BTW, this game rules!!!!

[Fe0n]

xD 16:58 you noticed that the fire don't hurt you ^^

[Gamewitzer]

Quality is really bad, everythings blurred.

[bigl240]

really? it was fine for me.

[Gamewitzer]

Now its better, guess I watched the low quality version before.