Speedball 2 Acorn Games Video Archive A5000/VGA

[animaze86]

ARM in your faces :)

[Archimedes75009]

Give little money and only a couple of weeks to a team and here is what you get.

In comparison see starfighter3000, this is a real Archimedes game, not a port from an inferior platform (Amiga or ST).

[JasperAbraxxious]

@Archimedes75009 : Now why would you say something silly like that? I am a big Acorn fan (have a Strongarm upgraded RiscPC 600 and love it), but the Acorn range were NOT superior to the Amiga. Whilst the RiscPC range had far more powerful Cpus than most Amigas (except for the very top models), they lacked all of the custom chipset the Amiga had, so had to use the cpu to render graphics etc when the Amiga could do it independant of the CPU. Both systems have their own strengths and weaknesses.

[Archimedes75009]

@Archimedes75009 Not only vertical scrolling is easy to do on the Archie, but horizontal, pixel by pixel too. Everything is in the VLSI Arm chipset doc, but few people bothered reading it, it's why 2D games on the Archie don't use its real power. It's why what I say is not silly : the Amiga and the ST are inferior machines. It's not because games programmers were lazy on the Archie that it means the Archie doesn't beat the Amiga, for 3D but also in 2D, and in of course in 256 colour modes.

[JasperAbraxxious]

@Archimedes75009 : pixel independant rendering is great, especially for games that use texture mapping, such as Doom etc, but it is hopelessly slow and inefficient for moving large chunks of gfx data in memory - this is the job of the Blitter, which is sadly missing in the Arch/Risc series. Anywho, tonight I am diggin out my ole' Risc 600 and installing Risc OS 6 Select, is there any decent theming/skinning proggies for Risc OS yet?

[Archimedes75009]

@JasperAbraxxious No, it's not hopelessly slow and inefficient, with the techniques I used : generated code, and intelligent reloading of the background, replotting only what needs to be replotted. Of course it implies to write your own programmes to encode your sprites, and encode the cycle perfect unplotting. I DID it, it DOES work, it OUTPERFORMS the Amiga. Why do you want to argue ? Watch my demo, it's the proof, and since then I've improved my code making it about 30% faster.

[Archimedes75009]

@JasperAbraxxious You must understand if the Archies had been programmed directly by people from Team17 or Psygnosis, then you would have seen some really amazing games for these machines. The game market for the Archimedes was too small, so it did not attract programmers with the same skills you could find on the Amiga and the ST. You're wrong if you consider the games ported onto the Archimedes, from the ST or Amiga, as a proof these machines can't do anything better.

[Archimedes75009]

@JasperAbraxxious I also ask you to find the demos by Karl Morton : they display the hundreds or thousands of colours in the background that the Archimedes is supposed not to be able to display. You can do that using the IOC Timer 1, but as ready made MOD players use this timer too, you must either write your own MOD player, or be able to amend the existing ones, so that your cycling colours raster routines and the MOD player don't conflict.

There is a patch for Zool to get coloured background.

[JasperAbraxxious]

@Archimedes75009 I have many 2d games on the Arch, colour palette is good, scrolling is VERY ordinary - the Arch has no custom sprite/bob hardware, no blitter and a crippled memory bus. For 2d it cannot come close to matching the custom hardware of the Amiga, but is this any surprise? The Amiga team spent years developing the custom chipset for the Amiga. The Arch has a very powerful cpu, but nothing else. For number crunching it runs circles around all but the top end Amigas, but not gaming.

[Archimedes75009]

@JasperAbraxxious I'm telling you that I DID developp routines which makes the Archies able to move sprites (on a background), in the VBL, making them more powerful than the A500, and in 256 colour modes. What else should I add ? You're telling me about poorly coded existing games, I'm telling you about the possibilities I've found : don't consider the existing 2D games as a demo of the guts of the Archies. As I've told you, much can be done if you understand the MEMC, IOC, and VIDC docs.

[Foebane72]

Why does this look like it was converted straight from the ST version? And the music is inferior to the Amiga and ST as well.