It was my first 44 hour day, playtesting this to make sure my music arrangements worked ok. Those days, you could kinda get away with smoking in your room (if no-one else was in the office). A cloud of cigarette smoke blasted out of my room each time I opened the door.
What a great game to start your career on though :) Not the easiests of jobs converting a 24 channel midi file into 4 channel mod format, and also allowing for SFX to take a channel.
This game runs MUCH better, when you play it on an Amiga 1200 with 4 MB Fast Ram. It's nigh twice as fast then. Combined with the 256 color graphics, the great amiga music in .mod format and the sound effects it's actually one of the better versions of Wing Commander I.
this game wasn't even released on the ST! And from what I've read in a review of the amiga version when it first came out, they reduced the number of colours from 32 to 16 because othervise it would have ran even slower than it already does on a standard A500/600.
They didn't write Amiga port properly to use all A500's capabillities. I've got A1200 and the disk (16 colour) version runs really slow. The old version is a little annoying, so I'm downloading the CD32 version now.
@janmansde3dede Yup, appearently, the programmers weren't capable of making the game run fast enough on a standard A500/A600 (1mb ram) when using 32 colours, so they decided to use 16 instead (still painfully slow though).
At least that was what the reviews said back in the days.
@superturbo2 Yeah, i can tell first hand, it was very slow, at least if you looked at a big ship from short distance or flied through an asteroid field. Was playable though and a lot of fun.
The main problem was that Amigas bitplane architecture wasn't really all that suitable for these kind of games, though i think they could have done it much faster using the hardware sprite features.
@alizta Not so sure that the hardware was the major problem. A patch was released on Aminet which gave both the EC3 and AGA version a significant speed boost regardless of what hardware you were using. It also made it possible to run the AGA version on an a1200 which was not possible before.
@superturbo2 Nah, being older and wiser (16) the OCS 68000 Amiga can easly do Wing Commander, If the whole game was reprogrammed to use the Amiga's hardware features... So this is acceptably..
Deeeeewd. Thank you so much for uploading this. The intro sequence almost brought tears to my eyes. I wonder what it is that makes these childhood game memories so strong.
Yeah, this looks like a straight port of the Amiga 500 version - it runs about as fast as that did on the A1200. I hear it's a little more sophisticated than that so it's a shame it's not very obvious!
Wing Commander only became playable on the A1200 - it was painfully slow on the 500!
icbrkr do u have amiga cd32 or u play these games on emulators?, i have two cd32 one good and one broken...
Chris30xxx 1 year ago
@Chris30xxx : All are on real equipment. I have both a PAL and NTSC CD32.
icbrkr 1 year ago
Viel besser als die AMIGA Disketten Version aber die SEGA CD Version dürfte wohl die BESTE sein.
Maasaa2000 1 year ago
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It was my first 44 hour day, playtesting this to make sure my music arrangements worked ok. Those days, you could kinda get away with smoking in your room (if no-one else was in the office). A cloud of cigarette smoke blasted out of my room each time I opened the door.
What a great game to start your career on though :) Not the easiests of jobs converting a 24 channel midi file into 4 channel mod format, and also allowing for SFX to take a channel.
themadfiddler 1 year ago
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themadfiddler 1 year ago
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themadfiddler 1 year ago
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themadfiddler 1 year ago
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themadfiddler 1 year ago
This game runs MUCH better, when you play it on an Amiga 1200 with 4 MB Fast Ram. It's nigh twice as fast then. Combined with the 256 color graphics, the great amiga music in .mod format and the sound effects it's actually one of the better versions of Wing Commander I.
andersdenkend 2 years ago
I always hated Origin for not releasing the expansions to the Amiga =/. I did get the PC version eventually, but that was several years after.
FredDude27 2 years ago
The bar music still kicks ass.
Flexcat010 2 years ago 5
this game wasn't even released on the ST! And from what I've read in a review of the amiga version when it first came out, they reduced the number of colours from 32 to 16 because othervise it would have ran even slower than it already does on a standard A500/600.
superturbo2 2 years ago
They didn't write Amiga port properly to use all A500's capabillities. I've got A1200 and the disk (16 colour) version runs really slow. The old version is a little annoying, so I'm downloading the CD32 version now.
Scumkill2 2 years ago
The main difference between the cd32 version and the standard amiga version is that this version have 256 colours instead of the original's 16.
superturbo2 2 years ago 3
The original had 32 (Atari ST had only 16)
Cornughon 2 years ago
@superturbo2 That version used 16 colors only ? not 32 or 64 ?
janmansde3dede 1 year ago
@janmansde3dede Yup, appearently, the programmers weren't capable of making the game run fast enough on a standard A500/A600 (1mb ram) when using 32 colours, so they decided to use 16 instead (still painfully slow though).
At least that was what the reviews said back in the days.
superturbo2 1 year ago
@superturbo2 Yeah, i can tell first hand, it was very slow, at least if you looked at a big ship from short distance or flied through an asteroid field. Was playable though and a lot of fun.
The main problem was that Amigas bitplane architecture wasn't really all that suitable for these kind of games, though i think they could have done it much faster using the hardware sprite features.
alizta 1 year ago
@alizta Not so sure that the hardware was the major problem. A patch was released on Aminet which gave both the EC3 and AGA version a significant speed boost regardless of what hardware you were using. It also made it possible to run the AGA version on an a1200 which was not possible before.
superturbo2 10 months ago
@superturbo2 Nah, being older and wiser (16) the OCS 68000 Amiga can easly do Wing Commander, If the whole game was reprogrammed to use the Amiga's hardware features... So this is acceptably..
janmansde3dede 8 months ago
Deeeeewd. Thank you so much for uploading this. The intro sequence almost brought tears to my eyes. I wonder what it is that makes these childhood game memories so strong.
Czymra 2 years ago
I played it all the way through, it took me a month mainly because my a500 was chugging at about 3fps lol, still loved it.
toggsuk 2 years ago
how good is to hear amiga version music after all thoes years
I miss this game very much...:(
airjersey89 3 years ago 2
Yeah, this looks like a straight port of the Amiga 500 version - it runs about as fast as that did on the A1200. I hear it's a little more sophisticated than that so it's a shame it's not very obvious!
Wing Commander only became playable on the A1200 - it was painfully slow on the 500!
Thanks for posting this.
Dogmang 3 years ago