Chequered Past - Archimedes Demo

[kieranhj]

Morning all, last weekend I released a new demo called Chequered Past for the Archimedes at the NOVA demoparty.

You can download the ADF from our Bitshifters site as usual. Emulate in Archimedes Live or watch on YouTube. Yes, I know I need to sort out a !Spark archive so it doesn't take forever to load in the emulator.

It's currently only optimised for ARM250 (eight layers), although if enough people ask I'll finish the ARM2 version that drops the bottom two layers. It also requires a whopping 4Mb to run because, well, to do anything fast on this machine everything needs to be unrolled and word aligned, so there are 8 copies of lots of things.

Thanks to Sarah Walker for helping me figure out how to even do this effect in the first place. Enjoy!

[garfield]

Cool. Nice music in particular.

[kieranhj]

Cool. Nice music in particular.

Thanks, it’s a great tune by Rhino. I love that it doesn’t sound like an Archimedes at all! It has bass for a start.

[davidb]

Clean visuals and nicely synchronised music. Very well done!

[NickLuvsRetro]

Outstanding once again Keiran! And thanks for sharing the sources as well, I love having a nosey at things I generally barely understand.

[jubber]

It's a really neat effect, but the demo also has a lot of style to it, especially synching with the music and the understated presentation. Ace.

[Diminished]

Beautiful.

[bob147]

This is really nice, enjoying seeing you put the Archimedes through its paces. It's not a system I know a huge amount about so good to see it holding its own against the Amigas of the world. Any plans for a killer game port like we got for the Master?

[kieranhj]

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I hadn’t really thought about a game port for the Archie as they are a lot of work, even on the Beeb. (Although I do have an outstanding itch wrt Paradroid, but that’s for another year.)

What game would be worth the effort to port, do you think?

[bob147]

Nothing specific in mind from me, I'd have just enthusiastically supported whatever you came up with! I guess the beeb has the advantage of sharing that 6502 with a number of other contemporary systems, no such luck with the Archie (unless I'm ignorant of some of the others?)

[jubber]

There's a really nifty game on the 3DO called StarFighter. Think it came out for PS1 too. Could we get a conversion of that?

A slightly more serious suggestion would be something that plays to the ARMs strengths. I'd suggest Stunt Car Racer (which you may be familiar with) or something like Damocles - Mercenary 2. That would probably fly on the Arc.

For 2D titles Alien Breed and Super Cars II would be fine additions to the Archie platform - especially in terms of novel gameplay for the system.

For pseudo 3D - Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master or Bloodwych would be great options - especially Bloodwych. We don't have a lot of dungeon crawlers and certainly nothing 2 player co-op.

[davidb]

There's a really nifty game on the 3DO called StarFighter. Think it came out for PS1 too. Could we get a conversion of that?

Another backport of features from the 3DO version?

[kieranhj]

A slightly more serious suggestion would be something that plays to the ARMs strengths. I'd suggest Stunt Car Racer (which you may be familiar with) or something like Damocles - Mercenary 2. That would probably fly on the Arc.

Ha! The Amiga 68K source is well documented, I actually referenced it whilst porting the Master version. Funnily enough the track data for the Amiga is byte-for-byte identical to the original C64 code…

That actually wouldn’t be too intimidating of a project tbh.

[bob147]

There's a really nifty game on the 3DO called StarFighter. Think it came out for PS1 too. Could we get a conversion of that?

Another backport of features from the 3DO version?

That's quite a sad story that no publisher could be found, glad it found a way to be released.

Also well up for Stunt Car Racer (even more) Enhanced Edition

[!FOZ!]

although if enough people ask I'll finish the ARM2 version that drops the bottom two layers.

Agree, with all comments, often its not about cranking out everylast pixel, its about style and production quality - another hallmark example here! Bravo! I'll also start the +1 for an ARM2 version.

[fwibbler]

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I hadn’t really thought about a game port for the Archie as they are a lot of work, even on the Beeb. (Although I do have an outstanding itch wrt Paradroid, but that’s for another year.)

What game would be worth the effort to port, do you think?

Oids (for either Beeb or Arch)
Quazatron for Beeb
Wonderboy 3: The Dragons Trap (I can dream can't I?)
A quick port of 'The Ur-Quan Masters'

[steve3000]

Should say this is fantastic work Kieran an awesome demo with mind-blowing music. Definitely up for seeing the ARM2 version if you have the time

[steve3000]

For game conversions, I think the Archie would really benefit from a high quality 2D overhead shooter or even platformer, something away from where the Archie's usual strengths (3D), home-grown games or mainstream conversions were. One of my favorite conversions to the Archie was Gribbly's Day Out (and not just because it features raster bars ) because it was very polished and quite different to other Archie games at the time. Then there's the game often talked about that's missing a conversion to the Arc... Exile. A conversion of the Amiga version could be very interesting.

There's a really nifty game on the 3DO called StarFighter. Think it came out for PS1 too. Could we get a conversion of that?

http://starfighter.acornarcade.com/sfwelcome.htm

[helpful]

There's a really nifty game on the 3DO called StarFighter. Think it came out for PS1 too. Could we get a conversion of that?

http://starfighter.acornarcade.com/sfwelcome.htm

https://rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2014/nov.html

[bob147]

I like how this thread has just turned into 'we did port StarFighter 3000, we promise! In fact we did it twice!'