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[eso76]

Couple of random Amiga GIFs:

I still think this is the most impressive amiga game with Lionheart

Wish i could find gifs from boss' stages

50fps texture mapping on vanilla Amiga 500 !


Loved Layer Section/Gunlock/RayForce/Galactic Attack in the arcades.

Surprising a lot of people in this thread never heard of it, especially considering it's the prequel to the excellent RayStorm and RayCrisis on PSX

 

[2+2=5]

Flaming words from Myth for amiga were really cool

Not really an effect but i loved animations in battle chess, the way the tower transforms in a sort of golem and then back to tower was awesome imo(but all the animations were really cool), a gif of the tower in action, sadly not of its transofmation

EDIT:
odissey had a cool hand animation...

...and morphing effect, no gif for both sadly

other than some well made animations

I still think this is the most impressive amiga game with Lionheart

Wish i could find gifs from boss' stages

50fps texture mapping on vanilla Amiga 500 !


Loved Layer Section/Gunlock/RayForce/Galactic Attack in the arcades.

Surprising a lot of people in this thread never heard of it, especially considering it's the prequel to the excellent RayStorm and RayCrisis on PSX

Wow i have never heard of it!
I don't think that's texure mapping though.

I still think that despite the lack of parallax scrolling and other effects Ruff 'n Tumble is one of the most impressive amiga games, it had great design, graphics and animations, it was also really hard(at least for me!).

Brian the lion is a game that doesn't seem to get all the praise it deserves, it has some impressive features, a huge amount of parallax scrolling(especially in the shoot'em ups sections), background rotation and element rotation and all the rest.

The road to the castle section of shadow of the beast is also really impressive not just for the parallax, but also for the awesome use of colors, everything looks "right" and harmonious especially if compared to the other versions.

 

[VNZ]

Wow i have never heard of it!
I don't think that's texure mapping though.

In computer graphics it works like this: if it looks like something, it is that something.

The bonus stage in Mr. Nuts is a rather classic Amiga demo effect first made by Chaos of Sanity – who actually coded that part of the game as well. And the texture mapper is very special cased; handling only rectangles of the same width, and constraining camera movement to ZY plane and rotation around the X axis. Still, textures are mapped.

 

[missile]

... I don't think that's texure mapping though. ...

It is texture mapping. It maps any texture onto a polygon without the mapping
being trivial, meaning, the mapping accounts for the shape of the polygon as
can be seen from the zooming/scaling of said textures with the polygon. Hence,
it is not just a simple cut-out of a texture put on the screen. However, the
polygons are so trivial in their alignment/orientation that texture mapping
them can't get any easier. Pretty sure it boils down to

screen[x][y] = texture[u*x][v*y]

with u, v encoding the geometry of the texture and the shape of the polygon.

 

[eso76]

I still think that despite the lack of parallax scrolling and other effects Ruff 'n Tumble is one of the most impressive amiga games,

At some point I just stopped buying games without parallax scrolling.

I was obsessed with it, i remember I would compare magazine pics of the same stage to see if elements in the background appeared in different positions in regards to those on the foreground and infer whether or not the game had parallax scrolling..

Anyway. Mr Nutz was a very good platformer, I never understood why people went looking for Sonic clones in Zool and Superfrog while neglecting legit stuff like this.

Kid Chaos was a pretty good technical showcase as well

Brian the Lion was good, but only the AGA version had proper parallax. A500 used the old, monochromatic silhouette + copper trick as seen in several other Amiga games IIRC

 

[2+2=5]

In computer graphics it works like this: if it looks like something, it is that something.

The bonus stage in Mr. Nuts is a rather classic Amiga demo effect first made by Chaos of Sanity – who actually coded that part of the game as well. And the texture mapper is very special cased; handling only rectangles of the same width, and constraining camera movement to ZY plane and rotation around the X axis. Still, textures are mapped.

Sorry but i STRONGLY disagree with that

Anyway it doesn't look different from things like this

I saw a video of mr nutz and i'm sure it's 2d, the inside of 3d models is empty, instead in mr nutz when the camera goes "inside" the road you see a image

the road is just made of a succession of lines or pieces of the same sprite at different size and distance imo.

 

[piggychan]

Air Zonk/PC Denjin has some cool scrolls too.

Parodius Da; arcade and pc engine gifs. The levels are a mixed bag on the pc engine version as some stages have missing scrolling and the colors seem decided stripped down and appear to have less color and detail than other stages, but these two are interesting. Here the pc engine version konami added more scrolling layers.

arcade

pc engine

arcade

pc engine

 

[nkarafo]

At some point I just stopped buying games without parallax scrolling.

Same here.

Sonic 1 was the first 16bit game that impressed me mainly because of it's parallax scrolling (especially in Green Hill Zone). After that, it became the first thing i would seek for in a game's visual presentation. And it was the main difference from 8bit games as well, although there were a few 8bit games that did emulate the effect successfully.

 

[missile]

... I saw a video of mr nutz and i'm sure it's 2d, the inside of 3d models is empty, instead in mr nutz when the camera goes "inside" the road you see a image

the road is just made of a succession of lines or pieces of the same sprite at different size and distance imo.

It doesn't need to be 3d. As described in my post last page, you just need to
get the projection "right". And for the trivial alignments of the (perhaps 2d)
polygons you can at least compute a proper scale factor to mimic some
perspective despite everything being 2d.

 

[eso76]

Sorry but i STRONGLY disagree with that

Anyway it doesn't look different from things like this

It does, because unlike Layer Section (gunlock/rayforce/galactic attack) Mr Nutz rotates. Sure, it only does so around the X axis, but it's not line scrolling; you could turn that level sideways and you could get a proper Wolfenstein, for example.

What happens in the (awesome) Taito shooter is closer to this

(in regards to the ground - sorry for the crappy framerate of the gif)

btw Unreal 3d levels were quite impressive for the time.

 

[dr. apocalipsis]

And that the Kawasaki game used the same engine, just like The Cycles* on PC (and I guess other machines) used the same engine as Grand Prix Circuit.

Oh, my god, you left me just like this:

I suddenly remembered I had those 2 games on Amiga and played them as a small kid.

It all started with Test Drive. They weren't any good technically, but they all shared that late 80's sense of style.

Presentation and music were so awesome with so little.

The Cycles intro - Amiga
Grand Prix Circuit intro - amiga

 

[magicalsoundshower]

arcade

pc engine

arcade

pc engine

Parodius on PC Engine indeed looks great in some stages and not so great in others, but much of this has to do with the limitations of the hardware.

The Engine's main problem is that it only has one background layer, but tricks like linescrolling, animated tiles and using sprites to simulate layers are possible to simulate depth.

Note how in both the bubble bath and the graveyard level, there aren't really any obstacles in the middle of the stage that overlap the background (save for the tombstones, which are most likely sprites). "Tunnel" style levels like that are a relatively simple setup because you can have parts of the single background scroll at differents speeds to make it look there's a foreground (i.e. the floor and ceiling) and a background (the scenery in the "middle" of the playfield).

Level 1 of the game isn't really suited for this setup as there are quite a number of foreground elements that directly overlap the background (such as those cliffs with a small opening to fly through). If you wanted a "parallaxing" scenery, you'd pretty much have to use sprites to draw all of them and use the BG layer to draw the sea and sky. As a result, the game would reach the sprite limit per scanline really quickly, causing flicker or breakup.

Level 2 most likely uses sprites for the foreground which works well because the foreground elemts are kind of sparse, but the flicker is pretty noticeable if you shoot the floating platforms.

Hopefully this doesn't read as if I'm knocking the PC Engine, but I'm really not, it's an awesome system and I love discovering the trickery that was used to pull of off near SNES level visuals in some of its games.

To give you an idea of what parallax techniques were used on the PC Engine, check out this analysis of the water level in Lords of Thunder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm4pKt_LE2k

Oh yeah! Chaos/Sanity programmed that game. I think the reason wasn't so popular is that it somehow lacked visual charm. It looked very un-Amiga, and compared with something like Flink (released the same year), Mr. Nutz looks almost like an 8bit game with its weird garish colors and obvious repeated patterns. I also think it was poorly marketed

I kind of agree here, but to be fair, the pretty harsh color restrictions you have to deal with if you want two BG layers on the Amiga (7 colors plus transparency for every background in this case, a ton of games used 15 plus transparency for BG 1 and 2 colors for BG 2) really sound like quite the pain in the neck to work with if you're going for a bright and cheery look.

 

[Joe Spangle]

The memories being stirred up by this thread...

 

[Lord Error]

I still think this is the most impressive amiga game with Lionheart

Wish i could find gifs from boss' stages

50fps texture mapping on vanilla Amiga 500 !

Oh yeah! Chaos/Sanity programmed that game. I think the reason wasn't so popular is that it somehow lacked visual charm. It looked very un-Amiga, and compared with something like Flink (released the same year), Mr. Nutz looks almost like an 8bit game with its weird garish colors and obvious repeated patterns. I also think it was poorly marketed

 

[piggychan]

Ginka Fukei Densetsu Saphire

Lords of Thunder/Winds of Thunder

 

[Muppet of a Man]

sin, the mathematical function. You feed it a value, and it gives you a value in return, that swings from -1 to 1 to back to -1 and so forth infinitely. Example:
Sin(1) = 0.8414709848
Sin(2) = 0.90929742682
Sin(3) = 0.14112000806
Sin(4) = -0.7568024953
Sin(5) = -0.95892427466
Sin(6) = -0.27941549819
Sin(7) = 0.65698659871
Sin(8) = 0.98935824662
Sin(9) = 0.41211848524
and so forth

This is because Sin is the Y height of a circle as you trace around the circle (where Cos is the X value... or I might have Y and X mixed up, doesn't really matter) like so:

This calculation cannot be done in the m68k processor of the genesis quickly enough (this is why Yoshi's Island uses a math co-processor for rotation of sprites) so, to fake it, they precalculated out Sin according to 255 radians (approximately a circle), and used the current value of Sin(X) as the offset for the pixels being drawn. So Row 1, at the top of the screen, is offset by Sin(1) which means they shift over a value similar to 0.8414709848 , while row 2 is offset by Sin(2) which means they shift over a value similar to 0.90929742682 and so forth. In actuality, to animate the rolling background, the value of the current row is also added to a figure that counts up as time goes forward, so the starting offset changes each frame.

Because of the way a unit circle works, you can get the values on the opposite side of the circle by negating the value of Sin. So, rather than store all the values of Sin from 0-255, they only stored 1/4 of the values and just multiply by negatives (which the genesis CPU can do quickly) to arrive at the correct values while only using 1/4 the rom space.

This is a fantastic post. Should earn you Member status. Thanks.

 

[eso76]

Oh yeah! Chaos/Sanity programmed that game. I think the reason wasn't so popular is that it somehow lacked visual charm. It looked very un-Amiga, and compared with something like Flink (released the same year), Mr. Nutz looks almost like an 8bit game with its weird garish colors and obvious repeated patterns. I also think it was poorly marketed

Garish is the right word.
They obviously had to deal with limited palette, but that doesn't completely excuse the weird choice of colours.
The tech world is pretty amazing, with 4 planes of proper parallax scrolling and the additional, several layers of 'fake' horizontal parallax. But those colours would stab your eyes.

Fun fact: the artist responsible for the character was behind that Toki HD remake that never saw the light of day.

 

[Lord Error]

Garish is the right word.
They obviously had to deal with limited palette, but that doesn't completely excuse the weird choice of colours.

Not at all. I believe Agony used the similar display setup, two years prior, and look what they've done with it. It was the kind of look (and beyond) people expected from a high end Amiga game of that time.

 

[eso76]

Not at all. I believe Agony used the similar display setup, two years prior, and look what they've done with it. It was the kind of look (and beyond) people expected from a high end Amiga game of that time.

Yes, but to be fair Agony went for a much more desaturated look, with little vibrance, so they could get away with colours that didn't clash as much with each other.
Mrnutz tried to be very colourful and bright, which means they wanted to have saturated reds, yellows, blues, greens and violets all on-screen at the same time.
Still, they could pick less acid shades of each of those colours.
I kind of want to open a PNG and replace each colour in Photoshop but on the other hand I kind of can't be bothered.

 

[dogen]

lol at sonic and tails literally arguing about blast processing

 

[dadjumper]

Unfortunately I don't have a gif, but I just played through DQ1 on the Super Famicom and the forest shadows in this town were really nice. They move around a bit. I've always been a sucker for weather or other similar effects in older games.

 

[Bitanator]

There was an obscure jrpg I played couple years ago called The Magical Land of Wozz, and I remember being impressed by some of the things that game did

like this forest area with the trees overhead, some parts of the game looks really cool.

Silva Saga II looks great as well for another obscure 16 bit jrpg

 

[dadjumper]

There was an obscure jrpg I played couple years ago called The Magical Land of Wozz, and I remember being impressed by some of the things that game did

like this forest area with the trees overhead, some parts of the game looks really cool.

Silva Saga II looks great as well for another obscure 16 bit jrpg

Ha, why didn't they translate "waza" in the attack menu? That's so weird

 

[gooner4life_uk]

Man i loved that game, what was it called? i remember it being superFx something.

 

[FyreWulff]

Man i loved that game, what was it called? i remember it being superFx something.

Stunt Race FX

Interestingly, whenever it appears in anything now, they call it by it's Japanese name, Wild Trax

 

[Cow Mengde]

Art of Fighting and Art of Fighting 2 on the SNES had scaling just like the arcade. While SNES was capable of mode 7, not many arcade ports were able to reproduce the scaling like the Neo Geo, but the 2 Art of Fighting ports had it! Even Samurai Shodown didn't have scaling on the SNES. It was a big thing back in the 16 bit days. The Genesis port couldn't scale either. Strangely enough, the Turbo CD version also had scaling, and the Turbo is a weaker hardware compared to the Genesis.

I wish I had some gifs to show it off, but it's a pretty incredible port. Though I heard Art of Fighting 2 sacrificed a lot of gameplay. AOF1 was the better port with scaling.

 

[piggychan]

Strangely enough, the Turbo CD version also had scaling, and the Turbo is a weaker hardware compared to the Genesis.

I have the game for my pc engine but I am not a huge fan of the way it fakes the scaling in the fighting stages however there are other cool things it does in the pc engine port.

 

[Cow Mengde]

I have the game for my pc engine but I am not a huge fan of the way it fakes the scaling in the fighting stages however there are other cool things it does in the pc engine port.

Yeah, I just saw a youtube video of it and it looks really weird. I thought it was because it's youtube.

 

[Celine]

Played it again yesterday on real PAL hardware.
Framerate was around 10 fps or so.
It's a pity because framerate makes the game unplayable while the game itself is a fun arcade racing game.

 

[c0de]

Played it again yesterday on real PAL hardware.
Framerate was around 10 fps or so.
It's a pity because framerate makes the game unplayable while the game itself is a fun arcade racing game.

You can overclock the chip to get better performance.

 

[nkarafo]

You can overclock the chip to get better performance.

I'm pretty sure that if you do this, the game will also run faster than normal, like in fast forward. At least this is what happens in Starfox.

 

[blast processed]

More like

 

[TheMoon]

More like

Ah yes, that game I've played!

 

[Oblivion]

At some point I just stopped buying games without parallax scrolling.

Good man.

 

[iidesuyo]

More like

Yes, that's what I remember it as well. Such a letdown after Virtua Racing.

 

[sixteen-bit]

 

[Shifty]

That looks super cool.

Shame I have no idea what it is.

 

[MightyHedgehog]

That looks super cool.

Shame I have no idea what it is.

It's the end of the intro to Wolf Team's Arcus Odyssey for the Genny/MD.

 

[Peltz]

Yo, title please.

Edit, nvm.

 

[Stone Ocean]

Reminds me of that Bastard! fighting game for the SNES

 

[Alo81]

Wait wait wait wait wait. Are we still talking about this one? Or this actual Genesis/MegaDrive piece?
Because the former is definitely an arranged/redbook audio version with real instruments and synthesizers, while the latter is 100% Genesis/MegaDrive (which still sounds so fucking good).

EDIT: Bleh, I can't read.
Well, I still can't believe that remix doesn't contain real guitars. They sound way too real.
I heard my fair share of synth guitars and they didn't sound even REMOTELY close to this majestic eargasm.

That first track is fuckin stellllar. That intro solo sounds so rad.

 

[2+2=5]

It does, because unlike Layer Section (gunlock/rayforce/galactic attack) Mr Nutz rotates. Sure, it only does so around the X axis, but it's not line scrolling; you could turn that level sideways and you could get a proper Wolfenstein, for example.

What happens in the (awesome) Taito shooter is closer to this

(in regards to the ground - sorry for the crappy framerate of the gif)

btw Unreal 3d levels were quite impressive for the time.

If the level rotates then i guess you are right, i thought it just went up and down.

It is texture mapping. It maps any texture onto a polygon without the mapping
being trivial, meaning, the mapping accounts for the shape of the polygon as
can be seen from the zooming/scaling of said textures with the polygon. Hence,
it is not just a simple cut-out of a texture put on the screen. However, the
polygons are so trivial in their alignment/orientation that texture mapping
them can't get any easier. Pretty sure it boils down to

screen[x][y] = texture[u*x][v*y]

with u, v encoding the geometry of the texture and the shape of the polygon.

It doesn't need to be 3d. As described in my post last page, you just need to
get the projection "right". And for the trivial alignments of the (perhaps 2d)
polygons you can at least compute a proper scale factor to mimic some
perspective despite everything being 2d.

I thought the level went just up and down, in that case is possible to make it with just 2d imo, but the level rotates so i guess texturing was used.

 

[lmimmfn]

It does, because unlike Layer Section (gunlock/rayforce/galactic attack) Mr Nutz rotates. Sure, it only does so around the X axis, but it's not line scrolling; you could turn that level sideways and you could get a proper Wolfenstein, for example.

What happens in the (awesome) Taito shooter is closer to this

(in regards to the ground - sorry for the crappy framerate of the gif)

btw Unreal 3d levels were quite impressive for the time.

By unreal, I presume the Amiga unreal game? I was stunned by those screenshots back in the day, it was blocky but looked amazing even in motion when I finally played it

 

[forknknife]

Best thread in ages. Hope Kreijlooc is not perma-banned!

Anyway, it's funny how i was all my life a Sega fanboy that at the same time thought super Nintendo was much better than the mega drive in the graphics department but this thread I'd say has much more impressive stuff on the mega drive front, some truly insane graphical feats here.

This thread slap reminded me once again of how amazing thunder force iv was. I believe it was what got me into metal music too. I remember i would plug my headphones on the audio jack and play the music test screen over and over while studying.

Also insane was virtua racing, although i feel sad that i was forced to play the slow PAL version instead, those gifs are definitely faster than i remember the game to be

 

[lazygecko]

Anyway, it's funny how i was all my life a Sega fanboy that at the same time thought super Nintendo was much better than the mega drive in the graphics department but this thread I'd say has much more impressive stuff on the mega drive front, some truly insane graphical feats here.

It's a weird type of reductive narrative that has stubbornly established itself by vastly overemphasizing the importance of the Super Nintendo's higher color output and mode7 effects, while marginalizing or outright ignoring everything the Genesis could handle.

 

[forknknife]

It's a weird type of reductive narrative that has stubbornly established itself by vastly overemphasizing the importance of the Super Nintendo's higher color output and mode7 effects, while marginalizing or outright ignoring everything the Genesis could handle.

I remember not even paying attention to vectorman because i thought it was just segas answer to donkey kong country in terms of making a game with cg pre-rendered sprites but always thought it looked dull and lifeless compared to it. Why was i comparing the two when they are completely different games i have no fucking idea...

 

[Peltz]

It's a weird type of reductive narrative that has stubbornly established itself by vastly overemphasizing the importance of the Super Nintendo's higher color output and mode7 effects, while marginalizing or outright ignoring everything the Genesis could handle.

I never understood it either. Color palette and Mode 7 effects aren't everything.

 

[nkarafo]

Best thread in ages. Hope Kreijlooc is not perma-banned!

Anyway, it's funny how i was all my life a Sega fanboy that at the same time thought super Nintendo was much better than the mega drive in the graphics department but this thread I'd say has much more impressive stuff on the mega drive front, some truly insane graphical feats here.

I have to agree here. If i exclude Yoshi's Island, i think the late Mega Drive years were a bit more impressive.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

hidden caravan style game in pc engine version of Tokimeki Memorial dating sim game

Force Gear

This may be peak otaku.

 

[vetrox]

This might have been posted already, but the Yu Yu Hakushu title for Sega Mega Drive had some cool scaling and scrolling going on.

https://youtu.be/kpP0VJubuPs?t=689

https://youtu.be/kpP0VJubuPs?t=750