shadow of the beast ST (Mark mc cubbin here)

[Dbug]

Not bad

Which reminded me that I forgot to post my blog post about the whole thing: http://blog.defence-force.org/index.php ... &ref=ART62 (not that this adds anything to the current thread, it's just a summary)

[Cyprian]

nice article Dbug

[wietze]

I just looked into the disassembled code, and I must say that my eyes are almost bleeding from the abhorring code I saw. I always considered (from talk mainly) that the shadow of the beast game was the pinnacle of ST gaming. But I have to conclude that when looking under the hood, this turns out to be a hoax. Perhaps the ST coder was under tremendous time pressure to get this thing released; but the code clearly indicates that the majority part of it was never seen a second time.

The disassembled source can be very used as a fun test when learning to optimize 68k assembly code

[Hazzardus]

Not bad

Which reminded me that I forgot to post my blog post about the whole thing: http://blog.defence-force.org/index.php ... &ref=ART62 (not that this adds anything to the current thread, it's just a summary)

This was a really interesting read.

I always considered (from talk mainly) that the shadow of the beast game was the pinnacle of ST gaming.

What? The game was garbage when it was first released on the Amiga, although it did look fantastic. It was and always has been a terrible "game". Who were you talking to? Joking aside, it was terrible. I owned the big box version on the Amiga (the one with the T-Shirt), and even knowing the game was pants, I bought the big box ST version too. The only half decent version in my opinion was the LYNX version (3rd time lucky for me, because yeah, I bought that one too).

[joefish]

just impressive
how many memory is needed? 512kB will be ok?
and how %CPU is free?

It runs on a 520. Though you might have to Auto-Run into it.
It takes just over 1 frame to redraw all the scrolling. And it's the full 320 pixels wide. Even the Amiga one is clipped to 288 pixels. That leaves loads of time in the second frame to draw sprites, of which the Amiga only has two on-screen anyway. And the main character actually has twice as many animation frames as the Amiga! In total what you see is taking about 1.5 frames to render.
You could maybe do it one frame by shrinking the view, but then you'd need twice as much pre-shifted scrolling!
I did have some ideas on reducing the memory usage, such as narrowing the background mountain graphic to 256 pixels, and adding a few extra scenic chunks that can be pre-shifted dynamically into one more slot. So as long as they're kept far enough apart so the routine has time to swap them over, you could add one-off features like the well, the Home tree, statues, etc.

[joefish]

One thing I notice in that Facebook thread is that someone said the SotB programmer used playfields, but it can't be. The background is in reduced colours, but the trees are still the 7-colour ones from the Amiga. The sprites seem to be drawn in a limited subset of the trees' palette, but that might just be down to programmer's choice since green and the light brown of the background wouldn't be much use.

Re-reading the first post in this thread, the programmer 'confesses' that the trees were done as software sprites, which is why that section is so slow!

[MegaSTEarian]

Amazing that I found this interesting thread in an Amiga forum: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=106757

And amazing that the ST and STE were never actually pushed to their limits until Thalion came into play.

[calimero]

Amazing that I found this interesting thread in an Amiga forum: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=106757

And amazing that the ST and STE were never actually pushed to their limits until Thalion came into play.

Sidenote regarding Thalion and EAB thread: Keops mention Gods of war as example game that utility PS3 hardware at full extend - Manakin aka Tim Moss of TLB (The Lost Boys), and later member of Thalion is lead programer of Gods of war.

I also encounter on many occasions that Atari programers was responsible for optimisation on many games, on modern hardware (I can not recolect from my memory right now, but it would be nice to have a such list).


Next from EAB thread: there are some really sick people that really hate Atari ST! Like Galahad/Fairlight or Foebane.

Jizmo nicely noted (post #12) that there are (example) many Atari related threads lately on EAB that getting heated replays from Amiga users...

[MegaSTEarian]

Nice info there, calimero.

About Threads with, errr let’s call them biased, opinions from Galahad and Foebane: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=6201

[Dbug]

I also encounter on many occasions that Atari programers was responsible for optimisation on many games, on modern hardware (I can not recolect from my memory right now, but it would be nice to have a such list).

Mit and myself worked on the PlayStation version of Time Commando, and our "demo maker" choices were things like having some (ugly) pseudo plasma effect in the main menu, using medium resolution in game (most games are in 320), the Adeline Intro logo appears with pixels flying around (a bit like the Phaleon Reset screen) and morphs into a 3D logo that rotates (the PC game just shows the picture with a fade), and there was some fancy image processing (grayscale conversion) when accessing the pause menu, getting the game run at 50fps was a challenge because of the real time depacking of the FMV in the background

[MegaSTEarian]

Wow!

Wish there was an SOTB version taking advantage of the full potential of ST/STE/MegaSTE or even TT and better yet Falcon.

[Dbug]

The TT and Falcon both have a 256 color mode, with 8 bit-planes, so technically it's probably possible to redo the entire display without any color loss, with all the levels of parallax.

On STe and MegaSTe, you have hardware scrolling, but not like on the Amiga where you have separate start addresses and pixel position for each bitplane, and there are only 4 bitplanes so you can't really have the trees, sprites and mountains with all the colors without doing (costly) masking instead of having that on separate bitplanes.

My take on that, is that it would be possible to add most of what is missing (music, better gradients and more palette changes, parallax level at the bottom) without impacting the framerate on normal ST/STe/MegaSTe.

It's probably possible to have the full A500 SOTB experience on Falcon and TT, but the full experience at 50fps on normal ST/STe/MegaSTe is not possible.

[DarkLord]

Even with Dougs amazing ST(e) game tools?

[Dbug]

Even with Dougs amazing ST(e) game tools?

Big tanks are mostly non transparent thing, you can generate optimized code to basically only update the outlines, Shadow of the beast is mostly made of things with a lot of holes, like the trees.

I'm not rulling out that on a megabyte + machine you could generate optimal code, but then we are not talking "stock 520" machine anymore, that becomes a totally different condition

[MegaSTEarian]

Even with Dougs amazing ST(e) game tools?

Big tanks are mostly non transparent thing, you can generate optimized code to basically only update the outlines, Shadow of the beast is mostly made of things with a lot of holes, like the trees.

I'm not rulling out that on a megabyte + machine you could generate optimal code, but then we are not talking "stock 520" machine anymore, that becomes a totally different condition

4MB STEs and MegaSTEs are quite common, even 14MB are somewhat common nowadays (same applies for Amiga of course, no one active in the scene has the plain stock 0,5MB or 1MB machinery).
I was thinking that STE hardware additions and DMA HD music and MegaSTE's 16MHz would provide for a version at least equal to the Amiga. With 4MB and a hard disk, even. I mean having more means to achieve is not a bad thing. See the PCs. On the other hand, I think on the Amiga, this is as far as it can go. The chipset will be a limiting factor, the 0,5, 1 or 2MB limit will make miracles in graphics and sound but IMHO the full capacity is somewhat known (maybe not on the AGA) whereas I am thinking that STEs/MegaSTEs/TTs and surely the Falcon have not been exploited to their full potential.

[Frank B]

Well you could always pre mask everything and draw pure rectangular regions with the blitter. Would cost memory but would look quite good and should be doable at 50 hz.

[DarkLord]

I'm okay with people "upping the ante" for software requirements.

I agree with MegaSTEarian - how many people are really (still) running
on 512k machines and floppy drives?

I say 1 meg, hard drive installable, STe and up if at all possible and
for Gawd's sake, take advantage of accelerators (and don't penalize
someone if they are running TOS 2.06/3.06 and up).

I think we should always be coding up, and not down to the lowest
common denominator...

Just "IMHO"...

[EvilFranky]

In the ST world, the vast majority of people run their machines in standard config, maybe with maximum RAM as it's so cheap compared to 30 years ago.

Acceleration is more common on the Amiga due to easier expandability.

Beast was a load of crap as a game, looked pretty and sounded good, that's it. Anyone with half a brain cell, who understands a little about the ST, knows a better version could have been created...even with 512k of RAM. Joefish has proven this already. His tech demo blows the official game out of the water and has plenty of CPU time left to implement the miniscule amount of game logic and still run at 25fps...I'm kinda hoping he revisits this to make a playable demo just so this whole Beast thing can be put to bed. Absolute waste of time updating the whole game, much better games to enhance than Beast.

I'm not sure what the STE could bring to the performance side, maybe we could get the same demo to 50fps with the use of the Blitter and HW scroll and the obvious experience improvement through the use of DMA for sound effects and extended pallette for the raster background.

Meh, the whole thing needs put to bed. I don't care that the ST wasn't as technically good as the Amiga. I like both systems, played both plenty as a kid, both capable of good games.

EAB isn't much different to other boards, but there are some absolute toss pots in the Amiga 'scene'. I like to see the projects on there, been some really good games released recently, interesting to watch the development.

But the anti ST rhetoric is actually very funny. These are blokes in their 40's and 50's that actually HATE a competing computer that they had no say, control or involvement over the creation of. They've tied their personal self worth to a product, a manufactured obsolete computer, that the vast majority of people haven't cared about for about 25 years.

These people need to grow up and move on.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen Atari people post stuff that makes me cringe. But it all seems so much more prevalent in the Amiga scene, like they have an Atari scab they can't help but pick at. Anything positive Atari wise gets jumped on.

[CiH]

Everything that Evil Franky just said above.

It's going to be so funny when someone tells them that they aren't going to get the life back that they wasted in hating. Good humoured banter back in the day is one thing, but these people simply can't let go.

Still, if hypothetical 32 and not 16 colour hastily produced shovelware games made in 1987 makes them happy, who am I to disagree..

[MegaSTEarian]

In the ST world, the vast majority of people run their machines in standard config, maybe with maximum RAM as it's so cheap compared to 30 years ago.

Acceleration is more common on the Amiga due to easier expandability.

Agreed. Scoping to 4MB and HD is possible as it is quite common. And of course the scope is determined by the objective. If one is targeting to selling to game then scoping for the most common config is the obvious way. Still, I doubt that this is the 520ST, nowadays. I'd say it is the 4MB ST, TOS 1.04 or higher. And of course the better TOS the higher config specs.

Beast was a load of crap as a game, looked pretty and sounded good, that's it. Anyone with half a brain cell, who understands a little about the ST, knows a better version could have been created...even with 512k of RAM. Junosix has proven this already. His tech demo blows the official game out of the water and has plenty of CPU time left to implement the miniscule amount of game logic and still run at 25fps...I'm kinda hoping he revisits this to make a playable demo just so this whole Beast thing can be put to bed. Absolute waste of time updating the whole game, much better games to enhance than Beast.

Never played it on either platform to be honest. Seen Amiga and ST videos, was never impressed by the gameplay as such.

I'm not sure what the STE could bring to the performance side, maybe we could get the same demo to 50fps with the use of the Blitter and HW scroll and the obvious experience improvement through the use of DMA for sound effects and extended pallette for the raster background.

Meh, the whole thing needs put to bed. I don't care that the ST wasn't as technically good as the Amiga. I like both systems, played both plenty as a kid, both capable of good games.

Would a nice demo. Especially for STE and even more for MegaSTE it would be something like "Look at me. This is what I can do, graphics and sound wise."

EAB isn't much different to other boards, but there are some absolute toss pots in the Amiga 'scene'. I like to see the projects on there, been some really good games released recently, interesting to watch the development.

But the anti ST rhetoric is actually very funny. These are blokes in their 40's and 50's that actually HATE a competing computer that they had no say, control or involvement over the creation of. They've tied their personal self worth to a product, a manufactured obsolete computer, that the vast majority of people haven't cared about for about 25 years.

These people need to grow up and move on.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen Atari people post stuff that makes me cringe. But it all seems so much more prevalent in the Amiga scene, like they have an Atari scab they can't help but pick at. Anything positive Atari wise gets jumped on.

As people used to say back then, ditto.

[Dbug]

Junosix has proven this already. His tech demo blows the official game out of the water and has plenty of CPU time left to implement the miniscule amount of game logic and still run at 25fps...I'm kinda hoping he revisits this to make a playable demo just so this whole Beast thing can be put to bed.

Do you have a link? I don't think I've seen this tech demo.

[EvilFranky]

Apologies it was Joefish who did the demo! Will amend my post...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRMOan38qRU

[Dbug]

Ok, thanks
Yeah, I had not actually seen it, managed to miss it, I guess I should update my blog post with a link to that one, but basically that confirms my guesses: On the same base machine (520 ST) it was possible to have pretty much very close visuals, just not at 50fps, and that it would have been possible to have a 50fps game by changing it significantly, but the game we were given is neither close visually or fast

[Cyprian]

Apologies it was Joefish who did the demo! Will amend my post...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRMOan38qRU

the impossible becomes possible. It runs at 50fps on a stock 520ST with 512kB ram.

well done @joefish


I've just submitted it to the Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=88890

[EvilFranky]

Apologies it was Joefish who did the demo! Will amend my post...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRMOan38qRU

the impossible becomes possible. It runs at 50fps on a stock 520ST with 512kB ram.

well done @joefish


I've just submitted it to the Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=88890

It's 25fps mate