Amiga, Commodore and creativity

[Luzur]

Just released port of Wolfenstein 3D for Commodore 64! This is running on an NTSC Rev B "Breadboard" motherboard inside a 64C case.

Using two cartridges: A CMD SuperCPU 64 V2 w/16MB "Super RAM" and an IDE64 3.4 running v0.897 firmware. Installed using d2m plugin, a CMD FD-2000, and a uIEC (CF version). Wolfenstein 3D for C64 available on CSDB. Mad props to the people who ported this!!! Frame rate in game here about 6 FPS, which is better than I expected. It varies wildly depending on mode and selected view window size.

Anywhere from 4-5 FPS in 16 color, max size, w/sampled sound to 22 FPS in 4 color, min size, "PC Speaker" sound effects. Technical observations: As far as I can tell, the sampled sounds and FLI graphics mode are, surprisingly, over half of the CPU load. Logically this would be due to the SuperCPU having to update the C64 much more often at the C64's native 1MHz bus speed.

Even the menu drops speed significantly in this mode. The game itself in the basic 4 color, "PC speaker" sound, runs at a very playable frame rate. That is insane considering the original game was optimized for 32-bit Intel at a time when most people were in the 33MHz or higher clock speed (40-66MHz common), and when PCs generally ran an 8MHz bus. The CMD SuperCPU is a 20MHz 16-bit speed-up cartridge for the stock C64 (and its 1MHz bus). This is having to do all the same scene rendering in 3D space, and also target the C64's odd graphics memory layout and color restrictions.

 

[Luzur]

Also Icon64 (small team making brand new c64 games, Trevor (Smila) Storey - Georg Rottensteiner - Achim Volkers - Stuart Collier) are making some nice looking C64 games

"Shadow over Hawksmill"

"Lord of Dragonspire"

“Isle of the cursed prophet”

Sequal to "Barnsley badger"

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

terminator 2 too, the last special effects revolution before matrix.

 

[Luzur]

Swedish news today

 

[Luzur]

 

[Makabb]

 

[Luzur]

 

[Makabb]

 

[Makabb]

Re-installed winuae and playing amiga games again after not touching them for like 8 years...... quality game and music making like this just does not exist anymore today.

Most of these games were created by 1-2 people or team of 5-10 max and not hundreds of people, seems the bigger team the quality goes down.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Re-installed winuae and playing amiga games again after not touching them for like 8 years...... quality game and music making like this just does not exist anymore today.

Most of these games were created by 1-2 people or team of 5-10 max and not hundreds of people, seems the bigger team the quality goes down.

You deserve to have your shitposter tag removed for this post.

 

[Silentstorm]

Honestly, from what i remember, a lot of the exclusives weren't that great and it was mostly the fact that some games were just better on the Amiga that saved it.

Platformers were an example of that aside from Turrican didn't tend to be great, particularly when they would go to consoles where almost no one wanted to actually play Amiga style platformers because japanese developers did it so much better...aside from Turrican which did go to SNES and Mega Drive for a reason.

But you still got games like The Chaos Engine, and Speedball 2, which was good enough to make many non-sports fans love that game, or the Lotus racing games, or Alien Breed, or the DICE Pinball games(remember when they weren't doing DLC and lootbox filled Battlefront games?), or Cannon Fodder, or Sensible Soccer...okay, so the Amiga had many great games or awesome versions to it.

Wouldn't say all the games either aged well or haven't been surpassed, or that i actually like all the Amiga classics, was never a fan of Cinemaware games for some reason, though i like King Of Chicago.

Still, it's quite weird that for all the love that the Commodore Amiga games get, a lot of them are only really remembered by it's fans or attempts at moving on from the Amiga mostly failed aside from Worms(and i am one of those that think Worms Armageddon is the best in the series) for some reason.

 

[Makabb]

There's plenty of amazing games on Amiga, go to lemonamiga.com and advanced search, filter the games list by minimum 5 votes and rating of 5....... there's like 80 pages of good games, and amiga has games which are rpg/adventure/open world hybrid which does not exist today like for example adventures of robin the hood, where you have an open world and have to free your castle and you can try to do it at level 1 skipping all the other quests.

 

[Makabb]

btw every amiga rom in existence is here

https://www.planetemu.net


so search for games on lemonamiga.com (they have reviews and screens for every game) and then dl them on planetemu

 

[Makabb]

btw winuae emulation is perfect now, running all games no problem, floppies set to 'turbo', all games load pretty much instantly, it's great to play amiga games now.

 

[taxalot]

When I was 10 or so, I really wanted my parents to buy me an Amiga 1200 and tried hard to convince my father to.

Instead, I got a 486 SX 33.

That's what you get when you have responsible parents.

 

[Makabb]

Amiga 1200 did not have a lot of games to begin with, it was kind of a failure because it did not had revolutionary hardware like amiga 500 and commodore 64 had, so your parents knew what they were doing.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Since the Kickstarter sticky thread seems to have vanished, I might as well post this here:

Upcoming Kickstarter project: SiD goes Prague.

So what's this one about then? The 8-bit Symphony concert that's mentioned in one of my posts further up this page, is looking to get into a recording studio with a full and live symphony orchestra!

To quote:

Recording with the professional musicians of the Czech Studio Orchestra will be another special event for everyone who loved the originals. The high quality recordings will open up broadcasting, TV, Radio, more arrangements and further live orchestral performances. I'm very excited about the possibilities!

The Kickstarter goes live on Friday August 9th (roughly a week as of this post) so keep that date behind your ear if you're interested... because I am, for once.

Update: The Kickstarter is now LIVE and off to a decent start, with 20% of the goal reached in less than 12 hours.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Resources for the History of the Amiga and Commodore

Jeffrey Reimer wrote a series of articles for Ars Technica, from 2007 to 2018, on the history of the Amiga. Although the individual articles are fairly short and contain a number of errors, they do serve as a good introduction.

Spoiler

• Part 1: Genesis
• Part 2: The Birth of the Amiga
• Part 3: The First Prototype
• Part 4: Enter Commodore
• Part 5: Post-Launch Blues
• Part 6: Stopping the Bleeding
• Part 7: Game On!
• Part 8: The Demo Scene
• Part 9: The Video Toaster
• Part 10: The Downfall of Commodore
• Part 11: Between an Escom and a Gateway
• Part 12: Red vs. Blue

Jimmy Maher, the Digital Antiquarian, wrote a book on the technology of the Amiga called The Future Was Here, published in 2012 by the MIT Press. It focuses on the hardware and principal 'professional' software applications of the Amiga, but also contains a look at the demo scene and games. He has also written several articles on the history of the Amiga for his website, as well as a number of articles on games developed for the Amiga.

Spoiler

• The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine
• The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back!
• The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up
• The 68000 Wars, Part 4: Rock Lobster
• The 68000 Wars, Part 5: The Age of Multimedia

Brian Bagnall has written two books covering the early development of the Amiga and Commodore in general from its acquisition of the Amiga in 1984 to its demise in 1994, Commodore: The Amiga Years and Commodore: The Final Years. These are the lengthiest accounts of the matter, though they do suffer from a reliance on oral history and an impressionistic writing style.

 

[FeelTheRads]

The Future Was Here is a good book, even for someone like me who never owned an Amiga, but is just interested in computers in general.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Since the Kickstarter sticky thread seems to have vanished, I might as well post this here:

Upcoming Kickstarter project: SiD goes Prague.

So what's this one about then? The 8-bit Symphony concert that's mentioned in one of my posts further up this page, is looking to get into a recording studio with a full and live symphony orchestra!

To quote:

Recording with the professional musicians of the Czech Studio Orchestra will be another special event for everyone who loved the originals. The high quality recordings will open up broadcasting, TV, Radio, more arrangements and further live orchestral performances. I'm very excited about the possibilities!

The Kickstarter goes live on Friday August 9th (roughly a week as of this post) so keep that date behind your ear if you're interested... because I am, for once.

Update: The Kickstarter is now LIVE and off to a decent start, with 20% of the goal reached in less than 12 hours.

And the Kickstarter ended... fully funded, thanks to "a lot of very motivated people and one amazing philantropist."

This means that a double CD of 8-bit classics, performed by a symphonic orchestra, will be released next year.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

 

[Luzur]

Fairlight's newest demo bois: Fairlight - The Last Truckstop 3 C64 Demo (Live Datastorm 2019)

 

[Luzur]

FairLight C64 We Are Mature Demo 2011 (on a real C64)

 

[Haba]

OMG, such disgusting sexism.

Clearly the demo scene is in dire need of diversity and social justice.

 

[Luzur]

CODEX C64 GOTY