Incline Gaming on the Amiga article series

[Rincewind]

The question of how to play Amiga games, how to configure Amiga emulators, etc. seems to come up regularly, and while it's not super complex to answer, it's better to do it once and do it thoroughly, then just point people to it.

Also, it has come to my attention that there's an alarming trend of recommending to "just use WHDLoad" while that's clearly a suboptimal and quite flawed option for a large number of games.

I've also realised that us Amiga fans who grew up in the 80s won't live forever either, so it's best to get this information out there in the hope that it will survive. Not that I'm the only one who can do this, but now at least I'm doing my part.

In any case, the first instalment of the series is up; it gives you a brief history of the rise and fall of this magnificent platform (contrasting it with the then-emerging popularity of IBM PC compatibles and DOS), and sets people right on all matters WHDLoad.

https://blog.johnnovak.net/2023/01/02/gaming-on-the-amiga-part-1-amiga-500-is-all-you-need/

 

[Jasede]

You do God's work my friend. Your posts on period accurate aspect ratios are, hopefully, eye-opening to many.

Have you done an article on sound yet? It might be good to document how to approach Roland MT-32 emulation or a guide on which sound card to pick as this is something that was pretty confusing in DOS days.

 

[Rincewind]

Have you done an article on sound yet? It might be good to document how to approach Roland MT-32 emulation or a guide on which sound card to pick as this is something that was pretty confusing in DOS days.

Nope, but we started working on a proper user manual for DOSBox Staging which will have a very thorough sound section authored by me. I'll keep you posted.

Until then, you can look up the ideal MIDI device for many popular DOS games in this handy table:

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games

You might also find the MIDI and Sound Cards pages of the DOSBox Staging wiki useful:

https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki/MIDI
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki/Sound-Cards

 

[Jasede]

Excellent, thank you. Maybe 2023 will be the year of DOS for me!

 

[Ladonna]

Nice. Looking forward to the next write up.

Just a question; from one of your last write ups https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/...personal-computer-emulators-part-1-the-amiga/

You state some games that were slower on PAL due to being American made. You list Pool of Radiance there. I thought the Amiga POR port was made by a French company? All the assets for the game are not reused from any other GB game either, as all of them are particular to the Amiga version of POR.

 

[Gerrard]

It’s inauthentic
As I get older, I find myself caring more about the preservation of the original Amiga experience for the future. Even perfect WHDLoad conversions (and many are far from it) take away from that authentic experience. It would be a sad thing indeed if these imperfect WHDLoad conversions were the only surviving artifacts 50 or 100 years from now!

Autism.
If you were to play Gothic would you want the "authentic" 5 minute load times every time you load a game save too?

 

[Jasede]

It's strange but I'll tell you that when I turned on "floppy drive sound simulation" it made me feel very very happy. It was just such a good time back then.

I get the same feeling when I'm watching a 486 boot up. Slowly. Beeping and whirring.

 

[Gerrard]

Yep. Turbo autism.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

 

[Rincewind]

An Amiga Christmas is the best Christmas!

And here's something for those summer months!

 

[Rincewind]

Just a question; from one of your last write ups https://blog.johnnovak.net/2022/04/...personal-computer-emulators-part-1-the-amiga/

You state some games that were slower on PAL due to being American made. You list Pool of Radiance there. I thought the Amiga POR port was made by a French company? All the assets for the game are not reused from any other GB game either, as all of them are particular to the Amiga version of POR.

Indeed, the Amiga port was skilfully done by Ubisoft France (yes, that Ubisoft!) I also mentioned that while games made by European studios are usually intended to be played on PAL machines, that's not always the case. There are special situation like this one: an American game ported to the Amiga by a European studio, but intended for the NTSC market primarily.

The art was redrawn, or to be more accurate, they drew over the original 320x200 EGA graphics for the most part, which means they kept the same image proportions and aspect ratio.

But even when you look at new art not present in the PC version (e.g. the title screen), it's obvious the game was drawn for NTSC as in PAL everything looks squashed. Same for the music; in PAL the notes are drawn out, the tempo just doesn't feel right. In NTSC, it sounds like it should: an upbeat, energetic intro tune for a grand adventure.

I made a few comparison screenshots so you can see for yourself (the AD&D logo in the intro also looks squashed in PAL, but I didn't bother taking screenshots of that too):

PAL vs NTSC comparison screenshots

NTSC

PAL

NTSC

PAL

There's more NTSC screenshots on the AmigaLove site. Note how the character portraits all look correct in NTSC (and human faces would look like gnomes in PAL):
https://www.amigalove.com/games.php?game_id=46


Video review; this is where the guy starts talking about the differences between the DOS and Amiga versions:



Accompanying article for the above video
https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=255


Finally, a lovely photo of a hard drive equipped Amiga 500 running the game on a C= 1084 monitor in NTSC. Even the original floppies are there! That's as period-accurate as it gets, max bonus points achieved!

 

[dbx]

These days I just download and keep an up to date WinUAE from DamienD gigantic pre-installed collection from the amiga FTP server and mostly change stuff about aspect correction and shaders in the configs.

 

[Rincewind]

It's strange but I'll tell you that when I turned on "floppy drive sound simulation" it made me feel very very happy. It was just such a good time back then.

I get the same feeling when I'm watching a 486 boot up. Slowly. Beeping and whirring.

Same for me. First I thought it was silly, but when I started playing around with it I realised listening to those floppy sounds just gets me in a good mood. Now I'm always using them when emulating a C64 or an Amiga.

Apart from the nostalgia factor, those sounds give you important feedback as well, e.g. in an RPG if suddenly there's floppy activity, you know something is going to happen, such as an encounter. That builds anticipation, and I'd argue the experience is diminished without those sounds and the slight waiting time. Also, staring at the black screen for 10 seconds or listening to floppy sounds while staring at the same black screen is different — with the sound of the drive ticking away, time goes subjectively faster. UX people realised that a long time ago, and that's the reason we have progress bars and similar indicators everywhere.

Better versions of the hardware Gotek floppy emulators also have a little speaker to emulate these sounds, and so does the 1541 Ultimate floppy emulator cartridge for the C64 because of the above reasons.

In my retro PCs I use CompactFlash cards and SSDs for storage because of practical reasons, except in a nice HP Vectra which still has a mechanical drive, and I must tell, the sound of the drive does add to the experience! Same thing with the floppy check at boot-up. If I could still get my hands on reliable old IDE hard drives for cheap, I'd use them in a heartbeat.

 

[Ladonna]

Apart from the nostalgia factor, those sounds give you important feedback as well, e.g. in an RPG if suddenly there's floppy activity, you know something is going to happen, such as an encounter. That builds anticipation, and I'd argue the experience is diminished without those sounds and the slight waiting time. Also, staring at the black screen for 10 seconds or listening to floppy sounds while staring at the same black screen is different — with the sound of the drive ticking away, time goes subjectively faster. UX people realised that a long time ago, and that's the reason we have progress bars and similar indicators everywhere.

I haven't been impressed with the emulator sounds of the drives tbh. They don't sound like my floppy drives on the Amiga or C64.

As for speed, the Amiga is fast enough with games that don't come on more than, say, 5 floppies (and you have an extra floppy drive), but with the C64, I admit I cheat these days and have Jiffydos in the computer and drive. This shaves off a huge amount of load time, and has been compatible with every game or program I have tried.

I also have a spare 1541 hooked up to my XP machine so I can write (or rewrite if a program dies) onto floppy disks, as I bought a stack of new/old boxes of them about 20 years ago, and have kept them tucked away for just this purpose. Tragic lol.

Speaking of Amiga floppies though, damn those things die off fast (well, it's been a lot of years, but you know...). In contrast, my dos floppies are mostly fine, as are the C64 floppies. Hardly any corruption or dead disks. Lost a lot of Amiga stuff though.

As for POR, I should have remembered the black space on the bottom. This is the only thing that pisses me off about using a real Amiga.

 

[Daemongar]

I have used Amiga Forever for the last five years or so - which uses WinUAE and WinFellow for emulation.

Part of the fun of getting a game to run is tweaking the settings just so to get it working. For some reason I get more entertainment out of tweaking games and getting them running then just booting them up and playing them. I also do run it with drive sounds, and with Original Speed set. That's part of the charm. I can't go through the holidays without playing Xmas Lemmings - damn that game is perfect!

 

[Rincewind]

As for speed, the Amiga is fast enough with games that don't come on more than, say, 5 floppies (and you have an extra floppy drive), but with the C64, I admit I cheat these days and have Jiffydos in the computer and drive. This shaves off a huge amount of load time, and has been compatible with every game or program I have tried.

Yeah, and those multi-disk games usually have official HD installers. Most games that come on 1 or 2 floppies are completely fine though, just like you're saying.

On the C64 I cheat a bit too sometimes... I have JiffyDOS set up in VICE too, and sometimes I enable warp mode as well to speed up loading. E.g. I'm playing Wizardry I now, and I only turn off warp mode once the game has been loaded into memory (C128 with 512 KB RAM expansion; only emulated, unfortunately).

As for POR, I should have remembered the black space on the bottom. This is the only thing that pisses me off about using a real Amiga.

Unless you have a really old Amiga 500, there's good chance it's soft-switchable between PAL and NTSC. So if your monitor can handle it, you can use something like Degrader to switch between PAL and NTSC (it will survive a reboot). It's on Aminet.

 

[Rincewind]

Part of the fun of getting a game to run is tweaking the settings just so to get it working. For some reason I get more entertainment out of tweaking games and getting them running then just booting them up and playing them.

Welcome to the club mate

 

[Rincewind]

Ladonna Just updated the article with a footnote about Pool of Radiance. Thanks for flagging it, it's an interesting special case.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I'm trying to get into Amiga 500 games. Unfortunately the article ends on a cliffhanger ("there are a few tricks to speed up loading times, too, as we’ll see").

Also, got a question about the first article. The shaders were made for a 1080p panel. The scanlines are extremely thick when I try to use the CRT-A2080-NTSC-4.0x shader at x9 scale. What would I have to adjust for a x9 scale?

Also, is there any way to leave black space around the edges and do a lower integer scale instead? I tried x8, i.e. I lowered the values from 7000*8800 (which represent 2880*2160 ntsc) to 6000*7600 (2560 * 1920 ntsc) and it still went full screen, leaving only black side bars. I can do Windowed of course, but... it's not the same.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Any autists want to comment on Amiga Live? It just works as far as I can tell. Has twitch and discord attached to it with a tranny constantly streaming but the emulator front end is different from that.

 

[Rincewind]

I'm trying to get into Amiga 500 games. Unfortunately the article ends on a cliffhanger ("there are a few tricks to speed up loading times, too, as we’ll see").

If you're using ADF games, e.g. from Gamebase Amiga, just use the Turbo floppy speed. That will work for basically all cracked games.

I will write part two sometime, but I'm busy with many things.

Also, got a question about the first article. The shaders were made for a 1080p panel. The scanlines are extremely thick when I try to use the CRT-A2080-NTSC-4.0x shader at x9 scale. What would I have to adjust for a x9 scale?

Also, is there any way to leave black space around the edges and do a lower integer scale instead? I tried x8, i.e. I lowered the values from 7000*8800 (which represent 2880*2160 ntsc) to 6000*7600 (2560 * 1920 ntsc) and it still went full screen, leaving only black side bars. I can do Windowed of course, but... it's not the same.

Screenshots with my original settings and your adjusted settings please.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

A minor note is that you have a typo in this table on the first row, 920 should be 960.

I figured out most of the questions I had so far. I have to say, this software is difficult to understand. The overscan made me chase my tail for hours as I tried to understand why I was getting "incorrect resolution", while getting a correct one all along.

If you're using ADF games, e.g. from Gamebase Amiga, just use the Turbo floppy speed. That will work for basically all cracked games.

After reading about the dangers of a bad crack, reading between the lines it basically told me to use IPF, as I assumed WinUAE can read it without problems. But turbo only works with ADF?
Any other benefits to using cracked games?

Edit: ah, trainers.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Any autists want to comment on Amiga Live? It just works as far as I can tell. Has twitch and discord attached to it with a tranny constantly streaming but the emulator front end is different from that.

It's basically just there if you can't figure out how to set up WinUAE on your own.

After reading about the dangers of a bad crack, reading between the lines it basically told me to use IPF, as I assumed WinUAE can read it without problems. But turbo only works with ADF?
Any other benefits to using cracked games?

Edit: ah, trainers.

TBH, the kind of Amiga games you need trainers for are usually not good games.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

It's basically just there if you can't figure out how to set up WinUAE on your own.

I figured that. But it's nice for an emulator to 'just work'. Microcomputer emulation often wants to do the full OS and have realistic loading times. While we a player I just want to run the games I want and be done with it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

amiga base philosophy has always been "stuff a floppy in there, it works without any other intervention". having to waste hours on tweaking settings is contrary to everything amiga meant.