(Figured that would get some Commodore-loving attention

So tell me, the eternal Atari ST whore that I am, what are good games to check out in the gp2x Amiga emu.. that run well and are fun on the 2x (ie: control by joystick for instance, sound good, decent fps..)

jeff

You deffinately got my attention. I wanted to beat you with a digital stick just for writting "Suxorz!!!!"... hahahahhahaha

I've only tried a few random games so far, but nearly all of them worked great at 250mhz. I especially liked:

Datastorm
Head Over Heels
F1 (formerly Vroom)
Hunter (some mouse control, but works well)
IK+
Exile
Spindizzy Worlds (slight GFX glitches)
Deflektor (brilliant music)

Fiddle with the CPU throttle settings (from full CPU for compatability, to full chip for speed), etc for best results.

btw, I just fired up OutcaST last night -- bloody brilliant work!!!

You lamers, Amiga is way superioir with its custom chipsets and can display up to 4096 colors (with OCS/ECS) and havew BOBS, SPRITES, true stereo sound 4 channels, blah blah! Atari ST suxxxxxx ;-).

Aahahahahah nahhh I am not that bad even if I own several amigas (2 A500, 1 CD32, 1 A4000).

For good games, it depends in what style of game your looking and also not sure how well they work in the emu (still dont have a GP2X yet). But I can take a look at the list on the wiki to see. Is there a kind of games you prefer?

I am also curious to see if demo can be played on that thing.

Some games you could take a look would be :

- Battle Squadron (shooters)
- The chaos engine (shooters)
- Crazy cars (racing)
- Defender of the crown (adventure)
- Great giana sisters (platform)
- The killing game show (shooters)
- Lemmings (fun)
- Pinball Dreams (well can you guess?, they also had Pinbal Fantasies)

No idea if you can find it out there, I haven't so far, but some of the games I used to love on the A500 that have a great chance to work on the 2X would be...

Firepower (Tank-battle game with excellent graphics and sound)
Tech (Lightcycles clone with great graphics)
Insectoids (Galaxian type)

And one of the best versions of Syndicate I've ever played.

Just a couple worth trying all over 250mHz.

Wings of Fury
Super Cars I and II (another example of how lame the ST was in comparison)
Deluxe Galaga
Street Rod I and II

You aren't serious, are you?

Basically Amiga allowed to have mod music in game and not only
in games' menus like in ST.
It could have more colors at once and better scrolling.
(it will depends on a title to what degree)

Many games are very close on both machines. There are
some others what were superior on the Amiga.
(or only on Amiga - it died later)

For historic standpoint I had been playing only of 1/2 of the really
best titles on the ST. For an example I didn't have chance to play
Awesome in old days. What a loss...



When in "the stereo" there are only TWO channels in Amiga.

For video DAC resolution it wasn't Amiga' advantage. The advantage was in 32 positional CLUT and some other tricks.
(some of them available on the ST after some arcane coding anyway)

The custom chipset of Amiga was in the works for much longer then ST's one. And given that VGA was at around it was unimpressive. The X68000 and FMTowns were superior to the Amiga in not funny ways too.

ST was a quick to develop and cheap to produce computer. It was on sale sooner than A500 and its time it was really great "bang for the bucks".

And ST has faster CPU too - not by much but it has.

Its mono 640x400 70Hz noninterlaced mode was a display luxury for eyes.

And don't forget why Amiga ended as a home computer - because it was a failed console chipset - the same way as the C64 or Atari800. No wonder why when comparing it to the SNES.

So not make a mistake - Amiga was overall superior to the ST. So ST was to the Apple and IBM PC offerings then. Where is now Amiga or ST for that matter?

So far for lamers what we were...

On my desk and under my TV.

A lot of the Team 17 games seem to run pretty well on it, i.e. Assassin, Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog etc.

theres a couple of games I remember playing when I was kid that I would love to play on the gp2x, anyone tell me if they run?

Miami Chase
Venus the Fly Trap (came runner up in the first coding competition i entered with a remake of this )

im sure those two should run well, pretty simple games iirc, however.. there was this one game which I cant remember the name of - I think it was castle of something? it was one of those really early 3d games. It was an adventure game and I remember the more you walked the more tired you would get and you would start crawling on your knees and then your stomach as you got more tired and needed food - I remember always getting stuck at this bit on the catacombes where by the time I got there I would be totally on my stomach and I would get to this table with cheese on top but i couldnt get to the cheese because i was on the floor --; anyway would LOVE to play that if anyone knows what it was called and if it runs?

the other game I know was on the ST and it -might- of been on the amiga, it was a 3d adventure like the previous one but this time about stopping a meteor or somat hitting the earth i think? or mars? some planet anyway, I think it was called damoclese or something.

those 2 3d ones might have problems being emulated, but no idea.

Sephnroth, is the first game this:

http://hol.abime.net/2945

and the second one:

http://hol.abime.net/2450

?

You should check the wiki as it has a big list if what games run.....

I'm trying to find Wings of Fury for the Amiga so that I can run on the GP2x ... no luck so far

I'd like to try the Amiga emulator as well some time - what are the _graphically_ best games? (So I can persuade my son that he really didn't want a PSP).

Atari... Hey, what about a midi output on the GP2x?

Outcast is great, anyone know if it supports STe bits though like Steem?
Obsession pinball & Stardust, were probably the most impressive graphically of the STe games.

I'm still hopefully the PS1 emulator will be up to the job of running his cupboard full of 3d games..

Kev

Mine on a table just near me as I sit.



Agony and Lionheart.

For ST Lethal Excess and Enchanted Land. Both technically crazy as hell
(extended resolutions, digital effects in a game using that pesky Yamaha chip, sync-scrolling, tons of sprites on blitter less machine...)



It's very good idea because STe should be still much quicker to emulate than Amiga. However there are some very nasty coding tricks
used to overcome ST hardware limits. The sync-scrolling is prime example of that. It's going to be much harder to emulate and Outcast don't have luxury of running on much faster CPU what the Steem has.

I never did much understand the sync scroll hardware details; tracing through the ASM in Enchanted Lands is a bit nasty, so thats on my shelf for 'when I've got a week off' to sort out I'd like to get hard drive support finished first.. thats half done already, I've just been beaten up too much the last few months to wrap it up One of these days... hmm.. see, the trick is with Real Life keeping me buy I don't think about it. If I sit and think about it for the 30s needed to type this post up, it makes me start thinking about ignoring Real Life... hmm

So much to do..

I also need to get more work into my Time Bandits remake; I've got the level parser working, the sprites all ripped.. just need to rip out the audio and start packaging it up nicely..

But as to Amiga (I've got a stack of STs around -- STacy, TT030, ST's modified) it shared many titles with the ST (for the first years both existed, the ST was often more popular as a game platform due to its great pricing, so games wqere first ST then ported to Amiga. As the Amiga outlasted the St, it took over naturally. It also grew as a platform, so games got fancier.) I'm looking for playable games on the 2x (trying a flight sim on a handheld is novel, but not really 'fun' I'd say so I can get a smile out of the ol' amiga..

(It does bring up the topic.. I have been debating how to make a good control scheme for playing _Falcon_ in OutcaST. To this day there arenm't many games as good as Falcon 1 with the dive through the open door on the train. Falcon 4 for PC is crazy cool, but been more or less dead for like 6 years off the top of my head )

jeff

As to STE extensions .. I'd have to look into that; I never had an STE (back in the day there wasn't a lot of software for it, so I never bothered to upgrade to it. Money was tighter then than now so I don't kjow much about the differences.

ie: Many of the extensions in the STE could be ignored likely to get something going..

But which game software used STE goods, that would need to be emulated?

(ie: Since so few STE's sold, very few companies made games for the STE extended options. They just focused on the ST proper to maximize audience.)

It's involving fooling the memory controller by quick 50/60Hz display changes as I remember. Will be quite hard to implement probably. And some things like the LethalXcess will be even harder to make run:
http://www.edv-rudolf.de/lethal-xcess/tech.htm
It was so awesome in its times even on the plain ST (not e).

I had been seeing once a demo (forgotten the name ) what has a smooth dualplayfields with horizontal scrolling...

Yeah and there was also 320x400 multicolor mode to achieve on a ST too:
http://alexh.umcus.org/games/leavin'_t...is/teramis.html

Or even better hi-res Spectrum like mode:
http://files.dhs.nu/party/outline2004/highres.png

Let me quote from this demo's readme:

"We found the cheat to switch the STE to god mode ... ;-)




We are proud to present you our little contribution for the wild competition of

outLine 2004 called the PARADOX - HighResMode - .



Each picture has a resolution of 640x400 and can contain up to 14.000 colors

out of a palette from 29.791 colors. It is very hard to convert 24Bit pictures

to this mode so you will still see some small color bugs in the pictures."

Atari should only be putting faster CPU in newer models. The rest could be done just by coding.

This is why by some ST is more regarded than the Amiga.

And for fun I have a link to remake of LehtalXcess music themes:
http://home.wtal.de/gmb/Hippel/Xcessaudio.htm

Enjoy!



Atari make an mistake putting the 68000 chip into ST. At the same time there was available Arm2 what could slay poor 68K easily. Then even custom Amiga's chipset could not be able to help much.



I don't know myself as I had only STFM.

It did :-)

The title got me, reminded me of an old FidoMail reply to the "no carrier" thing:

"No, Fido, don't chew that cable"
bzzzzttt
No Terrier

(and the wife still married me with this humor )

Have to say, Pinball Dream, or Pinball Fantasies for the Amiga. The former runs well enough to have entertained my brother for a couple of hours when I showed him!

Some of the other games mentioned have brought back LOTS of memories, thanks people

You could try Bombaman (oh look a game I wrote) that uses (as far as I remember) all the STe extra bits
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kevcallahan/b...AMAN_%201_0.htm

@Radek
Will have to look at Agony & Lionheat then
EDIT: Oh and the Pinball ones...
Mmmm.. anyone porting Visual Pinball / Pinmame ?? That would be a great GP2x special methinks!

Kev

It would be great, but only half of the program is open source. PinMAME (the emulator) is open source, but Visual Pinball (the simulator) isn't.

The only way it would be possible is for someone to make a similar pinball construction kit made specifically for GP2x and make it interface nicely with PinMAME. I just don't think it'd be a powerful enough system to do it nicely.

As it would be evident, I'll refrain mentioning why you used the Amiga in this topic in the first place lol...

I used and in fact still use an Amiga , my first real comp was ... leaving aside a half-dead ZX-Spectrum ( first the ZX81, after a ZX16 with 32 K Mem Upgrade lol ) ... An A500, from that I moved on to a nice totally basic A2000B, and from that... Ok, maybe with that, I made a monster .. My A2000B has more extras than a Korean car with a bad attitude !...

Atari... It was a nice comp, it was quite good in fact, most Amiga games had their Atari versions... But... The Atari was ever-so-slightly more doomed than the Amiga... The Atari Falcon and Tha Amiga 1200 appeared practically at the same time, both to fight a battle that they couldn't win... It was a sad situation... Very sad... Amiga and Atari are both part of my life, I wouldn't swap either of them, but I loved the way that the Amiga OS worked ... That is probably my fault, I loved coding on it lol...

And now, back to real life... I've tried emulation on the GP2X ( UAE4ALL ) emu , and I'm quite impressed , throw anything at it , it'll probably work lol... D*mn, even Benefactor lol...

Benefactor...now that's a great little game. Pity the characters are so damn small...not really ideal for portable gaming

True, the sprites may be a little small in Benefactor ( and quite a few games ), it takes a little time to get accustomed to that, but wow, I've even been playing Flashback lol, and even if I couldn't finish it via emulation, I would still be happy to be able to play it .

This little GP2X is the best portable, nothing is perfect ... YET !.

Don't bother with Flashback in an emulator, there's a native port using REminiscence and it works pretty much perfectly.

Falcon was too ambitious machine. The A1200 was much better product wise thought Falcon was overall technically superior.

At those times the PC was starting to dominate because of VGA and hardrives what were common on PC.

VGA like capability should be in STE! And STE should have faster CPU, linear like graphics mode as in 13H VGA mode so converting software for it wouldn't be hard from PC. The same goes for the Amiga.

Then we have more adventure games from Sierra and others like Master Of Orion, Civilization (vastly superior on PC) or even the Wing Commander.

Wolf3D and Doom were a final nail to Amiga's coffin (Atari was dead earilier) and why it was so? Because no one at Atari/Commodere couldn't implement linear graphics modes and put faster CPU into theirs computers!!

Even in Falcon 8bpp mode is that old interlaced bitplanes crap as 4bpp in original ST.

Then PC got Gravis so Amiga supposedly superior sonic capabilities were obliterated. Even Creative realized that and bought EMU and made AWE series based on EMU8K chip. The 486 were starting to be common plus Vesa Local Bus... it was the end for Amiga (or even more for Atari). Wintel won and rightfully then.

Thanks Ravnos

Radek... That is not entirely correct, graphic capabilities of the Amiga were far superior to any PC of it's time, including video or 3D work... As for conversion... I don't see why a simple refresh rate or resolution can't be converted, it's all simple code ?.

No, I don't talk about games, back then I worked in a professional environment, all video work ( hence the Opalvision card and modules ).

I do agree about the home-line, gaming on the Amiga seemed to reach it's apex and simply die, it was sad, it was, and still is a great computer ... The Atari, ( well, and the Amiga ), suffered from stupid marketing plots... ( a bit like having to pay for the RKM [ ROM Kernel Manuals ] for the Amiga DOS or having to pay a load of cash for a game - at least in Europe.)...

GP2X seems to have a nice clean open future so far ... And yes,sadly,it seems that Amiga was abandoned to it's luck... Even so, I'll keep my one alive lol .

Let me say you are right and wrong at the same time.
(the VGA showed first in 1987, the first Amiga was in 1985 (A1000))
However VGA got much better popularity as better graphics standard and it wasn't so featureless (it has hardware scrolling capability, split screen mode, x-modes, latch registers to boost fill/copy type operations).

And it has 70Hz noninterlaced modes as standard,

Not bad, eh?



You mean emulators? The interlacing tricks (more common on the Amige than on the ST) will need temporal supersampling to display them well. The Amiga's horizontal fine scrolling will need spatial supersampling in horizontal resolution (4x) to do in a correct way.

No... they aren't simple if they have to be done efficiently.



Imho the worst problem what Amiga had was it its custom chipset. Most software were too depending on talking directly to "the metal" hence a problem with making a compatible newer models. A1200 wasn't so and all that was because the Amiga was really a console chipset at its core:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Can you deny this, can you? Anyway C64 and Atari800 (an Amiga predecessor) were all failed consoles what were redirected to be home computers.

Atari ST was a different kind of machine. It was a desperate attempt of Atari to has somehting on the market after losing the Amiga licence to the Commodore. Isn't that funny? We should have the Atari Amiga not Atari ST...

Looking at all this I think ST was really good design in sense of a personal computer. But Atari wasted it in very worst way. It needed only faster CPU and 256 color (like in a VGA) mode and it'd prosper. Nothing special really but Atari instead prefered to go into an ambitious Falcon project what was a basically a waste. Who would like to have its audio capabilities and built in DSP to play some VGA quality games anyway?

So it failed.

A1200 was much better market wise thought it was a dead end also.

Some are saying that Commodore screwed a big time. They are wrong - Atari made it at much higher scale:
- succesful ST line what wasn't improved properly
- TT line as same as in previous point
- DTP market and laser printers where Atari was the lider at the time - Calamus, vector fonts - they crapped it as they could!
- multiple console attempts - except 2600 all were ill fated
(even superior Lynx and better that Nintendo at the same time 7800)
- the Jaguar - nuff said
- audio/midi market - ST was at the time a lider - again Atari shitted it badly
- a failed transputer attempts

So Commodore's sins were bad. But Atari's... heh - there is still an Atari brand anyway to make thing funnier.

Funny, at one point I had an Atarti LYNX, it was great ( exclluding the ridiculously priced games that is, on the other hand, most games for any platform cost much more now lol )... It was great to have a handheld brick ( it was heavy and batteries lasted at least 20 minutes when lucky lol )... Having a handheld that needs to remain plugged into a power supply at all times seemed quite pointless, but I was an addict to Gates of Zendocon and California Games... If I remember well, if you kept the forcefield active ( in Gates of Zendocon ) even when it looked like it wasn't there anymore ... it was !!!

As for all the tech stuff regarding conversion, I think that it is easy, just, not quite so easy if you want it done well, so I'll grant you that lol.

Better graphic standard ?, nah lol, mnore extended in any case, but yes, Amiga GFX modes were mostly hacks and clever solutions, the chipset was brilliant, too good for it's time, and too expensive to upgrade.

The Atari was also a great computer, I nearly bought one back then, ( when I had money and all that lol ), it was a computer that was very similar concept-wise to the Amiga, a nice piece of engineering indeed... I may actually buy an old Atari now, I like to keep classics up and running... My Amiga has done about half a trillion miles by now, it is solid as a rock, only major problem I ever had with it was caused by a severe power surge that fried it's somewhat complex power supply and the M68000 , now, that made things quite complicated being so near the wrong side of the world for those components lol...

I miss the old days coding on my Amiga, maybe I'll one day finish a small RPG that I was coding lol... Oh well, enough rambling for now...It's time for a cold beer, it's hot here

Man... Radek sure know a lot about all this stuff.

Very interesting... even if I only understand half of it...

MIAMI frickin' CHASE....!!!!

I LOVED that game. It's not very well known though - it was a budget release that punched way above it's weight. Damned if I can find the .adf ROM of it anywhere though...! (Sadly my Amiga got given away by my parents after i'd been away at uni for a few years!)

I briefly played Venus on OutcaST for GP2X, so it's available and runs. Didn't give it much time though, so can't say much more than that...

As much as i love all the other emus, i'm still holding out for the Amiga emulator being compatible & fast... Yep, i'll be patient...!