Hi all,
Back in the day when I was a kid and had my original Amiga 500, I never understood why so many arcade conversions were horrible on the Amiga. There were so many arcade games I wanted to play so badly and what a disappointment that was when the game started.
I've read somewhere a while back an interview with the programmers behind the double dragon for the Amiga (another shi*** port btw). Basically they were two guys that had a couple of weeks to come up with a home version of the arcade game. So quality wasn't a priority at all, all they had to do was something that resembled Double Dragon. So they sort of copied and pasted the backgrounds and redrawn the sprites (but why gave Billy and Jimmy a nasty blond black power hair style?). They said they had to make things really simple to make it fit in one disk and there was no music within the game because most basic Amigas had only 512kb, so it was either music or sound fx.
Wow, that explained so much. I assume most of the arcade conversions were done the same way, what a waste of hardware. I knew Amiga could do so much better in terms of graphics and sound (ie shadow of the beast, multiple parallax scrolling, huge sprites, awesome music). So why in hell they did so many bad ports? Was the Amiga that difficult to work with from the programming point of view? And why so many Atari ST conversions that ran so slow and jerky when ported to the Amiga. I remember Out Run being a HUGE disappointment, even the master system had a much more playable port .
At the same there was the x68000 in japan, with the same core processor but with a more powerful hardware overall and many arcade perfect conversions. So why the Amiga could not be more like the x68000 and less like the Atari ST and worse?
Back in the day when I was a kid and had my original Amiga 500, I never understood why so many arcade conversions were horrible on the Amiga. There were so many arcade games I wanted to play so badly and what a disappointment that was when the game started.
I've read somewhere a while back an interview with the programmers behind the double dragon for the Amiga (another shi*** port btw). Basically they were two guys that had a couple of weeks to come up with a home version of the arcade game. So quality wasn't a priority at all, all they had to do was something that resembled Double Dragon. So they sort of copied and pasted the backgrounds and redrawn the sprites (but why gave Billy and Jimmy a nasty blond black power hair style?). They said they had to make things really simple to make it fit in one disk and there was no music within the game because most basic Amigas had only 512kb, so it was either music or sound fx.
Wow, that explained so much. I assume most of the arcade conversions were done the same way, what a waste of hardware. I knew Amiga could do so much better in terms of graphics and sound (ie shadow of the beast, multiple parallax scrolling, huge sprites, awesome music). So why in hell they did so many bad ports? Was the Amiga that difficult to work with from the programming point of view? And why so many Atari ST conversions that ran so slow and jerky when ported to the Amiga. I remember Out Run being a HUGE disappointment, even the master system had a much more playable port .
At the same there was the x68000 in japan, with the same core processor but with a more powerful hardware overall and many arcade perfect conversions. So why the Amiga could not be more like the x68000 and less like the Atari ST and worse?
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