In 1986 Sega released one of the greatest arcade racers of our time called Out Run. A game designed by Yu Suzuki, that was not only a commercial success, but became one of the best selling games of its time. A game that featured incredible racing graphics and fantastic music. Sadly the Amiga version wasn't all that great, and even though we had the incredible release of OutRun Amiga Edition which still needed the original roms and a pretty powerful Amiga. It wasn't until now however, that a demo has been made available for 'Outrun AGA' by retrodnagames (Agermose on EAB). A new version that requires no accelerators, no extra roms and requires just an Amiga 1200 and above.
Here's what Agermose had to say about the game when the first announcement was made in 2021 and the more recent post in 2024. "Back in January of 2021, DJ Metune shared a picture of an icy road, which sparked off a conversation in the 1942 dev team about driving games on the Amiga, and how bad the Amiga Outrun conversion was. Since then we have been looking into converting Outrun, and the announcement of the project. The conversion will be for AGA machines only. An OCS version may happen later if the AGA versions is successful, and we believe in delivering something playable on OCS. The team is the same as 1942, myself coding, Nightshft on assets/misc, and DJ METUNE on music".
Links :1) Source
No complaints now, you don't need a pistorm! ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks for showing our Outrun port
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, it's a banger!
DeleteJust put it side by side with Reassembler's and, wow, impressive work, ok, there are a lot of missing details, like the oceans, the shadows under the trees, probably a lot less colors but, wow, great job...
ReplyDeleteI really would like to know what sould be possible pushing the requirements a bit (030+fast RAM) for this port.
Wow ! As an OutRun fan, how great it is to be on Amiga these days ! Congratulations for all those Outrun conversions both to Reassembler and to Agermose and their teams ! This is awesome !
ReplyDeleteThis is massive! Looing forward to try on my A4000/030@25 Thanks :D
ReplyDeleteIs it asking too much for an .hdf file? I tried running it on Pimiga, but the graphics are all wrong...
ReplyDeleteWe are getting there! Looking forward to OCS version to run my A600...
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on that! It seems obvious that using the superb game engine for Lotus 2, changing the colours and accepting less roadside objects, that you could have a brilliant Outrun conversion on an OCS Amiga with 512K fast ram & 512K chip ram.
DeleteChoking on my cornflakes after I bought an 060 to play the other Outrun port!
ReplyDeleteDon't do that, this version of Outrun doesn't have everything that Reassembler version has, first, the zooming effect is not as good, as scaled objects are precomputed, and there are not as many transitions as in arcade or Reassembler version. Second, this Outrun version has only 32 colors + sprite colors of road + copper colors, while reassembler version has 256 colors. This one has music + sfx simultaneously, but music is thin compared to Reassembler version.
DeleteAsk more if you want to, I'm an Amiga expert, also have ideas how both Outrun versions could be further improved. The 68030 CPU + AGA is the sweet spot, but both of these Outrun versions fall short of exploiting the Amiga hardware to the full.
This version is not falling short in exploiting the Amiga hardware. Not claming it couldnt be done in a better way, but lets see the final version before judging too much. With some polishing in the graphics and in general, this will easily stand out as one of the most impressive racers ever to run on a stock Amiga. I love the fact that they prioritized music and SFX simultanously, which the reassembler version doesnt do. IMO the overall gameplay feeling is pretty close to reassembler version. Big respect to anyone involved in this project.
ReplyDeleteYes, this Outrun version is well optimized, but not fully so. I would have liked to see at least 64 colors in objects. When you have a 68020 CPU and blitter, I would look into getting the 68020 CPU into doing some of the work of putting out the objects, usually blitter is only used in low-end Amigas. But the blitter and 68020 CPU can be combined for doing cookie cut and putting out objects a little faster than with blitter alone. Or then it's also quite fast to put out objects from fast ram with 68020 CPU, and then you can use also 4 MB fast ram for objects. Naturally, this requires skills at manipulating pixels in bitmap format with CPU, which is uncommon with Amiga, as blitter is normally used. But faster CPUs start to be faster than blitter with fast ram. It was necessary to use the blitter, because of the very slow 68000 CPU in A500.
Deleteplööh, what youre saying makes sense, though I'm no expert :) But comparing with other Amiga racers, even on AGA, this one clearly stands out. And remember, the intended target was a vanilla A1200, only with a bit of fast RAM. 4MB fast is because of WHDload.
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