In the 1980s Ocean Software ( Imagine Label) released a fine beat 'em up for many different 8bit systems. It was a game that involved you as a street fighter, fighting gangs, in order to rescue his girlfriend, who is being held captive by a mafia boss. Sadly, however, when it comes to the Amiga version, it was pretty terrible! With one person on the Lemon Amiga site saying it's "pure crap." Well, fast forward to today, and thanks to Douglas letting us know, he has released the Renegade Amiga AGA edition. An overhauled version that should be as faithful as possible to the Arcade.
Here's the full details from Dave Douglas "I disassembled the original code (6502) in Ghidra and rewrote the game logic for 68000, trying to be as faithful as possible. Of course, the graphics routines were completely rewritten. The music and sound effects use Frank Willes' Protracker player routine. Initial release is a single file so needs some fast RAM. I have tested it using 4mb fast on a standard A1200. "
Renegade AGA v1.5 is out now, here's the latest update from the dev
"I thought I was finished with the AGA version but naive of me to think there were no more bugs. Graveybeard noticed an issue with the Big Betha logic. I found a couple of bugs, one was using the wrong register to index a lookup table and I was also missing an alignment between a byte table and a long table. When I was converting the 'sprites' for the ECS version I noticed a few where I had originally missed bits out (the odd foot etc) so I've added these in. As well as the normal executable I've also added an lha download to make it easier for people to emulate in WinUAE"
Nice one.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to try this one...
Once complete, it would be great an Enhanced version with better color palettes and other gfx improvements!
ReplyDeleteWith the Latest MiSTer Minimig core (A1200, 2Mb chip, 8MB fast) I only get ~20 topmost raster lines visible on the screen? Game seems to run as I can hear the sounds and the screen seems to move (as far as I can make out of the visible part) Haven't had this problem with any other game sofar. Any cluesm what to try out?
ReplyDeleteV1 2 is out which fixes the issue
Deleteplayed this, and even if I never played the original, the arcade feel is there. As everyone can see, most coders settle for AGA on games like this that have big sprites & not "all black" backgrounds, because ECS is quite the challenge. A shame we didn't get AGA in 1985, but this is the hardware that enables most games without it taking forever to code/
ReplyDeleteHaving 2mb of chip mem makes life a lot easier too. Once you start coding for the Amiga you realise how impressive some games were to fit within 512kb
DeleteJim Power. I was provided with the source code for the CD32 version and I was impressed! It was very hard to understand, and had a hard limit at 32k of code so 16 bit signed pointers could be used everywhere. Fits in 512k by miracle.
DeleteAGA would not have been possible in 1985, but Commodore should have released it as a major upgrade in 1988, to remain in clear lead. 2 MB chip ram would also have been too expensive in 1985, but possible in 1988-1989. I think the memory map should also have been changed from 8 MB FAST RAM to 8 MB CHIP RAM, so you could have 10 MB chip ram in 32 bit AGA machines.
Deleteay any rate, too bad that AGA didn't sell more, so more people could benefit from AGA-only ports. AGA is really the chipset that makes most arcade games justice. ECS can cope but with some miracles.
DeleteThis is magnifique! I'm puzzled by some of the poor Amiga arcade ports from back in the day, because games like this homebrew and even a small handful of French Ocean titles demonstrate that this machine had more than enough muscle to handle 1980s arcade titles. Amiga users deserved better than what they got, but it's never too late to fix that problem!
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising that we got poor arcade ports for Amiga, it took some time before people learned to program Amiga hardware. Pacmania (1988), Menace (1988), Hybris (1988), and Shadow of the Beast (1989) were the earlier releases that fully used Amiga hardware. Otherwise arcade ports were usually cheap Atari ST ports, which sometimes used even CPU for drawing gfx instead of blitter and sprites. Dual playfield and copper was not used. That means frame rate could decrease from 25-50 FPS to 17 or even 10-12 FPS. And also 32-64 colors were not used, as Atari ST had only 16 colors. Also audio could be badly done, as Atari ST didnt have a good audio chip like Amiga.
DeleteWe need an Amiga version of Target: Renegade
ReplyDeleteDefinitely 😁
DeleteThe original arcade game uses 3 buttons. Not easy to come by for the Amiga.
ReplyDeleteThere is a CD32 pad option which uses the arcade control system, otherwise selecting joystick uses speccy like controls which some people prefer.
DeleteYou have added (6502) to the autor quote, but Renegade use a 6809, that is a Motorola CPU, not MOS.
ReplyDeleteThe 6809 is the sound CPU which is ignored in this port. The main game code runs on a 6502
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