The Commodore Amiga scene has received another hot news story with the first beta tease of a high-performance recreation of the arcade classic, Moon Cresta. Developed by Johnny Acevedo under the Amiten Games banner, this "from-scratch" build serves as a free tribute to the 1980s Nichibutsu original and a salute to François Lionet, the creator of AMOS. Furthermore unlike many modern retro efforts, this project is not a code conversion or a simple port. Developer Johnny Acevedo meticulously reconstructed the game piece by piece to mirror the original arcade mechanics.
As Amiten Games has noted "We proudly present a faithful recreation of Moon Cresta for the Commodore Amiga, developed entirely from scratch by Johnny Acevedo. This is not a port: no original source code was converted. Instead, the game was handcrafted, built piece by piece, based on a deep understanding of the original arcade mechanics, with graphics extracted from MAME ROMs (Thanks to 125Scratch) and converted for the Amiga."
What’s included in this new build:
- Ship control via Joystick – smooth and responsive.
- Full ship assembly system – 3 docking parts.
- Shooting mechanics & engine thrust animation.
- 99% Complete recreation of arcade levels and graphics.
- Sound system.
- Vertical scrolling starfield.
- Dual Playfield mode:
- Background: 4 colors (stars)
- Foreground: 8 colors (game action)
⚡ Performance and optimization:
- This is ~99% of game logic powered by AMAL for speed and smoothness ,.
- Main loop kept minimal to maintain fluid gameplay 50 Hz on Stock Amiga 1200.
- Collisions, sound triggers, and scoring handled efficiently in AMOS BASIC
- Micro-lags minimized with optimized score updating
- Continuous testing on real hardware ensures faithful arcade experience
- Running on a vanilla Amiga 1200 ? 50 FPS gameplay, game is already 99% arcade-perfect.
- *Note: At the moment, due to limited time, the game is not yet fully optimized to run at maximum speed on an Amiga 500. We plan to improve its performance over time. This build currently runs at 25 FPS on Amiga 500.
- Amiga OCS 512KB + 512KB users need Kickstart 2.00 or higher to run the game.
What a great Moon Cresta ne Amigo! And thank you for your dedication and your time, but it is a game that is too old and basic for it to only work at 25 fps on Amiga 500 and, an error that cannot work on Kickstart 1.3, we hope for optimization in the future if possible.
ReplyDeleteGreat choice! I found out that star scroller can be pretty cpu consuming if done with sprites or even pixels. If you want 50 fps on A500 you can try to fix the stars see what happens.
ReplyDeleteHello JoTD19,
DeleteThanks for your comment — and also congratulations on your excellent Amiga ports. I’ve tried several of them and they’re really impressive. I’d genuinely love to understand how that kind of transcoding work is done; it’s fascinating. Unfortunately, I don’t have the knowledge to do something like that myself, but I find the whole process very interesting.
Regarding the starfield scroll, yes — you’re absolutely right, it can be quite CPU-intensive depending on how it’s implemented. In this case, I approached it using hardware scrolling with AMAL, which keeps the CPU impact very low in this Amiga Moon Cresta project.
At the moment, I haven’t done any specific optimization targeting the A500. There are a few ideas I’ve been considering, like experimenting with sprites instead of relying so heavily on the blitter, since on an A500 it starts to become a bit too demanding.
As I usually mention in my live dev videos, my main goal was to achieve a solid 50Hz on a stock A1200 — and that’s what I’ve managed so far. With more time, we’ll see how much the A500 version can be improved.
Greetings from the Canary Islands, and keep up the great work!
Hardware sprites could do really well on those old games. Since I count 3 colors on some/all? enemies, you could just use 8 of them, and that's without multiplexing (that is not so easy). 8 sprites makes a big difference in refresh. If you cannot, just use sprites for the ship & shots. But also there are other ways to speed a game up: you can alternate blitter & cpu to erase BOBs. And last you can make it 50 fps but reduce to 25 fps if you have too many BOBs on screen.
DeleteKeep old arcade games alive!
Really good game. I think Phoenix is still my favorite but this game also gave the Galaga series a run for the money
ReplyDeleteGreat another conversion.....!!!! Again first C64 1983.....from 1979 coin-op !
ReplyDeleteC64 version best version !!!!
ReplyDeleteNot a chance. The c64 version is the worst port I have ever seen. This is from an expert at moon cresta and I would say say 1 of the biggest fans of this game anywhere.
DeleteNo way. I love the arcade version and was very disappointed with the C64 port. It should have been a whole lot better, and the one channel tune is atrocious.
DeleteNo way. It should have been a whole lot better on the C64, and the one channel SID tune replication and sound effects is atrocious.
DeleteThis game just gets better and better
ReplyDeleteThank you Indieretronews!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome matey!
DeleteC64 BEST !!!!
ReplyDeleteAaaarrgggh !!! Bleuurgghh....growwgrowww..sput spur !!
ReplyDelete