Modern Vintage Gamer who was behind the recent Amiga port of Zippy Race—a project that quickly became a fan favourite among our IndieRetroNews readers—has now released Capcom’s legendary 1985 Wild West arcade classic, Gun.Smoke for the Commodore Amiga AGA. Originally designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, the iconic vertical scroller put players in the boots of bounty hunter Billy Bob as he hunted down dangerous outlaws using a distinct three-button directional shooting mechanic. The original coin-op was a commercial hit, ranking as Japan's sixth highest-grossing table arcade game by the first half of 1986, and this new Amiga version aims to capture that exact high-stakes energy.
To pull this off efficiently, the developer has reverse-engineered the original arcade ROM directly into C source code, utilising a transcode method reminiscent of developer JOTD’s highly regarded work. Gun.Smoke AGA also uses the Amiga dual playfield mode (16 + 16 color backgrounds) and use of hardware sprites (16 colors) for the game, with each layer using its own palette. In fact, Modern Vintage Gamer even noted that building a port of this scale from scratch—complete with its ten distinct levels, weapon pickups, and boss fights was certainly a challenge! So what does this latest Arcade game feature? Well, it's an accurate near 1-1 version from the arcade, has full Speed 50/60fps gameplay even on a stock A1200, includes a dedicated CD32 iso image, fast RAM detection and utilization, NTSC version auto detection, High Score Saving for both the A1200 and CD32 versions, SFX from the Arcade game, 3 channel tracker music converted from the arcade, and so much more!
[UPDATE] 1.1 Has been released!
Bug Fixes:
- Slight diagonal shots are implemented (Left+Middle and Right+Middle)
- After player dies all enemies in that checkpoint will spawn in-order rather than all at once.
- In boss stages, grey enemies appear higher on screen. In sync with the arcade version.
- Stage 10 right side Winchester boss now appears.
- Added triple buffering to smooth out some stuttering
New Stuff:
- Options are now saved and persist each time you run the game
- Added an even faster 'Turbo' autofire option.
- CD32 version now has CDDA audio from the arcade game which freed up Chip Ram for more SFX. In my opinion CD32 is the best way to enjoy the game :)
Links :1) Source
Looks great! Really nailed the colours and feel of this game - I fondly remember this one from airport arcades on family holidays as a kid, waiting for flights playing this and Jail break. I like the oldies!
ReplyDeleteAnother great effort from MVG. Note that similar game Commando runs on unexpanded A1200 but it struggles with 25 fps, so maybe requiring a bit of fastmem won't hurt.
ReplyDeleteYou need to get your Commando running at 50 FPS on A1200+fastmem, whatever it takes.
Deletelooking forward to it
ReplyDeleteReleased! :)
DeleteThat man never, ever goes wrong! <3 Big love!
ReplyDeletelooks good ;)
ReplyDeleteOi! Cheeky!
DeleteLooks great, im considering 16 +16 dual play field for stage 4 of my POW aga port. Nice to see another completed Amiga port.
ReplyDeleteyou'll definetly lose some fidelity but with well optimized palettes it might be possible to keep things faithful. good luck with your port!
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ReplyDeleteVisually, they’ve done a great job; it’s very similar to the arcade version. However, the music doesn't seem up to par at all—I find it really shrill and off-key—so I think that aspect needs improvement.
ReplyDeletemusic is mostly a place holder for now. it will get updated later
DeleteSo, it used dual playfield, how exactly? and for what reason, DP is normally used for parallax but it´s not the case here...
ReplyDeleteDP can also be used to speed up blitting of objects, as they are now in a separate layer that wont interact with background, so no need to restore background graphics. If there are no nearby objects, an object can be blitted with a straight memory copy, which is a lot faster than a cookie cut with blitter.
DeleteNice, thanks for the reply.
DeleteAGA? Really? It's perfectly nice, but I would have pegged it as a decent, early OCS game.
ReplyDeleteIt gets super intense at times, almost bullet-hell levels so I found it very impressive that it stays pretty consistently at 50 fps with all that action.
DeleteJust played it on the CD32, either I'm getting too old or this is rather hard?! Needs stage save checkpoints starting over at the beginning sucks.
ReplyDeletePlayed it on my CD32 today, it needs save/ check points otherwise too hard and won't play again.
ReplyDelete