Amiga owners who remember the 1985 off-road arcade racer Buggy Boy are in for a bit of a treat. While the game famously made its way to home computers like the Amstrad and Amiga back in the day, two fans have just worked on this classic that will hopefully give you another reason to fire it up at home on original hardware or via emulation. Whether you want a smoother take on the original Amiga port or a recreation of the Commodore 64 edition, both projects offer a great excuse to dust off your Amiga.
First up is Buggy Boy Amiga Enhanced by Vesuri, which gives the original Amiga release a serious performance boost on faster machines. By enabling the new CUSTOM2=1 option via the supplied icons, owners of 68020 CPUs or higher can unlock the framerate, letting the game draw as many frames as the hardware can handle—reaching a silky-smooth 50 fps on a 68030 setup with Fast RAM. This extra power makes the road, curves, steering, and roadside objects move much more fluidly, as the game now takes advantage of Fast memory and CPU caches. If you are running a standard 68000 or 68010 machine, or leave the option turned off, the game safely defaults back to its classic 12.5 fps speed.
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Alongside Vesuri's upgrade, a fan going by the name MrDig has shared a completely different project in The Zone: a direct port of the Commodore 64 version built for the Amiga 1200. Rather than being a remake or a tweak of Elite's original Amiga release, MrDig used AI assistance to translate the C64's original 6502 machine code straight into 68020 code. The result is the C64 game running frame-by-frame on Amiga hardware, complete with the original loading screen, title music played through the Paula chip, all five courses, and the high-score table. Because MrDig isn't sure about the legalities of hosting it on platforms like itch.io, you will need to grab the ADF file from The Zone and pair it with a bit of Fast RAM for the best experience.
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That "enhanced" version is an absolute mess. It boots to a Workbench screen with three .INFO files on them. If you click on them the whole window goes black for a couple of seconds and then returns to the same folder view. That's it. That's all there is to do.
ReplyDeleteThat's a shame, I don't see anyone else mentioning this! Have you posted on the EAB site under his post, maybe it's a bug he missed? thanks dude :)
DeleteWell, I have been HOPING some one would do an enhanced version of Buggy Boy, as the original Amiga version is an ST port with a low frame rate - but I imagined it would be upgraded for the OCS Amiga with 512K fast RAM. Disappointing that this is AGA. I'd love if some one would tackle an enhanced OCS version - it must surely be possible to raise the frame rate to 16fps at least!
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