The Commodore Amiga community has just been treated to a bit of a tease, with the reveal of RoboCop Arcade, a brand-new conversion of Data East’s legendary 1988 coin-op developed by Ranx with the help of AI. While the original Amiga port of the era often left fans wanting more, this project aims to recreate the arcade game's authentic 1:1 visuals and raw gameplay feel on the humble, unexpanded Amiga 500 OCS. Built strictly around the machine's base hardware—including a stock Motorola 68000 processor and a tight 512 KB of RAM—the game aims to have hardware scrolling, Blitter-driven sprites, and all nine action-packed stages, including the iconic target-shooting bonus ranges.
Fitting an arcade-accurate experience onto a standard setup does require a lot of optimization, culminating in the entire game being packed onto a single 880 KB floppy disk. Ranx managed this through aggressive resource compression, sophisticated multi-stage loading systems, and meticulous memory management, leaving a mere 1,536 bytes of free space remaining on the disk. Amiga owners can even look forward to a classic "cracktro" sequence upon booting, alongside digitized speech and sound effects that make full use of the Amiga’s four-channel Paula audio chip. As this impressive passion project continues to evolve, the developer is actively seeking community feedback to fine-tune what is shaping up to be the definitive retro tribute to an arcade classic.
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Well, I'm about as hardcore an OCS purist as you can get - but even I find that targeting just 512K chip RAM - and NO fast RAM - is cutting it way too tight!
ReplyDeleteOn the bright side, nice graphics - WAY better than the original port - and I'm impressed that a parallax layer has been attempted.
But, I'm sorry - for me, performance is KING, and the frame rate is just too low in this demo. Looks to fluctuate between 12fps and 16fps, and I'm sorry, that just doesn't cut it for me. Needs to be 25fps, in my view - like the Amiga version of Robocop 2, which may not be as pretty, but by God, it's super-smooth with tons of action going on at once.
I suspect that moving the game code to fast RAM would really help with the frame rate. And is the parallax really necessary? If it's slowing the game down, I'd remove it - or replace it with a repeating sprite pattern, or a 1-colour silhouette. Many Amiga side-scrollers use those solutions, and they're very effective for maintaining a fast frame rate.
But still, this is a a valiant effort on the 512K (!) Amiga and is a lot more ambitious than the original port.
OMG! That's incredible for an unexpanded Amiga 500! Personally, though, I'd much rather sacrifice the parallax effect for a smoother overall experience. Perhaps it could be made optional, allowing users to toggle the parallax on or off. That way, Amiga 1200 owners could still enjoy the parallax effect without any performance hit!
ReplyDeleteAnother possibility for the Amiga 500 might be to experiment with using repeated hardware sprites to simulate the parallax effect without introducing too much slowdown. It could be an interesting way to achieve a similar visual result while keeping things running smoothly!
It would have to be analyzed but the parallax is probably already repeated hardware sprites. Else you'd have to draw all the screen everytime. This is really an impressive job. There was a A1200 project (no A.I.) that took years and was never completed, and the colors were similar. Congrats.
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ReplyDeleteI really have got no idea why some people are complaining. Were they not privy to some of the dire ports on the A500? This has got music and FX, parallax, and a boss with more than 2 frames of animation, it colourful. and all on A500 specs!. i think it's incredible, and I would have loved to have seen this on the amiga back in the day.
ReplyDeleteLooks fantastic! Meanwhile I find it absolutely incredible that this runs only with 512kb chip ram, which alone is absolutely fantastic achievement already, if the game would benefit from 512kb expansion, go ahead support it because everybody has at least that one. 🙂
ReplyDeleteWow, this looks stunning for an OCS Amiga! Sure, it could run a bit faster, but I'm sure there will be further optimizations down the line.
ReplyDeleteVery good work so far, but the framerate is sometimes too poor. You can't dodge shots while sitting down.
ReplyDeleteI'm a simple man. When I see an Arcade game faithfully remade on OCS, I upvote (if an upvote button exist)
ReplyDeleteIt's also amazing that this runs on 512K ram. There aren't many good arcade conversions that does this - I think Silkworm was really the only title that closely matched the arcade - and the coding team behind it was legendary.
Still, it would be interesting to see if running on 1MB ram would improve performance.
Incredible! This IMO is what all modern Amiga ports should be striving for - ability to run on base hardware! When I see another "Forget that crappy botched port of _____ for the base Amiga 500! I ported it the way it SHOULD have always been! BTW: It now requires a 68060 with 32mb fastram and a Picasso card"
ReplyDeleteI have looked at some recent conversions done with AI for A500. While they seem generally good, they are also slow, often below 25 FPS. This is because the AI is not able to use hardware sprites and or dual playfield properly, and also making a fast scroller in every direction is not so easy on Amiga. And the blit and restore graphics may be done more slowly than needed. Classics, like Turrican relied on hand optimized stuff, like having a black background for end of levels bosses, so that gfx need not be restored, and some games like Silk Worm used sprite multiplexing to get more sprites on screen, though there were sometime flickering when the routine ran out of sprites.
DeleteI couldn't agree with you more! Even worse is when they port an arcade game from the early 1980s that has primitive 8-bit graphics - and the Amiga port requires eight 68060 processors & 12GB of fast RAM & accelerator card in order to run at 4 frames per second.
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