It looks stunning, Simon looks great. I have a soft spot for amiga, never had one, but had a cousin who had it and i remember very vividly summer nights playing chuck rock on amiga with him. It was a great console.
@Atrahasis7 It's not a console though, well there was the Amiga CD32. But it was a high end workstation range, with the price to match. They weren't cheap machines at all :P. And for good reasons. You could do things on an Amiga that simply were unheard off for that price at the time. Imagine a MultiMedia machine? In 1986 :P. And then you understand why the Amiga series was such a big deal. Sadly the AGA Machines were a bit of a disappointment as Commodore and their owner Escom were not doing that well :( . But a Amiga 4000 was still a high end workstation with a CPU that could beat 486DX machines (680EC30) and even easily significantly outperform them with the 68040 (the higher end specs). Heck there are even 68060s in them in the later models. That one was pretty close to a Pentium :P . These were high end work stations that you'd drool about. Yet sadly before my time. So I only can hear the legends and read up on the specs and architecture.
@@DehnusNorder Commodore for most of its life was a badly run company, they mostly got lucky with the acquistions of MOS Technology and Amiga Corporation.
Best thing about AMIGA ports is the ability to use real-time FM-Synth or MIDI music, same for X68K ports, for which MiSTer has tons of options, one of the best being Pi-MIDI (but a standard MT32-Pi is great too), I'm hoping someone develops the ultimate MiSTer sound board that can be added to a normal MiSTer stack, complete with a Yamaha OPL3, Philips PSG, PLL oscillator, RISC SoC for MIDI emulation, Wolfson DAC, a decent DSP, a pre-amp with changeable OP-AMPS, and RCA stereo output, line-in for mixing, maybe even an FPGA dedicated to audio, freeing up LE from the main FPGA, a VS1053b chipset would be dope too, and could be used for multiple audio related tasks. My fave AMIGA game has to be Roadkill, especially the CD32 version, along with Banshee, Chaos Engine, Speedball 2100 and Alien Breed Tower Assault. If we ever get Pi-Storm working with MiSTer's MiniMig core, just imagine the possibilities that would open up, would be a powerful platform for porting games too.
The Amiga has hardware scrolling, so it can move the playfields in any direction with ease. It does however realistically only have enough hardware sprites for a single character, meaning the rest are drawn in software, which can slow things down. It also has some pretty strict colour limitations. On an AGA Amiga it has two playfields with only 16 colours each, plus 16 colours for the player sprite. It can re-use colours using the copper but that comes with limitations too. The Amiga is a fascinating piece of mid-80s hardware which was well ahead of the competition at the time, but Commodore ultimately failed to build upon it and update it successfully. The AGA Amigas were not what they should have been and ended up being a very minor update. They were too little too late and the Amiga was unable to compete both with PCs of the era and with console hardware (MD and SFC). Even during its heyday the Amiga had one fatal flaw - it shared the same CPU as the much cheaper Atari ST. That means devs would write for the ST (which was an extremely weak piece of hardware) then port to the Amiga, resulting in most Amiga games ignoring its graphics hardware and drawing everything on the CPU, as the ST did. And the results were always awful.
That was lazy devs' fault and not Amiga hardware's flaw really. Shadow of The Beast (Psygnosis 1989) was the first game which really used Amiga's custom chips and compared to Atari ST port there was absolutely no question anyone which one of the computers had far superior hardware.
@@KarpowSCX No, that's ignorant and offensive. Devs then even more than now worked to incredibly tight deadlines and budgets. They would have 6 months, often less to complete a port and were told by the publisher to target the ST. If they had the time and the budget, I'm sure they would have loved to have made an Amiga specific version, but they simply didn't. Frankly, the "lazy devs" thing is absurd. Try working in development yourself and see how "lazy" people are. (they aren't)
@@PhilBaxter Probably greedy publishers then and they told to do a quick cash grab. That was at least the case with Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. They had to do the port in two months if I remember correct.
The Amiga never had any trouble with vertical scrolling (or any other scrolling for that matter) thanks to the Blitter chip. I think it was one of the earliest computers featuring this kind of technology (in facts the Amiga project started as a concept for a 16--bit game console in the early 80s before turning towards personal computing). I bet all the bugs or most of them will be ironed out. It mostly seems like a development tool issue, as I think they are porting the game from an earlier version of the Scorpion engine to the current one.
Very impressive, especially the graphics are top notch for Amiga homebrew! My favourite Amiga game is The Chaos Engine, highly recommended if you’re curious. The SNES port is good too, but Amiga is the Real Deal. Co-op top down run ‘n gun with large exploratory levels. The peak of game design derived from Dandy/ Gauntlet.
Looks like they made the knockback more forgiving too I'll second Lionheart, that's one of the better platformers for Amiga. Globdule is pretty unique. Turrican 2 is pretty similar to JP platformers and shooters of the time. Flink is good too although it's a bit better on MD/MCD. If you like Prince of Persia then Another World and Flashback are must plays but they were on other platforms too. The Settlers, Cannon Fodder, It Came from the Desert and Lemmings are some other classic games that originated there.
My first Castlevania experience was the Amiga version, which definitely left me wondering what the fuss was about. The US and European markets were very different at that time, the NES didn't make much of an impact here and consoles didn't really take off until 16-bit. Super Castlevania IV then blew my mind 😄
I think it's just poorly programmed. Compare it to say the Amiga Turrican games and they look like different generations. Happened a lot on the Amiga unfortunately.
I feel bit spoiled with numbers of new games for Amiga, while there are always some low quality games there are also bangers like this one.@VideoGameEsoterica
Correct. A lot of Amiga fans "cheat" by comparing this to 16bit consoles but this was supposed to be in the same ballpark as the 32X/Atari Jaguar. But it was so bad that it could only compete with the 16bit consoles in the end.
@@Imgema Amiga fans and Megadrive fans don't bite each other anymore. There is quite a bit of homebrew going on in overlap between both machines. The Megadrive kind of proven to Amiga fans that is is a very capable machine.
@@VideoGameEsoterica Oh of course, I mean the architecture. The 1200 basically was a scaled down version of the 4000. With less features in expandability, less capable CPU. So it had a 24 bit addressing rather than 32 bit, meaning it could just address less memory (16MB rather than 4GB). Now the 4000 had a 680EC30 (or even 68040), so basically was a high end work station. The 1200 wasn't a slouch either, it could easily keep up with the 486 systems of the time. So yeah, "bits" in this case do matter :P, it just isn't the whole story. Sadly AGA was a bit of a disappointment (still it should look really good as it could do graphics beyond what most PC's should have been capable off). But there was another chipset planned that was way more advanced, just wasn't ready in time and Commodore was in financial trouble, so they couldn't finish it at all. If the 4000/1200 had contained that one? It would have been able to do 3D textured graphics at reasonable speeds as well :). Sorry Nerding out a bit :).
Nice parrallax, making good use of the hardware in a way many games didn't. Not a huge fan of the music, sounds alright but the 4 channels always hamstrung games on the platform.
The AGA might be the most overrated graphics chip ever made. I remember in magazines at the time how it was hyped as the "next generation" of Amiga graphics and it barely surpasses what the SNES can do.
Considering that the amigo 500 came out in 1985, the genesis came out in 89 and the super Nintendo came out in 91, the Amiga is ridiculously good for its time
Oh yeah, even the sprite pushing that it could do was nothing compared to what a console like the Megadrive could do. That said, it still was a great 2D workstation and if you had the accelerator cards, you could also do very good 3D work on them. The Amiga 4000s still were great machines for graphic designers. Just AGA was a bit of a let down on its own compared to how phenomenal the original capabilities were of the Amiga 1000 and 500.
@@jamescampbell8482 The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, the 500 came out in 1987. This was due to it needing to be a cut down version/lower cost version of the 1000. But it still was an expensive machine. You cannot compare the Amiga 1000 (due to it's price) to a Megadrive before the price would come down. The 500 maybe, the Megadrive was launched in 1988 (not in the USA I know) and the 500 in 1987? But still the price was very different. These were high end work stations, with a price to match! It was a multimedia machine, something that was never seen before then. The Megadrive was a dedicated game console, you cannot use it as a work station. So that is the main difference, very different markets and price ranges. Now the scary part? The Amiga could have beaten the Apple Macintosh, if Jack Tramiel wasn't such an asshole and held up the company with lawsuits and being a dick about loans until he could fumble together the Atari ST :( . Typical Jack Tramiel bullshit. He also ruined Atari after he left Commodore. A person that wanted everything on the cheap and would cancel products needed for the future of companies (like he also delayed the 7800 and it's sound solution was scrapped. the 7800 could have been to market before the NES would have released in the USA. Heck the Atari "8 bit line" of computers were basically proto Amigas once you start to look at how they worked and how they had dedicated chips for every function. AGA However does not come from 1985. That was the OCS and later ECS Chipset, AGA came out way later and was a disappointement as it wasn't the promised AAA chipset. That latter would have been.. stunning in what it promised. But by then Commodore was really scraping the barrel for cash and ESCOM was just releasing AMIGAS as were they consoles rather than the powerful workstations they were. Again.. sorry, I'm nerding out :P .
I had an Amiga growing up. Couple of games come to mind immediately:
SWIV
Ruff n Tumble
Lionheart
Moon Stone
Moonstone was amazing, though I remember it being as buggy as hell! 😆 Another game that I think deserves more attention is X-Out.
I’ll have to check them out
The pixel art is off the charts, so well done! such artistry!
It’s some great art no question
It looks stunning, Simon looks great. I have a soft spot for amiga, never had one, but had a cousin who had it and i remember very vividly summer nights playing chuck rock on amiga with him. It was a great console.
Amiga is a vibe. One I’m learning more about
@Atrahasis7 It's not a console though, well there was the Amiga CD32. But it was a high end workstation range, with the price to match. They weren't cheap machines at all :P. And for good reasons. You could do things on an Amiga that simply were unheard off for that price at the time. Imagine a MultiMedia machine? In 1986 :P. And then you understand why the Amiga series was such a big deal.
Sadly the AGA Machines were a bit of a disappointment as Commodore and their owner Escom were not doing that well :( . But a Amiga 4000 was still a high end workstation with a CPU that could beat 486DX machines (680EC30) and even easily significantly outperform them with the 68040 (the higher end specs). Heck there are even 68060s in them in the later models. That one was pretty close to a Pentium :P .
These were high end work stations that you'd drool about. Yet sadly before my time. So I only can hear the legends and read up on the specs and architecture.
@@DehnusNorder Commodore for most of its life was a badly run company, they mostly got lucky with the acquistions of MOS Technology and Amiga Corporation.
I played through this on my MiSTer a couple months ago! I should try the update.
Best thing about AMIGA ports is the ability to use real-time FM-Synth or MIDI music, same for X68K ports, for which MiSTer has tons of options, one of the best being Pi-MIDI (but a standard MT32-Pi is great too), I'm hoping someone develops the ultimate MiSTer sound board that can be added to a normal MiSTer stack, complete with a Yamaha OPL3, Philips PSG, PLL oscillator, RISC SoC for MIDI emulation, Wolfson DAC, a decent DSP, a pre-amp with changeable OP-AMPS, and RCA stereo output, line-in for mixing, maybe even an FPGA dedicated to audio, freeing up LE from the main FPGA, a VS1053b chipset would be dope too, and could be used for multiple audio related tasks. My fave AMIGA game has to be Roadkill, especially the CD32 version, along with Banshee, Chaos Engine, Speedball 2100 and Alien Breed Tower Assault.
If we ever get Pi-Storm working with MiSTer's MiniMig core, just imagine the possibilities that would open up, would be a powerful platform for porting games too.
Def sounds like a specialized board but I’m sure people would be interested in having one
The Amiga has hardware scrolling, so it can move the playfields in any direction with ease. It does however realistically only have enough hardware sprites for a single character, meaning the rest are drawn in software, which can slow things down.
It also has some pretty strict colour limitations. On an AGA Amiga it has two playfields with only 16 colours each, plus 16 colours for the player sprite. It can re-use colours using the copper but that comes with limitations too.
The Amiga is a fascinating piece of mid-80s hardware which was well ahead of the competition at the time, but Commodore ultimately failed to build upon it and update it successfully. The AGA Amigas were not what they should have been and ended up being a very minor update. They were too little too late and the Amiga was unable to compete both with PCs of the era and with console hardware (MD and SFC).
Even during its heyday the Amiga had one fatal flaw - it shared the same CPU as the much cheaper Atari ST. That means devs would write for the ST (which was an extremely weak piece of hardware) then port to the Amiga, resulting in most Amiga games ignoring its graphics hardware and drawing everything on the CPU, as the ST did. And the results were always awful.
And then the same thing happened with Jaguar and it’s 68000 cpu
I wouldn't call the MC68000 a flaw back in the day when these machines were introduced :P
That was lazy devs' fault and not Amiga hardware's flaw really. Shadow of The Beast (Psygnosis 1989) was the first game which really used Amiga's custom chips and compared to Atari ST port there was absolutely no question anyone which one of the computers had far superior hardware.
@@KarpowSCX No, that's ignorant and offensive. Devs then even more than now worked to incredibly tight deadlines and budgets. They would have 6 months, often less to complete a port and were told by the publisher to target the ST.
If they had the time and the budget, I'm sure they would have loved to have made an Amiga specific version, but they simply didn't.
Frankly, the "lazy devs" thing is absurd. Try working in development yourself and see how "lazy" people are. (they aren't)
@@PhilBaxter Probably greedy publishers then and they told to do a quick cash grab. That was at least the case with Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. They had to do the port in two months if I remember correct.
amiga was more than capable of what people make it to be
It’s better than people think and yet less powerful that others think it seems
Fantastic! Thanks for bringing this to my attention and i can't wait to play it!
Perfect for your avatar haha
The Amiga never had any trouble with vertical scrolling (or any other scrolling for that matter) thanks to the Blitter chip. I think it was one of the earliest computers featuring this kind of technology (in facts the Amiga project started as a concept for a 16--bit game console in the early 80s before turning towards personal computing). I bet all the bugs or most of them will be ironed out. It mostly seems like a development tool issue, as I think they are porting the game from an earlier version of the Scorpion engine to the current one.
Could be. I wasn’t sure on Amiga how it handled vertical
I had absolutely no idea that Amiga could do this. This looks amazing
It can do a lot more today than it ever could make in the day
porting a game is also a fantastic way to learn about making games
Yes def gets you familiar with the code base and hardware
Works on a500 mini perfects.. when i get a mister pi it will be first on my list to try there
Good to know
Thanks a lot for the video and your positive words!
Happy to do it. Project is great!
Very impressive, especially the graphics are top notch for Amiga homebrew!
My favourite Amiga game is The Chaos Engine, highly recommended if you’re curious. The SNES port is good too, but Amiga is the Real Deal.
Co-op top down run ‘n gun with large exploratory levels. The peak of game design derived from Dandy/ Gauntlet.
Chaos Engine I have played and it’s a fun time
Whoa! For the Amiga VGE? Nice!! 8^)
Fun right?
Looks like they made the knockback more forgiving too
I'll second Lionheart, that's one of the better platformers for Amiga. Globdule is pretty unique. Turrican 2 is pretty similar to JP platformers and shooters of the time. Flink is good too although it's a bit better on MD/MCD. If you like Prince of Persia then Another World and Flashback are must plays but they were on other platforms too.
The Settlers, Cannon Fodder, It Came from the Desert and Lemmings are some other classic games that originated there.
The knock back isn’t as brutal but it’s still there in a fun way
My favorite Esoterics
Haha glad you enjoyed
Should one use the HDF file for mister use? Thanks for sharing
I’d recommend the HDF
My first Castlevania experience was the Amiga version, which definitely left me wondering what the fuss was about. The US and European markets were very different at that time, the NES didn't make much of an impact here and consoles didn't really take off until 16-bit. Super Castlevania IV then blew my mind 😄
It’s interesting and odd the Amiga Castlevania did things so differently
I think it's just poorly programmed. Compare it to say the Amiga Turrican games and they look like different generations. Happened a lot on the Amiga unfortunately.
Awesome, I will check it if I only find some spare time.
Time. The one thing we all need more of
I feel bit spoiled with numbers of new games for Amiga, while there are always some low quality games there are also bangers like this one.@VideoGameEsoterica
Amiga seems to be getting a lot of love lately
Please test Banshee AGA on the Amiga core
I’ll try and take a peek
AGA is Amiga 1200 and higher though, not the 500. So this should look STUNNING! :). That's a 32 bit machine :). So this will be neat! :)
Correct. A lot of Amiga fans "cheat" by comparing this to 16bit consoles but this was supposed to be in the same ballpark as the 32X/Atari Jaguar. But it was so bad that it could only compete with the 16bit consoles in the end.
Def worth playing
Proving again bits don’t really matter
@@Imgema Amiga fans and Megadrive fans don't bite each other anymore. There is quite a bit of homebrew going on in overlap between both machines. The Megadrive kind of proven to Amiga fans that is is a very capable machine.
@@VideoGameEsoterica Oh of course, I mean the architecture. The 1200 basically was a scaled down version of the 4000. With less features in expandability, less capable CPU. So it had a 24 bit addressing rather than 32 bit, meaning it could just address less memory (16MB rather than 4GB). Now the 4000 had a 680EC30 (or even 68040), so basically was a high end work station.
The 1200 wasn't a slouch either, it could easily keep up with the 486 systems of the time. So yeah, "bits" in this case do matter :P, it just isn't the whole story. Sadly AGA was a bit of a disappointment (still it should look really good as it could do graphics beyond what most PC's should have been capable off). But there was another chipset planned that was way more advanced, just wasn't ready in time and Commodore was in financial trouble, so they couldn't finish it at all.
If the 4000/1200 had contained that one? It would have been able to do 3D textured graphics at reasonable speeds as well :).
Sorry Nerding out a bit :).
As someone who just picked up an American Amiga CD32 at a flea market: Will it work off a CD with CD32? :D
I don’t believe so
Good excuse for me to get a Terrible Fire expansion that turns it into a full-fledged Amiga 1200. :)
It’s targeting an A1200
Castlevania is kind of a lowkey Doom. Konami ported it to almost everything and now the fans are finishing the job.
But can it run Castlevania?
Nice parrallax, making good use of the hardware in a way many games didn't. Not a huge fan of the music, sounds alright but the 4 channels always hamstrung games on the platform.
The music is effective for the hardware. It’s different but it still hits IMO
US Gold butchered so many Amiga ports
Their track record doesn’t seem great
Please speak faster 😂😂😂😂
lol
The player floats down on jumps too much. With a few tweaks this could be really great.
Well it’s still in development so I’m sure tweaks could come
Wasn’t the original Castlevania on the Amiga a pile of trash?
It wasn’t the best
@ I just assumed that since one person called it dogshit.
The AGA might be the most overrated graphics chip ever made. I remember in magazines at the time how it was hyped as the "next generation" of Amiga graphics and it barely surpasses what the SNES can do.
Considering that the amigo 500 came out in 1985, the genesis came out in 89 and the super Nintendo came out in 91, the Amiga is ridiculously good for its time
Oh yeah, even the sprite pushing that it could do was nothing compared to what a console like the Megadrive could do. That said, it still was a great 2D workstation and if you had the accelerator cards, you could also do very good 3D work on them. The Amiga 4000s still were great machines for graphic designers. Just AGA was a bit of a let down on its own compared to how phenomenal the original capabilities were of the Amiga 1000 and 500.
@@jamescampbell8482 That's false though. The Amiga 500 was released in 1987. In 1985 there was the Amiga 1000 which was also ridiculously expensive.
@@jamescampbell8482 The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, the 500 came out in 1987. This was due to it needing to be a cut down version/lower cost version of the 1000. But it still was an expensive machine. You cannot compare the Amiga 1000 (due to it's price) to a Megadrive before the price would come down. The 500 maybe, the Megadrive was launched in 1988 (not in the USA I know) and the 500 in 1987? But still the price was very different.
These were high end work stations, with a price to match! It was a multimedia machine, something that was never seen before then. The Megadrive was a dedicated game console, you cannot use it as a work station. So that is the main difference, very different markets and price ranges.
Now the scary part? The Amiga could have beaten the Apple Macintosh, if Jack Tramiel wasn't such an asshole and held up the company with lawsuits and being a dick about loans until he could fumble together the Atari ST :( . Typical Jack Tramiel bullshit. He also ruined Atari after he left Commodore.
A person that wanted everything on the cheap and would cancel products needed for the future of companies (like he also delayed the 7800 and it's sound solution was scrapped. the 7800 could have been to market before the NES would have released in the USA.
Heck the Atari "8 bit line" of computers were basically proto Amigas once you start to look at how they worked and how they had dedicated chips for every function.
AGA However does not come from 1985. That was the OCS and later ECS Chipset, AGA came out way later and was a disappointement as it wasn't the promised AAA chipset. That latter would have been.. stunning in what it promised. But by then Commodore was really scraping the barrel for cash and ESCOM was just releasing AMIGAS as were they consoles rather than the powerful workstations they were.
Again.. sorry, I'm nerding out :P .
Also, this doesn’t work on those older Amigas… only Amigas with the AGA chip, including Amiga 1200 and CD32.