Wizball "loader"

[STE86]

Any of you who collect Amstrad "art" might like like this one. It's an Amstrad version of the Wizball loading screen redux I did for the c64 earlier this year. uses the Amstrads's unrestricted colour placement ability to add a little more detail to the logo and some "workarounds" for the lack of a greyscale

[SyX]

Great loading screen STE86!!!

Now we only need a decent conversion of that little jewel

I have put the picture in a DSK for easy seeing in the real machines

PD: STE86, aside of unrestricted colour, you have at your disposal another CPC magic trick, the overscan, you could find useful for your loading screens in case that you need more screen size for express your art 

[MacDeath]

 

uses the Amstrads's unrestricted colour placement ability to add a little more detail to the logo and some "workarounds" for the lack of a greyscale

yeay me like !

I love to do those kind of "doing it right while in the past they used to do it lazily" mocks ups...
That's even not funny because the modern tools do it easier than it used to be (mouse, 3 Ghz, shittons of Ram, proper GUI fast graphic app...)
Still some struggle with the somewhat limited CPC palette and the fact the orignal is C64... flawed to the core.

Right, while CPC has only one grey and perhaps only 1or 2 pseudo sepia/browns only (orange or dark red...)...
It can do all the rest so much betterly with no "fucking!" attribute artefacts.
(and even a few rasters...)

your one remastered picture is nice indeed, well done my friend !

(who needs greys anyway ?)

[STE86]

well, in all honesty, even "back in the day" we used  Atari ST's and Neochrome for doing Amstrad game graphics

[MacDeath]

yeah but obviously a lot of other considerations were into play...
CPC had its share of shi...lousy speccy ports with unrefined graphics.... or even C64 graphics badly ported.

Stormlord per exemple, while the first was completely ok, the second opus (deliverance) had its graphic hastily ported and the sprites don't feature the CPC capabilities (= no attributes...) and are therefore "shitty looking".
Also a few bad palette choices, due to hastily ported C64 graphics (which is often a disaster considering how the palettes from the 2 systems are different...)
Simply need to dither more heavily the "Grey"... but they most often only swaped palettes...


Even the EGA dos PC ("IBM compatible" at the time) was too often cruelly badly ported graphically.


recently on a french forum, I put some stuff to show this.
there i posted a few pictures of night hunter (french game)...

you can see the Atari ST version, "original"... not bad, perhaps too much greys for nothing, not enough contrast IMO but was a great game.

The original "EGA" (320x200x16... but limited to CGA palette)... WTF ? only one grey ? and blues everywhere ?

And a remastered version (by me) also using the CGA palette (in EGA so the whole 16 colours available) from the Atari ST picture (mock up then, ut I tried to do it the most accurate I could)

The result is quite different and some stuff are even better looking (the score zone with red spilled on...)
just a matter of opinion of course.

But to be honest, EGA was also plagued because it had to also look good in CGA... was perhaps too costly to put two properly done set of graphic datas...

but quite strange anyway, it reminded me the way some graphics were ported to CPC : limited palette compaired to C64 concerning Greys and browns (only one grey on CPC, only greys and browns on C64...) or Atari ST (more fine pixels and more palette to choose from...

while CPC often had to cheat to "emulate greys and browns" and wasn't helped because of the low resolution, the EGA PC had 2 greys and a "proper" resolution...
but still they used (badly) only one grey (bad palette swap IMO) and tried to replace it by blues and cyan, the way it was done on rick dangerous on CPC.
WTF ?

I can almost smell simple automatic palette swap for a whole tile/sprite set and no proper work on each tiles/sprite with a (actually few) handtouch pixels corrections in order to separate a few stuff to get a properly recolored thing.


Of course there were some exeption, even on CPC.


Barbarian is almost even better looking on CPC than on Atari ST (despite having large pixels) due to a clever pixel drawing.

[TomEtJerry]

Hello,

Very nice job STE, this screen is far better that the original one done for the Amstrad !

T&j/GPA

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

I hope someone tweaks the Wizball dsk to have this loading picture :-) It's great!

[MacDeath]

and a scrolling ?

[remax]

I'm so used to the lack of scrolling that i can barely play the C64 version 

[arnoldemu]

and a scrolling ?

that would involve reprogramming the whole game probably.

[MacDeath]

I'm so used to the lack of scrolling that i can barely play the C64 version

I quite agree.

While CPC version always got bitched by C64fans for having no scrollings, I would sea it just has a different gameplay.
which is not really uninteresting, except when you enter a new screen and immediatly get killed by a wave of enemies.
(added difficulty, not bad again)

Also better graphics IMO (nice to have a colourfull palette here...)


The strange thing was how you used to use the bonus function for the wizball... it wasn't really well explained and we played the  game a few year to even figure it out...

This freaking spacebar didn't worked you had to do left-right or circle stuff the decathlon style with the joystick...
which is more than hard on a keyboard...

[Gryzor]

(added difficulty, not bad again)

Not really. Adding difficulty is really easy (just have random lightnings falling on you for instance), fair difficulty is what's wanted. And random enemy waves up your nose is not really fair or nice.

[tastefulmrship]

I hope someone tweaks the Wizball dsk to have this loading picture :-) It's great!

I was bored for 2 mins. Wizball (non cheat version) with the new loading screen.
If someone wants cheats, then I can probably do that as well. I've got some free time this evening.


EDIT: It's a shame we can't cheat 16 colours out of MODE 1. The Amiga screen looks pretty good in the CPC palette.

[TotO]

It's a shame that the CPC Plus don't add those modes with its today "4096 colours" useless palette.
- 640x200 4 colours
- 320x200 16 colours
- 160x200 256 colours

[MacDeath]

To me this is were Amstrad missed the point.

"oveclock" both the CPU (into 8mhz) and those Video modes (twice bpp), perhaps even add a little blitter, get those sprites better (pointers to RAM, no vertical limit=full multiplexing enabled) and 128K minimum RAM (with some sockets to add a few), 256K-512K ROMs for games.

a 160x200x256 mode0+ would have been awesome.

Then such computer could really have been almost as good as an Atari ST, but in 8 bit only.




Anyway STE86...
Is it you the guy who actually worked on those games in the past ?

This picture looks great, and could then use some Rasters and a PLUS palette I guess.

inks and elements were properly separated and ditherings/gradiants are not messy at all.

So the Wizball Logo and the Ocean Logo or the "golden pipe" or some other elements could certainly get some palette changes (not sure with the nice but limited CPC palette but the PLUS can certainly work).


Or perhaps even get this picture in overscan, like 192x272 (or perhaps just 192x256...) only by adding stuff in the border.

[TotO]

Like he said, he have worked with Neochrome on ST. (320x200)
And he do it for CPC. So... No overscan or something else for CPC Plus.
The screen space is well used and don't need more area.

It's picture look great like this. Better than 80s versions on all computers.

[Bryce]

To me this is were Amstrad missed the point.

"oveclock" both the CPU (into 8mhz) and those Video modes (twice bpp), perhaps even add a little blitter, get those sprites better (pointers to RAM, no vertical limit=full multiplexing enabled) and 128K minimum RAM (with some sockets to add a few), 256K-512K ROMs for games.

Amstrad definitely didn't miss the point. If Amstrad had put an 8Mhz Z80, 128K and a load of ROM sockets into the machine (every other part would need to be of a higher spec too), the Amstrad would have been at least three times the price it was, nobody would have bought it and we wouldn't be here today still enjoying the CPC in 2012. We would most likely have had a Spectrum / C64 / atari which were affordable.

You can't compare todays situation / technology with what was available / affordable in the early 80's.

Bryce.

[TotO]

He don't speak about the CPC but the CPC Plus.
We are in 90s and all 16bit computers do that since 5 years.

[Bryce]

Ah ok, the plus could have had a bit more, but it was effectively a facelift and not a new generation of computer. I expect their biggest worry was compatibility with old software. It still would have raised the price quite a bit though.

Bryce.

[arnoldemu]

It's a shame that the CPC Plus don't add those modes with its today "4096 colours" useless palette.
- 640x200 4 colours
- 320x200 16 colours
- 160x200 256 colours

it's all down to memory bandwidth.
it would have to fetch 4 bytes instead of 2.

[arnoldemu]

Amstrad updated the CPC as cheap as they could within the limitations it had, that's why the sprites are in dedicated ram.
if they had been in main memory they would not have had the memory bandwidth to fetch them.
look at the c64, it loses a certain amount of cycles each line for fetching sprites .

[arnoldemu]

He don't speak about the CPC but the CPC Plus.
We are in 90s and all 16bit computers do that since 5 years.

I think people will continue to moan about it for for another 5 more years or more.

The plus was just a simple upgrade which fit within the existing design.

We should continue to push both the cpc and plus to produce great stuff.
It's being done already, lets continue to do it.

[TotO]

We don't speak about what can be done today with this "commercial upgrade".

[STE86]

as an FYI, ST Neochrome was used to draw Amstrad because it could mimic the 2:1 pixel aspect ratio and give 160x200 res in 16 colours to draw in. the only package which could do this back in the day.

my first experience with this was porting Ubisoft' "great courts" to the Amstrad. (and spectrum and c64)

[Carnivius]

Any of you who collect Amstrad "art" might like like this one. It's an Amstrad version of the Wizball loading screen redux I did for the c64 earlier this year. uses the Amstrads's unrestricted colour placement ability to add a little more detail to the logo and some "workarounds" for the lack of a greyscale

The original loading image wasn't actually too bad but this is still a great improvement.  Really nice work.  I don't even care for the actual game but I probably would load it up just to view that image.

And those "workarounds" you mention usually resulted in more interesting colour schemes in my opinion.   A lot of C64 games relied too heavily on those grays and often looked quite bland and drab in comparison.