MODE 1 > MODE 0 wishlist

[MacDeath]

Last ninja 2 is speccied to the core... if it uses only 2 colours on the playfield, then the engine may not allow for more unless redone (to be verified) and I suppose most assets are coded in 1bit per pixel ?
sometimes hte sprites are in 2bpp so you may patch those to use a few extra colours, but then the backgrounds would be in 1bpp so couldn't... Sometimes they would use the same system as on monocolor speccy : 1bpp graphs sprites AND 1bpp mask... see H.A.T.E per exemple (Hostile All Terrain Encounter) which is another classic exemple of UK doing sh**it on CPC.


Yes a patch may be fun but really, but why not go for a proper 320x200 CPC version ?

BBC micro version looks mostly in 160x200x8 (wide pixels)...

Also CGA version for MS-DOS may provide useful mode1 exploitable assets but it seems very few non french/spanish companies cared to use CGA assets on CPC, ever.
quite often Z80 based versions were devloped by a different contractor than the IBM-MS-DOS version and thsoe would never share stuff...
"get this running on speccy, then emulate speccy on CPC" was the too often english way of screwing us.

Fact is they didn't put any effort on the CPC and PCW versions...

[andycadley]

It depends a lot on how things are stored. Speccy sprites typically use a 1bpp bitmap and 1bpp mask, so this can usually be replaced with a 2bpp Mode 1 sprite or 4bpp Mode 0 sprite as long as you use a fixed colour for transparency rather than a mask.

The tricky part is background graphics that might not be masked. In an isometric game, however, it's possible many things have to be masked because they aren't necessarily drawn on clean boundaries so there might be space (unless masks are shared)

[isidoro]

Yes, LN2 is a direct port from Spectrum. The game area is drawn into a mode 2 compressed vram, and then decompressed to mode 1 on the fly every frame.
Graphics are stored in mode 2 (1bpp), so tiles and sprites can only use 2 colors. There are 3 types of graphics: solid, transparent and masked. Converting solid and transparent to mode 0 (or mode 1) needs double space, but masked sprites wouldn't need more space (e.g., in stage 1 all tiles take 7986 bytes, converted to mode 0 (or mode 1) would take 10650 bytes)

So in this case sprites and drawing routines must be rewritten, cannot be directly modified through a patch.
I've done a test in mode 0 using pen 0 as transparent color and LUTs for transparency and mirror, but mode 1 with 4 colors could be done in a similar way.

Z-sorted tiles and graphics are redrawn every frame, the same with all tiles that always are shown in front. The game also uses 4 dirty rects for storing the part of background affected by ninja, enemy and their weapons.
Also source sprite graphics are mirrored on the fly each time an actor changes facing direction.