Space Gun

[kawickboy]

even with hard sprites, the game is slower than the speccy release... and where is the title tune ?
whe i look to classic games (and older) like operation wolf, operation thunderbolt (2 players mode was possible) and budget release like operation hanoi or jungle warfare... even line of fire is better to my opinion.
and the amiga/st releases are light phaser compatible. why cpc+/spectrum not ?

ocean said goodbye to cpc with a such pity game.

[TFM]

@Arnoldemu: Sorry, if I look a the monsters.... they are just a bad example of software sprites w/o masking, very ugly. And that impression destructs the game. Anything else I would mind. But these blocky "punchouts" around the sprites are really ugly. That kind of technique is ok, but they use toooo big blocks of "punch out".


Well, ok, they may use some plus features, but it's not obvious to me. The game could run as is on a CPC old Generation (CPCoG) too I guess, with minor modifications though.


And as somebody pointed out before, the CPC Version was made love-less: While the damn speccy get animations, the CPC don't.

[andycadley]

Whilst that sort of unmasked sprite is handy on a Spectrum if you're doing colourful sprites it's not the only reason for doing so. Drawing sprites without any sort of transparency is significantly faster, which could well be crucial for a game like Space Gun. The biggest problem really is that whoever re-drew the sprites for the Amstrad version didn't seem to take this into consideration and so the outlining is extremely obvious. If you compare it with something like Trap Door, for example, you can see how it should be done right.

It's still a pretty shoddy port, although I can't say I was much of a fan of those type of games in the arcade either. Especially if you aren't using a light gun. I assume it was intended to go on cartridge originally (possibly with light gun support) and then ended up dumped on disk and sold off to try and recoup some losses when it was obvious the GX was a major flop.

[TFM]

In turn the GX flopped because it lacked games.

[dcdrac]

oh it was a mixture of things, inept decisions by Amstrad, the acid chip probably did not help maybe if Amstrad had produced a 16 bit machine with a cpc emulator built in that might have worked, but they did not.

[TFM]

Well, you argue from today's POV. Honestly, back the day, I assume... people just looked at games. And they decided to get a console [nb]and I only talk about people deciding for a console right now. Leaving out computers.[/nb] which is cheap and provides as much as possible for the money.


Now what did people see: There was just a dozend of games for the GX4000 and most of them looked not very great since all these games didn't really use the new hardware [nb]The new features are actually not bad, you just have to deal with it in the right way. The 2600 was a real pain to program, not the GX4000.[/nb] much. Most games were conversions of older games, just pumped up a bit. And that's just not enough. Of course there were / are few Cartridge games of great quality. But this was not enough to motivate people to buy a GX4000.


The broad mass of customers are no tech-freaks, they just want to play pretty games. They bought what pleased the eye - and that must be considered.

[Puresox]

Anyone with half a brain cell could see that the Console was a day late and a dollar short. Utter madness 

[TFM]

Yes, it was late. But for a cheap price they would have reached the "cheap" segment of console games. And IMHO the technology of the GX4000 is actually good. I guess I have to prove that with one of my next games    [nb]Or bloody fail and spend the rest of my life in a abbey  [/nb]

[andycadley]

To be pretty, it needed to compete with the Megadrive/Genesis and the SNES. To be cheap, it needed to compete with the vast library of games for the NES and Master System. A few years earlier and it might of carved a small niche but by the time it came it was too little, too late.

It's still a lovely machine to develop for though.

[Puresox]

It was just so late, The games that were reboots of existing CPC games should have been released at a competitive rate ,£10 , and exclusive titles at comparable rate to Master system and Nes . CAlso The scrolling capabilities did not seem good enough compared to these two systems (what I have seen anyhow) . They should have also got some publishers on side(Even if it was Amsoft)other than Ocean which did some great titles and went the whole hog in supporting it. All past If's now. But I can't see why they could not have seen the writing on the wall? Blind.
I would love to know the story though!

[arnoldemu]

oh it was a mixture of things, inept decisions by Amstrad, the acid chip probably did not help maybe if Amstrad had produced a 16 bit machine with a cpc emulator built in that might have worked, but they did not.

I believe they did ask game developers what they wanted.
They also had to work within the confines of the cpc system to make it backward compatible.

What they produced was not bad.

They should have priovided a way for a sprite to access any part of the internal ram of the asic, then it wouldn't be so bad. I believe they may have also considered more sprites which would have been much better, but cost limitations probably stopped them.

So what we have is actually not that bad and can be used to quite good effect I believe.

the gx4000 was a flop.

Some games would have been greater with larger carts. I believe the developer of Toki asked for a larger cart from Ocean, but because of costs, they said no. If they had said yes, we could have had that game done and looking great.

[TFM]

They should have provided a way for a sprite to access any part of the internal ram ...

Exactly! That's the only real point of criticism I second. It would have improved sprite handling in an order of magnitude. However, if we continue that way and ask for more and more we will finally end up with the PS9 [nb]Released 2025[/nb]. No seriously, you are right there. Just a pointer which tells where in the RAM the sprites starts and everything would be so easy.


Now is there an advantage to keep sprites in the ASIC?
- Saving RAM?
- Protection against accidental overwrite?
- Access sprite data independent of ROM and RAM state?


Well... These arguments don't really make much sense though.


But since we're using it since a quarter of a century, it can't be that bad. 

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

The reason the sprite memory is within the ASIC is memory bandwidth.


The same reason that C64 and Amiga sprites are read during HBLANK, and hence are limited in quantity and colour. There's only so much data that can be read in this time (128 bytes - ~80 bytes for screen data). Although on the Amiga this method meant that sprites could be any height (they were frequently used for static scores/etc over the gameplay area... and for the DPaint toolbar IIRC).


Alternatively, the ASIC could have had two address/data buses, and a separate sprite RAM - costly in terms of pin count, but it would have made the system very flexible.
Or the internal sprite RAM could have become a larger Sprite Bank that the sprites could be picked from - costly in terms of silicon.


TBH they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, and they did what they could within the budget they were given.

[TFM]

When producing a chip like an ASIC the RAM part is by far the most expensive part of that chip.


Sadly Amstrad decided to downgrade the ASIC, you can see that at the fact that only 4 of 8 bits are used in every sprite-data-byte of the ASIC.


Would be nice to have one of the ASIC prototypes which used all 8 bits instead of 4.