Street Fighter II CPC

[zeropolis79]

A classic game in 64K need to share memory: video memory / game code / sprites / background / ...


With a cart, you do not have to load sprites or background into memory -> Just connect the ROM and copy straight to video memory


SFII could be done on GX4000, but back in the days (90's) developpers would not have done two (very differents) versions of the game cause that was too expensive

I guessed that was why Ocean never did normal CPC versions of Plotting, Navy Seals, Robocop 2, Toki, Robocop 3, Space Gun

[Gryzor]

The game of the century, they said!   

Well, they didn't state which century. 

[Shaun M. Neary]

I guessed that was why Ocean never did normal CPC versions of Plotting, Navy Seals, Robocop 2, Toki, Robocop 3, Space Gun

I'm fairly certain that most, if not all of those ended up on the Spectrum. I'm quite shocked that nobody was even lazy enough to port those over.
That's how dead the Amstrad scene was in 91 though, when nobody was lazy enough to port over for a quick cash grab, it's game over.

[kawickboy]

Ocean did the choice to be a major gx4000 publisher and excepted with game like total recall, all of their titles from Christmas 90/Spring 91 were advertised on cartridges. More, they wanted to port shadow of the beast and double dragon on cartridge ! They did it on c64 cart for sotb.


Gremlin did the same thing with switchblade. Thanks to carts failure we gained a classic cpc port in 91.

[zeropolis79]

I'm fairly certain that most, if not all of those ended up on the Spectrum. I'm quite shocked that nobody was even lazy enough to port those over.
That's how dead the Amstrad scene was in 91 though, when nobody was lazy enough to port over for a quick cash grab, it's game over.

Everything that came out of cart was released on tape or disc for the Speccy and I had most of them bar Space Gun and Robocop 3 (only because they'rre so damned rare).

(But Ocean changed teir policy o make all Spectrrum games 128k only from 1990 onwards)

[andycadley]

Everything that came out of cart was released on tape or disc for the Speccy and I had most of them bar Space Gun and Robocop 3 (only because they'rre so damned rare).

(But Ocean changed teir policy o make all Spectrrum games 128k only from 1990 onwards)

A tape or disk release would have effectively crippled the games to be down-gradable to the standard CPC hardware. So there would have been no smooth scrolling in Robocop 2 or Navy Seals, for example and the palette choices would be limited by what you could successfully map back onto the standard CPC colors. Cart games that were just cheap disk ports already took criticism for this, imagine if all of them had done it.


The only other choice would have been to write a completely separate version for a tape/disk release and the CPC market just wasn't a big enough player to accommodate that. Ocean went all in on pushing the Plus machines and, whilst it turned out not entirely successful, it was probably a more sensible bet than trying to half-ass it.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Everything that came out of cart was released on tape or disc for the Speccy and I had most of them bar Space Gun and Robocop 3 (only because they'rre so damned rare).

(But Ocean changed teir policy o make all Spectrrum games 128k only from 1990 onwards)

That's a very good point that I hadn't considered. But Street Fighter probably would have ended up being 128k only anyway just like Final Fight did.

[zeropolis79]

I respect that Ocean was the main supporter of the Plus/GX4000 range and they wanted to give it a chance but us normal CPC users felt short-changed by it, especially when Spectrum owning friends could get what we couldn't.. I don't think Ocean were right to reserve all the top stuff for the cartridge.. The Simpsons was a major let down.. WWF wasn't too bad while Battle Command, Total Recall and The Addams Family were good.

Switchblade never suffered going onto the normal CPC. .

I couldn't see Street Fighter 2 working on 64k either.

[Shaun M. Neary]

I respect that Ocean was the main supporter of the Plus/GX4000 range and they wanted to give it a chance but us normal CPC users felt short-changed by it, especially when Spectrum owning friends could get what we couldn't.. I don't think Ocean were right to reserve all the top stuff for the cartridge.. The Simpsons was a major let down.. WWF wasn't too bad while Battle Command, Total Recall and The Addams Family were good.

Switchblade never suffered going onto the normal CPC. .

I couldn't see Street Fighter 2 working on 64k either.

In defense, Robocop 2 on the Speccy was a completely different game to the GX4000. Chase HQ 2 was awful.

I didn't mind The Simpsons, I thought WWF on the CPC was a big let down. Was a nice attempt at an original game based off it's arcade counterpart (Superstars in the Arcade was tag team based, but premise was based from it), but it was too much of a graphics disaster to get behind it.

But yeah, Street Fighter 2 wasn't going to work on 64k. Hell, the original Street Fighter didn't work! One standard kick and punch, no fireballs even. SF2 was never gonna stand a chance on 64K at all.

[andycadley]

Switchblade never suffered going onto the normal CPC.

YMMV, I still think Switchblade suffered heavily  by being primary targeted at the standard CPC range. A full on Plus targeted release could have been a lot better.

[Carnivius]

YMMV, I still think Switchblade suffered heavily  by being primary targeted at the standard CPC range. A full on Plus targeted release could have been a lot better.

I still prefer the regular CPC version over the cart version.  Don't like the hardware sprites on the cart at all.  They just seem too random and inconsistent.  Only real advantage is the quick loading.

In the case of RoboCop 2 I got more fun out of the Spectrum version. Still has some annoying jumping bits (RoboCop should NOT jump for jeezus mcripes sake) but less so than the Plus game and there's plenty more shooting of bad guys which should always be the main focus of fun gameplay in a RoboCop game which the Plus game seemed to miss entirely.

[dragon]

The hardware sprites, have the function of add more colours in screen independent of background. Not only to save cpu time. Its the trik of amstrad to reuse old cpc gate array desing.


I not view it random or inconssistent, the best  games pang or prehistorick 2, use it very well.

[Carnivius]

The hardware sprites, have the function of add more colours in screen independent of background. Not only to save cpu time. Its the trik of amstrad to reuse old cpc gate array desing.


I not view it random or inconssistent, the best  games pang or prehistorick 2, use it very well.

yeah they use it well.  Switchblade does not.  If it could have been used to add colour to the player character Hiro perhaps giving him a nice flesh tone and his red headband, trousers he's supposed to have it would look better.  And as for the raster background you only see for first few screens, the similar game Stryker did that a hell of a lot better with smoother colours, a variety of colour schemes and you spent more of the game outdoors so you'd see more sky anyways.  Don't think that was ever on cart though, but a tape/disk that detected Plus hardware if you had it.

[kawickboy]

In the data east arcade game robocop can jump. he can even play with his twin brother on the 2nd coin up game !
I read somewhere that for robocop 2 ocean tried to do a different game for each platform (amiga and st release are far different, st is close to gx4000 release).

[andycadley]

In the case of RoboCop 2 I got more fun out of the Spectrum version. Still has some annoying jumping bits (RoboCop should NOT jump for jeezus mcripes sake) but less so than the Plus game and there's plenty more shooting of bad guys which should always be the main focus of fun gameplay in a RoboCop game which the Plus game seemed to miss entirely.

Yeah, the speccy version is one of the better releses, though the jumping mechanic is very clunky, especially because you have a habit of jumping about when you're trying to aim upwards. The GX version is still much better than the horrible abomination that is the C64 version though - I have no idea what the thinking behind that version was but it doesn't feel like a Robocop game at all.

[tjohnson]

yeah they use it well.  Switchblade does not.  If it could have been used to add colour to the player character Hiro perhaps giving him a nice flesh tone and his red headband, trousers he's supposed to have it would look better.  And as for the raster background you only see for first few screens, the similar game Stryker did that a hell of a lot better with smoother colours, a variety of colour schemes and you spent more of the game outdoors so you'd see more sky anyways.  Don't think that was ever on cart though, but a tape/disk that detected Plus hardware if you had it.

I've just been playing switchblade on both cpc and gx4000 today, I agree that far better use of the hardware spirits could have been made, would have preferred to have more colour on the main character like you say and then cpc version seems to add more colour in the status bars than the gx4000 version.

[GOB]

RoboCop should NOT jump for jeezus mcripes sake

https://youtu.be/A56135DgHs8?t=2m47s

[dragon]

I've just been playing switchblade on both cpc and gx4000 today, I agree that far better use of the hardware spirits could have been made, would have preferred to have more colour on the main character like you say and then cpc version seems to add more colour in the status bars than the gx4000 version.

Probably is some type of time development problem. To use hardware sprites in main character they need remade all subrutine asociated to main character to the hardware sprites, movement,collissions etc etc.. they should be more easy in the 90 put little static hardware sprites here and there.

[andycadley]

Probably is some type of time development problem. To use hardware sprites in main character they need remade all subrutine asociated to main character to the hardware sprites, movement,collissions etc etc.. they should be more easy in the 90 put little static hardware sprites here and there.

If you're planning a game that runs across all models, you're pretty much going to avoid using the new hardware capabilities for any critical functionality, because that way you don't need to rewrite key parts. That tends to limit things to using a straight palette switch and maybe a few small effects here and there like hardware sprite foreground objects or raster changes like the sky in Switchblade.

[Carnivius]

If you're referring to him 'jumping' on Cain's back?  That's a very, very small jump from a 'platform' higher than the target.  So really more of a planned fall than a jump and certainly nowhere near the heights reached in the RoboCop games that have him jumping like a regular platform game character.

[dragon]

A guy in spanish forum put a picture of the spectrum version he recieve in spain in the 90 inside commodore box


The manual have instructions to load the game, in tape and disk. In the cpc








It appear diferent to the world of spectrum manual, he not have amstrad disk


http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/s/StreetFighterII.txt

[felow]

This is quite interesting as the fact that the Wikipedia page of the game lists also the Amstrad version and all the rumors stuff on the Amstrad magazine at the time of the porting releases. I agree that wiki texts should be always be taken with great care but I also usually tend not to think everything strange or uneven should necessarily be fake or uncorrected.
My point is, as when I started this topic, is: ok, there was no release of SFII on CPC . First: we are sure about that? Not even very few copies maybe distributed with great delay against the C64 and Spectrum before the end of CPC market and 8-bit games led to the decision to stop every kind of distribution? I admit it is too imaginative but has US Gold EVER stated officially, after a lot of rumoring that they were porting the game for the CPC and announcing that, even listing this version on the promotional and publicity campaign, that they DIDN'T released the CPC version?
Second: in case they effectively didn't finally release the game on the market, maybe the CPC version was anyway a realty. One thing does not rule out the other. Maybe there's still a prototype (or finished version) somewhere. Remember the Atari 8-bit version of Commando, completed but never released and then surfaced years later.  Another example could be the recent spotted prototype of Sim City for NES.

[dragon]

Yeah, personally,  i think the game was planned and developed,if not not make sense include de load instruction in the manual.


Buy only the u.s gold  guys know what happend, and nobody ask   about it.(retrogamer,or u.s gold book people).


If only geof brown have twitter or something else we can ask it wtf.


The spanish guh have put more.pictures of the manual:


























It appears only to 128k anyway. But im curious why amstrad disk version was plannned and spectrum disk not.

[6128]

This is quite interesting as the fact that the Wikipedia page of the game lists also the Amstrad version and all the rumors stuff on the Amstrad magazine at the time of the porting releases. I agree that wiki texts should be always be taken with great care but I also usually tend not to think everything strange or uneven should necessarily be fake or uncorrected.
My point is, as when I started this topic, is: ok, there was no release of SFII on CPC . First: we are sure about that? Not even very few copies maybe distributed with great delay against the C64 and Spectrum before the end of CPC market and 8-bit games led to the decision to stop every kind of distribution? I admit it is too imaginative but has US Gold EVER stated officially, after a lot of rumoring that they were porting the game for the CPC and announcing that, even listing this version on the promotional and publicity campaign, that they DIDN'T released the CPC version?
Second: in case they effectively didn't finally release the game on the market, maybe the CPC version was anyway a realty. One thing does not rule out the other. Maybe there's still a prototype (or finished version) somewhere. Remember the Atari 8-bit version of Commando, completed but never released and then surfaced years later.  Another example could be the recent spotted prototype of Sim City for NES.

Street Fighter II was never released for Amstrad CPC. Same case than Mega Twins (a demo with first unfinished levels was released few years ago).

[andycadley]

It appears only to 128k anyway. But im curious why amstrad disk version was plannned and spectrum disk not.

Spectrum disk games were much less prevalent than Amstrad ones, mostly because only the +3 had a disk drive and it wasn't an overly successful model and certainly nowhere near as popular as the tape based +2.