SHINOBI Gfx restoration

[Yves Rizoud]

Fano, any news on the palette ? I mean, what degree of liberty do we gain over the original, and which contraints are remaining ? The biggest constraint IMO is if color 0 has to stay black : We need black on the hero sprite too (a color > 0 ), so this means there would need to be two black entries in the 16-color palette at all times.

edit: By the way, reference on the arcade Shinobi seems hard to find, no sprite rips seem to be available. I've set up MAME at home and recorded save points at each map ~70% of the game; if somebody needs specific references (for example the animation frames of the enemy ninjas), I can spend some time saving screenshots.

[fano]

Sorry , i forgot to post there , colors from 1 to 11 are globals, they do not change with level.Colors 12,13,14,15 can be changed for each section.
Btw , color 0 must not be used in sprites as it is transparent color , if you need black , you must attribute it to one color.


No way , to use mame tile/sprite viewer for arcade ?

[Yves Rizoud]

I browsed all the graphics during game, and the character sprites were not visible, only fonts, tiles and large graphics. From what I understand of the MAME docs, it depends on the ROM : some are not decoded (known) enough to expose all graphics.

I mean if we use color #0 for dark red, it will make the entire GUI background dark red too.
Moving black to a different color slot requires finding every piece of code that 'paints' the GUI : for example when you lose a life it gets overwritten by a color 0 rectangle, if black is moved to color 5, this rectangle must be painted in color 5.

[Joseman]

it depends on the ROM : some are not decoded (known) enough to expose all graphics.

even the bootlegs?

it's a shame that an emulator like winkawaks doesn't support shinobi, because it can desactivate layers and let alone the sprites for a perfect rip...

[Yves Rizoud]

I didn't try the bootlegs, it may be worth a shot. But if the sprites are 16x16 blocks in random order, it may not be very helpful.
Anyway, perfect rips is not needed here because the specs are widely different, the CPC version already dictates the number, size, and timing of each frame of animation.
I'm not even speaking of backgrounds, two screenshots are often enough to get the "mood" of a map and redraw all the CPC tiles. And another option is to watch a longplay on youtube to locate a specific part of a map, even if the paused image is not pixel-perfect.

[RichAplin]

Sweet! The graphics are much better now - the original CPC graphics were quite bad in places, with some terrible colour choices.

[Puresox]

Wahey!

[arnoldemu]

Welcome Rich.

[MacDeath]

OMG... the real Richard Aplin ??



Welcome.
Also thank you for this sweet well playable shinobi version.


Could you explain to us why the graphics were like this? Were you really porting graphics directly from the Arcade with automatic/calculated conversion?

[ivarf]

Thanks for FlySpy Mr Aplin, loved that game.


I remember seeing you on some forum or was it news many years ago, you were trying to get a game programmers job in the USA. I hope all went well and that you now will return to coding for the CPC.
The community would have loved that!

[fano]

Hey ! You're welcome richard, nice to see you here !
Maybe you have a reply for this long time question, who made graphics in your amstrad games ?

(Seems i am the luckiest cpc 'hacker')

[SyX]

Welcome Mr. Aplin!!!

I always have been a big fan of your CPC/Amiga works, you always tried to push the hardware for giving us the best versions even if that means making the game 128 KBs exclusive or adding extras for the 128 KBs machines as the bigger screen in E-Swat or samples & music for Shinobi

And i had a lot of fun with your hidden messages, easter eggs (Final Fight Amiga) and startup-sequences, too 

If there is anybody that it doesn't know who is Mr. Aplin, he made a few of the best cpc games and don't forget to read this nice but short interview from a long years ago

.
.
.

(Seems i am the luckiest cpc 'hacker')

I hate you xDDDDD ... not really, because thanks to you, the old rockers return

[RichAplin]

Hi!


Various people did the graphics;
Going back as far as Fly Spy (which is really going back.. 1985/6) I dd the graphics, same as for for my first few mastertronic conversions games (C64 versions of 'The Islands of Dr Destructo' (CPC originally) and 'UCM' (Spectrum) )
After about a year working in-house at mastertronic (most obvious thing I did then was Invade-a-load on C64, again my gfx)


All the binary design/cml games had graphics done by different people; at the time of Shinobi they were hand-drawn (not especially well) by someone, later on they started using frame grabbers on the arcade board -  which at the time produced fairly poor results so stuff was extensively re-touched; obviously background gfx needed to be block-based so this chopping up was done by hand also.
If I recall DD1/DD2 were frame-grabber-and-retouching, as was ESWAT and Line Of Fire. 


The most interesting one was Final Fight, where I spent the time to pull apart the arcade board, read the roms and extracted the real graphics. It took a while to get everything (e.g. finding the color palettes in the roms, all the block maps for the different parallax layer backgrounds) but I got there in the end. The bummer then was that I had to brutally resample them with fewer colours, less frames, etc.


I can't recall a single instance of getting help from Sega, Capcom etc.  We got a PCB and... that was it.  Only with FF did I get the time to rip the graphics; in all other cases things were too rushed (and it was too much of an unknown whether the gfx could be ripped from the board successfully).

[Xifos]

Hi Mr Aplin,

Since you are here, maybe you could do the cpc version of Street Fighter 2 ?


Ok, i'm leaving !


(well i already asked Fano to do it, but he refused)

[sigh]

Sweet! The graphics are much better now - the original CPC graphics were quite bad in places, with some terrible colour choices.

Hi Rich! Nice to see you on the forum.

Regarding the Shinobi game, what was the reason for the missing final boss? Also, there is no speech for "Mission 5"?

[ivarf]

and I wonder how much the community would have to pay to get someone like Aplin to code a new quality game for the CPC. Sometimes I have been fantasizing about hiring a my own chinese coding team to do games for my dear Amstrad CPC 

[fano]

I'd say, no money needed just c'mon help us 

[TFM]

and I wonder how much the community would have to pay to get someone like Aplin to code a new quality game for the CPC. Sometimes I have been fantasizing about hiring a my own chinese coding team to do games for my dear Amstrad CPC 

How much so you pay for a game?

[MacDeath]

Please Gryzor, do something, the great Richard Aplin can't stay a "speccy" like that, promote him immediatly!


Also please mister Aplin, don't be afraid by us.
Yes we are still fans of those useless 8bit computers, but we can be nice guys too and some of us even have a normal family life and decent jobs.




Now the question : were the sources kepts safely and still in your possession or were they destroyed into oblivion by some flood, leaking roof, fire, hysterical ex-GF or whatever accident??

[RichAplin]

Source code... heh no I don't have the src for any old games I wrote; generally it just gets left on floppies (or more recently old hard drives) of various machines until one day they get thrown out.. you can imagine.


I think I wrote Shinobi on an old 512K RAM  Amstrad 80286 PC (remember those?) with a 10MB hard drive and PDS (development system) - that was a pretty deluxe rig; PDS was lovely. I wrote all my later CPC stuff on that machine


Fly Spy I wrote in my bedroom using a CPC 464 w/tape deck until about 3/4way through I finally got a 3" disk drive.


I don't know how many copies most stuff sold; I know Fly Spy for mastertronic did about 40k copies. 


It's funny how things change; the CPC series machines sold maybe 3-4 million, the C64 sold maybe 15 million, and the most recent game I worked on has ...errr.. 23,959,940 users.... mostly young girls.  Heh.

Anyway, I'd say that CPC Shinobi was the "funnest" game I wrote by a fairly large margin - oddly Final Fight (Amiga) was probably one of the technically cleverest games yet people absolutely fucking _hate_ it.  Any footage of Amiga FF on youtube practically has death threats in the comments.  It amuses me :-)

Rich

[TomEtJerry]

Hello,

Mr Aplin, you have said "PDS" in you last post. Can it be this computer (Philips PMDS 4400) ?

Some pictures of a recently saved one : Index of /PMDS

If it's so, I would be very interested if you could tell us what were the capabilities of this hardware.

T&J/GPA

[TotO]

PDS development system - CPCWiki

[Xifos]

Anyway, I'd say that CPC Shinobi was the "funnest" game I wrote by a fairly large margin - oddly Final Fight (Amiga) was probably one of the technically cleverest games yet people absolutely fucking _hate_ it.  Any footage of Amiga FF on youtube practically has death threats in the comments.  It amuses me :-)

Rich

Final Fight amiga seems ok to me, there are less colors than supernes but it's normal.
It's great,  well in my opinion...
Could you tell us what do you think normal for software scrolling games on cpc, i mean the frame rate you can get considering the hardware we have and the gameplay you need ?
For exemple, shinobi is 5 vbl, it's impossible to do less, is it ?
I am not saying it's bad or something like that, it's just a question from the poor programmer i am.

[RichAplin]

Scrolling;


Most CPC games (and most of mine) used 'software scrolling'


"Fly Spy" used hardware scrolling on the CPC but it's a significant pain because
a) the 6845 doesn't let you split the screen into scrolling/non-scrolling areas; i.e. you can't raster-split it (see FlySpy where I blanked the top portion of the screen when scrolling)
but worse;


b) once you h/w scroll, your video memory is no longer linearly mapped, i.e. it has a point where it wraps around, which is a real PITA because then all your sprite/display routines etc have to be able to cope with potentially drawing half a sprite in one part of memory and half in another. This makes shit a lot more complicated and fiddly (+ potentially slow). 


c) with software scroll you obviously have two options;
c1) you can either copy+move the display memory with an LDIR or similar (although a series of LDI's is faster, bizarrely) and then fill in the new gfx around the edges...
c2) or you can redraw the whole display each time from the tilemap. 


Many people ended up doing (c2) because it has a number of advantages;
it's easier to implement, runs about the same speed regardless of which direction (or how fast) you scroll, you can animate tiles easily, and most usefully of all you don't need to erase any sprites because you're redrawing the whole screen each time.  The constant-speed thing was quite important for games.


As for your actual question - the frame rate? It depends how big your display area is and how much you optimize the tile drawing code.  :-)


In Shinobi specifically I recall that several of the end-of-level bosses just used a single-colour background (maybe with a simple floor) which meant I had that much more time to draw the sprites, but the main in-game backgrounds were just regular maps.

[Puresox]

What is your opinion of the Amstrad CPC464/664 6128 etc... Rich? I would be interested to know. What work are you involved with at the moment,if you don't mind me asking?