Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Ultima 6 port (and Might and Magic I
From: Peter_Huebner@kcbbs.gen.nz (Peter Huebner)
Date: 12 Apr 92 06:21:37 GMT
Organization: Kappa Crucis Unix BBS, Auckland, New Zealand

 
uzun@crash.cts.com (Roger Uzun) writes: 
 
>This is what worries me about certain type sof games and the Amiga, 
>in the PC world it is OH SO common for games to REQUIRE a 386SX or 
>better, 16Mhz of greater clockspeed and 15-30 M of hard disk space. 
>Examples include Ultima Underworld, Ultima 7, even Falcon 3.0 is 
>only truly playable on a 386 system running at 20Mhz or greater. 
>All these games REQUIRE 2M of RAM and really only enable all features 
>with 4M or more of RAM. 
> 
>Now we port them over to the amiga, and the base machine here 
>is a 2 Floppy, 1M A500 running at 7Mhz at best. 
>This means for certain types of games, it is a no win sort 
>of port.  I applaud New World computing for making a decent port, 
>but in fact, for this type of game, the base Amiga market is 
>so under-powered I feel that they will get a lot of flack from A500 
>owners.  I know of no answers, but I would rather see an A3000 
>as the target machine that get some lame port of a wonderful 
>MS-DOS product.  The A500 is great for Shadow of the Beast type games, 
>but I woud dread playing falcon 3.0 on one! 
>-Roger 
 
I don't entirely agree with you. Yes, they should certainly provide for/ 
make use of the more expanded Amigas: I am sick and tired of games that 
are not hd-installable, don't use a second floppy drive, don't know to 
cache graphics/sound/text in surplus ram. There is some unbelievable 
stuff being written out there.  
 
Mostly I blame this on people who have programmed x86 machines before 
and don't know stuff all about the Amiga's OS. There is for instance 
the port of Wizardry6 that asks for floppies in "unit 0" and then  
executes 'diskchange'!!!!! What? The guy's probably hardly even read 
the dos manual! ( I expect most people on here know what 'diskchange' is 
for :-) ) It goes on to display EGA graphics ( according to the 
games option menu ) . . . and, by the looks of it, I would say uses 
the 7Mhz cpu to animate the graphics instead of using the blitter -  
things do slow to a CRAWL at times. Bad policy indeed. 
It hogs the keyboard, even when run as a separate task ( never mind  
separating itself ) . . . 
Don't get me wrong: it's a great game, but only the exceptionally good  
storyline and plot and the good sense of humour etc makes up for the  
impossible IBMmish interface - in effect it turns my machine into a  
prehistoric-XT-lookalike with a colour card plugged in. 
 
Similar things can IMHO be said about many SSI-games. Although the speed 
of their graphics is acceptable I find the UIs painfully arkward. 
This includes EOB, although it's a vast improvement over previous 
titles, where, in games like "Roadwar 2000" the graphics are pretty  
much of "pong" standard . . . would look very flash on a amber  
screen, maybe, but . . .  
 
UMS2 falls into the same category: I actually took it back to the shop!  
My idea of entertainment is not to watch a runaway computer chugging 
through slowmotion window renderings for 55 mins per move . . . 
 
I think if these software houses would bother to get some kids to do the 
conversions for them who've sat in front of an Amiga before we might 
all be pleasantly surprised. Look at a game like Speedball 2 and you  
know that you don't NEED powerprocessors if you know how to program the 
machine! 
 
Although I will grant you that they might make bigger and better things 
possible still :-) they especially would help with virtual reality/ 
filled vector graphics etc. Your Falcon certes falls into that category, 
and if that's what you're into, fair enough. 
Still, how about we learn to do well with the existing resources, before  
screaming for bigger and better hardware to do the job for us . . . 
 
cheers P.