From: davereed@wam.umd.edu (Michael Robert Bromery)
Subject: Re: Street Fighter 2: HAHAHAHAHA
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 08:09:12 GMT

     The question about sprites for street fighter 2 on Amiga is Bar NONE.
 I happen to know a couple of friends in New York. You can say we are a
  part of a development team, and we happen to take the Street fighter 2 demo
  code apart to see what makes this thing tick. Now, I understand that alot of
  people on this newsgroup doesn't program so I'll explain. On the amiga, 
when it comes to platform games, sideview games, or any of that type, we almost
NEVER use real sprites. In fact, almost all of our moving objects are BOBS,
those bitmapped objects are what we use, especially when we want to utilize
large or many objects on the screen without the harsh color and horizontal
size limitatations of the non-AGA sprites. Taking the code apart quickly
revealed the characters as such. They are mearly bitmapped objects that are
using the blitter for movement. If they did happen to use sprites for
street fighter 2. I would easily say that the game will (GASP) run a heck of a
lot faster than you'd expect. (Can anyone say Flash Gordon??) But in that case
, you or your joystick wouldn't want it that fast. On occasion, sprites 
become very useful in even those kinds of games. For example, if you want 
some rain or snow to fall in the foreground without slowing down gameplay.
Remember, sprites are sooooooooo unusually fast that it is easy to see that 
most games don't use them.(They just have too many limitations for normal
graphic shapes). Now, of course, Bobs do use some sprite data which helps
burst the speed that the Bitmapped object has which makes the blitter a real
lifesaver. 
    

      --- There are probably a few games you can use that could use simply
sprites, if that is what you want to code, then speed isn't a concern in all
accounts. But there was one point that I found where people hit the nail on
the head as to why the amiga version didn't have ALL the stuff the NES version
has in terms of animated backgrounds and extra graphic stuff of the like.
 --- CHIP RAM --- yep. It's the fact that so much of the amiga market is
stuck with only 512K of chip ram. When they went all out to give you some of
the most awesome graphic conversions yet to hit the screen and quite a good
amount of moves to boot, it leaves very little space to fit the gut wrenching
music. I've already ordered the game myself. I'm just glad that the music
was never a real concern for me in Street fighter 2 anyways. It's true that
the amiga can do the music pretty well, but the limit of chip ram space makes
it hard to fit the stuff in only 3 tracks with an open fourth. With 1 meg of
chip ram or more, it's pretty easy to, I know, it wouldn't be a challenge for
me to outdo the NES version if that was the case. 

       Speaking about ports. Has anybody aquired the number or address of
Mindscape? I kind of have a few questions for them, especially while I
play Wing commander. I would like to ask them what language the game was
written in and some other stuff for my quest in the 3D arena. The language is
important for the original WC was written with Borland C++ compiler( I kind
of saw it written when I looked through the code with a norton utility.
If the language is the same, then I will love to ask them more for I can take
it as a good algorythm. Certainly, these efforts should end up with a faster
product, mainly since I'm not starting with that kind of scaling. 

       About 3D, I still think the good thing is that the stock 68000 is
slowly being weeded out as a standard to code for. Soon, I hope, most
everything will be coded with some kind of accellerator in mind which would
put 3D games in good standing with the amiga community so once again,
speed will not be of much concern for the amiga again just as it used to
them years ago, back when blood money was new. 

---- Hope this helps. And thanks for any response to the Mindscape issue.

 ------ Mike.
    Email: davereed@wam.umd.edu

P.S. --- If anyone plans to play those new Origin releases for the amiga 
   on a stock system in anticipation of a faster system upgrade; you'll
   get a surprising difference in playability with OS 2.0+ and a hardrive.
   The harddrive fixes the speed in loading music and flipping disks, the
   2.0+ ROMS fixes enough of the speed(all other cases) in comparison to
   1.2 or 1.3.
   For an even greater difference check out the difference of A10 v1.5 between
   a stock 1.3 amiga and a 2.04 amiga.