pmasterBR

** SEGA GENESIS - RUFF-N-TUMBLE WIP PORT ** I love Ruff-n-Tumble on the Amiga, its got it all - Amazing pixel art / aggressive Soundtrack / Fun but tough Gameplay to boot. One of the negatives is the frame rate however, it targets 25 FPS, this was not uncommon for Amiga games , its understandable with the 5 bitplanes the Amiga needed to shift around ( supporting 32 colors in the game area ) , the more bitplanes the more processing that's needed to move screen/objects around. So part of me always wanted to rectify the frame rate - and that's how this port came about ! How does the port stack up ? - 60 FPS solid gameplay . All movements / animations / timings were reworked from 25 FPS of the Amiga to 60 FPS for the MD port , so the port just has a smoother feel to it. This wasn't a given by any stretch and streaming animation was a key issue , the first stage uses up to 1450 tiles in its map tiles alone , so once you get HUD / Video Planes / Sprite List & Tiles for player and player attacks theres nothing left for enemy objects and thats just the first world. So both layers had to shift to streaming scrolling tech i developed for SOTA, so things are only in vram if they are onscreen presently , once that was in tile usage on the 1st world dropped to 850 tiles ( from 1450 ) for the backgrounds, this left some breathing room for Enemies and effects. However it still wasn't enough vram without a strong DMA object streaming system to send the tiles to VRAM , a lot of optimisation went into it so the game could run 60 FPS will full animation and nothing cut . If DMA streaming lagged that means the frame rate has to slow so i didn't want that . - larger viewable game area on MD : 200 pixels high + 24 pixels high semi transparent HUD vs 192 pixels on Amiga + 24 solid HUD . This was almost by mistake , I thought the Amiga port was using a 256 high pixel screen size so I designed the engine to get close to that on MD with a transparent shadowed hud for contrast so you could see through it a little. The MDs (NTSC) display is 224 pixels high and the Amiga (PAL) is 256 pixels high. The hud is 24 lines high but it overlaps on the MD but with transparency you can still see critical things in the hud area . What i didn't realise at first was the Amiga uses less than its native resolution which was common to save ram / blitter time etc. So hence MD comes out favourably here still as it was a bit overdesigned ! - Despite having 8x less colors in the palette 512 MD vs 4096 Amiga , the MD does amazingly well here . I also had to put both background planes into Lock-Step so both are layered 1:1 , which gives up to 30 colors per tile on the MD rather than 15 so it compares well to the Amiga original which can have > 15 colors ( normal single plane tile limit on MD ) . I think from the side by side comparison you can see there isn't a noticeable quality drop and since it looked amazing in the first place I was very happy with the result ! - PCM SFX are in an all working with similar quality to the Amiga , XGM2 driver is in use so 13.3 khz PCM samples are used , which is more than enough to do a good replication of the Amiga SFX. FM / PSG soundtrack is been worked on currently hence video has no sound at present. I'm confident with the guy doing the music that its going to be a very close match to Amiga. On MD we can use 2 SFX channels where Amiga used 1 SFX channel and would play the last SFX over the top of the current SFX , the MD one moves low volume SFX to one channel and higher volume SFX to another channel and mixes it up a bit . - Controls , there are some nice options to utilise the extra buttons on the MD controller and that should help the gameplay a bit also. - Size, did i just throw ROM at this to make it work ? not really . The Amiga has 1024kb of combined chip ram required for the game , the MD has 136 kb of Ram/VRAM so i couldn't compress and decompress everything the amiga could but i got close . Without optimal music yet ( it should drop overall rom size ) we are about 19 mbit on MD vs the 14 mbit version of the Amiga . So whilst there's a bit more rom been used on MD its still well below the typcial 32 mbit rom that's in common use these days and a lot of efforts were made to minimise rom where possible . It started out prior to optimising rom heavily at 31 mbits of assets, i could have left it there but thats not how i do things haha. - The game is fully complete apart from waiting on Music and a few playthroughs to catch remaining bugs. - I did use some AI to aid this project , its 20 levels - its a lot of work and its not happening without some help , I used code from my SOTA / Parodius and EBH projects to make the engine , there has been no compromises . I think you can see some love went into this and the end result is what matters / garbage in is garbage out and vice versa. - Game is written in C/SGDK for some parts ( cold pathes ) but a lot of custom assembly / custom modules are used for hot path also . - Once music is done it will get a full release ! #Amiga #SegaGenesis #Megadrive #SGDK