Achieving period-correct graphics in personal computer emulators

[Ash]

I got FILTERED by the beast that comes at night on the overworld in Drakkhen. I guess that just meant I headed in the wrong direction? One of these days I'll do a proper sit down with it, maybe.

 

[Lemming42]

Generally, if you love 8-bit games, pixel graphics, and abstract early interfaces (not tolerate them, *love* them!), things do downhill from the 90s onwards, generally speaking. As the FPS & Doom craze started, things went downhill very very quickly, and on many fronts. Well, Doom alone is not to blame, but that "infamous" interview with Roberta Williams is the truth—the demographics of computer users changed a lot in the early/mid-90s and suddenly selling dumb games became profitable.

Going back to this because it interests me a lot, can you point me to the Williams interview in question?

I've been reading old magazines and I'm always struck by how "we've streamlined everything!" is used as a selling point back in the late 80s and early 90s. There seemed to be an attitude that a lot of games were unnecessarily obtuse or clunky, and people wanted something more accessible and simpler, which is funny because the case seems to be the opposite these days (though I'd argue that a lot of modern games are technically far more mechanically complex than 80s and 90s games, albeit usually not more fun). I'd be interested to hear if Williams perceived a shift in demographics and desires from the public around that time, because there did seem to be such a shift underway.

Just to pick one example:

Notice the "you won't need to mix reagents or memorize spells" being billed as a positive thing - pretty clear dig at AD&D magic rules there, which I suppose some people might have been getting pretty tired of by 1993.

This one's interesting as well - half the focus of the ad is that the game is easy to play, and that it boasts an automap feature. This game fucking rocks btw.

Doom objectively is very straightforward and mechanically simple but that seems to be exactly what people wanted at the time - a game that cut away any and all unnecessary padding and deadweight and boiled itself down into a very concentrated experience that controlled intuitively and which basically anyone could pick up right away. And honestly, the idea that Doom heralded the downfall of mechanical complexity isn't true IMO - most 1990s games seem to me to have substantially more depth than most 80s games, only they also tend to be more accessible. Wasteland for example, which I like, is not a particularly complicated game, the only issues a new player will have come from its obtuse and vague objectives and slightly clunky interface. Fallout's got a lot more going on but is also much more intuitive to play.

For what it's worth, though, I do wish the FPS genre had taken more cues from Ultima Underworld and System Shock than it did from Doom. Doom was great for shaking the industry up but subsequent devs really should have sought to expand on it, rather than just replicate it.

 

[Ash]

[For what it's worth, though, I do wish the FPS genre had taken more cues from Ultima Underworld and System Shock than it did from Doom. Doom was great for shaking the industry up but subsequent devs really should have sought to expand on it, rather than just replicate it.

They did expand. Unreal, Half-Life, Turok, Quake, Brahma Force, Duke Nukem 3D, and more are all different branches with numerous additions. All of that has great value to me. I just wish it was about equal, instead of so few games being Underworld-likes at all. Severely untapped, criminally underrated, but we luckily got a few absolutely astounding games in that lineage regardless. But yeah, dungeon crawlers have always been too hardcore for the masses. Especially the navigation component. A lot of people out there are navigationally-challenged sadly. To test, go ask people in your house to approximately point north or to some nearby landmark (1-2km range), from inside the house. Despite this being a fairly simple task to deduce, in my experience it probably has a 50% failure rate. I only tested it on a small pool of victims but still, it's quite something. Women failed it the most.

 

[Rincewind]

Going back to this because it interests me a lot, can you point me to the Williams interview in question?

There's a thread about it here:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/if-1999-was-this-bad-what-would-williams-say-now.121676/

Wayback Machine link to the article:
https://web.archive.org/web/19991127225719/http://www.gamersdepot.com/interview_roberta_a.htm

Relevant part:

GD: Why do you think that the Adventure game genre has kind of died out?

Roberta: Well, since I've not been in touch with the gaming industry as much as I'd like to, my answer might seem kind of off. Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one. There's also the influence of the game consoles as well. So most of these people have gotten used to shoot-em' up kind of games on the consoles. Now they want to get that kind of experience on their computers.

Does this mean that the original crowd still isn't there? Probably not, however, there are much fewer of them. And the numbers for a good selling computer game are much harder to reach now. Something that sold 300,000 copies then, would be a lame selling game today. The other side of it is that adventure games, to do them right, probably have some of the highest production costs around. It doesn't appear that in today's world, that our demographics will change anytime soon. Now I do think that there is some hope on the internet. It's my feeling that a lot of people who were in love with their computers, are now hanging out online.

 

[Rincewind]

Now I do think that there is some hope on the internet. It's my feeling that a lot of people who were in love with their computers, are now hanging out online.

Well, that has turned out really well, hasn't it?...

 

[Lemming42]

Thanks. That's fascinating, because I agree with what she's saying overall... and yet she was saying it during what I'd consider a golden age for videogames.

She's right that the affordability and popularity of computers probably constitutes a trend towards simpler, easier-to-play games becoming very popular in the mid-90s. I remember when I was very little, my uncle got his first computer around 1996 and he had Heretic, WarCraft and Red Alert, followed by Diablo when it came out. Good games, but definitely very simple and very appealing to someone who's just bought their first computer and wants something they can jump into and learn quickly and easily, and which offer a dose of spectacle and excitement rather than the more slow-paced gameplay of old adventure games.

 

[octavius]

One man's incline is another's decline eh.

Looking at some of your entries, how is Wizardry & Dungeon Master not superseded by Ultima Underworld, Eye of the Beholder,

You're talking of

games featuring complex, multi-genre, intelligent or otherwise engaging gameplay.

and think Eye of the Beholder was superior to Dungeon Master???
In DM you could interact with the environment (like weapons or fireballs on wooden doors), you could use traps on monsters, all attacks had individual cool downs, you had a wounded body parts systems which affected amongst other things movement speed.
Sure, EoB had more varied graphics, and it has some NPC interaction, but it was a dumbed down game squeezing AD&D into the DM formula. Gameplay-wise the only thing more "intelligent" was that you needed to rest to memorize spells instead of your characters just regenerating mana while walking around.

 

[Ash]

I don't know, not played DM. I just heard others say Eye is better and so parroted. Forgive me.

sounds like I should probably play dungeon master. Mission accomplished, thread data extracted - the best RPG of the 80s?

 

[Rincewind]

Speaking about the best games of the 80s, there's an absolutely marvellous gem of a game called Exile, originally released for the BBC Micro & Acorn 1988, then the Amiga & C64 ports came out in 1991. Vastly underrated, almost nobody mentions it, but it's one of its kind. It's a long game featuring non-linear exploration and hundreds of physics-based puzzles with multiple solutions to many of them.

I haven't played it yet, just watched a few videos, but it's high on my list.

EDIT: Added video reviews. A marvel of a game—cramming a whole little living, breathing and reacting world into a single floppy disk, similarly to Elite.

 

[Incognito/STK]

Nobody could believe their eyes (and ears!) when the Amiga 500 appeared, as if teleported back to us from the future or some technologically advanced alien dimension!

I'm 45 and lived through the 80's with the Spectrum and an Atari. Got my Amiga in 1989. It's still vivid on my mind, 30+ years later, the first time I heard the engine roar on an F1 game, or a voice sample in an Alcatraz demo, or saw the absolute gorgeous graphics of Cadaver. The above expression is absolutely correct: it was as if we were given something from the future. Today I can't give a shit if the new Nvidia card does one million extra calculations than the previous generation.

 

[octavius]

The voice sampling on the Amiga was like something from the future.

 

[Rincewind]

The voice sampling on the Amiga was like something from the future.

Only my Gravis Ultrasound I got in 1995 surpassed it (and it surpassed it substantially). Pre AWE32 SoundBlasters were a bit of a joke, at least the digital audio path (OPL/AdLib was always cool).

 

[Rincewind]

On the topic of '80s computer games, it's worth noting that the golden age of Amiga-original games was really the five-year span of 1989 through 1993, since that scene took far longer to get going than should have been the case.

Backing this up with some concrete original research & hard data from my article Gaming on the Amiga — Part 1: Amiga 500 is all you need (mostly) I'd personally move the 5-year period forward by a year to 1988 to 1992, but that's nitpicking.

My interpretation of the sudden drop of new Amiga releases around 1993:

No big surprises here, but it’s quite interesting to see the abrupt drop in the number of new releases in 1993 in both the adventure and RPG categories. My guess is that this is the result of major American developers seeing the writing on the wall and abandoning the platform (a significant portion of the more cerebral Amiga titles were American-made).

So, by process of elimination, the tail end we see after 1992 is the output of the European game dev scene which operated with a "phase shift" compared to the North American market, but those releases are mostly action/arcade affairs largely uninteresting for us.

 

[Incognito/STK]

Speaking about the best games of the 80s, there's an absolutely marvellous gem of a game called Exile, originally released for the BBC Micro & Acorn 1988, then the Amiga & C64 ports came out in 1991. Vastly underrated, almost nobody mentions it, but it's one of its kind. It's a long game featuring non-linear exploration and hundreds of physics-based puzzles with multiple solutions to many of them.

Added to my humongous backlog. Thanks.

"It is often cited as one of the earliest examples of a Metroidvania game and featured realistic gravity, inertia and object mass years before players understood the concept of a physics engine... an astounding level of AI, stealth-based gameplay, a logical ecosystem governing the world's creatures and a teleportation mechanic that feels startlingly like a predecessor to Portal" - wikipedia

On WHDLoad, if anyone's interested.

 

[Rincewind]

Speaking about the best games of the 80s, there's an absolutely marvellous gem of a game called Exile, originally released for the BBC Micro & Acorn 1988, then the Amiga & C64 ports came out in 1991. Vastly underrated, almost nobody mentions it, but it's one of its kind. It's a long game featuring non-linear exploration and hundreds of physics-based puzzles with multiple solutions to many of them.

Added to my humongous backlog. Thanks.

"It is often cited as one of the earliest examples of a Metroidvania game and featured realistic gravity, inertia and object mass years before players understood the concept of a physics engine... an astounding level of AI, stealth-based gameplay, a logical ecosystem governing the world's creatures and a teleportation mechanic that feels startlingly like a predecessor to Portal" - wikipedia

On WHDLoad, if anyone's interested.

Make sure to play the OCS version as the AGA version was done by a different team and while it has some unnecessary graphical gimmicks (e.g. parallax scrolling), it's an overall decline as the viewport size is just too small compared to the OCS version. In fact, after testing the BBC, C64 and Amiga OCS / AGA versions of the game, I realised I prefer the original BBC version as it has the largest viewport. Well, at least for the first playthrough!

The game has a lot of replay value, and due to its high levels of non-linearity, no single definitive walkthrough exists. So a BBC -> C64 -> Amiga OCS playthrough is in order The sound effects of the Amiga OCS version are particularly nice. But when researching the version differences, I learned that both the C64 and Amiga versions were made a bit easier by simplifying some puzzles & making some key items easier to find, so the BBC original is the TrueExperience(tm).

Also, the game features some *nefarious* copy protection scheme, similarly to Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back and Fate: Gates of Dawn. There's no obvious indication that you're using a bad crack, but if the game has detected a cracked copy, it will make certain key items required for completing the quest disappear during the endgame. Yep, but first it will let you play happily for 30-40+ hours (it's a long game)

I won't bother looking up the thread, but the first 100% crack was created around 2009 by Galahad/FLT — all previous cracks triggered the copy protection, rendering the game uncompletable. So hopefully the WHDLoad version uses the Galahad crack, but you wanna make sure. Alternatively, just use 2 MB chip on an emulated A500 and it will be fine as the game loads pretty much all data in memory at startup, so you can simply just use the uncracked IPF image from the SPS collection.

The C64 versions I recommend are either the tape version from the Ultimate Tape Archive 4.0 (tape versions are always a safe bet as they had no disk-based copy protection, obviously), or this 101% crack that also contains a small bugfix: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=82430

EDIT: The latest WHDLoad version is fine:

info install​

adapted by Bored Seal & JOTD and Codetapper/Action! ------------------------- All Protection removed by Galahad / Fairlight ------------------------- 1.4 (04-may-2020 23:45:57)

 

[Incognito/STK]

Added to my humongous backlog. Thanks.

Make sure to play the OCS version as the AGA version was done by a different team and while it has some unnecessary graphical gimmicks (e.g. parallax scrolling), it's an overall decline as the viewport size is just too small compared to the OCS version. In fact, after testing the BBC, C64 and Amiga OCS / AGA versions of the game, I realised I prefer the original BBC version as it has the largest viewport. Well, at least for the first playthrough!

I'd rather play on real hardware and right now don't have any AGA Amiga. So definitely OCS.

The game has a lot of replay value, and due to its high levels of non-linearity, no single definitive walkthrough exists. So a BBC -> C64 -> Amiga OCS playthrough is in order

Har har, funny guy. Just the other day I was looking at my backlog and wondering... adding up all the hours each one of these games takes to complete... how many years do I have to live to finish them all? The answer of course is immortality. Or a divorce.

Also, the game features some *nefarious* copy protection scheme, similarly to Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back and Fate: Gates of Dawn. There's no obvious indication that you're using a bad crack, but if the game has detected a cracked copy, it will make certain key items required for completing the quest disappear during the endgame. Yep, but first it will let you play happily for 30-40+ hours (it's a long game)

Hm, I don't recall ever seeing Exile back in the day. Maybe the copy protection was so successful it prevented the game from being pirated and becoming well known? Actually I don't remember any games that couldn't eventually be cracked... so it might be the other way around, it never gained much notoriety and crackers didn't apply enough brainpower to it?

EDIT: The latest WHDLoad version is fine:

Thank you for your service, sir.

EDIT: Just read your Gaming on the Amiga Part 1. So you're a WHDLoad hater... It's interesting because I have a bunch of my favorite games installed with WHD but more often than not will still boot them from floppy or gotek. The "Authentic Original Experience™" matters!

 

[Rincewind]

I'd rather play on real hardware and right now don't have any AGA Amiga. So definitely OCS.

The game has a lot of replay value, and due to its high levels of non-linearity, no single definitive walkthrough exists. So a BBC -> C64 -> Amiga OCS playthrough is in order

Har har, funny guy. Just the other day I was looking at my backlog and wondering... adding up all the hours each one of these games takes to complete... how many years do I have to live to finish them all? The answer of course is immortality. Or a divorce.

Don't tell me... You haven't seen my "games to play" spreadsheet yet. The proper title would be "games to play if I lived another 100 years"... But surely it was (and still is) a lot of fun to research all those games and understand gaming history a bit better.

Also, the game features some *nefarious* copy protection scheme, similarly to Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back and Fate: Gates of Dawn. There's no obvious indication that you're using a bad crack, but if the game has detected a cracked copy, it will make certain key items required for completing the quest disappear during the endgame. Yep, but first it will let you play happily for 30-40+ hours (it's a long game)

Hm, I don't recall ever seeing Exile back in the day. Maybe the copy protection was so successful it prevented the game from being pirated and becoming well known? Actually I don't remember any games that couldn't eventually be cracked... so it might be the other way around, it never gained much notoriety and crackers didn't apply enough brainpower to it?

AFAIK, we still don't have a 100% working crack of Chaos Strikes Back as of 2023. There's a kinda working version but that doesn't play the outro when winning the game, that's the best we've got. As I explained in my article, nothing is impossible, but defeating these nefarious protections needs a lot of dedication and familiarity with the game. Most crackers aren't interested in spending 200-500+ hours on such an endeavour and to replay a 20+ hour game over and over again. Especially highly non-linear games where there is a combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes (such as many RPGs).

EDIT: The latest WHDLoad version is fine:

Thank you for your service, sir.

EDIT: Just read your Gaming on the Amiga Part 1. So you're a WHDLoad hater... It's interesting because I have a bunch of my favorite games installed with WHD but more often than not will still boot them from floppy or gotek. The "Authentic Original Experience™" matters!

Hate is a strong word, and it has its uses. I think I've made my point quite clear: it's necessary on AGA hardware as there's often no other way to run those ECS games. But when using emulation, it's largely a pointless complication and it causes more problems than it solves, in general.

Plus yeah, I just prefer OCS Amigas and the true original experience

 

[Incognito/STK]

Don't tell me... You haven't seen my "games to play" spreadsheet yet. The proper title would be "games to play if I lived another 100 years"... But surely it was (and still is) a lot of fun to research all those games and understand gaming history a bit better.

Ah, a fellow enjoyer of spreadsheets. Very prestigious. Or autistic. I actually had to make a separate "Quick backlog" tab, restraining myself to ~20 games, because the long one was getting out of hand. But indeed it's fun just researching the games.

AFAIK, we still don't have a 100% working crack of Chaos Strikes Back as of 2023. There's a kinda working version but that doesn't play the outro when winning the game, that's the best we've got. As I explained in my article, nothing is impossible, but defeating these nefarious protections needs a lot of dedication and familiarity with the game. Most crackers aren't interested in spending 200-500+ hours on such an endeavour and to replay a 20+ hour game over and over again. Especially highly non-linear games where there is a combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes (such as many RPGs).

That's interesting. I found this page where some guys discuss CSB. The copy protection, as in other games, seems to be related to the way the Amiga read the floppies. It ends with:

"I did manage to finish CSB using real harware and the disk images you provided.
Wrote them back to real disks and used my trusty old 1988 Rev. 5 A500 0,5/0,5 RAM - KS 1.3"

The linked images are still online, so now I wanna try it too. Never played CSB back in the day

 

[octavius]

What's the deal with Chaos Strikes Back?
I don't recall any problems when playing it using Amiga Forever about ten years ago.

Incidentally the Amiga version is the only version worth playing, since it's the only one with directional sound, which to me is more important than getting perfect aspect ratio for this kind of game.

 

[Rincewind]

What's the deal with Chaos Strikes Back?
I don't recall any problems when playing it using Amiga Forever about ten years ago.

Incidentally the Amiga version is the only version worth playing, since it's the only one with directional sound, which to me is more important than getting perfect aspect ratio for this kind of game.

The deal is that if the crack is not 100% correct, the game will fuck with you in various random interesting ways and it will render itself uncompletable, but only gradually over time (e.g. Dungeon Master was adding random walls a few hours after a crack was detected, among many other infuriating and amusing things...)

If you played a disk version, you must have played the crack done by SCSI of Betrayal then. You did not see the outro, did you? That cracked version works, but the intro is missing. More details about the cracked versions here (search for "Downloads" on the page):
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/591#toc13

The WHDLoad version of this game might been cracked properly then if you're saying you played it 10 years ago. So if you did not play the floppy version, you might have played the v1.1. WHDLoad conversion—good to know that is completable! Details:
https://www.whdload.de/games/ChaosStrikesBack.html

Incidentally the Amiga version is the only version worth playing, since it's the only one with directional sound, which to me is more important than getting perfect aspect ratio for this kind of game.

I agree, but we can get the correct aspect ratio in WinUAE too. See my article

 

[Rincewind]

Don't tell me... You haven't seen my "games to play" spreadsheet yet. The proper title would be "games to play if I lived another 100 years"... But surely it was (and still is) a lot of fun to research all those games and understand gaming history a bit better.

Ah, a fellow enjoyer of spreadsheets. Very prestigious. Or autistic. I actually had to make a separate "Quick backlog" tab, restraining myself to ~20 games, because the long one was getting out of hand. But indeed it's fun just researching the games.

Guess what, mine contains 1770 entries. But to hell with reason! It was fun to make, and I learned a lot about gaming during the process without actually playing anything

AFAIK, we still don't have a 100% working crack of Chaos Strikes Back as of 2023. There's a kinda working version but that doesn't play the outro when winning the game, that's the best we've got. As I explained in my article, nothing is impossible, but defeating these nefarious protections needs a lot of dedication and familiarity with the game. Most crackers aren't interested in spending 200-500+ hours on such an endeavour and to replay a 20+ hour game over and over again. Especially highly non-linear games where there is a combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes (such as many RPGs).

That's interesting. I found this page where some guys discuss CSB. The copy protection, as in other games, seems to be related to the way the Amiga read the floppies. It ends with:

"I did manage to finish CSB using real harware and the disk images you provided.
Wrote them back to real disks and used my trusty old 1988 Rev. 5 A500 0,5/0,5 RAM - KS 1.3"

The linked images are still online, so now I wanna try it too. Never played CSB back in the day

Wrote them back to real disks using what? Surely not a stock Amiga drive as those copy protections are NOT writable by standard drives. That was the whole point behind them; you needed special equipment costing several tens of thousands of dollars to duplicate those master disks. The trick was those protected disks could be *read* by Amiga drives, but not written, and the presence of the intact protection was inferred by the software from side effects, e.g., small fluctuations in the data read speeds. I think these days the KyroFlux can in theory write those images, though.

This comment of the guy from the linked post isn't confidence inspring at all. He did a speed run or something to test it? I guess he was lucky; the copy protection can take its time to kick in, maybe hours or days, then it infects your saves and fucks you over 5-10 hours later... It's pure evil (and effective).

Used the usual tips & tricks and spend like 30-40 min from start to finish without triggering copy protection.

I could´ve been just lucky?

From my notes on working versions:

WHDLoad version is supposed to be 100% tested.

The version cracked by SCSI of Betrayal seems to work, except the ending animation is missing.
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/591

 

[octavius]

I played the floppy version, and I remember that I did finish it, and that not seeing the ending animation sounds familiar.

 

[Neuromancer]

Speaking about the best games of the 80s, there's an absolutely marvellous gem of a game called Exile, originally released for the BBC Micro & Acorn 1988, then the Amiga & C64 ports came out in 1991.

In 1991 also an Atari ST port was released.

Not having played the game and only seen the screenshots, I guess it was like with most games of its time:
Same graphics and gameplay as the Amiga port, but inferior sound.

 

[Rincewind]

I played the floppy version, and I remember that I did finish it, and that not seeing the ending animation sounds familiar.

As there is only one known completable floppy crack, that answers it, yeah

 

[mediocrepoet]

As there is only one known completable floppy crack, that answers it, yeah

Wasn't really paying attention and thought I was reading GD for a minute.