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Psygnosis' Shadow of the Beast used halfbrite, and was heavy on the copper effects too. Gameplay kinda sucked, but it was a hell of a demo against an ST or PC.

Psygnosis' Shadow of the Beast used halfbrite, and was heavy on the copper effects too. Gameplay kinda sucked, but it was a hell of a demo against an ST or PC. When it was released no one had seen anything like it. :) Edit: I suspected many Psygnosis titles used EHB, so I did a quick search, and discovered that the surreal barn-owl based defender clone -- Agony (Shades of Jeff Minter?) indeed used EHB, then got easily sidetracked as someone has made a UE4 based PC clone of it. https://gamejolt.com/games/agony-unofficial-remake-demo/160108 https://gamejolt.com/games/agony-unofficial-remake-demo/1601...

z303 7y ago
Codetapper has a nice breakdown of how it did things https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...
gpderetta 7y ago
I still vividly remember Agony beautiful soundtrack. The game itself was very pretty but gameplay was nothing exceptional.
vidarh 7y ago
I remember my friends and I spent far more time showing it off to people than actually playing it properly. Which fits, as people involved basically later described the original Shadow of the Beast pretty much as a graphics showcase with "no thought whatsoever" going into more than showing more parallax scrolling and more monsters in. It's hard to show it to people now and have them understand just how jaw-dropping it looked to people at the time, both to Amiga users, but especially to PC users where most people still did not have graphics cards capable of lots of colours and smooth scrolling with even a single parallax layer, much less the dozen or so in Shadow of the Beast... I also just realised the intro I remembered showing friends is the intro for Shadow of the Beast II, a game I never bothered playing - but where "everyone" had seen the couple of minutes of animation of the intro, at a time when having a long animated intro like that was in itself a big deal.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Also the smoothness - locked at 50 frames per second, it was mesmerising. I came from the MSX computers, which usually had blocky character per character scrolling, or slower animations. The PC games were usually even crappier then that. And the Amiga stereo sound, was also incredible if you happened to play a game on a stereo TV set. Most games didn't even bother to mix the sound properly (to slow CPU and/or too few channels, 2 for left, 2 for right) but that the sound had some kind of "depth" not present in mono speakers, also added to the subconscious feeling that this is different. (3D games - Wolfenstein & Doom - instantly switched the tables, it was obvious that the parrot was not merely pining but actually dead.)
Flow 7y ago
Most Amiga games with parallax used dual playfields mode. AFAIK, you couldn't combine that with EHB. Shadow of The Beast used dual playfield graphics, not EHB. Agony too, for gameplay. Title screen etc could be EHB. https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

z303 7y ago

Codetapper has a nice breakdown of how it did things https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

gpderetta 7y ago

I still vividly remember Agony beautiful soundtrack. The game itself was very pretty but gameplay was nothing exceptional.

vidarh 7y ago

I remember my friends and I spent far more time showing it off to people than actually playing it properly. Which fits, as people involved basically later described the original Shadow of the Beast pretty much as a graphics showcase with "no thought whatsoever" going into more than showing more parallax scrolling and more monsters in. It's hard to show it to people now and have them understand just how jaw-dropping it looked to people at the time, both to Amiga users, but especially to PC users where most people still did not have graphics cards capable of lots of colours and smooth scrolling with even a single parallax layer, much less the dozen or so in Shadow of the Beast... I also just realised the intro I remembered showing friends is the intro for Shadow of the Beast II, a game I never bothered playing - but where "everyone" had seen the couple of minutes of animation of the intro, at a time when having a long animated intro like that was in itself a big deal.

jacobush 7y ago
Also the smoothness - locked at 50 frames per second, it was mesmerising. I came from the MSX computers, which usually had blocky character per character scrolling, or slower animations. The PC games were usually even crappier then that. And the Amiga stereo sound, was also incredible if you happened to play a game on a stereo TV set. Most games didn't even bother to mix the sound properly (to slow CPU and/or too few channels, 2 for left, 2 for right) but that the sound had some kind of "depth" not present in mono speakers, also added to the subconscious feeling that this is different. (3D games - Wolfenstein & Doom - instantly switched the tables, it was obvious that the parrot was not merely pining but actually dead.)

Flow 7y ago

Most Amiga games with parallax used dual playfields mode. AFAIK, you couldn't combine that with EHB. Shadow of The Beast used dual playfield graphics, not EHB. Agony too, for gameplay. Title screen etc could be EHB. https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...