16 ms·

Another World ported to FPGA

303 points by retro_guy 3y ago

29athrowaway 3y ago
The intro was fantastic. Even with a PC speaker / no sound card. Having to swim away as your first action, and then escape from some kind of lion is one of the most brutal game experiences ever. Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever.
- crtasm 3y ago
  and not just the intro but the entire game fit on a single floppy disk, blew my mind.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  I'll never forget the "dialogue" in the game either, right after you get rescued from that lion thing by your new friend. konanaka beetzai! motsuubo! /wave
  - the_af 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, your alien friend never rescues you from the beast. The ones who shoot the beast (and then you) are the "bad" aliens ;)
  - jakemauer 3y ago
    Mykaruba!
- guiambros 3y ago
  > Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever. I don't remember playing for much more than a few minutes (maybe a couple of hours), and barely making any progress, but that intro and the initial escape got etched in my memory for all those years. The dramatic camera effects of this game were indeed out of this world for the time.
  - the_af 3y ago
    The game itself is barely a couple of hours. It's very, very short. I wonder, if the intro made such an impression on you, why didn't you finish it?
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      I also didn't finish it. The game is hard and requires more patience than usual to figure it out.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        It was on par with games at the time though.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        Definitely a short, and not hard at all, game. I beat it without difficulty when I was single-digit aged. It's absolutely worth it, and better late than never.
        recursive 3y ago
        Maybe you're just a good gamer. I was absolutely stumped.
        joshspankit 3y ago
        As a general rule: Try not to take your subjective experience and imply that it’s either the universal experience or objectively true.
    - recursive 3y ago
      I'm in the same boat. I could not figure out how to get past the second screen. But I still remember those few minutes very clearly these decades later.
      - the_af 3y ago
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  > Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever. I’ve never player that game, but it’s been engraved in my mind for 30 years just from a 2 min? segment in a promotional VHS tape that came with a videogames magazine. Also the artwork in the cover is amazing.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  I have the same memory of playing for one minute and getting stuck. I went back to it 25 years later and beat it. Once you get over the reaction-time hump, it’s a glorious and memorable game.
erickhill 3y ago
"Only Amiga makes it possible" is being replaced by FPGA 30 years later.
retro_guy 3y ago
See as well: - Infernal Runner for Amstrad CPC reverse-engineering and JavaScript port by cyxx [title from creator of Another World, both games utilizing virtual machine architecture]: https://github.com/cyxx/infernal_js https://github.com/cyxx/infernal_js - The Virtual Machine Architecture of Infernal Runner presentation by Norbert Kehrer (in German with English slides): https://media.ccc.de/v/vcfb20_-_146_-_en_-_202010111400_-_the_virtual_machine_architecture_of_infernal_runner_-_norbert_kehrer https://media.ccc.de/v/vcfb20_-_146_-_en_-_202010111400_-_th... - The Story of Another World on the Amiga | MVG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iz9PJbs5rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iz9PJbs5rE - Nintendo 64 port of Another World: https://github.com/jnmartin84/aw64 https://github.com/jnmartin84/aw64 - Another World PlayStation 1 port: https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/rawpsx https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/rawpsx
derbOac 3y ago
Off topic, but I was excited to find out Another World is on Steam... but isn't available to play on macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. The incompatibility with 32-bit makes me extremely frustrated; it seems as if in 2023, with quantum computing, DL models, and people porting games like this to FPGA, there should be a way to get 32-bit software to run on modern hardware. It's bizarre to me. Steam specifically recommends not upgrading your mac OS to play these older games. Is all this software going to become unusable because of this sort of thing?
- bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
  Only macOS dropped 32bit compat. Join linux my friend
  - VHRanger 3y ago
    Android is dropping 32bit support. I can't play planescape: torment on my phone because of this.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Yes, you can. Find a gemrb build for Android, maybe from F-Droid.
      - VHRanger 3y ago
        Link? I spent 2h the other day trying to patch the apk to use APIs that would be compatible,and it still wouldn't start
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    True, I run a vanilla fedora, never touched the driver and buy most games on steam without thinking about compatibility. ( I play low demanding games, but still )
- bzzzt 3y ago
  There's no business case in making sure those old titles persist and publishers mostly forget about them after initial sales are made. You can play the MS-DOS port in QEMU, so I presume there will eventually be some emulation layer capable of running the HD release.
pengaru 3y ago
The original developer of Another World did a GDC postmortem, it's one of the better GDC talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA IIRC He shows some of his development tools including how he could modify and step through animation directly line by line in VM bytecode.
msephton 3y ago
I can't tell if this is just the intro rather than the full game?
tombert 3y ago
I remember playing Out of this World on my Sega Genesis as a kid, and I could not believe that graphics would ever get better than this; I had never seen fully animated cutscenes like that on my Sega and thought it was incredible. Obviously graphics did get better, but I feel like Another World still holds its own artistically. The graphics are still very stylish and distinct, and upon replaying the game again about a year ago, I am still really impressed by it. The game isn’t perfect; a lot of the puzzles and stuff sort of just come down to trial and error and it’s extremely short, but I also don’t think I would change a thing about it. It’s sort of in a different category, but for fans of Another World, I recommend also checking out Flashback: The Quest for Identity. It’s got a similar cinematic vibe, and while I didn’t like it at first it’s really grown on me in the last decade or so.
- efnx 3y ago
  I found flashback first, on sega. I loved it instantly. Later on I played Out of this World and it took a bit before I got into it. The two are great works of art though.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Flashback is a bit more approachable; it is a bit more actioney and honestly might be a better game in an “objective” sense, if such a thing can exists, but for some reason I’ve always liked Another World a bit better. Maybe it’s just because of the bizarre artistic nature of the entire thing, or maybe it’s because I played Another World first, but something about it has always just stuck with me.
- theragra 3y ago
  I liked flashback so much, I tried to complete it on expert. Stuck somewhere closer to the end, though, cannot defeat slime man
- slim 3y ago
  Flashback has a sequel : Fade to black
pbj1968 3y ago
Because of this thread, I finally admitted to myself I was never going to figure this game out and watched a play through on YouTube. 22 minutes! I think I got past the lion once.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nickelpro 3y ago
For anyone confused by the HDL, it's the author's custom language: https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master It provides a compiler to Verilog that then can be fed to traditional design flows.
83457 3y ago
The Story of Another World on Amiga, Technical Wizardry https://youtu.be/0iz9PJbs5rE https://youtu.be/0iz9PJbs5rE
wzdd 3y ago
> [Transparency] introduces some complexity in the rasterizer. To flip only one bit [of the colour value] we need to know the prior value of the pixel at this location. This is like one of only three advantages to using planar graphics, like the Amiga did. With bitplanes you don't need to read back video memory: you just assume the top bit is for transparency effects only and blat out your spans. [The other two advantages are cool moire effects because you can move the planes relative to each other, and memory / bus bandwidth efficiency for awkward colour depths which don't fit nicely into a byte or a nybble, like 8 (3 bits per pixel) or 32 (5 bits per pixel)]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 3y ago
This is quite cool project.
burglins 3y ago
I wonder how common were full game VMs in the 90s. For a game older than myself, wouldn't a VM layer incur a great performance penalty on PCs from that time?
- thepawn1 3y ago
  "older than myself" #rightinthefeels
- dragontamer 3y ago
  It was far more important to have the same software work on Amiga, x86 (DOS), Mac and the whole slew of different machines than came and went. Today we have fewer machines than the great explosive growth of the 80s. Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. It's not like those portability concerns didn't exist in the 80s, if anything, it was harder because you had to make your own interpreter back then. --------- Many (maybe most?) video games seem to have been written in a VM, at least before Doom / high performance 3d graphics. I think console games were in C/Assembly for performance. But 'computer' games at that time was before the standard IBM PC or at least, before the PC won and Microsoft achieved dominance. When you didn't know if Amiga, PC98, IBM PC, Mac, or others would win it only made sense to write a VM. SCUMM (Monkey Island and many others) comes to mind.
  - einpoklum 3y ago
    > Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. I thought most software was MS Excel sheets with interacting formulae :-)
    - pdw 3y ago
      And as it happens, early versions of Excel used a bytecode running on a VM instead of native code. Though the motivation was not portability, but rather memory requirements: > In most cases, p-code can reduce the size of an executable file by about 40 percent. For example, the Windows Project Manager version 1.0 (resource files not included) shrinks from 932K (C/C++ 7.0 with size optimizations turned on) to 556K when p-code is employed. > Until now, p-code has been a proprietary technology developed by the applications group at Microsoft and used on a variety of internal projects. The retail releases of Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint®, and other applications employ this technology to provide extensive breadth of functionality without consuming inordinate amounts of memory. http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%20Technology_msdn_c7pcode2.pdf http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%...
thepawn1 3y ago
Loved this game. Still holds up...

303 points by retro_guy 3y ago

The intro was fantastic. Even with a PC speaker / no sound card. Having to swim away as your first action, and then escape from some kind of lion is one of the most brutal game experiences ever. Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever.

crtasm 3y ago
and not just the intro but the entire game fit on a single floppy disk, blew my mind.
ChainOfFools 3y ago
I'll never forget the "dialogue" in the game either, right after you get rescued from that lion thing by your new friend. konanaka beetzai! motsuubo! /wave
- the_af 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, your alien friend never rescues you from the beast. The ones who shoot the beast (and then you) are the "bad" aliens ;)
- jakemauer 3y ago
  Mykaruba!
guiambros 3y ago
> Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever. I don't remember playing for much more than a few minutes (maybe a couple of hours), and barely making any progress, but that intro and the initial escape got etched in my memory for all those years. The dramatic camera effects of this game were indeed out of this world for the time.
- the_af 3y ago
  The game itself is barely a couple of hours. It's very, very short. I wonder, if the intro made such an impression on you, why didn't you finish it?
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    I also didn't finish it. The game is hard and requires more patience than usual to figure it out.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      It was on par with games at the time though.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      Definitely a short, and not hard at all, game. I beat it without difficulty when I was single-digit aged. It's absolutely worth it, and better late than never.
      - recursive 3y ago
        Maybe you're just a good gamer. I was absolutely stumped.
      - joshspankit 3y ago
        As a general rule: Try not to take your subjective experience and imply that it’s either the universal experience or objectively true.
  - recursive 3y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I could not figure out how to get past the second screen. But I still remember those few minutes very clearly these decades later.
    - the_af 3y ago
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever. I’ve never player that game, but it’s been engraved in my mind for 30 years just from a 2 min? segment in a promotional VHS tape that came with a videogames magazine. Also the artwork in the cover is amazing.
dougmwne 3y ago
I have the same memory of playing for one minute and getting stuck. I went back to it 25 years later and beat it. Once you get over the reaction-time hump, it’s a glorious and memorable game.

erickhill 3y ago

"Only Amiga makes it possible" is being replaced by FPGA 30 years later.

retro_guy 3y ago

See as well: - Infernal Runner for Amstrad CPC reverse-engineering and JavaScript port by cyxx [title from creator of Another World, both games utilizing virtual machine architecture]: https://github.com/cyxx/infernal_js https://github.com/cyxx/infernal_js - The Virtual Machine Architecture of Infernal Runner presentation by Norbert Kehrer (in German with English slides): https://media.ccc.de/v/vcfb20_-_146_-_en_-_202010111400_-_the_virtual_machine_architecture_of_infernal_runner_-_norbert_kehrer https://media.ccc.de/v/vcfb20_-_146_-_en_-_202010111400_-_th... - The Story of Another World on the Amiga | MVG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iz9PJbs5rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iz9PJbs5rE - Nintendo 64 port of Another World: https://github.com/jnmartin84/aw64 https://github.com/jnmartin84/aw64 - Another World PlayStation 1 port: https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/rawpsx https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/rawpsx

derbOac 3y ago

Off topic, but I was excited to find out Another World is on Steam... but isn't available to play on macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. The incompatibility with 32-bit makes me extremely frustrated; it seems as if in 2023, with quantum computing, DL models, and people porting games like this to FPGA, there should be a way to get 32-bit software to run on modern hardware. It's bizarre to me. Steam specifically recommends not upgrading your mac OS to play these older games. Is all this software going to become unusable because of this sort of thing?

bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
Only macOS dropped 32bit compat. Join linux my friend
- VHRanger 3y ago
  Android is dropping 32bit support. I can't play planescape: torment on my phone because of this.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Yes, you can. Find a gemrb build for Android, maybe from F-Droid.
    - VHRanger 3y ago
      Link? I spent 2h the other day trying to patch the apk to use APIs that would be compatible,and it still wouldn't start
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  True, I run a vanilla fedora, never touched the driver and buy most games on steam without thinking about compatibility. ( I play low demanding games, but still )
bzzzt 3y ago
There's no business case in making sure those old titles persist and publishers mostly forget about them after initial sales are made. You can play the MS-DOS port in QEMU, so I presume there will eventually be some emulation layer capable of running the HD release.

pengaru 3y ago

The original developer of Another World did a GDC postmortem, it's one of the better GDC talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA IIRC He shows some of his development tools including how he could modify and step through animation directly line by line in VM bytecode.

msephton 3y ago

I can't tell if this is just the intro rather than the full game?

tombert 3y ago

I remember playing Out of this World on my Sega Genesis as a kid, and I could not believe that graphics would ever get better than this; I had never seen fully animated cutscenes like that on my Sega and thought it was incredible. Obviously graphics did get better, but I feel like Another World still holds its own artistically. The graphics are still very stylish and distinct, and upon replaying the game again about a year ago, I am still really impressed by it. The game isn’t perfect; a lot of the puzzles and stuff sort of just come down to trial and error and it’s extremely short, but I also don’t think I would change a thing about it. It’s sort of in a different category, but for fans of Another World, I recommend also checking out Flashback: The Quest for Identity. It’s got a similar cinematic vibe, and while I didn’t like it at first it’s really grown on me in the last decade or so.

efnx 3y ago
I found flashback first, on sega. I loved it instantly. Later on I played Out of this World and it took a bit before I got into it. The two are great works of art though.
- tombert 3y ago
  Flashback is a bit more approachable; it is a bit more actioney and honestly might be a better game in an “objective” sense, if such a thing can exists, but for some reason I’ve always liked Another World a bit better. Maybe it’s just because of the bizarre artistic nature of the entire thing, or maybe it’s because I played Another World first, but something about it has always just stuck with me.
theragra 3y ago
I liked flashback so much, I tried to complete it on expert. Stuck somewhere closer to the end, though, cannot defeat slime man
slim 3y ago
Flashback has a sequel : Fade to black

pbj1968 3y ago

Because of this thread, I finally admitted to myself I was never going to figure this game out and watched a play through on YouTube. 22 minutes! I think I got past the lion once.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nickelpro 3y ago

For anyone confused by the HDL, it's the author's custom language: https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master It provides a compiler to Verilog that then can be fed to traditional design flows.

83457 3y ago

The Story of Another World on Amiga, Technical Wizardry https://youtu.be/0iz9PJbs5rE https://youtu.be/0iz9PJbs5rE

wzdd 3y ago

> [Transparency] introduces some complexity in the rasterizer. To flip only one bit [of the colour value] we need to know the prior value of the pixel at this location. This is like one of only three advantages to using planar graphics, like the Amiga did. With bitplanes you don't need to read back video memory: you just assume the top bit is for transparency effects only and blat out your spans. [The other two advantages are cool moire effects because you can move the planes relative to each other, and memory / bus bandwidth efficiency for awkward colour depths which don't fit nicely into a byte or a nybble, like 8 (3 bits per pixel) or 32 (5 bits per pixel)]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 3y ago

This is quite cool project.

burglins 3y ago

I wonder how common were full game VMs in the 90s. For a game older than myself, wouldn't a VM layer incur a great performance penalty on PCs from that time?

thepawn1 3y ago
"older than myself" #rightinthefeels
dragontamer 3y ago
It was far more important to have the same software work on Amiga, x86 (DOS), Mac and the whole slew of different machines than came and went. Today we have fewer machines than the great explosive growth of the 80s. Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. It's not like those portability concerns didn't exist in the 80s, if anything, it was harder because you had to make your own interpreter back then. --------- Many (maybe most?) video games seem to have been written in a VM, at least before Doom / high performance 3d graphics. I think console games were in C/Assembly for performance. But 'computer' games at that time was before the standard IBM PC or at least, before the PC won and Microsoft achieved dominance. When you didn't know if Amiga, PC98, IBM PC, Mac, or others would win it only made sense to write a VM. SCUMM (Monkey Island and many others) comes to mind.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  > Consider that most 'software' today is JavaScript interpreted by the Web Browser. I thought most software was MS Excel sheets with interacting formulae :-)
  - pdw 3y ago
    And as it happens, early versions of Excel used a bytecode running on a VM instead of native code. Though the motivation was not portability, but rather memory requirements: > In most cases, p-code can reduce the size of an executable file by about 40 percent. For example, the Windows Project Manager version 1.0 (resource files not included) shrinks from 932K (C/C++ 7.0 with size optimizations turned on) to 556K when p-code is employed. > Until now, p-code has been a proprietary technology developed by the applications group at Microsoft and used on a variety of internal projects. The retail releases of Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint®, and other applications employ this technology to provide extensive breadth of functionality without consuming inordinate amounts of memory. http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%20Technology_msdn_c7pcode2.pdf http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%...

thepawn1 3y ago

Loved this game. Still holds up...