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Grind – A first person shooter for Amiga 500
- vardump 3y agoLooks absolutely amazing considering Amiga 500 limitations. Same renderer as in Dread, a newish Amiga game.
- ekianjo 3y agoThe video is on a A1200
- actionfromafar 3y agoStill amazing compared to what was out in say, 1992 on the Amiga. (3D games wise.)
- ekianjo 3y agoYes still very impressive
- rasz 3y agowith fast ram. That pretty much means additional accelerator card because Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994. You could argue it still cheaper than PC, lets count. A1200 bare system £276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... 4-8MB fast ram £200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mo... 340MB £380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo... 14 multisync monitor ~£320 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mo... ~£1200-1400. 1994 £/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170. To quote a classic I feel like Im taking crazy pills. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_specs_of_my_1800_dollar_pc_in_1994_amazing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp... 486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840
- tuukkah 3y agoFast RAM is not in the minimum requirements, but I don't remember how 10 FPS compares to Doom.
- vardump 3y ago~8-10 fps is about what this game gets on an Amiga 500 without true Fast RAM. Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with that.
- ChrisClark 3y ago> Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with that. I was happy with 5 fps or less on the gameboy with Faceball 2000.
- Zardoz84 3y agoBack in the day, I was playing DooM 2 on a 386DX 40MHz and was very fine. And Rebel Assault on 14fps. Also, I managed to play DooM 3 on a GeForce 2 MX DDR (using the patch sets to allow it to run on Voodo cards).
- ekianjo 3y ago512k Fast RAM Extension on the Amiga 500 was VERY common back in the days, as many games benefited from it.
- snvzz 3y ago>512k Fast RAM Extension Has never been common on Amiga 500. Perhaps you mean 512k SLOW RAM Extension. Or CHIP RAM (after a motherboard solder-jumper adjustment) with the ECS Agnus common in late A500 models.
- einr 3y agoAnd after all that, you'd still have a 68020 under the hood. You could, of course, spend an eye-watering amount of money on a 68040 accelerator... and then... you're still not going to beat the DX2/66. (Let's not even talk about the performance of AGA versus a local bus SVGA card) It feels like I've heard so many Amiga users say that they finally broke down and jumped ship when Doom and the DX2/66 dropped. It really was a gamechanger. Before then it was possible to argue that a '040 Amiga 4000 still held its own against a DX/33 or maybe even a DX/50, but not this. There were a lot of things that came together to kill the Amiga, mostly Commodore's mismanagement, mismarketing and complacency, but as the final blow to it being a viable computer with a future in the eyes of consumers, I feel like the DX2/66 was it. It would have killed the Mac too if Apple hadn't woken up to smell the coffee a few years prior and had Power Macs ready to go.
- 7thaccount 3y agoGraphics look amazing and the game looks fun. I get the feeling the player in the first video has played the game many many times lol. Are they still making those new Amiga systems implemented on an FPGA?
- ekianjo 3y agoThe Vampire series? Yes
- 7thaccount 3y agoDang. $750 USD is a lot. Do you own one of the products listed on their site? Is the Amiga scene fun?
- navjack27 3y agoDo not vampire. It's just not good
- mortenjorck 3y agoI love the imaginative, alt-history attention to detail: rather than a derivative clone of Wolfenstein or Doom, this looks like something The Bitmap Brothers might have produced in 1993 if they'd had access to another 30 years of community knowledge optimizing for the Amiga's great-for-2D but not-great-for-3D architecture.
- lttlrck 3y agoYes, exactly this. What a masterpiece.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoLook, I don't want to talk down on this beautiful thing...but let's be honest: it's barely more than a doom reskin. It's not trying to be, either.
- badsectoracula 3y agoI think the Bitmap Brothers mention is because the 2D graphics feel very Amiga-ish / BB-ish. When i read the comment i wondered "why the Bitmap Brothers reference?" but once i saw the screenshot i thought "ah, i see". Compare the textures/2D artwork of, say, Doom, Duke3D or Blood and then the sprites of something like Chaos Engine, Gods (even the DOS versions) or even some of their 90s PC games like Z and i think you'll see how the visual style of Grind is closer to that of Bitmap Brothers' games than to Doom/Duke3D/Blood/etc.
- whizzter 3y agoIt's on a Amiga 500, it has about 3 MIPS of performance or about 4x less than a 486sx25 that has about 12 (yes, 68k had a couple of extra registers). On top of that the Amiga500 graphics chip placed all graphics in bitplanes, that was a great move for just copying 2d graphics in the mid 80s with the help of simple hardware acceleration, but it really became a pain for anyone wanting to do 3d graphics. To call it a reskin is quite a disparagement of the amount of work they've probably had to put in to get in running decently (unless they figured out a very clever way to make the hardware do a fair chunk of the work for them, kudos either way). And as others have pointed out, it's that they've chosen a more "amiga-y" artstyle.
- kristopolous 3y agoI know nothing about this. What's up with the vertical lines for color variations here? Is there some kind of hardware trick why that technique is used? The last time I wrote a 2.5D engine was over 25 years ago so please be gentle
- actionfromafar 3y agoI suspect it's a way to dither with few colors, and possibly a way to render textures very quickly into the Amigas peculiar pixel format. One pixel is not a triplet or bytes, or even a single byte. One byte is 8 pixels! And that's for monochrome. (Pure black and pure white.) To have more colors, you add more of these "bit planes" on top of each other. So if you have say, 32 colors and want to update a single pixel, you have to write four bytes, changing only the one bit in every one of these four bytes. This is not very nice when you try to sweep textures on a 3D-ish mesh. (But very good for 2D graphics with large chunks bobbing up and down.)
- kristopolous 3y agoah that would explain why the rendering is a bunch of rectangles. Is this a classical vga mode (320x(either 200 or 240) x 256 color)?
- actionfromafar 3y agoMy guess without looking to closely, it's 32 colors, because that's max what the Amiga 500 could display at a time. Definitely 320x200 something.
- ekianjo 3y agoThe Amiga could display more colors than that with copper hacks though. Look at Shadow of the Beast.
- z303 3y agoI expect you are correct. The Amiga (except some early 1000s) also had a Extra Half Brite mode that has 6 bitplanes, 64 colours with the second 32 being half the brightness of the others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode The extra data fetching does slow things down. https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102990#:~:text=And%20unlike%20the%20double%20playfield,brite%20mode%20is%20very%20slow https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102990#:~:text=And%20.... The panel at the bottom looks like it uses the copper to have a different palette to the rest of the screen. That is a very common effect. https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...
- bee_rider 3y agoDid the Amiga 500 have better graphics than the PCs of the early 90’s? Because those graphics look a bit better than Wolfenstein 3D.
- dabeeeenster 3y agoYeah they did at the time for sure. When the A500 was released PC games were generally CGA/EGA. The A500 was way ahead of its time, especially when you account for how much they cost.
- bee_rider 3y agoWhat really impressed me is that I was born around the same time as the A500 but I remember playing PC games that looked worse than this, hahaha. Part of it is surely that I was using hand-me-down PCs and there was probably some time lag on the games that my dad would get through the sneaker-net. The art style is also really solid and modern which I’m sure helps hide some of the limitations.
- markmark 3y agoAround the time I got my A500, my neighbour's dad bought a PC that ran California Games in CGA at about one frame per second. I'm sure there were much better PCs available, but it didn't impress us kids much. They _did_ have Leisure Suit Larry though...
- rasz 3y agoSounds like something like Amstrad PC1512 - ~$100 cheaper than Amiga 500, cheaper even that Atari 520ST with mono monitor.
- actionfromafar 3y agoYes and no. It's complicated. For textured 3D games, even with 256 colors, the PCs with VGA were better. Wolfenstein catered to EGA, with 16 colors. For smooth frame synced 2D games (no lag, no jitterynes, no tearing) Amiga was hands down better, but those kinds of games were falling out of style in the early 90s.
- aidos 3y agoThis is not how I remember games on the Amiga. Having said that, I loved the games and graphics on the Amiga. It just felt like a beautiful visual experience.
- pornel 3y agoBack in the day Cytadela (Citadel) has been the first and probably the only Wolfenstein clone supporting Amiga 500: https://youtu.be/BpiqAN8URAU?t=376 https://youtu.be/BpiqAN8URAU?t=376
- nathell 3y agoThere was also Ubek, but it required a 68020. https://www.ppa.pl/gry/ubek.html https://www.ppa.pl/gry/ubek.html
- cyberax 3y agoWant something to blow your mind? Here is a 3D FPS on ZX-Spectrum: https://youtu.be/tiV8ZPmmoJI?t=106 https://youtu.be/tiV8ZPmmoJI?t=106 or https://youtu.be/3v7cFGneuaw?t=66 https://youtu.be/3v7cFGneuaw?t=66 This is running on a computer with a 3.5MHz CPU, no hardware multiplication, and only 48K of RAM.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Findecanor 3y ago"Just" a demo with no enemies, but on a Commodore 128: https://youtu.be/1tDflgqJlTw https://youtu.be/1tDflgqJlTw
- ruk_booze 3y agoIt is originally from the C64 demo ”Andropolis” by Booze Design and Instinct. Coded by Andreas Larsson, the guy/genius who ported Eye of the Beholder to the C64. Here is the same thing in turbo mode on an Ultimate 64: https://youtube.com/shorts/fF2IXTwWDPQ?si=ds5-5Kwm95Zj2vtf https://youtube.com/shorts/fF2IXTwWDPQ?si=ds5-5Kwm95Zj2vtf And with no vsync: https://youtube.com/shorts/hvmNnwz7ENQ?si=mDVQLWx3T8hnrbuC https://youtube.com/shorts/hvmNnwz7ENQ?si=mDVQLWx3T8hnrbuC
- pbj1968 3y agoOnce people know something is possible with video games, they tend to imitate it fairly well across platforms. I like to use Street Fighter 2 as an example… good ports on PCE, SNES, Genesis.. and surprisingly decent bootlegs on NES and others. But until it hit arcades, there was nothing else like it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bgeeek 3y agoNo, it's a 128. The obvious giveaway being the audio.
- malfist 3y agoThis is different than Grindr, a couch co-op shooter
- sgt 3y agoShoot-em in.
- lizardking 3y agoReddit is that way, sir
- bartread 3y agoOooooooookay, so I'm not about to do this down, because I think it's awesome, but I do think it's time for a little more up-front transparency here. When I clicked through and hit play on the first video I braced myself for the worst framerate in human history and/or a tiny viewport, and so my jaw briefly dropped when I was greeted with neither of those. The game is basically fullscreen and runs great: a perfectly respectable (for the time - I know a lot of you will moan about games that don't run at a constant 60fps but, man, maybe you don't know what it was like back then) 25 - 30fps, and a frankly amazing framerate for the Amiga. Plenty of 2D games couldn't have reliably held that and just forget it for any kind of 3D. Then my rational mind kicked in with, "There's no effin way that's running on an A500 with a stock 68k CPU running at 7.16/7.09MHz." And, sadly, I'm right: there is no effin way. The footage was recorded from an A1200 with a stock 68020 running at 14MHz. The graphics are OCS compatible, and I've no doubt the engine is caning the OCS blitter to within an inch of its life, so it looks exactly the same as it would on an A500, but you ain't getting that kind of framerate without more horsies than the A500's 68k can supply. With that being said, the game runs at 10 - 12 fps on a stock A500 with 1MB RAM (512K chip + 512K fast, so you need the 1.3 ROMs and the Fatter Agnus), which is still incredibly impressive. For a lot of solid polygon 3D games back in the day - think F/A-18 Interceptor, F-19 Stealth Fighter, and even games like Starglider 2 - drops to single digit framerates if not exactly the norm, were certainly commonplace (I remember F-19 being particularly bad for this). I seem to remember the Amiga version of Elite held a pretty decent framerate but, to be fair, the polygon count was very low, and it had a pretty small viewport. By comparison with these games, the Grind visuals, at 10 - 12 fps, on a bog standard A500 with an absolutely era appropriate amount of memory are nothing short of extraordinary. If, in 1990 - 1993, or even after I'd first played DOOM on a mate's dad's 486SX in summer 1994, you'd shown me Grind running on my Amiga 500 at 10 - 12 FPS I would probably have fainted or jizzed myself or something equally ridiculous. It would have literally blown my mind. Incredible work. EDIT: Is it me or is the shotgun sound effect a slightly edited version of the DOOM shotgun sound effect? Not complaining, because it's an awesome sound, but just wondering if others are hearing the same thing I am.
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- DennisL123 3y agoIn the nineties this would have saved the entire platform.
- bluescrn 3y agoNah, might have helped give it a bit more life for another year or two, but even if the Amiga (and Commodore) survived the era of Doom (386/486s), it was never going to survive the arrival of Quake and Pentiums, let alone the arrival of GPUs that was to follow shortly after.
- vidarh 3y agoThe thing is, Commodore might have been as little as months away from getting the next gen chipset to production if they'd had just a bit better sales through '92 and '93. They were producing samples '92 onwards but struggled to afford iterations. They were mismanaged enough that they might well have failed to leverage that and just failed a year or two later as you said, and it might very well be that even the best case of completing AAA[1] would just have bought them another extra couple of years. But Commodore had faced crunches like that several times and survived and bounced back massively. So who knows what things might look like if AAA had gone to market (with chunky graphics modes, and massively increased memory bandwidth) and bought them enough sales and by extension time to complete the next-iteration - Hombre[2] - as well. Though Hombre was based on PA RISC, so might well have ended up being the death-knell instead a bit later. Though their "backwards compatibility" story for it was based on options of either a "classic Amiga on a chip" or emulation, so maybe they'd have gotten to a sufficiently CPU agnostic position to be able to make further architecture switches survivable. It's fun to speculate. I'm a bit of two minds about it - I'd have loved the Amiga to have survived longer - I still miss it -, but I'm unsure if I'd have liked the direction Commodore would have taken it in with Hombre (which was being designed to also run Windows NT... Shudder). It's easier to have nostalgia when later iterations haven't ruined the original experience... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
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- kapitanjakc 3y agogetting Doom vibes... Looks nice GG
- simne 3y agoFrom PC perspective, very unusual view, when control panel is rendered much better than game itself :) - Looks like Mona Lisa paint in 8 bit, but it's frame is 16 bit.
- leidenfrost 3y agoI'm sure it looks miles better with a CRT
- dansalvato 3y agoFellow Amiga game dev here. The Amiga dev scene is alive and well, and I feel like these past five years especially, we've seen some mindblowing stuff on the platform. If you haven't seen any recent Amiga demoscene entries, you're in for a treat. I'm tempted to share a whole list of demos, but here is a particularly amazing one released earlier this year that runs on a stock A500: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jciCr8zEhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jciCr8zEhw
- postmodest 3y agoAre people doing this on vintage hardware or new hardware? (Or emulation?)
- qingcharles 3y agoIf I was doing it (as an ex demo coder) I would do as much as I could in emulator to make my life easier and then test it on the hardware and hope for the best. Demo coding is one of those annoying things where real hardware is absolutely essential because you are often doing things which aren't properly emulated. This demo didn't impress me that much, I was actually hoping for more. Maybe I've just forgotten how underpowered the Amiga OCS was for things like this? Second Reality by Future Crew on the PC is still my #1.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe Amiga 500 is extremely well emulated by now though.
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoA 33 MHz 486 CPU (the recommended spec for Second Reality to run smoothly) is MUCH more powerful than the 7 MHz 68000 of the A500... It's not just nearly 5 times faster, the 486 is way more cycle efficient, not to mention having a nice byte-addressable bitmap screen to draw into (vs 2-6 separate bitplanes). So yeah you forgot how underpowered OCS Amigas are :)
- scrame 3y agoman, I remember the "chunky vs planar" usenet megathreads when DOOM came out, amazing that it's still producing results 30 years later. I miss my old A500, but not slip/ppp, x/y/zmodem downloads and the terrifying floppy checksum errors.
- blue1 3y agoIn the last years I remember also using ftp (and its now-forgotten relative fsp)
- dalant979 3y agoYou can find great videos documenting development of the “Dread” engine (which this game is based on) here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-3inz2kpSUPGYZwBUAbJjaj-klo4nErb https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-3inz2kpSUPGYZwBUAbJjaj-...
- darkwater 3y agoI wonder how many people working on the Amiga scene were not even born when Amiga was in its best days.
- finnjohnsen2 3y agoJudging from Amiga retro channels on youtube, they all look like GenX-ers to me. I suspect nostalgia drives you to this, not because these are particularly interresting machines today. (shots fired, I know)
- royjacobs 3y agoThis is true for the demoscene in general, as well. Not completely, thankfully, but it seems like that it is becoming even more niche than it already was.
- finnjohnsen2 3y agoI bought an Amiga 500 about 10 months ago. Haven't touched one since way back when (89-90?). If you are considering doing the same, I recommend going to YouTube and look up two keywords: PiStorm and FS-UAE. These two allow me to prepp a hard-disk image in emulation on my PC, transfer the image to a rPi inside the Amiga and mount it. My Amiga 500 now boots a workbench with all the things I was looking for. I also bought a new case and keys, because the Amiga was very yellowed. And a new power supply because the old one looks like it wanna burn my house down
- beezlewax 3y agoThis kind of reminds me of Quake stylistically. A series that took a wrong turn after the first one. More sequels in the style of the first one would have been amazing. The visuals here though are lovely. Well done to the team
- junon 3y agoWow this is beautiful. The artwork rivals even modern retro games.
- stuaxo 3y agoThe artwork really works with the engine - everything looks a bit grimy and muddy which means the vertical stripes you get as part of the implementation fit in really well.
- skywal_l 3y agoThe sound, animation and gameplay is also great. I love the sound of the machine gun starting and stopping when the character get in the line of sight of the enemy. Great attention to detail. I kind of wish they port it to PC !
- bluedays 3y agoNot to be confused with grindr.
- sixQuarks 3y agoI’m assuming this game would have worked in the original console. Imagine if this game was released back then. It would absolutely blow everyone’s mind. Now think what’s possible on a PS5, someone 30 years from now will create an awesome retro game for it