DarkLord wrote:
I doubt if there are many people who regularly haunt these forums that don't know
the stated *factory* specs for an Atari ST was 16 colors out of 512 (original not STe).
I would imagine that most of us also know that much more could be done with the
hardware than was given by the factory specs. Any game maker that only used 16
colors in a game wasn't because of the ST's limitations, but their own, IMHO.
A certain number of companies actually had the politic of "code first on the weakest machine of the market". As everybody knows it was the ST. Psygnosis internal politic was "code first on the strongest machine of the market and then do as much as you can to port over to the other machines, including the weaker ones, but always do your best". Just as the article source i posted said, Psygnosis guys took their time, they could hold a release of a game if they thought it was not finished or not polished enough.
Some psygnosis games are not good at all, and have not sold well or not that well, we can agree on that matter.
But look, the psygnosis emphase on their games was : brilliant coding, exceptional graphic effects, superb color palettes, awesome sound tracks.
When you're playing with the beast series, whatever the episode, you dive in a wonderful fantasy-dark-monsterous world, and you are free to explore it, and it's a pleasure for the eyes. This even if Beast I is very hard, it's always a pleasure to see those backgrounds, sprites and music.
It's pure artistic work. The thing is, this artistic work is pushed so far and so hard that it goes far beyond the Atari ST world.
When you say "Any game maker that only used 16 colors in a game wasn't because of the ST's limitations, but their own, IMHO",
i think you're stating something incorrect. Why ? Here it is :
1) The coders can't do what they want on an ST. They must make a choice : even if they use all the tricks they can in coding, the sheer amount of graphically wonderness pulled on screen need either more cycles than the ST can fork out, sprites, planes, colors they will be blocked.
It will be either a correct framerate OR graphical bits of madness. Look at Beast 2 on ST it displays 3-4 16 colors palettes, and it's faithfull to the amiga version. The game is crawling at 8 frames per sec !
This proving that. For information, the ST ports of the psygnosis games were handled by ST specialised coders. Mark Mc Cubbin is famous for coding Flimbo's quest on ST, which is a good game technically on ST. Echelon took care of Beast II and they did a very good work considering the obstacles.
So, you want to pull on screen as much colors as the amiga is doing ? You can't. The ST will not support it, and you will have to remove things from the game code in order to releave the burden from the CPU, OR you'll get the fancy tricks, and you're in the world of slowdowns 
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dlfrsilver, can I ask you a personal question, if you don't mind?
Why are you *here*?
i have memories of playing on Atari ST back in the day. I met this machine before the amiga.
i played Rick Dangerous, Twinworld, Navy Moves, Maupiti Islands, New Zealand Story, Wings Of Death, Frenetic, Crazy Cars III to name a few.
I mean, are you an Atari fan, someone who remembers the ST for all of its strengths
and weaknesses (which all machines have) and have that warm, fuzzy feeling when
you recall the good times you had with it? Are you an Atari collector, who still has
many of those Atari ST's from "back in the day" and uses them on a regular or semi
regular basis?
I'm not a fan of a particular machine, i'm a fan of specific versions of some games released on a particular machine.
Lastly i played Wings of Death on my 1040 STE straight from start to the end (i cheated a bit otherwise it's too hard).
It's always nice to remind the memories
Oh if you're interested, Wings of Death on amiga, is :
1) not using a single bit of this computer in any possible way (how i know that ? I hacked the game, and even the game palette is not correctly handled).
2) basically an ST emulator running on Amiga. It's only ok in NTSC mode, in PAL it's a crap.
3) having the intro music on Amiga buggy, something is wrong in the music player, hence the bizarre sound.
i was an ST collector, i had quite a lot of very rare games, alas, they burnt in my family old house.
I not only use my STs on a regular basis, i have also fully restored them (PSUs recapped and exxos will be happy to hear it, i have finally reworked my soldering because i had to change on both my STEs, 520 and 1040 the DMA chip. Now it works fine, however i must wait to buy back an sd card for my ultrasatan, because the two others have been killed by the previous buggy DMA chips i had, i have also recapped the motherboards capacitors, on my STE only, and it has brought back a better sound, as the original capacitor were really crap and low cost ones.)
Other than that, my goal is to help the ST owners who own kryoflux boards to check and preserve their original games in IPF.
This is my main motive above everything else
Only reason I'm asking is, you sure do talk a lot of Amiga talk, for it to be an *Atari* forum... Don't see you doing much in the way of Atari celebrating at all.
You want my thought on that ? Some great games were released on the ST for sure. But this computer in itself is a 'terrible' hardware.
When i was young, and playing on the games named above, me and the guy playing on its 520 STF were not looking at all at what the ST
was like and could hardware wise.
I got the biggest shock of my life when i played in another friend's house, who owned an A500. Then when i played back on the other's friend Atari 520 STF, things were no more the same. The Magic of the "ST" or what i thought it was just vanished, like an illusion.
I was playing on Wings of Death quite often with him, but after seeing Hybris and Battle Squadron, Wings of Death felt so slow and outdated
After a while, he got an A500 for Christmas. It was another world, we passed on Final Frontier, Alien Breed, Tower Assault, many games which would never come out on Atari ST. Did i said Lionheart from Thalion ? We played also a lot on Flashback.
My way of celebrating the ST is to preserve the games released on it in IPF.
Anybody on the forum can contact me, i will check and process their games I have done a lot of them already, some are coming from the SCP disk image repository (however quite a number are BAD, due to dirty disks, and unusable for preservation).
Statistics: Posted by dlfrsilver — Tue Oct 27, 2015 12:18 am