Attempt at porting Shadow Of The Beast to the Archimedes

[xlt...@gmail.com]

yeah, was a bit fed up with the Archimedes bashers, mainly Amiga fanatics, so I have decided to try to port it.
1/ 100% software solution
then
2/ Solution using RasterMan by Steve Harrsion

I am working on 2 versions :
1/ for 8 Mhz machines screenmode 320 x 256, 256 colours
2/ for faster machines screemode 384 x 288, 256 colours (overscan)

Of course the idea is that all versions run at 50 frames per second.

You can follow my progress on my YT channel Zarchos :

https://www.youtube.com/user/Archimedes75009/videos

I am on Facebook in the Acorn Computer and BBC micro enthusiasts group.
(Xavier Louis Tardy).

[druck]

On 23/01/2018 08:25, xlt...@gmail.com wrote:
> 1/ for 8 Mhz machines screenmode 320 x 256, 256 colours
> 2/ for faster machines screemode 384 x 288, 256 colours (overscan)

As the next step up from an 8MHz ARM2, was an ARM3 3+x faster, surely a
bit more resolution than that can be afforded.

---druck

[Someone Somewhere]

12MHz ARM250?

[druck]

That was a step back down, as the ARM250 A3010/A3020 was released after
Archimedes ARM3 upgrades and the A5000.

---druck

[Someone Somewhere]

Semantics on the way you put it - the 12MHz ARM250 is in fact a faster
machine than the 8Mhz original Archs and may well have enough oomph to
run the given resolution but no more, and therefore may be the machine
targeted.

[xlt...@gmail.com]

It is true we would all have prefered an ARM350 but Acorn decided differently.
And well, now Sir Hermann Hauser is a billionaire I doubt I can say his strategy was the wrong one ;-)
As a businessman he was 1st there to thrive, not to please me more than needed.
Others companies like Atari or Commodore miserably failed always putting more 'stuff' in their toy computers to close business in miserable conditions, remember (screwwin their suppliers).

And yes a higher resolution is possible for ARM3 machines, the issue will be that the target machine will not need 2 Mbytes, but 4.
But : why not, after all.

Thanks for your interest, anyway.
I will not produce anything I am afraid before a week as I am very busy at the moment.
The good news is that I have the right algo to plot all the trees with a very small additional cost in terms of CPU usage, as the background 'behind' the trees won't be plotted (for 90% of the surface).

[Someone Somewhere]

On 27/01/2018 21:45, xlt...@gmail.com wrote:
> It is true we would all have prefered an ARM350 but Acorn decided differently.

Yes -it's a shame that they didn't - the differential in the chip cost
would have been very small and the performance would have been much
inproved.

Their big prooblem would have been how to keep sellng the A5000 at a
premium of course.

[xlt...@gmail.com]

Exactly.
Now note with some fast DRAMs you can bring these machines to 26 Mhz CPU and memory bus ...
Vectorlight demonstrated that on stardot and there are some videos on YT.
Not bad for 10 euros maximum to do the modification.