Shadow of the beast, ( very slow ) ongoing port for the Acorn Archimedes

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

So far it's only WIP or POC but I'm quite pleased with the results so far :

 

 

[4ever2600]

Absolutely beautiful!

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

Thanks !

 

I should be able to show more moving on screen some day this month, I'm working on it.

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

Update

 

 

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

Hello.

If you've got 2 minutes to lose you can watch this.

I have difficulties making good captures of a CRT monitor, unfortunately, as it's much nicer on a good old CRT monitor, than on my modern DELL monitor, with an upscaler.

 

There are now 4 horns displayed, instead of 2.

And I can display them full heigth ( 170 pixels) which was not the case previously.

I also added the screen opening effect, achieved by altering the contents of some of the VIDC registers ( also using RasterMan and its software equivalent of an H-Sync interrupt ).

And and and ... still 50 fps on a 'slow' 8 Mhz Acorn Archimedes 🙂

 

Edited February 1 by Xavier Louis Tardy

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

Captured with a DIGIT NOW! device.

Sorry for the distorted sound, I screwed the sound mods on this machine.

Please read the description section to know more.

 

 

Edited April 9 by Xavier Louis Tardy

[ColecoGamer]

Any updates yet?

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

This is the latest video :

 

I have a version with more cycles saved, not uploaded yet.

With this version I could plot about 10 additional rectangles and keep a steady 50 fps ( These rectangles are plotted to give me an idea of how many unused cycles I've got left to add something on screen per 1 50th of a second ).

Thanks for your interest.

Edited August 27 by Xavier Louis Tardy
Explanations about the reason why I plot some coloured rectangles

[ColecoGamer]

Impressive! I only recently learned about these computers. Why they never caught on (and why they didn’t outsell the Amiga) is surprising to me.

[Xavier Louis Tardy]

Thanks.

Well, there are many reasons.

I'm going to tell you what I think, of course other people will think differently.

I'd say only selling in the UK and a bit in Australia doesn't help, for a start.

Then, positioning the range for education and small business, almost 'despising' gaming, has its consequences.

Then, the price.

Considering how capable the Archimedes were, to me they were not overpriced at all, but of course they were not as cheap as an Atari ST or C= amiga.

Hiding how to directly access the chipset wasn't a 'plus' either, be it for demomakers or games developers.

I'll never regret having one BITD.

The ARM is a beautiful beast, RISC OS is just brilliant, and we were gifted with editors, languages and tools.

The lack of games lead me to spend most of my time coding ; to me, it was more a blessing than a curse.

I had mostly spent my child years playing on the Speccy ; for my teenage years I wanted a powerful and user friendly machine to learn assembly language, the Archimedes fulfilled exactly what I was looking for.