Tinyus - Gradius port for the Amiga (2021)

[Herr Schatten]

I don't know if this has been talked about here before, it showed up on my radar just recently.

Tinyus is a new-ish port of Gradius to the Commodore Amiga. It looks pretty impressive, although I'm not enough of a Gradius expert to comment on the accuracy of the port. I think it would be interesting to hear what people think who know the original in and out. Apparently, the same team did a new Amiga port of Bubble Bobble before that improved massively on the one released by Firebird, but at the same time introduced some new inaccuracies, so I'd really like to hear how ell the Gradius port holds up.

[BrianC]

Designed around 50 Hz when Amiga could handle 60 Hz. ugh.

[Bassa-Bassa]

PAL Amigas couldn't, though. And 75% of games/userbase were PAL, I'm afraid.

[StrzxgvNuvWvfld]

If we're comparing to the arcade, it is slow. The truth is though, we're spoilt these days being able to play near perfect versions of arcade games at home. If this had been released in the late-80s I'd have been blown away by it. I was pretty impressed by the NES version!

Today, if anyone wants to play the arcade version, they can. For anyone who wants to play a new shoot'em up on their Amiga and doesn't know any better, it would still be pretty damn good.

Not sure whether there would be opportunities to optmise for PAL, speed things up a little. I can imagine it's a lot easier said than done.

[BrianC]

PAL Amigas couldn't, though. And 75% of games/userbase were PAL, I'm afraid.

I know, but this is a more recent port and it would be nice if it could be played on a US CRT. Then again, I'm not sure what refresh rate the original AC game runs at. I'm kind of bummed by some C64 stuff being released in US being PAL centric to the point of running NTSC games at the incorrect speed, TBH. Though, AFAIK, the C64 was more successful here than the Amiga was, though it was still more successful in EU. Amiga wasn't as successful here, but it did get released in the US and does have games that were optimized for NTSC. It does sound like an impressive port, though.

[Bassa-Bassa]

The Gradius PCB indeed refreshes at around 60hz.

I'm not too impressed, to be honest:

(Bug?) Ship speed doesn't reset to slowest at death (don't remember if >this was in the original).

That was by intention. The game is otherwise really unplayable in later levels (at least in my view). So you always fall back to speed=1 instead of 0.

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=145 ... stcount=28

Seems the game doesn't loop just because and the slowdowns are far from optimal.

Today, if anyone wants to play the arcade version, they can.

Rendering attempts like this quite pointless indeed, hardware fetishism and all.

[pulsemod]

it's a demoscene prod so I imagine it to be more for show and proof of concept rather than trying to be a super accurate playable port at a gameplay level, different crowd. you'll see usually PAL first and foremost there

[Herr Schatten]

it's a demoscene prod so I imagine it to be more for show and proof of concept rather than trying to be a super accurate playable port at a gameplay level, different crowd.

After playing it a bit on real hardware, I'm inclined to agree.

Even as a casual Gradius player (I only ever finished the C64 and PCE ports of the first game) I can identify several issues. I don't have an A1200, so I played it on a stock A500, and it has a ton of slowdown there. Nothing that renders the game unplayable, but easily in the same league as SNES Gradius III's worst moments. What's worse, though, is that using autofire seems to make the game drop inputs, which sometimes results in not being able to activate an extra weapon at the right time. Also it seems to me like the hitboxes on the enemies are smaller than they should be. Player bullets just pass through the enemies if they don't hit them right in the center. I don't know if it's because of this or a different issue, but it's very difficult to destroy the Moai in stage 3.

That said, I still think this is an impressive effort. All the groundwork for an accurate port is present. Shame they decided to leave it at that and call it a day instead of going the extra mile and fixing the issues. Still, I would have been absolutely thrilled had I been able to play this in 1990.

[neorichieb1971]

DynaBlaster was 60hz and played fine on a PAL Amiga as long as you had a monitor or RGB scart into a TV that supported 60hz.

On the A1200 didn't you press something on boot up? Like both mouse buttons or something?

If the Famicom can do a decent port of Gradius, I'm sure the Amiga can.

[Sengoku Strider]

It's not arcade perfect, but that's a good thing imo. Anybody who wants to play the original game has a ton of accurate ports across multiple platforms they can easily access. Truth is, I'd take the PC Engine port over any of them anyway. In a similar vein I'd rather see this do things that are uniquely 'Amiga' to bring something new to the table. From a technical standpoint they're knocking it out of the park here; purely by having music and sound FX at the same time and using as much of the screen as it does, this places itself in the upper tier of Amiga shooters. But what I'd love to see is something like a Hülsbeck-style atmospheric track or two, maybe a wildly ambitious eurostyle title screen image rather than just a recreation of the arcade key art.

But as a showcase or a demonstration, they did a great job. Makes you wonder how good the Amiga could have been with better middleware out there.

[bcass]

The slowdown is nowhere near as bad as it is on the original PCB, and as a result is significantly more difficult than the PCB version. This is especially pertinent on stage 5, which slows to an absolute crawl on the PCB but has almost no slowdown at all on this Amiga version. Overall, this is a very impressive conversion and shows that the Amiga was quite capable of decent arcade conversions of 80s titles. Of course, this is with 30+ years hindsight in code optimisation though, likely using techniques that were not known about back then. Had conversions of this quality been available back in the late 80s / early 90s, I think the Amiga would be a lot more fondly remembered than it is.

[Shatterhand]

It depends a lot on what hardware you're playing.

I have an A600 with no upgrades. It slowdowns more and in different places from the arcade version. Play it on an A1200 and there are nearly no slowdowns.

It was an insanely nice effort. It's a shame it doesn't loop. I finished it without dying on my 1st go, but I can usually beat arcade Gradius also without dying, and this one is actually easier.

If this was released back in the day, it would be a must have game for the system, for sure.