Jim Power cheat code

[sunteam_paul]

Wow, I'd never seen the game before actually, but the first level music, at least in the amiga version - I definitely recognize the first melody from another PCE game. Dragon Slayer, maybe?

Ys III

[Necromancer]

did You realise that you compare CDA music with chip tune  

Of course I do.  What do you think 'redbook' means?

And redbook audios on pce for jim power and sotb, have not a large superiority.

Large or small, it makes no difference.  Either way, the redbook tracks are superior.

For me redbook audios are out of competition, with soud ship comparaison.

This isn't a comparison of sound chips, but rather a comparison of Jim Power.  Complaining about the unfairness of such a comparison is pointless, as we can only compare what we have, not what might have been.

This is the reason of my deseperate cry (i don't know the traduction of "coup de gueule"), i have read all this topic 

Really?!?  Did you miss the many instances where the PCE version was deemed inferior to the other ports?  You must have, else you wouldn't deride us as a bunch of mindless fanboys that always place the PCE above all others.  I repeat: please post some side by side screen shots (in the other thread) of Jim Power from the PCE and Amiga versions.  Feel free to throw in the Amstrad and ST versions if you can.

I don't want to create polemics, or fighting topic .. 

Are you sure about that?  The use of absolutes and name calling are sure ways to start an argument.

[shubibiman]

There use to be a website dedicated to evry single version of the games, with screenshot comparison but I can't find it.

[sunteam_paul]

For me redbook audios are out of competition, with soud ship comparaison.

This isn't a comparison of sound chips, but rather a comparison of Jim Power.  Complaining about the unfairness of such a comparison is pointless, as we can only compare what we have, not what might have been.

Necro is right about this. Some would call a comparision between amiga music and CD music unfair. But then if you want to get picky, you could point out that the amiga is using sound samples and not actually generating the sound in 99% of game music, so therefore it is unfair to compare it to 'real' chip sound. The argument just spirals down from there. Just compare what things actually are, regardless of how they are generated.

[Tatsujin]

and sotb, have not a large superiority.

ok, this is quite BS, since the PCE SotB OST is one of the greatest I've ever heard and it plays in the very upper league of red book audios. has nothing to do with chip tune or not now, just a fact. and i'm an old amiganer from to good ol' times as well, and I love SotB and its chip tune music to no end.

[Tom]

I'll respond to a few things about this game and the amiga port.

 First off, the Amiga port isn't that impressive to me. Looking at the graphics, it looks like it uses Miggy's two BG plane mode - where each layer only has 8 colors (use of scanline +copper to change colors for following scanlines). But the scrolls are nice. The music is pretty cool too. I think the chip rendition is good, but I much-much prefer the CDDA tracks over it (a CD32 version with the PCE soundtrack would awesome, no?). Probably because I have no nostalgia for the original game (or the Amiga per se, only had one for a short time). The CDDA tracks just rock - composition quality, instruments, numbers of instruments, etc. Just being CDDA doesn't necessarily make the sound track better. There are cases where I do like the chip renditions better than the redbook versions. I do think it's totally fair to compare CDDA to redbook. People often compare much less/inferior sound chips to more advance ones. 99 or 100 times, the Amiga games have better music than ST games. It makes no difference here. It's the end result which counts. If you put a 20mhz RISC chip on the PCE hucard, I could give you a music chip in software that would rival the PS1 - just using the PCE's multiple 10bit paired DACs (and that's *linear* PCM, not that non-linear stuff later Amiga demos try to pull off) and hardware stereo volume to boot. It really makes no difference. What does make a difference is that was a *valid* *option* of sound/music for the targeted system and was used. Compiled PCM or realtime generated - makes no difference. What you heard is what counted.

 Second off, Jim Power is just an average-at-best port to the PCE. Nothing fancy like dynamic tiles + sprites for complex scrolls or such. *All* the fancy code and tricks pulled off on the Amiga port, none of that attitude/ambition transferred over to the PCE port. In that aspect, the PCE port is inferior. But that's only a minor issue compared to the 1000 pound gorilla sitting in the room...
 
 I personally think the controls is were this game really sucks. If it weren't for that, this would be a decent game. The control logic/mechanics just really sucks. I'm not sure if this is just limited to the PCE port or what, but it ruins the game for me personally. The graphics; besides lacking PCE specific optimizations for scrolls - this games doesn't even begin to touch the PCE's massive subpalette system. Like 2-3 subpalettes for the BG? Come on! Sprites are no better in the color department. The palette transition from the Amiga's to the PCE was pretty decent, but could have been much better with more subpalette usage. In other areas, color choices seem a bit better matched/upgraded - but only minor (and even some of the color/palette choices are even better on the Genesis port compared to the PCE port). From the little I've seen of the Amiga one, the stage design/layout also changed somewhat in the transition to the PCE one. To a more simpler layout - going by memory. Like the second level on the Amiga version; it comes off as less repetitive/boring and boring looking. Some of the art of the bosses/enemies just plain looks terrible - given that this was a port with some visual changes (be it good or bad), they should have corrected *some* of that character artwork - yuck. Just yuck.

 Anyway, having not played the Amiga version and only watched it - I can't comment on the controls of the Miggy port. But if it's anything remotely like the PCE controls/mechanics, arguing/deciding/declared/deducing/deducting/etc which port is better is totally and completely a moot point.

 Also, did anyone get my codes working?

[awack]

Yep, i just tried it, the hold select then press down trick works...your character dies but you have an infinite number of lives.

[touko]

Necro is right about this. Some would call a comparision between amiga music and CD music unfair. But then if you want to get picky, you could point out that the amiga is using sound samples and not actually generating the sound in 99% of game music, so therefore it is unfair to compare it to 'real' chip sound. The argument just spirals down from there. Just compare what things actually are, regardless of how they are generated.

The difference is, samples or not, this tune was played by amiga's audio chip, like adpcm for PCE.
This is a part of amiga capabilities.

In this case snin midi sound are not player by SNIN's chip, cause it use a static sample table.
If you'r listening battle squadron musics, you must compare PCE's psg sound and amiga's pcm sound .
Here amiga's sound quality is far superior to pce sound too.

Another exemple, watch turrican PCE and compare intro music with amiga's one .. 

@shubibiman: the site compare 3 versions of jim power :
AMIGA,SNIN, MD.

For parallaxes, amiga has only 1 bg layer like PCe, but his blitter pemit him to simulate more bg layer.
Parallaxes in brian the lion game, are very impressive, like lionheart

Brian the lion :

Lionheart :

[Tatsujin]

i like the amigas CUS format the most. it sounds like Hi-Fi SID but without loosing much of its original charme.

lissen to this ->

and you'll know what I mean

[touko]

i like the amigas CUS format the most. it sounds like Hi-Fi SID but without loosing much of its original charme.

lissen to this ->

and you'll know what I mean

Ah hybris, a masterpiece ... ;-)
I have used my floppy drive on this game.

Intro and in game music are very awesome.

[sunteam_paul]

A couple of things I'd like to thrwo out at this point:

1. I don't think anyone would argue that the 'raw' PCE sound chip could outperform the Amiga sound chip (including samples)

2. Jim Power is rubbish on any format.

[exodus]

Ys III

ah, right! thanks.

[ccovell]

For parallaxes, amiga has only 1 bg layer like PCe, but his blitter pemit him to simulate more bg layer.

The Amiga does have a 2 bg layer mode, but it limits each bg to 3 bitplanes (8 colours).  In 1 bg mode, bgs can use 6 bitplanes if needed.

i like the amigas CUS format the most. it sounds like Hi-Fi SID but without loosing much of its original charme.

The CUS is not a single format, but an Eagle/Deliplayer wrapper for a custom (nonstandard) music format.

Anyway, about Jim Power, we shouldn't be comparing games between PCE and Amiga when they've been designed around a lower common denominator -- the Atari ST.  JP suffers from a lack of colours in many levels & screens because of the ST's simultaneous colour limitations.

[Necromancer]

Anyway, about Jim Power, we shouldn't be comparing games between PCE and Amiga when they've been designed around a lower common denominator -- the Atari ST.  JP suffers from a lack of colours in many levels & screens because of the ST's simultaneous colour limitations.

Screw that!  We gotta talk about something 'round here.

Would you rather talk about how the word 'color' is not spelled with the letter U? 

[Tom]

Another exemple, watch turrican PCE and compare intro music with amiga's one ..   

 If you know anything about synth sound generation and how to effectively get fairly complex instruments out of the PCE, you'll know who ever code Turrican on the PCE is an idiot. It's basically treated like an ST with an extra sound channel. Square waveforms? What a joke. The port of Turrican to the PCE (and even on MD) is a joke. Quick cash no talent coders.

 And Sunteam Paul is right, bring out more specs about the audio hardware and what even qualifies as a synth - will only degrade this topic without anyone getting any meaning out of it. Fact, Amiga's 4 audio channels makes it more of a pain for games. Reserving 1 channel for FX (soft mixed or not), you've got 3 channels left. Many Amiga games resort of small sample shorts to "extend" the number of instrument complexity in a song. Hell, quite a few games have been known to just straight sample stream with repeated sections. There are weaknesses in the Amiga's audio system and it isn't totally superior to the PCE's audio (PCE has more channels, better hardware volume (two stages), real stereo, higher frequencies, real noise generation). Not arguing the Amiga's sound isn't damn good or sounds more realistic, just that it's not superior in every category. Oh and Bonk's original sound track totally kicks BC-Kids changed sound track Way to ruin the game Factor 5.

 But regardless, music/sound track is just that. There is no fair or unfair. If an Amiga games streamed all its music, that would be perfectly valid (and some come really close to this). I played Jimpower on SCD, it had music. I watched a video of someone playing Jimpower on Amiga, and it had the game's music. Fair comparison. I mean, why do you think the CD format was partly chosen for the game system? Duh... audio/music upgrade. There are PS1 and Saturn games that stream compressed audio. No one complains that's unfair. Hell, even the PS2 streams compressed audio for a lot of games (and it can do it while streaming live data from the DVD. Compressed audio only needs a small fetch every few or more seconds. Perfect for fetching/streaming from two places on the DVD drive at once). Matter of fact, 99.5% of games don't even change there sound track to react. So it doesn't make any real difference if the music is generated in realtime - but never deviates or if it comes from a streaming source. SF2 is about the only game that I can think of where the music speeds up/down. Most games, it's not a factor.

 Also, Chris is right. Because the Amiga chipset treats the video pixels as planar, it's able to take 3bits for one plane and 3bits for another plane to have a two BG layer system. The Amiga has a total 6bit pixel mode, with the 6th bit being half-bright. What youtube rarely shows (because of the blurry image of the pixels) is that only 8 colors are shown on a line per layer (7+1 constant, and 7 for the other) - but a good master palette helps hide the low color count on a single line. You just can't have wide range of changes/colors in a single line. Games use copper to change those colors on specific scanlines, but it's still a VERY limit method. Games graphics are design explicitly around this limitation. If you look carefully at Brain the Brave, you clearly see the limitation in the design. On a side note, why is that game trying sooo hard to look like a SNES game? Almost every other level has that "tunnel" effect. For no reason too. Pardon me, but I didn't know caves were round like that and tend to rotate. Even the cloud part made no sense. But the tunnel doesn't even scroll like it would on the SNES. It's just a static, rolling BG. (I know how the effect is pulled off). This is a running theme for EU/UK games. Over the top, but completely out of the place FX for no reason other than to show off. A demo/game. It makes the games feel hollow/empty overall. SotB 1, while not my favorite game or anywhere near it, is a good example of a EU/UK game that at least keeps itself in check from this. Yes the over world FX are nice, but would the game play any different if it didn't have them? I would say no. I'm definitely *not* against eye-candy (having coded some crazy ass complicated FX myself), I just can't stand when it's clearly out of place/looking.

 I'm getting off track there though.

1. I don't think anyone would argue that the 'raw' PCE sound chip could outperform the Amiga sound chip (including samples)

 Well, if you want to get technical - the PCE *can* output three 13bit linear PCM streams on 3 channel with real stereo/pan hardware volume direction. It's raw and it's superior.. or six 10bit non linear sample streams with the same stereo hardware pan volume per channel If you like your cpu resource processed through a meat grinder...

/smart ass off