Can anyone rip Amiga disks onto the PC in adf format?

[sunteam_paul]

It's strange but I think there can be a real benefit to having restrictions on colour pallettes/resolution. I think it made me produce much better work - I really don't like the freedom of limitless colours on PC these days and even on my current not-very-secret project I intentionally withhold smooth gradients in favour of a lower pallette. It gives a certain feel and texture to the graphics.

[Arkhan]

limited palettes bring out creativity!

[sunteam_paul]

limited palettes bring out creativity!

Very true. I think even more key is a nice low resolution. With a high resolution It feels like you are drowning in a sea of pixels, there's far too much choice. But in low res you really have to draw everything carefully and precisely to make it look just right. I used to love doing the old 8x8 sprites on the Spectrum and drew them out on scrappy old bits of graph paper at school.

[Tatsujin]

limited palettes bring out creativity!

so does limited sound capability

btw. some uber great work you have done paul. indescribable! this is real pro work. you could have been a pro game designer

[guyjin]

btw. some uber great work you have done paul. indescribable! this is real pro work. you could have been a pro game designer

Unfortunately, it's probably for the best that he didn't go that route. 'Cuz, you know, I think he has a life, and likes it.

[sunteam_paul]

btw. some uber great work you have done paul. indescribable! this is real pro work. you could have been a pro game designer

Unfortunately, it's probably for the best that he didn't go that route. 'Cuz, you know, I think he has a life, and likes it.

I vigorously deny any allegations that I have a life. If I did, you think I'd be able to create and maintain my website? 

One of my big regrets is that we (the small group of us back then) never pushed far or hard enough with our work. With a few twitches of fate, we might just have slipped into game design as a career. Sure, we were not as good as a lot of people, but considering the quality of some of the bilge that was released on the Amiga, we were certainly more talented than others at the time. Unfortunately, none of our large projects were completely programmed to a finish and they were held back by the slowness of AMOS, great though it was. And after I moved away from the area with my family, it all started to fade away. I've repeatedly be driven to design retro styled games over the years since, but again, the programming just tends to never get finished (I'm not knocking my programmer, top bloke, but it seems there's always a bottleneck at the programming stage). We managed to complete the PC based Cybernoid remake which I am very pleased with, and I'm very much hoping that we can get the new project done (again, programming seems to be running slow, but of course these days people have families and it's just not as easy any more). Looking back at all my stuff makes me kind of sad at the untapped potential that we had, if only we had developed our skills a bit more.

[sunteam_paul]

Some more anime/manga based pics. All from existing illustrations of course.

[Arkhan]

so, that first anime picture rules and looks like it was straight out of a commercial release.

[Tatsujin]

how did you port them to amiga? pixel by pixel via hand adaption? amazing anyway!

[sunteam_paul]

how did you port them to amiga? pixel by pixel via hand adaption? amazing anyway!

Some of the early ones were drawn by eye but I developed a sneaky way of doing them. I'd use an A4 bit of acetate, trace the picture (from Newtype or off a paused video) with a felt tip pen, then tape the acetate onto my TV screen and trace around it in DPaint. Not as easy as it sounds because if you moved your head a fraction, existing pixels would not line up properly. And the more detailed areas often came down to referring to the originals as the tracing just isn't accurate enough. I then hand drew backgrounds and coloured in manually based on the original image.

I think one of the key things that make a subtle yet significant difference is the manual anti-aliasing I put on the outlines, something that some 'real' games didn't do, and it does make the pictures look far better.

[sunteam_paul]

My recreation of the Zillion pic (it was animated to).

[Arkhan]

that

is




aweeeeesome.


Zillion shoulda been on PCE!

[esteban]

Great Scott! I love the last pic!

This looks like Yuko in Doraemon Land.

Do you have any screenshots of Emperor Megas, the final boss in your game?

[sunteam_paul]

Hehe, the final boss was going to be a giant Dogu (like in Doraemon) in a shoot 'em up style stage, but we only got as far as drawing the graphics. When I finish my Sunteam minisite, I'll put the adf files for Don Don Land (for that is what we named it) up there to download.