How to adapt Donkey Kong to Speccy mode

[highrise]

yes, as you said the colour clash is terrible when it comes to the girders. For the screen above, I ultimately decided that yellow and white was a reasonable solution since the colour clash is quite minimal. I also looked at Nirvana and even a custom version which looked great, but you would lose a huge amount in the gameplay speed, smoothness, and how much is going on because of how much processing power you lose. In the end I think the most important thing is that it plays right first, and looks right second. Of course you try to do both, but I always believe the former trumps the latter.

[Bubu]

Donkey King on the Dragon 32 managed to fit the first screen into 192 pixel rows:

http://archive.worldofdragon.org/index. ... e=The_King

As you can see in one of my last posts, the Speccy's resolution is not a problem at all, I only have to cut 64 pixels: 48 pixels from the upper side, and 16 from the bottom side, and I respect every pixel of the original game

[Rorthron]

But that pic is nice cause Kong is in a "rigid" position, but, what should we do when Kong starts moving?

Remove one column of barrels and move Donkey Kong left a bit?

Or move the ladders right a bit?

Or have I misunderstood?

[Bubu]

I've been keeping this one quiet since 2018 but I guess I might as well post about it now I decided to return to it just recently.

Quite a lot of progress but I need to go back and recode a few things, and of course do proper masking on the sprites. But in general there's quite a lot to work with.

https://youtu.be/Oy1OPhMBTmI

Congrats, [mention]highrise[/mention] !!! It looks veery great!!! And yesss, lot of work still remainig Years, I would say... How long have you taken to do that?

[highrise]

most of this was done in about a month in December 2017 / 18. I dipped back in a few times. I had a Dragon 32 before I had a Spectrum and the only two games that were better than on the Spectrum were clones of Joust and Donkey Kong. Having already converted Joust it's always been my biggest Spectrum ambition to convert Donkey Kong as well.

[Bubu]

Remove one column of barrels and move Donkey Kong left a bit?

Or move the ladders right a bit?

Or have I misunderstood?

Yes, you have What I mean is that Kong, with his head in the middle, has no color clash, but with the head in the right or left, you have 3 colors very close: black, red and yellow.

[Bubu]

most of this was done in about a month in December 2017 / 18. I dipped back in a few times. I had a Dragon 32 before I had a Spectrum and the only two games that were better than on the Spectrum were clones of Joust and Donkey Kong. Having already converted Joust it's always been my biggest Spectrum ambition to convert Donkey Kong as well.

Amazing!! I always take months and even years for doing a game, as I need to analyze the "A.I." of enemies, how they move, where the move, what speed they move at, what pixel or pixel area is the active zone for the collision... Do you know how the fires move in the last round of each level? I've been weeks trying to figure out their "A.I", but nothing...

[highrise]

well, I tend to just try various things out until they more or less feel right. One interesting thing I learned was when I was coding Roust (Joust). When I first coded it, I added all kinds of complex AI into the game for the enemy birds. It really slowed everything down. So instead I wrote a really simple routine that just cause them to follow certain simple patterns at certain times, along with a bit of a random element. The result is that in the game, it feels like the birds are a lot smarter than they actually are. All in all it taught me quite a useful lesson, which is that how the player perceives the AI is a lot more important than what it actually does, and emergent AI is often a lot better and more efficient than the one you design.

[Bubu]

I think that in this case, it's not necessary to have a pixel perfect arcade graphics. In any case, it's not possible because of the different screen size.

Concerning colour clash, probably it's not possible to have slanted platforms of one colours and a smoothly moving character of another colour. One solution is to have both of them in the same or similar colours. Another solution is to change the platforms shapes. Another one, which is probably the best, is to use some multicolour engine (like Nirvana).

I tried Nirvana 4 or 5 years ago, and I realised that this engine is for moving "tiles" (8 pixels at a time) not "sprites" (1 pixel at a time). And you had only few clock cycles to do "your things", most of time Nirvana needed the CPU.

[AndyC]

I think that in this case, it's not necessary to have a pixel perfect arcade graphics. In any case, it's not possible because of the different screen size.

Concerning colour clash, probably it's not possible to have slanted platforms of one colours and a smoothly moving character of another colour. One solution is to have both of them in the same or similar colours. Another solution is to change the platforms shapes. Another one, which is probably the best, is to use some multicolour engine (like Nirvana).

I tried Nirvana 4 or 5 years ago, and I realised that this engine is for moving "tiles" (8 pixels at a time) not "sprites" (1 pixel at a time). And you had only few clock cycles to do "your things", most of time Nirvana needed the CPU.

Lots of real games deal with sprites that only move eight pixels at a time (indeed I'd say the majority of them). The trick is in using animation frames to conceal the fact. Look at something like Jet Set Willy, where all horizontal movement is in eight pixel increments and all "sprites" are exactly 16 pixels wide. In slow motion you can see how it tricks the eye into believing everything moves smoothly.

More modern games just tend to use wider sprites with more whitespace at the edges, so the artist is less constrained in how movement works, but the principles are the same.

[highrise]

I think he knows that - the two main stumbling blocks for Nirvana are that when you place these tiles, there is no masking, and secondly the amount of processor time left over after the multicolour routine is done, in this case at its maximum level, you are working with about 20% of the processor time you might normally have. The smoothness and playability would be quite significantly compromised for the sake of extra colours. As I said earlier, I personally feel that whilst how a game looks is important, it should never be more important that playability. The Spectrum is littered with games that do that, with one reason being that they wanted the screenshots to look good in magazines at a time when we often bought the games on that basis.

[highrise]

if you look at a game like Gandalf, it looks excellent. However, the game is not as smooth as you would want for a game like Donkey Kong, and it also is quite limited in terms of the number of sprites on screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdYbeqP5KPs

Don't get me wrong, Nirvana is one of the greatest coding achievements on the Spectrum, it's just asking a little too much to have that much going on at once and have it be as smooth as the arcade original.

[Art]

OK, so in this case, I am not sure if the red platforms will work without too much colour clash.

[Art]

What about Manic Pietro? In the part Attack of the Mutant Telephones (24:20), there are 8 sprites, which are moving quite fast and smoothly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQI8Af6Wutg

[highrise]

There's no masking. And DK needs at least 12 sprites by my estimation.

[highrise]

It's not like you to project your opinion and expect everyone else to agree Stuart

I'm sure Commando and Ghosts and Goblins would look amazing if only they had the right colours with a load of colour clash. Nobody would mind would they, they expect it.

[+3code]

I agree, the yellow/white formula looks nice and dont make your eyes to explode

[highrise]

The thing is, it doesn't matter which way you go, the colours will always be wrong, because the barrels will turn red, or the girders will turn yellow. It's just a question of which mess you prefer. In the end it the yellow just gives better definition with less clash. My opinion, and that's how I like it. I loved the Dragon 32 version which was totally monochrome. It's all about the gameplay and that's how I like it. Fortunately it's my prerogative

[XTM]

I'm also in the "the less clash, the better" camp. Sure, you can say "it's the Speccy, deal with it", but having to live with it doesn't mean we have to like it. Personally I've always hated heavy clash like, for example, Dizzy turning red when walking in front of red scenery. Though the clash in games like the Wally games where the background takes the colour of the character is the worst. It's instances like these that make the Speccy the laughing stock in the 8 bit community and I can understand why people would feel that way, it does look horrible.

Now, minor clashing of colours that are fairly close together luma-wise like 2/3, 4/5 and 6/7, or bright/non-bright of the same colour, I find that much more acceptable, especially on a real screen where colour artifacting may even make it less obvious, especially on static graphics like loading screens.

Ultimately it's down to the creators of the games/ports to pick the colours. Too bad if they messed up.

Manic Pietro looks quite awesome indeed. Impressive that he even managed to have AY music playing considering the player routine will take a good chunk of that remaining processor time. I remember using Soundtracker music in my demos and changing the border colour before and after the player routine to see how much time it uses, and there was a fair bit of variance ...

[highrise]

Also, the reason the Ocean version does not have so much colour clash is because huge liberties are taken with the actual layout of the girders. They are almost horizontal. I'm sure they did this to avoid the clash, but in doing so they compromised the overall feel of the game. It's a terrible game.

[stupidget]

....Dragon 32 version which was totally monochrome. It's all about the gameplay and that's how I like it. Fortunately it's my prerogative

On a Dragon you had the option to play in either monochrome or colour. The colour version is excellent and probably one of the finest 8-bit versions of DK that was ever made.

[Art]

I agree that there will be colour clash in coloured games like Donkey Kong in the normal Spectrum mode and we should expect it and live with it. That's exactly why we always try to minimize it and in any case, Donkey Kong won't look like the arcade version no matter what we do. But I fully respect the author's decision, it's his game.

[highrise]

I'm well aware that you could play it in low-res colour. For me the high-resolution monochrome version was far superior. When it comes to 'wrong' colours, that really takes the cake. I purposely didn't mention it because it's so far away from looking right that it makes the aesthetic of the Ocean one wrong.

The real point here from me is that what you really want is something that feels like the original.

Mr Campbell, you are more than welcome to express your personal opinion on this forum, I very much welcome it. Nevertheless, you do have a habit of using words like 'everyone' when stating them.

And you're right about Ghosts and Goblins - looks bloody awful doesn't it. I was confusing it with the much better Ghouls and Ghosts.

[highrise]

...except you just countered your own argument. You just said 'unless you made it monochrome'. Some people would very likely expect that, since many Spectrum games are done that way. Others may expect a game that moves in 8-pixel steps, like the one that Gabriele made. Still others may well expect monochrome with a dash of colour that doesn't distract you from the game, which is what I aimed to do.

it's a common cognitive bias to imagine that everyone else thinks the same way that you do, or even that they should

[highrise]

fair play! Anyway, we shall see. I'm sure it won't be too hard to add colour clash if everyone, I mean some people, I mean you want it. Colour clash is actually quite an easy thing to achieve on the Spectrum.