Lynx Warbirds...blimmin' Heckl!

[Harry_S]

I was checking out this awesome 1/3 of Wings for the Amiga arcade style game on the Lynx and I find the graphics shocking. Wings 3D dog fighting aspect is barely playable on a stock 7mhz 68k Amiga and nothing special to look at even on a 1200. Great game but Cinemaware were using Hypercard style dev tools clearly.

But can you imagine playing Wings with something a lot less rubbish looking behind of the pilot + wings bitmap images displayed? I don't think there is a single game like this on the Amiga, even an 030 Amiga 3000/4000 targeted game.

OK I know the custom chips on the Lynx run at 16mhz not 7mhz like Amiga OCS, and I know the Amiga's lowest resolution is four times the number of pixels to manipulate as the 160x102 of the Lynx. Anybody know of even an Amiga demo that is doing anything as impressive as Warbirds on the Lynx?

[lifeschool]

Looking at the clip, Id say it probably didnt have a huge landscape in memory to deal with, like Interceptor or Knights of the Sky. There are only a few buildings and hills in true 3D, the clouds and the enemies are sprites. They used some kind of sprite scaling technique to make them more colourful and faster. Im sure with those specifications, an A500 could have run it fast enough, given Alianator runs faster and smoother using pure 3D.

This reminded me of Wing Nuts, which used a very simple play area and vector clouds. I think this footage is using a fast CPU though.

[Harry_S]

The Lynx does have hardware sprite scaling, a blitter and 75% less pixels to push round the screen true but it still looks more like a Sega arcade conversion of Wings than anything with polygons running at 1-4 frames per second.

Apart from the 160x100 sort of resolution it would have made one hell of a home computer specification, better than the Amiga in terms of custom features of sprites taking a huge workload off the CPU and Blitter for game engine design. A 320x200 version of the Lynx chipset mated to a 68000 CPU is what the Atari STE should have been really, if Atari was to survive beyond stock dumping £160 520STFM computers in the early 90s.

In fact it's probably a lot like what the original Amiga designers would have added to the Amiga OCS chipset if Irving Gould's clown school hadn't botched the whole Amiga timeline.

[LongLifeA1200]

I know the Amiga's lowest resolution is four times the number of pixels to manipulate as the 160x102 of the Lynx.

Could also make OCS/ECS render the game in 160x102, with the rest of the screen filled with a picture of the Atari Lynx acting as a border frame. Could fool people into thinking it's an emulator.

Anybody know of even an Amiga demo that is doing anything as impressive as Warbirds on the Lynx?

The quickest method would be to have the sprites already scaled in memory.

[Minuous]

The Lynx does have hardware sprite scaling, a blitter and 75% less pixels to push round the screen true but it still looks more like a Sega arcade conversion of Wings than anything with polygons running at 1-4 frames per second.

Yes, maybe Hard Drivin' would have been faster if they had taken more advantage of the hardware.

In fact it's probably a lot like what the original Amiga designers would have added to the Amiga OCS chipset if Irving Gould's clown school hadn't botched the whole Amiga timeline.

The Lynx is actually what they designed after the Amiga so no wonder .

[xubidoo]

Had a Lynx back in the day and it may not have had that many games, but some of ones it did were amazing for the time.
Hard Drivin was pretty bad on it though.

Warbirds was brilliant, i even played it 2 player comlynx (link-up cable)
I remember hiding in the clouds so i could sneak attack my m8

Other games which i completed and thought were amazing:

Slimeworld (also 2 player, early deathmatch ,was great fun)
Blue Lightning
Electrocop
APB - ( better than the Amiga ver)
Roadblasters ( better than the Amiga ver)
Gauntlet 3 ( better than any Amiga ports)

Only reason i sold it with nrly all the games it had was , can't see small screens anymore lol , so wanted it to go to a good home.