Quote from: geco on 2020.April.12. 22:41:48

hopefully fixbias will not cause any problem

The re-coloured Enterprise screen grab that I posted earlier is using a FIXBIAS-compliant set of colours, but I'm only finding a way to use at-most 6 out of the 8 colours for any of the FIXBIAS values that I've tried.

If I can't find an easy raster split, then I'll have to change some of the sprites so that they use one or both of the unused colours in the FIXBIAS set.

Damn ... FIXBIAS really does have a nasty effect on your colour options, especially when converting an Amstrad game that uses more than 14 colours on screen at a time!


If I use a FIXBIAS value of 07h then I can get a good match to the original Amstrad colours, and still have the ability to try to find some use for the otherwise "useless" bright pink that FIXBIAS forces on me.

I suspect that geco has found that it is one of the most useful FIXBIAS values when converting Amstrad games because you get both a usable shade of blue, and a dark grey that will often be a very good substitute for the Amstrad's darkest blue, which a lot of Amstrad artists used for dark shadows.

However, if I use the value of 07h then I don't believe that the game really looks much better on the Enterprise than on the Amstrad. I've edited the Amstrad graphics to try to take advantage of the different colours on the Enterprise, but the result still doesn't make me very happy.


The re-coloured Enterprise screen that I posted earlier uses a FIXBIAS setting of 09h, which results in a totally-different set of colours.

Unfortunately, when I use that setting, the useless purple colour that FIXBIAS forces on me means that I must remove one of the other colours in the game, there just aren't enough palette entries!

As much as I hate to lose it, I believe that if I use the 09h setting, then the best colours to merge are the yellow and white, and replace them both with the Enterprise's brightest-and-whitest yellow.


Whichever FIXBIAS setting I use, the game's entire graphics will need to be manually edited in order to get the best result on the Enterprise, because just swapping palette entries really doesn't give a good result.


Anyway, since a picture paints a thousand words, here is a visual comparison of the different options., with the original Amstrad screen on top.

Please note that both Enterprise screens have been manually edited to reassign some of the pixels to different palette entries.

Both looking and visibility of bottom screen are very good.

Sorry, i did not send you the CPC source either, but it is not perfect yet, and the stage of EP version is also early, the program is just running, graphics converted, music is there, but CPC addressing is also there, and between screen changes it change to a bad palette for a short time

Loader screen has bias 0, this is not the final version, because there are some purple pixels on the bodies, i edited it, and have the modified picture too, just not used yet.
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Game has bias 1fh
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Level1
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Level2
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level3
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Thank you for spending so much of *your* valuable free time working on converting one of *my* old games.

I'm just curious how things are going for you since it's becoming obvious that we have somewhat different approaches in trying to get an Amstrad  game working on the Enterprise. It's fun to see (from afar) how you're getting along with my horrible old code.

I make it as a hobby, and i enjoy it , I saw several solutions in the code what i did not see before, i think your code is much more sophiscticated than what i saw in later released games. I checked Target Renegade (only on youtube) and i am sure that you and the graphics guy who worked on Renegade could do much better game on CPC.

Now i had much harder situation, because you had an early stage source , and i played puzzle with the existing source and the source what i got from binary, but finally we have it

Those screen are looking really good! Great job!

The thing that I'm noticing in the screengrabs is that you're using the  FIXBIAS pink colour as the flesh tone for the sprites.

You've mentioned that before, and now that I have some actual experience of trying to get something working on the Enterprise, I have a better understanding of the problem that you're facing with re-colouring the game.

There's no easy, or perfect solution, is there? The Enterprise's FIXBIAS limitation really does seem to have a nasty effect on making games look great on the Enterprise, even though it has all those lovely 256-colours to choose from for the first 8 palette entries.

Thank you very much I was in big trouble in the beginning, i did not want to loose number of colours, but when i found the bias, and the result, it made me happy
Yes, this pink not the best, but gives quite good result, much better than loosing a colour
Unfortunately there is no perfect solution, nearly each game gives other problems with their palette, except 4 colour games And it would be good if there would be a possibility for 1 - 2 raster split, but in most cases there isn't. Now i could do, but as i saw the advantages could be used on level 2 only.

I totally agree with you, separate 8 colour palette register would be much better than 1 fixbias, but i think Nick chip would never be ready if they choose this solution

Loader screen has bias 0, this is not the final version, because there are some purple pixels on the bodies, i edited it, and have the modified picture too, just not used yet.

Dang, that Renegade loading screen is a huge pain to get looking good on the Enterprise!

It would have been so much better (and infinitely easier) without FIXBIAS getting in the way.

Anyway, here's my attempt at a conversion, mainly in an attempt to get the background wall looking darker than in the screen that geco posted earlier.

There are 2 raster splits, but they don't really add a lot.

I'm not sure that this looks any better than geco's version, but I don't believe that there's much else that I can do to it.

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And here's a version in the light palette, which makes it possible to add a raster split for the girl's hair ...

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Woohoo!!!

It's been a long time coming, but the printout of my old Gryzor source code finally arrived from the UK today!

Even more surprising to me, it is not a partial printout of some debug build that I made during development, it actually looks like an "archival" printout that I made when the project was finished. This is probably the only remaining copy of the source code left anywhere in the world!

It's been a long time coming, but the printout of my old Gryzor source code finally arrived from the UK today!

Even more surprising to me, it is not a partial printout of some debug build that I made during development, it actually looks like an "archival" printout that I made when the project was finished. This is probably the only remaining copy of the source code left anywhere in the world!

Awesome!