Barbarian

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danboid
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Barbarian

Post by danboid »

There is a widely ported remake of THE game that brought decapitation to the masses and soft porn to video games, Barbarian:

http://barbarian.1987.free.fr/indexEN.htm

It has been ported to almost everything including the Megadrive, Jaguar and PC Engine but sadly not the Uzebox yet! There is a C / SDL version of Barbarian but do we think the Uzebox would be able to handle a port? Do you think there's too much sprite data involved? Obviously there is no SDL on the Uzebox so its going to require extra effort to port.

If it could be possible to port it, does anyone like this game enough to attempt doing just that? I'm not sure if the source is available online but the dev is happy to send it to you if you request it, or otherwise I could send you what they sent me. I'm certainly not experienced enough to attempt to port something like this but I suspect the UB doesn't have enough RAM to store all the sprites required anyway.
barbarianSDL.zip
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Last edited by danboid on Mon Jan 16, 2023 3:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
CunningFellow
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Re: Barbarian

Post by CunningFellow »

Yes - I think the Uzebox could do that in a 160x240x4Bpp mode and match the CPC version fine.

The Uzebox could possibly even do better.

No I did not love Barbarian enough to add it to my list of UB projects I wish to finish.
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danboid
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Re: Barbarian

Post by danboid »

Good to hear you think its possible CF! Its pretty unlikely anyone is going to put the effort into porting this but I wanted to let the forum know about it anyway.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Barbarian

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Could probably do it in Mode 3 pretty well. Sprites aren't too big and no drastic particle effects, so the alignment could almost always be good(%8) on at least the Y axis(saves a lot or RT) for the MetaSprites.

Then it comes down to what's important to the game. If doing it M3 then there would definitely need to be changes on the BG to eliminate unique tiles. The huge "Barbarian" logo seems unnecessary to me, and also impractical since that would really be a hit to include in every tile set(or sandwiched between every 2). I do think with a bit of work you could do it well though.

The side tree foreground effects can be done. Alter Ego or I'm sure other games show an easy implementation on mask based FGs for M3.

SD would be a bit strange unless using a bitmap mode. One could at least offload all the screen tile maps. For title and other screens, I would cut them down to fit in ram tiles(big sacrifice in quality, lots of work), and then if using SD, get the pixel data from there too. Alternatively store the data as 4bpp in flash and decompress to RTs.

If using SD, then SPI Ram might offer an expanded version. Better PCM via streaming, maybe music or something.

The playthrough I saw did have a good bit of PCM. Although it might be a shame to not have the classic sound effects, I think they could be better. If space were an issue, they could be replaced with much smaller patch SFX.

M74 might be a candidate as well. Resolution is always my number one so Im biased. Ill sacrifice some content to keep 240/256. I never played this game, but I can see why some people are nostalgic about it.
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danboid
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Re: Barbarian

Post by danboid »

Thanks for you feedback DA!

I have emailed the dev to tell him about this thread, your feedback and to ask him what the license is. I suppose it may be a bit grey because its a remake and so the original is probably still copyrighted. I don't think he's uploaded it to github, gitlab or similar yet.
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uze6666
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Re: Barbarian

Post by uze6666 »

Although I'm also biased for 6px/cycle modes, I think Jubatian's Mode74 deserves much more love because I consider it a true masterpiece of coding craftmanship. And not only because of what it does, but because it is so well documented and easy to incorporate in your project (like all his code btw). It puts my own code to shame, really. In the end, for a game with sprites of that size at that resolution, seems a no brainer to me, it's totally doable, albeit with compromises on the background as Lee mentioned.
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danboid
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Re: Barbarian

Post by danboid »

What games use mode74 apart from FOAD? Any?

I presume its big draw is being able to use SPI RAM? It has a lower resolution and less simutaneous colours than mode 3 tho right? So it seems to me like mode 3 is the best choice for most games unless you want to use SPI ram or do vector gfx? Uze seems to disagree.
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danboid
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Re: Barbarian

Post by danboid »

The author seemed cool with me sharing it so I've belatedly attached the the C SDL port source of Barbarian to the OP should anyone want to attempt a port.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Barbarian

Post by D3thAdd3r »

After reviewing the assets, I think I was wrong to suggest M3 for this one. Flickering would be especially glaring in this game. The assets for the SDL look like 200% scaled, but even integer downscaled 2x, are going to be pushing 40 ram tiles, or more, per character...Then the extra resolution seems silly when the characters have to get squashed 4x down from there.

M74 is a technological marvel. If I make another game it will probably be M74. Way under-utilized so far.

There is over 360K PCM for the SDL port, though it could for sure be downsampled to half...for stock Uzebox it means you'd basically not use PCM. I'd say thats a really important part of the game too. If it was that important, then SD+SPI become necessary.

Easy to load PCM from SD, and stream simultaneous from SPI ram without flash costs(vsync mixer RAM cost, and M3 is RAM limited already). Using SD gets all the tilemaps and up to RAM_TILES_COUNT tiles on title screen offloaded. Need that space savings for graphics. M74+SD+SPI RAM doesn't seem crazy for this.
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danboid
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Re: Barbarian

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