Retro-Remake Challenge!

[Shockwave]

Remake Challenge Overview

The rules follow in the next post in this thread, this is just an overview which is necessary this time because the challenge is a little bit more complicated than usual.

Welcome to the second remakes challenge on the DBF interactive community. The first one happened last year and was mostly a great success, a few things are different this time but the spirit is still the same.

The last challenge was so much fun for a lot of people and in particular, Stormbringer that a complete new website was created for them, the website is RETRO REMAKES, at the time of writing this, there are 160 remakes on that web site. A staggering achievement considering that it has been open for a year. Stormbringer himself has remade nearly 100!

The purpose of this challenge is to remake a demo, intro or cracktro from an old computer, such as Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64 or Atari ST, to remake the production with total respect and sensitivity for the original so that it runs on a modern day PC.

There are several constraints on this competition, firstly the entry needs to qualify for it. There are two judges appointed to this challenge;

Stormbringer (Webmaster of retro-remakes.net)
Shockwave (Sponsor / part time webmaster of retro-remakes.net)

Both Myself and Stormbringer may enter into this challenge, but you will not be able to vote for us in the final voting.


Stormbringer and I will assess how close your remake is to the original, the bench mark is 90% accuracy.

We will then give your entry a mark, the mark will be a difficulty rating of 0-100 which will be multiplied by accuracy, this score will be displayed in the competition summary to help voters to choose the winner, so even though we will be vetting the entries to make sure they hit the needed standard to be added to retro-remakes, the winners will still be democratically decided by the users of this forum and with this consideration, it is possible that we may be over-ruled by the community if you feel that we got it slightly wrong

We will provide help with obtaining the original media from demos and intros where we can, although you should definately NOT rely on this and we prefer you to obtain your own media.

We have made a zip file of some of the common fonts and exotic tunes that are used in Amiga cracktros available, also I compiled a small tutorial about ripping CLICK HERE If you want something ripped for you and you cant do it yourself you should post in THAT thread, NOT here, any erroneous posts in this thread will have to be deleted because this thread will be used for reservations only.

Yes, reservations! There is no point in people working on the same thing so you may reserve up to 3 Intros/Cracktros at once and post links in this thread to the one(s) you are working on.

If you stop working on something because it is too difficult, you should post to say it is available again, so that someone else can work on it. Please do not reserve something you know you have no chance of remaking or time to remake. To show you what I mean I will make the first reservation in this competition.


Last year there was an accusation that someone had stolen code without credit from a remaker, that remaker has been allowed to re-join this forum because the accusations were later found to be possibly true. The argument spilled over onto the forum, if this happens again any protagonists will have an instant ban and all their posts deleted. This is to protect this and future competitions. However...

If you think we have got something wrong, please PM us. We just want to make sure that this comp is great fun for everyone who enters it.

The other thing is (and it's fairly obvious) is that we don't want remakes of things we already have.
You can check this by going here;

CLICK

You do not need to be a member of retro-remakes.net to use the search feature of that site or to enter this challenge, but you do need to be a member of this community.. In any case, joining retro-remakes takes less than a minute


Lastly, the challenge prize fund has been sponsored by;

Shockwave^Codigos and RBZ^Codigos

We also would like to thank;

Stormbringer for looking after the site, Tetra for building the portal, Hell's Angel for moderating the portal and to all our users for their downloads, votes and comments..

Rules are below

[Shockwave]

Remake Challenge

Competition rules:

• The challenge is open between NOW and Midnight (GMT) Saturday 25th October 2008.
• You may remake up to 10 productions.
• Your remake has to be at least 90% accurate to be approved by the judges (Shockwave and Stormbringer).
• If your entry is not up to standard we will let you know what needs changing to make it eligible.
• The judges calculate a rating like this;
  Difficulty (0 - 100) Multiplied by Accuracy%
  Your scores for ALL your entries will be combined together, this will give voters a guideline.
  To give you some idea..
  An intro with a built in text font, no music, no fades would have a difficulty of 1.
  If you remade Crionics and Silents Hardwired, that would have a difficulty rating of 100.
  Obviously that means nothing unless the entry is accurate enough to get accepted to the challenge.
  
• We prefer pixel Shaders not to be used, however if you do use them it is up to you to make your program compatible. ie. use a primitive shader model.
• The entry must be a single file windows exe.
• Use either 640 * 480 or 800 * 600 screen mode if the remake requires it
• DO NOT use unoriginal gfx or music. you MUST use the original media.
• The original text from the production is to be displayed BEFORE your own text/greets etc. Please include all text in its entirety.
• If there is too much interpolation of colours from texture filtering etc, it may mean that your entry is too innacurate. Best thing is not to use texture filtering.
• Your entry must use 60hz refresh rate or be delta timed to that.
• If you have a screen mode selector, please keep it tasteful and minimal.
• If you allow a windowed mode, the window must be borderless and non-scalable.
• Your intro must run on Windows 98, XP and Vista, on ATI and NVIDIA cards. We will test it, if it is incompatible, we'll ask you to fix it.
• There will be a grace period of one day at the end of the competition to fix any compatibility problems of remakes submitted before the deadline.
• You may reserve up to 3 remakes at once, please post in this thread to say what you have reserved for yourself.
• Anything that has been reserved or is already been remade is not eligible for the challenge.
• Remake code must be your own, if you use a framework, please credit the original coder.
• All eligible entries will be added to www.retro-remakes.net.
• No correspondance regarding the rules will be entered into on the public forum, please direct it to Shockwave or Stormbringer via PM if you have questions please.
• Overall winners will be decided by a poll of the community here.
• Please post your entries with the topic title: [REMAKES] Your entry name
• Once you have posted them we will approve them / provide feedback of what needs to be fixed (if anything).
• Remake must be of a cracktro, intro or demo from the Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64 or Atari ST.
• You MUST include a screen shot with your entry.

These rules have been very complicated to bring together, we think that they are workable and we really hope that you'll enjoy the challenge! We're relying on the good spirit of this community as usual to be sporting and not try to pick the rules apart because the comp needed to deviate from our usual format with it spanning two sites, so please keep this in mind

Prizes:

• 1st place : £50 (sponsored by RBZ and Shockwave) , Sig, 25 Karma
• 2nd place : Sig 20 Karma
• 3rd place : Sig 15 Karma

[Shockwave]

{reservation}

CLASSIC CREATURE + 5 TRAINER



I will be working on this one to start with.

[hellsangel]

I don't know if it's for the competition, but I am on this one, almost finished, so... :


and also my old remake I want to adapt with OpenGl :


skid row z-out...


lemmings giga trainer/punishers-betrayal


bubba'n stix/paradox

crystal

[Shockwave]

Ok, as I haven't started it it's yours I'll think of something else to do

[stormbringer]

{reservation}

Agile - Gods
Horizon - Powerdrom Import
Scoopex - Mental Hangover
Scoopex - Xenomorphs
Papillon - Samurai
Quadlite - World Darts Trainer

These reamakes are almost done or will be done in the next days to come.

As Shockwave mentions, I'm not part of the competition, but will release these for fun only. I'll be glad to help people with already ripped music/graphics and more if possible.

I hope we will get more of you involved in the preservation of these little marvels for the platforms Shockwave mentinoned. They all deserve to be available on modern computers with proper fresh code and no approximative emulation.

Please keep in mind that we'll be glad to add to the collection all remakes with a quality mark above or equal to 90%. However the winner of the competition will be designated using the criterias liste above.

[Jim]

I'm gonna try this one, cos I love the music

Jim

[Shockwave]

I'll be doing this little Paranoimia one then (also because the song is wonderful).

[hellfire]

Scoopex - Mental Hangover

If you remade Crionics and Silents Hardwired, that would have a difficulty rating of 100

That's my favourite amiga-demo ever!
Everyone feel encouraged to try it please

Your remake has to be at least 90% accurate

I'm wondering how you're going to measure that...

As already stated elsewhere, I'll try this one:

[Shockwave]

Your remake has to be at least 90% accurate

I'm wondering how you're going to measure that...

It can't be scientifically measured of course We will gauge them by the 160 + that are done already and by running the remake alongside the original.

If we get it wrong though, the voting system will even things out I am sure

Nice choice for the remake btw.

[stormbringer]

There is no scientific method of course, but be sure that on my behalf, I'm not judging things based on my taste or my understanding of what is difficult. Even the most simple ones can become a nightmare once you try to remake them. I'll give you a few examples of what I'll look at, so there will be no doubts., things I'll look at quite seriously, since what were trying to reach as a goal is to have a large collection of Win32 remakes to preserve these prods with maximum fidelity:

1) the rules are specific about the resolution and interpolation (filtering) and aspect ratio of the visuals
2) timing and sync of visual elements (as much as possible, knowing that perfect timing cannot be achieved for some intros due to the different VBL rates on Amiga/Atari/C64 and PCs)
3) positioning of the visuals with the exception of trade offs in case because of the chosen resolution. For example, for some prods, it may not be wise to choose a 800x600 resolution because the screen would be too big and probably empty. By choosing a 640x480 resolution you may want to rearrange the elements in a way that they fit within the screen in a proper way. The easy way would be to squeeze the visuals but of course this would ruin the prod.
4) some things may be difficult or maybe very difficult to recreate (even with the source code available) such as plasmas. I'll be checking these carefully and of course these are things that when done properly, would raise your accuracy mark and quality mark at once.
5) low-res, mid-res, high-res consistency. Mixed resolution consistency (the Amiga allows mixed resolutions.... so watch out!). An example is this intro I remade a few days ago: Paradox Sub Trade The 2 rotating cubes seem to have a 1:1aspect ratio,but if you take a closer look, they are rendered at half the resolution in Y and then stretched (using the copper on the Amiga). These are the kind of thinks I'll look at... same here: Vision Factory .. the twisted copper bars are spinning in opposite directions because otherwise the optical effect between one copper bar and the bubble starfield would result in an apparent lack of motion for one of the copper bars...

if you need more of these details I'll look at, just ask..

[Rbz]

[Reservation]

I'll remake this one -> TRSI Cracktro #6

[Shockwave]

Nice choice Rbz, that one has some really nice music and has some details that would be quite time consuming, such as the fades on start up and exit.

[Xalthorn]

I'm a little late starting, and I'm trying to get my head around the challenge, but I thought I should reserve the one I'm going to attempt.

It's Cyberzerk from Accession

[stormbringer]

excellent choice Xalthorn! I'm sure you will finish it before the deadline

[Xalthorn]

excellent choice Xalthorn! I'm sure you will finish it before the deadline

Hehe, I wish I had your confidence, I'm currently falling over what appear to be elementary assumptions..

For example, the screen resolution is confusing me.  A screengrab of the emulator running this is 720x568.  As it's doubling the resolution, that brings it to a 'normal' of 360x284 or a 1:1.27 ratio rather than 1:1.33.

If I run the emulator in 800x600 fullscreen, the image is shunted to the right with a lot of left hand wastage.  If I run at 640x480 fullscreen, there is some really horrible clipping.

Having obtained the graphic rips, the logo is 352 pixels wide and according to the internet, the Amiga ran at resolutions of either 640x200x4 or 320x200x256, neither of which seem to 'fit' this logo.  Even taking into consideration that the logo was bordered by dead space, and I'm assuming 4 pixels either side to bring the display to 360 pixels wide, it doesn't seem to fit anything sensible.

Unless I'm missing something really really obvious (and no doubt embarrassing), do I need to do some fiddling to make it 'fit'?

[stormbringer]

well, here is the story:

The Amiga had the following screen modes

Low resolution: 320 x Y
Med/High resolution: 640x Y

it's times Y because Y can be anything, up to 568..

so, here is a bit of useful information. The Amiga computers were made to work with television-like monitors. When the Amiga was released, the television standards available were only SD (standard definition) and with 2 signal formats: NTSC & PAL.

Both NTSC & PAL have 720 pixels in width and

NTSC has 486 pixels height
PAL 568 pixels height

NTSC is often given the height of 480, but that's because the 6 remaining lines are used for signal sync.

The Amiga could drive the scanline beam (among other things) through the Copper, a dedicated processor.

So, in your case, if you want to display the full possible Amiga resolution, then the target buffer you draw to (DirectX, OpenGL, software, etc) should be 720x576 (unless you go for NTSC, but most of the prods where made for PAL resolutions).

Obviously, such a resolution is not available on PCs in full screen mode. It used to be, but since graphic card manufacturers had the opportunity to make their own decisions, they decided to go with their own stuff, rather than having something compatible with the television standards. The closest resolution would be 640x480. That's closer to NTSC, normal since most of the manufacturers (if not all of them) are american

No more PAL-like resolutions. Plus the minimum refresh rates for a PC screen is 60Hz. There was once the posibility to set 50Hz, but no more.

So if you want to have a screen resolution that can handle the whole PAL resolution, then go for 800x600. All you have to do, is to position your content in an appropriate manner. Have a look at some prods on http://www.retro-remakes.net and you will see how it works.

For me, I always set the WinUAE emulator for windowed mode, PAL resolution, no aspect ratio correction. That's easier for screen captures, although I prefer to rip graphics using the old way.

I hopethis helps a bit. If not, let me know...

[Xalthorn]

Thanks for that,

That explains the resolution and that I'm not going *completely* mad

[Shockwave]

Fantastic choice Xalthorn

This is a remake that I would really, really like to see in the library.. It's a very good one!

[Shockwave]

Song is a strange format though I think?
Will it play with sc68?