Head Over Heels - 256 Colours
After two weeks of painstaking work I've finally completed my 256 Colour version of the classic Head Over Heels, for use in Vladimir Khladov's excellent EmuZWin emulator! Download from here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.lycett/Head%20Over%20Heels.ezx
Enjoy! :)
(@Arjun: Feel free to add this one to the 256 colour games on your site!)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.lycett/Head%20Over%20Heels.ezx
Enjoy! :)
(@Arjun: Feel free to add this one to the 256 colour games on your site!)
Post edited by monty.mole on
Comments
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
I tought about doing this one too, but the PC remake on Retrospec is so good that I tought there was no need to a conversion.
Instead I started ( ehmm...but never finished..) Batman the caped crusader.
Anyway congratulations, that's a shiney little masterpiece.
Tomaz
Phew - it took nearly all my spare time for the last two weeks - probably around 40 hours in total. Half spent colouring, half spent testing. Took me a while at the beginning to get to grips with the method of colouring - and learning to pause the game during the process, otherwise everything becomes corrupted as the sprites get inverted in memory.
I used the Amiga version as a guide to where to put all the basic shading, then coloured in everything with the improved palette, making some other adjustments and "improvements" as I went along. I didn't leave it until I was happy with every pixel in every room... :)
And for my next project... Damn! - run out of ideas.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
BTW, how do we play 256 colours? What's the emu?
Fantastic conversion/colouring in.
Just imagine if the speccy had been able to do that 20 odd years ago!!!!
Wow, imagine how brilliant Jack and the Beenstalk would be without all the colour clash!!!! only jokin'!!
Once again well done m8.
Use Emuzwin to play the 256 colour games.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Aw shucks! Thanks stupidget and everyone else for the praise!
The 256 colour facility in EmuzWin is excellent for games that you really enjoyed on the Spectrum... if only they were not limited by the Spectrum's restrictive graphics...
Many people say "Just play a remake, or 16 bit version of the game instead", which obviously isn't possible for games only released on the Spectrum or the 8 bit rivals.
Head Over Heels on the other hand has Amiga and Atari ST versions, plus the excellent Retrospec remake. But for me, nothing beats the feel of the original Spectrum version. The Amiga version may be more colourful, but it lacks a keyboard control option (essential for me) - making the game very fiddly and difficult to play. Plus the Amiga version is just a lazy copy of the 16 colour Atari ST version, which are both just ports of the Commode version... They actually lack some of the detail that was added to the four colour CPC version.
That was the incentive for me to recolour the Spectrum version. It seemed an impossible task to begin with...
Hopefully more people are working on 256 colour conversions, so we can really increase the catalogue of games and justify the excellent work of Vladimir and the original Spec256 team. But I know the progress will be slow - it's just so time consuming! Personally, I don't think I could do most other games the justice they deserve. But after a rest, I might have another go. The Great Escape, perhaps? Or Nebulus...
Or how about Heavy on the Magick or Batman for that matter?
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Hey Monty.Mole you have been so nice to answer any questions,I've got one as well:
I was wandering what tools have you been using to achieve such terrific results ( other then your talent ) and specifically what paint program did you use, since I have been struggeling for weeks to find a good one to work just with 256 colors.
And don't tell me it's MSpaint !! :o
Again, wonderful job ;)
Thanks again, q_armando!
Not even MS Paint - all of the work was done using the GFX editor in the latest build of EmuzWin 2.5. I used Paint a couple of times to flip some sprites horizontally, but nothing more. The simpler the paint program is the better, as far as I'm concerned. It gives me the maximum control over the graphics. It obviously takes longer, but I think the result is worth it. It would have been nice to at least have had a Line tool in the GFX Editor, mind. That would have saved me a lot of time. That plus the ability to invert / rotate selections in the Editor itself without having to copy and paste into Paint.
As I said - I used the Amiga version as a guide to where to apply the shading to sprites - I took a screenshot of the various screens from WinUAE - pasted into Paint, and magnified. I then shaded in each sprite in the GFX Editor, mostly the same way as the Amiga ones, but with a lot of modifications. I then coloured in with different colours from the GFX Editor palette, considering the original Amiga palette selections were quite crap.
Is that the 3D isometric version of Batman that you started work on? If you're not continuing with it, I might have a try, as it's very similar in style. I'm worried that compared to Head Over Heels, I won't be able to do it justice though - since there is no Amiga version to draw from. I'm probably just using that as a comfort blanket though. ;)
This has given me an idea for a "hook" in the final documentary chapter. I'm going to cover remakes definitely, and this 256-colour Speccy version would be a nifty link to that section.
But bear in mind I won't be doing the final chapter for a few years yet, so no rush <i>at all</i>...
256 colour games can be found at:
http://www.arjun.150m.com/ZX256games.html
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
First, you take a banana.... :)
But seriously, you have a point there. The gfx editor does take some getting to grips with and some more documentation would help I suppose.
Pending that the best thing would be to read the existing documentation on it and experiment as much as you can. Some of us here can help you out if you get seriously stuck in any way.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Blimey - that looks incredibly cool!
Looking forward to trying it out "soon"...
[ This Message was edited by: Tom-Cat on 2005-02-06 09:30 ]
I agree that the palette effect of the Amiga version was a bit crap. It seems to just be a copy of the Atari ST version. If the game had used the full 32 colours available it would have been so much better.
I know that in EmuzWin, you can configure it so that a different palette is used in each room; but that seems to be very complicated to setup (you have to know when certain memory locations contain certain values in order to trigger the different palettes). That seemed to be an overkill for what I was trying to do, anyway. There are some other limitations of the 256 colour system that are probably impossible to overcome though - for example you can't have two copies of the same sprite appear in two different colour schemes on the same screen. Therefore you can't have Heels "greyed out" at the bottom when you're currently controlling Head; you can't see what Crowns you have still got to collect on the Crowns screen, etc. You could probably get around this partially by colouring in the sprites using the part of the palette that is mixed with the normal Spectrum ink attribute, but that won't look as good. Ah well...
Currently, that seems to be the only way to get around the problem though. I wonder if Vladimir knows of any trick to get around this too?
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.