ROBOCITY

[Arne]

I saw a WB icon for a demo called RoboCity and got interested because, well, robots! It appears to be an early tech demo for the Amiga 1000 (which heralded the A500). Because it was made so early in the Amiga's life (the very beginning of, 85-86) I suspected that they might not have bothered packing the data, so I decided to write a little program allowing me to have a peek inside. I suppose I could've used GFXrip but I don't have it on my machines atm.



Two palettes, 0-15 for BGs and 16-31 for figures. Some strange color choices, and some colors are not used.

The backgrounds are actually identical, and are used in some kind of double buffer setup. Could be used for nice light strobe effects and color mixing. Would be fun to see static characters in the background to blend things together.

The blank space at the edge of the characters is due to how bitplanes are stored/drawn with 16bit alignment. I tried adding a little bird flying over the dog, so the area can be certainly be used. I'm unsure where the hotspot of the characters lie but it can probably be seen in the youtube video.

Most of the file is image data, as you can tell from my colors in the data block.

Anyways, if I can figure out how the palette can be accessed (Edit:done!) then we could have a little activity, mayhaps? My program can write images into the data using the palette strips for indexing, so I could release it or run the conversion for you. Grandfather A1000 would be pleased to see the ROBO CITY bustle once more.


Program is done and seems to be working. I've located the palettes and cleaned up my code a little. The two BG screens might have different palettes but atm. I'm cloning, like in the original data.



Had to write a special program to spot the palette entries, but in hindsight it was pretty obvious how they were stored. I messed up because my emulator doesn't seem to have a palette extraction function so I had to make up some entries and I guess I forgot about it and ended up trying to search for them.

I think I'll go play around with the gfx and palettes now.


Unsure about the heavy full black, and the details are just happening. Skipped the cartoony eyeball on the dame and did regular shiny eyes which is what I thought it was supposed to be first time I saw her.



Post merging?

[wolfenoctis]

I don't know anything about the amiga or its restrictions, but I think this would be a great activity. I edited the colors and values just for fun:

[Arne]

Yeah, my palette is pretty crazy and experimental. I rarely use magenta or nonlinear rampsso I wanted to have a go at it. The environment might have some glue light though so there were some thought behind it. Also, I noticed that my PC stuff comes out dark on my Mac so I probably have a calibration issue. Further, I rounded my colors down so 255 is 240. It doesn't matter much on the Amiga of course as the colors are stretched back up, I assume.

Anyways, good points. I abandoned the idea of structure and just went nuts throwing pixels all over the place:



Pretty severe color/value matching issues but maybe someone else want to play around with it, then pass it on? The scene lighting will dictate what light and shadow colors ashould be used on the sprites, or vice versa. The blue guy is indeed too dark atm. I'm thinking the city could have some technogreeble and static inhabitants.