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DF Retro: Pitfall the Mayan Adventure
- Thread starter Tizoc
- Start date
The Genesis and SNES don't have saving. I've only tried the GBA version very briefly (not long enough to complete a level), but according to IGN's review of the GBA version, it too lacks a save feature. Not sure if Sega CD or 32X offer saving.
IIRC, the Jaguar version only has one save slot. After you complete a level, it asks if you want to save. If you choose "Yes", then it stores your progress up to that point. You can load that game from the main menu, and resume from where you left off--there's no "level select" option, unfortunately.
As Pop-O-Matic said above, the Sega CD port was probably a cinch for Activision to make, by adding the CD soundtrack and FMV to the Genesis game, although they added extra levels as well. The 32X version was a vehicle for Activision to showcase the high-color artwork on a Sega platform.
How many other games have distinct versions for Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X? There are several Genesis games that also game out on Sega CD, some Genesis games that came out on 32X, and even a few Sega CD games that also came out as a 32X CD (requiring the Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X), but (aside from Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure) I can't think of any others off the top of my head that were released on Genesis cartridge, Sega CD disc, and 32X cartridge.
Sometimes this kind of thing is done to curry favor with the platform holders. Sega was just about to Saturn up, and Activision had kind of been out of the console realm for a while, so sucking up to Sega is a good idea. With less games coming out at that time, you're a big fish in a small pond of releases, and likely to get some reviews in magazines that feature those platforms. Sega CD games were probably dead cheap to make compared to the console versions too. Activisions other title of the time, Radical Rex, also got a Sega CD port.
Wow, that's even worse than I thought. Most of the SNES-to-GBA ports at least put in password systems at minimum... but when you're talking about a port which somehow removes all the music, I shouldn't be surprised. The graphical changes are more okay -- making the game playable on an original GBA is important -- but seriously, no music? Why...
Ah. That's better than the other console versions for sure. The PC versions' level select menu probably is better, though. In both games (this and EWJ '95) it's just a dropdown menu on the top bar, but it works.
I don't know,. they made three new levels, paid for a CD soundtrack, and made an FMV. I'm sure it wasn't too hard, but that's about as much work as most Genesis-to-SCD ports did and I'm sure it cost some money... but it made sense and allowed for clear improvement. Earthworm Jim's Sega CD port added in a password save system, though, so it's too bad tha tthe SCD version of Pitfall doesn't seem to; just like the Genesis, 32X, and SNES versions, it's got a cheat code for level select and that's it, apparently.
Yah, if ou mean the exact same game on all three formats, I think Pitfall is it. The next closest would be Brutal, which is on all three formats but the 32X version is technically a sequel and not a port of the first game, though it's quite similar. After that all you've got is 'well the franchise is on all three formats, but not one specific game', for After Burner, NBA Jam, and Mortal Kombat.
I think the copious amounts of dithering seen in the Genesis version is moreso a byproduct of the general dark aesthetic to the environment. This has less to do with the amount of onscreen colors and more to do with a very distinct bottleneck in the 512 color master palette which barely has any dark colors to choose from. Most of the palette "budget" goes to the mid range.
As you can see, you basically only have a gradient of saturated blues within the truly dark range. Then you have a bit of magenta and brown/red. This pretty much forces you into using those colors (if you look at many other Genesis games with dark artwork you'll notice how often artists employed that distinct mix of dark blue and brown) or in Pitfall's case heavily relying on dithering pattern to achieve a more nuanced color mixture.
If you were clever you could partly work your way around this limitation by going for a higher gamma sort of look, which I think Ristar does in places (which is also one of the very best examples of getting the most out of the system's color limitations and quirks).
I thought the hardware also has a highlight and shadow mode that brings all 512 colours to a darker shade or lighter shade, which extends the pallette to 1536 colours?
Though without writing any code for the hardware, I have no idea if individual colours can be flipped to a higher or lower tone, or if it is just the whole pallette at once?
To be honest, I have never given this Pitfall game a fair chance. And I own a copy for the Sega CD too!
Still, this is an interesting video, none the less. I had no idea that they hired an animation studio to do the animations.
Not enough credit is given to the Mega CD version, it's just as brilliant as the Mega Drive version (The MD was so much better than the Snes for Line scrolling effects) but then with the added sound effects and music. Not only does the CD-DA audio really add to the game, but fair play to the developers they really made full use of the Mega CD Ricoh PCM sound chip, with some of the best and most impressive sound effects of that Gen and a big step up over the MD base version and even the Snes version. The Mega CD version of Fifa, also makes stunning use of the Ricoh PCM sound chip too
Loved this game back in the day, it was brilliant. The Mega Drive version specifically. I remember until this day how I farmed extra lives in one place where you could grab two lives near a checkpoint and then fall into an endless pit. The game was quite challenging so it was a good idea to do that, haha.
Oh yeah, and also... The Mayan Adventure on the GBA is not the worst SNES to GBA port, as bad as it is. Earthworm Jim 1 and 2 have it beat by a wide margin. They were also published by Majesco too, by the way:
And yeah, these ports are based on the SNES versions and not the Genesis games.
And yeah, these ports are based on the SNES versions and not the Genesis games.
That's true. A lot of GBA games were implementing saves to the cartridge, even at the system's launch. I guess Majesco had some aversion to the concept...or maybe they just didn't feel like forking out whatever it would cost to add the feature.
That's not all that they omitted. According to the IGN review that I linked to earlier, the GBA version is also missing the original Pitfall! that was hidden as a "game within a game".
If you have the irrepressible urge to play the original Pitfall! on GBA, I suggest getting your hands on Activision Anthology. It's an excellent collection of games, and an impressive technical achievement.
By the way, Dark1x , how about a future video that analyzes the various versions of Activision Anthology? I've never tried the computer versions, but the versions for PS2, GBA, and PSP (named "Activision Hits Remixed" on PSP) are all really good, and have some interesting differences in content as well as technical implementation.
I love DF Retro so much. I played a bit of Pitfall when I was younger but I never realized how significantly different the Genesis and 32X versions were at the time
I was very pleasantly surprised to see Pitfall TMA featured in such satisfying detail. I've been a fan and proponent of the game since I bought it new for my Sega CD back in the 90s, and it has confounded me over the years to read negative opinions of it. I also own the Genesis version, but the SCD is so much better for reasons mentioned above. Thanks for this. Note that if you go through the effort to find all the letters of PITFALL, the only thing extra you get is a screen with congrats text telling you to take a picture of your accomplishment, LOL!
Great episode. Only ever played the Windows version back in the day, seems like I got the luck of the draw.
A decent way I've found to play the Windows version is to emulate a P166 in PCem and set up an actual Win95/98 system. It takes a bit of time to set up the system and you need a rather beefy CPU for the emulation of the actual hardware, but I find it works best for that early 96-97 era of Windows games.
Pitfall definitely works pretty well. And given what was said in the video, it seems to be worth it for that version.
A decent way I've found to play the Windows version is to emulate a P166 in PCem and set up an actual Win95/98 system. It takes a bit of time to set up the system and you need a rather beefy CPU for the emulation of the actual hardware, but I find it works best for that early 96-97 era of Windows games.
Pitfall definitely works pretty well. And given what was said in the video, it seems to be worth it for that version.
I remember seeing this game as a kid and thinking it looked twitchy as hell. The camera is nuts.
I played the Mega Drive version when it first came out and loved it. Back then I already knew that it was a special game.
Din't know about the Win '95 version. Did it have the same soundtrack as the Mega-CD version?
What are the chances that the PC version comes to GOG? Are there even other Activision games there?
Awesome video as always Dark1x
Din't know about the Win '95 version. Did it have the same soundtrack as the Mega-CD version?
What are the chances that the PC version comes to GOG? Are there even other Activision games there?
Awesome video as always Dark1x
No, unfortunately. Everything has to go through the Genesis which has its limiting 9 bit palette.
The only way to get around it was what the 32x did: take the output of the Genesis, plug that into the 32x and then the 32x will output the full image.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possoble since they seem to be capped at 30fps.
The weird thing about the Jag version is that the title screen and intro are 60fps but the game itself is capped at 30.
Also, I discovered after the video that the PC version's "fast" mode is 320x200 at 70hz. Smooth mode should sync to monitor refresh but it doesn't always seem to work as it should.
Which is one of the reasons FMV games (aside from cartoony ones) looked so bad on the Sega CD. 32x CD games were typically a massive improvement.
It's a shame there were no non-FMV 32X CD games. It would have been cool to get Knuckles Chaotix or Kolibri with a CD quality soundtrack.
Thanks for that.
I could've sworn it was possible to double the colours on Mega CD through a hardware trick. Pretty sure Eternal Champions CD did so.
Yeah, that all sounds great on paper but, in practice, it isn't feasible.
There are a few issues here.
The big one is memory. Remember, on these older systems, carts function as memory in that the system can directly access memory on the cart. 32x itself, however, only has 256kb of system memory so a CD game using 32x would have very little memory to work with - a problem for the types of games you might try to make on 32x since even moving data from the Sega CD into 32x memory would be pretty slow, I'd imagine.
FMV games are basically data streams so, with the right setup, you can make it work (as we saw with some shipping games). I just don't think it would really work well for other game types. If 32x had more memory available it might be possible to load CD data into memory and rely on CD for things like audio.
Still, the thing is, 32x is bad at 2D games. As I said, Knuckles Chaotix is primarily a Megadrive game - all foreground and background tilemaps are handled exclusively by the MD hardware while 32x handles sprites. Even then, it slows down regularly.
You're probably thinking of shadow and highlight which is a common trick.
Weird era. All those ports to those (at the time) expensive systems, and they were just not systems I ever planned to buy. Would have been nice if stuff like this got a Saturn or PS1 port to have the best of all versions, like Earthworm Jim 2.
But once you add Mega Drive into the mix, I guess they were usually pretty much forced to make it the lead platform if they wanted to share work, because you have to make assets built around its extremely restrictive tile palettes and lack of transparency. You can use those assets on SNES fine and it can reproduce them perfectly (albeit stretched if you use high res mode on Mega Drive) and add extra colour and shading, but the other way around just doesn't work very well, and can be seen in the few SNES to MD ports like Zombies or SF2, they look dirty and grainy.
Clearly given it was originally announced only on SNES, it was going to be the main focus.
But once you add Mega Drive into the mix, I guess they were usually pretty much forced to make it the lead platform if they wanted to share work, because you have to make assets built around its extremely restrictive tile palettes and lack of transparency. You can use those assets on SNES fine and it can reproduce them perfectly (albeit stretched if you use high res mode on Mega Drive) and add extra colour and shading, but the other way around just doesn't work very well, and can be seen in the few SNES to MD ports like Zombies or SF2, they look dirty and grainy.
This game was included with my Windows 95 PC and everyone in my family loved it. I remember playing the SNES version on an emulator in high school and I swore "the graphics and sound were better than this", turns out it wasn't nostalgia lying to me!
This game actually played a huge role in my childhood, great to see an episode on it.
This game actually played a huge role in my childhood, great to see an episode on it.
No mention at all that the Atari Jaguar version is the only version of the game which features game saving? Every single Atari Jaguar cartridge features 64kb of Flash Memory -- it's part of the cartridge spec for the Jaguar. Most games use this in minor ways -- saving game options or whatever, but the Jaguar version of pitfall uses the save ram in the cart to actually save the game. Thus, unlike every other version (excluding the Windows 95 version), the Jaguar allows you to actually save and load your game, which is a massive improvement considering how long the game is and how difficult it is.
One of my friends made the GBA port of pitfall. That port had a lot of problems that this video doesn't go into. For one, the team was not given any access to the original art or code or anything. It was made in the old-style of game ports -- by the team playing the game, watching with their eyes, and figuring out how it works. The art for the game was created by the team playing the game on the SNES and taking pictures of the CRT they were playing on, and digitizing those pictures, which is partially why all the art is so garish and the colors so messed up. They also only had like 5 months to do the port. Considering the insane time constraints and how little they had to work with, I'd say it's a minor miracle they got the game out at all.
One of my friends made the GBA port of pitfall. That port had a lot of problems that this video doesn't go into. For one, the team was not given any access to the original art or code or anything. It was made in the old-style of game ports -- by the team playing the game, watching with their eyes, and figuring out how it works. The art for the game was created by the team playing the game on the SNES and taking pictures of the CRT they were playing on, and digitizing those pictures, which is partially why all the art is so garish and the colors so messed up. They also only had like 5 months to do the port. Considering the insane time constraints and how little they had to work with, I'd say it's a minor miracle they got the game out at all.
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Also worth noting, which explains why so many ports of Pitfall happened -- the background tech for the game is super standard. The actual tilemap technology used in the game is the hyper standardized TUME - The Universal Map Editor, created by . This was an Amiga and MS DOS technology created to quickly and easily port products from one machine to another. Using TUME, one can get the background levels of the game up and running in just a few weeks. TUME not only handles the placement of tiles, it also generates meta-data for ground pieces. Using TUME, changing the art from one port of the game to the other is literally as simple as loading a new tileset.
TUME gave way to MEAT once Windows 95 arrived. MEAT is the Map Editing Art Tool, which is just a fancy way of saying it's TUME, but with support for 24-bit color tiles. MEAT was specifically created for the Windows 95 port of Pitfall.
TUME and MEAT exist for the Sega Genesis (and thus 32X and Sega CD), Super NES, Amiga 500 and 1200, MS Dos, Atari Jaguar, Atari ST platforms, Gameboy Advance, and Windows 95. Other games which used TUME include Cool Spot and Earthworm Jim.
Demonstration of TUME:
TUME gave way to MEAT once Windows 95 arrived. MEAT is the Map Editing Art Tool, which is just a fancy way of saying it's TUME, but with support for 24-bit color tiles. MEAT was specifically created for the Windows 95 port of Pitfall.
TUME and MEAT exist for the Sega Genesis (and thus 32X and Sega CD), Super NES, Amiga 500 and 1200, MS Dos, Atari Jaguar, Atari ST platforms, Gameboy Advance, and Windows 95. Other games which used TUME include Cool Spot and Earthworm Jim.
Demonstration of TUME:
Insane, like those old C64/IBM ports of console games.
I get the feeling a lot of GBA work was like that, especially in the west where handhelds got no respect.
Yeah, I forgot to mention the saving on Jaguar but only because it's not a feature I really think about in that I usually finish this game in one sitting every time I play it. So the save thing just didn't stick in my mind because I don't need it or use it.
As always, there are more details I'd love to have included but I made the whole video in two days so there was a limit to what was possible. I wrote and edited the Jag and GBA sections in about two hours total. Again, I wish I could do more but the return on investment is low and I have to produce these fast to be able to make them at all. Which kinda ties in with the GBA port...
I didn't know those details since, well, I don't know anyone that worked on it and there isn't a lot of information out there. It sounds like a nightmare project, though, and I feel bad for your friend.
I'd imagine it was a similar situation on 32x and Jaguar - short development cycles on less than optimal hardware.
I'd like to track down TUME and play around with it. Is it available in any form where this is possible? Seems really interesting and I want to know more.
Yes and yes
I love Earthworm Jim but it has too many gimmicky levels which slow down the pacing while EWJ2 is just a mess. EWJ2 is a game that I like less each time I play it. The DOS version of 2 is probably the best version since it eliminates some of the worst content. Lorenzo's Soil? What a terrible stage to play through. I hate it so much despite the neat tech.
...either way, it's all opinion.
There's a download link for TUME at Sega Retro:
https://segaretro.org/TUME
More info here: https://games.greggman.com/game/tume___the_universal_map_editor/
And yeah, TUME was first used in Mc Kids for the NES. But was also used for The Mayan Adventure, Earthworm Jim, Aladdin, and many other Virgin games. You will need DOSbox to run it, and as Krejlooc said, there is also MEAT which is a win95 version. But I have no idea where to get MEAT, as it may not be open source or any under any other license.
Oh wait. looking at that Greggman.com website:
Maybe you would have to send an email?
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Regarding animation in games like Pitfall and Earthworm Jim and Disney's Aladdin: The reason those games had extra special animation is owed to the specific way the Sega Genesis handles sprites compared to the Super NES, and it explains why Pitfall had more frames of animation on the Genesis. Disney, for aladdin, hyped up a technology called digicel animation, which was supposed to be a process to squeeze more frames of animation out of the genesis. In fact, it's not the digitizer that is the star of the show, digitizers had been rote technologies for a long while by that point. Rather, the star of the show is a program called Chopper, which was created by the same people who created TUME.
To understand how it works, you need to understand how sprites work on the Sega Genesis and Super NES. Sprites on the Super NES are actually very restrictive. There is a singular hardware flag that is set in the PPU -- if the flag is not set, then all sprites on the screen are 16x16 pixels big. If the flag is set, then all sprites on the screen are 32x32 pixels big. Individual sprites cannot set their size. This means, for example, if you have both large sprites and small sprites on screen, that those small sprites are still using 32x32 pixels to draw, it's just that most of those pixels will be transparent. This wastes a ton of space.
By contrast, the Sega Genesis has finite control over its sprites. Every hardware sprite has it's own flag, and that flag lets users set the horizontal and vertical width of their sprite independently in steps of 8. Meaning you can have sprites that are 8x8, 8x16, 8x24, 8x32, 16x8, 16x16, 16x24, 16x32, 24x8, etc. Every single sprite on screen has their own flag, so if you have a screen with big sprites and small sprites, your small sprite could actually only be 8x8 pixels big in VRAM, with no wasted space.
Sega at the time took heavy advantage of this feature in their first party games. They had a tool that would chop a single large sprite up into smaller sprites, and position them so that empty 8x8 cells in the sprite would get cut out of the complex sprite. Sonic games in particular heavily used this. For example:
This is a few frames of animation for Super Sonic in Sonic 3. The green pixels are transparent pixels, but the black pixels are pixels that outright don't exist. In fact, these frames of animation aren't one sprite, they are 4 sprites, split vertically into horizontal strips. Look at the first frame of animation: the top sprite is 8x16 big, the second sprite is 16x32 big, the third sprite is 24x24 big, and the bottom sprite is 8x16 big. Instead of just constraining the sprite into a single 32x32 sprite, by chopping them up into smaller sprites, it winds up saving about 9 8x8 tiles worth of pixel data. When you draw sprites on the Genesis, it's common to begin each frame of animation with a vector table of offsets,telling each sprite how much to move to the right so that the sprite forms a complex shape. The SNES can't do things like this, the hardware literally does not allow it.
As I said, Sega had their own internal tool to do this since Sonic 1. 3rd parties, however, formed their own tool, called Chopper:
Games like Aladdin and Pitfall used Chopper on the Genesis. In the screenshot above, you can see chopper cutting up a sprite into smaller sprites for the Genesis. This space winds up adding up in the end, which is why pitfall harry has more frames when riding the cart. In addition to the Genesis' chunky pixel definitions literally being smaller than the SNES' planar pixel definitions, the way they handled sprites makes the Genesis much more well suited to lots and lots of frames of animation compared to the SNES. If you play lots of cross platform games, that becomes a common reoccurring theme -- Genesis games tend to have more animation, because the exact same amount of cart space just goes way further on the Genesis. To put it simply -- you can fit more animation into the same amount of space on the Genesis compared to the SNES.
To understand how it works, you need to understand how sprites work on the Sega Genesis and Super NES. Sprites on the Super NES are actually very restrictive. There is a singular hardware flag that is set in the PPU -- if the flag is not set, then all sprites on the screen are 16x16 pixels big. If the flag is set, then all sprites on the screen are 32x32 pixels big. Individual sprites cannot set their size. This means, for example, if you have both large sprites and small sprites on screen, that those small sprites are still using 32x32 pixels to draw, it's just that most of those pixels will be transparent. This wastes a ton of space.
By contrast, the Sega Genesis has finite control over its sprites. Every hardware sprite has it's own flag, and that flag lets users set the horizontal and vertical width of their sprite independently in steps of 8. Meaning you can have sprites that are 8x8, 8x16, 8x24, 8x32, 16x8, 16x16, 16x24, 16x32, 24x8, etc. Every single sprite on screen has their own flag, so if you have a screen with big sprites and small sprites, your small sprite could actually only be 8x8 pixels big in VRAM, with no wasted space.
Sega at the time took heavy advantage of this feature in their first party games. They had a tool that would chop a single large sprite up into smaller sprites, and position them so that empty 8x8 cells in the sprite would get cut out of the complex sprite. Sonic games in particular heavily used this. For example:
This is a few frames of animation for Super Sonic in Sonic 3. The green pixels are transparent pixels, but the black pixels are pixels that outright don't exist. In fact, these frames of animation aren't one sprite, they are 4 sprites, split vertically into horizontal strips. Look at the first frame of animation: the top sprite is 8x16 big, the second sprite is 16x32 big, the third sprite is 24x24 big, and the bottom sprite is 8x16 big. Instead of just constraining the sprite into a single 32x32 sprite, by chopping them up into smaller sprites, it winds up saving about 9 8x8 tiles worth of pixel data. When you draw sprites on the Genesis, it's common to begin each frame of animation with a vector table of offsets,telling each sprite how much to move to the right so that the sprite forms a complex shape. The SNES can't do things like this, the hardware literally does not allow it.
As I said, Sega had their own internal tool to do this since Sonic 1. 3rd parties, however, formed their own tool, called Chopper:
Games like Aladdin and Pitfall used Chopper on the Genesis. In the screenshot above, you can see chopper cutting up a sprite into smaller sprites for the Genesis. This space winds up adding up in the end, which is why pitfall harry has more frames when riding the cart. In addition to the Genesis' chunky pixel definitions literally being smaller than the SNES' planar pixel definitions, the way they handled sprites makes the Genesis much more well suited to lots and lots of frames of animation compared to the SNES. If you play lots of cross platform games, that becomes a common reoccurring theme -- Genesis games tend to have more animation, because the exact same amount of cart space just goes way further on the Genesis. To put it simply -- you can fit more animation into the same amount of space on the Genesis compared to the SNES.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of GBA ports were coded in C and C++ and not assembly; unlike most 16 bit games. So you lost a lot of potential performance because of that too. Couple that with the lack of support, budget and proper tools to work with and... well... yeah...
GBA developers rarely got the budget, time and respect that they deserved (even for original projects, let alone cheap cashgrab ports); and certainly didn't get the time and budget that developers got back while making console games for the 16 bit systems. So even though the GBA was a clear step up from the 16 bit systems, very few developers (especially western ones) got the chance to actually really get the most out of what the GBA had to offer. The idea of the "handheld ghetto", that developers all wanted to graduate out of, was all pervasive throughout the west and absolutely held their projects back for the GBA (as well as every other handheld system that proceded and followed it).
I agree on with Earthworm Jim 2, too many gimmicks, sometimes two or three major ones in sequence. Overall, still an ok game, though.
But level design apart - even if it's a thing I love about DK country - which to me was the first (that I know) that had what I call: "this cool gameplay gimmick is for this level only" for all levels, a thing that New Mario series puts so such good use...
...what really puts the Pitfall below all those games is the character control. I think it's floaty, the jumps have no weight to it, collision and hit detection are not satisfying. I played the Sega CD version and occasionally the windows one too, which by your analysis are the best versions.
But yeah, opinions! Let's all agree it's better than Super Pitfall and the rest is cool!
I guess it's a matter of taste but I love the way the controls feel in this game but can agree that hit detection is a little wonky at points. I've become used to it but it's not perfect. To me, it's very much a B+ type of game that I just happen to enjoy a lot.
Is there a good resource for reading up on all of this?
Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is such a great game.
It just oozes adventure, always kinda wanted it to be a Indiana Jones game :D
Personally I've always preferred the SNES version as that was the one I had. Something about the movement just felt more "right" in that version. The Genesis felt like the animation didn't really match the characters movement when you ran around in comparison.
There actually is one more thing that the SNES version has over the Genesis version. The use of the wall kick jump move. On SNES it actually has some use, on Genesis it appears useless as it hardly gives you any lift at all. Just a fun little detail :)
It just oozes adventure, always kinda wanted it to be a Indiana Jones game :D
Personally I've always preferred the SNES version as that was the one I had. Something about the movement just felt more "right" in that version. The Genesis felt like the animation didn't really match the characters movement when you ran around in comparison.
There actually is one more thing that the SNES version has over the Genesis version. The use of the wall kick jump move. On SNES it actually has some use, on Genesis it appears useless as it hardly gives you any lift at all. Just a fun little detail :)
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Not in any one spot, unfortunately. Chopper, the program, was only found about a year or so ago, although evidence it had existed through headers was around for a while. A long while back, someone found a development PC that had a copy of Aladdin's source code and many of the tools used to build it still on it, and thus a copy of chopper can now be obtained.
The process for making these western games on the genesis seemed to be to draw first on paper, digitize them with a scanner, drop them into Deluxe Paint on an Amiga, use vector quantization to reduce bitdepth, then drop the art into either Chopper for sprites, or ProPack for background tiles, where, if they were background tiles, they then got dropped into TUME which allowed them to rapidly export them as planemap data that the hardware could read.
LZ-based compression like ProPack is useless for sprites, because the decompression time is too long for on-the-fly animations, so it's only ever used for background tiles. Chopper's use of the Megadrive's specific sprite quirks would be the closest form of compression you could do for an "uncompressed" art asset that animates.
The windows 95 version is the one I had back in the day, although I have all the ports now.
Came in this two-pack with a really awesome 6-button controller from interact. Amazingly, that same shell for the controller got reused later in life for the sega saturn, where it became a very popular third party controller back in the day:
And my Pentium PC set up to play it:
A common problem for some of these western platformers of the era (like Pitfall, Earthworm Jim, Genesis Aladdin, The Lion King, etc) is that the level design is a bit shit frankly. Backgrounds and foregrounds often bleed together, and it's not immediately clear what are the boundaries of the platforms you're on, or sometimes it's hard to make out what parts of the level are platforms you can interact with. Level design in general is just messy to me without a clear sense of direction. And as has been stated, hit detection is complete garbage in all of these games. Not poor. Not kinda bad. Just trash.
These collective failings are the reasons I think Aladdin on the SNES is a much stronger game than the Shiny game. Look at Aladdin literally falling through a platform for no reason. This kind of crap is ubiquitous in all of these games.
These collective failings are the reasons I think Aladdin on the SNES is a much stronger game than the Shiny game. Look at Aladdin literally falling through a platform for no reason. This kind of crap is ubiquitous in all of these games.
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So I booted up TUME in DOSbox under Linux Mint 19, and so far I have no idea what I am doing. But the .zip file comes with a demo.zip file which contains two live demos of the program showing how to use itself. Pretty neat.
