Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja
Elite Systems ported Data East's Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja coinop of 1991 to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1992. Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja is an early VGA port that impressed me in terms of how it displayed, sounded and performed.
Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja displays in 256-color non-standard VGA and features several layers of parallax scrolling. The drawspace is 256x180.
On a technical level Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja evokes a coinop-quality conversion. To be clear, I am not saying that PC Joe & Mac is arcade-perfect, I am saying that it evokes coinop-quality. It's missing too many pixels to be considered arcade-perfect.
Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja requires an i80286 CPU, 512K of free conventional RAM and 288K of EMS RAM. Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja supports keyboard or joystick control as well as Sound Blaster, AdLib and Roland audio.
Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja was distributed on 1x 3.5" 1.44 MB HD diskette and 1x 3.5" 720kB diskette. Joe & Mac installs via New World Computing Install v.2.0. The install size is 2.5 megs.
Compare Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja with Titus France's Prehistorik of the same year. Prehistorik has no parallax-scrolling or even proper conventional scrolling: it has catch-up scrolling; that is, when the edges of the screen are reached the viewport scrolls to the next screen in one move.
Core Design's Chuck Rock of 1991 on the Amiga (ultra-smooth parallax):
The IBM PC MS-DOS version of Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja furnishes one example of how VGA had caught up to Amiga graphics by 1992 -- in "Amiga" genre. The Amiga version looks like a port whereas the VGA version could be mistaken for the original arcade game (at least, to a casual observer).
Both IBM PC MS-DOS and Amiga versions feature smooth parallax scrolling and smooth sprites, but the VGA version features several layers of parallax whereas the Amiga only features one cloud-cover layer.
The Amiga version looks like an EGA game:
Clearly, the IBM PC MS-DOS version also features more colors (256 versus 16 on the Amiga version).
It comes down to which developer ports the arcade as to which version comes out better, but I still think this shows that VGA > ECS / OCS if the coders know VGA as well as ECS / OCS.
Ok, enough about caveman games.
cf. Platform games:
- Bubble Bobble Amiga 1988 Software Creations David J. Broadhurst
- The New Zealand Story Amiga 1989 Choice Colin Gordon
- Commander Keen IBM PC MS-DOS id Software 1990
- Flood Amiga Bullfrog Productions Sean Cooper 1990
- James Pond Amiga Vectordean Chris Sorrell 1990
- Rainbow Islands Amiga 1990 Graftgold Andrew Braybrook
- James Pond Amiga Vectordean Chris Sorrell 1990
- Gods IBM PC MS-DOS 1991 Bitmap Brothers
- Parasol Stars Amiga 1992 Ocean Software Mick West
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