Recreating Dune II for the Amiga | Hacker News Reader

Recreating Dune II for the Amiga

spillhistorie.no

Having played Dune II all the way through on PC and tried it on the Amiga, The Amiga version was a poor substitute. While there may have been holy wars back in the day about which machines were better, it really did come down to how much effort was put into each incarnation of a game. The real testament to this is the things that people have been able to do in recent years with modern support tooling taking on some of the load of the effort required. Grind on a stock Amiga 500 is amazing https://youtu.be/z3_3J7YPaaE?t=20

It's nice to see Dune II being rejuvenated into what it always could have been.

I always liked dune 1 a lot better. The gameplay wasn't as RTS but there was a storyline mixed in (following the book which I was not familiar with). It made it a really cool experience.

Dune 2 was definitely the better RTS though

I hate squashed screenshots. Does everyone forget that screens used to be 4:3? Does nobody notice the squashed oval shapes of planets (and other circles)?

It's the non-square pixel size that throws off screenshots, pillarboxing should account for the differences between 16:9 and 4:3. 320×200 resolution was "4.8:3" squished to a 4:3 display, so pixels should be slimmer in the horizontal direction.

These are genuine screenshots, you're seeing what most Amiga owners (Europeans with PAL/SECAM screens with square pixels and 256 lines without overscan) were seeing -- a game made by Americans designed for NTSC but happened to run on PAL machines. Hence the overly wide circles and big blank block of 56 lines at the bottom.

I haven't thought about it until reading this article. The collecting of random "tiberium", "ore", etc laying around, actually makes sense in the context of Dune. Not so much in Red Alert etc.

Tiberium is C&C 1. Red Alert does not have Tiberium, but ores and gems. And ores can be found on the superficial layer of the earth, so it is not that much of a stretch. Although from a game design perspective, it is greatly simplified.

Using harvesters to scoop up gold and gems is kind of dumb, but I think it's acceptable as a game design convention.

I feel like Generals had the best economic design out of any C&C game. Your helicopters / trucks / bare-footed workers simulate modern logistics by collecting crates of resources from a "warehouse". Once they are collected, you can switch to your secondary economy of pumping oil, getting supplies delivered by the UN, stealing money from the internet, or selling goods on the black market.

The game engines for C&C and Red Alert are full of Dune II references; as just one example, the factions (GDI/Nod or Allies/Soviets) are still called "houses" in the internal configuration files of C&C/RA.

C&C is pretty much what you get when you want to produce a sequel to Dune II but can't (or don't want to) license the Dune I.P. again so everything has to be re-skinned...

> C&C is pretty much what you get when you want to produce a sequel to Dune II but can't (or don't want to) license the Dune I.P. again so everything has to be re-skinned...

What REALLY set C&C apart was its presentation, which was like nothing else* when it came out. It made a serious and earnest attempt like you were actually using your computer as an interface to command an army*, from the "in-universe" installer to the present day setting where "you" choose a side after NOD and GDI hijack your TV, to the non-western battlefields, to the way Kane and General Shepphard addressed "you" personally in the live-action kinematics. The CD music was awesome too.

* Dune II also was known for its great graphics and having strict system requirements * This continued in later games, but they were much more self-aware.

Ye the immersion was fantastic.

I think RTS:es with base building is a bit too abstract, nowadays when the graphics are so good, to seem believable, in the way it did in the 90s.

Inheriting Dune's gameplay required inventing another valuable substance in a new setting. They didn't come right out and say he who controls the tiberium controls the universe, but…

Woah, I would have loved a A1200 version back in 1993.

I loved this game, and remember having to swap several discs to play it before I eventually bought a HDD (a whopping 545Mb beast).

It was only recently that I saw the DOS intro on YouTube and realised the Amiga had been short-changed.

I guess playing this on the Mega Drive/Genesis I already knew I was being short changed. Also to have that much storage back then would have been life changing. I remember having a 120MB HDD in 1991 (?) and it felt like you would never run out of space. That was until you had both Doom and Doom 2 on it a few years later and combined took up about 30% of total storage.

Dune on the Genesis was incredible. I still own it!

One of the first games I played after I got a sound card for my PC. I sunk so many hours into this game. Music was great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Mlozm6fZY

Same here, one of my very first PC games even. It is worth pointing out though that the link you provided is for an additive version of the soundtrack across different audio devices; so it was not something that one would have heard back in the day.

Played through it again recently on stream using a borrowed MiSTer, second hand Roland SC-55 I picked up on the cheap, official v1.07 patch [1], Mr Fibble's v1.07 fix [2], and the official sound fix to be able to select different devices for music and sound effects. All patches and fixes are available on PCGamingWiki [3]. Not a difficult game (although Mr Fibble's fix makes it harder as it corrects a major AI bug), but made me sweat a bit for the last few missions when I nearly lost my only construction yard to an early missile before I had a back up.

[1]: https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/20343-differences-between-dun...

[2]: https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/20168-dune-2-v107-fix

[3]: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dune_II:_The_Building_of_a...

Returning to the amazing music. With the SC-55 I could enjoy the soundtrack in a different light [4] than the ad lib version I remembered from my childhood [5]. Now, if only the Roland MT-32 was not so darn expensive I would pick it up just to listen to Chani's Eyes from Dune (the other one) in its ultimate rendition [6]. Two very different games, but both with amazing soundtracks.

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdRRCtD4d_k

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKBjmJCBHw

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zYSDhwmI_Q&t=1129

> Chani's Eyes from Dune (the other one)

Have you heard the professionally produced CD of the Dune soundtrack by its composer, Stéphane Picq? Dune: Spice Opera (1992) by Exxos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWn1C1POc6M&t=2492s

... and its 2024 remaster?

https://stphanepicq.bandcamp.com/track/chanis-eyes-2024-rema...

Software also went the other way from Amiga to PC thanks to Brent Iverson, as with EA's DeluxePaint II Enhanced & III and DeluxePaint Animation. Many gaming titles used the former (Amiga? PC?) to create their graphics.

TIL: EHB, the "VGA Mode X" for Amiga.

There were eventually Deluxe Paint versions for both DOS and Amiga. I think the Amiga one was first out as the PC graphics were more limited until VGA.

Simply incredible that projects like this exist

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