WC1 Amiga - Direct PC port or SNES conversion?

D

-danr-

Vice Admiral
Thinking back, my earliest Wing Commander flying experience was when I was six years old in 1991 - my older brother had WC1 on his Amiga A600, at the time it was eye-poppingly good, I can remember telling other kids at school in detail just how it will be remembered as the best game ever(!)

By 1993 I had WC1 on my first PC, and the obsession went from there really, never really thought back until now much about that Amiga version...

But does anybody know, which version was it? Direct PC port? Or the SNES version repackaged?

My memories of the Amiga game are vague, I remember that Bluehair's arm did not move in the cockpit (although it was there, just static) I also remember the musical score to be much the same as the PC version I later played.
 
The Amiga version has a bit of a confused history.

Wing Commander for the Amiga is technically a PC port, in that the game’s development team worked on the PC version and someone else did the Amiga version. It’s a little different from the later console ports in that this was (supposed to be) done simultaneously. Where the SNES version was a reaction to Wing Commander’s overwhelming success, the Amiga release was planned from the beginning. If you look at the pre-release material for Wing Commander, you’ll see it includes the Amiga version in the ordering information (and the catalogs printed around the PC release say it’s ‘coming soon’).

WC straddles the point in computer game development where this was an ordinary thing. Before 1990, the market was divided between the IBM PC, the Apple ][, the Amiga, the Atari and so forth. Development of an early Ultima game, for instance, would take place on the Apple ][ while other programmers followed close behind on the other systems in an attempt to release all the versions at once. By Ultima VI and Wing Commander, development was being done for the PC version first and the others second. The next year, no one even bothered with anything but the PC.

But wait!, you’re probably saying, the Amiga version actually came out over a year after the PC did! That’s correct, and there’s something of a story there. Although the Amiga version was advertised alongside the PC version, it was significantly delayed. The Amiga wasn’t a popular system in the United States and Origin didn’t do in-house development. Instead, they hired an expert programmer in England (a man named Nick Pelling), where the machine was huge, for the conversion. Unfortunately he developed a nearly fatal brain disease and the project slipped while he recovered.

In terms of the game itself, there were changes made to accommodate the less powerful Amiga 500. Some of the ‘extended memory’ features were removed (I don’t remember the moving hand specifically, but that seems a likely choice) and there was no 256-color mode (it was visually the equivalent of the PC’s EGA version instead of the VGA we’re mostly familiar with). The music likely sounded better at the time (unless you had a special MIDI setup for the PC) because of the Amiga’s nicer sound hardware. There was a second Amiga version developed for (and bundled with) the CD32 a bit later that brought back the 256-color graphics.

The SNES version was actually much later, releasing in 1993 (three years doesn’t seem like a long time today, but it’s enormous in terms of Wing Commander’s overall development history).
 
Bandit Loaf - Thankyou for the thorough, frankly encyclopedic but enjoyable account of the WC1 Amiga version. The subtle differences you describe make me pretty anxious to dig it out again now, I'd especially like to hear the game through the A600's sound boards.

Incidentally, do you know if Nick Pelling ever returned to game development following his tragic ordeal? It's a name that I think is quite renowned in software circles here...Thanks.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The music likely sounded better at the time (unless you had a special MIDI setup for the PC) because of the Amiga’s nicer sound hardware.
Click to expand...

I cut my teeth on the Amiga version and I remember being very disappointed by the PC music.
IMO not even WC1 on KS quite ever quite matched it for feeling
 
Flashpoint said:
I cut my teeth on the Amiga version and I remember being very disappointed by the PC music.
IMO not even WC1 on KS quite ever quite matched it for feeling
Click to expand...

Likely you had an FM synthesys card(Adlib/Soundblaster or clone), wich was the common card, while sound cards were still uncommon.

Some people had an MT32, or a compatible MIDI synthesizer hooked up to General Midi/SoundCanvas compatible port, what the soundtrack was designed for originally, early RAM-based wavetable cards such as Gravis Ultrasound were able to emulate the MT32, and far surpass the Amiga sound. These days you can do all those things in software.
 
I had a 486DX4 with 8mb of ram which was pretty swish at the time.
I think the problem for the PC was that MIDI will rarely sound great compared to a composition using real samples (if you get my meaning) like what was done on the Amiga.

I'm not trying to bash the PC version. I guess it's because the music was a big part of my immersion into the game, so the PC music left me a little cold.
 
At that time, you probably had a Soundblaster Pro, or compatible for a soundcard. Wavetable and RAM-wavetable boards did use real sounds, while what you adress as midi is probably FM-synthesys. Professional MIDI setups use samples far superior in quality to those of the filtered 8khz sample common in the Amiga 8khz sound standard, then and now.

Wavetable cards were very expensive and definetely uncommon then. Soundcards are itself a rarity now. Listen to the "Wing one" soundtrack, listed a few times in the news. That is the sound coming directly from a roland MIDI setup. If you set up dosbox correctly, you can configure a gravis ultrasound with Mega-EM to set up the sound, and while not as good as the MT-32, you can get an idea of what it is supposed to sound like(and more accurate then kilrathi saga especially in flight)
 
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