Posts: 1370 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
Quote:
OlafSch wrote:
I had a discussion with one NG game developer recently why there is no 68k version of his game. He first mentioned speed but then admitted that emulation would be fast enough but in his view would make no sense because then you could also use the Windows version. That on the other side made no sense to me either because why amiga NG versions at all? People buy it for nostalgic reasons and because they want to play it on the platform they like.
A big concern is that, after decades of neglect, the development environment is simply very much outdated on 68K platforms, which makes porting various types of software (3D games, for instance) especially challenging.
Plus, developers obviously target platforms that they themselves are interested in. If someone prefers an NG platform, then this is where the focus is. Now imagine a port to 68K actually requires more time than the inital work on an NG platform (see my previous remark about the development tools), then it should not be surprising that there is limited appeal here. A straight recompile is not going to work for many titles, unless you happen to be using Hollywood or FreePascal.
Moreover, many developers involved with retro and related platforms derive pride from writing efficient code and finding out how much performance you can get out of hardware that is generally seen as "underpowered" by outsiders. When you are developing for emulation, this motivation is lacking since even the most efficient code is going to be slower than a native implementation.
