User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jul 30, 2017 6:46 pm

I’ve been playing the game Starflight by Binary Systems and published by Electronic Arts recently. It's a mind-bogglingly expansive sci-fi exploration game made back in 1986. The game was revolutionary in its approach to squeezing an entire star system onto a single disk, and has been credited for inspiring the hugely popular Mass Effect series, among many others.
Please be sure to check out the video comparison I made, too.
To be fair, the basic premise of the game was a straight rip of Star Trek (or, shall we say pays homage to it heavily) and that is not a bad thing at all. And the application of how the team from Binary Systems got it all to work in Starflight really is amazing. There are over 800 planets to explore and even procedurally generated lifeforms based on (I think) fractal math. It's really cool.

In any case, I’d been playing it on my 7Mhz Amiga 2000, which I’d stripped down to near barebones recently while performing various hardware tasks. After playing Starflight for about two weeks, I got a bit stuck and seeked out some hints on how to better create my crew and prepare my ship. I was really hoping to find a couple of gems of knowledge, as I was teetering on the brink of quitting. The game was just so slow, and while I loved immersing myself into the well-written manual the game's scope is massive. It felt like I was going to spend a few years on the game just to wrap my head around it. Plus... the slowness.

Naturally I went to YouTube.

I soon ran across a very good player named MysteriousJG who had broken his playing the game into a stunning 17 individual chapters. I was both thrilled and scared to death of what I'd found (here's episode 1).

I think MysteriousJG, at least at the time of the filming in 2012, was in the Canadian army stationed overseas somewhere and made videos in his off-hours to pass the time.

In any case, his setup was DOSBOX running on a modern PC. Right off the bat I could see his DOS graphics were very pedestrian and blocky compared to what I was used to. But more importantly, I got a lump in my throat when I saw how freaking fast his game was compared to what I was used to. I was confused to say the least.

That got me really wondering about my stripped down stock 2000. I had a few megs of RAM and a 2 megs of chip RAM, but that was it. And frankly, in the grand scheme of things, that's more than enough to use the machine on a daily basis. For the RPGs I've been playing, I never noticed anything wrong at all.

I had pulled my GeForce 030 card out of the CPU slot as I wasn’t convinced I was really getting that much benefit out of it and, at the time, I was working on some hard drive experiments that made life easier by just pulling the GeForce out of my way.

I’d just about given up on Starflight. Just landing on a planet, I’d programmed my brain to never land with the ship’s viewport open as it took forever to land the ship this way. After watching MysteriousJG land his ship, however, and how smoothly he was able to do it (maybe 30-40 seconds) I was simply shocked. His crappy, blocky graphics be damned - the animation looked amazing. This was bullshit!

I decided to perform a test and captured most of it on video.

TL;DR
The accelerator card's 40Mhz makes Starflight an absolute joy to play. I will never play Starflight on a stock 7Mhz ever again - just being honest. It’s like night and day.

And what really saddens me is why it was released in this state. There is really very little animation on the screen at any time (if you haven't played it before, the animation is akin to Bard's Tale levels), and the parts of the screen which do show animation are in relatively small windows with minimal sprites with the exception of the planet landings. There really is no excuse for how slow the game plays on the Amiga, especially when you consider how powerful the machine is and was compared to the DOS crap that was available in 1986.

Since the game was made in 1986 and one of the earliest titles on the platform, I’m chalking this up to simply bloated code and probably some tight deadlines. It should have been optimized better before shipping to retail stores - no doubt about it.

I don’t typically endorse accelerator cards to anyone. To be honest, I think the vast majority of software made for the Amiga BITD (for average consumers, not video production artists) never really benefited from them.

But man, Starflight sure does.

Check out my video to see the speed comparison I perform as well as some general thoughts about the differences between the DOS version and the Amiga. Spoiler: the Amiga version is way better in every department.

Note: I noticed during the editing of my video that my SysInfo was reporting a PAL mode for some reason. Heart in my throat I quickly fired up my stock Amiga 500 to compare speeds against my original 2000’s test. Descending on a planet with the viewport open on the 500 took 02:06 - two seconds longer than the 2000’s 02:04 time. Basically, it was exactly the same speed. Whew! Sometimes NTSC games play better & smoother on NTSC hardware and slower on PAL hardware. Starflight plays exactly the same on my stock 2000 as it does on my stock 500 as you would expect it to.
IMG_9671.JPG
The gorgeous original box for Binary System/Electronic Arts 1986 masterpiece: Starflight.


User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:50 am

You might want to cross-check with the CRPGAddict, he played through this recently.
Check out his final rating of Starflight here:
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/search/label/Starflight
Warning - spoilers ahead! :)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jan 28, 2018 10:50 am

I finished the first one - it took me AGES. It's so deep and so awesome. That game is definitely in my top-5 of all time. I realize I'm in the minority there, but I just loved it. It felt like I was finally in a real Star Trek simulation and I just adored every minute of it.

I plan on playing Starflight 2 some time this year. Maybe in the next 1-2 months.





Return to “Hardware”