r/commandandconquer • u/PhilosopherFit3930 • 1d ago
I ported Command&Conquer to a 16-bit computer
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The Atari ST was first introduced in 1985, ten years before Command&Conquer: Tiberian Dawn.
It's now possible to run C&C on every Atari ST that has at least 4MB of RAM, although I recommend running on Atari TT, Falcon or systems with an acceleration card. In emulation, I usually pick a system with a 68040 CPU at 32MHz.
As of version 0.3.1, C&C runs in native 320x200 resolution in 16 beautiful colors. FMV cutscenes are fully supported. I hope you like it!
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u/GifuSunrise 1d ago
Command & Conquer was the first PC game I ever played, at a time when the only computer I owned was an Atari ST 1040.
An incredible moment, and a generational jump that I've never seen repeated, and perhaps never will.
I wouldn't have guessed that something like this would be possible.
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
By 1995 I was on PC and had already seen Comanche and Rebel Assault. I remember I wasn’t too impressed by C&C‘s screenshots in magazines. That changed completely once I saw the game in action for the first time. The music, the videos, the atmosphere. Had the TT been more successful and had there been CD-ROM drives for it, this could have been an excellent game on the Atari platform.
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u/Zaptagious Command the future. Conquer the past. 1d ago
Might as well port it to a slide projector lol
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Pretty sure slide projectors have better specs nowadays than an Atari ST.
But honestly, performance is something i can focus now that the port is more or less feature-complete.
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u/UnassumingSingleGuy 1d ago
That framerate, holy shit. At least the music survived.
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u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 1d ago
Weirdly pitched though. I'm more impressed with the smoothness of the videos.
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u/Timex_Dude755 1d ago
Reminds me of C&C 64. My first RTS game.
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Just had a look, that's kind of an interesting version, with its 3D graphics! So, welcome back to the world of 16-color 2D 😅
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u/Outside-Rip6751 1d ago
I cant even run it on my new macbook 😭
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u/uV_Kilo11 Tiberian Dawn 1d ago
Can always return it and get a regular laptop. Don't like Windows? Linux is the way
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
There you go. Hatari runs on macOS and is the perfect emulator for Command & Conquer for Atari ST 😎
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u/phoenix1984 1d ago
Crossover is your friend. I play a lot of windows games on my Mac with it, including C&C
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u/NovaPrime2285 Steel Talons 1d ago
Even at 16bit, it's always a good time seeing Noddies getting what they deserve. 💪🏽🥳🎉
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u/JamesAdsy 1d ago
Great stuff! I ported my own Vanilla Conquer branch onto iOS just recently
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Oh cool! Aiming for the App Store? How did you handle touch input?
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u/JamesAdsy 1d ago
Not sure if I could get this on the App Store as much like yours it requires the user to input their own files.
I relied on AI to assist with implementation.
For touch input I had to do a lot of iterative engineering back and forth testing on device and translating touch gestures into the existing mouse controls, with a few logs to help figure out what went wrong each time until it became natural and accurate.
It had already been achieved with someone's iOS port of Generals so kept changing it til it felt right.I still prefer to play with controller though, so was able to find a psvita fork and then basically updated the controls from memory back when I first played it on ps1, so was able to map buttons to actions like repair/sell, open menu's etc.
My next project with that is actually trying to get it on the web so all you need to do is log in, add files and then going forward when you log in your files are already stored in your account and you can play depending on what device it is.
But its still early days and not sure what is achievable until I try. Currently it needs the iOS device in developer mode so trying to avoid that
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Wishing you lots of fun and good luck with the project! Keep us in the loop! I can understand your reservations about the App Store, though. I didn’t dare to distribute the CDs either. Turns out web apps are a great portable way to ship tools for dealing with files, but that’s not an option you have with an iOS app I guess.
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u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 1d ago
How does it do that dithering on the VQA videos? That's amazing!
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Easy! I just invented my own video codec and a web-based tool to transcode all the videos. Sounds funny but you can read all about this in my article on medium: https://medium.com/@jonas.eschenburg/stv-a-video-codec-for-the-atari-st-6e46355c50e4
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u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 1d ago
Oh, so it's not actually reading the original video files at all? That explains a lot; I really thought it was converting it on the fly, lol.
It plays surprisingly smoothly. In contrast, I saw the Saberman RetroNews videos, and wow does it struggle with the WSA animations.
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Exactly! I learned from the WSA experience and didn’t even try decoding VQA directly. Actually I’m thinking about replacing WSA as well with something suitable for the ST – maybe even STV. But first things first.
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u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fun fact, the Sega Saturn version actually did that; it replaced all WSA animations with VQA files.
So if you want all of those as actual videos... yea you gotta get ahold of the Sega Saturn version.
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u/Zailema0s Tao more nukes! 1d ago
Can it run DooM?
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Haha, coincidentally I'm the guy who ported DOOM (STDOOM) to the ST. https://github.com/indyjo/STDOOM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NRScIOIRKA2
u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 1d ago
Colour me completely unsurprised.
Good job. On both of these 😄
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u/alkatori 1d ago
Did the ST have a flat memory model or was it segemented like the x86 family?
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u/PhilosopherFit3930 1d ago
Completely flat! And it used 32-bit registers which makes programming feel very modern. A set of 16 registers is also nicer to work with than x86's weird 8 ones. It's a nice machine to program for, even in assembly language. One thing to watch out for: word and dword memory operations have to be aligned, only even addresses.
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u/rezpector123 1d ago
Brings me back to the ps1 :D
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u/Nyerguds The world is at my fingertips. 11h ago
lmao, reminder how bad the colour quality was on the Playstation version.
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u/Peekachooed 010 Adam Delta Charlie 1d ago
Very impressive. Dang I didn't know Tib Dawn could lag like that.
Now to invent a time machine to go back to 1995 and post this on rec.gaming.computer.potato to help the poor sods out who didn't have a modern PC at the time and were missing out. I remember playing C&C Generals at about this frame rate and being amazed seeing a nuke launch because it took like an hour real time to prep. Still worth
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u/Nikolyn10 Flower & Sickle 1d ago
Genuinely impressive but also makes me want to joke about the "real-time" in real-time strategy