Reshoot-R on Classic Amiga

First of all, I am sorry for the long delays between posts.

My wife and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary this year and decided to do the trip of a lifetime to Europe. It was my first time to go to Europe and we saved for ages to be able to go. We had a wonderful time and we were away just over a month in May and early June. This is why the blog (and everything else) took a back seat for a bit.

Among many things we did, I finally got to go to the Monaco F1 Grand Prix in 2019, something I have dreamed to do since I was very young. FYI in case you didn't already know, I am a huge F1 fan, having watched every race since 1988 - it's a bit off topic sorry but here's one picture:

Now that I am back home, I am catching up on the Amiga news and there is a bit to digest!

One thing worth noting quickly though is that this month is now the 7th year I have been doing this blog! I started it back in June 2012 covering the AmigaOne X1000 and expanded it to cover NextGen and Classic Amigas. Amigas are one of my very favourite things to muck around with when not working or watching f1 races :-)

It is amazing that I am still doing the blog, but there is still so much interesting stuff happening in the Amiga world in 2019 - how could I stop now?

I hope you have enjoyed this blog, however long you may have been following it. It is still fun for me to do, and I will continue it as long as it is :-)

Today I wanted to take a quick look at the recently released game called Reshoot-R, which is a shoot em up sequel to the original Reshoot game I looked at on this blog here.

Given the time I have been away, I did a big order a while back for Amiga Future, Reshoot-R and Trap Runner. They all arrived in two packages this week and I was very keen to unwrap!

I have fallen behind a bit with Amiga Future magazines while saving for our trip so I had bought a few issues to catch up with some left over money from our trip!

Since this post is focused on Reshoot-R, it is only fair to check out that first! The cover looks great!

I bought the Signature Edition, which include not only the game on CD (bootable on CD32), it includes an audio CD of the music from the game and a signed postcard from the author Richard Lowenstein! This version costs EUR47.95 which is a bit steep in my view, but it does include the audio cd too.

You can opt for the much cheaper download only version which costs EUR29.95, or the Pure version for EUR34.95 which includes the download version, game CD, instruction manual but not the audio CD.

A closer look at the included CD's, etc inside the box:

 Reshoot-R requires AGA to run, so it needs an Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 or Amiga CD32 to run.

Here it is about to be loaded on my Amiga 4000:

However I did have problems with it on my Amiga 4000. It installed ok, but on launch it would crash and reboot every time. I tried the installer on the CD, and extracted the archive version on the CD too but no luck running it. Maybe it doesn't like the 060 or AmigaOS 3.9? I tried it on my A4000t as well and hit the same issue. I should look into that some more as it is weird.

Anyway, being impatient I copied it to my Amiga 1200/030 running AmigaOS 3.1 via CF card, and I am pleased to say it worked perfectly on that:

My initial feedback on this new version is that Reshoot-R is considerably better than the original Reshoot release. I think the graphics look better and the game dynamics are better too.

You can choose to play the game without music and/or sound fx from the main screen.

The high score table and ability to upload the scores to an internet high score table is a nice touch too.
 

Like most shoot em ups, Reshoot-R is basically shoot anything that moves.

The power ups you can collect along the way are essential as the game gets harder quite quickly. Being able to move quicker, extra weaponry, etc are well implemented.

The included manual explains the game controls using CD32 controller or joystick and keyboard, and also the interesting story of the game development - very interesting read!

The star of the show for me is the music though - I really enjoyed it and it suits the game very well.

I think this game lends itself well to two player, which I was surprised was not included - I hope a later version will include a two player option!

Graphically the game looks good, thanks to the work of Kevin Saunders.

Screenshots don't do the game many favours as it doesn't show the graphics at it's best, but they are good, and the action and frame rate is smooth at all times. The speed of the game is good, and the difficulty level ramps up how you would expect it to.

I think having some additional lives and level stage codes to avoid starting from the beginning again each time would help the game a bit. It made it hard for me to show screenshots from the later sections of the game as I was not good enough and kept having to start again to get to the parts to take a picture!

I borrowed these last few images from the APC&TCP webshop as I couldn't get that far into the game to do them myself - sorry!

Having said that I guess I have to accept I am not as good at shoot em ups as I used to be back in the days of Xenon 1/2, Silkworm, Menace, Blood Money, SWIV, R-type 1/2, Katakis, Hybris, Battle Squadron, UN Squadron, Atomic Robokid, Project X, XP8, T-Zero and many many more too. Sigh, rattling these off makes me realise how many cool shoot em ups there have been on Classic Amiga.

It is great to see a modern shoot em up on Amiga in 2019 and I recommend picking up Reshoot-R! You can buy it from APC&TCP website here

ACA1233n, memory upgrade and floppy drive for Amiga 500

Hello again - I am now back from my trip to Japan and can use my Amigas again! This week I received my most recent purchase of a new ACA1233n 030 accelerator, 512k memory upgrade and new floppy drive to install into my Amiga 500 - the accelerator via the ACA500 expansion.

I got a little distracted first playing the newly released Giana Sisters SE on my Amiga 4000T which I had set up to make sure it is working well for the Adelaide Retro Computing meeting this week, which has a "Bring along my favourite retro system theme". Of course it has to be Amiga! :-)

Great Giana Sisters SE in 2016 replaces many of the graphics of the original 1980's classic Amiga game whilst maintaining the same mechanics and gameplay of the original.

Have to admit I enjoyed playing it:

Anyway, enough of the distractions! My package from AmigaStore.eu arrived this week, ready to try out on the Amiga 500 I got recently. You can follow the earlier posts on the Amiga 500 work I have done so far here and here.

I bought a 512k memory expansion:

I also bought a new Amiga floppy drive, complete with a 3D printed drive eject button designed to fit the Amiga 500:

I also got an Individual Computers ACA1233n 030 accelerator, which has 128MB memory:

This is the slower accelerator that runs at 26Mhz rather than 40Mhz. Since this Amiga 500 is really for WHDLoad games and OCS/ECS demos I didn't see the need to pay the significant extra cost for the small extra speed bump. There is no FPU anyway. I already have other big box Amigas that fill those higher spec needs much better anyway.

I also got the optional RTC battery expansion to plug onto the clockport expansion port on the accelerator to maintain the correct time/date on the system:

Last, but not least, some light Amiga Future magazine reading - two issues as I missed one with my recent job redundancy situation from mid June.

On that topic fortunately I am very glad to say this is now resolved and I have now secured a new full time job, starting next week! :-)

Here is a closer shot of the accelerator, so you can see the clockport expansion port for RTC battery expansion or RapidRoad USB expansion:

There is no FPU installed but it can be installed if you desire it. Here is the RTC battery expansion close up - it is very small:

First things first - I load the RTC expansion on to the accelerator:

From the messages on the back it is clear that there is no warranty if you try to solder an FPU on the board....

 I tried out the easiest upgrade first, the 512k memory expansion card for the Amiga 500:

It is a small board, with plenty of space still left in the expansion bay!

I powered on the Amiga 500 using the external disk drive port Gotek drive acting as DF0 using the DF0 selector expansion I installed on my last Amiga 500 blog post here. Here it is booting Workbench 1.3 ADF:

And excellent - I now have the extra memory:

That done, I turned my attention to the accelerator next. I got out my ACA500, which has an A1200 accelerator port to connect selected accelerators (like this one) to use on the Amiga 500:

Here it is with the case taken off:

The new accelerator fits nicely in the ACA500 case housing:

I then reassembled the casing, ready for action:

I connected the ACA500 to the Amiga 500, ready to test:

Power on and things are looking promising - ACA boot menu appears:

I boot up the kickstart 3.1 CF hard disk configuration to boot Workbench 3.1 from CF card on the ACA500 - soon after the Workbench appears - much faster than before thanks to the 030 accelerator on board. I am using Directory Opus in Workbench replacement mode with Magic Workbench:

As you can see the 128MB FAST memory from the accelerator has been picked up and available to the Workbench! Excellent!

This machine doesn't have much software on the CF hard disk as yet - something I plan to work on soon enough.

But for now I am happy it works, so I turned my attention to the final upgrade on the Amiga 500, a replacement floppy drive for the not working internal floppy drive.

Here you can see the new drive (left) and the original drive:

One problem that becomes immediately apparent is that the height of the two is not the same, which will create problems for mounting the new drive correctly in the Amiga 500.

This then began a frustrating afternoon of adding bits here and there to raise the height to the correct level...

To say this task was frustrating is an understatement!

It took me a long time to get it aligned correctly. Perhaps they should include the necessary bits to raise the drive to the right level out of the box to make things easier for future customers.

Eventually though I got it pretty much right:

So I hooked up the Amiga 500 to test things out:

The drive worked and the eject button was ok, although a little bit shorter than the original one:

Booting floppy disks worked well - Amiga Workbench 1.3 and some demos too of course:

As you can see the fit is not perfect as the drive eject button is not quite deep enough to nicely fill the hole on the Amiga 500 which is a shame, but it works ok and ejecting it is not a problem, once I finally got the alignment correct:

Here it is with a disk inserted:

I was glad to get the upgrades installed on the Amiga 500 - there is more to do of course with the Accelerator and CF hard disk setup, but this is for a later time!