Was This The First Amiga Game To Receive an Update? (Project X - Amiga)

Nowadays, it's common for games to receive multiple updates and fixes after released, but was it so common back in the Amiga days? Project X by Team 17 for the Amiga received some "tweaks & enhancements" in 1993, after being released in 1992. Was this the earliest Amiga game to do that? I'm not sure.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:12 This game got updated!
3:02 Boot test
4:30 'update' release notes
5:52 Making new disks
7:44 Boot test (new disks)
8:38 Playtime WinUAE
Links:
Question: www.quora.com/What-was-the-fi...
Project X: www.lemonamiga.com/games/deta...
Project X: www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/...
1992 Cover Disk Image: www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/...

[@retrojb101]

I too have the revised version of this game and, honestly, it’s still rock hard. Think I barely made it to level 2 but mainly died on the first level back in the day. Still a great game and what a soundtrack!

[@DavePoo2]

Ha ha, well it IS and Amiga game after all, when were they ever easy?

[@xxxxSylphxxxx]

I recently uploaded a video of the original (not special edition) version of this! You're right, the special edition was still rock rock-hard! The main 'easing' effect of the patch was to make the player only lose 1 level of their weapon when losing a life, seems weird that that change wasn't mentioned! Took me *ages* to beat project-X back then, and even revisiting it required quite a lot of tries! The recent video even mentions a few tips for getting through certain areas and such. kzbin.info/www/bejne/rou3mJapaq2Hr8U

[@user-pr8jz6ef2h]

When I had my 1200. this was my best game ever. and i was addicted to the intro type and the game song that always played in the background.

[@DavePoo2]

That tune slaps!

[@JanBeta]

I remember that there are different versions of things like Pirates! and SimCity for the Amiga. Ambermoon got an update at some point, too (I think that was even downloadable already in 1994/95). The Project X Special Edition got recommended to me (by cheaplehre who you maybe know from a certain Discord) after I failed miserably playing the original version on a live stream. The 1993 version definitely was a lot less frustrating (even though I still failed pretty badly)... :D

[@DavePoo2]

If that Ambermoon patch was downloadable in 1994 or 95 then that certainly beats the 2002 entry for Unreal Championship, which is what the Guinness book of records seems to think. I feel like the history of these patches may have been lost, as I wasn't aware of any patches at all, and I don't seem to find anything about them on the net. I do seem to remember you playing Project-X once on stream, but as this is an Amiga game, being hard was just par for the course. I haven't beaten the 1st level yet, I'm looking forward to playing this a bit more.

[@user-pr8jz6ef2h]

If you like this game you will definitely love a game called Apidya. It's a side scroller just like this game but you play a wasp flying through a garden, shooting other insect's.

[@DavePoo2]

Ah yes! With the Chris Heulsbeck soundtrack.

[@markmilenkovic1745]

I remember buying this game, big box version. I bought it purely based on the artwork. It was excellent. I must remember to play it again

[@DavePoo2]

It does seem to be a good game. The reviews say it's incredibly hard though, It seems that was apparently one of the things addressed in the patch.

[@markmilenkovic1745]

@@DavePoo2 oh yeah. I never came close to finishing it. But the frantic pace and the music meant I kept going back to it. Wonder if I’ve got what it takes to complete this in 2023 with all my years of experience Probably not :(

[@paszTube]

A stock Amiga 500 has 512k ram so the "ONE MEG AMIGA" was added to prevent sad costumers probably!

[@geertjalink]

512k expansion, probably most had them also because of the date clock it had.

[@DavePoo2]

Yeah, they don't say whether it needs to be chip ram or not, and many Amiga 500's had 512kb of chip and 512kb of "slow" ram. So I assume this means it needs 1Mb but at least 512kb of chip, which means it could even work on an Amiga 1000?

[@RasVoja]

@@DavePoo2 Some early a1000 models had 256k chip :D

[@daishi5571]

I can't find it but I had a list and there were surprisingly few 1MB games on the Amiga, I thought it was more of a normal thing. I had an A500 KS1.2 with 512KB Chip and 512K Fast and with games never had an issue. Some of the applications would eat up the memory quickly (you can raytrace on a 1MB A500 but it was rather restrictive. I was so happy for my A1200.

[@daishi5571]

@@RasVoja It was an odd configuration, as on the A1000 it came with 256KB Chip RAM on board (Jay Miner argued with Commodore to have 512KB standard, but they insisted on 256K so he insisted on the memory door. In the end Jay was correct as the memory prices dropped and by the time the A1000 was released with the additional cost of making the interface and circuit for the memory door it would have been cheaper to just put in 512K on board) but had a special expansion door on the front for an additional 256KB Chip RAM bringing you up to the 512KB Chip RAM limit for the time. But it did not have any direct way to add memory unlike the A500 with the underneath trap door. However memory upgrades were released that attached to the side slot that were actual real Fast RAM not Slow RAM so the A1000 with 1MB was a bit faster than an A500.

[@mcborge1]

I still have this game and it's main theme is my ringtone. 😁

[@DavePoo2]

Nice. Did I read somewhere that the main theme is a remix of the Superfrog main theme?

[@mcborge1]

@@DavePoo2 Ha ha! I had no idea it was a remix of the Superfrog theme, I played very little of that game. I'm going to have to do some investigating. 😁👍

[@mcborge1]

I just checked and nope, they are nothing alike, oh well, lol. 😁

[@DavePoo2]

@@mcborge1 well, "believe half of what you see and nothing of what you read" goes the saying.

[@mcborge1]

@@DavePoo2 Wise words Dave. 👍

[@xxxxSylphxxxx]

Alien breed for the amiga came out before project X, and received a similar update. I'm not sure whether the update was released before project-X special edition? When it says 'for all 1-meg amigas' on the box, that's not all amigas - the A500 had only 512mb, unless the owner had installed extra memory in the trapdoor on the bottom. I actually recently played through project-x on the amiga and uploaded the video. Not original hardware, mind! If you do go back to it, I even mention a few tips while playing if you're interested: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rou3mJapaq2Hr8U Thanks for the video! I enjoyed watching this.

[@DavePoo2]

I was having a look at your video, this game does look super hard. Oh well, par for the course for most Amiga games.

[@xxxxSylphxxxx]

​@@DavePoo2 Par for the course is about right! It's about as hard as most amiga shooters (Apidya, Disposable Hero) on their hardest settings. Great fun... Disposable hero is probably _slightly_ more fun, and also has 'medium' and 'easy' difficulties! Project-X is such a team-17 classic though!

[@Jussi-PekkaAaltonen]

That's the first *console* game ever to receive a downloadable patch. By that time (2003) it was pretty much a standard on PCs, and even Amiga had downloadable patches in the mid 90s and even before. But yeah, it wasn't a standard, and usually not for commercial products, the earliest I found with a quick search of aminet was a patch released for SimCity 2000 in '95.

[@DavePoo2]

Yeah, it was just very uncommon I think. I think a lot of software development at that time was just, once it's done, it's done, and bugs never got fixed, so it's nice to see an early example of this. Apparently, they added the "rookie" difficulty mode, as the game was incredibly hard, it was probably a response to the reviews of the game. I don't think they did much user testing on game back in the day, so when the game came out, many games were just unplayably hard.

[@Retro4u]

So hard this game is will get it on my cd32 when it's fixed.. love the music though

[@DavePoo2]

Like most Amiga games, it's just way too hard!

[@bazza5699]

i remember this and had it.. but i'm pretty sure I had the original 92 version. it's so long ago now though that i can't see any real differences.. great game

[@DavePoo2]

Apparently the tweaks are to the difficulty. The Stuart Campbell (of Cannon Fodder 2 fame) review said the original game was so hard that after days of playing, he was the only one in the office who had made it to level 2.

[@bazza5699]

@@DavePoo2 haha sign of a good game lol

[@d_vibe-swe]

Uhm. I'm pretty sure that Team 17 released a downloadable 060 patch for Alien Breed 3D 2 back in mid 90's.

[@DavePoo2]

060! Really? Those guys were dedicated.

[@d_vibe-swe]

@@DavePoo2 I think it was their last Amiga release..

[@Kris_A]

The Guiness World records is totally wrong there. Even if the early Amiga updates like you show here were somehow discluded, I know for certain that I remember waiting all night to download a 75Mb update to Half Life (With Team Fortress Classic) on a 5.6k modem (praying that no one picked up the telephone!). The internet cost per minute back then too! (People don't talk about this much these days). I think people want to forget about the telephone bills they may have caused their parents (Not me of course :). Anyhoo, Guiness is wrong, and I'd rather go with your suggestion. :)

[@DavePoo2]

I remember staying up all night to download the Alpha build of Quake 2. I'm glad we now have the days of always on internet.

[@entity8019]

Only played the original. BASTARD HARD. Couldn't beat the second level. This game made me bald!!!!! Two things I've realised... firstly, the music on the title screen has been reworked - still one of the Amiga's best. Secondly, it's gone from four disks to three. If memory serves, there's no cheat codes either, so 99% of people never saw more than the first one or two levels.

[@DavePoo2]

Yep, the magazine review said that only one of the reviewers could even get to level 2!

[@vertigoz]

On dream17 you should have what you're looking for, today by chance I downloaded the regular version there

[@DavePoo2]

I think that's where I downloaded these special edition ADF files which refused to work on my real Amiga.

[@lochmarnegoat9812]

The original version was called Project W.

[@DavePoo2]

I have since read a review from Stuart Campbell (of Cannon Fodder 2 fame) of the original version. He said after days of playing it in the office, he was the only one who manged to get to level 2. I now believe the original game was patched because it was way too hard.

[@vapourmile]

This reminds me of two of the things of the many which put me off the Amiga: 1. Instantly, you can tell, it isn't great, is it? This is not a game which was set be remembered by the public or games fans generally. Most of those who do remember it will do purely because they owned an Amiga and had a copy. It hits you straight away that the game hasn't been well thought through and it's just a general mish-mash of effects found in arcade games of the day. 2. It isn't 50fps. Like many other Amiga games, after coming over from a Commodore which almost only had 50fps gapes except for 3D games, watching the screen in Amiga refresh at 50/2 or 50/3fps was a step backwards. What of the reality of the blitter chip if the computer can't even refresh its own screen? Answer: The blitter was slow. Too slow to do even this much graphics in a fame. The Vic chip in the Commodore 64 can refresh more pixels per frame than the Amiga blitter can. Amiga fans never talk about this.

[@DavePoo2]

1. Agreed 2. The Amiga certainly is faster than the VIC-II. The VIC-II can do the same resolution as most Amiga games, but only in 1-bit colour. If you went to more colours VIC-II resolution dropped by 1/2 and you were limited to a fixed 16 colour palette and you couldn't use those colours anywhere on screen, there were limitations to that. The Amiga certainly is a step up from the VIC-II/C64 but was just the beginning of a new generation (whereas the C64 was really the end of it's generation, or perhaps you could say the C128 was the very last). The C64 was an amazing machine, but it had gotten as far as it could. The Amiga hardware was released just 3 years after the C64 and was the first step in a new generation of computing. Was it perfect.... no, but there was no going back.

[@vapourmile]

​@@DavePoo2 Excuse me... I am not sure you really understood what I wrote. I said the VIC II chip can move more pixels per frame than a blitter, and it can. Yes, I accept they are four-colour pixels, well, up to 16, if you write a sprite multiplexer, but I made no specificity about that. It's still 16 colours and it /still/ moves more pixels per frame than a blitter. It may not be a fact you have thought of before, or even believe right now, but it is, nevertheless, a fact. Second, I was talking about the VIC II, so wasn't invoking a comparison to "the Amiga". I am comparing the 64 video chip to the Amiga video chip. No other part of it. The blitter by itself is NOT faster than the VIC II in terms of clock speed. The VIC II is 8Mhz (exactly 8 times as fast as the 6510 in the same computer, or, the same speed as the dot clock which writes the screen pixels) the blitter is 7.09Mhz. So, in terms of cycle speed, the blitter is SLOWER than the VIC II. Not a well known fact, but a fact nonetheless. Also I pointed out that almost every scrolling PAL game on the 64 refreshes at 50fps. Many Amiga games only refresh /some/ objects at 50 and some at a slower speed. The game in the video updates some parts at 25fps. In Xenon II the backdrop updates once every three frames and the foreground updates 2 times every 3 frames making it jerky. In Speedball II everything updates at 25fps, making it jerky. One of the reasons for this is the 64 screen has a 1Mhz CPU tied to a 1K graphics green. A 16 colour Amiga screen at 320x256 is 38K. So the Amiga's screen takes 38x as much RAM as a 64 screen but the Amiga CPU is /only/ 7x as fast (Let's not forget, the Blitter is also 7Mhz while the VIC II is 8Mhz). So you LOSE a substantial amount of efficiency with scrolling graphics on the Amiga compared to the 64. That's why Most 64 games run at 50fps.... because it takes far *LESS* CPU time for the 6510 in the 64 to do it. Oh, and the 64 has pixel scrolling registers so, with your 1K screen, at 1 pixel per frame, on a 64, you only need to move 125 *BYTES* per frame. Something very easily achieved by even the 1Mhz CPU. Finally, if you compare a game, such as the one above, to a well-thought out shooting game on the 64, like IO, I don't know about you, but, I'd rather play IO. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fJC5oZuGptuIoM0 At least classic 64 shooters, like IO, Armalyte and Delta scroll smoothly and refresh the screen at 50fps.

[@vapourmile]

@@DavePoo2 So is the Amiga "faster" than the 64? The CPU is, yes, probably. But as far as computer games are concerned such a claim ignores the fact that /that/ component is not faster /enough/ than a 6510 to compensate the Amiga for how much more badly designed the Amiga video chip is. Leaving the Amiga an overall Worse design than the Commodore 64. Amiga fans love to boast about "custom" chips without pausing to think: 1. Almost every other micro has "custom" hardware of some kind. 2. What does that even mean? Who cares if it's "custom" or not? It may sound cool to you but if you can't describe what it does then it doesn't mean anything. 3. What about when you Do find out what it means? You notice the Amiga sound chip is little more than 4x 8bit D/A converters with a circuit which pumps it through at a user selected speed. The graphics chip is shit: More colours than previous hardware but not by so much it's a big deal but also a lack of basics such as tile-mode graphics which save a ton of CPU for the stock-in-trade of 2D games of its era. The blitter was SLOW and infamously only twice as fast as the 68000 CPU for the same operations. 4. The Amiga REQUIRED that proclaimed "custom" hardware because with an anaemic 7Mhz 68000 it would have tanked without them because games, which is what most people wanted, would not have been /possible/ without them. 5. Games are also the ONLY app the blitter and copper actually make any difference to. For anything else you fall back on the crappy 68000. So.... what if you DON'T want a computer for games? What if you want it for work? Then the blitter and copper don't contribute much.

[@Midwinter2]

Okay, I bought this game on release. The common criticism of it was that it was unfairly difficult. However, that was NOT my complaint. My complaint was that the game just WOULD NOT WORK on my Amiga 1000 (with 2.5 MB of ram). Brought it back to the shop. Then, when it was re-released, I bought it again, thinking the problem would have been fixed.... It WASN'T. It still didn't work. So....I never got to play Project X!!!

[@DavePoo2]

It seems that the "revised edition" was not revised enough! I just tried it on an emulator with 1/2mb of chip ram and 1/2mb of slow ram and it worked. I tried it with just 1/2mb of chip ram (and no other ram), and it failed to start. Not sure why it failed on your A1000 (did it have 1/2mb of chip ram?) Well, anyway you can play it nowadays on an emulator, but sad times that you missed out on it back in the day.

[@Midwinter2]

@@DavePoo2 Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier! Thanks for your post! Yes, my A1000 had 512K of chip ram, plus 2MB of Fast ram. Note: Project X, like most Team 17 games, required 1MB to run at the time.

[@RealLloyd]

Did you tried different Kickstart versions?

[@DavePoo2]

Tried it on an A500 with 1.3 and Amiga 1200 with 3.2 - It works on WinUAE using 3.2

[@RealLloyd]

Thats weird. At first I thought it was an AGA game but internet told me it was OCS/ECS. I’m curious if you find a solution…

[@DavePoo2]

It might be just down to a slightly dodgy floppy drive in my Amiga

[@Turrican]

I had this game. Far too hard!

[@DavePoo2]

I think one of the reasons for the update was to try and address that. The magazine review in Amiga format agrees with you.

[@JarppaGuru]

1:21 we are not suprise microsoft started it LOL was bad game need fix xD

[@AmigaWolf]

There are more then a few Amiga games that will not work on "modern" Amiga computers, you can try loading in old Kickstart, or if you have a fast RAM and or Turbo card, disabling that or removing that, and then a lot of times it will work again.

[@DavePoo2]

I still suspect a dodgy floppy drive. It totally works on WinUAE with all the same setup as my Amiga 1200

[@AmigaWolf]

@@DavePoo2 Yeah, and was that a ADF or a WHDLoad version? Old games made as WHDLoad versions do work most of the times. I have more then a few original Amiga CD32 games that will not work with fast RAM or a faster CPU, like a 68030 or higher, that's why i have a disable switch on my TF330 and now TF360. And is also good to clean your readers of your disk/floppy drive with 96+ alcohol.

[@AmigaWolf]

And i used 96% alcohol to clean the floppy's/disks with cothen sticks, worked perfect, did it with my father 35+ year old original floppy's of his C28D.

[@DavePoo2]

It's been cleaned recently and loads mostly everything ok, but its still a little suspect. I might clean it again.

[@AmigaWolf]

@@DavePoo2 Yeah, old tech, will stop working after a time, and yeah also a lot of times never work again.