Wing Commander was published on the Amiga in 1992 after being ported by a single programmer Nick Pelling. Loaf has written up a history of its development so rather than repeat it all here I’ll instead point at the thread here.

I imagine that a port of Wing Commander would have been a point of honour at the time for Amiga owners. When it came out the Amiga was way ahead of its time and easily the most advanced gaming computer commonly available. Wing Commander perhaps more than any other game heralded the start of the power shift toward PC’s.

When I decided I was going to play this I bought the regular version off Ebay, except the seller decided that he didn’t actually have one to sell after I won the auction. Rather than wait for another I figured that I may as well get a compilation edition instead in the form of Space Legends. This was released for DOS and Amiga in 1993 and also contains the excellent Elite Plus and Megatraveller 1 (which I’ve never played).

The decision to aim for a target audience of A500 (the affordable model) of the Amiga, was a little surprising and led to the game being done in only 16 colours to get performance up. It’s certainly contrary to how Origin usually worked which was to make the games you wish you could play if only you could afford the system. Games like Wing Commander drove PC hardware more than anything else in the early 90’s and were the first thing you would buy for your new PC when it became affordable. There must have been a plan to also release the mission packs for the Amiga since SM1 is in the opening menu but these were never seen on the system.

The 16 colour dithered graphics are better than I might have expected but could have been better still in the sense that some of the dithering isn’t needed. On occassions, even the text at the bottom of the screen ends up being dithered.

The colours are at their worst with the spotlights in the background which look like giant pool balls more than anything else. These are the exception though and the game looks fine the rest of the time.

Looking for changes in the Amiga version is tricky as it is incredibly close to the original. The starting screen for the arcade game in the bar is the biggest change I’ve found so far with its spinning ships.

Other than that, the briefings are there in full….

… and the launch sequence looks much more like the PC version than the demo I tried out a couple of days back, as does the landing sequence.

In the cockpit, everything is as it should be and I’m instantly at home with the keyboard controls which are copied over from the PC. The speed through the emulator is excellent although I am playing with it cranked up to maximum. It does grind along if I drop it to A500 speed so it may not have been the best way to play the game even with the reduced colours.

There is one major hitch in that the game doesn’t support analog joysticks. I was looking forward to finally playing one of these Wing Commander ports with a real joystick but I’m stuck with digital controls once again. The emulator does allow me to use my analog joystick but it’s only turning it on and off when I move it enough in one direction and this just didn’t play right. I tried using a gamepad but this left it hard to use the keyboard commands so I’ve ended up resorting to playing the old-fashioned way with cursor keys. I can’t have played a Wing Commander like this since the early 90’s.

The handling of the ships is exactly as I’d expect other than having to repeatedly press tab to keep my atferburn going because it doesn’t allow me to steer and afterburn simultaneously. That aside, if it wasn’t for the lack of analog control’s this could almost have been the EGA version on the PC (if there had been such a thing) except for one thing which I haven’t mentioned so far, the sound.

Back when all of us PC users were stuck with beeps, the Amiga had a multi-channel sound system which allowed 4 sampled instruments to be played simultaneously. These instruments were created with digital samples which were tuned up and down in a slightly similar manner to a soundfont. In theory this allowed for much more diversity than General MIDI, although the small number of channels was a serious compromise. When used well the audio on an Amiga could be quite something although I always through it worked better for some types of music than others. PC programmers eventually figured out how to do the same thing with games like Pinball Dreams being among the first to support it, although it had already been seen in demos before this. The only Origin games to generate their music this way were the Crusader games which I would have thought must have been among the last games to support it.

This very different format means that the original Wing Commander soundtrack has been given a complete overhaul. It’s still all the original pieces but they never sounded quite like this before. I have heard it described as the best version of the audio. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who thinks this doesn’t own an MT-32 but you could certainly make the case when compared to Ablib. Some of the music translates better than others but there is a definite loss in subtlety and it’s apparent that instruments are being forced to cut off short or are missed out due to the 4 track limitations. It’s still my favourite music out of the Wing Commander ports but I’d rather have the original.

The sound effects in the cockpit are lacking also with no noticeable sound when I score a hit. After the clunking digital effects on the Sega CD this is quite a change and it’s not always easy to tell when I’m on target. It’s only a minor quibbly though and not an entirely fair comparison. An MT-32 would probably have cost about as much as the A500 on it’s own. The Amiga does have the advantage of digital fx for firing guns and the like.

Another tiny change I’ve noticed is that when I link up with escort ships, they say “Well done Sir” for some reason and I don’t see them when I autopilot. Other than that, it’s business as usual. The difficulty level is the same as the PC from what I’ve seen, making it slightly harder with these controls. My wingmen have been getting occassional kills which wasn’t the case on the Sega CD but I’m not so sure about the PC version. They may be more intelligent but I’ve played that many versions of Wing Commander recently they are all blurring together. I’ve been skipping through a lot of the conversations for that reason but they have been identical from what I’ve seen.

I’ve got as far as the second cutscene, almost halfway through the game. Unless it starts to vary more from the PC original, part 2 of this could be an extremely short post.

With Loaf building his Amiga and two Amiga Wing Commanders to be going on with, I figured one of those had to be the next one to try out. Before that, I thought I should have a look at the demo. Loaf posted a link to this in the wcnews forums saving any searching on my part. It allegedly didn’t work on emulators but I found that hard to believe given the healthy state of Amiga emulation so I thought I’d give it a go anyway.

My knowledge of Amigas is non-existent. It’s the machine I should have owned instead of a CGA PC back in the late 80’s but I’ve never had one in my possession to this day. As such I have no idea how I’m supposed to get AmigaDOS up and running properly but I’ve managed to learn enough to get the job done. The demo was launched via what appears to be the Amiga equivalent of a batch file with each small section having its own executable launched from in there.

After some googling, I found a list of basic DOS commands of which I only appeared to have a small subset available to me in the emulator, presumably because I need to use a boot disk I don’t have to get the full OS. One of the missing commands was the one that executes script files. However, I managed to run the demo by manually launching each stage from the command line. I’ve edited out all of that at and put the final result on Youtube:-

There is no sound or gameplay but there is a little original spiel and some of the cutscenes. The only changes I noticed on here were that the pilots are a lot more friendly when running for their ships,the cockpit visor slides in from a jaunty angle and the landing screen showing the ship damage has a very different colour scheme.

I would imagine that this was an extremely early preview long before the game was playable. Ultimately, the decision was made to drop to 16 colours so that it would run on A500’s whereas this demo makes use of a larger palette and looks all the better for it.

At the end of the last post, I had the idea that I’d play through the rest of this game in one long session. It didn’t quite work out like that but I’ve finished it now a couple of days later. I’ve blogged my way through Wing Commander several times already and already mentioned most of the changes in this version so this post is going to be something of a random collection of observations.

I’ll start with something I forgot last time which is that I don’t get to name my pilot thanks to the speech and am known throughout the game as Hotshot. WC3 much have been well under way by now, so it should really have been Blair but it’s a minor point.

All the cutscenes from the PC were included and this is big improvement on Super Wing Commander’s fly bys or the planet zooming of the SNES. They haven’t been enhanced outside of the speech.

The novelty of the voice acting wore off slightly while playing this, with some characters being done a lot better than others. The Clint Eastwood impression for Iceman was pretty good and I never noticed it before but the character even looks like him. A conversation between Maniac and Hunter on the other hand could quickly become mind-numbing. I thought about putting an audio clip of this up but I’d like to hang onto the few readers I have.

I noticed that some of the commands in the VDU’s have been abbreviated in the console due to the lower resolution. Surely there must have been a better option than “Aim This”. They all still get the job done though. The full range of wingman commands and taunts are all present in this, if tricky to get to in the middle of combat.

I was right to be worried about slowdown in the later missions. It’s not so much a case of dropping frames as the game going into slow motion. This actually makes the big dogfights a lot easier and takes reaction time completely out of the equation. As such I didn’t have any difficulty with the later missions. It did mean they could take a while to play through but even without joystick control it was easier than on the PC if anything.

At the end of the game, the final cutscene (with a few extra ships in the flyby) is all there with the flag being hoisted at the end. If there were any changes in the dialogue or missions themselves on the way through, I didn’t notice them.

All around, this was a great port although the slowdown was a bit much at times. A 32X version would have easily run at full speed but I don’t think there were more than a handful of games that needed 32X and CD and I had a great time playing this as it was.

One of the things to do on the ever-growing list for this blog would be to play all the losing path Wing Commander missions. I like this enough that I’d actually think about playing this version ahead of the PC for those. After I’d thought about it, I expect I’d choose the PC but of the two so far this is easily the best port I’ve played. I would hope the CD32 can offer some competition and maybe the FM-Towns if I ever actually get hold of it.

I’ll probably have a quick look at the WC3 demo on the 3DO tomorrow. I’ve paid the customs bill and my VFX-1 is finally being delivered on Thursday so assuming I can get it working, that will be getting my full attention after that.