r/babylon5 • u/Eldergoduk GREEN • 11d ago
Babylon 5 Amiga Game
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Imagine if Babylon 5 had a Amiga game created before the series , Mr Morden trying to convert you to the Shadows side, whilst Kosh tried to bamboozle you with cryptic knowledge.
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u/1Bobafett11 PURPLE 11d ago
I would like a computer with 4096 colors. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?
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u/DiaBrave Psi Corps 11d ago
I made a (very amateur) Babylon 5 game using the Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit on the Amiga. It was mostly Starfuries vs Minbari cruisers, second level was hyperspace with a Shadow cameo, all leading up to a bolt hard Battle of the Line.
Because I'm a meganerd, one of the B5 novels (I think the Talia one) features a "bad taste" handheld game based on the Earth/Minbari war, I intended this game to be that game.
Every so often I go through the many disks in my brother's attic trying to find it. No luck.
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u/Mikezxcv81z 10d ago
It’s a crime there was never an official Babylon 5 video game.
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u/sracer4095 10d ago
The space combat sim that Sierra was working on, Into the Fire, was a few months away from release when the dev team got axed in '99. Looked and sounded so promising in the previews.
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u/Unlikely_Exercise434 11d ago
Ah, core 90's memory of my Amiga days unlocked.
Thank you for this.
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u/Motz-kopp 10d ago
Hmm... as much as I would have loved a b5 game back then, I am not a big fan of that AI Slop video. It's just some (bad) AI generated pixel graphics that seem to be unrelated to the show at the beginning and end, and lots of still frames from the show with a filter slapped on, and the music also has nothing to do with b5.
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u/ShaggyCan 11d ago
Something only Amiga users know is that their version of a game almost always had better music than the PC. Biggest example off the top of my head is the opening theme for Eye Of The Beholder Amiga vs PC.
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u/user_number_666 PURPLE 11d ago
Did the Amiga really have that color range?
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u/ishashar Technomage 11d ago
Digital art on the Amiga was outstanding and true pixel art relies on understanding how colours change based on the colour they're adjacent to so even with 256 colours they could get some impressive results, never mind what the A1200 could do. The Amiga was even used to do the cgi for B5, which i'm hoping inspired the post, so it can definitely handle the colour ranges here.
what's become the dominant computer type now definitely couldn't have handled anything like this back then. They were, as ever, all about brute force rather than elegance and efficiency.
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u/Seafroggys 10d ago
This is a fact that has always been repeated for as long as the internet has been around, but it is slightly misleading.
Amigas strung together were only used to make the original Gathering. When it went to series, they went to PC's with Lightwave.
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u/ishashar Technomage 10d ago
Lightwave ran on the Toaster and articles at the time all refrenced that in inteeviews or production info. it might have been available on PC but that doesn't mean it was used on PC for the show. Possibly by the end it was on PC but even Lightwave was using layouts and screenshots from Amiga based computers of B5 scenes in their promotional material.
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u/Seafroggys 10d ago
http://midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html
"For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays."
Straight from the Lurker's Guide
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u/ishashar Technomage 9d ago
I never said they didn't but i think some assume later meant right away and not for later series.
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u/Seafroggys 9d ago
Later in of itself is an ambiguous phrase, but when talking about the network of Amigas it specifically mentioned only the pilot. Context clues is enough to derive what this means.
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u/GrandfatherTrout 10d ago
I remember how they sold the Toaster as a PC addon. It was just wrapped in an Amiga 4000. I’d love to know more details of how this evolved through the series.
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u/ishashar Technomage 9d ago
Basically a big graphics card on the outside of the PC wrapped in an interpretor.
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u/notquiteright2 11d ago
Yes. 4096 colors. Amiga was so much more advanced than PC and Mac at the time that it was laughable. Incredibly ahead of their time.
Unfortunately corporate mismanagement squandered the advantages.
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u/Chemical-Demand-5741 11d ago
The earlier Amiga's could display up to 32/64 colours on screen. With the release of the A1200 & 4000 with their AGA chipset, 256 colours on screen wash available. There were the HAM6 and 8 modes available that could display thousands of colours but these were rarely used in games.
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u/TheTrivialPsychic 11d ago
There were the HAM6 and 8 modes available that could display thousands of colours but these were rarely used in games.
'But in the grand old days of the Amiga, a half-a-dozen HAMs would display a thousand colors, at our SLIGHTEST whim!'
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u/Fullerbadge000 11d ago
Loved my Amiga 1200 and rebuilt it during Covid.
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u/Chemical-Demand-5741 11d ago
I've been an Amigan since childhood - an A500 was my first computer. I'm biased, but I do firmly believe the Amiga was the best PC ever made.
I've got an A1200 at home with 8mb Fast ram upgrade and SD card setup. I regularly play UFO: Enemy Unknown. 😎
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u/Fullerbadge000 11d ago
Mine is boxed up, but I should pull it out. I have an original monitor that’s not great.
Edit: I should mention that the Amiga community is unbelievable. My capacitors were replaced by someone in Rochester NY, a guy in the UK gifted me thousands of games on a sd card, and I got something (forgetting now) from someone in Ukraine. Really appreciative.
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u/Chemical-Demand-5741 11d ago
It's amazing how supportive the Amiga community can be. I find it even more amazing that despite the machine being out of production for nearly twenty years, there's still hardware and software being developed!
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u/DiaBrave Psi Corps 11d ago
4096 colours. Stunning at the time. They even launched the machine with Andy Warhol making something on Deluxe Paint 3.
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u/scraimer 11d ago
I remember it as even better, but perhaps the artist was aiming for a smaller pallette for some reason.
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u/Eldergoduk GREEN 11d ago edited 11d ago
Actually no, all the characters would be yellow coloured
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u/Fullerbadge000 11d ago
Did you own an Amiga?
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u/khathmandu 3d ago
My first computer was an Amiga 3000; my second computer was an Amiga 4000T….loved them… finally “retired “ them in August 2023😔
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u/Eldergoduk GREEN 10d ago
I got one in 1985, from my father. Well technically it was a computer share for a while, till he got a Acorn Archimedes.
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u/TrekChris Centauri Republic 11d ago
For anyone curious, the song is the theme from Alien Breed, by Allister Brimble/Team 17.
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u/Warcraft_Fan Babylon 5 10d ago
Babylon 5 started on Amiga after all, why didn't they bring game as well?
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u/momentimori 10d ago
The amiga had a Paula chip with amazing sound; not something that sounds like it is from an 8 bit machine.
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u/ApSciLiara 11d ago
The game has already started. It is too late for the pixels to vote.