Oh, I'm so excited for this! It looks better than I could have imagined, I love the little touches. Thanks for the info Mindfield, and grats on a front page story. My pants are officially crapped
I cant wait for this either. I never played the original versions of Pinball Dreams or Pinball Fantasies but ive been playing Pinball Dreams like crazy! I know the physics aren't spot on but I really appreciate it due to the fact that that's how the original actually played which I feel is awesome. BUT I must say that I really hope that they fix the code in Pinball Dreams like they did with Fantasies to achieve 60FPS. I know the game had glitches in the original where the ball would act funny but there are times where I know it's not glitches and it's just pure drop in framerate. All-in-all im excited for Fantasies, ive never played it. And if everyone says Fantasies is better than Dreams then hell, im sold.
I really like that you guys have pulled the camera out a bit more than some other pinball games. I like to have a bigger perspective of the whole board and not have the camera move around all over the place. Anyway, looks great
Yeah, it's a bit odd -- but not distracting by any means. I guess I never really paid that much attention to it since the original was like that, and aside from more colours in the enhanced mode, it was a case of "didn't miss it 'til it was gone" -- except it wasn't gone, so I didn't miss it. Will do. I thought it was cute they did that too. Thanks. It'll be worth the wait, but let's hope Apple doesn't take its sweet time with it. My 3GS should be arriving tomorrow, which means new UDID, which means I'll have to get him to build me a new beta 'til the real deal arrives or else I won't be able to play 'til everyone else does. I dunno, I think the physics are pretty accurate myself. It is perhaps not 100% due to the relatively simplified engine, but for the purposes of the game I don't think any higher granularity in calculating surface angles would make any noticeable difference. Yeah, they're working on getting Dreams up to speed (literally), which shouldn't be too hard. Fantasies already plays like a champ, so they just have to do with Dreams what they did with Fantasies. Of course, 3GS users probably won't care 'cos they'll both be 60FPS no matter what's going on.
hi there , can't wait for this one either , i've been checking every day for the last few weeks . Juuso was nice enough to let me know that he was working on this one and being an amiga owner ( yep still have it and the amiga cd32 ) and also a real pinball collector i just love playing fantasies . Great work , and can;t wait to play , thanks to all involved !!! Andrew
There's no multiball in Dreams? Then why can you lock a ball? I thought they were just really hard to get started...
Oh man, just listening to the youtube video reminds me of the early 90's. I used to have this game on my Amiga 500. It didn't even have a Harddrive so you had to load the game from the floppy EVERY time. lol So buying this app.
Yeah, loading from floppy was such a cruel wait. The iPhone version even loads faster than the hard-disk installed version I eventually had on my A4000 (my last Amiga) ..I like the way handheld devices have caught up to all the hardware I used to know and love.
First I can put my whole music collection into a little palm top device and now it can easily play any of my old Amiga favorites, MY GOD, WHEN WILL THE MADNESS STOP!
Think of it like a sequential multiball. When activated, locked balls would be released when you lost the current one. The originals had to do this because there was no way to track multiple balls if two or more of them were in places on the table that went beyond each other's scroll regions. Remember, the tables couldn't zoom out, so there was no good way to handle multiball without frequently losing track of one or more balls if they were to far away from each other. I played the Atari Jaguar version. Instant load times from cartridge. Every once in a while I'll marvel that I now have a cell phone no bigger than an 80s calculator that is more powerful than a desktop computer I had just six or seven years ago. 'Course, I'm an older fart who once marvelled that I had a calculator I could strap to my wrist.
..ah, but you can only play *some* of your old Amiga classics. I'm hoping to be able to play them all by the end of the year ..should be able to play Left 4 Dead in the next 2 or 3. Then the madness can stop. Only then. Yeah? Cool! I never even saw a real live Atari Jaguar, though they sounded darned cool at the time. But I played both Dreams and Fantasies on Amiga500, 1200, and 4000, and now emulated Amiga on the PC. Basically I never stopped playing them. Amazing thing is they're still fun after all this time. (Except Beatbox ..never liked that table much.) What I loved most about those watches was the incredibly tiny incredibly hard to use keys. If only they'd had multitouch screens back then, eh? Yeah, it's hard to get over the sheer power of these smart-phones now. I've even decided not to upgrade to the 3GS for now because it's 'powerful enough'. (Part of this strategy includes avoiding using any 3GS, lest I get a taste for just how much faster it is.) Of course if Amiga/Jaguar/PSX or similar emulators start appearing in the Apps store I might have to make the leap.
Mindfield can you confirm this? Because I play so much of Pinball Dreams, and no matter how amazing Fantasies is I know ill always continue to play Dreams... I'd just really like the performance to be that of Fantasies. If you could let me know id appreciate it buddy.
The Jag was a damn cool and potentially powerful device that was hampered by a steep developer learning curve due to crappy documentation and no SDK whatsoever. It was just you, a $5,000 Alpine board (the dev hardware), a somewhat buggy compiler, and some really basic docs. As a result, a lot of the games used the 68000 for most operations -- a chip that was intended mainly for game logic. The two VLSI RISC chips (Tom and Jerry -- yes, really) never got used to their full potential. Pity. Still, Pinball Fantasies ran great on it. That's what was so cool about them though. It was like a whole-body example of how technology kept getting smaller. Those game watches were da bomb though. Pac Man on my wrist? Awesome! I even had a watch radio. Great idea in theory, but dumbest idea ever when you realize that you swing your arms when you walk, so most radio stations rhythmically cut in and out of static as you moved. I do not believe in "powerful enough." I already upgraded because I must...have...more POWER...Scotty! Don't count on emulators A) showing up on the App Store ever, even fully licensed (just look at the C64 emulator right now) or B) being significantly faster on the 3GS anyway. The speed difference of ~200MHz between the 3G and 3GS is pretty significant (30% or so) and the new video hardware is powerful, but CPUs are very tightly CPU-bound, so while they'll be faster, it won't be a massive jump. PSX could possibly approach full speed. Jaguar is less likely. A500-3000 should be no problem. 4000 or 1200 is a bit iffier with that '030 and AGA chipset, but probably doable to one degree or another. Yes, they are working on this. I was actually talking to Juuso yesterday about it and we were discussing the difficulties of syncing the physics checks with the screen refresh. I can confirm that they both run at 60FPS on the 3GS and 2G Touch. Dreams runs at a solid 52FPS on the 1G Touch and iPhone 3G, though they have no idea why it's exactly that speed. Nevertheless Vesa is working on getting the physics fixed up and synced. I don't know if they'll be able to hit 60FPS solid on 1G Touch and 3G devices though. The combination of demanding physics calculations and an apparently somewhat slow system bus seems to be the bottleneck when they're performing 3-4 physics checks per frame -- but they're doing to try their damndest anyway. They're pretty hardcore about accurate reproductions.
Thats excellent news, because for the most part Dreams is very effecient or else I wouldn't enjoy the game, but there are times where framerate has really hurt me. Pinball is a game of accuracy and calculating when to hit the flippers, and when framerate dips its hard to achieve accuracy. I know they're at a limit with the iPhone 3G hardware, but im very happy to see they are trying their best.
Mindfield, can you also confirm that the "Classic Difficulty" option from Dreams is not there anymore in Fantasies, and that the ball speed is now locked into the slower 'Classic' mode?
The wait is driving me nuts. I'm so hoping this will get released very soon. I'm really looking forward to it. I haven't actually played the original game since back in the day. I have just vague nostalgic recollections to go on. I think they're often hard to live up to but it was the same for Dreams and I love the iDevice version of that. Well, the wait continues...
As I understand it, Cowboy Rodeo have already submitted Fantasies for Apple's review. We're just waiting on Apple. (The great Apply delay seems to have become a lot longer in the post-3.0 word, more's the pity. ..If it was the old one week wait we were used to, it would be out by now.) Not long now. Don't worry, it will live up to every nostalgic memory.
ARgghghh! where are u pinball, i can either blame apple for slack speeds or it hasn't been submitted yet. Any news anyone ? NM ITS OUT! ARRRGH
