How Amiga Games Work - Episode 44 - Slam Tilt AGA

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]Okay, right now we're going to do the last pinball game from 21st Century Entertainment in 1996.

[00:00:06]And some people say the best of all the pinball games that 21st Century put out, the Pinball Dreams and Fantasies and Illusions. So, on a stock Amiga 1200, we've got all eight bit planes, 256 colors. The screen is actually split up into two different areas, so the dot matrix part at the top is in five bit planes and then the bottom is in eight bit planes. So, let's take a look at them all. Bit plane zero, one, two, three, and four and that makes up the whole top. And then bit plane five, six, and seven makes up everything. So, in the palette visualizer, you can see up here it has 32 different colors and down here there's a palette of 256. So, down here right now we've got 273 colors all together and in game right now there's 219. Now, looking at the sprites, if we take all the sprites off, the only thing that goes away is the ball. So, so sprite zero and one make up the two attached 15 color sprite for the ball.

[00:01:09]And I think the maximum for the multi-ball is four balls, so there's eight sprites and two each, so that makes perfect sense. So, you've got 50 frames per second action with eight bit planes and 256 colors, so very, very impressive. And you'll see that the visible area is 320 by 256. The display at the top is 320 by 48 and then the playable area at the bottom is 320 by 208. But by far the most impressive thing to me is when you have multi-ball or when you press a key and go into high res mode. Look at that. Now, the visible area says 640 by 512, which is doubling both things, but but actually I think it's only the horizontal, so it would be 640 by 256 still. So, the table gets it's higher res and so it smaller on the screen, but the dot matrix display at the top actually stays the same relative to the screen. So, when we're playing in high res, you can see almost the entire screen all at one time, and it works fabulous. One thing I had a few questions about is sometimes with the scrolling or with the ball in high res, it looks a little jagged. And I think that may be an emulation issue because I was looking at some different long plays on YouTube, and some of them had the same jagged look, but then there were some that were perfect. So, so I'm pretty sure on real hardware it looks exactly as it should. I wish I could test that out, but my 1200 doesn't work, so let me know if I'm right in that issue is caused by not perfect emulation. So, I think Pinball Illusions had the high res mode, too. So, it really does look incredible, and it's something that other consoles and stuff until the PlayStation could never match. Something that looked this good with the high res.

[00:02:52]So, so kudos to Dice who made Illusions and Liquid Design who made Slam Tilt here. And I was reading the Lemon Amiga reviews, some people were saying that till this day this is still the best pinball game of all time on any system.

[00:03:06]So, people really love the game, and rightly so. So, I hope you loved this video. Please like and subscribe, and my favorite thing is when you leave a comment. So, so hope to see you lots of comments. Thanks so much for watching.

[00:03:18]Always appreciate it. Till next time.

[00:03:20]Take care.