I am documenting the development of a totally new Amiga AGA and OCS version of Dune II. A fantastic gift to lots of Amiga users that loves the sci-fi story.
Dune II on the Amiga was a really popular game when it came out. Most of the Amiga games and even PC magazines gave it awesome reviews and the Amiga version also regularly appears on lists of the “best amiga games of all time”. Despite all those awards, the game on the Amiga wasn’t as good as it could have been. So, this version for Amiga aims at fixing that.
The Amiga version of Dune II lacked material from PC version
At the time when Dune II came out. Only users with bigbox Amigas had a hard drive. This meant that the Amiga version was also delivered on disks. The game for Amiga was delivered on 5 disks that suffered from frequent disk changes. So, if you didn’t have a second disk drive or a hard drive. Playing Dune II on the Amiga was embarrassing even though the colors and gameplay was much better on the Amiga than on PC.
Also. Most of the great introduction sequences in the DOS version have been reduced considerably. The soundtrack was limited in stock and there was no AGA-specific version with more colors on the screen. Even the Amiga gameplay was slightly affected due to the limited resources available to the game.
So, the goal is to re-develop Dune 2 for the Amiga from the ground up as it was originally planned, correcting all the errors — and more — for example, there was no native PAL support. Arrakis will soon be embraced on the Amiga as it should, thanks to Robert Koon.
Want to give the Amiga community the full Dune II gaming experience
I was on the original Dune 2 Amiga team at Westwood. Even though I did the bulk of the Dune II conversion, leaving Westwood before it was released was something I still regret, and so I want to give the Amiga community the Dune 2 experience they deserve.
Robert Koon
It is awesome to see that a former Dune II developer at Westwood put his skills into this remaster of the game for Amiga. He is also behind Amiga ports of:
- Gunship 2000 (Amiga CD32)
- Legend of Kyrandia
- UFO: Enemy Unknown (XCOM) (Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 and Amiga CD32)
Read all about the Dune II Remaster project, that Robert does in his spare time. I hope that he adds a nice hard drive installer with the release. Also, an RTG Amiga version would be perfect for all AmigaOS4, MorphOS, and AROS users. But first, this remaster needs to be released.
What are your memories regarding Dune II for Amiga?
