Hi,
Not sure if the subject has already been discussed here but have you considered doing a port of the game for the retro computers like the Amiga 500 ?
There would be no speeches and downgraded audio/gfx/anims but it would be so cool to play this game on retro consoles. Maybe doing another kickstarter to make sure there is enough demand first.
Thanks !
Marc
There was a discussion on this question on the development blog already. If I remember correctly, the team stated that such a port was very unlikely, because those platforms hardly get used nowadays, so it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
And, I assume that the amount of work would be even bigger, in comparison to the current ports, because both hardware and software have evolved too much over all these years.
Though, there is a chance for a Raspberry Pi port, because the RPi is very similar to a smartphone board, for which there are ports in the works anyway.
It has not been discussed very much. Someone wrote a thread to test the interest for a C64 conversion, a few months ago, and there has been no reaction:
Personally, I loved Amiga but I think that porting a big game like Thimbleweed Park to this platform (or to other platforms used only by a few users) wouldn’t make sense from an economic point of view and from a marketing point of view.
I would buy Thimbleweed Park Deluxe.*
If you want to release TWP on floppy discs, then this is true. But for the Amiga 500 was a CD-ROM drive available, then there were the CDTV and later the CD32. So if you use the CD you could have speech and maybe even CD audio. 
I’m pretty sure that there was a statement in a (friday questions?) podcast.
I wonder how many/few people still own an Amiga 500 with a CD-ROM drive.
Personally, I would be interested in such a version as well, even if it was a floppy disk version, but I don’t own an Amiga 500 or something similar - and I’m sure that the prices for a previously used Amiga 500 would increase drastically, if an Amiga 500 port of TWP was announced. Many of us would go away empty-handed then.
I only have an old PC with a floppy drive, but, if there was an MS-DOS version of TWP, I would probably end up with using DOSBox - for the convenience’s sake - which would not make such a big difference to playing one of the current PC versions.
But, I’m hoping for a RPi port. I also think that it would attract the attention of a lot of nostalgic RPi fans who are already playing old classics via RetroPie, for example.
cough 
This sound like we need a poll!
You could use an emulator like WinUAE.
*[If it would be a reasonable port, offering a familiar Amiga experience, like: 4bpl, trackersound, Copper usage, harddrive … The fun is about having an Amiga like version, not about running the same version on some config, almost no one ever used.]
This would make sense as a hobby project, but business-wise this would be like suicide.
You’d have to rework most of the art, you’ll have re-record the music in a format usable on the amiga, and you have to re-develop the engine and tools.
It’s a bit like asking someone like Lady Gaga(or, just any other famous musician for that matter) to play a private concert at your house, instead of playing at a large public venue. Unless you’re super-rich, it would be a financial loss for them, and their other fans might be angered.
I guess Lady Gaga could afford such a project and the sound issues would be gone too. Obviously it’s not the best way to make money but it’s an interesting project.
Wouldn’t it be cool if Lady Gaga would show up at your home? I mean, if I had to choose …
I’m not sure if an Amiga version would be desirable or even possible. Thimbleweed Park seems to me much more complex than any other classic Amiga adventure. Technically it also features many animations, higher resolution, thousand of colors, colour gradients and effects. I don’t think it would be technically possible on a classic OCS Amiga with its limitations (memory, CPU, colors). And if, then only very static, very colorless, ,greatly shortened and simplified. I think even with a CD drive the game would be very difficult to realize. Today’s audio and graphics compression methods cannot be used with a classic Amiga. Therefore, full voice output will already fail due to memory space.
Is that really what we want?
I’m not a programmer, but the effort for such a nostalgic complete reprogramming and new development seems to me hardly meaningful.
Of course we would never get an 1:1 port.
Not really shortened, all the dialogue and puzzles won’t be a problem.
But you are right about all the other stuff which would be either completely cut (voices, dynamic lighting) or greatly reduced (graphics in general, scrolling, music, background animations…).
This may be true. It won’t stop some people from undergoing such endeavours though, just because it’s fun
There can be fun in the challenge.
I’m pretty sure a game that’s not too dissimilar to the TWP we know could be made to run on the Amiga. It would look “worse”, sound “worse”, take longer to switch rooms, but gameplay-wise I don’t see any issue.
Just by looking at the requirements for the Bard’s Tale remaster shows how much bloat we have in our software and operating systems today:
Minimum system requirements
Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q9300 / AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / Intel Core i5-2500K or higher if using integrated Intel GPU
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Storage: 1 GB available space
That game originally ran on the C64.
Yes, I agree about “bloating”. But it is not the same thing, the other way round.
Making a game conceived for modern machines run on an Amiga 500 would imply saving only the puzzle dependancy chart, the dialogues and not much more.
The art should be redrawn, the sound redone. Maybe the engine itself should be rewritten from scratch.
disclaimer: I’m not into computer programming, please correct me if I’m wrong.
TWP may very well not even run on my 2010 netbook due to requiring too new a version of OpenGL. (I’m vaguely curious now.)
That would seem to be a remastered version of a mid-2000s 3D remake.
I have converted the 4 screenshots of https://thimbleweedpark.com/ with Photoshop and ham_convert to Amiga possibilities. 320 resolution, 32 colors and the limitations of the Amiga palette. Before the conversion I edited the interface extra to black and white to avoid wasting colors. The result is this:
You should consider that in the game the palette is not completely freely selectable, the ideal palette per scene can never be used and animations are added. It may be possible that it looks good, but a hell of a lot of work.
A VGA 256 color ScummVM version seems feasible to me, but for the Amiga a damn big sacrifice would have to be made.
I think it’d look better with the classic font. 
No, this is exactly what you’d have to do. You might even be able to downsample the graphics, though unless you’d have really clever software for this, the results will likely be less than pleasing.
There’s that too, but I mean the remaster of the actual 1985 BTI.
Some of those don’t look too bad (2 & 4 specifically). But yeah, in reality you’d lose some more of these colours.