[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Remember that the classic Mac version took 8 megabytes just for Wolfenstein, let alone Doom.
...
The classic Mac 2 had chunky modes and colors. 16 colors. The A500 wouldn't have had 8bit color in 1987 even with chunky modes.

But those modes were more-or-less redundant because the Classic Mac's graphics were entirely CPU-driven, and for a long time Mac CPUs weren't what one could call particularly quick. The genesis of raycasting games on the PC grew out of having relatively quick processors with limited graphics capability(in the EGA era) and later taking advantage of the quirks inherent in VGA mode 13h (neither of which were available on the classic Macs).

Originally Posted by Miggy4eva

We can only wish OCS had a chunky mode because then Doom and Wolf3d would have been possible on A500 with no need to C2p conversion.

Well, no. Original DOOM considered a 486 with a full VGA card to be minimum spec, meaning that a 486 core running at at least 20MHz (and yes, the SX could be downclocked to 16MHz, but we'll get to that...) was the minimum required to perform the raycasting calculations, do the game logic and drive the VGA frame buffer via the CPU; it should also be noted that minimum true VGA spec required 256kB dedicated VRAM.

I remember very clearly at the time (thanks to hours trying to get my school computers to run it) that if you had a 486SX (i.e. no FPU) and bog-standard VGA, you'd have to reduce the size of the play viewport to get it to run at a decent clip. Getting it to run remotely smoothly in full-screen mode usually meant a VESA-compatible graphics card was necessary on anything less than a 486DX2.

The concept of first-person games built around a raycasting engine was an outgrowth of people like John Carmack, Doug Church, Michael Abrash et al. discovering something to which the mid-evolution PC architecture turned out to be well-suited (though it required DOS extenders and the like to make it work). It simply wasn't remotely feasible during the period in which the Amiga was designed (limited transistor counts and a worldwide RAM shortage being limiting factors).

I think it's also worth bearing in mind that even if you had a 486DX2 with a VESA card in about 1994, the architecture was singularly bad at reproducing the kind of "2D" games which were the norm until the early-mid '90s. I vividly remember playing Project X on a friend's PC with that exact spec and almost getting a headache from how jerky the horizontal scrolling was.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The irony is, if the Amiga designers had designed the copper chip to be able to reload the colour registers every 1 pixel instead of the 8 it could do.....theres your chunky mode right there in 1985!

I'd always thought it was every 4px on OCS/ECS and every 2px on AGA (hence the original AB3D and Gloom, which took advantage of that). Please correct me if I've been labouring under a misapprehension!