Quote:
Originally Posted by Promilus
That's why AAA (which was initially in-development around '88) was intended to have 32bit blitter already running faster and with much greater and faster chipram. Why this piece of hardware didn't change at all in AGA eludes me.
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Commodore budgeted for AGA to have ONE new chip. ONE. We got Lisa and a slightly tweaked Agnus. It was a bad decision. Like so many other bad decisions Commodore made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Promilus
As for Willoe I guess biggest seller is 2MB of chipram and maybe new features available when combines with other custom chips replacement versions.
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Instead of coming here and posting about how far Commodore was falling behind, how about let's talk about what we can do now.
The ECS 16-bit bus can support a 2x and 4x FPM/EDO mode; the chips were the bottleneck here. This opens a lot of possibilities that can even exceed AGA without adding "bonus features" that no one will support. Their choice to only make one new chip and nerf the rest was stupid; they should have stuck with 16-bit and gone all-in with FPM. Because adding 2x and 4x FPM to all three chips probably would have been cheaper, more compatible with ECS and a lot faster.
What could be done with Willoe alone:
- 16MB chip RAM (2MB addressable from 68K); this could allow Workbench, for example, to have it's screen not take any of the critical base 2MB
- 2x and 4x Blitter speed and Copper prefetch (non blocking)
- Note that the 3000 will use real chip RAM for the base 2MB and will need upgrading to 70ns FPM to support 2x and 4x AGA fetch modes
What could be done with Willoe and Xander (A500/A2000):
- up to 8MB of chip RAM addressable from 68K
- non-blocking CPU cycles for up-to double the CPU bandwidth
What could be done with Willoe and Faith (A500/A2000/A3000):
- AGA 2x and 4x display modes, double playfield and HAM8
- possible side-banding up to 50% of bitplane DMA freeing more cycles
- integrated scan doubler for VGA output
What could be done with Willoe and Harmonie (A500/A2000/A3000):
- Paula 2x and 4x audio and disk speeds
- Support for HD floppy speeds (60kbps)
- Support for either 112kHz 8-bit or 56kHz 16-bit audio