Quote:
Originally Posted by ovale
While Jay Miner's team had surely designed the cartridge option in '83, I think Commodore never designed A500 for it.
A cartridge system requires a robust female connector on the motherboard. A male connector has traces consumed by the repeated cartridge insertion and extraction. Even the Atari 2600 had one.
Assuming cheap adapters were available or people just didn't care about ruin the side connector, we can start to imagine how it would have been.
Consoles with their tile systems and palettes are able to use memory more effectively. Amiga cannot remap colors or hflip gfx at no cost. This means Amiga needs to decompres gfx from ROM to chip RAM.
This is not a disadvantage after all. Also Megadrive and SNES need to copy gfx from ROM to VRAM and the A500 had 512KB of RAM instead of 64KB. We can imagine similar performance thanks to more space for caching gfx on the Amiga.
It is interesting to note that ROM is accessed like fast RAM so the 68000 can execute ROM code without competing on the Chip RAM bus.
This potentially opens the door to optimizations and speed ups. This is an interesting choice for the developers because the effort makes the code not compatible with a possible floppy release.
If we leave our fantasy go wild then we can even imagine cartridges with small amounts of SRAM mapped as fast RAM and simple circuitry to mirror ROM horizontally flipped to another address.
With these two features I think Amiga can start to compete with the Megadrive at least.
Anyway, we can return to planet Earth just noticing that no copy protection hardware exists built-in on the A500.
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The 512 kb of ram of the miggy cannot be compared to the specialized RAM used on the megadrive.
In those 512kb of ram, you're storing the game code, the music, and the graphics stored as bitmap (means big).
the 64kb is a memory used by the Megadrive VDP, where you 1 byte correspond to 1 tile (that's more or less the system).
To do the same on Amiga, you'd need more ram than 512kb, something like 2 up to 4mb of chip (for the biggest games).
Bitmap and tile systems cannot be compared on this matter, they are too different.