Quote:
Originally Posted by Leffmann
The Blitter is quite efficient at what it does actually. Most of the costs of the logic operations (masking, shifting, computing minterms) are hidden because they happen between memory accesses. The real problem is that chipmem is so terribly slow.
|
Amiga OCS Chipmemory speed was actually rather fast when it was first released in 1985. Later systems did -obviously- do a lot better than this, but the base chipmemory speed was very respectable for when the system came out. I mean, you could go and compare it to say a Sega Megadrive or SNES, but that doesn't feel fair - those systems are several years newer and both relied heavily on a technology (VRAM) that was effectively unavailable when the Amiga was designed*.
(a small note, my point about comparing it to newer systems is not aimed at you, but it felt relevant to point out as people often do compare the Amiga to newer systems)
IMHO, the real problem is that the Amiga used a bitplane based display and relied on using the Blitter to draw objects (in part - Sprites are indeed available but they're rather limited for general use), where just about all other game oriented systems relied instead on hardware sprites and a tile based screen system. These are a much better fit for gaming as the overhead of using hardware sprites is much lower and tile based graphics means that the overhead of changing background graphics is also much lower.
*) I know that VRAM was available in 1980, but it was ludicrously expensive until the later half of the decade and even then it was still not exactly cheap (which is partly why the 16 bit consoles have such a small amount of it). As a bit of trivia, VRAM is also what made the X68000 and the PC-Engine so good.
Quote:
Originally Posted by E-Penguin
"Is the Amiga hard to program well?"
Yes, I think so. There are lots of ways to achieve a result and some are better than others. It's very much a distributed system (68000, blitter, copper, whatever it is that does the sprites...) and understanding that, and using them to the best effect, is tricky.
|
I agree with this completely.