Amiga A2410 games -- a worthy project?

[AmigaHope]

Something occurred to me, C='s first graphics card for the Amiga, the A2410, was actually made with the ridiculously powerful (for the time) TIGA chipset. It was no dumb framebuffer, it was actually the most advanced GPU on the market with a fully programmable coprocessor.

Theoretically a bog standard A2000 with an A2410 could run a near-arcade-perfect Mortal Kombat II, etc. because in Midway Y and T series cabinets, the GPU *WAS* the CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

It'd be funny if you could get the games running on an old Zorro 2 card. xD

[Juz400]

I think they only made drivers for Amiga linux, the card was aimed at that market to begin with, I think some time later AmigaOS drivers were made as to how much of the card was available to use....

Heres the `Reference Manual` you can see that aimed at both x86 AND 680x0 based machines.

http://www.transputer.net/mtw/rg-750...0/t34010ug.pdf

[Shadowfire]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Theoretically a bog standard A2000 with an A2410 could run a near-arcade-perfect Mortal Kombat II, etc. because in Midway Y and T series cabinets, the GPU *WAS* the CPU.

This is kind of like, no, actually EXACTLY like, saying that since the Amiga and the Neogeo both have the same 68000 processor, that you can "probably" make the Amiga do almost exactly the same thing as the Neogeo.
The Y-unit has a different system architecture and support chips. The A2410 doesn't even have the hardware support for multiple playfields, only has one hardware sprite, etc.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Shadowfire

This is kind of like, no, actually EXACTLY like, saying that since the Amiga and the Neogeo both have the same 68000 processor, that you can "probably" make the Amiga do almost exactly the same thing as the Neogeo.
The Y-unit has a different system architecture and support chips. The A2410 doesn't even have the hardware support for multiple playfields, only has one hardware sprite, etc.

It's more than that though, it's like saying if the Amiga had the same GPU as the Neogeo you could probably make the Amiga do the same thing.

As I understand it, the Y-unit doesn't have hardware sprites (except for the same single hardware sprite the A2410 does) or playfields, instead they're managed by the 34010's blitter operations. The framebuffer/DAC setups are different but you could adapt the data format to match.

The T-Unit probably wouldn't be portable as it includes an extra DMA controller ASIC to blit data in from ROM.