25 November 2019, 20:12 | #61 | |
Zap´em
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It's not "false". Many DOS programs were not intended to be used from harddisk. You would often have problems with them. I could use like 10% of my disks and that's even an optimistic number. |
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25 November 2019, 20:30 | #62 | |
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Were most of them cracked versions of the games / programs?? Sure, we could have different experience with the same thing. In my case, having them all run from HD was great, then first JST games and later WHDLoad - that was Amiga how it was supposed to be from beginning. But nobody asked me. |
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25 November 2019, 20:42 | #63 | |
Zap´em
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25 November 2019, 20:55 | #64 |
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In my opinion (again, just my opinion), working with HD on Amiga had me learn how to use Workbench, and I really enjoyed that.
HD games made me rethink original astonishment of Amiga and later made it more easy to move to PC and DOS/Win. But, to say that there are only 10 games that support HD was false information. Here is list from HOL with all games that had HD install. Nor all of them are AGA, so not all required A1200. http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_hd=yes |
25 November 2019, 20:58 | #65 | |
Zap´em
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25 November 2019, 21:17 | #66 | |
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Commodore 386SX@25mhz Also Word Worth 2 is mentioned here for 120GBP Atari Falcon 030@16mhz/1MB RAM/16Mhz Blitter/32mhz DSP @ 8channel with 16bit sounds for 480GBP Yeah It's not an amiga, but it's equivalent to the 386SX ?!!? 1993-January Amiga Format review of Amiga 1200 1993-January Amiga 1200 80MB HDD 680GBP PCMCIA RAM expansions, yeah I know it's not FAST RAM 2MB@120GBP 4MB@180GBP I remember seeing in issues a few months later in 93 that you can buy the HDD yourself and install it yourself and void the warranty. Shout out to the scanners and uploaders of these zines Last edited by redblade; 25 November 2019 at 21:59. Reason: Added URLS. |
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26 November 2019, 12:50 | #67 | |
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(i.e. not the 1MB thing, but WB eating some precious, required memory) A couple of days ago I was just fiddling with my A1000 and I read an official installer README (Wings perhaps? can't remember right now) that warned users about the game fully exploiting available chip memory and that using Workbench in certain configurations might lead to issues. To be completely fair though, it's not like 1992-3 era DOS games on PC were a pleasure to work with, "low" 640KB memory was often a huge problem, far worse than the Amiga IMHO due to the steps involved in trying to resolve them. That '030 would make for a fully 32bit architecture computer so I think it's reasonable to say it was way better. Last edited by Turrican_3; 26 November 2019 at 15:48. Reason: typos |
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26 November 2019, 13:47 | #68 | |
Zap´em
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That's at least how I understood it. |
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26 November 2019, 13:50 | #69 |
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In late 1992 I believe the A1200 was difficult to get hold of by suppliers, which might explain why there aren't many references to price. Page 60 of the Argos catalogue released in the summer of 1993 prices the A1200 stock at £379.
Yeah, there were plenty of hard drive installable games back in the day. I tended towards strategy-type games, and so my experience is the other way: almost all the original games I bought included hard drive installation options. Some were tight on RAM if you didn't have any additional RAM available, especially if you were using a 1MB machine as stock with a hard drive. 1MB is little enough that the developers had to pack everything in. That Commodore PC listed sounds like a horrendous machine to use... I also remember the fun of disabling certain devices, drivers etc. to try and free up base memory just to get certain games to work. And then having to change everything back again to run some other software. It certainly wasn't any more convenient than booting an A1200 without the startup-sequence and running a game from the shell to save RAM. Edit: Every mounted volume does indeed use some RAM for buffers, but it will normally use fast RAM (since it's faster) unless you only have chip RAM available. |
26 November 2019, 14:05 | #70 | |
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Quite possible, since I had always 1.5MB minimum memory when I got HD. Even on WinUAE for WB 1.3 emulation I always start with 1.5, as somehow felt right. Games that I wished that were available on Amiga, and eventually made me move - Master of Magic / Master of Orion. Last edited by Anubis; 26 November 2019 at 14:22. |
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26 November 2019, 18:43 | #71 | |
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As I always wrote, about what many fanatics have a problem: Commodore bankrupt because for the price of amiga 1200 one can buy 386 sx with better and faster graphics than amiga 4000. Commodore advertises in Amiga Format in December 1992 a 386 SX for 750 GBP. They sell this 386 SX with: - 40 MB HDD - color monitor Take away hdd and monitor and this 386 SX will be around 400 GBP. Commodore PC were expensive, no name PC by the end of 1992 where cheaper and with better graphics. Last edited by swinkamor12; 26 November 2019 at 18:51. |
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26 November 2019, 19:45 | #72 | |
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Amiga is more than just a games machine. |
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26 November 2019, 20:09 | #73 | |
Zap´em
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Edit: I later in 90's had an Amiga 1200 and an A4000 with using Aminet and Internet on it and my A500 harddisk was sold long before that. Last edited by Zak; 26 November 2019 at 20:24. |
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07 December 2019, 10:50 | #74 | |||
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But one huge advantage over the Amiga - IBM compatibility. Quote:
A scant few years later all those 386SXs quietly disappeared. Limited to 16MB RAM or less, ISA bus too slow, CPU not upgradeable. The only part worth keeping was the case (unless you had a slimline, and then the best thing to do was throw it away and buy a whole new PC). I had a 386DX-40 which ran Windows 95 slowly. On a 386SX it would have been a joke. The Amiga already had a proper OS in 1992, 3 years before Microsoft. By 1994 you could pop an accelerator in your A1200 with a 50MHz 32 bit CPU and up to 128MB RAM. Shortly afterwards the 040 appeared, then the 060 and PowerPC. And now, nearly 30 years later, we will be able to upgrade our 1200's even more, with an FGA based accelerator more powerful than we ever dreamed of! One computer model stood the test of time - and it wasn't the 386SX. Quote:
Commodore didn't go bankrupt because no name 386SX's were cheaper than the A4000, they went bankrupt because the Amiga didn't run Microsoft software. And they weren't the only ones. Apart from Apple, none of their contemporaries survived either. Hell, even most PC manufacturers didn't survive. But just imagine if it had been the other way around. If IBM had chosen 68000 instead of 8088, if they had hired the Amiga team to make their OS, where would under-powered non-IBM compatible Intel machines have gone in the marketplace? Nowhere. Last edited by Bruce Abbott; 07 December 2019 at 10:56. |
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10 December 2019, 05:36 | #75 |
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You mistake 1992 with earlier years.
In 1992 even chapest VGA cards has 0.5 MB RAM. Yes I compare bare a1200 with PC with 1 MB RAM and 1 MB RAM vga card. Even Trident TVGA9000 has 640x480 256 colors mode. And it is faster in this mode than AGA. hint: chunky pixels. Commodore bankrupt because AGA has not chunky pixels. A4000 with 32 bit Zorro III graphics card was wonderfull hardware but cost at least as four 386 DX at that time. |
28 December 2019, 05:22 | #76 | |
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If you want to see what AGA would have been like if it had included chunky modes, hook up a Graffiti and see that it doesn't help that much as stuff becomes more complex. Doom is basically the last game where it would have helped at all. |
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29 December 2019, 11:48 | #77 |
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In 1998 I think about buying 68060 but finally I don't buy it, because cheapest ppc with bvision cost only litte more.
So even if on 68060 c2p takes only tiny fraction of time, 68060 cost too much and come too late. On slower cpu than 68060 c2p takes significant amount of time. Famous lack of chunky pixels in AGA was main reason why Commodore bankrupt. |
29 December 2019, 13:03 | #78 |
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I think the testing done with tf330 for cd32 showed that akiko c2p stopped helping when anything faster than a 50mhz 030 was used.
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30 December 2019, 02:33 | #79 | |
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Wolf3D is a very simple engine, so C2P is a huge issue if you have to process the frames from it. Doom is more complex, but C2P is still a significant fraction of the processing per frame. By the time you get to Quake, so much time is spent rendering the frame that C2P is a relative non-issue. If you look at the Akiko chip on the CD32, it handled chunky pixels in hardware, reducing the C2P process to a single write and copy, but it only helps much on games where the 68020 is fast enough to even run the game. On modern games the graphics engine NEVER renders to the target framebuffer, and instead there's a copy process to what the buffer is. It's even more complex on modern consoles where they render at completely different resolutions depending on field of view and then scale them to the target framebuffer, performing a hundred computations per pixel just to get the scaled output to fit right to the fixed-aspect display device. Chunky pixels were only relevant for a couple of years for a very specific limited period of time where game engines did CPU rendering of a fake-3D engine to a framebuffer. Nowadays your smartphone does a number of transformations getting from game output to your framebuffer that make C2P look like childs play. |
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30 December 2019, 11:31 | #80 |
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Bitplanes was great in the eighties when RAM was very expensive.
Bitplanes gives OCS/ECS advantage over graphics of IBM/Apple/Atari, by using non standard bpp like 6 bpp. Bitplanes gives nothing when 256 or more colors are used, and only slow down graphics. There is no reason to use ancient technology like bitplanes after 1992. |
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