Vampire Games

[daxb]

If you still can do the basic stuff I`ve no problem with extra features like a useable browser, fast I/O, enough RAM to don`t get "not enough memory requester", connect standard hardware like SATA (don`t search for expensive special hardware), view a PDF, ... and games that don`t run at a crawl and use a good resolution. No problem with OCS/AGA and 8bit sound. If a port is good, why not. Although I would prefer self made software. Of course it doesn`t need to look/sound like pc software.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Steril707

I think for keeping it "real" to its essence, do OCS/ECS/AGA games.

But that's not what I mean at all.
This is a new architecture with alleged power to do lots of brilliant new things. Using it to replicate what's done and tried a million times over seems like a waste of all the goodness.
What I meant about the Amiga essence wasn't about keeping it compatible. It mean the real essence behind it all, from the beginning, what was "only Amiga makes it possible", right? Meaning it showed the computing world that there was a way to do things differently and in ways not imagined before.

Amiga was made and marketed with innovation at its core. Porting Quake one more fucking time is contrary to that ethos.

Turning an Amiga into an underpowered Raspberry Pi (or worse, a ridiculously underpowered PC) seems to be a waste of what's on offer.

Then again you will have no one interested in doing those "cool new things" because, well, a lot of reasons. It's hard enough to get coding a game for standard Amiga, this much power only increases the difficulty by large factors. So you are pretty much stuck with porting the old.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Isn't the main game people play on Vampires called "SysInfo" or something? I see people posting screenshots of their hi-scores on Facebook all the time.

Ha, ha, ha... lol!

Give some time and I guess there will be more games for the system. For a start we're thinking seriously to support Vampire and high-end amigas with Alarcity (by adding some extra enhancements or perhaps a later special edition) but those are just thoughts for the moment.

A very easy thing to do that wouldn't require an extreme amount of work or a true dedicated version would be to maximise the amount of objects/effects on screen. Games like ours or Reshoot-R f.e. could support this with ease without breaking the main "vanilla" game. It's not comparable to a true dedicated version -of course- but it's a nice bonus non the less

[drHirudo]

Porting Atari Falcon games to the Vampire will be a good start. It will give the semi-uniqueness that everyone is looking for (the Atari Falcon is pretty rare as well), plus it will once again prove that the Amiga is better than the Atari (even if the Atari Falcon beats the crap out of Amiga 1200, hardware wise speaking).

[grond]

Not sure why a Vampire should turn an Amiga into just another PC. It's still a 68k processor and thus you can program it in 68k asm. It still runs AmigaOS which is also a lot of fun to code with.

[zero]

Don't get me wrong, it's great for developing stuff and running apps. I use an A4000/060/PIV to write code on, or WinUAE. But I don't target those platforms, I target a basic A500/1meg or A1200.

[Tigerskunk]

I think you guys really misunderstood me here..
I don't want to turn the Amiga into another low level PC.

I doubt, though, that we will see many unique big software projects utilizing the Vampires power.

It's simply a reality.

I hope to be wrong though, off course...

[grelbfarlk]

The time it takes to do the art assets for a single game is a large undertaking, characters, sound, backgrounds. Then keep in mind that a lot of Amiga users won't pay for a game at this point, sure some will. Then coding, writing and all the other sausage making of game development either implies a lot of people donating a lot of time for fun for their one favorite platform.

How many Triple-AAA games came out for the Amiga platform in the last 10 years, can you count them all on one hand? I'm talking games with the production values of something like a Psygnosis game from their heyday like Lemmings 2.

Meanwhile somebody like Arte can port a game over the course of a couple months or weeks-to the end user it's about the same level of quality and since it's a port most of the time no one expects to have to pay for it. And in many cases the art assets are of a much higher quality.

I don't mean any offense to the true Amiga developers like Amiten or Cobe, but part of their expectation and limitations come from the expectation that their games will run on an unexpanded or very modestly expanded Amiga. This same problem applies to a greatly expanded non-Vampire classic Amiga, other than ports name how many RTG games that exist that can run over 320x240 resolution.

The thread is Vampire games. But yeah I'll be happy to write a novel's length of text for an RPG for the GemRB engine, do we have a half dozen artists that want to get working on that?

[ExiE]

Originally Posted by matthey

The Apollo-core has an unorthodox ISA for a GP CPU. It adds registers everywhere they can be bolted on (not x86_64 philosophy), deprecates the MMU (not any high performance GP CPU), deprecates floating point (not any high performance GP CPU), joins SIMD unit and integer unit forever limiting the SIMD unit to 64 bits and integer only (only defunct ISAs like PA-RISC). The CPU design is highly optimized for an FPGA and the extreme memory bandwidth relative to the CPU clock (instead of planning for a future ASIC). The Vampire Apollo-core CPU definitely scores points in the "uniqueness" category.

I can smell same unresolved issues in your comment.
What you mean by depricates FPU? Few days before your post Gunnar clearly stated that V4 will have 68882 compatible FPU and reason why V2 don't get FPU is FPGA size.

And BTW they are developing FPGA core not ASIC...

[Tigerskunk]

I think, what I want from the Vampire is to be my "hobby" machine. Where I can do stuff like running Emulators, listen to music, code on, play the occasional OCS game, etc...

I don't expect someone to write and design unique to the Vampire state of the art of 1998 software for it (if we compare speed and abilities, it's in the league of something that came out at that time), like Zelda Ocarina of Time or Quake 2.

If you have the power and skills to build a game like that, fine. I certainly know I don't.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

How many Triple-AAA games came out for the Amiga platform in the last 10 years, can you count them all on one hand?

Yeah I'll count them:
ZERO

Steril707, a hobby computer sounds fun, but can't you do exactly what you just described with basically any other machine available out there right now? Why does it have to be Amiga and Vampire?

This is the main Vampire issue: I question its point in existing in its current aim.

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by Akira

Yeah I'll count them:
ZERO

Steril707, a hobby computer sounds fun, but can't you do exactly what you just described with basically any other machine available out there right now? Why does it have to be Amiga and Vampire?

This is the main Vampire issue: I question its point in existing in its current aim.

Because it can?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Because it can?

I know better than to engage further into this and call forth the trolls.

[zero]

I'd love to see a kind of Action Replay style cart but with a connection to a PC for ease of development. Write and compile code on the PC, download it to the Amiga for debugging with single step, memory/chipset monitor etc.

It's just so much easier to develop code when you have a separate machine to write it on, and when a crash doesn't take your IDE down with it.

Having said that, WinUAE isn't bad and maybe it could integrate more closely with that. WinUAE has the advantage of being able to single step the chipset, view DMA slot allocation and stuff like that.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Akira

I know better than to engage further into this and call forth the trolls.

Just because somebody doesn't have the same opinion as yours doesn't mean that person is a troll.

Well, the reason of why using this is off course, like anything Amiga, purely an emotional attachment to something that gave me some warm feelings in my youth.

If I can do my hobby stuff like playing a round of Pulstar on a Neo Geo emulator running on a machine, while I know that deep inside in that box is still a copper resting somewhere (even if it's just implemented in FPGA now) that I can use when I write an assembler program, it kind of makes me happy.

It doesn't make sense. My car, an old Alfa Romeo Spider doesn't make much sense as well. It makes me happy, and that's what counts.

Using Win-UAE or FS-UAE is nice, but having an A1000 standing in front of you running this kind of stuff is a nice idea to me.

[coder76]

Originally Posted by Akira

Yeah I'll count them:
ZERO

Steril707, a hobby computer sounds fun, but can't you do exactly what you just described with basically any other machine available out there right now? Why does it have to be Amiga and Vampire?

This is the main Vampire issue: I question its point in existing in its current aim.

Both the 68080 CPU and SAGA are cleanly designed hardware that continues the Amiga
tradition. Other computers and hardware usually needs to be coded through drivers and software APIs, where you lose a lot of speed to begin with and then you have to deal with APIs that change the whole time/and have their own problems. I don't have the latest hardware on PCs and tablets, but many games, even simple ones, don't work properly. Like OpenRA, and Skyforce series, which aren't even 3D games. So coding the Vampire directly, you get the kind of smoothness that is a trademark of many Amiga games and this with less CPU and hardware power.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by coder76

Both the 68080 CPU and SAGA are cleanly designed hardware that continues the Amiga tradition.

Is MMX (coming from the x86) of the Amiga tradition ?

Originally Posted by coder76

So coding the Vampire directly, you get the kind of smoothness that is a trademark of many Amiga games and this with less CPU and hardware power.

This is a property of Amiga+68k, not a property of Vampire itself.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Just because somebody doesn't have the same opinion as yours doesn't mean that person is a troll.

You misunderstood me, I meant "I don't want to keep talking and ATTRACT the trolls". Didn't call anyone a troll. Yet :P

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Akira

You misunderstood me, I meant "I don't want to keep talking and ATTRACT the trolls". Didn't call anyone a troll. Yet :P

Ah okay...

[Galahad/FLT]

I'm surprised to not see on Youtube a Vampire running TFX