Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's an illusion. 320x256, 640x256 and 1280x256 are all the same resolution.

Was gonna post the same. Open an interlaced screen and a lowres screen and reveal the laced screen by dragging the lowres down. Suddenly the lowres screen starts flickering.

Dead giveaway.

[Pyromania]

Nothing stops a Hombre! Nothing!

[Photon]

Hombre seems like Sega Saturn in 1993. David can be faulted for not remembering tech from 30 years ago. The video is a mash-up intended to attack his statements from various years.

I'm just a mod of the coder forums mostly, and therefore I tried to keep it tech.

I'm 100% free speech, that way lies forum. But if the thread turns into personal attack I'm not on your side, and will likely get the support of the other moderators. And David's detractors will then be happy that "EAB is not giving him a platform"?

I speak freely. I don't think anything that David has said is the reason that the Amiga didn't "beat other platforms". The Amiga was a great success long before Hombre or AAA was on the radar. We tend to forget.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TCD

But Batman wasn't an Amiga exclusive game. The Batman pack sold A500s because it was cheap.

Amiga's Batman pack was a "timed exclusive."

[hammer]

The potential innovation for 100 Mhz PA-RISC-based OpenGL-capable Amiga is a low-cost non-walled garden hardware accelerated OpenGL-capable game console and low-cost A1200-like personal computer acting like its dev kit.

I'm okay with a low-cost hardware accelerated OpenGL-capable 100 Mhz PA-RISC-based Amiga 1200-like personal computer for the 1994-1997 time period.

Retail 3D hardware from Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo 64 are not open platforms i.e. walled garden.

Running Windows NT on a PA-RISC-based Amiga 1200-like machine would be useful for education i.e. during my time in university, we have fleets of DEC Alpha-based Windows NT 4.0 along with Intel Pentium 166 to 200Mhz based Windows NT 4.0 machines (equipped with Premedia 2 or NVIDIA RIVA 128 (1997) OpenGL accelerators).

Windows NT on a low-cost PA-RISC-based Amiga 1200-like machine would be attractive for education sectors.

AmigaOS 3.x PA-RISC version wouldn't be accepted as a network public multiuser workstation OS.

PA-RISC at 100 Mhz with 64-bit SIMD Max extension has superiority up to classic Pentium 200 Mhz. 1997-era Pentium MMX would have negated PA-RISC's 64-bit SIMD advantages.

PA-RISC Max is 64 bit SIMD integer e.g. quad packed 16-bit integers on general-purpose registers.

1998-era AMD 3DNow has a 64-bit SIMD integer and floating point.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the Playstation itself nearly didn't happen, so in an alternate universe it's possible Commodore might have pulled it off. Only problem is there were other consoles with 3D coming out that it would have to compete against.

In an alternate universe without the PlayStation, the Sega Saturn would have been half as powerful as Sega wouldn’t have reacted to add another CPU to their machine.

But then you might think Commodore are in with a chance, but don’t forget the 3DO, it only looked outdated against the PSX and a full specced Saturn, and with multiple hardware backers it could well have sold tens of millions of units around the world.

Commodore however, in my mind would still be fumbling around in the dark dragging the company down from the inside! Joking aside, their plan for a 1995 release of Hombre being console first still could have been too late had the 3DO taken off and did ‘a PSX’ in the two year head start it had.

[Pyromania]

Since we are Whatifing things. In a different timeline Apple acquired Commodore instead of NeXT and made a combined AAA and Hombre chipset the new Mac. They even replaced MacOS with AmigaOS. Instead of Jobs RJ Mical is the new Apple CEO.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by hammer

Amiga's Batman pack was a "timed exclusive."

Got a source for that information?

Edit: Found it here https://filmstories.co.uk/features/h...iga-computers/
Interesting, first time I hear about it.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's an illusion. 320x256, 640x256 and 1280x256 are all the same resolution. Hint: SVGA CRTs and flat panels don't switch modes when switching between these compatible resolutions. These are not different resolutions in this context.

Sorry, but that is wrong. Resolution is the number of pixels or lines across and down the screen. 31kHz is a scan rate. A CRT has no concept of horizontal resolution, it only knows about brightness and line width. LCD panels have scalers that try to lock onto the pixels and then stretch them if necessary, often resulting in a poor display if the signal resolution doesn't match the LCD panel's native resolution.

Yes, for screen dragging each screen needs to have the same horizontal scan rate, but the resolutions can be different. And we are not just talking about stretching pixels, but actual hardware differences like number of bitplanes, color palette etc. The Amiga is far more flexible here than PC graphics cards of the day.

It's an OS feature that they didn't add.

An OS feature they couldn't add with the original VGA card, and with limited success on (some) later cards.

Any recent graphics card can do that pretty easily because the resolutions are just doubled like in my example above.

It's not just a matter of changing pixel clocks, but also where to fetch data from, color palettes etc. You may be right that modern graphics cards can do this on a line by line basis, but older ones couldn't.

In fact, a graphics card can do this better than an Amiga because it can do proper up scaling so that you can mix truly different resolutions like 640x512 and 800x600.

Scaling is a different thing. Now you are talking about converting different resolutions to be all the same, with results that may not be very satisfactory.

If it's better than anything we have now, it would've been better than anything available back then.

Yes, I believe that was the plan.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Commodore however, in my mind would still be fumbling around in the dark dragging the company down from the inside! Joking aside, their plan for a 1995 release of Hombre being console first still could have been too late had the 3DO taken off and did ‘a PSX’ in the two year head start it had.

That's why I said "Only problem is there were other consoles with 3D coming out that it would have to compete against.".

But the 3DO didn't take off, because it was too expensive and didn't have enough backers.

3DO

Citing a lack of decent exclusives and an "astronomical asking price"... video game website IGN chose the 3DO as its 22nd greatest video game console of all time, slightly higher than the Atari Jaguar but lower than its four other major competitors: the SNES (4th best), the Sega Genesis (5th), the PlayStation (7th), and the Sega Saturn (18th). On Yahoo! Games the 3DO was placed among the top five worst console launches due to its one-game launch lineup and high launch price

Even without being compared to the PlayStation, the 3DO wasn't that great.

Commodore, had they survived, could have built on their success with the CD32 by putting Hombre (or something like it) in the next model. Another possibility might be an upgrade for the CD32 via the FMV slot.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

An OS feature they couldn't add with the original VGA card, and with limited success on (some) later cards.

It was a useful feature in 1985, the hardware wasn't beefy enough to run the desktop with high colour depth but you wanted to be able to multitask with things like Deluxe Paint and still paint in the full HAM colour range. And we could all live with the quirks that "screens" were kind of clumsy versions of windows that were less flexible in terms of positioning.

But by the time PC's had SVGA graphics, it was obsolete. Windows would just optimise the on screen palette for the foreground application and that worked well enough for most use cases and avoided the limitations on where an application could place its windows.. And once 16-bit colour depths became viable, any need for different colour depth or pixel resolution was gone.

Of course you could do it in a modern display, everything is just 3D textures so you could fake low res pixels for part of the display if you wanted, but there isn't a practical reason to do so.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Retail 3D hardware from Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo 64 are not open platforms i.e. walled garden.

PlayStation had Net Yaroze, so the wall wasn't that high.

Running Windows NT on a PA-RISC-based Amiga 1200-like machine would be useful for education i.e. during my time in university, we have fleets of DEC Alpha-based Windows NT 4.0 along with Intel Pentium 166 to 200Mhz based Windows NT 4.0 machines (equipped with Premedia 2 or NVIDIA RIVA 128 (1997) OpenGL accelerators).

Hardly a market worth pursuing.

Windows NT on a low-cost PA-RISC-based Amiga 1200-like machine would be attractive for education sectors.

But a PC would be the more obvious choice.

PA-RISC at 100 Mhz with 64-bit SIMD Max extension has superiority up to classic Pentium 200 Mhz.

Ah yes, that's why everybody was buying PA-RISC machines instead of PCs.

PA-RISC Max is 64 bit SIMD integer e.g. quad packed 16-bit integers on general-purpose registers.

1998-era AMD 3DNow has a 64-bit SIMD integer and floating point.

And? PA-RISC wasn't IBM compatible, so it was a non-starter regardless of what it could do.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the 3DO didn't take off, because it was too expensive and didn't have enough backers.

Even without being compared to the PlayStation, the 3DO wasn't that great.

Commodore, had they survived, could have built on their success with the CD32 by putting Hombre (or something like it) in the next model. Another possibility might be an upgrade for the CD32 via the FMV slot.

It was only really expensive in 1993, by early 1994 other models came out at $399 and then $299 later on when sales would have pushed through, of course the PSX hype train stopped that, but don’t forget this is the alternate reality here where people didn’t hold out for this exciting new fangled Sony thing.

The 3DO was the single biggest leap in games consoles, i’m not sure how anyone can say it wasn’t that great, in what regards does the hardware disappoint you? (ignoring the PSX and Saturn, this is 1993 btw).

Commodore had plans for the CD64 (Hombre based) for late 1995, yet they also had plans for an upgraded CD32 in late 1994 with an 030/28 and 32k nvram, but still had the same slow 2mb chip ram.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The 3DO was the single biggest leap in games consoles, i’m not sure how anyone can say it wasn’t that great, in what regards does the hardware disappoint you? (ignoring the PSX and Saturn, this is 1993 btw).

It was really the (initial) price and to a lesser degree that some of the games/ports didn't use the hardware properly.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

It was really the (initial) price and to a lesser degree that some of the games/ports didn't use the hardware properly.

I agree, but i wanted to know what he thought was wrong with the actual hardware side of things.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore, had they survived, could have built on their success with the CD32 by putting Hombre (or something like it) in the next model. Another possibility might be an upgrade for the CD32 via the FMV slot.

I'll be honest here, they should've included some fastRAM and the FMV cartridge in all CD32s in the first place. That way it could really be competitive against the 4th generation consoles. I know prices would skyrocket with such expensive hardware, but I think it was the only way unless they wanted a completely new machine (Like Hombre)

[LaBodilsen]

maybe he meant: "better than anything on the market today (for the amiga platform)"

[Bren McGuire]

i didnt say he was running it i specifically said "stop giving this man a platform" and this is literally the person you mentioned Ravi Abbott giving them a platform and right after that whole fiasco. i specifically remember the person organizing saying that they were still welcome to show up because of course they have to lick that boot! it belongs to an ex-Commodore employee!

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

this is a private enterprise by Ravi Abbot of Retro Hour fame, Pleasance isn't running anything to do with it.

[CCCP alert]

Today the PS5 will do real-time ray tracing, we have achieved a holy grail moment with AMDs sterling patented hack that enables this to be affordable. As someone who bought a copy of Turbo Silver for my Amiga 2000 many decades ago and waiting hours for my ray traced scenes to appear it really is amazing how far even mediocre priced consoles can do, it's no longer the preserve of people with many many thousands invested in top end of what gaming PC at any price is capable of.

Maybe David is fixating on one thing the chipset would do that still isn't done today, and in fairness he does say his memory is terrible and he is not a technical person.

[spud]

David Pleasance... once a salesman, always a salesman. Tells a good story and obviously did good stuff at Commodore. Cut him some slack I say.