ECS and OCS - Page 3

cookieninja · 12 December 2023, 17:32

If I recall correctly, ECS was first introduced alongside the A3000, a high-end workstation.

That might go some way towards explaining why the feature set is not exciting from a games perspective. Higher resolutions and more chip men were sorely needed features for applications which can be shown a dedicated monitor. Booting from a hard disk, straight into a newly enhanced workbench the low resolutions unavailable to those monitor which couldn't sync low enough wouldn't be much missed.

There's also the matter of the deal with Sun that fell through, which was going to run a UNIX operating system on rebadged A3000 machines. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that, perhaps, releasing it as an Amiga may have been a little bit of an afterthought when that deal fell through? Or at least that it was the main driver behind the ECS chipset

Megalomaniac · 12 December 2023, 19:44

More chip RAM still did have its potential advantages for games though - Mega Typhoon I think needed 1Mb chip RAM, though otherwise the potential for more bigger sprites largely went unused - partly because such a small percentage of Amigas were ECS by the time AGA usurped it a year after the A500+. Still, plenty of games used it for extra sound - Walker, Hired Guns, The Settlers, Worms and Tubular Worlds all had enhancements that I think needed 1Mb (or more) chip RAM rather than 512 chip + 512 fast.

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12 December 2023, 17:32	#41
cookieninja Registered User Join Date: Apr 2020 Location: Norwich, UK Posts: 21	If I recall correctly, ECS was first introduced alongside the A3000, a high-end workstation. That might go some way towards explaining why the feature set is not exciting from a games perspective. Higher resolutions and more chip men were sorely needed features for applications which can be shown a dedicated monitor. Booting from a hard disk, straight into a newly enhanced workbench the low resolutions unavailable to those monitor which couldn't sync low enough wouldn't be much missed. There's also the matter of the deal with Sun that fell through, which was going to run a UNIX operating system on rebadged A3000 machines. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that, perhaps, releasing it as an Amiga may have been a little bit of an afterthought when that deal fell through? Or at least that it was the main driver behind the ECS chipset

12 December 2023, 19:44	#42
Megalomaniac Registered User Join Date: Sep 2022 Location: Eastbourne Posts: 1,019	More chip RAM still did have its potential advantages for games though - Mega Typhoon I think needed 1Mb chip RAM, though otherwise the potential for more bigger sprites largely went unused - partly because such a small percentage of Amigas were ECS by the time AGA usurped it a year after the A500+. Still, plenty of games used it for extra sound - Walker, Hired Guns, The Settlers, Worms and Tubular Worlds all had enhancements that I think needed 1Mb (or more) chip RAM rather than 512 chip + 512 fast.

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