Best way to do SuperAGA in Apollo core

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

try looking it up, and you will find, it is actually an amiga-related thing

Or amigo-related.

[eXeler0]

Gunnar mentioned he wanted P96 to be *integrated* as a chunky mode in SAGA rather than a parallell mode. Even controllable by the Copper.
Would that require any changes to the current Copper?
In the old Natami specs, lots of Blitter improvements were listed, the Copper... not so much..

[Mrs Beanbag]

if it used the original 8 "bitplane" pointers, it could be exciting to be able to combine 8 different chunky buffers in programmable ways, so an RGB display would be synthesisable out of 3 "byteplanes" by setting a colour multiplier for each and an addition operation. Lots of weird and wonderful effects could be programmed!

[IanP]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Gunnar mentioned he wanted P96 to be *integrated* as a chunky mode in SAGA rather than a parallell mode. Even controllable by the Copper.
Would that require any changes to the current Copper?
In the old Natami specs, lots of Blitter improvements were listed, the Copper... not so much..

The copper is incredibly simple all it does is wait for the raster to reach specific points and at those points move some data into custom chipset registers as determined by the copper list programmer. The power of the copper is what the data in it's lists are and where it puts it. The programmer can manipulate the chipset in very clever ways. The copper control register contains a single bit to restrict which registers it can access. A SAGA copper could conceivably add one or more bits to restrict access to some SAGA hardware registers.

[grond]

I'm not sure about the detailed implementation but the way I understood it the copper is supposed to remain the same for compatibility reasons but a second coppy is planned that can deal with higher resolutions and access a wider range of registers. E.g. there are going to be wide palette registers that are going to be accessible without bank switching. I'm not sure whether these registers will be a second palette for the rtg screen or whether they will be a second port to one and the same palette, though.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

It has "half-assed" written all over it..

You do NOT diss the great AGA God in front of ME, sir! I don't care if it has design flaws, they're easily compensated for by faster processors anyway! AGA allowed the Amiga to be up there with the PC on the Demoscene, whereas it would've failed years ago. Besides, I just LUUUURVE those subtle shades and millions of colours!

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Foebane

You do NOT diss the great AGA God in front of ME, sir! I don't care if it has design flaws, they're easily compensated for by faster processors anyway! AGA allowed the Amiga to be up there with the PC on the Demoscene, whereas it would've failed years ago. Besides, I just LUUUURVE those subtle shades and millions of colours!

I told you to stay off the mushrooms man 😆
No but seriously.. If Commodore had some kind of decent R&D budget, and the A1200 would have gotten something closer to AAA and ppl wouldn't have abandoned it so fast when Doom arrived on PCs.
If you look at it objectively, yes it's improved over ECS.. but honestly consider the time frame between the two in relation to the improvement in what we got and then it's not such an impressive achievement. .. The PC graphics market was picking up pace at the time.. it was not a good time to sit on your ass and hope for the best from your delayed 5 year development plans...

[sandruzzo]

32bit blitter and copper with more mhz will give us a lot of power. In the old days if Aga had 32bit blit copper and blitter running a 14mhz would allow us to have chunky copper 1x1.

[invent]

Super AGA to me sounds like the ability to have:

1024x768 or similar resolutions
256 colour palettes (maybe independent to each parallax layer)
Big full colour sprites

No doubt it would be great to also have doom type games.

While anti-aliasing / alpha channel type graphics is nice, maybe not as essential.

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

I told you to stay off the mushrooms man ��
No but seriously.. If Commodore had some kind of decent R&D budget, and the A1200 would have gotten something closer to AAA and ppl wouldn't have abandoned it so fast when Doom arrived on PCs.
If you look at it objectively, yes it's improved over ECS.. but honestly consider the time frame between the two in relation to the improvement in what we got and then it's not such an impressive achievement. .. The PC graphics market was picking up pace at the time.. it was not a good time to sit on your ass and hope for the best from your delayed 5 year development plans...

Full RTG support including API (CybergraphX 3) is much more important than AGA (even if improved)

something like SuperAGA would be cool for some demo coders and to run old software. New software certainly will work with RTG

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by invent

Super AGA to me sounds like the ability to have:

1024x768 or similar resolutions
256 colour palettes (maybe independent to each parallax layer)
Big full colour sprites

No doubt it would be great to also have doom type games.

While anti-aliasing / alpha channel type graphics is nice, maybe not as essential.

Yes, I've always been impressed by the sprite hardware design in NeoGeo.

[Samurai_Crow]

Why settle for less than 720p in this day and age?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Why settle for less than 720p in this day and age?

768 is more than 720 😆
No but some might prefer 4:3 or 5:4 ratio to 16:9 considering no Amiga software is made for widescreen. As for performance, if you can shuffle around 1024x768, 1280x720 wouldn't be a problem either.

Back to SAGA..-ish. ..
Could someone with the proper knowledge explain to me how Atari implemented it's 16 bit chunky mode alongside the usual bitplanes in the Falcon? Was it a good solution or simply a completely separate screen mode? Lessons to be learned when adding Chunky mode to (S)AGA?

[kolla]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

Full RTG support including API (CybergraphX 3) is much more important than AGA (even if improved)

something like SuperAGA would be cool for some demo coders and to run old software. New software certainly will work with RTG

That's the issue right there, most relevant software is old and does not work well on RTG. My wish for SAGA is something compatible with AGA, but faster and with access to more RAM. That means, for example, something like 1920x1080 HAM8 modes for programs like Deluxe Paint and Brilliance.

[kolla]

This (now old) video shows software (DOpus' image viewer) using more than 2MB of chipram
[ Show youtube player ]

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by kolla

This (now old) video shows software (DOpus' image viewer) using more than 2MB of chipram
[ Show youtube player ]

I remember being really excited when seeing that 6 years ago (wow!) and I just thought how I couldn't wait to get my hands on one of those...

Well, turns out it was just "two more weeks" like almost everything in the Amiga world

Kudos to the Apollo Team for ACTUALLY delivering something!

[kolla]

That is true. I am a little on the fence, for a number of reasons. I do have A600s, but there are probably other people out there who are more excited about the Vampire than I am, and production is limited In other news, Minimig AGA core 1.2 just arrived for MIST, with tons of improvements

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by kolla

That's the issue right there, most relevant software is old and does not work well on RTG. My wish for SAGA is something compatible with AGA, but faster and with access to more RAM. That means, for example, something like 1920x1080 HAM8 modes for programs like Deluxe Paint and Brilliance.

but RTG means "retargettable graphics" which is supposed to be an API that is agnostic of the underlying graphics hardware from the programmers point of view, right? So as long as SAGA is powerful enough it could be both RTG and compatible.

[TjLaZer]

Super AGA shouldn't be much more different that AGA anyway, as anything more is where P96 comes in!

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

Super AGA shouldn't be much more different that AGA anyway, as anything more is where P96 comes in!

Except... If I understand Gunnar 's vision properly, he does not want to simply slap on P96 along side original AGA and be done with it. He wants to improve what's already there and implementing P96 as a chunky "mode" of SAGA. Meaning there would not be a "either this or the other" scenario but rather an integrated solution that can be mixed and e.g. accessible from the Copper and used in combination with an improved Blitter.
Whether I got this right or if this really is what we get in the end remains to be seen of course....