Which OCS games do you remember being better run on A1200?

[lyzanxia]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Indeed, with a higher framerate you can quit the game quicker.

[Megalomaniac]

The Settlers is another one - bigger maps, music, and those lovely ambient sound effects. Worth an extra 2-3%. One of the few games which really makes use of 1Mb A500s AND standard A1200s AND Amigas above that (even if the SVGA graphics mode was only added for the later PC version)

Syndicate is a bit slow on an A500 but fine on an A1200 or faster too. Probably most flight sims too, though it seems like most of them were either fast enough on the A500 (F29, F15-2, Combat Air Patrol), or still too slow on a 14Mhz 020 (Red Baron, Tornado).

Looking back, it annoys me when reviews are written as if only one spec of Amiga exists, most games that were too slow on a standard system could be improved with a hard drive or an accelerator (or both). You could upgrade an A500 pretty well in 1992 and still have spent about the same (with inflation) as an A500 cost in 1987, and PCs moved on leaps and bounds in that time.

[Marce]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

You could upgrade an A500 pretty well in 1992 and still have spent about the same (with inflation) as an A500 cost in 1987, and PCs moved on leaps and bounds in that time.

nope
in 1992: upgrades as hardisks or turboboards for the A500 were rare and very expensive, around 1500-2000 usd from the era

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Marce

nope
in 1992: upgrades as hardisks or turboboards for the A500 were rare and very expensive, around 1500-2000 usd from the era

Accelerators may have been rare, but hard drives (usually with fast RAM) were relatively common and in the hundreds of dollars range rather than the thousands.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Accelerators may have been rare, but hard drives (usually with fast RAM) were relatively common and in the hundreds of dollars range rather than the thousands.

Yep, just had a quick look in Amiga Joker and found this in the May edition of 1992:

Just under 1000 DM for 52 MB (without RAM) would make it between 600 and 700 $ in 1992.

[Retro1234]

Going off topic that Troll could be from some modern meme

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Going off topic that Troll could be from some modern meme

Amiga Joker was ahead of its time in many ways

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The Settlers is another one - bigger maps, music, and those lovely ambient sound effects. Worth an extra 2-3%. One of the few games which really makes use of 1Mb A500s AND standard A1200s AND Amigas above that (even if the SVGA graphics mode was only added for the later PC version)

Theme Park was completely gimped on the OCS/ECS machines. The AGA version was passable though the music cut out in my experience and the 040 mode was jerky. The Mac version on Shapeshifter shows how the mighty had fallen in many ways by that point!



I think Lemmings 2 and The Settlers REALLY benefited from an A1200 but they deserved AGA versions. The fact Fightin' Spirit was back ported to ECS and Ruff n' Tumble was ECS shows that they simply didn't sell enough AGA machine to sustain these great games!


What the hell did AGA add to Worms: The Director's Cut? I prefer the CD32 version because it has much better sound; a soundtrack and the ability to play your own audio CDs in the background!

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by BigD

Theme Park was completely gimped on the OCS/ECS machines.

Especially on my OCS A500, the grass would not render and there would just be that weird mirror effect you see when you noclip through a wall in Doom.

[Marce]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just under 1000 DM for 52 MB (without RAM) would make it between 600 and 700 $ in 1992.

I don't know to which device you refer
but a good accel like the GVP A530 + ram + hardisk surely was above 1500 us in 1992

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by BigD

What the hell did AGA add to Worms: The Director's Cut? I prefer the CD32 version because it has much better sound; a soundtrack and the ability to play your own audio CDs in the background!

The CD soundtrack is CD32-specific of course; the original OCS/ECS version of Worms didn't have that either. AGA gave DC much nicer looking title screens, twice the colours in the game screen, smoother gradients in the backgrounds and subpixel scrolling (aside from the many gameplay improvements that weren't necessarily AGA related). The 2MB of chip RAM, while not AGA-specific, also allows the extra colours, more sounds and title screen music.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Marce

nope
in 1992: upgrades as hardisks or turboboards for the A500 were rare and very expensive, around 1500-2000 usd from the era

Originally Posted by Marce

I don't know to which device you refer
but a good accel like the GVP A530 + ram + hardisk surely was above 1500 us in 1992

You wrote 'or' in your post, not 'and'.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Marce

I don't know to which device you refer
but a good accel like the GVP A530 + ram + hardisk surely was above 1500 us in 1992

The GVP A530 was a premium product with 40MHz 030 and DMA SCSI controller, introduced in September 1992. List price with 1MB of 60ns 32 bit RAM and Quantum 52MB SCSI drive was US$999. Typical street price in October 1992 was US$959-969.

Still not cheap though, and few A500 owners would have bought one just to play games. However many did buy hard drive + FastRAM expansions, which they used for games as well as 'serious' stuff.

[Megalomaniac]

I've got £750 in my head as the UK cost of an A530 from around that time, which was slightly less than $959 I think, but I may be confusing it with a cheaper product with a lower clock speed than 40Mhz. Amiga format issue 38 had a great guide to upgrading an A500, but I can't find it online (Amiga Magazine Rack pretty much only scans the games stuff, and I don't know of anywhere that has as much scanned as Atarimania does for the ST and other Ataris.

Still, a 16Mhz 286 PC cost about $1000 then, and a 40Mhz 2Mb 52Mb PC would be double that at that time.

[kamelito]

Vroom

[lordofchaos]

Lionheart runs better on the A1200, slow down is gone and loading is quicker.

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The CD soundtrack is CD32-specific of course; the original OCS/ECS version of Worms didn't have that either. AGA gave DC much nicer looking title screens, twice the colours in the game screen, smoother gradients in the backgrounds and subpixel scrolling (aside from the many gameplay improvements that weren't necessarily AGA related). The 2MB of chip RAM, while not AGA-specific, also allows the extra colours, more sounds and title screen music.

Yeah, colour gradients and the 3D effect on the terrain craters after impact damage don't make up for no in game sound IMHO! I have to play the Worms 2 PC soundtrack on my phone during play to get an idea what the experience should have been like!



Team17 only sold 5,000 copies I'm told! Well I'm not surprised as it's not a "Director's Cut" without in game music or the promised support for the music to be added via the Amiga Format CD Cover Disc! Yes, you get the Old Woman and stupid extra weapons but those ideas didn't reach fruition until Worms Armageddon IMHO. It's more of a beta AGA testbed version for future PC development with higher production values to come!

[jotd]

most 3D games that actually use fastmem run better on A1200. 2D games usually don't benefit that much of the acceleration because they make heavy use of the blitter and guess what? that's the component that commodore decided NOT to upgrade with AGA (along with Paula)... Recently relocated Killing Cloud in fastmem just to realize that it uses the blitter to fill polygons and that it's still super slow...

Some visionnary developpers published games with a poor framerate on A500 but which reveals its true beauty on A1200.

[Coagulus]

Syndicate and Power Drift spring to mind immediately for me

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jotd

most 3D games that actually use fastmem run better on A1200. 2D games usually don't benefit that much of the acceleration because they make heavy use of the blitter and guess what? that's the component that commodore decided NOT to upgrade with AGA (along with Paula)...

I think it would be very hard to make the blitter faster and still maintain the hardware compatibility needed to work with OCS 'bare metal' games. Programs that did it all with OS functions would benefit, but how many of those were there?

Recently relocated Killing Cloud in fastmem just to realize that it uses the blitter to fill polygons and that it's still super slow...

Even though the blitter wasn't upgraded, it can still benefit from having more DMA slots free in AGA fetch modes. On a 16 color 320x256 PAL screen the blitter is ~40% faster in AGA vs OCS.

Killing Cloud boot disk is NDOS and has no files on it, so I'm guessing it doesn't use the OS at all and therefore cannot take advantage of AGA features. However there should still be a speedup due to the CPU and blitter not competing for slots. If you saw no significant speedup then something else is to blame. Perhaps the frame rate is throttled, or it doesn't use the blitter but renders to screen memory in an unsophisticated way.

Some visionnary developpers published games with a poor framerate on A500 but which reveals its true beauty on A1200.

Some developers ported games from platforms that didn't have a blitter so they did it with the CPU. With a faster CPU it would be faster (up to a point) but with the stock CPU it would be slower. This isn't 'visionary', it's perverse. The game should be optimized for the platform it is targeted at, not some hypothetical machine that the purchaser will probably never own.