What Makes The Amiga CD32 The Best Amiga?

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by FOL

I have configured my A1200 to runs exactly like a CD32.

Blasphemy!
How worse Amiga can emulate better Amiga?
No Amiga can emulate best Amiga (CD32), not even A4000/060.
Not even my Intel i7 can do that, nor the Nasa computers

And yes, I've been ironic.

This reminds me of Sega "blast processing" myth.

[jotd]

I have configured my A1200 to runs exactly like a CD32.

then try to run Lotus Trilogy, Myth, Premiere, James Pond 3 or Chuck Rock 1 and 2 on it

It's not going to work because all those games are using Rob Northen hardware banging akiko CD access

Is it really a problem? nope since whdload does a better job with those (except maybe for Lotus with the CD intro...)

The only games worth it would be my recent CD32 sfx+CD audio conversions, since it's also using hardware banging and won't run on a non-CD32.

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by FOL

Please re-read what I have posted. You have taken everything I have said and taken it out of context. Never called you a "newb" for starters and for seconders, where are these offensive words. Regarding, me using the word "newb", it was ment in the sense, we are not new to the Amiga. As some of your posts talk as if we know nothing about the Amiga.

You misread, I don't make CD32 games. I have configured my A1200 to runs exactly like a CD32.

You also misread my other posts. The CD32 was my first Amiga purchase when I got my first job. I got an A500 back in 1990 for Christmas, this was stolen and I had A600 as replacement.

Oh sorry about the offensive word part That was McGeezer. I get mixed up with who is insulting me. We CD32-owners have to put up with a lot of abuse. Standard Amiga owners don't like us because we have the Akiko chip. I can understand though.

This was your first post to me. It does sound like you called me a newb!

Ok, your getting more and more confusing with every post.
Yes we all bought stuff 12 years ago for pennies. We are talking about now.

People are screwing the retro market with the ripp off prices they are charging these days.

You must be new to the Amiga scene or something, as some of us are not simple newbs.

Someone stole your Amiga from your house? That's horrible. Did they take any games too?

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Blasphemy!
How worse Amiga can emulate better Amiga?
No Amiga can emulate best Amiga (CD32), not even A4000/060.
Not even my Intel i7 can do that, nor the Nasa computers

And yes, I've been ironic.

This reminds me of Sega "blast processing" myth.

That is true - about the CD32 being so good - that no other Amiga can emulate it though. They all want to try though

Blast processing was meant to refer to the DMA which is much faster than the SNES's. I guess DMA is a kind of blast processor when you think about it. CD32 has a blast processor built in to AKiko chip in that case - as well as 32 Bit Power.

[Rochabian]

The CD32 certainly would have been the best Amiga for gaming if games have been made for it. But it has been seen as a A1200 with a CD drive. Akiko was not used at all.
Wich app or game use the CD32 hardware at it's maximum and that a A1200 with CD drive can't do ? None i think.
Games with Rob Northen Akiko CD access surely could have been run on a A1200 if a standard CD access was programmed, without a performance hit.

As said elsewhere, with a 030+fpu and fastram, surely CD32 games could have been a little more ambitious

When Atari has done the Jaguar, they don't have put a Falcon in a console case, they have made new hardware. The CD32 is a refurbished A1200 with a CD drive

The CD32 is the most practical amiga, but not the best for me

[jotd]

Games with Rob Northen Akiko CD access surely could have been run on a A1200 if a standard CD access was programmed, without a performance hit.

except that the games which were adapted that way were NDOS and a considerable amount of work would have been needed to adapt them so they're OS-compliant and use standard OS CD reads.

[FOL]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Someone stole your Amiga from your house? That's horrible. Did they take any games too?

Yes, my most prized, Big box Adventures of willy biemish, .

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by Rochabian

The CD32 certainly would have been the best Amiga for gaming if games have been made for it. But it has been seen as a A1200 with a CD drive. Akiko was not used at all.
Wich app or game use the CD32 hardware at it's maximum and that a A1200 with CD drive can't do ? None i think.
Games with Rob Northen Akiko CD access surely could have been run on a A1200 if a standard CD access was programmed, without a performance hit.

As said elsewhere, with a 030+fpu and fastram, surely CD32 games could have been a little more ambitious

When Atari has done the Jaguar, they don't have put a Falcon in a console case, they have made new hardware. The CD32 is a refurbished A1200 with a CD drive

The CD32 is the most practical amiga, but not the best for me

But some games do use Akiko?

That's unfair saying "what game uses CD32 at it's maximum?" because we only ever got the first wave of games for it. I think if you look at Guardian you see game using maybe at most 60% of the CD32's power - there was a lot more to come.

Also imagine if the cD32 had been very successful and then Commodore released a FAST mem memory upgrade - and sped the console up by a huge amount. Maybe this was the real reason for the Chip-mem only approach - to give the console a power boost in later years. Consoles like the Saturn and N64 both used memory enhancement add-ons. One of N64's best games - Perfect Dark is nowhere near as good without the expansion pak

I agree Jaguar is a new console but it has a lot of flaws too including a bugged CPU. You need some crazy workaround to get around it. For me the best Amiga-that-wasn't-hardware is the Atari Lynx (also designed by the Amiga designers). I think Commodore didn't really put 100% into making a console - it was more an opportunity. As evidenced by the cheap case and A1200 + CD Drive architecture. Still the best Amga tho

[Gilbert]

Originally Posted by FOL

Yes, my most prized, Big box Adventures of willy biemish, .

That sucks but crazy they only took one game! I guess looking for a sale for the lot, rather than to play it. We can say this burgular has bad taste!

[Rochabian]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Also imagine if the cD32 had been very successful and then Commodore released a FAST mem memory upgrade - and sped the console up by a huge amount.

I own a CD32 + TF330 and i think it is in this state that the CD32 should have been released. With this combo, yes it's the best amiga for me, with the huge work of JOTD and the WHDLoad Team to make CD32 pad compatible games.

But on launch in 93-94, it was a deception for me, it has been my last console before moving to PC.

Perhaps with a boosted A1200, I would have been less disappointed

[FOL]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

That sucks but crazy they only took one game! I guess looking for a sale for the lot, rather than to play it. We can say this burgular has bad taste!

Awwwww man and you were doing so well. Nothing wrong with Willy Biemish. I was a big fan of Sierra and Dynamix. Had loads of big box versions of their games. Willy and Red Baron were my treasures.

Originally Posted by Rochabian

I own a CD32 + TF330 and i think it is in this state that the CD32 should have been released. With this combo, yes it's the best amiga for me, with the huge work of JOTD and the WHDLoad Team to make CD32 pad compatible games.

But on launch in 93-94, it was a deception for me, it has been my last console before moving to PC.

Perhaps with a boosted A1200, I would have been less disappointed

Its hard to comment, as we were still kids back then. I only knew what was in the magazines. Never attended any shows.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

People are too sensitive these days - they think everything is an insult.

... and then:

Originally Posted by Gilbert

I get mixed up with who is insulting me. We CD32-owners have to put up with a lot of abuse. Standard Amiga owners don't like us because we have the Akiko chip. I can understand though.

Interesting. Aside from the obvious irony, to presume you know what other people are thinking, and that they're somehow jealous, is incredibly arrogant.

It seems like one of two things are happening here: either you're imagining things in some sort of bizarre persecution complex arising from people pointing out flaws in your beloved machine, or people are genuinely having a go at you because of your attitude of not accepting criticisms or entertaining the idea that your opinions are just that, is annoying them. I can't see any other possibilities here - on the whole, people aren't abused simply because they have a CD32 that I've seen, and I've been in the Amiga community for 25+ years without a break. Other than from trolls (which can be discounted on that very fact), if someone is receiving abuse, it's more likely that they've brought it upon themselves.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

They used poor compression routines. There is enough space if you use good compression.

Compression isn't magic. If you have 10KB of data to fit into 1KB of storage, you're going to struggle immensely. And that's just for one game - what if you have three games for your CD32 that you'd like to save? Can you name a suitable compression routine that can store, say, a SWOS save, a Theme Park save and a Frontier save in 1KB? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to save three different games on one console, do you? But each one of those saves is too large for the CD32's NVRAM, and in the CD32-specific versions, SWOS simply doesn't save, and both Theme Park and Frontier dump data in order to fit: Theme Park doesn't save the actual park, and Frontier only saves to your last warp, not anything that you've done in that system since or any details of the state of the system, and even then, requires the entire 1KB.

But for pig-iron, I took a save file from each of those games at random from my setup. Using 7zip, which is a pretty good compression routine by modern standards, those three files add up to around 70KB. Seventy times too much for the CD32, and that's with a good compression routine. The smallest of those, the Frontier save, is around 17KB compressed. Incidentally, it was only 18KB uncompressed, which would suggest the data was already pretty well compressed.

Also if the CD32 had been successful there would have been some kind of add-on to give more space.

Add-ons of this kind are non-trivial - you can't just stick a memory card in the CD32. The NVRAM itself isn't directly accessible by any expansion port so it can't be modified or taken over by a simple expansion. If a game uses the OS to access the NVRAM, then those calls can be redirected to other storage, e.g. a floppy drive. But the CD32 lacks the CIAs to use a floppy drive even if it had a physical connector for such communication, so any such expansion is going to be non-trivial. They did exist - the SX-1 and SX-32 would both allow attaching a floppy drive as well as providing some other enhancements, since if you're going to recreate a significant portion of the Amiga's functionality, you might as well go the whole hog and not limit it to just floppy support. But they were an extremely expensive solution to the problem.

People picking on these minor issues rather than focusing on the CD32s massive advantages just help make the argument for it's superiority

That's all very subjective. Not being able to save games on a machine whose sole purpose is to play games is a pretty major issue in many people's eyes. You would do well to re-read your own sentence there with an objective viewpoint - it might help you see that it's basically nonsense.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

I was going to apologise but then you did hate on the CD32 by saying it has a sub par 3d processing chip!

What 3D processing chip? Akiko knows precisely zero about 3D, and the poor graphical standard of 3D games in comparison to any system with 3D acceleration shows that. Akiko does chunky-to-planar conversions, which is a very low level thing. It's useful for games that build a screen in pixels rather than planes, so *textured* 3D can benefit. But much of the 3D work comes down to complex mathematics, blending and visual effects, none of which Akiko can help with.

I feel a lot of A1200 owners do get insecure when the CD32 is nearby. They have to try to bring the CD32 down to A1200 level. Understandable though.

Again with that presumptive arrogance.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

That is true - about the CD32 being so good - that no other Amiga can emulate it though. They all want to try though

Every Amiga has the capability to emulate the CD32. Any software that uses Akiko the correct way can also be used on any AGA Amiga with OS 3.1, since that includes routines for emulating Akiko's C2P function.

Blast processing was meant to refer to the DMA which is much faster than the SNES's. I guess DMA is a kind of blast processor when you think about it. CD32 has a blast processor built in to AKiko chip in that case - as well as 32 Bit Power.

DMA in itself doesn't mean much unless you're making significant use of that function. Given the limited use of Akiko's DMA, it doesn't really seem like a significant selling point. Or anything to get excited about really.

That's unfair saying "what game uses CD32 at it's maximum?" because we only ever got the first wave of games for it. I think if you look at Guardian you see game using maybe at most 60% of the CD32's power - there was a lot more to come.

And the exact same applies with the A1200.

Also imagine if the cD32 had been very successful and then Commodore released a FAST mem memory upgrade - and sped the console up by a huge amount. Maybe this was the real reason for the Chip-mem only approach - to give the console a power boost in later years. Consoles like the Saturn and N64 both used memory enhancement add-ons. One of N64's best games - Perfect Dark is nowhere near as good without the expansion pak

The CD32 wasn't designed with that approach in mind - if it was, it would have had a similar approach to the A500 and A600, both of which can very easily use a dedicated, RAM-only expansion, just like the N64 and Saturn. And how are these what-ifs different to any other Amiga? You can say the same about the A1200: what if they'd included fast RAM? Again, there were fast RAM expansions available for the CD32, but they were more complex than the equivalent required for the A1200, and thus were more expensive.

So I do have to ask directly: Are you being serious with all this? The CD32 definitely has some benefits, but it also has some significant drawbacks, and ignoring some criticisms or filling gaps with what-iffery instantly undermines any point you think you're trying to make.

[fxgogo]

The only way we are going to solve this is with a challenge....a ‘make a game’ challenge. Whoever makes the best game wins. No comebacks after that.....Ready.....Go.....??

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Rochabian

I own a CD32 + TF330 and i think it is in this state that the CD32 should have been released.

That's a bit silly, the price would been astronomical back then.

But Commodore put a full expansion bus connector on it, and room inside the case so you could expand it when doing so became economic. Now that it is you have the machine you wanted, so that means it is the best! And will continue to be while even more powerful expansions are made for it. Commodore designed it this way on purpose. What other contemporary console can match it?

But on launch in 93-94, it was a deception for me, it has been my last console before moving to PC.

Perhaps with a boosted A1200, I would have been less disappointed

You didn't have to move to PC, you could have bought an SX32 Pro for the CD32. But I bet you wanted to run PC games and/or apps, so no Amiga would have satisfied you.

BTW which PC did you get, and how much did it cost?

[saimon69]

A port of Ordyne on the CD 32 from the arcade would have been possible? (included rotations) If so CD32 would be the best amiga else nope...
[ Show youtube player ]

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Oh sorry about the offensive word part That was McGeezer. I get mixed up with who is insulting me. We CD32-owners have to put up with a lot of abuse. Standard Amiga owners don't like us because we have the Akiko chip. I can understand though.

Oh I'm sorry, did I offend and insult you for writing utter crap in your posts?

For some reason you seem to be in this self created bubble of Amiga sub-class with an "us and them" attitude. Your thread appears to be aimed at causing friction instead of discussion so excuse me if I've offended or insulted you but you deserve it.

Perhaps if the your thread title was "Is the CD32 the best Amiga platform?", and came up with reasonable arguments about why YOU think it is then you'd get different responses.

The CD32 isn't the best Amiga - for reasons I have given, it's my opinion, I think the A1200 is the best Amiga but I don't go whinging like a pussy when people say the A500 is the best Amiga. I simply take it on the chin, and so should you.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

That's all very subjective. Not being able to save games on a machine whose sole purpose is to play games is a pretty major issue in many people's eyes.

It was in fact one of the reasons I didn't want one. A friend of mine had one and I was genuinely kind of shocked he had to throw away ten or twenty hours of progress in one of the included games (some puzzle game) to be able to save a new game he bought.

Every Amiga has the capability to emulate the CD32. Any software that uses Akiko the correct way can also be used on any AGA Amiga with OS 3.1, since that includes routines for emulating Akiko's C2P function.

I wouldn't be surprised if even a modest 68030+fast ram will already be faster at C2P than Akiko. The C2P in Akiko has to go across the chip memory bus twice and that ain't particularly fast.

Edit: I just read chb's post. Apparently it's even worse than I thought. Akiko's C2P goes across the chip memory bus three times. That's not good.

DMA in itself doesn't mean much unless you're making significant use of that function. Given the limited use of Akiko's DMA, it doesn't really seem like a significant selling point. Or anything to get excited about really.

Yup.

Case in point: both the SNES and the Mega Drive have much slower DMA than an OCS Amiga, yet can handily outdo it in terms of how many objects they can throw around on screen etc. Obviously, DMA can be very useful and it is a key element of why the Amiga performs like it does - but just like you pointed out when talking about compression: it's not magic.

Edit: I want to clear something up here, as this is probably a bit confusing otherwise to those who know the specs of the consoles. The DMA speed in the SNES/Mega Drive is slower in that generic DMA memory transfers are slow (i.e. move/copy this block of memory there). They're quite a bit faster for the specialised stuff like GFX chip access to VRAM for sprites & tiles. However, on consoles those types of DMA are usually not called DMA, which is a convention I also used.

[chb]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Blast processing was meant to refer to the DMA which is much faster than the SNES's. I guess DMA is a kind of blast processor when you think about it. CD32 has a blast processor built in to AKiko chip in that case - as well as 32 Bit Power.

Just for the sake of completeness in an honestly quite bizarre thread: Akiko cannot use DMA for chunky-to-planar conversion. Its DMA capabilities are limited to data transfer from the CD-ROM (which is a nice feature, but rather less relevant for most games, as they do not support loading during gameplay). For c2p chunky data has to be written to some Akiko registers, then read back as planar data and finally written to chip RAM - all solely by the CPU. There's zero DMA involved.

[jotd]

without DMA, CD loading would be even slower so it's a must have. Yes, apart from that the DMA of the CD32 is the same as the A1200: paula, gary...

And CD audio playing during gameplay doesn't need DMA since there's no memory transfer. The audio data is directly fed to the audio output and mixed with paula output. The machine just issues order like play, pause, stop, set track... (not even set volume...)

AKIKO is overrated since forever (maybe because it's less documented than other amiga chips).

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

I think the A1200 is the best Amiga

Admit you're feeling insecure because your A1200 not having Akiko chip.

(that's the best statement ever!)