Could an Amiga with an 030 do Virtua Fighter?

[spiff]

I’m not even sure who’s trolling or if ppl in general just mean, any slide show that boots with a Virtua fighter screen = yes 030 can do virtua fighter

Virtua fighter PC port had a min requirement of a “pentium 60 or higher”, svga card and 8 megs memory.... And we all know what minimum requirements meant back then, barely boots.

Most of you were there when games had to support both software and hardware render paths. Take mech warrior 2 as an example, even first gen 3d cards did 4 times the resolution at twice the frame rate (when they booted)

So sure, yes a 030 at what, 120 mhz with a 3d accelerator and 8 megs of very fast fast-ram could probably do virtua fighter just fine. But that is as much amiga as any power PC mac that can boot morph OS.

[olleharstedt]

What about decreasing the specs of the game a little, and use a 2D background but 3D characters? Would that work for 68030 without any 3D-accelerator?

[robinsonb5]

Realistically, on an '030 Amiga the best you can hope for is two characters of this sort of detail level (from near the end of the Skarla Authentik demo) moving at a decent framerate.

Nowhere near the same ballpark as Virtua Fighter - but it could still be a fun game nonetheless.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Realistically, on an '030 Amiga the best you can hope for is two characters of this sort of detail level (from near the end of the Skarla Authentik demo) moving at a decent framerate.

Nowhere near the same ballpark as Virtua Fighter - but it could still be a fun game nonetheless.

Yes, that probably a good "ballpark figure" for where the 030+AGA performs compared to the Model 1 arcade board.
Model 1 hardware could draw 4000 quads per frame, 030 would struggle with 200. So 5% of the polygon density could probably be done..
But then you also have to ask yourself what made Virtua Fighter special.. Its not Virtua Fighter as soon as its 2 flatshaded character on screen. Its a pretty ambitious fighting game. They have a ton of different moves and plenty of different characters.. Having 2 generic box-figures fight on Amiga and calling it Virtua Fighter is a stretch ;-)
Its like the Super Monaco GP port on the master System. "If you can't even get close to the original then whats the point really".
If the thread was, could a 060 Amiga do Virtua Fighter then we'd have some more "breathing room" for speculation ;-) A Vampire-Amiga would be the only realistic option...

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Having 2 generic box-figures fight on Amiga and calling it Virtua Fighter is a stretch ;-)

Call it BoxMen Fighter then

i repeat my question, if we remove the fill, would that increase performance?

[roondar]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

...030 would struggle with 200...

I'll be honest, that is a disappointingly low figure.

Out of interest, how do we determine these figures? Is this just "common knowledge", or do have we some sort of 3D benchmark somewhere I'm just not aware off? I'm asking because I've always found Amiga 3D performance to be a particularly nebulous area. I've never found a clear result for any Amiga really and there seems to be a lot of misinformation out there.

Anyway, to me the question of porting is still technically interesting even if perfection is way out of reach. Note that I'd never actually suggest putting all that effort in only to be disappointed. But it still got me thinking about the idea of 3D fighting games on such limited hardware. Which is interesting in it's own right, even if it'll never be Virtua Fighter

[saimon69]

I think a game like Simulcra got more than 200 polygons and move decently on a 68000 or even Virus or Zeewolf
- ok i think he mean 200 polygons per frame but if we don't assume target to be 50 or 60 FPS we could do it

This is Simulcra and the speed it goes on an A500
[ Show youtube player ]

Zeewolf
[ Show youtube player ]

[Samurai_Crow]

Summary:
Could an Amiga with an 030 run Virtua Fighter?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: heck no, not in a million years.

[Amigajay]

Even just going on MIPs (obviously dont give a full picture but make it clear it wouldn’t be possible with anything near the poly count or speed on an 030).

030/50 - 10-12 MIPS
Sega 32-X - 50 MIPS
Sega Saturn - 80 MIPS
060/66 - 88 MIPS

The 060 being the only viable option

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Even just going on MIPs (obviously dont give a full picture but make it clear it wouldn’t be possible with anything near the poly count or speed on an 030).

030/50 - 10-12 MIPS
Sega 32-X - 50 MIPS
Sega Saturn - 80 MIPS
060/66 - 88 MIPS

The 060 being the only viable option

This is all accurate and I'd fully agree that a 1:1 port (or anything close to that) is not possible on a 68030 based Amiga.

But it's also IMHO a rather limiting way of looking at the feasibility of ports. See, the exact same logic hold for 2D arcade ports to the A500 (or A1200). Arcade systems and consoles are invariably much more powerful than the Amiga:

A500 - about 25 objects @32x32 per frame (tricks can increase this, but that also goes for all systems that follow). CPU heavily slowed down by GFX/Blitter operations.
Sega MD - 80 objects @32x32 per frame. CPU's not slowed by GFX.
Sega System 16 - up to 128 sprites per frame, up to 800 sprite pixels per scanline (nearly three times the sprites per scanline as the MD). CPU's not slowed by GFX.

Note that the Sega System 16 is from 1985, later arcade boards were vastly more powerful.

Yet despite this rather big gap in technical abilities, there are some quite capable ports from arcade systems/consoles to the Amiga, as well as some ports that were clear downgrades but still managed to translate the gameplay experience quite well. Which is why it might still be interesting to see how close the Amiga could get, all the while acknowledging it'll never get to be anywhere near perfect.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by roondar

But it's also IMHO a rather limiting way of looking at the feasibility of ports. See, the exact same logic hold for 2D arcade ports to the A500 (or A1200). Arcade systems and consoles are invariably much more powerful than the Amiga:

Yet despite this rather big gap in technical abilities, there are some quite capable ports from arcade systems/consoles to the Amiga, as well as some ports that were clear downgrades but still managed to translate the gameplay experience quite well. Which is why it might still be interesting to see how close the Amiga could get, all the while acknowledging it'll never get to be anywhere near perfect.

Oh don't get me wrong i didn't say a version of some degree couldn't be pulled off, but the compromise has to be made graphically/polycount as with 3D fighting games especially speed is everything.

So unless you want 4D Sports Boxing models at 60fps, i can't see anything less than an 060 moving any models resembling VF ones at those kind of speeds.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by roondar

Out of interest, how do we determine these figures? Is this just "common knowledge", or do have we some sort of 3D benchmark somewhere I'm just not aware off? I'm asking because I've always found Amiga 3D performance to be a particularly nebulous area. I've never found a clear result for any Amiga really and there seems to be a lot of misinformation out there.

I think it's one of those things where there are so many variables that it's hard to make meaningful comparisons.

Chip RAM bandwidth is one hard limit, though - it places an upper bound on how much of the screen the fighter figures can fill at a given frame rate.

Games aren't always the best benchmarks, either - some of them don't make use of fast RAM. (Zeewolf 2 is an exception, so I've used that a smoketest/benchmark in the past.)

Anyway, to me the question of porting is still technically interesting even if perfection is way out of reach. Note that I'd never actually suggest putting all that effort in only to be disappointed. But it still got me thinking about the idea of 3D fighting games on such limited hardware. Which is interesting in it's own right, even if it'll never be Virtua Fighter

Yes indeed - a 3D block-puppet fighting game could be a lot of fun (provided the frame rate remains high enough!) - but it would merely be "inspired by" Virtua Fighter rather than any kind of conversion. (Which, arguably is better, anyway, in the current legal climate!)

Originally Posted by saimon69

I think a game like Simulcra got more than 200 polygons and move decently on a 68000 or even Virus or Zeewolf
- ok i think he mean 200 polygons per frame but if we don't assume target to be 50 or 60 FPS we could do it

This is Simulcra and the speed it goes on an A500
Simulcra

Zeewolf
zeewolf

Interphase is quite interesting, too:
[ Show youtube player ]

I'd say that to be fun a fighting game would have to run at an absolute minimum of 25fps, though.

[dreadnought]

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Perhaps we should say balls - sorry, ballz - to polygons

[ Show youtube player ]

(the hell were they thinking? Nineties was a funny time )

[spiff]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Interphase is quite interesting, too:
[ Show youtube player ]

I'd say that points even more to block fighter being optimistic. Repeating primitives, trivial culling scenario, using 3/4 of the screen, frame-rate drops like a rock when objects start filling the screen.

It's a bloody good effort for the 90s...but its just not "fair" to compare dedicated 3d hardware to a software approach.
With the Amiga Genesis comparison, at least there the amiga had SOME sprites and an architecture that can shuffle objects.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by spiff

I'd say that points even more to block fighter being optimistic. Repeating primitives, trivial culling scenario, using 3/4 of the screen, frame-rate drops like a rock when objects start filling the screen.

To be fair, though, that's running on an A500, so 7MHz 68000, ECS chipram bandwidth, no Fast RAM. (It's picky about running on anything better.)


(On Minimig variants that have it, the Turbo ChipRAM makes a huge difference to speed, so I'm pretty sure it's not using the blitter much, if at all. Probably a direct Atari ST port.)

[ruinashiro]

Even with an 030/50, the amiga would only really have leeway for a decent port of a 2D game from a more powerful platform - much more than it would have for a 3D port. That's because of all the tricks available for 2D using the blitter, copper, sprite multiplexing, etc. With 3D, you hit a hard limit. In fact, a few different hard limits. And those limits are nowhere near a faithful Virtua Fighter port.

[ Show youtube player ]

[roondar]

It's certainly true that high end 3D is out of reach of a 68030 based AGA Amiga, but those 68030 based systems with fastmemory do actually get quite a bit more "bang for the buck" out of chipmemory bandwidth than an A500 does.

Not only does the CPU have twice the bandwidth to chipmemory to begin with, it can also prepare graphics in the much faster fastmemory and only copy over the resulting display instead of building the entire display in chipmemory.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it really kinda is. An A500 has a best-case CPU bandwidth to chipmemory of 3.5MB/sec and that's it. Adding fastmemory will not increase this maximum as the 3.5MB/sec is the limit of the CPU, not the bus. A 68030/AGA machine with fastmemory on the other hand might have closer to 20MB/sec to fastmemory and 7MB/sec to chipmemory. This is quite a bit less than the consoles we've been talking about, but also much, much more than what an A500 gets.

And that's setting aside the ~10x speed increase of the CPU, which vastly speeds up the 3D math being done. Even a game that knows nothing about fast memory based rendering, such as Frontier:Elite 2 runs several times faster on a 68030 based AGA machine. Had Frontier been written with higher spec Amiga's in mind, I'm convinced it would've been much faster or better looking on such machines.

[DamageX]

Sega 32-X - 50 MIPS
Sega Saturn - 80 MIPS

SH2 is not a superscalar chip, so these numbers are impossible. 32X would have to be somewhat less than that, and Saturn closer to 50 unless you are counting the DSP and CD-ROM controller in the totals...

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by DamageX

SH2 is not a superscalar chip, so these numbers are impossible. 32X would have to be somewhat less than that, and Saturn closer to 50 unless you are counting the DSP and CD-ROM controller in the totals...

According the this site the 32-X is actually closer to 59MIPS, https://segaretro.org/Sega_32X

Whilst the two Saturn CPUs alone total 74MIPS before the DSP is taken into the equation

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by ruinashiro

Even with an 030/50, the amiga would only really have leeway for a decent port of a 2D game from a more powerful platform - much more than it would have for a 3D port. That's because of all the tricks available for 2D using the blitter, copper, sprite multiplexing, etc. With 3D, you hit a hard limit. In fact, a few different hard limits. And those limits are nowhere near a faithful Virtua Fighter port.

[ Show youtube player ]

Well, even controlling someone with few poligons like robocop in the video you shown at 8:59 would make people quite happy i presume, ok would make ME happy enough;

However i remember in 1994 or 1995 i did grasp a copy of the japanese computer mag Login and seen a virtua fighter style game using giant robots for japanese windows PCs (probably on the level of pentiums or 486 dx4); i don't remember the name and i remember was using basic texture mapping with no interpolation, do you fancy the name?