Amiga vs PC

[Galahad/FLT]

Yeah, Spidersoft were utter crap. They were predominantly Atari ST coders, they did Thomas Pinball and Pinball Mania on the Amiga and continued on PC.

none of their games were well received on Amiga, their pinball games were AGA, but Dreams being ECS managed to look better!

[Unknown_K]

By the time the 486 rolled around the Amiga was very dated. I have plenty of old PC's around for gaming and stuff (Tandy 1000, XT clone, and up), they have some nice games on them. Amiga dominated during the CGA/EGA PC era , when VGA was common and 386DX40's and 486 were around the PC versions were better plus they had content that was never sold for the Amiga.

I don't see the big deal comparing the two platforms, each one had its good periods and bad ones. DOS era games with Gravis ultrasound and MIDI cards do rock, commodore never did anything with Amiga sound since the A1000.

[Tom Walker]

Originally Posted by Jgames

@Tom Walker
What do you mean by slideshow?

I mean it's very slow.

Aside, a lot of VGA card of the 90's had blitter on them, but were not standard VGA; If a programmer used a particular VGA card to do a game, the game would run only on that one.

Which is why no-one bothered. There were some blitter-like features on EGA/VGA, which were used in 16-colour mode and mode-X, but they're nowhere near as good as a proper blitter.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Wasn't Dreams converted by Spidersoft? They are programming morons.

Pretty sure Fantasies was someone else doing the conversion.

Fantasies and Illusions were ported by Frontline Design, formerly the demogroup The Space Pigs.

Spidersoft also did the dire Pinball Dreams 2 - crap conversion, now with crap tables as well!

[Jgames]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I know I'm a little late to this party, but I must take issue with this.

UW was a demanding game. I had a 386 25mhz, and had to turn detail down to get consistent framerates for anything like a playable experience. Compare this 3D engine to that in AB3D1 - AB3D rendered in the same amount of colours, with transparent water effects, with catwalks (you could pass underneath solid structures) and all in the same size window that UW runs in. Bear in mind that UW's 3D engine was nothing like as sophisticated, and that the Amiga 1200 at 14mhz was reasonably playable without a CPU expansion (though one of those at 25mhz made it smooth as silk). AB3Ds sound effects were chilling - UW's are FM clicks, and even then they're hardware-assisted.

AB3D1 took some shortcuts, noticeably larger pixels (though on examination, the window is actually larger on-screen than UW's window), but lacked VGA byte-per-pixel hardware and had to do the lot in software. I daily mourn the fact that nobody has released a version that uses 1:1 pixels, I really do.

UW the most technically awesome game ever? No, AB3D was technically superior.

D.

When i talked about the "the most technically awesome game ever", it talked about UW taken in general, not just it's 3d engine;
remember it's a 1992 game; on a 386dx40, it worked perfectly;

Now for AB3D that is a shooter, how does it compare to doom?

[Jgames]

Originally Posted by Tom Walker

As I've said several times now, on the hardware of the time (386DX/40 with ISA graphics card) it simply was not possible. Every platformer with smooth scrolling and parallax needed 486 with local bus.

And some magazines testers were blaming the poor programmers for not doing a good 2d action game on PC; whereas there was a hardware limitation for this.

[john4p]

Originally Posted by Jgames

whereas there was a hardware limitation for this.

Yes - and since the Amiga didn't have this limitation we preferred it.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Jgames

When i talked about the "the most technically awesome game ever", it talked about UW taken in general, not just it's 3d engine;
remember it's a 1992 game; on a 386dx40, it worked perfectly;

But clock for clock, the Amiga clearly beat it whilst technically having the superior engine. But anyway.

Now for AB3D that is a shooter, how does it compare to doom?

It's more advanced than Doom was. Doom was incapable of catwalks :-)
Doom being able to display a full screen at 320x240 was a product of the display hardware being faster (the Amiga at the time only had planar graphics) rather than being a better engine.

IIRC, Doom required a 486 at 66mhz at minimum going by the box specs here. That was a lot more than the Amiga had.

Edit: My mistake, it requires a 386 at 33mhz. That is not going to run at fullscreen or 50/60hz though, and is still more hardware than the Amiga required.

D.

[Tom Walker]

Originally Posted by Dunny

But clock for clock, the Amiga clearly beat it whilst technically having the superior engine.

Which is rendering at a quarter of the resolution. That does have something of an effect on the speed.

Edit: My mistake, it requires a 386 at 33mhz. That is not going to run at fullscreen or 50/60hz though, and is still more hardware than the Amiga required.

Doom was more than playable on a fast 386, even if it wasn't perfect. And didn't AB3D need most of the detail turning off to run at a playable speed anyway?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Tom Walker

Doom was more than playable on a fast 386, even if it wasn't perfect. And didn't AB3D need most of the detail turning off to run at a playable speed anyway?

Maybe Doom I with the original levels, but Doom II would struggle on it. It also depends on the RAM you have in the machine. On a 486/33 with 4 MB is was 'okay' to play SP, but MP was nearly not possible.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Tom Walker

Which is rendering at a quarter of the resolution. That does have something of an effect on the speed.

True, but rendering Doom at 1/4 screen size doesn't have anything like the impact on framerate.

Doom was more than playable on a fast 386, even if it wasn't perfect. And didn't AB3D need most of the detail turning off to run at a playable speed anyway?

Doom on my 25mhz 386 was dog-slow ;-)

AB3D with full detail moved much more smoothly, I regularly experienced framerates of about 20/25 - provided not much was going on, of course. I finished the game on an unexpanded A1200, so it can't have been that bad

D.

[Tom Walker]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Maybe Doom I with the original levels, but Doom II would struggle on it. It also depends on the RAM you have in the machine. On a 486/33 with 4 MB is was 'okay' to play SP, but MP was nearly not possible.

Yeah Doom II was pretty sluggish, especially on the later levels. The original ran pretty well though.

Doom on my 25mhz 386 was dog-slow ;-)

386SX or DX? I'd expect an SX to be pretty slow, but it should be playable on a decent DX/25.

AB3D with full detail moved much more smoothly, I regularly experienced framerates of about 20/25 - provided not much was going on, of course. I finished the game on an unexpanded A1200, so it can't have been that bad

On my A1200 with fastram it's noticably slow, even in the normal mode (which is a _much_ smaller window than you'd play Doom on, even on a 386SX).

[Jgames]

@Tom Walker

I just saw the shoot level on youtube, it looks parallax, not palette change (or really tricky one)
This is so impressive, a pc gamer will doubt it's real!

[ Show youtube player ]

[TCD]

Actually there are two things that make it look like a 'trick' rather than true parallax. First it's mirrored on the y-axis and second the pattern is repetitive (i.e. no variation in the 'parallaxed' layers at all). I'd say that indeed [ Show youtube player ] looks much more impressive.

[Jgames]

From the same author of Charlie, he did before a mario clone, and this one had parallax smooth scroll, i can confirm that, because i played on my 386dx40, and played at full frame rate 60Hz;

The author of the video try it on a real Ibm PS2, it's smooth, but slooooow; make me glad i had a dx40!
[ Show youtube player ]

@Tom Walker
What's your say on this?

[Tom Walker]

@Tom Walker
What's your say on this?

Have you not noticed the parallax is on a tiny part of the screen only?

[Adropac2]

Mind you i remember seeing some very impressive smooth Spectrum scrolling from some of it's games and of course this had decidedly bad and slow hardware compared to how blistering PC's were

I would expect smooth scrolling from a 386 quite honestly if even ST could manage this with a very big push

Power was all pc's were back then and even then they didn't compare to how great 2d was on Amiga

Thing is if i'd had a pc at this time then i'm sure i'd look back and say it was an enjoyable time but i'm also sure i'd be more jealous than if i were an Amiga user - there were of course some games that i did want to play on pc but we were generally spoiled at this time

[Jgames]

Originally Posted by Tom Walker

Have you not noticed the parallax is on a tiny part of the screen only?

Come on, it's the way the author choose the background, look at the other levels here, the background layer fill the whole screen.

[ Show youtube player ]

@Adropac2
As Tom Walker explained, thanks Tom, it's the ISA bus that didn't allow 60 frames/s anims, if you have an isa VGA card, no 60Hz no matter what programming you do!, no matter what processor you have, even a pentium!,
Unless you go Modex, there you have more than 2 screens on Vram, then you could have 1 (double buffering) or two screens (triple buffering) drawn in advance in Vram, this way 60Hz is acheivable.

This also explain why PC games didn't have problems with 3D games, because 30 frames/s for 3D game is acceptable, and isa can push 30 frames/s.

Vesa local bus VGA and PCI allowed for fast ram to vram copies, if a 286 had a VLB or PCI bus for VGA, it would match an amiga! (your opinion on this Tom is much appreciated)

Between, there were rare 386 with VLB bus;

Here is a page with various bus transfer comparisons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

[Adropac2]

Originally Posted by Jgames

Come on, it's the way the author choose the background, look at the other levels here, the background layer fill the whole screen.

[ Show youtube player ]

@Adropac2
As Tom Walker explained, thanks Tom, it's the ISA bus that didn't allow 60 frames/s anims, if you have an isa VGA card, no 60Hz no matter what programming you do!, no matter what processor you have, even a pentium!,
Unless you go Modex, there you have more than 2 screens on Vram, then you could have 1 (double buffering) or two screens (triple buffering) drawn in advance in Vram, this way 60Hz is acheivable.

This also explain why PC games didn't have problems with 3D games, because 30 frames/s for 3D game is acceptable, and isa can push 30 frames/s.

Vesa local bus VGA and PCI allowed for fast ram to vram copies, if a 286 had a VLB or PCI bus for VGA, it would match an amiga! (your opinion on this Tom is much appreciated)

Between, there were rare 386 with VLB bus;

Here is a page with various bus transfer comparisons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

Ah yes then i guess my lack of any technical knowledge here has clearly been shown

It no doubt had the power

[Tom Walker]

Originally Posted by Jgames

Come on, it's the way the author choose the background, look at the other levels here, the background layer fill the whole screen.

Other levels are more palette cycling tricks.

Unless you go Modex, there you have more than 2 screens on Vram, then you could have 1 (double buffering) or two screens (triple buffering) drawn in advance in Vram, this way 60Hz is acheivable.

No, it's the hardware scrolling that allows 60hz scrolling with mode-X. Double buffering is used as well, but isn't absolutely vital.

Vesa local bus VGA and PCI allowed for fast ram to vram copies, if a 286 had a VLB or PCI bus for VGA, it would match an amiga! (your opinion on this Tom is much appreciated)

It wouldn't. 286 is nowhere near fast enough.

Here is a page with various bus transfer comparisons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

I'd take that with a pinch of salt. The ISA speed quoted I think is the DMA speed, not PIO as all video accesses are. And VLB video cards were normally between 6 and 25 mb/sec, nowhere near the theoretical speed quoted there.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Jgames

Vesa local bus VGA and PCI allowed for fast ram to vram copies, if a 286 had a VLB or PCI bus for VGA, it would match an amiga! (your opinion on this Tom is much appreciated)

Well it hadn't and that's pretty much the point Anyway, what about resting the case now, because I think we all got the idea?