Does AGA capture the spirit of Amiga?

[Foebane]

I believe that AGA improves upon the classic OCS designed by Jay Miner's team, but I just wonder how much Lew Eggebrecht (head of tech at Commodore) consulted Jay about the chipset, or if he simply doubled the bits on everything (12-bit colour to 24-bit colour, for example). At least Paula remained intact - Amiga sound is a favourite of mine.

[vulture]

I think it captures the spirit perfectly, only 2-3 years later than it should. Paula could be improved upon, without losing its unique sound imo.

[frank_b]

No. Certainly not. It is nowhere near as elegant as the original design. Everything extra s compromised. The sprites can't be reloaded as there's no DMA register for the extra control words. You lose all sprites when scrolling with large fetch modes. The palette is bank switched across 32 colour registers (high and low nibbles for 24 bit). This was to allow them to re use the old copper design. So many copper moves to set up the palette Same blitter and copper. Same 7 mhz chip RAM bus. Same paula. Same 2 mb limit. Custom copper lists are required for scan doubling. It wasn't automatic like the 3k with amber. The list goes on.

[Glen M]

AGA feels like a very incremental step in the chipset design. As I've said before I would of went OCS - AGA in the A500+ and then the 600 and 1200 would have been a something new if even an "Amiga" at all.

Easy to say of course from a consumer viewpoint.

[AdvanceFollow]

Well that depends on how you define "spirit". The first and only Amiga I owned was an A1200, so obviously for me AGA is the "spirit" of the Amiga, whatever that means.

Obviously AGA came out in a completely different age than OCS and ECS. VGA and SVGA were commonplace, and consoles had also caught up with the old 16-bit computers. AGA was never as revolutionary as those older chipsets, just a desperate attempt to stay relevant. From a technical standpoint, it was obviously a rushed compromise, but it mostly got the job done IMO, especially if it had come out a year earlier.

Jay Miner seemed reasonably happy with the chipset:
http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/comment-5.html

They've improved the chipset in the 4000, taking the colours to 256 from 8 bitplanes. The higher resolution and more colours are really fast. The MS-DOS interface [CrossDOS] is quite nice but I'm unhappy about the SCSI and they didn't go to full 16-bit audio, but according to Eggibrecht that's coming soon. I'm also a little disappointed they didn't use the 040's memory management facilities. The 3.0 operating system looks very good with datatypes and a number of other great features. Who needs MS-DOS and Windows?".

[kriz]

Totally killer Amiga experience with AGA from a consumer perspective, as a developer it could maybe be something different ...

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by AdvanceFollow

Well that depends on how you define "spirit". The first and only Amiga I owned was an A1200, so obviously for me AGA is the "spirit" of the Amiga, whatever that means.

I think, here lies the answer.


Everything that have (hardware) backward compatibility with older models holds the spirit of the Amiga.
You, on aga could play most of the A500 games, and therefore, have a true amiga expirience, and that what's count.

We can all agree that aga was to late, or rushed, but for me, it was a big part of amiga history, and I would never renounce of it.

[PortuguesePilot]

The simple answer is Yes. Yes, AGA captures the spirit of the Amiga (whatever that means). It is an improvement over the OCS/ECS without loosing touch with that standard. But (and this is a big but) it was not enough to keep the Amiga competitive at the time. Even at the risk of being a bit more expensive, AGA should have AT LEAST got on-par with the SVGA standard, which was already several years old in 1992 and was quickly becoming the standard in the PC world. While theoretically delivering the same as a VGA board (256 colours on the screen at low-res), the AGA chipset was not able to compete with the SVGA (256 colours on screen at hi-res, 64-bit colours at low-res, better at handling chunky graphics, better at handling 3D graphics, etc). So, while capturing the spirit of the Amiga and being, IMO, the pinnacle of "true Amiga" graphics, AGA - as has been debated and argued for so many years now - was too little, too late and didn't have the brilliance and edge that the OCS did when it debuted in 1985.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Everything that have (hardware) backward compatibility with older models holds the spirit of the Amiga.
You, on aga could play most of the A500 games, and therefore, have a true amiga expirience, and that what's count.

And in those cases where there were compatibility issues with games, they could simply be patched to run correctly anyway.

PortuguesePilot: In my honest opinion, the biggest mistake Commodore made was not including a Chunky-to-Planar chip or circuitry in AGA, at least not from the start. Yes, they brought Akiko in with the CD32, but by then it was too late.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

was too little, too late and didn't have the brilliance and edge that the OCS did when it debuted in 1985.

Absolutely.
But we all forgot that it didn't look that desperately, back in the days. We didn't know if Commodore would release AAA, or some other awesome chipset in 1994. Those, who in 1993 had AGA 030/50Mhz, had pretty little beasts, and the future looked bright (for them, at least )

What the hell 1993. , many people believed that Amiga will return even in the 1996-97... and only when internet (through PC/Win) started to enter most average, or poorest homes, that majority switched.

I actually went pretty off topic.
Sorry

[nexus]

AGA got me through the early 90's
did lots of my artwork and animations on it
was my upgrade from OCS
HAM modes were great for a built in video for someone on a budget like i was then

[toples50]

I think AGA was better than S.VGA in animation.You can animate in high-res with HAM8 instead of 160x120 with 256 colors.And a lot smoother.

[jotd]

lack of chunky pixel screenmode killed the joy... Akiko isn't a chunky mode, it's just hardware c2p.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by jotd

lack of chunky pixel screenmode killed the joy... Akiko isn't a chunky mode, it's just hardware c2p.

Lack of fast-page bandwidth support for blitter and copper didn't help either.

[jotd]

and video memory being in chipmem kills the chunky mode anyway because we'd have to use the blitter to blit chunky stuff... not really handy for 3D games/emulators

[Mrz]

Originally Posted by toples50

I think AGA was better than S.VGA in animation.You can animate in high-res with HAM8 instead of 160x120 with 256 colors.And a lot smoother.

AGA is better and faster in low resolutions. 320x256 and 320x200
for that reason AMiga platforms games are better and smoother compared to PC games from such era

but in high res ie 640x512 PAL or NTSC 640x400 AGA sucks ,is slow as turtle
VGA is way faster in high resolutions

Animations in HAM8 are very buggy because HAM8 modes have lot of bugs, gfx glitches everywhere when there is movement (green dots)
HAM8 mode is usefull only for a static screen, ie to show pictures,

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Mrz

HAM8 mode is usefull only for a static screen, ie to show pictures,

With enough processing power (68040/060), HAM8 can run realtime animations with thousands of colours on-screen, as I've seen in at least a dozen demos. Do you want me to list them?

Animations in HAM8 are very buggy because HAM8 modes have lot of bugs, gfx glitches everywhere when there is movement (green dots)

By "graphics glitches" I assume you mean the fringing that is common with HAM? That is really unavoidable, but can be mitigated by using higher horizontal resolutions, as I've noticed most of these HAM8 demos do.

However, I've never noticed these green dots that you mention. I'll keep an eye out for them the next time I watch these demos.

I've often wondered how these HAM8 demos display the hi-colour pixels: in a high-horizontal resolution screen, it's like the pixels are 4x2 (to remain square) and the left-hand first three are basically the red, green and blue components. Combine that with a software C2P routine, and I can see how simple it would be to render hi-colour animations in HAM8. Of course, it's probably not as simple as that, but then to adapt the left-hand pixels to the most immediate colour changes has always fascinated me (to reduce the colour changes by pixels) and I often wonder how these software whizzkids created these efficient routines.

I'm being highly technical here, but if anyone wants any clarification, I'll try to explain.

[nexus]

yeah and its also how you do your animations or stills
where the skill comes in everything has down falls just got to work around
i never had those issues in my work cause i made sure they were not a issue
i did everything on a CD32 wth SX-1 8MB and a HDD

[Tsak]

@Foebane : I think he means artifacts or perhaps dithering from lame conversions. This is much more evident with Ham 5, but if done properly Ham 8 can display videos with surprisingly good quality (for the era).
Afaik, Ham 8 can easily play on a barebone 1200 in low res (even if not 100% full screen).

[Mrz]

Originally Posted by Foebane

By "graphics glitches" I assume you mean the fringing that is common with HAM? That is really unavoidable, but can be mitigated by using higher horizontal resolutions, as I've noticed most of these HAM8 demos do.

However, I've never noticed these green dots that you mention. I'll keep an eye out for them the next time I watch these demos.

.

yes the green dots is a bug in all HAM animations or videos, HAM8 or the old HAM mode

look for example the green dots in the game "Penthouse hot numbers deluxe"
The nude girl dancing , look at the border of her body : is full of green dots,such bug is in all HAM animations
if you see any Amiga 'animation without those green dot glitches is because such animation is running in 256 colors or 32 or so , but not HAM