The Amiga 1000 could of done a game like Wolfenstein in 1985 - shock!

[donnie]

Honestly why bother?

Even if you could, it would not be a great port. And even then. Who wants to play wolfenstein today.

wolfenstein in 10 frames in a small box. what a waste.

[Knocker]

I'm surprised by the negativity, and harsh language, towards an Amiga fan, on an Amiga board.

OK, so there's an ST version of Wolfenstein. When I was a teenager it was known that an A500 was a better game machine than Atari ST, due to special features like blitter/copper.

Isn't it then fair to assume that a better version could be made for an A500 (w/ trapdoor memory, no FAST RAM)? If not, can someone explain why? Or is the blitter/copper not that useful in this case? Thanks for clarifying.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Knocker

I'm surprised by the negativity, and harsh language, towards an Amiga fan, on an Amiga board.
[...]Isn't it then fair to assume that a better version could be made for an A500 (w/ trapdoor memory, no FAST RAM)? If not, can someone explain why? Or is the blitter/copper not that useful in this case? Thanks for clarifying.

You know as much of Amiga hardware as Miggy4eva, hence you come to the same conclusions.
The problem is not lack of hardware knowledge itself, but reluctance to learn from what people who actually know are telling.

If you had read the whole thread, you would realize, there's a LOT of information that can answer your question. Your assumption isn't fair, the evidence is in 7 pages worth of forum analysis. Actually 4, until Miggy4eva derailed it.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The ST was mostly £100 cheaper than the A500 in the UK, same market so the comparison is fair, where as the X68000 was aimed at developers, so for one it was never aiming for the mass market, again if i owned one i would state the sales figures would never be in the millions just like the Neo-Geo.

The X68000 was aimed at developers no more than the Amiga was aimed at developers. It was an enthusiast's machine, released on a market that never had any competing 16-bit home computers. Just the case of the X68000 was so costly that the A2000 equivalent X68000 Pro ended up costing less than the standard machine, despite the "Pro" monicker.

Originally Posted by Amigajay

But yes the X68000 has some great arcade games, that's because alot were developed on the machines! Other than these there really isn't a massive selection of games bar anime, hentei etc i would still rather an A500 over one anyday.

The X68000 has great arcade games because its hardware was similar to arcade platforms, not the other way around. And because its games weren't developed by 17-year-olds sitting in a bedroom for an audience consisting of 12-year-olds who bought Ocean games.

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

@Miggy4eva

[SNIP]
Your argument is no better than those Atari ST owners and Archimedes owners that claim that because the Phaeleon Giga Demo on the ST and the Power Demo on the Archimedes look quite close to Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga, that a near 1:1 version should have been released on their machines!
[SNIP]
.

This is a fallacious argument as far as the Power Demo on the Archimedes is concerned, since you do not know how many CPU cycles unused are left per frame.
Much is demonstrated in this demo, many Amiga owners including the hord of liars on Gamopat, pretending that, IN A DEMO, no way the Archie could reproduce the effects found in a SOTB level.

Now for your information.
Thanks to me asking Steve Harrison, the author of the QTM mod player to inquire, the Archie has now a precise end of a scanline interrupt, and in fact it can have up to 16 interrupts per scanline.
It allows to change (because the values are written by the ARM, very fast at writing series of registers) ALL the values of ALL the registers of the VIDC and the MEMC.
Had this been revealed 30 years ago, the games market and the demo scene on the Archies would have been completely different.

I always wrote, and I have been insulted for that, that the hardware of the Archimedes had never been fully used, because of :
- lack of sales (thus lack of potential programmers)
- lack of interest for hardware related solutions, when the main CPU is so fast.
Playing with the chipset was also clearly discouraged by Acorn, to make sure full compatability is guaranteed for their next models.
- lack of interest for 2D things when clearly the Archies are gifted for 3D
- no real competition in the games market or demo scene to have people scratch their heads and have really wicked ideas.

Hadn't Steve agreed to come back and developed RasterMan, I would still read that :
'The Archie hardware is lame because everything must be coded in software and the Archimedes has no hardware resources to alleviate the burden upon the CPU'.


Like for all machines, wicked ideas are necessary to get the most of the Archie.
Wicked ideas also like my fast sprites plotting routines, where it appears only the authors of Scorpius, the Hughes brothers (demomakers)
[ Show youtube player ]
came to the same conclusion and developed (more or less, and in fact : less) the same algos I did.
Note what you see only takes 290 kbytes on a diskette, and the author explained this demo version was rushed in to be supplied on next month monthly disk (Acorn User) and the game was to have more sprites, and ingame music, too.
OK it runs at 25 frames per second (whatever the Archimedes model), but no way a non AGA Amiga (unexpanded) can do it.
1st it uses a 256 colour screen mode, so it is going to be impossible for the non AGA Amiga to do it.
A base, stock 1 Mbyte RAM, 8 Mhz Archie from 1987 runs Scorpius, at 25 fps, with no slowdowns.
And everyhting is done by software.
Imagine what it would give with RasterMan hardware acceleration capabilities (and my superior plotting routines).

PS : There is an history behind the development of RasterMan by Steve Harrison.
I nearly fell off my (ARM)chair when I 1st saw this German demo, the cMEMC demo, from 1994 :
[ Show youtube player ]
It has been produced by BlackIce (Marko Lukat), who also developed (with Lord of the Earwings) a sound playroutine, the Matrix Tracker, able to play S3M files on the Archie, up to 32 channels, as demonstrated on my YT channel.
I then understood that to get a precise h-sync it was necessary that the sound play routine doesn't conflict with your code.
So only somebody who had developed a sound playroutine could develop a precise pseudo h-sync.
This is why I asked Steve to investigate, because he had developed QTM.
The Archimedes can say 'thank you' : it is thanks to Steve that the power of it chipset, dormant in its guts for so long, is now unleashed.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

This is a fallacious argument as far as the Power Demo on the Archimedes is concerned, since you do not know how many cycles unused are left per frame.
Much is demonstrated in this demo, many Amiga owners including the hord of liars on Gamopat, pretending that, IN A DEMO, no way the Archie could reproduce the effects found in a SOTB level.

Its not fallacious in the slightest. I really don't think you have any appreciation for what it would take to realise something like Beast on the base model Archimedes. Sure, its got a fast processor, but that won't be enough on its own.

As well as the parallax layers in the sky, it uses hardware sprites for the moon and the blimps that move across, it also reloads the sprites for the heart rate monitor and the potions. These are elements that don't need to be redrawn every frame, and sprite priorities are switched so that the blimps and moon are below the clouds.

All of the sky elements on the Archimedes would have to be redrawn every frame.

Then there is the 13 levels of parallax at the bottom that are simply hardware scrolled, the Archimedes would have to redraw all 13 at their varying speeds every frame.

Some of those trees moving across the screen? Reloaded hardware sprites, no redrawing necessary for the Amiga, on the Archimedes, you're going to have to redraw all that as well, some of those trees are not sprites and are part of the dual playfield, meaning objects plotted over the trees don't have to preserve the parts of the trees they cover because its dual playfield.

Archimedes doesn't get that advantage.

The Beast character, obviously no hassles there. However, some of the enemies that you come up against in Beast on the outside level are pretty big, with the metal spikes easily going higher than the mountain background,
the hands are pretty big objects, sometimes two onscreen, then theres the yellow tree/spike things that are quite big, as well as at times the ball/eye enemies that bounce around the Beast character.

The Archimedes is going to have to redraw EVERYTHING on screen, and, play music and sound fx, and not drop a frame, no 25frames a second here

The Amiga could do all of this because Reflections designed it around the Amigas strengths.

Theres a reason why the game is in dual playfield.

But that means only 16 colours right? Wrong. Try at least 128 colours with
extensive colour reloading by the copper

Beast was exploited by many demo groups back in the day, eager to prove that Reflections didn't have the monopoly on technical prowess, I find it odd that in light of Beats reputation that no-one ever tried to replicate it in full on the Archimedes, clearly the Power Demo was inspired by it, you have to ask the question why they didn't go further with it.

Originally Posted by Zarchos

Now for your information.
Thanks to me asking the author of the QTM mod player to inquire, the Archie has now a precise end of a scanline interrupt, and in fact it can have up to 16 interrupts per scanline.
It allows to change (because the values are written by the ARM, very efficient at writing series of registers) ALL the values of ALL the registers of the VIDC and the MEMC.
Had this been revealed 30 years ago, the games market and the demo scene on the Archies would have been completely different.

With respect, thats irrelevant now. Advances like this needed to be discovered when the Archimedes was current, 30 years later is 30 years too late.

Originally Posted by Zarchos

I always wrote, and I have been insulted for that, that the hardware of the Archimedes had never been fully used because of :
- lack of sales (thus lack of potential programmers)
- lack of interest for hardware related solutions, when the main CPU is so fast
- lack of interest for 2D things when clearly the Archies are gifted for 3D
- no real competition in the games market or demo scene to have people really have wicked ideas.
- this RasterMan could only be developed by somebody having also developed a playroutine so that both work together and don't conflict.
No surprise it is this demo which made me ask Steve3000 from Quantum to come back to the Archie scene to develop his Raster Manager :
[ Show youtube player ] and the author had developed the Matrix Tracker (able to play S3M files on the Archie, up to 32 channels, as demonstrated on my YT channel).

Would have helped if the Archimedes wasn't hampered by Acorn in the first place who priced it too high, and just expected that all schools would replace their ageing BBC Model B's and Masters with Archimedes instead.

The likes of RM with their shitty Nimbus machines undercut them, and they were not even a quarter of the power of an Archimedes.

Originally Posted by Zarchos

Like for all machines, wicked ideas are necessary to get the most of the Archie.
Wicked ideas like my fast sprites plotting routines, where it appears only the authors of Scorpius, the Hughes brothers (demomakers)
[ Show youtube player ]
came to the same conclusion and developed (more or less, and in fact : less) the same algos I did.
Note what you see only takes 290 kbytes on a diskette, and the author explained this demo version was rushed in to be supplied on next month monthly disk (Acorn User) and the game was to have more sprites, and ingame music, too.
OK it runs at 25 frames per second (whatever the Archimedes model), but no way a non AGA Amiga (unexpanded) can do it.
1st it uses a 256 colour screen mode, so it is going to be impossible for the non AGA Amiga to do it.

Tell that to every Amiga programmer that knows how to reload the copper chip

Originally Posted by Zarchos

A base, stock 1 Mbyte RAM, 8 Mhz Archie from 1987 runs Scorpius, at 25 fps, with no slowdowns.
And everyhting is done by software.
Imagine what it would give with RasterMan hardware acceleration capabilities (and my superior plotting routines).

Its impressive, it has lots of stuff onscreen, but really, the goal of most horizontal scrollers was for 50fps, certainly there are plenty of Amiga 500 shooters that had the same 25fps restriction, and had quite a lot onscreen, but as most of the horizontal shooters on Amiga were conversions of arcades, they kind of had to follow the template set down.

Bullet Hell shooters were never really a thing on Amiga

[Zarchos]

So you don't understand what the raster manager brings then ?
Your 1st assertions are all wrong.
I'll read the other ones later tonight.
Pop corn.

[Dunny]

Is there a reason the scrolling layers in the Power demo on the Arch don't overlap?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Bullet Hell shooters were never really a thing on Amiga

I don't think they are possible.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

So you don't understand what the raster manager brings then ?
Your 1st assertions are all wrong.
I'll read the other ones later tonight.
Pop corn.

Its certainly not going to reduce the overhead of having to redraw EVERYTHING on screen

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Its certainly not going to reduce the overhead of having to redraw EVERYTHING on screen

You are a 100% wrong.
Why don't you watch the cMEMC YT video where I explain it all ?
I provided the link. You didn't even click on it ?
That is non scientifical.
And you use caps, what is that for ? Shouting ?
Please, behave yourself.

[Samurai_Crow]

http://aminet.net/package/game/demo/walls17 shows what the Amiga blitter can do. It has no texture maps and that is why it works well on the Amiga 1000.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

You are a 100% wrong.
Why don't you watch the cMEMC YT video where I explain it all ?
I provided the link. You didn't even click on it ?
That is non scientifical.
And you use caps, what is that for ? Shouting ?
Please, behave yourself.

I already did, nothing in that shows that the Archimedes can do Beast.

You're trying the same argument Miggy4eva is doing by showcasing a demo ( which incidentally in this case isn't REMOTELY relevant! ) which doesn't have game mechanics running at the same time which would have a massive effect on the end result.

What is 'scientifical' is to use a demo/example that at least closely tries to resemble the effects of what it is you're trying to argue. Power Demo is the example you should be using, because that is closer to Beast than your cMEMC video is.

Don't just tell me i'm wrong, please give us the details of how and why Power Demo is as it is, and not a 100% replication of Beast when its clearly obvious thats where its inspiration lies

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Knocker

Isn't it then fair to assume that a better version could be made for an A500 (w/ trapdoor memory, no FAST RAM)?

No.
Wolfenstein games (AFAIK) typically draw single pixels, in column order. With bitplanes you a) update a single bit in each bitplane, b) keep everything in registers and write it out after batching up 16(or 32) rows, or c) treat a buffer as a chunky pixels buffer and convert it to bitplanes after it is updated. Option b) is not very good as the algorithm is designed for columns.

So the ST then? It clocks 12-13% faster and the weirdo bitplane layout it has might help it twiddle stuff faster (and I don't think it would slow it down compared to proper bitplanes).

Could you think out of the box and do something different on the Amiga? I bet you could. Perhaps many sets of hw sprites for different columns. Perhaps many precalculated columns that could be blitted onto screeen.
But you would quickly deviate from the point of the game which is basically a showcase for an algorithm and neither the copper nor the blitter boosts single pixel / column handling unlike multi-words / rows.

[Zarchos]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I already did, nothing in that shows that the Archimedes can do Beast.

You're trying the same argument Miggy4eva is doing by showcasing a demo ( which incidentally in this case isn't REMOTELY relevant! ) which doesn't have game mechanics running at the same time which would have a massive effect on the end result.

What is 'scientifical' is to use a demo/example that at least closely tries to resemble the effects of what it is you're trying to argue. Power Demo is the example you should be using, because that is closer to Beast than your cMEMC video is.

Don't just tell me i'm wrong, please give us the details of how and why Power Demo is as it is, and not a 100% replication of Beast when its clearly obvious thats where its inspiration lies

Who cares about the Power Demo as we do not know how many cycles there are left.
The text says it works on a MEMC equiped Archie when all can have a MEMC1a, available as standard from 1989, and giving a speed gain of about 10%.
10% of 4.5 MIPS is already a lot to deal with games logic. That is more than half the power of the 68000 of the Amiga.
I explained why RasterMan changes everything.
I gave details in the cMEMC video.
You are a 100% wrong when you say all elements have to be redrawn.
Video DMA redirection + VIDC border, start and end of visible screen all reprogrammable per scanline makes everything you SHOUTED plain wrong.
I ll type with a computer later, cellphone is too lousy.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

Who cares about the Power Demo as we do not know how many cycles there are left.

Of course we care. We look at it, and its still missing lots of Beast type elements. So we either conclude:

1). The Archimedes couldn't do more than what was shown
2). The programmer was lazy and went to all that effort to do a Beast style demo feature, but decided it would be better to not equal Beast and do something inferior

And we know why its inferior to Amiga Beast, because the Archimedes doesn't use separate bitplanes, and isn't really designed to be able to do something like Beast, no matter how powerful the CPU is.

When it comes to vector based processing, well, theres no comparison, Lander looks and plays MUCH better than the Amiga version (Virus) does.

You see, this isn't a discussion to say "the Archimedes is shit and can't do anything", its to be HONEST and say "its good at a Lander style of game, but not so good at a Beast style game".

Originally Posted by Zarchos

The text says it works on a MEMC equiped Archie when all can have a MEMC1a, available as standard from 1989, and giving a speed gain of about 10%.
10% of 4.5 MIPS is already a lot to deal with games logic. That is more than half the power of the 68000 of the Amiga.

Irrelevant, and shows you really don't understand how a game like Beast which is designed around how the Amiga hardware works. The hardware (i.e. the 'weak coprocessors') do all the work, it really doesn't matter how fast the 68000 is, it could be half the speed that it is, and Beast would likely be unaffected, because it's not doing the work.

Some of the graphics are hardware sprites, entire game is coloured by the copper, the blitter is used to copy graphics around, dual playfield is used to reduce overheads, Paula is used to play sounds and music, hardware scrolling is used for the obvious reasons.

The very nature of how Beast works means everything has to be redrawn on the Archimedes because its strengths do not lie in this style of game.

Originally Posted by Zarchos

I explained why RasterMan changes everything.
I gave details in the cMEMC video.
You are a 100% wrong when you say all elements have to be redrawn.
Video DMA redirection + VIDC border, start and end of visible screen all reprogrammable per scanline makes everything you SHOUTED plain wrong.
I ll type with a computer later, cellphone is too lousy.

I'm doubting you know how the Archimedes works! Yes, hardware scrolling 13 layers at the bottom of the screen is easily within the capabilities of the Archimedes, you're not taking into account all of the elements that are drawn over those layers that the Archimedes absolutely HAS to redraw, because the Archimedes doesn't use separate bitplanes like the Amiga.

The foreground fence/stone wall has a different speed grass layer shown in the transparent parts.

Then there are the rest of the parallax layers with the player character, which has the NON-REPEATING Trees behind it, and behind that is the mountain range, as well as any enemies that show up being plotted over all those elements.

You can't just scroll all of those elements and not take account of the interaction of the other elements that will be plotted over them?!?!

The Archimedes is a decent machine, better than the Amiga at some things, but i'm afraid you're going to have to accept that in other areas, the Amiga is better than the Archimedes at things it was specifically designed to excel at.

I'm not even sure how this is an argument

[idrougge]

Wait a minute, are you saying that the Archimedes can't scroll?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Wait a minute, are you saying that the Archimedes can't scroll?

Nope, not at all, i'm not sure how you even got that from my posts?!?!

It can scroll, but I don't believe it can do a 1:1 copy of Amiga Shadow of the Beast.

[idrougge]

I must have misread something. I don't know much about the Acorn video hardware.

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by Akira

I don't think they are possible.

but they are possible on Falcon

[ Show youtube player ]