Yesterdays technology and todays experience

[mrbob2]

Just wondered today..........

What if i gave (lets pretend lol) EA games, rockstar and square my Amiga 1200 with 150mb HD 2mb ram, 32mb fast ram and blizzard 1260 accelerator.........locked them in seperate rooms for a year to get used to the hardware etc.......

Now then.... what sort of games would/could they produce? Was quake pushing the amiga hardware to its limits (and struggling a little) or could these modern day coders who can make next gen games etc produce something on my amiga and push the hardware to beyond its limits that would make my eyes open?? GTA 1 for example.........

I know ages ago i read somewhere that some coders wrote a demo on the speccy with colours that shared adjacent pixels. Impossible at the time by even the top software houses yet amazing things are possible.


Just wondered............

[Dizzy]

I wouldn't let EA have my amiga you end up with another crappy version of their crappy sports games

[mrbob2]

To be honest if they did fifa street 08 on my amiga with HD gfx and dolby surround sound all loaded from a blue ray disc id be physically sick...............

[Dizzy]

so would your amiga

[Legerdemain]

I've been through exactly your way of thinking...

...but with a little twist.

What if the Amiga had become Big In Japan™? Would we have had games like R-Type, Gradius, Salamander, SD Snatcher, Ys, Metal Gear and the like to play around with today? Considering how well the MSX did over there... even though the computer was complete crap in certain aspects (MSX2 vs. Amiga 500 would have been like Commodore 64 vs. SNES, it feels like) but still was a commercially viable product... how nice would it not have been to see the Amiga take its place? Just like Windows have done today (here in the western part of the world you don't really see much console-ish games for Windows, but in Japan that simply isn't the case).

I'm almost getting a tad sad just thinking about what could have been.

Sigh.

[Rebel-CD32]

Hmm. Todays programmers are used to programming with barely any technical limitations at all. These modern consoles and PCs have an over-abondance of CPU and graphical power, so just about anything is easy enough to do on them without having to "hit the hardware" like they used to do back in the Amiga days. It seems that using modern, easy programming techniques, they'd have a hard time moving more than five testure mapped poligons around an Amiga's screen without slowdown.

Of course, I'm not saying all these guys are crap programmers, just that they're probably not used to programming with limitations anymore. On the other hand, I'd still love to see the results of such an interesting experiment.

As for the Japanese, yeah, if Amigas were popular in Japan, the whole WORLD would be different. Windows would not have become the dominant platform, there would be no war and global warming wouldn't exist. Sigh.

All we can do is try and make the best damn games we can. We can always try to emulate the Japanese style games, just take a look at Fightin' Spirit, Apidya, Minskie's Furballs, Gem'X and a few others who, although European games, emulated the look and feel of the Japanese arcade and console games.

[Coagulus]

This is why I am loving watching what demo (and the odd game) coders are coming up with on the 8-bits at the moment or fairly recently eg. Taquart's Numen really stretched the Atari 8-bit and the things happening on the Speccy and C64 show that the limits aren't as solid as they first appear when hardware has to be pushed. That's not to say that the Miggy doesn't have this too but it's so impressive to see an "incapable" machine doing the supposedly impossible.

Modern coders seem to rarely push hardware to it's limits, they just wait for faster hardware!

[spiff]

While good game play doesn’t have to be connected to good hardware there’s still a certain level of hardware needed for some of the best games.

Ace attorney on the DS has some great game play and relatively fresh ideas. It pretty much could have worked on anything with more then two colours, lets say and Atari.

Rockstars GTA, or in general the “sandbox genere” simply takes a shed loads of hardware to manage that level of freedom. They pretty much pushed playability and the PS2 to a new level with that game.

Supreme commander has some 100+ units individually simulated, even if you would run the game in 2d mode you still would need some thing around 1Ghz 256mb for just AI. The level of simulation could be abstracted to say units of 10 but for some that’s real difference. Any unit can be combined with new squads, upgraded… that sheer scale just can’t be done on crap hardware in real-time no matter the pushing the boundaries of the platform.

Pushing the hardware for the sake of pushing it, ie demos is another thing. Then you need limits in order to appreciate the pushing, like the amazing 4K and 64K procedural demos of today.

[FromWithin]

Programming is different on today's machines. The more you are able to do, the more you tend to do. It becomes a much greater exercise in data management. With such large amounts of data, speedups generally come from a change in algorithm, rather hand-coding in assembler (although small, tight loops are always beneficial). A cache-miss in a loop is a very hig performance penalty, so managing the data to make sure that cache-misses don't occur is very high priority. It's a totally different type of programming these days. There's no reason to think that today's current generation programmers would be any better on older hardware, and it's very likely that in general the reverse it true. It's a different set of skilss.

[BippyM]

They'd be limited by the technology so I wouldn't go expecting some super-duper-wonder stuff..

Gameplay is where it should be at, if they can't do it on a top end 3rd gen console or top end PC then don't expect it from old Amiga!

[ennio]

I think that to some degree, the technology that exists today, while conducive to outstanding graphics, is sort of a double-edged sword. I think gameplay takes a backseat because of the graphics and animation capabilities. Relatively speaking, it's much easier today to create a game that "looks cool." But the skills required to make a game that's playable? The technology advances don't enable that. In fact, I would argue that most, certainly not all, games today are becoming like mainstream movies, that is to say, boilerplate, because the gaming engines just keep recycling. It's not often I see a new game that looks and feels and plays unique.

I've been playing a lot of Lemmings lately, whose graphics and animation are secondary to the genius of the game design and interface, a skill that doesn't get flushed out just because of modern processing firepower.

Of course part of me is biased because I grew up with the C64 and Amiga. I do like some PS2 games, Shadow of the Colossus for starters, but I'm mostly a nostalgia freak I guess.

[blade002]

The problem in todays world seems to be with a generation or two before us that have very little idea about pushing the hardware that we had become so accustomed to seeing with our C64's, Spectrums & Amiga's. In today's generation, we have alot of kids and even alot of adults who only became accustomed to gaming once they became more realistically war like with games such as Medal of Honour, so they too are just as clueless as to what can be done with hardware when it is pushed.

So as a result of the clueless market consumers we have now, we have companies like Nvidia & ATI pushing out video card after video card every few months & saying that we need to update to a GeForce 99008000 with 2000 gig if ram and a spare satellite dish thrown in for good measure with the NASA launch pad included as an optional extra for a registration fee.

Alot of this is of course due to also the competition between the two rival graphics accelerator companies trying to outdo eachother and that is understandable, but that does not justify the hefty pricetags for new cards that are essentially under utilised by developers and underappreciated by the end users for whom should demand more from their expensive investments.

Seeing the C64 & Amiga pushed year after year was one of my GREATEST joys, as were its games which gave me the GREATEST memories.

But i think the Amiga went further than just nostalgia, because i cannot seem to fathom the reason why i dont have the same feelings towards the CBS Colecvision
& Atari 2600. Both those machines went further back in my gaming life, and generally speaking, the younger you are, normally the greater amount of nostalgia you have for that time. I got my first A500 in 1990 when i was 16 years old, so i well and truly past my infancy, and later on, i would say that the A1200 was THE machine that gave me the biggest buzz!.

[killergorilla]

I don't personally think that pushing the hardward to it's limits makes a great game anyway. I know bucket loads of games that never really pushed the hardware.

[Graham Humphrey]

Agreed, never really understood the obsession with "pushing the hardware". There are also plenty of games which technically are excellent but play like a brick.

[BippyM]

Originally Posted by ennio

I think that to some degree, the technology that exists today, while conducive to outstanding graphics, is sort of a double-edged sword. I think gameplay takes a backseat because of the graphics and animation capabilities.

I remember hearing the same things about the Amiga in 1990/91

[blade002]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

I don't personally think that pushing the hardward to it's limits makes a great game anyway. I know bucket loads of games that never really pushed the hardware.

I agree with you also, but the point of the thread wasnt gameplay but hardware. I think we all know from being retro computer users that gameplay always comes first over graphics, but what was the main reason why we bought the Amiga to begin with!?. It certainly wasnt because it had the same graphic output as a ZX Spectrum

Compare Amiga games from 1998 and then fast forward it to 1991. The programmers that tapped the hardware produced more playable games with smoother scrolling, more immersive sound, greater speed.. etc..

[blade002]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

Agreed, never really understood the obsession with "pushing the hardware". There are also plenty of games which technically are excellent but play like a brick.

Pushing the hardware helped keep the Amiga alive. Shadow of the Beast anyone!?.. yeah it had shit gameplay but it sold alot of Amiga's

[Graham Humphrey]

Well yeah, I understand that (e.g. Shadow Of The Beast) but, purely in terms of gameplay it's, by and large, irrelevant.

[blade002]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

Well yeah, I understand that (e.g. Shadow Of The Beast) but, purely in terms of gameplay it's, by and large, irrelevant.

Well i know it didnt seem very irrelevent when the majority of us didnt think that gameplay was the most important thing back when we were too young to realise this. Now that we are older and wiser, yes we know that gameplay is the main factor, but the main factor was the eye candy that the Amiga gave us when buying the machine, and good graphics along with great gameplay was acheived later on in the Amiga's life which to me started to happen in 1990 for the Amiga.

Why didnt we buy an Atari ST and spend extra on buying an Amiga?. I for one wanted my hard earned investment back then to be utilised to its fullest extent with great gameplay as well. We didnt buy the Amiga for shit graphics.

[killergorilla]

Originally Posted by blade002

Compare Amiga games from 1998 and then fast forward it to 1991.

You have some weird ideas of fast forwarding

Anyway... back OT...

I know what you're saying but as the generations of computers/consoles pass the difference between each generation gets less and less and the graphical jumps get less impressive because they're less visible.

I can understand that the extra power under the hood nowdays can be used for extra AI/physics and stuff but most of my favourite games of past and present aren't probably known as "system bangers".

A good game is still a good game

(I'm not really sure what point I had in that lot other than to point out your date error really )