State of computer graphics when Amiga was born...

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Mark Wright

Classic from TF1 France at closedown/fermeture... hardly anyone watching, must have cost a fortune (1986)

That intro video was very nice, it have, consistent, pleasant colors, and design, opposing to almost every other 3D animation at that time, where people just throw every color and texture they have, not realizing they are creating just a messy look.
But then again, kudos to everyone who did any sort of 3D animation in mid 80's.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by roondar

This is true, but the ISA cards I referred to didn't cost anywhere near that. The Number Nine Revolution series was a bunch of PC ISA cards that came out between 1983 and 1984, costing between $1995 and $2995 and they had high colour capabilities.

For instance, the Revolution 512x32 could display a 512x480 resolution with 245760 colours on screen out of 16 million. This was in 1984.

Obviously out of the price range of consumers and AFAIK these cards couldn't do animation at all well, but they were available and cheaper than I thought they were.


For sure, I would never say anything different. It was also much more capable in the animation department than specialized ISA cards were.

It is true they may be cheaper than expected and in fact the reason for it is the Amiga world is replete with an argument which goes:

"The Amiga was the best computer in its time for graphics!"
"How about this better one?"
"No that other computer costs more so it doesn't count!".

They shrink-wrap what they'll accept around the exact technical specifications of a Commodore Amiga, so of course the choice they go with eventually will hone in on the Commodore Amiga.

Amiga's owner always forget that "I have an Amiga, what can I get that has all the same ease-of-use features for under $1000?" is NOT the question many people actually using a computer for graphics asked in 1985. What they asked was "I want to do CAD / visualisation / image processing. I have $20,000 to spend. What is available?". There's no purchasing law that says "Nothing counts unless it matches the specifications of a Commodore Amiga".

Was the Amiga better for animation? Amigas were not popular in animation houses. People working in animation houses were not choosing between a Commodore Amiga and an desktop IBM PC to do their work on. Look at Dragon's Lair, it dated from 1983. What do you think this was done on? How long was it before people were doing animations to this standard and fidelity on an Amiga? Ever? People doing this sort of work were obviously not using an Amiga.

[ Show youtube player ]

Even if you are to concede that the Amiga was better in the animation field, a dubious claim because there was never a time when there were not much better platforms than the Amiga for that application if professional animation is what you wanted to do, it still doesn't make a lot of difference as far as people purchasing PCs for computer graphics were concerned because people buying PCs for graphics were not interested in the sort of toy animation program Amiga users liked. They were professional scientists. It was used for oceanographic and seismic surveys and medical imaging. It was used for CAD and CAE applications.

Take these examples:

The Parallax graphics 600 & 1200 PC range offered graphics resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 60Hz non-interlaced. Much higher resolution than any Amiga of the same time. It offered up to 25 megapixels per second draw rate, bit blitting at 12 megapixels per second, and bit blitting included hardware scaling.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0%20pc&f=false

The Number Nine Revolution 512x32 you mention was the one of the first 24bit graphics cards available for any desktop system. It was available before any Amiga was released. It predates even the Amiga 1000. It allowed images to be loaded at DMA speeds. The colour output quoted by the company of 245,760 on-screen colours which you noted was only quoted as that number because it was the maximum number of screen pixels at any one time in 24bit mode, at 512x480 non-interlaced resolution. 512 * 480 = 245,760 screen pixels. It was in fact a full 24bit graphics mode, with an additional 8 bits which could be used for Alpha channel or Z-buffer.

This is the sort of application it was used for:

"The National Environmental Satellite, Data. and Information Service (NFSDIS) manages the Nation's civil Earthobserving satellite systems, as well as global national data bases for meteorology, oceanography, geophysics, and solarterrestrial sciences. From these sources, it develops and disseminates environmental data and information products critical to the protection of life and property, national defence, the national economy, energy development and distribution, global food supplies, and the development of natural resources"

So, if you'll excuse my French, its purchasers didn't give a shit if it could be used for sprite animation. They wanted it for a much more serious application.

The Revolution 512x32 was also fitted with an NEC µPD7220 graphics accelerator.

The sad fact about the eternal argument that the Amiga was a missed opportunity is that the PC was a much bigger missed opportunity because most of its potential was buried behind the spreadsheet and databased applications it was famous for. Accelerators with 16.7 million colour graphics were available for the PC before the Amiga was even released.

The only thing really convincing Amiga fans the Amiga was better for graphics is ignorance.

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

The only thing really convincing Amiga fans the Amiga was better for graphics is ignorance.

Thanks for this. I was kind of wondering why I was watching early CGI of a type the Amiga was never, and still is not capable of producing, then reading opinions that seemed to say "...then the Amiga came along and blew all of this out of the water." I love Amiga demos as much as the next guy but not one of them looks as good as some of this stuff produced in the mid-80s.

[wodan]

That game appears to be from 1996, that's a lot later.

[James]

Originally Posted by wodan

That game appears to be from 1996, that's a lot later.

From Wikipedia:

The first model, the PC-9801, launched in October 1982,[9] and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and was shipped with 128 KB of RAM that could be expanded to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series

From a review of that game:

I originally played Flame Zapper on a NEC PC-9821Ap which had the stock Intel 486DX2 66MHz CPU (no slouch for its time but 3 years old by 1996) and around 13MB of RAM I noticed some areas of slowdown, usually when many ships are exploding at once. It isn’t enough to affect gameplay too much but it’s noticeable and one of the driving reasons to upgrade the CPU which I did, very recently. To be honest, the 66MHz CPU is totally adequate for this game but I’m one of those guys that feels compelled to upgrade things and do my best to maximize performance. After upgrading to a 100MHz CPU, I will say that in the default 30 fps mode, the game runs really great. However, switching to 60 fps mode still crushes my machine, especially when using the purple laser. The game does get really easy with that much slowdown though ? I would say it’s best to stick with 30 fps mode as I’m not sure any classic PC-9821 can run this game at full speed with 60 fps.

https://bitchinbits.foolproofdesigns...pper-kotsujin/

An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2.

As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced but much more expensive pro choices.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by James

From Wikipedia:

The first model, the PC-9801, launched in October 1982, and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and was shipped with 128 KB of RAM that could be expanded to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series

An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2.

As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced but much more expensive pro choices.

"An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2"

If you can show me evidence "An 80's Amiga can be expanded to run games like Quake2" I'd be impressed. It reads as a fantasy. It smacks of yet another common outcrop of Amiga fan reverie, the "fantasy alternative timeline". Quake 2 wasn't released until the end of 1998 so Amiga users of the 1980s were definitively Not running Quake 2. You can make exactly the same "imaginary alterative timeline" argument about literally anything. If you had sufficient technical ability you could extend a 1950s transistor radio to run "Doom: Eternal". So what? The fact is nobody then was actually doing it. PC users don't need a fantasy alternative timeline; they really were playing Quake II on their PCs by the end of 1997. I don't know the exact date Quake was ported to the Amiga but a quick look suggests no real-life Amiga version of Quake II existed for almost five years after it was released for the PC.

Meanwhile, you took only one trivial detail from a very long post with all sorts of information in it, other than the one video of that game. I'd written all I wanted to without that section of the post, which was a section I only added to point out what was written in the paragraph above: Graphics accelerated PCs, dating back to before the Commodore 64 was released, exist. In fact, I accept your point. I have since removed the video from the post because that game came rather later. The rest of the post is as it was and it changes little because that detail doesn't change the central point. The point is not "Here's a PC game...". The point is: The first accelerated 24bit graphics cards, including the Number Nine Revolution 512x32, were available for the PC before the Amiga even existed at any price.

Also, in typical Amiga-fan style, you're diverting to using GAMES as the metric here. If I wanted to play games I still wouldn't buy an Amiga, I'd buy Nintendo, like most people did. I'm a PC user. I care very little whether my PC can play games or not. The PC I have has just a few emulators installed but no modern games on it even though it's more than capable of running them. I'm a technology professional, I don't use computers to play games. When I have been interested in games I prefer the cost benefits and - by a wide margin - the software catalogue of Japanese consoles from NEC, Fujitsu, Sega and Nintendo. I actually still own an Amiga and I never use it; it doesn't have any use today. For the rare occasion I want to play games I have a collection of emulators and I use a Commodore 64 emulator, DosBOX, a SNES emulator or Mame. I also have WinUAE but I don't use it.

Most people buying the PC were not buying it for toy-purposes such as playing games, they were buying it for business and professional use, so talk of games is moot. Games are not IBMs corporate ID. The PC was sold predominantly as an office desktop for business executives. It was not really until after Doom in 1993 that the PC was ever primarily marketed as a games platform. Until then it was marketed, bought, and sold, as a platform for industrial use, and for business users and technical professionals. Games are clearly also a moot point for Most PC customers because until Doom there wasn't much of a games market for the PC, but it still massively outsold the Amiga throughout its entire life. Unlike the Amiga fan-base, obviously people were Not buying PCs mainly to run games and novelty applications, for at least the first decade of the PCs life. In fact, the PC games market had scarcely even begun until after Commodore went bankrupt so a dearth of games in its formative years was clearly not an issue either for PC users or for the PC platform itself.

Regarding: "As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced but much more expensive pro choices", it's ironic you should say you've never heard that argument, and yet, you immediately follow the denial you've ever heard it with that self-same argument you just wrote to say you've never heard. Maybe it's more a case of refusing to notice or acknowledge it? It is again a moot point because, as Amiga fans are wont to do, it disregards the fact that not everybody buying computer hardware shares the average consumer's budgetary constraints. It also ignores the fact many if not most people buying a computer don't share the Amiga fan-base interest in novelty graphical effects of dubious value. It further disregards the fact that most of the early PC graphics cards were directed at science and technical computing professionals at a time when no consumer market existed for the PC. Therefore some of those devices were of course more expensive because they were directed at a rarefied market with bigger budgets. They expected to sell maybe a few dozen devices to technical specialists, not millions of units to consumers. At their inception the IBM PCs and compatibles were platforms exclusively directed at professional users who expected - and in many cases actively Wanted - to pay exclusive prices, to help purchase a competitive professional edge.

Meanwhile, I'd like to see evidence of a 1980s Amiga competently running Quake II.

[Foebane]

What the hell? Who is this arrogant Vascillious joker who has just joined and is promptly writing essay posts solely to ridicule and bash our favourite platform?

I have no doubt there was plenty of (very) expensive hardware doing Amiga-like stuff before the Amiga even came along, but you're comparing relatively inexpensive home computer hardware to what industry professionals use for research, costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in some cases, that's hardly a fair comparison. There's no way the Amiga is in that league, acknowledged, but it was still good for the budget market, like the NewTek Video Toaster used in TV stations throughout the States in the 1990s.

Quake 2 actually came out before the end of 1997, and yes, I have played Quake 2 on Amiga as well, without the coloured lighting, but it was fine.

And what do you mean by "Amiga users of the 1980s"? Are you referring to the OCS/ECS chipset and not AGA?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Also, in typical Amiga-fan style[...]

You do realise that both of your posts read in "typical Amiga-hater style?" I mean, to go on such long-winded tangents which are completely fixated on some esoteric points clearly indicates that you have a bone to pick with this platform. It also betrays a complete lack of perspective in regard to the whole issue.

I can't speak for other posters in this thread but I thought it's obvious for most users that when people say "Amiga blew the competition out of the water in the fx department" they mean the home and amateur segment of the market. The segment which can't afford a 20K rig but can be very happy - and productive - with a 1-2K one.

I don't suppose anybody here imagines Amiga was capable of producing stuff on the level of that Dire Stairs vid. If they do then they are wrong on this very point and you are right to mention it, but was there really need to write hundreds of words completely denigrating the whole machine?

What it could do is well described in its Wikipedia page's first paragraphs, in case you didn't know it already. This includes simple video control, effects, 3D rendering and music capabilities. It was hugely influential and the fact that it did not sell bazillion units like PC means squat in this context.

It also encompasses games, yes, that subject you clearly struggle with. I'm sorry but saying that "PC games market scarcely begun until Commodore's bankruptcy" (1994) is a complete hogwash, seeing as gaming on PC was alive, kicking and influential since King's Quest (1984). Bringing consoles into equation is also a waste of time since it's obvious that home computer users either wanted to do more than just play games, or wanted to play games which were unavailable on consoles. As it is, Amiga again was hugely influential in this field, showing people what could be done and inspiring what is now a multi billion dollar industry.

Overall, you wrote all that from an extremely narrow point of view of a self-professed "technology professional". Okay, though similar people I know don't actually have such strong tunnel-vision and have understanding and appreciation of the roles of historical computer platforms, even if they did not use them in the past.

And was it really worth the effort of registering here and reviving this old thread?

[robinsonb5]

Rule 1 of the internet (not to be confused with rule 34 of the internet) - Don't Feed the Trolls.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Rule 1 of the internet (not to be confused with rule 34 of the internet) - Don't Feed the Trolls.

What I've said is largely a point of fact. It isn't trolling to state contradictory facts. You might get upset about it because it doesn't say what you want to hear, but that in itself does not make my posts troll comments.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Meanwhile, I'd like to see evidence of a 1980s Amiga competently running Quake II.

Here you go (this uses an Amiga 600 which technically isn't a 1980s Amiga but uses 1980s Amiga technology, however, you can get the same hardware upgrade for 1987's Amiga 500):


[ Show youtube player ]


Of course, you will now move goal posts because the expansion used is one from the 2010s. However, if you read carefully, nobody ever claimed differently.

BTW, please note that the video uses a software FPU which later was replaced by a hardware FPU that is many, many times faster. The other Amiga videos that showed Quake II were just very long ones showing many other programs so I didn't pick them.

[Vascillious]

Oh what déjà vu this is!

I was so prepared for this. The very first comment I made in this thread starts with these words:

The Amiga world is replete with an argument which goes:
"The Amiga was the best computer in its time for graphics!"
"How about this better one?"
"No that other computer costs more so it doesn't count!".

Now look at the response!:

@James: As for that argument that the "Amiga world is replete with" - I've never heard it before in over 30 years of using an Amiga. It was always understood that there were more advanced *but much more expensive* pro choices.

@Foebane: I have no doubt there was plenty of *(very) expensive* hardware doing Amiga-like stuff before the Amiga even came along, but you're comparing relatively inexpensive home computer hardware to what industry professionals use for research, *costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in some cases*.

@Dreadnought: I thought it's obvious for most users that when people say "Amiga blew the competition out of the water in the fx department" they mean the home and amateur segment of the market. The segment which can't afford *a 20K rig*.

Every single Amiga-fan response summed-up by exactly the self-reflexive argument I predicted they'd use before they'd even spoke. The prediction about what they'd say is right up there where they can read it, but they said it anyway, exactly as predicted. You really don't change your tune, do you, Amiga fans? It's always like talking to people reading from a script. Worked out by Amiga disciples in conversation with other Amiga disciples.

The Amiga fan bible. Chapter 1 verse 1:

"The Amiga is the best graphics platform of its time!".
"How about this one with better technical specifications?"
"I can't afford it so it doesn't count!".

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Every single Amiga-fan response summed-up by exactly the argument I predicted they'd use before they'd even spoke.

Did it occur to you we use this argument because it makes more sense in the wider context than your cherry picking, tunnel visioned, and bone-headed one, which exists only in the tiny bubble you happen to inhabit?

With all this crystal ball gazing of yours, you then talk about reading from a script...s'funny

Charitable fellow that I am, I did give you a benefit of a doubt hence my initial reply, though it did look rather obvious from the start. So, yeah, what robinsonb5 said...

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by grond

Here you go (this uses an Amiga 600 which technically isn't a 1980s Amiga but uses 1980s Amiga technology, however, you can get the same hardware upgrade for 1987's Amiga 500):


[ Show youtube player ]


Of course, you will now move goal posts because the expansion used is one from the 2010s. However, if you read carefully, nobody ever claimed differently.

BTW, please note that the video uses a software FPU which later was replaced by a hardware FPU that is many, many times faster. The other Amiga videos that showed Quake II were just very long ones showing many other programs so I didn't pick them.

"Of course, you will now move goal posts because the expansion used is one from the 2010s"

It is not moving Anything to point out that is is definitely NOT what was claimed.

The claim was "a NNETIEEN EIGHTIES Amiga can run Quake 2".

Anything which requires expansion hardware which did not even exist until 2015, more than 10 years after Quake 2 was released in 1997 is, by definition, certainly NOT "a 1980s Amiga". It's a 2015+ Amiga. Not only that but just one technical point: It is running that demo at standard PC VGA Mode X resolution of 320x240. Not exactly high resolution: It's the lowest resolution setting that game can use and it's still running at about 10fps, a rate most players would consider unplayable, on a 2015 accelerator.

For the sake of giving you something to compare that result to, the GeForce 980 was released for the PC in 2915 just *before* the Apollo Vampire 600 was available. This is a retrospective showing what games running on a PC with a GTX 980 - a 2015 card - look like today:
[ Show youtube player ]

And this is what Quake II looked like on a PC:
[ Show youtube player ]

This is what Quake Champions looks like, running on a 2015 PC. Skip past the preamble to 2:50. It's running at 2560x1440 resolution, more than 57x the resolution of Quake II running on an Apollo 600 you showed me:
[ Show youtube player ]

Here's that video you suppled again for a side-by-side comparison to the Amiga, using a 2015 FPGA card which is faster than a 68060:
[ Show youtube player ]

What have you got for evidence of the claim actually made: Quake 2 *running on Amiga hardware you could actually buy in the 1980s*.

I'm prepared to take any version of Quake running on any Amiga, because I am confident there is no example of Quake running on any Amiga which could not run far, far better on a PC available the same date, and by the time the Apollo 600 hardware came to market it was 2015 and the PC games market had moved on more than a decade after Quake II.

Quake III was released for the PC in 2010:
[ Show youtube player ]

PS. I knew this would happen: GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES.

Are you a child? Who cares about games? I'm a serious computer user. I don't care about games. Yet even though that's the territory you want to push the debate on to, you still don't look good. Even on a 2015 Amiga with an Aftermarket upgrade using recent modern technology faster than a 68060, Amiga Quake II still looks terrible compared to a PC version of the same date.

It isn't trolling. You can literally see the truth with your own eyes if you open them.

[Foebane]

Technology advances.
Technology from a later time will always be more advanced than technology from an earlier time.
Comparisons should not be made with technology from different times, the older technology will always lose out.

That's my reasoning, anyway. Make of it what you will.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

The claim was "a NNETIEEN EIGHTIES Amiga can run Quake 2".

No, the claim was that a nineteen-eighties Amiga *can be expanded* to run Quake 2.

Are you a child? Who cares about games?

He says, after removing the game footage from his earlier post.


My earlier comment stands.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Did it occur to you we use this argument because it makes more sense in the wider context than your cherry picking, tunnel visioned, and bone-headed one, which exists only in the tiny bubble you happen to inhabit?

With all this crystal ball gazing of yours, you then talk about reading from a script...s'funny

Charitable fellow that I am, I did give you a benefit of a doubt hence my initial reply, though it did look rather obvious from the start. So, yeah, what robinsonb5 said...

What's that noise? Oh, I recognise that, it's the sound of somebody making no attempt at all to bring any pertinent facts to the discussion, but instead wants to divert quickly into the tried and trusted safe-space of a trade of personal insults where nothing technically pertinent enters the discussion.

"we use this argument because it makes more sense in the wider context"

That's about the most conter-factual summary of that argument I can imagine. No, what that argument does is try to find ways to *refuse to acknowledge* the wider context, by first declaring the Amiga a graphics powerhouse and then closing ones eyes by refusing to recognise better hardware on grounds of price.

By what rationale do you think that makes sense? I'll tell you what the public thought: Exactly the same thing, but about Japanese consoles, cheaper hardware than the Amiga. I can't recall the statistics exactly but I think the SNES sold more units in its first year of production than the sum total of every model of Amiga ever sold during its entire run. Why's that? For the reason I've given: The SNES is cheaper than an Amiga, and it has what most people outside the Amiga bubble would regard as a far better software catalogue.

I suppose you accept exactly the same argument favouring the SNES, do you?

"The SNES is the best home games platform there is!"
"No, the Amiga is!"
"No! It's more expensive! It doesn't count!"

There, that IS the wider context, how do you like it?

The Amiga price-objection argument is false, for the reason already given: Not everybody shares your same budgetary constraints, nor do they have the same interests.

What's interesting about that, especially considering the Amiga fan-base standard price objection, is the Amiga was outsold by cheaper hardware AND by more expensive hardware.

?

[Foebane]

Lazy Sundays ARE boring, aren't they?

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

No, the claim was that a nineteen-eighties Amiga *can be expanded* to run Quake 2.
He says, after removing the game footage from his earlier post.


My earlier comment stands.

"He says, after removing the game footage from his earlier post"

Yes. It's entirely consistent. I removed it because I don't care about it. It can go. Not only that but nobody has bothered to understood why I linked to it so it was only causing confusion.

"the claim was that a nineteen-eighties Amiga *can be expanded* to run Quake 2."

And that's your point? Quake II, running on a 2015 Amiga, at 320x240 resolution, with an aftermarket FPGA, at about 10fps?

Exactly who do you think that will convince? When you have in the same thread a PC running Quake II at the full frame rate at 2560x1400, that's 57x the resolution and at least 5x the update speed.

While in the meantime a PC can be "expanded" to run "Doom: Eternal", at 130+ FPS in 3840x2160 resolution.
[ Show youtube player ]

Accounting for frame rate and resolution That's over 1000 times as fast as this:
[ Show youtube player ]

Where's the part where the Amiga is not obviously objectively worse than the PC? By what Measurable specification is the Amiga better?

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Technology advances.
Technology from a later time will always be more advanced than technology from an earlier time.
Comparisons should not be made with technology from different times, the older technology will always lose out.

That's my reasoning, anyway. Make of it what you will.

I accept that reasoning.

So why is the Amiga Worse than technology which comes before it? The Amiga did not innovate anything.

Here's the Amiga Juggler from 1986:
[ Show youtube player ]

Here's "Adam Powers, the Juggler", by MAGI, from five years previously, before the Amiga existed, which it was based on:
[ Show youtube player ]

Name some features which were unique to the Amiga when it was released?