Hm. Not sure why you create this argument, because the facts are well-known and they... kinda refute you on all points. :spin
Let's see. In general, you can't compare computers and consoles because computers do so much more! :great But you'll notice that any consoles that beat Amiga for sprites came after Amiga. Amiga 500 had the best sprite chip on the market, while its main competitors the ST and Archimedes had nothing. You can't compare the Amiga's visionary design with a jack-a-buck budget imitation of specialized arcade PCBs. The Megadrive and SNES were absolutely horrid as soon as you wanted to do something that didn't fit within their narrow limitations, whereas on Amiga you could and can make any game you want. Lastly, Giana and Turrican are objectively technically better than Mario and Metroid. Now, to showcase the Amiga's sprite hardware fully, you have to take advantage of it. By adapting your game idea to Amiga (as was done on consoles because that's all they could do), lots can be done, and the Amiga is capable of full dynamic multiplexing with fallback to bobs, but AFAIK few games implemented the full tech. |
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We teen amigans wanted the moon and the stars that dpaint screenshots promised to us, rather than the dark room with a white baloon and christmas lights ceiling that european software houses were giving us mostly :/ |
By the way, question: can amiga sprites be stretched out like on c64 and Atari?
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Due to colour limitations some sprites are simply set as bobs (the Blue robotic dude being one example). Put to good use..the hardware sprites can make for some pretty awesome effects in games....but an Amiga programmer has to work harder to exploit them than a console programmer (in my opinion). |
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@mcgeezer: that's pretty impressive. All this to save CPU/blitter saving/restoring the background!
I'm upgrading my SDL-like engine so it can use sprites or bobs indifferently. Just the image type differs, and the SDL-like "blit" routine will adapt. |
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Slightly more seriously: these days we're all much more aware of how big the price difference really was, so surely we can see why the comparison is such a weird one to make? Quote:
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What makes console sprites easier? |
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Well, the C64 was like 2/3 years later, which was a lot of time given the speed of evolution back then. The Atari P/M graphics evolved from the even more primitive TIA display generator which did not even had a framebuffer (or playfield, to use the term from back then). Thus, P/M graphics are just a DMA channel and a priority generator. You need to understand the evolution from the TIA to ANTIC/GTIA to learn why the P/M system is so primitive. It was the best and simplest they could do with the technology back then. As far as I know, more than 1/2 of the C64 VIC is devoted to sprite generation and the sprite logic. |
The layout of sprite management bits in register space was a bit flubbed, IMO.
Manual mode would have been much more useful if horizontal position information for each sprite had been in a single register word instead of in two, and all sprite horizontal position registers collected together in a block of eight registers. With such an arrangement the CPU could have been used to quickly move pairs of sprites to a new place on the same scanline with MOVE.L. |
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With multiplexing however, you can get way more sprites on screen. Now, multiplexing itself does not have to be hard per se, but it is certainly harder than just picking a free sprite number. It can also get quite tricky to multiplex correctly depending on your needs (just read what McGeezer wrote about Rygar AGA earlier in this thread - that is way more complicated than just setting up some sprite coordinates). Couple that with the lower width of OCS Amiga sprites (16 pixels) compared to C64 sprites (24 pixels), Mega Drive sprites (up to 32 pixels) and SNES sprites (up to 64 pixels) and you can see it becomes tricky to use the sprites in such a way they are as useful as they can be. It gets a bit easier with AGA because the sprites can be wider (up to 64 pixels), but you're still limited in terms of how many sprites you get without using multiplexing. *) depends on the console, but the Mega Drive for instance offers you 80 of them at the same time. Quote:
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What is "manual mode"?
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RE: Giana Sisters/Turrican
In the context of this discussion, I have to agree with Photon. When looked at from a purely technical level, these games are indeed objectively better games than Super Mario Brothers or Metroid. This does not need to imply they are better games to play, by the way. That, however, would be rather off-topic to discuss here so I won't ;) |
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Also consoles mostly allow horizontal and vertical flipping of the sprites, especially the former is not easy to do on the Amiga and usually requires storing both directions. |
The following is somewhat, but not completely off-topic. It's more about me being a completionist than anything else ;)
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Looking at the specs, I'd personally guess the intention of this hardware sprite is to be used as a mouse pointer or similar. I'll freely admit that it's probably not what Archimedes coders generally relied on for games though. I just thought it was interesting and figured I'd add it here in the discussion as we've been comparing sprite hardware between the Amiga and other systems here. |
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