Quote:
Originally Posted by oscar_ates
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This article has some interesting historical information that some people may not know about, but the rest of it is unrealistic armchair engineering.
No, ECS could
not have had 'enormously more useful' 256 colors. In fact they would be pretty useless, because:-
1. 8 bitplanes would suck up all the bandwidth. Combine that with double the blitter load and it would be horribly slow. The same problem would also occur with dual playfields. This is why AGA has 2x and 4x fetch modes.
2. The main reason for having 256 colors is to match the graphics in PC games. But when they consist of 32 colors with 6 brightnesses achieved by bit shifting it becomes very difficult to match palettes. The darker shades lose color resolution, so in practice you end up with far less than 256
useful colors.
OCS already had 64 colors with EHB, yet very few games used it because even 6 bitplanes taxed the system too much. if people thought AGA was disappointing they would be even less impressed by ECS with 256 colors done this way.
He says adding stereo panning to Paula would be 'trivial'. But as you can see from the
die photo, there is no spare silicon to add this feature to the existing design. A completely new chip would have the designed, and as Paula is a
mixed signal (digital and analog) IC this would not be easy.
The suggestions for making ChipRAM access faster don't apply to the 68000, and would be useless on faster CPUs without greatly increasing ChipRAM bandwidth. This would be a lot more than just a little tweak. The caching ideas would also involve a lot of extra circuitry and tricky logic, with significant compatibility issues.
This article derides the "Read my lips – no new chips" command, but if it was intended to avoid stuff like this then it was justified. Trying to jam all these features into ECS could have set back its release by years. Commodore had to get the A3000 out while it still had a chance to be relevant - thus 'no new chips' - but in fact it had heaps of new chips in it already.