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Originally Posted by hammer
PSX's Psy-Q SDK is superior since it's focused on game development.
Psy-Q was an SDK created by SN Systems Limited and Psygnosis.
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If the A1200 was a dedicated games console that didn't share 90% of its architecture with previous Amigas then this would be relevant. But then it wouldn't have a keyboard, mouse, floppy drive and hard drive, multitasking GUI OS etc. so you would absolutely need that (expensive) development system. And you would
only be using it to develop games, not applications like Final Writer or IBrowse.
BTW Sony had their own development system based on MIPS R4000 which was much more expensive. Small-time developers could forget about their dreams of producing innovative PlayStation games.
The attraction of Psy-Q over the official Sony SDK was that mere mortals might be able to afford it. But how many did? Meanwhile any Amiga owner could grab a copy of Hisoft Devpac and Deluxe Paint, and be making hot Amiga games in their bedroom for peanuts. A good example of this is Another World:-
The polygons of Another World: Amiga 500
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Since the A500 was the development machine, it is the original version built from 1989 to 1991 by then 21 years old Eric Chahi working alone in his bedroom.
Two reasons made the Amiga the perfect development machine. First, the GenLock allowed to super-impose a video camera output onto the computer own outputs which enabled rotoscoping. Second, and most importantly, the Amiga Agnus immensely facilitated polygons rendering.
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Another World (video game)
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In August 1989, Chahi was impressed by the flat-color animations that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair had and thought that it would be possible to use vector outlines to create a similar effect using much less computer storage. After first attempting to write the graphical routines in C, he turned to assembly language... he found that he could run the code on the Amiga platform and achieve a frame rate of about 20 frames per second...
He was able to take advantage of the Amiga's genlock capabilities to create rotoscoped animations with the polygons, using video recordings of himself performing various actions... Chahi resorted to developing his own tool with a new programming language through GFA BASIC coupled with the game's engine in Devpac assembler, to control and animate the game...
Chahi acquired the rights to Another World's intellectual property from Delphine Software International after they closed down in July 2004. Magic Productions then offered to port the game to mobile phones, and it was ported with help from Cyril Cogordan. Chahi saw that the game's playability could be improved, so he used his old Amiga for reprogramming certain parts of the script and made the graphics' shading clearer in order to counter mobile phones' low resolutions.
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