30 July 2018, 08:33 | #21 | ||
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30 July 2018, 17:02 | #22 | |
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A friend of mine had a wonderful CRT monitor (which name and model I no longer can remember), that allowed him to use full super hires laced to max overscan, flicker free and crystal sharp. He used monochrome screenmode, and it was a delight to use. |
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30 July 2018, 17:10 | #23 | |
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All these things are true. And pointless at the same time, because all of those consoles came out years after the Amiga did. Of course they where going to be better at games - they had technology in them (such as VRAM) which literally didn't exist when the Amiga was designed. It always struck me as odd anyway. After all, if you where willing to spend a fortune, you could have had a 24 bit graphics card for your PC back in 1985. Sure, it was useless for anything other than stills and cost more than most expensive cars did. But you could |
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30 July 2018, 19:59 | #24 | ||
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31 July 2018, 01:14 | #25 |
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But the whole point is that AGA, at the time of its release, was behind even older graphics systems such as (S)VGA, the SNES and even the Megadrive.
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31 July 2018, 05:02 | #26 | |
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In terms of resolution, AGA surpasses the consoles. VGA's only strengths are a chunky mode, but then Amiga was designed differently, for 80s platform games. Sprites are the Amiga's weakness in relation to the console, but then Jay Miner hardware sprites have always been weak compared to other systems. However, the Blitter makes up for it. If this is not what you mean, please explain. Last edited by Foebane; 31 July 2018 at 05:09. |
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31 July 2018, 12:04 | #27 |
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To begin with, AGA is very slow. Hardly anyone runs his Workbench in 256 colours, let alone at high resolutions, and hardly any game uses the full 256 colours unless it's mainly static screens since screen updates are too slow.
Having underpowered sprites in combination with a bitmap-based system with an underpowered blitter is poison for gaming. For productivity, most screen modes are flickery — even the ones described as flicker-free — and steal lots of DMA time. This is especially troublesome on the A1200, which has only chip memory. |
31 July 2018, 13:13 | #28 | |
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I've made a list of my favourite demos on Amiga over on the Demos board, and the high-end AGA ones are indicated by F to H. Have a look at them to see how fast AGA can be. |
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31 July 2018, 13:19 | #29 | |
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So on the one hand the AGA machines can display similar numbers of sprite pixels when compared to either the SNES or the Mega Drive, but the latter two are more flexible in terms of splitting those sprite pixels into individual objects. Ironically, this should've made the AGA machines quite good at displaying the old Amiga nemesis: the 2 player beat em up (which needs a few, but large objects), but no one seems to have bothered using sprites for AGA beat em ups. Last edited by roondar; 31 July 2018 at 13:21. Reason: Grammar. It's not simple. |
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31 July 2018, 13:20 | #30 |
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Like you said, it's the CPU doing all the hard work here, AGA is actually a huge bottleneck on 040/060-machines. So no, AGA is not fast.
EDIT: And let's be honest here, referencing modern 060/AGA-demos while trying to insist that AGA is fast is a bad idea, considering how sluggish most of them run on real hardware Last edited by britelite; 31 July 2018 at 13:33. |
31 July 2018, 19:10 | #31 | |
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It seems I've had a vastly inflated opinion of AGA, or as of now, I did have. Damn you, "Fastest Possible" mode. At least they look pretty, even if they are slow. |
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01 August 2018, 01:07 | #32 | |
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The A500 was quite a balanced architecture; you had to go beyond 16 colours or lowres before experiencing any CPU slowdowns. The A1200 is, given our expectations of it running at 256 colours and high resolutions, underpowered. |
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01 August 2018, 11:54 | #33 |
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On an A1200 the blitter is still faster than the CPU at it's most important tasks (the CPU can match the blitter in copy & clear speed - they're about even for those tasks, but not for the more complicated blits - there the blitter is still clearly faster). Even when fast ram is added the blitter still beats the CPU for the more complicated blits (which are the ones that you need for making games).
It's only when you start adding a faster processor that the blitter starts looking rather weak. On the A4000, yeah - there the blitter wasn't that good. But IMHO the main problem with AGA is not that the blitter was weak (you could say it was there just for backwards compatibility). The main problem with AGA is that chipram only has 7MB/sec of bandwidth for the CPU - at best. This (again IMHO) is more of a problem than any of the other things AGA did or didn't do - including the slow graphics fetches at high resolutions. If the same 28MB/second bandwidth that Lisa got was available for the CPU as well, a lot more would have been possible. |
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