Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

Mode 3's 1 layer 256 color and 256x224 resolution.

https://nesdoug.com/2022/05/30/other-modes/

Mode 3
Mode 3 has 1 layer 256 color and 1 layer 16 color per tile.
...

Please use QUOTE tags for quoting text, not CODE tags.

All these detailed hardware comparisons are silly. What matters is game design, not the exact number of colors etc. that can theoretically be displayed. So long as the hardware is powerful enough to realize the designer's intent it's fine. And as with many things, often less is more.

The A1200 represented a big step up on the Amiga's 2D capabilities. If the A500 could do amazing games (which it did) the A1200 would do even better - provided that developers didn't get carried away with the extra capabilities and try to push them beyond the limit. The faster and more powerful CPU also meant that games needing a lot of compute power would be improved too. But once again the improvement wasn't limitless. Designers who understood that could do amazing stuff.

The biggest problem with some Amiga games wasn't the technical stuff, but poor design of the actual game. All the hardware capabilities in the World wouldn't have made up for it.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by hammer

Apple's DTP, publishinh photo editing and WYSIWYG word processing target market is larger and it pays for somebody's employment.

Yes, of course Apple's market was bigger than the Amiga's.
But in the Apple range to my knowledge, only one model used the DSP 3210. Apart from "office" uses, the DSP seems to me to have been used very little.
In any case, the MAC which was equipped with it was, as always, excessively expensive. To my knowledge in the MAC world there wasn't really anything equivalent to the demomaker trend.
From my point of view, a DSP 3210 would surely have been much better used on the Amiga, like on MAC for office applications, but also for many other things, including unexpected things.
We can see that on Falcon the DSP allows a lot of nice things.

DSP3210 was used for QuickDraw acceleration in place of Am29K RISC CPU in 1990 Mac II. Am29K wasn't a $20 to $30 part.

Thank you for the information.
This shows that the DSP 3210 could perhaps have helped the AGA.
On the other hand, here too, I find that Apple has still limited itself in the use of DSP. Given the price of the MAC which was equipped with it, they would have done better to leave their am29k for the display, as on the other models and to have the DSP in addition and therefore freer to do other things in parallel.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Thank god somebody mentioned Doom again, I was getting worried.

In case of argument-loss: Mention Doom. Checks out.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

@babsimov

If you couple my specs with 28mhz 32/64bit chipram + 28mhz fastmem + 28mhz "trapdoor ram"(without bitplanes penalties) + 28mhz chip registers' bus(without bitplanes penalties), you should have a lot of room without ramping up AGA COST.

What would you have? 28/56MB * 4! Better than DSP I would have add a "true" processor like PPC...

For my part, the DSP looked much more modern at the time.
I regret that the Amiga community didn't have the chance to have this kind of technology brought to market.
I am convinced that we would have seen a lot of good things achieved with a DSP.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The strategy was clear enough - it just didn't match their abilities.

So... their strategy was to release an outdated product just to replace it with another product within a year?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Like many companies, Commodore wanted to have a finger in every pie. Take Microsoft for example. Were they in the business of making an OS, or applications? Which OS would they push - DOS, or Xenix, or Windows? And which Windows - the one that ran on top of DOS, or the one that didn't (Windows NT)? And what hardware would they support - just the IBM PC, or one they designed themselves (Windows CE), or something completely different (smart phones)? And what about games - should they just supply a general purpose OS which supported them along with business apps etc., or should they make a dedicated games console to compete with the likes of Sony and Nintendo? Being Microsoft they tried to do it all of course!

MS phase out Xenix development with joint development with IBM on OS/2. SCO took over Xenix's development.

IBM and Microsoft signed the "Joint Development Agreement" in August 1985.

For Windows NT, Dave Cutler left DEC for Microsoft in October 1988 and led the development of Windows NT.

[ Show youtube player ]
The Rise and Fall of the IBM PC Part 3: The Cloners Strike Back. Includes background on OS/2, IBM vs MS culture clash and partnership collapse.
OS/2 is bloated in 1987 and 1988. Windows 2.0 is less bloated.
OS/2 couldn't print to non-IBM printers. Windows 2.0 can print to non-IBM printers.

32-bit Windows NT's purpose is to replace 16-bit MS-DOS.
OS/2's purpose is to replace 16-bit MS-DOS.
Apple's 32-bit/16-bit 68000-based Mac replaced the 8-bit Apple II.


[ Show youtube player ]
The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 2: Windows 2x. For OS/2 project, Bill Gates (full 386 support) vs IBM's Bill Lowe (full 286 support). Bill Lowe resisted 386.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

SNES exceeds 121 colors,

At 0:06 of 2:13. SNES reached 161 colors.
At 1:00 of 2:13. SNES reached 151 colors in gameplay.

How you are counting those colors - hope not from analog video output an YT compressed videos...?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

An A1200 with 14MHz 020 and DSP chip could achieve similar results to putting a 50MHz 030 in it - except the 030 would accelerate everything, not just the few things suited to the DSP.

Are you sure on this? how many cycles is required by 68030 to perform ordinary multiplication operation? - 030 will be probably 30..50 times slower than DSP on this...

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by hammer

SNES exceeds 121 colors,

At 0:06 of 2:13. SNES reached 161 colors.
At 1:00 of 2:13. SNES reached 151 colors in gameplay.

121 is the limit for background colours in Mode 1, but there are also a whole 120 colours available for sprites. And then there's colour maths too which can be used for lighting/transparency type effects. Of course you'll possibly want some colours, like black, in every palette so there's probably a lost of repetition but I'd be surprised if most SNES games don't have 150+ colours on screen most of the time.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

121 is the limit for background colours in Mode 1, but there are also a whole 120 colours available for sprites. And then there's colour maths too which can be used for lighting/transparency type effects. Of course you'll possibly want some colours, like black, in every palette so there's probably a lost of repetition but I'd be surprised if most SNES games don't have 150+ colours on screen most of the time.

Of course if you take every possible tricks and
But the SNES doesn't use 256 colors at once generally. It is a theoretical number, just like saying that the A1200 can display 262000 colors at once on screen.

Correctly used, with the copper the theoretical limit of the OCS and the AGA could also be outpassed by much more. Brian the Lion or Worms DC far exceed 256 colors.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by babsimov

Yes, of course Apple's market was bigger than the Amiga's.
But in the Apple range to my knowledge, only one model used the DSP 3210. Apart from "office" uses, the DSP seems to me to have been used very little.
In any case, the MAC which was equipped with it was, as always, excessively expensive. To my knowledge in the MAC world there wasn't really anything equivalent to the demomaker trend.

Quadra 660AV (US$1970 to US$2,300) has the full 68040 @ 25 Mhz, DSP3210 @ 55 Mhz, SCSI, video-in/video-out and dedicated 1MB VRAM.

Quadra 660AV's can display 512x384 and 640x400 at 24-bit color, 640x480, 800x600, and 832x624 at 16-bit color and 1024x768 and 1152x870 at 8-bit color.

Reference
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/m...dra_660av.html

AGA doesn't run on expensive 1 MB VRAM.

PC SVGA example like ET4000AX has 32-bit DRAM or 16-bit VRAM options.

Originally Posted by babsimov

Thank you for the information.
This shows that the DSP 3210 could perhaps have helped the AGA.
On the other hand, here too, I find that Apple has still limited itself in the use of DSP. Given the price of the MAC which was equipped with it, they would have done better to leave their am29k for the display, as on the other models and to have the DSP in addition and therefore freer to do other things in parallel.

DSP 3210 has a hardware barrel shifter at 50 Mhz to 66 Mhz for bit manipulation in graphics or data encryption.

A1200 has 68EC020 has hardware barrel shifter @ 14 Mhz. How much is 68040 @ 25Mhz in 1992?

For soft bilt, DSP 3210 has a hardware barrel shifter @ 50Mhz with 3D FP32 math (25 MFLOPS) hardware for $20 to $30.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

How you are counting those colors - hope not from analog video output an YT compressed videos...?

I'm not VCDECIDE.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Please use QUOTE tags for quoting text, not CODE tags.

All these detailed hardware comparisons are silly. What matters is game design, not the exact number of colors etc. that can theoretically be displayed. So long as the hardware is powerful enough to realize the designer's intent it's fine. And as with many things, often less is more.

The A1200 represented a big step up on the Amiga's 2D capabilities. If the A500 could do amazing games (which it did) the A1200 would do even better - provided that developers didn't get carried away with the extra capabilities and try to push them beyond the limit. The faster and more powerful CPU also meant that games needing a lot of compute power would be improved too. But once again the improvement wasn't limitless. Designers who understood that could do amazing stuff.

The biggest problem with some Amiga games wasn't the technical stuff, but poor design of the actual game. All the hardware capabilities in the World wouldn't have made up for it.

What matters is the ease of programming.

It wouldn't remove the fact that Turrican 2 AGA (with PC VGA 256 color art assets) requires Fast RAM to maintain the target frame rate. A1200 must have Fast RAM as baseline.

I'm aware with race raster beam copper color palette change can be zone tiled across the entire screen e.g. Pang.

I'm aware of Amiga OCS's ability to approximate VGA 256 color PC adventure games like Universe or sports games like Links via HAM mode.

Games like Metro-Siege has copper-based color shading on 4 bitplane display.

As shown from A500's Quake running on HAM6 mode, high compute power and Fast RAM helps.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Of course if you take every possible tricks and
But the SNES doesn't use 256 colors at once generally. It is a theoretical number, just like saying that the A1200 can display 262000 colors at once on screen.

Correctly used, with the copper the theoretical limit of the OCS and the AGA could also be outpassed by much more. Brian the Lion or Worms DC far exceed 256 colors.

[ Show youtube player ]
With high math power, Amiga 500's HAM mode can display Quake VGA approximation at playable frame rates.

A500's HAM mode has no problems displaying procedural generated frames from the CPU's side at near full motion video.

Amiga 500's HAM mode can display near full motion video from Time Gal laser disc port.

[ Show youtube player ]
With high math power, A1200 AGA's 256 colors mode can display Star Wars Dark Force at more than 50 fps for 320x200. That's pretty good for a "display adapter."

Amiga AGA chipset is reasonable for frame buffer display with CPU/Fast RAM's side doing the hard compute workload.

My argument position is to keep AGA as is and argue for cheapo high math power for the job in the 1991-1992 time period. DSP3201 compute capable for Doom with good frame rates.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Of course if you take every possible tricks and
But the SNES doesn't use 256 colors at once generally. It is a theoretical number, just like saying that the A1200 can display 262000 colors at once on screen.

Correctly used, with the copper the theoretical limit of the OCS and the AGA could also be outpassed by much more. Brian the Lion or Worms DC far exceed 256 colors.

SNES is 256 color capable e.g. Doom.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Remember, Amiga is an Actual Home Computer (PC) not a pure console!

Amiga has a game console nature with a keyboard, a mouse, and a game controller.

Amiga's graphics chipset transition into the next generation is like a games console, unlike gaming PC's upgradable graphics adapter modularity. There's a graphics chipset generation transition issue during Commodore's best revenue years of 1989, 1990 and 1991.

The Amiga sits between a game console and a gaming PC.

"Only the Amiga" rendered its full 32-bit equipped 68020/68030 Amiga OCS/ECS models as dead ends for 256-color gaming.

A full 32-bit desktop PC with either 386DX or 486, the same PC can join 256 color VGA gaming.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Exactly. More complicated dedicated hardware that was only present on that one platform - and a subset of it to boot. Meanwhile in the real world (Doom) how was it being done? Purely in software which could run on any platform with enough compute power.

An A1200 with 14MHz 020 and DSP chip could achieve similar results to putting a 50MHz 030 in it - except the 030 would accelerate everything, not just the few things suited to the DSP. And the same stuff would run on any other Amiga with a fast CPU (even better if its CPU was faster). Furthermore - perhaps more importantly - you could port games from that other platform (the PC) with minimal effort.

https://www.academia.edu/76445360/Th...gnal_processor
For older DSP32C's whitepaper.

Although DAU instructions employ a fetch-multiply-accumulate-store pipeline, the pipeline timing is such that the DSP32C achieves a throughput of one instruction per instruction cycle

DSP32C has CAU (integer) and DAU (floating) pipelines.

DSP3210 is the successor for DSP32C.

Without the MMU requirement, there are reasons why 68030 was dumped for RISC competitors e.g. SuperH2.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Of course if you take every possible tricks and
But the SNES doesn't use 256 colors at once generally. It is a theoretical number, just like saying that the A1200 can display 262000 colors at once on screen.

But 241 colours is without any tricks whatsoever, in the most common SNES mode. As I said, practical realities will tend towards duplicating some colours across the various palettes and so forth. So 150+ colours on screen is a more conservative estimate. If you pull out all the stops and use every trick in the book, well then you get Donkey Kong Country level graphics.

And that's part of why the A1200 was so disappointing for gamers. You can argue back and forth over the A500 and MegaDrive, each having different strengths and weaknesses from a graphical perspective. But the A1200, despite being it's contemporary, was such a long way behind what the SNES was capable of.

[sandruzzo]

@hammer

Sorry Pal, but you're hammering this thread with the same exact datas: what's the point?

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by hammer

Quadra 660AV (US$1970 to US$2,300) has the full 68040 @ 25 Mhz, DSP3210 @ 55 Mhz, SCSI, video-in/video-out and dedicated 1MB VRAM.

Quadra 660AV's can display 512x384 and 640x400 at 24-bit color, 640x480, 800x600, and 832x624 at 16-bit color and 1024x768 and 1152x870 at 8-bit color.

Reference
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/m...dra_660av.html

AGA doesn't run on expensive 1 MB VRAM.

PC SVGA example like ET4000AX has 32-bit DRAM or 16-bit VRAM options.

I'm not saying that this MAC wasn't more powerful than the AGA generation. Just that I don't feel like the DSP inside was used to its full potential. If Apple had not limited the DSP to a single model, perhaps things would have been different on this point. But that's not even certain, since the target audience for the MAC was very different from that of the Falcon or the 1200. Of course, all of this is just a guess on my part.

DSP 3210 has a hardware barrel shifter at 50 Mhz to 66 Mhz for bit manipulation in graphics or data encryption.

A1200 has 68EC020 has hardware barrel shifter @ 14 Mhz. How much is 68040 @ 25Mhz in 1992?

For soft bilt, DSP 3210 has a hardware barrel shifter @ 50Mhz with 3D FP32 math (25 MFLOPS) hardware for $20 to $30.

I read the DSP 3210 specifications a while ago, at the time I initiated discussion with the Falcon community about DSP.
Of course, I am convinced that this DSP would have brought a significant gain to AGA. This is why I sought to learn more about this DSP and also about what a DSP could provide.
So I went to the community that i see the closest to the Amiga community feeling and which was lucky enough to have a DSP as standard, the Falcon community.