Which OCS config to expect nowadays?

[dissident]

Hi,

I just want to know what to expect for OCS stuff nowadays. Do most people still use a vanilla A500/A500+ or is the Terrible Fire A534 accelerator card for the A500/A500+ common now?

[Photon]

I have no stats, but I guess they're not that common. There are 3 different answers here, however:

1. Dev: Choose a platform that makes your game run well and target and "market" it (docs/minimum specs on download page) for that platform. If you require lots of acceleration (and even FPU) it will be a quite small subset of A500 users.
2. Real HW Gamer: Expect an A500 rev 5 (1.3, 512k chip, 512k fast in trapdoor) to be the most compatible.
3. Emu/WHD Gamer: as 2 but additional compatibility is added so that you can usually have higher CPU speed, more fastmem, "Turbo" floppy emulation, etc. Keep chipmem at 512k and go with a full OCS chipset. Usually it's OK to just point to a blank Harddrive Directory or .hdf and fill it up with harddisk installable games, but sometimes you must still find the right floppy image and run it from floppy.

[dissident]

Originally Posted by Photon

I have no stats, but I guess they're not that common. There are 3 different answers here, however:

1. Dev: Choose a platform that makes your game run well and target and "market" it (docs/minimum specs on download page) for that platform. If you require lots of acceleration (and even FPU) it will be a quite small subset of A500 users.
2. Real HW Gamer: Expect an A500 rev 5 (1.3, 512k chip, 512k fast in trapdoor) to be the most compatible.
3. Emu/WHD Gamer: as 2 but additional compatibility is added so that you can usually have higher CPU speed, more fastmem, "Turbo" floppy emulation, etc. Keep chipmem at 512k and go with a full OCS chipset. Usually it's OK to just point to a blank Harddrive Directory or .hdf and fill it up with harddisk installable games, but sometimes you must still find the right floppy image and run it from floppy.

Many thanks for your very detailed answer, Photon. This helps me a lot.

[chip]

OCS rulez !

[Photon]

Hey, NP Dissident.

Even more detail (I wanted to keep the first answer to the point):

Re: 1. If it's impossible to fit the game in the A500 specs, e.g. lots of world updates or calculations, the recent Z80 transcoded games, and other things, some are made for "some acceleration" with backwards compatibility, so that if you have it, you don't need an A1200 etc.

And if it runs just a little bit over frame time sometimes (<30%), you can require only real fastmem, this can be enough and then A500 users without accelerator but with sidecar fastmem expansions, Kipper2K, A1000/A2000 with real fastmem, etc can run the game on OCS also.

[CCCP alert]

Above 512 Chip + 512 Fast RAM and 7mhz 68000 is going to exclude the majority of gamers on real hardware. For serious stuff...go for the max as it scales down I guess to 020?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Photon

A500 rev 5 (1.3, 512k chip, 512k fast)[/LIST]

But remember that it's not real fast, it's what is called "slow mem" in WinUAE.

I don't think this configuration is the most prevalent these days.