Outrun AGA

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Thanks for the update.

I 'm now wondering why it says this is an AGA game, but with only a 16 colour palette?

Aside from the speed gains from limiting bitplanes, AGA also offers other benefits like sprites being larger and more useful as well as improved throughput over OCS/ECS.

[saimon69]

AND dual playfield on AGA works as 4+4 bitplanes so 16 and 15 colors, but we also have 16 color sprites that work a bit better and a 24 bit palette, and a copper...

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by saimon69

AND dual playfield on AGA works as 4+4 bitplanes so 16 and 15 colors, but we also have 16 color sprites that work a bit better and a 24 bit palette, and a copper...

AGA, the gift that keeps on giving.

[lifeschool]

Thanks. Certainly chipset timings are one good reason for sure, as is 32-bit fast ram.

If I'm using Cannonball, I dont expect it to run below an 040. But then, I guess the idea for this game/thread is simply to replace the pathetic conversion of OutRun we got on the amiga, with an authentic port?

[saimon69]

Well, i still hope to see a playable Outrun (not necessarily faithful) for OCS/ECS, is one of my personal grudges with US Gold port

[agermose]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Just wanted to ask, how far along is the game engine at this stage? I have it listed on Lemon Amiga as bare bones, but is it in fact playable?

I think the original Outrun cabinet used x2 68000 chips, but I dont think it had a hardware sprite scailler? But maybe there was another chip to handle the logic? It's not that Ram was faster when outrun came out, so it might be just a buffering issue?

But I dont think the 020 has enough horse power to match x2 68000's. For one thing, the 000 has a 32bit internal clock, and the 020 still has the same 32bit internal clock, so you arn't really gaining a perfect match, even with Instruction Caches enabled. Perhaps just say the game is for 040 AGA users, and then it will work fine.?

The game is playable, but not all elements are complete, collisions are rough.
The 14.2 mhz 020 can match the 2 68000’s in the arcade.
Outrun arcade had hw sprite scaling.
Reassemblers port will run ok on 68040 I believe.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by VincentGR

Outrun was a beast.
It even had a GPU with Z-buffering and depth map.
Extra hardware for dual road rendering.
And even if we assume that the road was CPU driven, the chipset could scale everything else.

Did it really? On the arcade the main 68k CPU sorted the sprites in z, and made a list for the sprite hw with x,y,xzoom,yzoom.
The sprite hw did the drawing from that list.
The road hw drew the 2 roads from road data prepared by the 2nd 68000.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Thanks for the update.

I 'm now wondering why it says this is an AGA game, but with only a 16 colour palette?
Of course the game will speed up in 16 colour mode, but why not 256? That would save a lot of time when it comes to a common palette?

I know the pain of common palettes from my efforts of making games, especially the Dizzy 1 Prototype. In the end I made a shortcut. I used an extended (64 col) palette with all kinds of random colours on it, and 8 fixed colours at the start of it. So the level graphics were fixed to 8 colours per level/screen, but the sprites could pick out any of the other colours when they needed them. But even my demo needs an 030 to play it.

If you read Adrian’s post again you’ll realise this is running in 32 colour mode.
256 colours uses 60% more memory and 60% more blitter time, which we don’t have.

And AGA is more than just the additional bitplanes.
64 bit sprites, FMODE4, 68020 cpu, 32 bit architecture all help.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

The more bitplanes you use, the less time for other stuff you have.
So, the least amount of bitplanes you can get away with is the best option.

Like always on the Amiga, it's about finding the best compromise, and then finding ways to make that one pretty.

Spot on. No surprise, you know what you’re talking about.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by saimon69

AND dual playfield on AGA works as 4+4 bitplanes so 16 and 15 colors, but we also have 16 color sprites that work a bit better and a 24 bit palette, and a copper...

This is single playfield. I did have a dual playfield version initially, but switched for more colours.
24 bit colours are used in some places.

Adrian is doing a stellar job of bringing Outrun to AGA 32 colour mode.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well, i still hope to see a playable Outrun (not necessarily faithful) for OCS/ECS, is one of my personal grudges with US Gold port

I want that as well.
This port uses too much memory, and AGA hw for OCS.
OCS version maybe in the future, but don’t count on it.
Other devs maybe?

[agermose]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Thanks. Certainly chipset timings are one good reason for sure, as is 32-bit fast ram.

If I'm using Cannonball, I dont expect it to run below an 040. But then, I guess the idea for this game/thread is simply to replace the pathetic conversion of OutRun we got on the amiga, with an authentic port?

For AGA Amigas yes that was the idea.

[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well, i still hope to see a playable Outrun (not necessarily faithful) for OCS/ECS, is one of my personal grudges with US Gold port

I know what you mean. If only we had a port. A port is a 1:1 carry over of the code and graphics; just like Dizzy 2 was ported over from the Amstrad to the Spectrum and C64, and was identical. A conversion is built from scratch, and is an interpretation. So Dizzy 2 is a good convention, but OutRun is a totally bad one. That's why half of the CD32 games are bad, because they are just ports from the A1200.

Originally Posted by agermose

Adrian is doing a stellar job of bringing Outrun to AGA 32 colour mode.

Ah ok, 32 colours does sound good actually.

Don't forget, Out Run is the game's official name, not Outrun.

I've updated this to Playable status on lemon, and added an 'Active' tag as well. You guys please take it easy, I don't like to see burn-outs, I prefer doughnuts.

[pixie]

Originally Posted by Dunny

AGA, the gift that keeps on giving.

I guess there's still a lot to squeeze out of AGA.

[jotd]

link went awol

[agermose]

Originally Posted by jotd

link went awol

What link?

[jotd]

wrong thread sorry

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Of course the game will speed up in 16 colour mode, but why not 256?

Actually, I remember reading, not so long a go, on this forum, that there is no AGA game (or is very very rare) that uses whole 256 color palette.
Not even the likes of Banshee, or Aladdin...
They are using more like 64-128 color palette.

From what I understand full, 256 color palette is really demanding.
It's not like "I have an AGA.. let's turn the 256 color palette, and we are good to go", it's more like a limit of the system, and using all 256 colors will limit you in a wide areas of other things.

I am saying all above as a guy who doesn't code, so bear that in mind.

As for the colors, I personally did many tests on conversions on Amiga, and I draw on Amiga a lot, and all I can say that above 64 colors (or even 32 colors) doesn't really makes much difference.
In these resolutions you really can't tell difference if the image is in 64 or 128 colors.. or even much less if it's 128 compared to 256.
But between 8 to 16 - Dear God.. like heaven and hell... between 16 and 32.. much less... but you can still clearly see the difference.

But why I really adore Amiga is that we can, whatever numbers of colors that we choose.. we get to pick any color we want from gigantic palette of 4096 colors of oldest Amigas (OCS/ECS) or 16,7 millions colors from AGA.
This is SOOO important for anyone who likes to paint, and is so powerful feature for the time...

man...

It's beautiful in a fantasy way.

[lmimmfn]

The simple fact is that more bitplanes and thus more colours result in higher DMA access to update the screen. Max chipram write for AGA is 7 MB/second which divided by 50 is 140KB per 50th of a second(single 16 colour 320x256 screen is 40Kb), but DMA slots are split across audio, floppy copper, sprites and screen.
So really a game needs to consider these absolute limitations and make the best possible combination of DMA slot usage.

[logo]

It's the same on many systems. Most Snes and Neo-Geo games don't use 256 colors mode for speed and memory reasons.