Vampire discourse, keep it civil (was: Vampire 1200 V2 waiting times)

[hammer]

Originally Posted by TCD

CBM didn't survive its own bad business decisions way before Doom appeared. Doom might have been the final nail in the coffin, but CBM was most likely dead in December 1993 anyway.

Commodore International announced voluntary bankruptcy liquidation on May 6, 1994.

Escom was also bankrupt on 15 July 1996. Ex-Commodore Germany's team doesn't know to market and manage the Amiga.

There were PC first perspective 2.5D games precursors to Doom such as Wolfenstein 3D and Wing Commander. PC's Wing Commander in 1990 was PC's "Defender of the Crown" moment.

Commodore was aware of the rise of PC's 2.5D/3D games since CD32 has Akiko C2P but rejected David Pleasance's push to ship out-of-the-box Amiga 1200 with CPU accelerators.

Market timing is important.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

What’s XAGA?

XAGA is the future, it's XTREEEEEEEME AGA. The natural evolution of the Amiga where we used the features of off the shelf GPUs rather that having the CPU and a dumb framebuffer.

Voodoo 3 was XAGA, 20 years old and far more powerful than SAGA and equivalent to AAA+.

Also if you have an undead problem, whether it's ghasts, ghosts, spectres, vampires, wights, wraiths, zombies, the first person you should call is a Voodoo practitioner-that's just common sense!



Then we have CrayGA, which is at least AAAAG-AA.

[Promilus]

Yeah, but sad truth is that there's not a single solution out there to fit Amiga with relative ease. Should there be any open source solution (as with nouveau for GF, amdgpu for Radeons, Lima for Mali 400) they would still require massive development to get it working under AmigaOS (3). That's why you have to pay to get working driver for AOS4. I'm not quite familiar how VooDoo came to AmigaOS3 with h/w support but I can only guess it was due to part of their tech being open sourced just before it was acquired by nvidia. But... as I have explained nowadays we have nothing even close to that (and GPUs became incredibly complex in comparison to VooDoo3). 2D RTG with some 3D support is fairly reasonable, especially when you realize there aren't all that much games in amiga world requiring hardware 3d acceleration in the first place. On the other hand should V2 introduce PCIE slot back in the middle of 2010s I guess there just might be some working solution right now. So... who knows.

[jbenam]

Can we just admit that there is no real reason for 3D accelerators on the Amiga?

It saddens me when I see development efforts being spent on implementing new 3D hardware for the Amiga. That being said, everyone is free to spend their free time as they like but... IMHO, this time and these skills could be better spent on creating FPGA replacements for the *real* Amiga chips that are now failing and/or extremely expensive to purchase.

Nothing uses 3D on the Amiga, except PC ports. Not even the last few true Amiga games that used 3D (Nemac IV, Gloom 3, Trapped 2, Shadow of the Third Moon...) used Warp3D. Literally the only true Amiga game that cared to use it was Payback, and only as a patch.

It was a "solution" to a non-existing problem - how to sell a few more games to the few stalwarts that still refused to purchase a PC back in 2001. Since we have all capitulated by now and have at least one PC in our homes, can we just stop caring about Warp3D?

New games don't bother using it (for good reason - if you're developing for the Amiga, it makes sense to use Amiga-exclusive features, like using the chipset) and if we really need to desperately play Wipeout, there are plenty of ways to do so on the PCs or smartphones we are all writing from.

That's unless we need more PC ports (and I think we have plenty of those already)

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Can we just admit that there is no real reason for 3D accelerators on the Amiga?

I agree with this regarding classic Amiga, it's more interesting/challenging to have the limitation of the original custom chips when coding "3D".

Originally Posted by jbenam

IMHO, this time and these skills could be better spent on creating FPGA replacements for the *real* Amiga chips that are now failing and/or extremely expensive to purchase.

Which Amiga chips are missing?

I assumed after Minimig (and later Minimig-AGA) hardware was released open source (Verilog) that the custom chips can be reproduced functionality wise. Perhaps this is about the work of separating the functionality into pin compatible PCB drop-in replacements for each chip?

[Promilus]

it's more interesting/challenging to have the limitation of the original custom chips when coding "3D".

Except SAGA is designed to bypass those limitations (by having much higher memory bandwidth, additional sprites and display modes etc.)
So ... we either either are pretty comfortable with what AGA offers or we need something much more (in which case regular RTG implementation is just barely adequate). SAGA is somewhere between.

Which Amiga chips are missing?

Super Fat Agnus (8375, 8372AB), Ramsey 07 + DMAC 04, Super Buster ...

[Chucky]

there are a reason why the demoscene focus on original Amiga and cpus.. as if they would do 3D etc etc. why not instead do a shader on a PC? they want to do whatever is possible with the old hardware.. actually more and more going to stock machines and not only AGA+060.

but putting energy to do 3d etc etc is total waste of time and energy.

[StormLord]

Originally Posted by Chucky

there are a reason why the demoscene focus on original Amiga and cpus.. as if they would do 3D etc etc. why not instead do a shader on a PC? they want to do whatever is possible with the old hardware.. actually more and more going to stock machines and not only AGA+060.

but putting energy to do 3d etc etc is total waste of time and energy.

I'm all in to platform progress. It's like a demoscene for platforms, what you can do with this old architecture/platform.
Don't forget that when PPC accelerators existed it had a quite big impact, even-though it was a dead platform already.
There were some amazing demos for PPC and these were/is enough of me to keep my PPC setup.
Groups can compete in oldscool stock machines, but there is a possibility couple of them will get advantage of the "new" hardware and present something just for the sake of "what amiga can do"

[Chucky]

There was a few PPC demos (was there anyone else then polish groups that did demos for the PPC?)

but being kinda active in the scene and talking to quite a few of the coders I still have to find one single person even thinking of doing anything vampire.. why bother? more fun to that stuff on a weird platform in that case.

[chucsmom69]

The only reason id be interested in this apollo maggie shit would be if it could be put to work for decent ports of quake 3, unreal tournament, open lara and the like. Instead all i see is games like apollo blocks and apollo invaders? Erm nope i have my snes and megadrive for those kinda games!

[James]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Can we just admit that there is no real reason for 3D accelerators on the Amiga?

No.

Originally Posted by jbenam

Nothing uses 3D on the Amiga, except PC ports.

Not true.

Originally Posted by jbenam

Literally

Originally Posted by jbenam

the only true Amiga game that cared to use it was Payback

Not nothing then - that was the only commercial game, but there are a few other games, and other software too.

Originally Posted by jbenam

and only as a patch.

Calling it a patch is a bit misleading, it was an update and includes new executables.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by James

Not nothing then - that was the only commercial game, but there are a few other games, and other software too.

Would you settle for "next to nothing" then?

[James]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Would you settle for "next to nothing" then?

Yes.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Would you settle for "next to nothing" then?

To be fair HOL is lacking when it comes to PPC based games (not saying there are tons more out there though, just in general).

[Promilus]

@dreadnaught - both Wolf and Doom can be considered 3D (while not exactly being fully 3D) and neither of those support 3d hardware at all... Not Gloom, not AB3D, not Dread... So having 3d capable hardware doesn't bring up much to amiga classic. And yes - original point (nothing uses 3D on Amiga - 3D hardware!) was few ports (and handful of updated native Amiga titles). And that's exactly what those W3D cards did brought to Amiga 68k. New inexpensive 3D HW would not change anything.

Even with AC68080 that's still only Pentium MMX level of gameplay, maybe early Pentium II. Which means Unreal Tournament is possible but barely playable. And that's with real 3D hardware (with half a decent fillrate and texel rate plus effects like alpha blending, texture filtering) and not part of SAGA blitter supplemented by ISA extensions (which actually makes more sense when adapting software renderer and doesn't need any API, libs, drivers so it's usable nearly out of the box on V4 hardware).

[Galahad/FLT]

So, other than Elite Frontier's intro looking great on Vampire, have we got any other candidates that actually show Vampire in a great light that makes it worthwhile to consider?

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by James

Not true.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on a list of software using Warp3D, other than the usual PC ports? I have a Voodoo3 in my Amiga and it would be great to finally put Warp3D to some use.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

So, other than Elite Frontier's intro looking great on Vampire, have we got any other candidates that actually show Vampire in a great light that makes it worthwhile to consider?

If someone want to port all those virtua games from Genesis + extra chip a vampire might be a good place to go BUT i would still prefer some acrobatics on original hardware

[grond]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

So, other than Elite Frontier's intro looking great on Vampire, have we got any other candidates that actually show Vampire in a great light that makes it worthwhile to consider?

I heard that AB3D2 is very much playable on the Vampire. And all the stuff that required an 060.

[James]

Originally Posted by jbenam

I was wondering if you could elaborate on a list of software using Warp3D, other than the usual PC ports? I have a Voodoo3 in my Amiga and it would be great to finally put Warp3D to some use.

You can find a few among the many ports here:

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1431788&postcount=2

There are a few missing from that list - like a 3D version of the ESCUtil.

Non 3D version here:

https://aminet.net/package/driver/print/ESCUtil

The 3D version can be found somewhere on archive.org along with a few other things (some 3D and also not on the list) but I have lost the link...