Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Thx


Another things is when I see an advanced game like Jim Power, made in 1992, I don't understand why the technogical curve of developing amiga games wasn't evolving.
I mean, when you compare first generation Megadrive/SNES titles with the last ones, you can see how devs have managed to stretch out the technical specs of these consoles (Compares Altered Beast with Alien Soldier on the MD, it's impressive !).
In the contrary, on the Amiga, Battle Squadron was released in 1989 and I cannot see a better made shoot'em'up. Same for games like Apidya, Jim Power, Beast. All these games we're technically much more advanced than laters games. When you see Zool1/2 or Superfrog, it is hard to think that they we're released in 1993 !
...And I won't say nothing about James Pond III released in 1994 as an "AGA" game... :/

Well, the Amiga was a few years old by 1989, so quite a mature technology. Also, the Amiga sprite and copper tricks are better suited to vertical games than horizontal.

As already mentioned, many of the coders/artists had begun to move on by 1990-91.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I do know what you mean, but at the same time I don't think you can get much more advanced than games like Turrican 2 or 3, Jim Power, etc on the 500 hardware. I think the Amiga programmers simply figured out how to get the most out of the hardware more quickly than the MD programmers did.

While these were all technically great games, I'm still convinced the Amiga was never really "maxed out". Especially AGA games were only scratching the surface. But after the Megadrive came out I think there wasn't so much interest in developing.

[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I'm still convinced the Amiga was never really "maxed out". Especially AGA games were only scratching the surface.

I couldnt agree more. Looking at the Final Fight AGA project and games like Fightin Spirit shows the Amiga was capable of so much more. Imagine No Second Prize as a flight sim and you have Starfox no problem. I'm 100% convinced full convertions of Sonic and Outrun were possible, and cut down versions of Ridge Racer and Tekken.

btw, Mrs Beanbag. I was forced at gunpoint to review Mr Beanbag AGA last weekend and was very embarraced to say the game was still 98% complete. As the review will be in a book which will stand forever as a testament to the Amiga PD scene, I feel it would be a great shame to spoil the review for the sake of hitpoints on the final boss....

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

While these were all technically great games, I'm still convinced the Amiga was never really "maxed out". Especially AGA games were only scratching the surface. But after the Megadrive came out I think there wasn't so much interest in developing.

I believe several games pushed the Amiga 500 very close to its limitations. I agree that the gaming possibilities of the AGA machines was not explored to any great extent.

Originally Posted by lifeschool

I'm 100% convinced full convertions of Sonic and Outrun were possible, and cut down versions of Ridge Racer and Tekken.

Sonic? Possibly. Outrun? Not a chance. The Sega arcade hardware of that time had incredibly powerful graphics hardware. The Amiga hardware is nothing short of pathetic in comparison.

Ridge Racer & Tekken on an A500? You're joking, right?

[lifeschool]

off topic: I mean AGA for all four. With the extra bitplanes it becomes possible to match many arcade tricks and with 14mhz it is fast enough to do 25-50fps. As I say, if No Second Prize was somehow made up for AGA then Ridge Racer is possible. Lambo American Challenge has Outrun speed and smoothness on A500 so why not Outrun on A1200? If Hunter had those 3D polygons on the A500 then some form of Tekken was at least possible. All I'm saying is that with the right time and skills those games could have made it. I'm not saying Tomb Raider or Tenchu or Monkey 3 were possible, but Virtua Fighter and Virtua Cop may have been possible in some form of powerful AGA machine.

[lifeschool]

Anyway, these questions I was always afraid to ask.

First question: In the outrun cabinet there was a scaler chip. Would a scaler chip inside the amiga have helped with display modes and sprite handling. I know the Amiga was a general machine, not built with games in mind, but would a 3rd party trapdoor add-on really make the machine 'arcade compatable'?

Second question: On a very fast AGA machine, is it possible to run mame, or software to emulate the scaler chip?, and have outrun running in 16 colours or whatever?

Third Question: As some arcades had 000 processors, surely it was possible to port the code directly and work around the custom chips and dma registers with a softare VM. Ok this may be very hard in reality, but is it possible?

[s2325]

Have you seen flying level in Amiga game Borobodur? [ Show youtube player ] Fast and smooth, just like in Outrun from arcades.

[tin]

Unfortunately, that's still nothing like outrun (or space harrier, or power drift) in the arcades. Also it doesn't look smooth but I'm guessing that's youtube (there's technology for ya!!)

[wanderer]

Exactly what is DiskDoctor CLI supposed to do? I clearly remember the one time it actually worked... I was so happy!

[prowler]

DISKDOCTOR attempts to repair a corrupt floppy disk enough to allow you to retrieve files from it and copy them onto a good disk.

If AmigaDOS detects a corrupt disk, it displays a requester stating that the disk could not be validated. By using DISKDOCTOR, you can try to restore the disk's file structure.

After running DISKDOCTOR, you should copy the restored file to another disk, then reformat the corrupt disk.

[lesta_smsc]

I used Disk Doctor on NDOS disks assuming I will be able to write to them afterwards as it was then accessible in Amiga Workbench although appeared empty... the game still booted though!

[zipper]

I once could repair a non working Lotus 1 game disk with Diskdoctor so it played 1/3 of the game. Later with DiskSalv (1.42?) I got the disk totally repaired. DiskSalv is a much, much better alternative.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

I used Disk Doctor on NDOS disks assuming I will be able to write to them afterwards as it was then accessible in Amiga Workbench although appeared empty... the game still booted though!

Interesting!

I suppose it didn't find any AmigaDOS track headers so it only "fixed" the filesystem root, so perhaps didn't write over anything important. Copying any files onto the disk would have started overwriting game data at random though.

[lifeschool]

A school friend nailed DiskDoctor when he said:
"DiskDoctor either fixes a disk completely or f#cks it up altogether." - so true.

Outrun aside, here's another question:
WHY where so many games made on the ST and then ported to the Amiga? Was this to cut down on system conversion time or was there a more practical reason?

Also, why didnt the Amiga have more commands in ROM. Simple stuff like Echo, Wait, EndCLI, Mem, List, Dir, Protect, CD and Rename were a PITA on an A500 because you had to make sure all those progs were pathed and in 'C' - otherwise it was:
"CD, bad command or file name"
"DIR, bad command or file name"
Surely it was better to make a COMMAND.COM and have it resident?

[Leffmann]

Lack of time and ROM space most likely. Things got better in Kickstart 2.0 when these commands were all ROM resident, but the default Amiga shell has always been really poor. No automatic expansion of wildcards is probably my biggest gripe with it.

[wanderer]

I've always been intrigued by Intuition, was too embarrassed to ask and could never understand what it was and its relationship with Kickstart and Workbench. Though Wikipedia seems to give a good explanation, I had to put this here.

[ShK]

Did the A1000 have an IBM CGA compatible monitor, which was able to use in the RGBI mode, or why does the Amiga have digital output?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

[slaapliedje]

I've been wondering, ever since I bought my A4000 a few years back, why no one has come up with a way (outside of UAE) to add more Chip ram? Either that, or make more things use fast ram. I realize (correct me if I'm wrong here) that it's the Agnus chip that handles how much chip memory is accessible, and the chip only allows 2mb. But there had to have been some sort of upgrade path planned, with the jumper on the board for (if memory serves, up to 8mb).

Indivision already did a socket over the Lisa chip to add VGA and / or DVI output, so I kind of wondered if a bypass/addon for the memory controller could do the same.

Then we could have higher (maybe even faster) resolutions with native AGA displays. I know if I switch to AGA/Indivision resolutions and I have it somewhat high (1024x768 or more) it starts to go really slow and I run out of chip memory frighteningly fast.

Heck, with a faster memory controller/bus for the chip memory, the whole system would be much faster. I have tons of fast ram, but the chip memory is a huge bottleneck.

slaapliedje

[ajk]

The 2 megs of chip RAM is enough for "normal" video screenmodes, especially with FBlit (if you aren't using it already, get it!) etc., and power users always had the option of a separate RTG board which blows AGA out of the water anyway.

I'm not sure what exactly is needed to add support for more chip RAM, but it would require the redesign of probably several of the custom chips. Clearly this has been too much of a challenge so far. Perhaps one day we can stick WinUAE on an FPGA and have that updated chipset

[TCD]

Here's a thread about it: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=69919