Mortal Kombat II AGA Tech Test

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

Not too sure what's going on here. Testing with the quicklaunch 68060 option in WinUAE works fine, along with all the others. If you're seeing one of the statues at the edge of backdrop image then it's not setting the scroll register and bitplane pointers correctly, for some reason?!

Is it displaying any hex value in the top left of the screen when the startup grid is displayed?

B

Yes, it displays a Hex value. Do you need me to provide it when I get home? What real Amigas has this been tested on?

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by BigD

Yes, it displays a Hex value. Do you need me to provide it when I get home? What real Amigas has this been tested on?

No, the number itself isn't important. If you can see that, then everything is set correctly up to that point. If it isn't getting any further, I suspect the copper interrupt isn't actually triggering the CPU to process the frame loop. I've no idea why not, though.

The configs that I'm aware of being tested are the ones already reported in this thread.

B

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

No, the number itself isn't important. If you can see that, then everything is set correctly up to that point. If it isn't getting any further, I suspect the copper interrupt isn't actually triggering the CPU to process the frame loop. I've no idea why not, though.

The configs that I'm aware of being tested are the ones already reported in this thread.

B

Nope can't get it to work on my big box Amiga. Will try on my Pistorm32 A1200 when it's set back up.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

I'd be somewhat surprised if a real A1200 at 14mhz could manage 50fps with it, but a 1220/4 accelerator board, or similar with a 28mhz CPU *should* hopefully?!

I tried on my A1200 with fastram (see sig for details).



Reptile and Liu Kang moves around, but the bar colors looks different compared to your screenshot.

[BigD]

Originally Posted by roondar

My guess would be that the TF1260 doesn't have good Chip RAM bandwidth for the CPU. Many 68060 accelerators and even some 68030 accelerators struggle with that. Since your code is copying from Fast RAM to Chip RAM, that might play a big role. To test this, I tried it on my A1200 with Blizzard 1230MK IV and it shows no flicker in the border, which seems to fit with this idea, as that card reaches the full 7MB/sec write speed for the CPU to Chip RAM. See video below:

[ Show youtube player ]

On a side note, it looks very nice to see the Sprites & background at such a high colour count
Also: sorry for the flickering video!

I assume any 1995/96 era 030/50 board would be good for this? I've got one with EDO Fast Ram but I guess this is a Chip Ram limited test?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by BigD

I guess this is a Chip Ram limited test?

Yes CPU->ChipRAM

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

The demo runs in 8 planes/256 colours with interleaved bitplanes. The background is 128 colours with a separate 64 colour palette for each fighter. The CPU is rendering in a buffer in Fast RAM while the copper is executing a list to perform the erase step in Chip RAM. Then, it copies only the parts of the buffer overwritten in the draw step to Chip RAM when the last erase blit is done. With this, 50pfs is achievable if the CPU is fast enough. Where it would be simply impossible if relying on the blitter alone.

B

It's bonkers how unusable the 256 color mode is on the raw 1200.

[jotd]

What were they thinking when they decided to go 256 colors planar-only with the same old blitter and 2MB chip?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jotd

What were they thinking when they decided to go 256 colors planar-only with the same old blitter and 2MB chip?

See other threads. Lets not go off on a tangent about chipset design fauxpas. Nothing we can do to change it now and still use our classic Amiga chips. Best to talk about what tricks / tips we can do with what we've got. e.g. HW sprite multiplexing etc.

[jotd]

You're right! I just could not help commenting. I don't know any action games using 256 colors. AGA is mostly used for big sprites / 16+16 color dual playfield, and sometimes maybe 64 or 128 colors max.

I'm one of those who think that all games should run on vanilla A1200, but sometimes a bit of fastmem helps! For me the goal is to play on the real hardware. Now the definition of "real hardware" may vary.

[el_pasi]

I was tempted to try this on Amiga 1200 + Blizzard PPC 603e+(200Mhz)/68040(25Mhz)-setup. Unfortunately it only shows after executing program black screen. Tried also to start without startup-sequence, but black screen still.

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by jotd

You're right! I just could not help commenting. I don't know any action games using 256 colors. AGA is mostly used for big sprites / 16+16 color dual playfield, and sometimes maybe 64 or 128 colors max.

I'm one of those who think that all games should run on vanilla A1200, but sometimes a bit of fastmem helps! For me the goal is to play on the real hardware. Now the definition of "real hardware" may vary.

Super Stardust makes pretty good use of an A1200 in 256 colour mode. Just not at 50fps. Not that I minded when I used to play the game at the time. Even with that handicap, it still plays great.

B

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by el_pasi

I was tempted to try this on Amiga 1200 + Blizzard PPC 603e+(200Mhz)/68040(25Mhz)-setup. Unfortunately it only shows after executing program black screen. Tried also to start without startup-sequence, but black screen still.

Did you see the green/black grid after program startup?

B

[hammer]

Originally Posted by jotd

You're right! I just could not help commenting. I don't know any action games using 256 colors. AGA is mostly used for big sprites / 16+16 color dual playfield, and sometimes maybe 64 or 128 colors max.

I'm one of those who think that all games should run on vanilla A1200, but sometimes a bit of fastmem helps! For me the goal is to play on the real hardware. Now the definition of "real hardware" may vary.

Turrcian 2 AGA uses 256 colors mode and it recommends Fast RAM.

The 3MB RAM-equipped 32-bit game console group such as 3DO, PS1, and Saturn has a discrete system and video memory pools.

Gaming PC's Mortal Kombat 2 VGA has a discrete system and video memory pools.

[el_pasi]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

Did you see the green/black grid after program startup?

B

No, it is immediately black screen. I know this Blizzard PPC -setup is not very compatible

[roondar]

Originally Posted by BigD

I assume any 1995/96 era 030/50 board would be good for this? I've got one with EDO Fast Ram but I guess this is a Chip Ram limited test?

Most should be, though not all manage it for some reason. IIRC some of the 'cheaper' ones didn't reach it, for instance. I'm not a hardware expert, but it seems to be that boards need to be specifically designed in order to reach the full CPU->Chip RAM bandwidth and that might either be harder to do or need extra components that would increase price.

[sokolovic]

According to this article, a vanilla A1200 is more than enough to make a decent Mortal Kombat AGA version :
http://obligement.free.fr/articles/a...kombat_aga.php

I've tried to recompile the sources some times ago and it was indeed very promising with all the parallaxes, even the animated monks and two characters.

Sadly, the link to download the sources doesn't seems to works anymore. Maybe someone from Obligement could correct this.

[jotd]

they say they are using 4 hardware sprites per fighter, so basically 16 specific colors per fighter for a possible width of 128 bits. It makes such a game completely possible, but the devil is in creating a playable game, with A.I, etc...

I think my calculations are exact? 4 HW sprites per character: 2 attached sprites 16 colors = 128 possible width => more than enough.


I was thinking of trying to reverse MK Amiga for AGA but what Richard Costello wrote daunted me (plus the fact that there's no source available, either Amiga or arcade)

He used bitplane tricks to display characters and said that it would be very hard to adapt the code to increase the number of bitplanes. But with hardware sprites it would be different.

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by jotd

they say they are using 4 hardware sprites per fighter, so basically 16 specific colors per fighter for a possible width of 128 bits. It makes such a game completely possible, but the devil is in creating a playable game, with A.I, etc...

I think my calculations are exact? 4 HW sprites per character: 2 attached sprites 16 colors = 128 possible width => more than enough.


I was thinking of trying to reverse MK Amiga for AGA but what Richard Costello wrote daunted me (plus the fact that there's no source available, either Amiga or arcade)

He used bitplane tricks to display characters and said that it would be very hard to adapt the code to increase the number of bitplanes. But with hardware sprites it would be different.

Would that be 15 colours, divided between both fighters if they're being used in attached mode? Or, 15 each? I know we can switch colour banks for the sprites on AGA, but without checking I can't recall the specifics. If they're shared, it's not much of an visual improvement over the version we have, already.

In either case, it would reduce the processing overhead for the graphics engine by quite a bit, of course, as well as the memory requirement. For an A1200 or CD32 with Chip RAM only, it would probably be the way to go.

B

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by el_pasi

No, it is immediately black screen. I know this Blizzard PPC -setup is not very compatible

Hmmm... the program hasn't really done much up to the point it displays the grid. Exactly why it's not even getting that far on your setup is a bit of a mystery!?

B