Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Then I'm confused. Was the Amiga not capable of 'dazzling 3D graphics manipulation and animation'?

No, not especially.
As explained above.

But in general the Amiga was capable of 'dazzling graphics manipulation and animation'.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

PiStorm32 Lite Emu68 (June 2023 build) with RPi 4B's ARM Cortex A72 @ 1.8Ghz (three ARM instructions per cycle) with Commodore's AGA display
Result: 47.23 fps for 320x200

It's about 49 fps in recent Emu68 buids.

From https://old.vgamuseum.info/benchmark...rendering.html
With Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 Ghz, three X86 instructions per cycle), Soltek SL75-KAV (Via KT133A), 256MB SDR CL3

When both machines has similar class 1.8 Ghz CPUs, AGA will beat all ISA based SVGA cards at 320x240 resolution level.
Best ISA SVGA card reached 36.2 fps.

This isn't of much relevance to what people thought about the A1200 'back in the day', but it does validate its design. PiStorm brings the A1200 into the 21st century with performance that nobody could rightly complain about at a price everybody can afford. The only reason people aren't using it is to preserve the retro status of their machine.

Imagine if Commodore had marketed the A1200 in 1992 with a promise that in the future it could be upgraded to that level of performance for very little money. Nobody would have believed them!

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This isn't of much relevance to what people thought about the A1200 'back in the day', but it does validate its design. PiStorm brings the A1200 into the 21st century with performance that nobody could rightly complain about at a price everybody can afford. The only reason people aren't using it is to preserve the retro status of their machine.

Imagine if Commodore had marketed the A1200 in 1992 with a promise that in the future it could be upgraded to that level of performance for very little money. Nobody would have believed them!

I mean...yeah, because customers would've had to wait 20 years or more!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PiStorm brings the A1200 into the 21st century with performance that nobody could rightly complain about at a price everybody can afford.

By using an entire computer as an emulator.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

By using an entire computer as an emulator.

Wrong, AGA needs compute power and game-centric SDK with "game ready" optimized C2P. Sony's SDK quality was superior to other game consoles such as Sega Saturn or 3DO. Sony's PSYQ SDK includes many texture mapped 3D source code examples.

AGA display capability is okay for TV texture mapped 3D gaming.

Emu68 only offers CPU translation, setting memory map to the AmigaOS's needs and the rest are AmigaOS device drivers and Amiga AutoConfig (TM).

Emu68 runs big endian mode, no big endian to little endian translation, there's no Linux host, RPi's memory is Amiga's bare metal Fast RAM.

Commodore's $40 Amiga Hombre's PA-RISC clone is "cheap RISC" approach and ARM has "cheap RISC" approach.


[ Show youtube player ]
Flyin High RTG on Amiga 1200 with Pistorm32 Lite (running Emu68 on RPi 3). This texture mapped 3D game needs 68040 class CPU.
AGA runs similar to RTG in this case.

[ Show youtube player ]
Virtual GP on Amiga. 68030 CPU is the minimum.

The problem is compute power for the asking price. Motorola didn't participate in game consoles after 68000 and they were pushed out of smart handheld PDAs and smartphones by ARM. IBM participated in game consoles by offering PowerPC 602(3DO M2), PPE (Xbox 360) and CELL (PS3). PowerPC A2 evolved from PPE and could be the competitor to AMD's Jaguar which won the PS4 and Xbox One contracts.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

I mean...yeah, because customers would've had to wait 20 years or more!

CD32's FMV module has the following:

1. 24-bit DAC (STM's STV8438CV) for 16.7 million colors display.

2. MPEG-1 decoder from C-Cube CL450, 352 x 240 pixels @ 30hz, 352 x 288 pixels at 25 Hz, pixel interpolation and frame duplication to produce output formats of 704 x 240 pixels at 60 Hz or 704 x 288 pixels at 50 Hz.

https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/...LES/060803.PDF

CL450 has about 398K transistors with up to 40 MHz. CL450 includes a licensed MIPS-X RISC processor with semi-custom extensions. In quantities of 100K or more per year, the price is less than $50 in 1992.
CL450's MIPS-X RISC processor still has the usual RISC instruction set.

3. LSI l64111qc (Digital Audio Decoder, 16-bit DAC),

4. 512 KB local RAM, NEC 423260 DRAM 4Mbit (512 KB) with 80 ns.

5. Lattice ispLSI 1024-60LJ CPLD.

Commodore is willing to spend on this non-core business by following the failed CDI.

Commodore says NO to MIPS RISC processor @ 40 Mhz for Amiga's general-purpose games. Commodore has played with MIPS CPU.

Commodore says NO to 512 KB Fast RAM for Amiga's general-purpose games.

Commodore says NO to 24-bit color 704 x 288p for Amiga's general-purpose games.

Commodore says NO to 16-bit stereo audio for Amiga's general-purpose games.

The argument against $20 DSP3210 is implemented on CD32's higher cost FMV module with a very narrow functionality!

The Amiga has been sabotaged. Commodore didn't focus on core gaming competency. Commodore's strength is in gaming and the dev platform to create these game content.

The Amiga is not a Mac and it's not a VCD player. For intended purpose, the Amiga is the alternative "gaming PC".

Microsoft recognizes the value of "gaming PC". IBM later recognizes the gaming market with PowerPC 602 and PPE. When the gaming market generates multiple billions of dollars, it's serious business.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This isn't of much relevance to what people thought about the A1200 'back in the day', but it does validate its design. PiStorm brings the A1200 into the 21st century with performance that nobody could rightly complain about at a price everybody can afford. The only reason people aren't using it is to preserve the retro status of their machine.

Imagine if Commodore had marketed the A1200 in 1992 with a promise that in the future it could be upgraded to that level of performance for very little money. Nobody would have believed them!

With ARM, PiStorm materializes the "cheap RISC" from $40 Amiga Hombre's "cheap RISC" PA-RISC clone road map.

Like PA-RISC, ARM still supports 68K's big-endian mode.

ARM's existence was from Jack Tramiel's Commodore's crap MOS 65xx R&D road map.

Commodore couldn't repeat the wow factor of MOS 65xx. This led many 65xx desktop platform vendors to switch to Motorola's 68K and the creation of ARM.
Commodore couldn't repeat the wow factor of Amiga OCS.
There's something wrong with Commodore's leadership team.

Without high compute power, AAA is nearly useless i.e. this is like attaching 386DX-16 to VLB capable S3 Vision 968 VLB.

PiStorm-Emu test with AGA is to validate AGA's display capability for gaming use case and compare it against similar era competition. AGA is pretty good when paired with high compute power.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by hammer

Wrong

No, it's not wrong A PiStorm uses a Raspberry Pi and that's a whole computer and it runs an emulator Plain fact

Don't detract from facts with irrelevant information

Sorry about that

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This isn't of much relevance to what people thought about the A1200 'back in the day', but it does validate its design. PiStorm brings the A1200 into the 21st century with performance that nobody could rightly complain about at a price everybody can afford. The only reason people aren't using it is to preserve the retro status of their machine.

Imagine if Commodore had marketed the A1200 in 1992 with a promise that in the future it could be upgraded to that level of performance for very little money. Nobody would have believed them!

FYI, I run ClickBoom's Quake port with 68060/68040 copy routing, AGA delivered 60 fps 320x200p demo1.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, it's not wrong A PiStorm uses a Raspberry Pi and that's a whole computer and it runs an emulator Plain fact

Emu68 with AGA wasn't using Raspberry Pi as the whole computer. Emu68 does not have USB drivers for USB keyboard input.

Don't detract from facts with irrelevant information.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, it's not wrong A PiStorm uses a Raspberry Pi and that's a whole computer and it runs an emulator Plain fact

Can't believe that people still don't understand how the pistorm works even after all this time.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by hammer

[ Show youtube player ]
Flyin High RTG on Amiga 1200 with Pistorm32 Lite (running Emu68 on RPi 3). This texture mapped 3D game needs 68040 class CPU.
AGA runs similar to RTG in this case.

Impressive video but it use the RTG emulation. I cannot find one without it to really see AGA+PiStorm performance. This said, there's one running on AGA+68030:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Can't believe that people still don't understand how the pistorm works even after all this time.

So it's not an emulator then?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, it's not wrong A PiStorm uses a Raspberry Pi and that's a whole computer and it runs an emulator

It's a software defined implementation of the 68040 instruction set running on bare metal, not a complete system emulator. That's all that matters. The Amiga it's plugged into sees all the same hardware signals that it would from any other CPU expansion board designed for the same interface. Everything else is still happening in the original hardware.

I have no issues calling it an emulator, since that's technically correct, I just don't think it does justice to what it is and how it works. It's not as if the 68000 series all have the exact same same internal DNA. The 060 is very different on the other side of the pins to the outside world than it's predecessors.

[TCD]

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I have no issues calling it an emulator, since that's technically correct

Yeah, it's software running on a Pi. It can't be anything other than emulation.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, it's software running on a Pi. It can't be anything other than emulation.

There is still a more important distinction to be made - it's not application software running an emulation on an alien host operating system. It *is* the host operating system, if indeed it can even be described that way.

The Amiga 1200 hardware designers, in their wisdom decided that the whole CPU/FastRAM subsystem should be replacable. They specified the signals and timing that any expansion needs to respect in order to work. That interface, and that interface alone, is all that matters from a hardware perspective. From a software perspective all that matters is that the processor on the other side of that hardware interface executes 68K code.

So I don't really get all the bruxism and hand wringing over it.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

So I don't really get all the bruxism and hand wringing over it.

Yeah, you're right. Don't know why I brought it up

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, you're right. Don't know why I brought it up

Not *you* specifically, just people in general. People wanting a pure hardware solution have plenty of options. I don't get the antipathy towards PiStorm. It's even more bare metal than Amithlon was.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The Amiga 1200 hardware designers, in their wisdom decided that the whole CPU/FastRAM subsystem should be replacable.

Well ... in other cases a socketed CPU does just the same thing...