Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[daxb]

Originally Posted by Gorf

that is still only a question of the sampling frequency in the end: you can sample with just 1-bit in high fidelity if you drive your frequency up in the MHz range. The noise is huge, but it is all very far in an unhearable high band, that gets filtered.
See "Super Audio CD".

Theoretical maybe but you know the practice. I've never seen samples with such high frequencies.

Originally Posted by chb

On the Amiga when using four channels in tracked music, you have additional 6 bits for volume per channel, so best practice is using samples normalized to 100% volume and then use the volume registers to adapt to your needs. A fade out done this way should not at additional quantization noise, as you always use the full 8 bit range.

This is similar. Theory against practice. You have samples with several different volume in tracked music. You can't always avoid this. And sometimes you fade out the whole track e.g.. I sampled a lot with my TST2 sampler. The source isn't always optimal. Optimal volume isn't always possible. Further you have to fight against the limited hardware and software. Yes, you can get really good quality, but that doesn't work always.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Ah, but it was if you were using MIDI. Unlike the Amiga, the ST had a cheap, sharp, high-resolution monochrome screen without any flicker or 15 kHz whine which would be unwelcome in a studio setting.

That was a bit of an oversight on Amiga Inc.'s part back when they designed OCS. They could have easily hacked in a 31Khz screenmode which is essentially what ECS was. ECS didn't require any more silicon than OCS, it was just tweaking OCS to add "free" features without having to do any redesign of the architecture.

That's why ECS has its 64-color palette limitation in the 35ns pixel modes, it's pulling the palette fetch in the exact same way as OCS, just splitting the bits. There's no reason it couldn't have used a 4096 color palette with some small redesign, but the 64-color hack worked with almost no changes to the design. C= probably could've had it added in the second batch of chips for the A1000 if they'd asked for it (back when they added the EHB tweak, which was a similar zero-cost hack they added after the first batch of Denise).

The most fascinating thing is that Paula was flexible enough to output higher sample rates with zero changes, once ECS let you change the horizontal sync. Another free performance hack that required zero changes to the audio silicon.

[chb]

Originally Posted by daxb

This is similar. Theory against practice. You have samples with several different volume in tracked music. You can't always avoid this. And sometimes you fade out the whole track e.g.. I sampled a lot with my TST2 sampler. The source isn't always optimal. Optimal volume isn't always possible. Further you have to fight against the limited hardware and software. Yes, you can get really good quality, but that doesn't work always.

I totally agree with you that recording samples in 8 bit is very difficult, as you need perfect recording levels not to loose even more of the already limited dynamic range. However, that does not apply to playback at a comparable scale. You can e.g. record a sample with 16 bit and easily covert it to an 8 bit sample with full volume, without the need for perfect levels - you have enough bits left for normalization. That's similar today - almost everything in the studio is recorded at 24 bit (and processed in 32 bit floating point), to get some headroom for recording and processing; but for the final mix 16 bit is sufficient (even more than). So that rather supports the argument that the grainy, noisy sound heard so often on the Amiga stems from limitations of the sample recording process, not the playback hardware.

[daxb]

And the result is: Amiga musicians need(ed) 16 bit 44,1 kHz at least.

[EmilAmiga90]

From a (very little experienced) programmer point of view, the AGA chipset is frustrating (and also challenging) to me, because I think it has a good potential, but it has several performance issues that limit its use in practice. Sort of "here I am but you cannot have me"

I was thinking of a sort of an anime-style point and click graphics adventure. I am sort of tired of 320x200. I mean, the lowest VGA mode is 640x480 and is NOT interlaced, with just 16 colours.

With AGA, a 640x400 16 colours non-interlaced screen at 4x fetch (maximum fetch speed) would require half the chipram bandwidht. That would be good enough (probably) but upgrading to 256 colours (8 bit planes) would take all of the bandwidth. That would not be such a big problem for CPU if there is some fast memory available (but standard A1200s where shipped without any fast ram), but I suppose the blitter would have serious speed issues.

I mean, not only the bandwitdth available to the Blitter would be really low, perhaps about one quarter of the total, but also the blitter speed has not been improved at all: 16 bits per DMA access.

I suppose that would slow down animations a lot. Perhaps it could be solved using sprites as much as possible and perhaps some nice tricks (16/32 colour BOBs ?)

I know I am speaking of pushing the machine to its limits. Probably a "simple" point and click adventure can be good enough even with a slower animation frame rate (25 fps).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by EmilAmiga90

I know I am speaking of pushing the machine to its limits. Probably a "simple" point and click adventure can be good enough even with a slower animation frame rate (25 fps).

I recently acquired an Amstrad PC2086. This is an 8MHz '16 bit' 8086 PC clone with VGA graphics. It came with a copy of 'Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego' on the hard drive, so of course I had to try it out.

The PC2086 can do 640x480 in 256 colors, but is unusably slow in that mode. Carmen Sandiego only runs in 16 colors, and even then is slow. But it works. The cartoon characters weaving in and out of those 16 color 'photographic' backgrounds actually look pretty good, and you only notice the slowdown when they get too big.

If a crappy machine like that can get away with it, the A1200 shouldn't have any trouble. Since you have high resolution you don't need that many colors - 32 or 64 should be plenty, especially when combined with copper effects etc.

That would not be such a big problem for CPU if there is some fast memory available (but standard A1200s where shipped without any fast ram)

A1200s were shipped without FastRAM to keep the price down and options open, but it was expected that users would upgrade (like they did with the A500). And they should! Don't feel obligated to limit your game just to suit a few skinflints. The minimum spec for an A1200 today should be at least 4MB of FastRAM and a hard drive.

Nobody in the PC world complained about having to upgrade their machine to run the latest games - they enjoyed it! And they put up with things like slow VGA graphics and limited sound because even that was much better than what they had.

[EmilAmiga90]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Nobody in the PC world complained about having to upgrade their machine to run the latest games - they enjoyed it! And they put up with things like slow VGA graphics and limited sound because even that was much better than what they had.

Thank you Bruce. I fully agree with you. Indeed, someway now I feel I can unleash the A1200 horsepower

You're right. I recall my PC classmates in the beginning of '90s speaking of "how much ram", "hard disk size" and even "CD-ROM" and, yes, nobody complained. That was the contrary. Everybody was very willing to make their PC more and more powerful (probably because it was a poor machine compared to stock Amigas), especially when "X-WING (Star Wars)" was released.

I think I will follow your suggestion: If high resolution with 256 colours will be too slow, I will reduce colours to 64 (no EHB ) and add some "copper magic"

Now, let me just complain a little about the blitter. You know, Amiga from the beginning was not really suited for 3D graphics but was great on the 2D. If AGA blitter was someway faster, it would have been of help...

Also, perhaps it could have been quite simple to swap sprites DMA slots with disk DMA slots to prevent sprites to be stolen by hscroll. I mean, it is almost impossible that a task (game or productivity) will ever need to access a floppy disk during hscroll. On second tought, perhaps an interruption during disk write could lead to disk errors...

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Don't feel obligated to limit your game just to suit a few skinflints. The minimum spec for an A1200 today should be at least 4MB of FastRAM and a hard drive.

Nobody in the PC world complained about having to upgrade their machine to run the latest games - they enjoyed it! And they put up with things like slow VGA graphics and limited sound because even that was much better than what they had.

Were are not in the 90ies anymore. The cool kids code for stock machines...

[lesta_smsc]

In this day and age, the upgrades have become so advanced that you are left with Amiga due to the case and motherboard but the rest of the machine has been taken over by an alien (or vampire) being! You essentially are required to have a PC clone.

[sandruzzo]

If you need more cycles, try to have a little bit less screen size...

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by EmilAmiga90

From a (very little experienced) programmer point of view, the AGA chipset is frustrating (and also challenging) to me, because I think it has a good potential, but it has several performance issues that limit its use in practice. Sort of "here I am but you cannot have me"

I was thinking of a sort of an anime-style point and click graphics adventure. I am sort of tired of 320x200. I mean, the lowest VGA mode is 640x480 and is NOT interlaced, with just 16 colours.

With AGA, a 640x400 16 colours non-interlaced screen at 4x fetch (maximum fetch speed) would require half the chipram bandwidht. That would be good enough (probably) but upgrading to 256 colours (8 bit planes) would take all of the bandwidth. That would not be such a big problem for CPU if there is some fast memory available (but standard A1200s where shipped without any fast ram), but I suppose the blitter would have serious speed issues.

I mean, not only the bandwitdth available to the Blitter would be really low, perhaps about one quarter of the total, but also the blitter speed has not been improved at all: 16 bits per DMA access.

I suppose that would slow down animations a lot. Perhaps it could be solved using sprites as much as possible and perhaps some nice tricks (16/32 colour BOBs ?)

I know I am speaking of pushing the machine to its limits. Probably a "simple" point and click adventure can be good enough even with a slower animation frame rate (25 fps).

I agree. Sadly AGA was well long in the tooth when it was finally released. AAA that Haney was working on years before AA was release would have been another major leap forward for the platform.

The Amiga 1200 was really good at some type of games back in the day, but the reality is that the computer gaming market was going to FPS and already hitched their wagon to the PC. It pains me that the games released for the pc in the early to mid 90's were better than any game we could get on the Amiga. There may have been some exceptions, but the standards of the pc keep trucking along and AA was done. Even looking at a really decent games like Star Trek 25th release around 93, looked good on AGA but the PC VGA game was simply better.

The Amiga graphics couldn't handle FPS like wolfenstein 3d and doom very well. VGA point and click adventures leveraged the pc's faster bus and ever improving video cards.

The Amiga with a high end zorro video card was really no match for a the pc. My 3000D with an 040 at 40MHz with a Retina BLT Z3 was noticeably slower than my friends 486 with svga. I tried every trick in the book to get more speed and it was not nearly enough. I debated with my pc friends, about the superior aspects of the Amiga but in the end it was academic, the Amiga was still no match for the PC for most games on the market. I still kept using my 3000D for many years beyond that and really enjoyed it as a productivity workstation. I eventually bought a PC with a decent video card to play games with friends and kept the 3k for productivity.

Decent history on topic: [ Show youtube player ]

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by matt3k

My 3000D with an 040 at 40MHz with a Retina BLT Z3 was noticeably slower than my friends 486 with svga.v=Tv6aJRGpz_A[/url]

As a 3000D owner myself I can not support that impression.
It was not before the Pentium that PCs got really faster than my Amiga.
(and my Amiga re-took the lead again for a short while with my 060/PPC-board)

How did you come to your conclusion?

[matt3k]

We used games, watching videos/animations, and displaying pictures as a benchmark. Admittedly the games were being optimized for the PC, but that said games ran better and faster. The 80's and very early 90's the Amiga had better games. At around (Some examples even earlier) 93 or 94 the pc games started become better on the pc. When he ran doom and I ran??? Doom in high res on the 486 was a game changer, there wasn't a single piece of software I could run that was even close.

Displaying an animation or picture on my friends 486 was noticeably faster than my 3000. I thought I would have him on these test, but sadly he won them.

Sure the Amiga was superior in many ways especially with productivity, that why I still use the thing to this day , but the cold hard fact that the pc was actively being developed and amiga was slowly be abandoned.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by matt3k

We used games,

there were not that many for accelerated Amigas with gfx-card ... most of them came much later and even now it is only a hand full...

watching videos/animations,

worked equally well (or bad) on a 3k and a 486 - the Amiga had the advantage of some nice anim-players and the cdtv-video-format.
But both machines are not able to even play early mpeg. You need a 060 or a Pentium at least.

and displaying pictures as a benchmark.

most picture formats the PC would not display at all...

Admittedly the games were being optimized for the PC, but that said games ran better and faster.

so we are talking about ports from the PC?
Or games without real support for Amigas with gfx-cards?
You can't make any assertions related to speed by that.

The 80's and very early 90's the Amiga had better games. At around (Some examples even earlier) 93 or 94 the pc games started become better on the pc. When he ran doom and I ran???

There was no technical reason:
Doom runs fine on a 040 with gfx-card - there was just no market for that combination.

We could look for some ADoom benchmarks on an 040/gfx now and compare them to an old 486 ... I guess there is not much difference.

Doom in high res on the 486 was a game changer, there wasn't a single piece of software I could run that was even close.

true - it was certainly a "game-changer" - but that has nothing to do with speed but with availability.

Displaying an animation or picture on my friends 486 was noticeably faster than my 3000. I thought I would have him on these test, but sadly he won them.

that is strange ...
Slow harddisk? bad datatype or slow picture-viewer?
Maybe his picture-viewer did some clever preloading in the background...

Sure the Amiga was superior in many ways especially with productivity, that why I still use the thing to this day , but the cold hard fact that the pc was actively being developed and amiga was slowly be abandoned.

sure.

PS:

maybe you had a 040@40 card without own fast ram and were using the A3000 onboard zip-memory? That would explain your impression: driving the 040 on a 030 bus slows things down significantly.
Or your friend had one of these 486@100MHz with large 2nd level cache, that would beat early Pentiums....

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by Gorf

there were not that many for accelerated Amigas with gfx-card ... most of them came much later and even now it is only a hand full...

Used ST 25th, some Lucas Arts, and can't remember the others. PC was better for those. As we went back in time a bit, the Amiga was better some Cinemaware titles. The Amiga showed it strength early on greatly, but as time went on the PC was better.

Originally Posted by Gorf

worked equally well (or bad) on a 3k and a 486 - the Amiga had the advantage of some nice anim-players and the cdtv-video-format.
But both machines are not able to even play early mpeg. You need a 060 or a Pentium at least.

We used some anims and a mpeg movie. Played fine on both... Think I used a Retina based player, can't remember anymore. But regardless they ran.

Originally Posted by Gorf

most picture formats the PC would not display at all...

Jpegs would. May have converted some to different formats. Showed fine on both systems. Decoding was faster on 486.

Originally Posted by Gorf

There was no technical reason:
Doom runs fine on a 040 with gfx-card - there was just no market for that combination.

Technically your right we have great ports today, back then we had crickets.

Originally Posted by Gorf

We could look for some ADoom benchmarks on an 040/gfx now and compare them to an old 486 ... I guess there is not much difference.

I would guess the latest Amiga ports are just as fast also..

Originally Posted by Gorf

true - it was certainly a "game-changer" - but that has nothing to do with speed but with availability.

That was my point the Amiga was being left behind at that point, the game industry moved off of the Amiga and the Amiga was left on the dock with it's technology.

Originally Posted by Gorf

that is strange ...
Slow harddisk? bad datatype or slow picture-viewer?
Maybe his picture-viewer did some clever preloading in the background...

Had a Warp Engine with 64 megs on the card and the SCSI was around 10 megs per second, the 040 was 40MHz. I tried a bunch, don't remember anymore...

Originally Posted by Gorf

sure.

PS:

maybe you had a 040@40 card without own fast ram and were using the A3000 onboard zip-memory? That would explain your impression: driving the 040 on a 030 bus slows things down significantly.
Or your friend had one of these 486@100MHz with large 2nd level cache, that would beat early Pentiums....

I don't remember the specs on the 486, but it was decked out. That I remember...

We also used a 4000, think it had an 040 and a 1200, again don't remember the specs, and my 3k. Fun times...

I also remember feeling sad, brute force had overcome an elegant design. Then came the dark times in the force...

[EmilAmiga90]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I happen to think that some of the Amiga programmers of the day were better than their PC counterparts, they had to think outside the box and get the Amiga to do stuff it wasn't meant to do, PC programmers? Just tell the end user their machine isn't fast enough and they need to upgrade.

Doom is a great game, other versions that were rewritten for their prospective machines have shown that the PC version relies more on the power of the machine its running on rather than the skills in the programming department.

Indeed most of the PC software market relied on the "you have to upgrade your machine" policy.
IMHO I think two important issues for PC were the higly variable hardware configuration ant the really poor operating system suppor. I suppose that could be two of the reasons the programmers needed so much CPU power and RAM space. I mean, MS-DOS provided little more than file management. Wiindows, before the DirectX release, provided little more than a good environment for users. PC machines born as productivity machines. So, every new game (also productivity software) worth of notice had to rely on custom software solutions (and often shipped with a bunch of proprietary device drivers to deal with the hardware)

AMIGA, including A1200, was a total different story. AMIGA was born to be a multimedia machine when the word "multimedia" did not exist. The hardware was standard and that helped a lot, also being a big limit (anyway, AutoConfig was born long before Plug And Play). AmigaOS was much better than MS-DOS and Windows.

As someone else already said (perhaps I am repeating "an old story"), probably what Commodore really wanted buying Amiga Inc was easy money with little effort. They took the AMIGA ready to be shipped and all they did was just to sell it. Besides shipping, they did little more else. The only good thing they did was to split A1000 to A500 and A2000 making it possible for A500 to be purchased by thousands of people all around the world.

AMIGA was a great machine because it came from the passion of its creators. From the beginning AMIGA was born not just for high sales, but for innovation. So innovating to be almost revolutionary, at that time. Perhaps I am exxageratig but I feel that what made AMIGA unique was not just advanced technology, but the great vision behind that technology, and the heart of a few pepole that designed it as their own "creation" not just one "product".

OFF TOPIC: Thinking of Commodore policies, probably they deserved to go bankrupt, because during too many years they hoped for big money with few and poor ideas (example: CDTV), probably hoping that AMIGA "sells by itself". Probably, that's what happen when management olnly wants profit. I am not a company manager, so I am not really in position to say it, but I know that little efforts do not produce big results for long time. The party ends and the house gets empty...

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by matt3k

Even looking at a really decent games like Star Trek 25th release around 93, looked good on AGA but the PC VGA game was simply better.

Because it was CD Enhanced version on PC. It's not AGA fault, it's medium (floppy vs CD) fault. VGA have 256 colors like AGA, and only in Lo-Res. In some cases (e.g. 256 colours in any resolution or HAM modes) AGA is even better than VGA.

Originally Posted by matt3k

The Amiga graphics couldn't handle FPS like wolfenstein 3d and doom very well.

That's weird... i must dreaming playing Doom and some other FPP games on AGA in decent speed and even Quake (i had 040@40 & PPC@160)


As i mentioned before AGA have similar, and sometimes even better parameters like VGA. There are games which are looking same like on PC VGA. Problems of some worse games was not graphic chipset, but memory and sometimes forcing conversion to OCS/ECS.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by EmilAmiga90

As someone else already said (perhaps I am repeating "an old story"), probably what Commodore really wanted buying Amiga Inc was easy money with little effort. They took the AMIGA ready to be shipped and all they did was just to sell it.

No, it wasn't ready to be shipped. Why not? Because they wanted it to be more than just a games console. But the OS wasn't finished and they had to get it out to developers, so they kludged in an expensive 'Writable Control Store' daughter board and forced users to load the ROM off floppy.

History of the Amiga

Commodore marketed it both as their intended successor to the Commodore 64 and as their competitor against the Apple Macintosh and the Atari ST. It was later renamed the Commodore Amiga 1000...

An August 1986 Compute! editorial expressed amazement that Commodore, insisting that the Amiga was a business computer, did not show it at the summer Consumer Electronics Show.

Bruce Webster... criticized many aspects of Commodore's handling of the computer, including selling "not-quite-finished" hardware and software...

Electronic Arts had expected Commodore to sell it as a $600 high-end home computer instead of a $1800 business computer... Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video.". This marketing confusion would plague the Amiga throughout its lifetime

The Amiga was originally designed to be a games console. Fortunately for us Commodore saw it as more than that. Perhaps they did deserve to go bankrupt for not marketing it aggressively enough, or investing too much in an advanced OS and 'business' hardware rather concentrating on games, but I for one am glad they didn't limit its potential.

OFF TOPIC: Thinking of Commodore policies, probably they deserved to go bankrupt, because during too many years they hoped for big money with few and poor ideas (example: CDTV), probably hoping that AMIGA "sells by itself". Probably, that's what happen when management olnly wants profit. I am not a company manager, so I am not really in position to say it,

Anyone who has run a company knows that everything revolves around profit - without it you are dead. Part of the problem for Commodore was not going after the easy money. They put way too much effort into developing products with questionable futures that could have been directed towards maximizing short-term profits. Only in the later years did they realize their mistake, but by that time it was too late (luckily not quite too late to get the CD32 out).

Commodore certainly made lot of mistakes (CDTV, A3000 etc.) but they managed to produce awesome machines despite continuing financial difficulties and fierce competition from PCs. And it's not like the others were much better. IBM sold PCs solely on its reputation, didn't know what they had initially and then when they did stuffed it up - eventually being relegated to making clones of their own design! The vast majority of computer manufacturers from that era did not survive, and neither did any architecture apart from the PC.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The vast majority of computer manufacturers from that era did not survive, and neither did any architecture apart from the PC.

Acorn lives on in your smartphone.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Part of the problem for Commodore was not going after the easy money. They put way too much effort into developing products with questionable futures that could have been directed towards maximizing short-term profits. Only in the later years did they realize their mistake, but by that time it was too late (luckily not quite too late to get the CD32 out).

Just the opposite is true in my opinion:

Commodore was ONLY looking into short-term profits and had a total lack of a vision for the Amiga or any decent platform development.
They did NOT put enough effort into chipset development, they did NOT put enough resources in OS and software development.

Instead they focused only on selling a cheap gaming machine after the initial A1000 did not take of as expected.
Gould and Ali had absolutely no clue about computers in general and also no clue about the Amiga.
Sadly they weren't even good businessmen.