05 March 2022, 14:21 | #81 |
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Bruce, while I admire your dedication to the Amiga, I don't understand why people cannot just love the Amiga for the great computer it was in its time, and let it lay as such. Another year for Commodore may as well been a drunken man pissing in the wind.
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05 March 2022, 14:37 | #82 | |||||||||||
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SX32 is rare expansion and hardly ever used by any CD32 specific game. And you couldn't get 040/060 without conflicting with Akiko C2P (iirc) but it doesn't matter as 040 can do that math faster anyway. |
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05 March 2022, 14:43 | #83 | |
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07 March 2022, 08:53 | #84 | ||||||
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Commodore A2410 (1991) used a Texas Instruments TMS34010. Digital Micronics Resolver (1991) also used a TMS34010. Digital Micronics Vivid 24 (1992) used a TMS3020 and up to four TMS34082 coprocessors. Ameristar 1600GX (1992) used a Weitek 91460. Macrosystems Retina (1992) used an NCR 77C22E+. Retina BLT Z3 (1994) used an NCR 77C32BLT. Archos AVideo 12 (1992) used an Actel A1010 CPLD. Archos AVideo 24 (1992) used two CPLDs. Impulse FireCracker (1990), GfxBase GDA1 (1991), Harlequin series (1991), GVP EGS 110/24 (1992), and Rainbow III (1994) all used standard TTL and PAL logic ICs - no 'PC' graphics chips. Quote:
But this is getting off topic. Nobody in 1994 was expecting Commodore to use PC graphics chips in the Amiga. We were thinking a few enhancements to AGA would do the trick, and that's probably what they would have done. Quote:
Most PCs of the time didn't come with a sound card or joystick interface either. Great for dealers - I sold heaps of them in my shop. I don't remember selling a lot of wheels and pedals back then, but I do remember having a demonstration unit that was always getting in the way. The Amiga didn't have a lot of serious driving games, but it did have a good number of flight simulators and many of them supported analog joystick. Here's a (non-definitive) list of Amiga games with analog joystick support:- A-10 tank killer v. 1.5 AV8B Harrier Assault Birds of prey F-19 Stealth Fighter F-15 Strike Eagle II Fighter Duel Pro-2 Fighter Duel: Corsair vs Zero! Flight of the Intruder Flight Simulator II Formula One Grand prix / World Circuit Gunship 2000 Jet Pilot Knights of the Sky Mig-29 Fulcrum Mig-29 SuperFulcrum Reach for the Skyoes Red Baron Tornado One driving game you won't find on that list is Test Drive by Accolade, released in 1987 (was this the first Amiga driving simulator?). Here's what a reviewer on Moby Games said about the PC DOS version:- Quote:
But there may have been a good reason for reducing the resolution. The Amiga reads analog joystick positions with hardware, while the PC has to do it in software. Here's some info on the PC analog joystick interface:- Quote:
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07 March 2022, 09:46 | #85 | ||||
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It is hard to communicate how many patches and tricks it requires to get systems like P96 or CGfx running, it is more or less a complete replacement of the graphics.library, with some quirks and workarounds on other libraries. CBM did only very little (in Kick 3.1) to support RTG, and this approach was half-hearted and incomplete. Quote:
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The only difference is that on the Amiga, by tradition, digital joysticks were more popular, but one could also connect analog joysticks to the machine, then using a different set of registers. |
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07 March 2022, 10:16 | #86 | |
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The NCR chips not extensively as they sucked massively, but here they are: http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/...2-ncr-77c32blt http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/...22-ncr-77c22-e The Texas Instruments ones? funny you mention them as their biggest volume was likely accelerated PC graphics cards for things like MS AutoCAD and 3DsMax on MS-DOS -> http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/...hitecture-tiga Some of the other cards you mention which didn't use a video chip use a bare frame buffer with a RAMDAC with sometimes a hardware cursor, in some cases one from Inmos (yes, the Transputer company), that's just trying to make a card as simply and cheaply as possible. Given those cards where still very expensive in their day i'm not sure i'd call that much of a special achievement. Last edited by Locutus; 07 March 2022 at 10:36. |
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07 March 2022, 10:59 | #87 | |||
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One advantage of CD is that files are contiguous. That means once you start reading a file you can continue reading sectors directly, knowing they will be in order with no gaps. This is similar to how some games store data on floppy. An early example of dynamic loading is The Faery Tale Adventure. You say CD32 wasn't used properly. I say as time went on it would have been better utilized. Most developers were initially happy enough just having much faster loading times and virtually infinite storage space, but I'm sure it wouldn't have taken them long to use it 'properly' - had Commodore still been selling CD32s. Quote:
A few games that needed the extra horsepower were released for the A1200 in the mid 90's, but we are only now seeing what might have been if Commodore had lasted another year or so. Yesterday I downloaded a new Wolfenstein 3D port from aminet, and was surprised to find that it was too fast on my A1200 with 50MHz 030. And the sound was excellent too (much better than DoomAttack). A 14MHz 020 with some FastRAM might be the 'sweet spot' for this game. That shows what a moderately expanded CD32 or A1200 can do in the hands of a talented programmer. |
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07 March 2022, 11:51 | #88 | ||||
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However, while most contemporary VGA chipsets at least implemented the EGA/CGA/VGA engine and register set, the Inmos is just a stupid framebuffer whose only advantage is that it has very high pixel clock of 110MHz, so you could reach resolutions beyond what contemporary chips could deliver. Quote:
Later on, some 3D chips with memory-mapped registers arrived, such as the Permedia3D chip, which did not use the VGA legacy registers for its advanced modes, but implemented its own specific register set (much saner than the VGA set, but also somewhat limited). By around this time, the interface moved away from the hardware (VGA register) interface to the software based windows "Direct Draw" interface, and vendors became more and more quiet about their hardware layer, delivering only drivers instead of datasheets. For windows, this made perfect sense as software is easier to adapt than hardware. |
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07 March 2022, 15:40 | #89 | |||||||
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@Bruce
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07 March 2022, 20:40 | #90 |
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PSX hardware was great, no doubt, but it wasn't the only winning factor - after all Saturn wasn't far off, in fact some say it was more powerful, even if undeniably more difficult to code for. And N64 even more so, though they made a huge mistake of sticking with carts as the storage medium. Still, they were a heavyweight, established competition, but what Sony did was to aim for the the zeitgeist - and capturing it was a masterstroke. With PSX, gaming was no longer associated with nerds and kiddies, it has become a "cool" thing to do in clubs and after parties, and eventually broke into the real mainstream. Games like Wipeout employed the hippest design houses and put the underground chart toppers on soundtracks, others yet were "serious" PC imports such as Tomb Raider or Driver, and it all made Mario & Sonic look a little bit childish and dated.
All of this was not accidental, but carefully orchestrated and advertised, with support of Sony's mammoth budget. How on earth Commodore, a crumbling & uncool old-timer with empty pockets, was supposed to compete with such relentless (and expensive) tactical blitz is anybody's guess. |
07 March 2022, 22:12 | #91 | |
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07 March 2022, 23:57 | #92 | |
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So, as I was saying... |
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08 March 2022, 00:45 | #93 | ||
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For example if you stick to funneling everything through the BIOS your programs can work even on MSDOS machines that aren't IBM compatible. But BIOS functions like printing characters were so slow on the 8088 that application developers avoided them in favor of writing directly to screen memory. Once they did that graphics chip manufacturers were forced to make their chips compatible with IBM's video adapters. In the early days of the Amiga it was considered acceptable to kick out the OS and take over control of the hardware completely, but this started to become problematic when new chipsets were introduced. Commodore withheld some information on the AGA chipset and told developers to go through the OS to initialize the hardware. Part of the reason for this change in policy was that as the chipset was being developed they encountered bugs and incompatibilities that they intended to 'fix' in software. By going through the OS, application programmers didn't have worry about supporting different chipset peculiarities in their own code. Had Commodore continued to develop their chipsets this problem would have gotten worse. However at the same time CPUs were getting more powerful so the need to to bypass the OS was getting less. The move towards 3D and graphic adventure games also helped because they only needed a basic frame buffer. There's a lot you can do on the Amiga without kicking out the OS and taking over the entire system. The performance degradation is often minimum, and the advantages numerous. However unlike modern PCs it is possible to combine system functions with hardware banging code - at least on machines that were produced up to 1994. |
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08 March 2022, 02:03 | #94 | |||||
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I am a user of P96 for the simple reason that the Vampire uses it. Now as you know, the Vampire does not have any PC graphics chipset in it, and yet it somehow still manages to work. P96 does not require that the hardware be a clone of Super-VGA. Quote:
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Interpreting Proportional Controller Position On the PC the CPU has to wait on a bit in the I/O port while counting time. As well as wasting CPU cycles this can seriously impact multitasking and interrupts because for accurate timing all interrupts must be disabled for several ms (the entire time that the capacitor is charging), and it can reduce accuracy and calibration because the timing is dependent on CPU speed etc. |
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08 March 2022, 14:08 | #95 |
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https://mobile.twitter.com/commodore...74605457616908
There you go, straight from the horse's mouth. |
08 March 2022, 17:17 | #96 |
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Not to be negative, but I think that'd have just made the Amiga look even worse in the eyes of history.
It was already verging on obsolete technology wise in '94 while the rest of the tech world was getting more advanced at an astronomical rate. |
08 March 2022, 18:47 | #97 | |
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Being level-headed, rational, realistic and factual should never be seen as being "negative". I - and many more - share your view on the subject. It's not what we wanted to have been or to have happened, but we are capable of understanding that our will or our needs beard no consequence on how things unfolded or where they ended up. Things are what they are, regardless of what we wanted them to be. Not acknowledging this is being in denial. |
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08 March 2022, 19:04 | #98 | |||||
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It only became worse after that point due to the "designed for windows" policy, which allowed chip vendors to move the interface from a hardware to a software interface. However, the same would have been necessary in the long run on the Amiga as well simply because the hardware interface is just not flexible enough and hard to upgrade. Quote:
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No, part of the reason was that CBM wanted a migration path to newer hardware without having to worry about software too much. MS did the same, and it is of course the right move. It was just too late, and the graphics.system of the Amiga is not exactly the right foundation for this move, with its "bitmaps", "bitplanes" and "masks", all oriented at a planar graphics layout. |
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08 March 2022, 20:43 | #99 | |
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Just out of curiosity, how would the PA-RISC follow-up to CD32 have compared to PS1? I'm guessing the answer is "poorly", but I also know nothing about the hardware described in the document. |
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09 March 2022, 01:39 | #100 | ||
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Here's an interesting document dated 11th May 1993. Some highlights:- Quote:
However you think PA-RISC may have compared to the PS1 in 3D gaming performance, there is no doubt that it would eat it for lunch in other areas. The PS1 had no OS to speak of and was useless for anything but 3D games. Neither did it provide an upgrade path or commonality with any computing platform past present or future. |
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