new amiga 500 doom like !

[Mathesar]

Am watching it again now quietly with a headphone on. The dynamic stereo and volume effects are working *really* well

[TEG]

Originally Posted by KK/Altair

Blitter? Or Paula?
If the latter, she already does. If Paula couldn't vary sample playback rates smoothly, she couldn't play sample-based music.

I was really talking, and half joking, about the blitter (Agnus) because of the speed of the frame-rate and so the intensively chunky to planar conversion done with the blitter, you invented, it implies.

I guess some demos already used the blitter intensively but on a limit amount of time. So I don't know if we have a case of, let's say, one hour of play, and so continuous and intensive use of the blitter, in the Amiga history.

[LongLifeA1200]

Originally Posted by TEG

I was really talking, and half joking, about the blitter (Agnus) because of the speed of the frame-rate and so the intensively chunky to planar conversion done with the blitter, you invented, it implies.

I guess some demos already used the blitter intensively but on a limit amount of time. So I don't know if we have a case of, let's say, one hour of play, and so continuous and intensive use of the blitter, in the Amiga history.

I hadn't thought about that. Now I'm a little concerned.
Should A500 owners start installing heatsinks on their Agnus chips' now?
Will the line "Adequate Cooling" be added to the minimum requirements of Dread?

[d4rk3lf]

That would be ridiculously funny.

Imagine cover:
You don't need AGA to play our amazing 3D game!
You don't need 020 to play it.
You don't even need more then 1MB!
All you need is this water cooling system for blitter, that costs 600 euros... err.. 599 euros

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

That would be ridiculously funny.

Imagine cover:
You don't need AGA to play our amazing 3D game!
You don't need 020 to play it.
You don't even need more then 1MB!
All you need is this water cooling system for blitter, that costs 600 euros... err.. 599 euros

Thankfully I have no A500 and I really hope I get to play this game on my A1200

I still commend the power summoned up though to get this as good as it is at the moment and working on the good old A500! Fantastic sorcery!

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Thankfully I have no A500 and I really hope I get to play this game on my A1200

Well, A1200 and A500, have exactly same blitter, so you'll need 599 euros to save that chip (I might find you a cheaper alternative for 399, but it's not that reliable, and you are in risk to set fire on both your Amiga, and your home (and your face, if it explodes). :P

Joke aside,
Yes, this game is strictly made for A500, but with your A1200, you should have twice the framerate, right from the get go.

[KK/Altair]

Could something be gained then by lowering the sample rate by an integer factor? Like going from 22050 to 4410Hz (divide by 5) instead of 4000Hz?

Integer factors only matter if you are trying to optimize the filtering for speed.
Here we can take all the time we need for preprocessing, so I'm using FIR filter to resample to any rate I might ever want.

the intensively chunky to planar conversion done with the blitter

1/3 of it is done by the CPU already. And for free.

So I don't know if we have a case of, let's say, one hour of play, and so continuous and intensive use of the blitter, in the Amiga history.

Blitter isn't always ON, as it's not the bottleneck. CPU still takes even more to render next frame, so Blitter completes its job and waits.

Unless you are running A600 with Furia. The it's the CPU that waits for Blitter most of the time.

Should A500 owners start installing heatsinks on their Agnus chips' now?

I doubt Blitter uses that much more power, compared to common DMA transfers that happen all the time.

And again, Dread is nowhere near saturating Blitter on A500.
Better turn your attention to those record-beating line/poly drawing demos that use Copper to make sure Blitter doesn't have time to catch a breath.

All you need is this water cooling system for blitter, that costs 600 euros... err.. 599 euros

That made my day!

Thankfully I have no A500 and I really hope I get to play this game on my A1200

It already works on A1200 amazingly.

[TEG]

1/3 done with the CPU. Thx for the clarification.

But why you say "for free"?

[Lisko]

Originally Posted by KK/Altair

It already works on A1200 amazingly.

Runs surprisingly well. Citing CDPRJKT RED.

[chb]

Originally Posted by TEG

1/3 done with the CPU. Thx for the clarification.

But why you say "for free"?

Just my guess: KK is saving one of three passes in the blitter c2p (the first one probably, as it replaces the bytes in a word) by writing the data in scrambled order; if you do it in a clever way, it does not take additional CPU time.


As he called it a 'crazy programming trick' at some point, my bet would be on some additional use of the stack's word alignment, but I might be off completely. :-)

[KK/Altair]

Just my guess: KK is saving one of three passes in the blitter c2p (the first one probably, as it replaces the bytes in a word) by writing the data in scrambled order; if you do it in a clever way, it does not take additional CPU time.

Exactly that. Long live the a7 register.

As he called it a 'crazy programming trick' at some point, my bet would be on some additional use of the stack's word alignment, but I might be off completely. :-)

You're completely on point. All my rendering writes through (a7)+, prescrambling columns at the byte level. Of course the other byte is another column, 8px to the right.

[roondar]

Finally watched the video. Nice work with the positional audio. That's quite cool and it works really well as you show. Also love all the sound options you're adding to the menu

---

Originally Posted by TEG

I guess some demos already used the blitter intensively but on a limit amount of time. So I don't know if we have a case of, let's say, one hour of play, and so continuous and intensive use of the blitter, in the Amiga history.

I feel it should be pointed out here that many games on the Amiga use the Blitter extensively and for long periods. In fact, simpler 2D games potentially have less CPU overhead than Dread and hence could possibly make even more use of the Blitter (relatively speaking that is).

Personally, I wouldn't really worry about it

[DanScott]

I'd imagine if there was ever some kind of issue with Blitter overheating, we would have heard about it by around early 1986 probably

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by KK/Altair

It already works on A1200 amazingly.

Yeahhhhh!! Can't wait. Amazing work my man

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by DanScott

I'd imagine if there was ever some kind of issue with Blitter overheating, we would have heard about it by around early 1986 probably

Lol, yea, you'd think so

Otoh, if you traveled back in time and show Dread to Amiga designers they'd fall off their chairs.. ;-) There would be idol posters of KK Altair on every wall of CMB offices ;-)

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Lol, yea, you'd think so

Otoh, if you traveled back in time and show Dread to Amiga designers they'd fall off their chairs.. ;-) There would be idol posters of KK Altair on every wall of CMB offices ;-)

Sounds like a plot of a B movie

[malko]

^ or A comedy movie if shooted with good actors (check this one, not Amiga related, but "if happened differently" related : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477988/ )

[Tsak]

Hey guys, time for a sneak peek on our gfx update work.



In the pic above you can see the old walls with the familiar, grey vertical dither looks and the brand new wall texture at the top. Both of these pics are taken from the 3d level display/preview of KKs tool, so it's the same resolution, geometry and detail the engine outputs in-game.

For those of you with a keen eye, you'll notice that this example not only showcases we can display clean textures in full detail, but also that the resolution we can display them into is NOT your usual 2x2!

Enjoy & happy Easter!

[malko]

On an A500
Crazy how good you are guys !

[rothers]

I can't wait for this, I hope people from ID software see it, I saw a few people have tweeted it at John Romero.

If you guys do a proper big box release it will be the first Amiga game I've bought in almost 30 years!