Mega Drive questions

[fishyfish]

When the storage medium *is* RAM/ROM there's a great benefit. It's like the system getting X amount of additional fast ram and installing a game to that. Transfers to chipram are next to instantaneous, it removes the need to realtime compress/decompress data, not to mention being able to store more data to ram/rom in the 1st place.

[Amiga Forever]

This is really Interesting....Had Amiga CD32 Console release in 1988 then it would have give Megadrive run for moneys!

Checkout compare between two Machines!

http://www.reviewmylife.co.uk/data/2...-specs_big.jpg

[Lobotomika]

Please explain this amiga having more colors with denise thing (excluding copper) as it's hard to believe it could display more colors than a MD with 64/183 colors.

[Amiga Forever]

I think Amiga CD32 Console can handle 256 colours at once on the screen but maybe I am wrong.....someone know more about CD32 Console on how many Colours can they handle

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Lobotomika

Please explain this amiga having more colors with denise thing (excluding copper) as it's hard to believe it could display more colors than a MD with 64/183 colors.

Ocs/Ecs: 64 colors in extra half bright mode (32 definable colors, other 32 colors are half the brightness of the definable ones), 4096 colors in HAM6 mode.
AGA: 256 definable colors or 262144 colors in HAM8 (not counting the definable colors).

All this without using the copper to change any colors.

[Lobotomika]

Thanks but I meant to talk about actually usable modes that were used in commercial games. I'm not biased towards either system as a fan of both but I've never seen a game using HAM and please don't dig out a text adventure that doesn't use sprites and such. 64 colors are standard in MD with 183 in shadow/highlight mode.

Of course AGA has more than that but the original post was about 500s so I didn't feel the need to specify OCS/ECS here. Again, I assumed that this was a comparison thread between the gaming capabilities of a MD and a 500/500+ but perhaps people interpreted it differently after the OP.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by Lobotomika

Please explain this amiga having more colors with denise thing (excluding copper) as it's hard to believe it could display more colors than a MD with 64/183 colors.

As far as I know, there is no megadrive game displaying more than 88 colours in game (Vectorman, and as far as i'm aware, the only one). Though I would certainly like to see a screenshot of one (not including MegaCD, which is not the same display hardware or processor).
Why would you exclude the copper? it isn't just for rainbow gradients, you can change the actual palette entries per scanline.

Pioneer Plague uses a HAM to display 256 colours on screen. Shame the guy couldn't draw ;P Does anyone know how he did this?
Universe has 256 colours on screen
Knights Of The Crystallion uses HAM
Labyrinth of time is in HAM

Other games with between 100 and 200 colours are: Brian the lion, Lionheart, Fire and ice and elfmania. Some change the palette on the fly, some use copper gradients, and some open a new screen for the scoreboard. The same as you can do if you drag down deluxepaint to show another deluxepaint with a different picture. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

[Cammy]

4,096 colour HAM games (not text adventures)






64 colour EHB games




Poor Mega Drive had ugly dithered shadows in Desert Strike, thankfully the Amiga hardware could handle the combination of two sets of 16 colour graphics and add another 32 for shadows. It's not really a comparison of the hardware though, the Amiga version of Desert Strike was touched up and enhanced in many ways.

[khph_re]

An interesting thread on the Megadrive:

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.ph...han-64-colors&

[Lobotomika]

I didn't know desert / jungle strike were EHB, thanks. Too bad most of the other examples are either about static fullscreen digitized ugliness or a copper gradient. My main objection to these are that they're too situational, raw and gimmicky; like SNES mode 7. So if MD's shadow/highlight mode is also that static, it doesn't worth talking about either. EHB in desert strike is more like what I agree with. That brings possibilities to the table, some potential you can provide to the graphic artist. Also interesting to hear you could open a new screen for scoreboard and have a seperate palette there, on the same screen. So did Elfmania do this? If not, what game did?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Lobotomika

I didn't know desert / jungle strike were EHB, thanks. Too bad most of the other examples are either about static fullscreen digitized ugliness or a copper gradient. My main objection to these are that they're too situational, raw and gimmicky; like SNES mode 7. So if MD's shadow/highlight mode is also that static, it doesn't worth talking about either. EHB in desert strike is more like what I agree with. That brings possibilities to the table, some potential you can provide to the graphic artist. Also interesting to hear you could open a new screen for scoreboard and have a seperate palette there, on the same screen. So did Elfmania do this? If not, what game did?

No offence, but I don't think you appreciate the power of the Amigas custom hardware.

The copper chip does a lot more than colourful rainbow backdrops, it can be used to reload colours EVERY scanline.

Take Jim Power for instance, its technically a 16 colour game because its dual playfield. However, with extensive reloading of colours per scanline, its quite a hell of a lot more than 16 colours.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by Lobotomika

I didn't know desert / jungle strike were EHB, thanks. Too bad most of the other examples are either about static fullscreen digitized ugliness or a copper gradient. My main objection to these are that they're too situational, raw and gimmicky; like SNES mode 7. So if MD's shadow/highlight mode is also that static, it doesn't worth talking about either. EHB in desert strike is more like what I agree with. That brings possibilities to the table, some potential you can provide to the graphic artist. Also interesting to hear you could open a new screen for scoreboard and have a seperate palette there, on the same screen. So did Elfmania do this? If not, what game did?

Changing palette/resolution per scanline isn't gimmicky, it's supported by the OS, and documented in the hardware bible. Every time you drag a screen down to display another screen behind, you are using this technique, it will even show different resolutions on the same screen. It's used so often it's not even worth listing the games that use it.

'digitised ugliness' =for the poker, I agree. However Pioneer plague is a very fast shooter with 256 colours on screen, the quality of the artwork is down to the Artist, not the hardware mode. The adventure games features nice rendered graphics. Ideal for it's subject, and probably usefull for dungeon master style games s well.

You seem to be arbitrarily deciding what is a 'gimmick' SNES mode 7 is also a documented feature of the hardware. By rights then, and MD game with over 63 colours, is also a gimmick.

[Lobotomika]

I counted the colors in Jim Power screenshots while masking the background gradient. Appears like you're correct. There are indeed a lot more colors going on. Reducing those screens to 32 colors did not result in any perceivable change but still that's a good job.

@khph_re
Anything that is massively situational is massively situational.

[Adropac2]

Originally Posted by fishyfish

When the storage medium *is* RAM/ROM there's a great benefit. It's like the system getting X amount of additional fast ram and installing a game to that. Transfers to chipram are next to instantaneous, it removes the need to realtime compress/decompress data, not to mention being able to store more data to ram/rom in the 1st place.

Compression in this way on the Amiga? i know little of these things but is that how things were when people wrote games on this platform?. I'm thinking more of a performance increase from that extra memory allowing for better routines. Extra memory is oviously what you always want but the 1MB was at least enough? for allowing the best routines possible here i would have thought

[fishyfish]

It comes down to the game to a degree I guess. It is indeed possible to create a good game soley with the 1 meg chipram, but for a bigger more elaborate game it gets harder and harder to squeeze good results. Code itself eats in to available chipram, which is quite valuable when your storage medium isnt "instant". More and more tricks are needed to squeeze in required gfx data, like realtime decompression of data, which itself eats into resources. Given an extra 8/16/32megabit of ram (well rom really) data can be stored in ways that make less "tricks" required leaving the full potential of the hardware to be used. Not to mention that chipram is slower than ram dedicated to the cpu (hence the term "fast ram).

Had the a500 had its chipram plus a few meg (say 16megabit) fastram, even with everything else unchanged there would have been more potential to let the hardware shine.
Just a shame that potential was never really tapped as by the time a typical amiga was upgraded with extra ram commercial development had pretty much ceased.
Personaly I think its a shame that there's not real games that use the potential of an upgraded aga machine in an "amiga style" game, but even ocs/ecs system could have produced games with fewer comprimises had megabytes of storage space been instantly available (like in a cartridge for example).

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by fishyfish

It comes down to the game to a degree I guess. It is indeed possible to create a good game soley with the 1 meg chipram, but for a bigger more elaborate game it gets harder and harder to squeeze good results. Code itself eats in to available chipram, which is quite valuable when your storage medium isnt "instant". More and more tricks are needed to squeeze in required gfx data, like realtime decompression of data, which itself eats into resources. Given an extra 8/16/32megabit of ram (well rom really) data can be stored in ways that make less "tricks" required leaving the full potential of the hardware to be used. Not to mention that chipram is slower than ram dedicated to the cpu (hence the term "fast ram).

Had the a500 had its chipram plus a few meg (say 16megabit) fastram, even with everything else unchanged there would have been more potential to let the hardware shine.
Just a shame that potential was never really tapped as by the time a typical amiga was upgraded with extra ram commercial development had pretty much ceased.
Personaly I think its a shame that there's not real games that use the potential of an upgraded aga machine in an "amiga style" game, but even ocs/ecs system could have produced games with fewer comprimises had megabytes of storage space been instantly available (like in a cartridge for example).

Firstly your use of 'megabit' is a misnomer (32megabit= 4megabytes), it was a measurement used by console manufacturers to make out that their games were bigger than they were, plenty of Amiga games were far in excess of that size with ease.

Secondly, 1 meg of memory on the Amiga was pretty much the norm by late 1990 early 1991, the Amiga was still plenty commercially viable at that point.

Team 17 made a point of making nothing but 1meg only games, and plenty of other software companies were doing the same.

Secondly, console game makers would also use depack routines and the like to fit as much as possible onto a smaller cartridge as it could significantly bring the cost of developing on Megadrive and SNES down by requiring a smaller ROM.

And no it doesn't mean its harder to create a bigger and better game if it exceeds the 1Meg of memory..... that is after all what floppy loading routines and disks are for!

[_ThEcRoW]

What is the game above fighting spirit shots?. Looks like myst and interesting...

[matthey]

Black Crypt uses EHB and special copper effects.
There was a special version of A10 Tank Killer that used HAM.

EHB is VERY usable from a programmers perspective. The hardest thing is remapping the colors of existing pictures/bitmaps. Most of the 256 color VGA "ports" to the Amiga should have used this mode but the programmers were just too lazy. HAM is trickier to use. It is not good for most types of games but not a problem at all for some.

[fishyfish]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Firstly your use of 'megabit' is a misnomer (32megabit= 4megabytes), it was a measurement used by console manufacturers to make out that their games were bigger than they were, plenty of Amiga games were far in excess of that size with ease.

Secondly, 1 meg of memory on the Amiga was pretty much the norm by late 1990 early 1991, the Amiga was still plenty commercially viable at that point.

Team 17 made a point of making nothing but 1meg only games, and plenty of other software companies were doing the same.

Secondly, console game makers would also use depack routines and the like to fit as much as possible onto a smaller cartridge as it could significantly bring the cost of developing on Megadrive and SNES down by requiring a smaller ROM.

And no it doesn't mean its harder to create a bigger and better game if it exceeds the 1Meg of memory..... that is after all what floppy loading routines and disks are for!

Sure, but beyond 1 meg chip +2meg fast (for a random example) for the typical user didnt happen until much later, but which point the amiga was commercially dead.
Also, you cant really compare floppy disks to dedicated ram/rom, clearly having 16/32 mb "on tap" is an advantage vs. floppies. Valuable chipram is freed up when code can reside in other ram for a very simple example, graphics and sound data can be ready be passed to chip, and descompression can be done inside fast ram (along with the code for it).

Obviously its not going make a big difference to how quickly bobs can be thrown around, or influence hardware sprite power and so on, but the cartridge format does hold some advantages to floppy discs, especially with the sort of machines being discussed.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by matthey

Most of the 256 color VGA "ports" to the Amiga should have used this mode but the programmers were just too lazy. HAM is trickier to use.

Don't know about that, It was mainly a floppy storage issue. Monkey island 2 would have needed too many disks to run in EHB (it came on 11 as it was), same with most other VGA games. 880k wasn't enough by this point, the hardware outstripped the storage.