Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Ah yes, I had forgotten about that one. It was released for the PC in November 1992, one month after the A1200 was released.

The AGA chipset design was firmed up between November 1991 and February 1992 (it was supposed to be finished and delivered in the A1000 Plus by October 1991, but for various reasons that didn't happen). At that time chunky pixel texture mapped 3D games didn't yet exist, so it's understandable why Commodore didn't give chunky pixels high priority. The AGA chipset was oriented towards 2D graphics because that's what everyone was doing at that time, and it was a natural extension of OCS/ECS. I wish they had put a 256 color chunky pixel mode in it though, if only to reduce PC envy.

https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/Tiles
SNES's Mode 7 and Mode 7 Direct Color features are chunky pixel formats.

The original key Amiga engineers-led 3DO has chunky pixel and texture mapper hardware ready for Q4 1993.

What's needed is Commodore's cost reduction specialty and the original Amiga engineer team's cutting-edge technical specialty for another "A500" in 1993. The two halves created the A500 in 1987.

Sega Model 2's 3D R&D occurred before its 1993 release i.e. General Electric approached Sega with some real-time texture mapping ASICs, which led to a commercial partnership in August 1992. Sega Model 2's CPU is Intel's RISC i960 at 25 Mhz. Sega Model 2's use case influenced the Sega Saturn. GE Aerospace's expensive texture-mapping technology was cost-reduced by Sega's Suzuki team into a more affordable chipset.

General Electric Aerial & Space's textural mapping technology was purchased by Lockheed Martin and span-off into Real3D Inc which is later purchased by Intel Corp. There are more than 200,000 Sega Model2 and Model3 arcade systems.

References
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real3D

The company also formed a partnership with Intel and Chips and Technologies to introduce similar technology as an add-in card for PC's, a project known as "Auburn". This project became a showcase for the Accelerated Graphics Port system being introduced by Intel, which led to several design decisions that hampered the resulting products. Released in 1998 as the Intel740, the system lasted less than a year in the market before being sold off under the StarFighter and Lightspeed brand names.

By 1999 both relationships were ending, and Lockheed Martin was focusing on its military assets. On 1 October 1999 the company closed, and its assets were sold to Intel on the 14th.[4] ATI hired many of the remaining employees for a new Orlando office. 3dfx Interactive had sued Real3D on a patent basis, and Intel's purchase moved the lawsuits to the new owner. Intel settled the issue by selling all of the intellectual property back to 3dFX.[5]

By this point, nVidia had acquired all of SGI's graphics development resources, which included a 10% share in Real3D. This led to a series of lawsuits, joined by ATI. The two companies were involved in lawsuits over Real3D's patents until a 2001 cross-licensing settlement.[6]

----

ATI was purchased by AMD in 2006. ArtX was founded by ex-SGI engineers and was purchased by ATI.
3DFX sold its graphics-related assets to Nvidia in 2000. 3DFX was founded by ex-SGI engineers.
SGI graphics team moved to Nvidia in 1999.

AMD's Radeon Group and Nvidia are the direct successors to SGI and Real3D Inc. There was an assimilation of technical distinctiveness by the PC world.

[CCCP alert]

byte per pixel was a feature of mode h on VGA since the mid 80s, possibly it's IBM developed predecessor (MCGA?)too?

nobody had an answer for the PS1 chipset sold in a £299 console anyway. Everything split into £1500 PC gaming rig vs £300 PS1 in 94/95 so everything else is meaningless to a gamer. Oddly stuff like Final Writer 95 is much more usable on a £600 worth of A1200 than a £600 PC Office 95.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

SNES's...

3DO...

Not interested in gaming consoles with with no computer functions.

Sega Model 2's

Not interested in arcade boards either.

I just realized that in all the time I have been programming the Amiga - including making commercial titles - I never once tried using the blitter directly, or the copper, or sprites, or hardware scrolling, or any of that stuff the pros did. I meant to but never got around to it. All that fun I have been missing out on! Need to put that at the top of my bucket list...

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not interested in gaming consoles with with no computer functions.

The Amiga wasn't an isolated platform.

PC VGA has chunky pixels.

With EGA cards, the programmer can write pixels to video memory in a chunky way using Write Mode 2, but it's much slower than writing plane-by-plane.

FastDoom supports this particular video mode https://github.com/viti95/FastDoom/b...STDOOM/i_ibm.c

The Amiga can do chunky pixels with a post-Lisa Graffiti raster addon. http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Graffiti Lisa's raster needs to be modified for different data structures.

[ Show youtube player ]
Nemac IV running on Indivision ECS's Graffiti and A600's 68030 @ 25 Mhz accelerator. Indivision ECS's Graffiti enables chunky pixel 256 colors on ECS Amigas. Using ECS's Chip RAM bandwidth and extra chunky pixel raster as a simple buffer, it's good enough for 320x200 256 colors. Imagine, if Denise++ direct chip-replacement upgrade had a built-in Graffiti-like solution and every 16-bit Amiga had the potential to join entry-level 256 colors 3D gaming.

Evolved Lisa's Graffiti chunky pixels have access to higher memory bandwidth and it should remain software-compatible with ECS's Graffiti chunky pixels. It needs official support from Commodore.

A3000's Super Denise has access to higher Chip RAM bandwidth.

Remember, C65 has 256 colors with A500's level memory bandwidth.

[ Show youtube player ]
A1200 with 68030 @ 50Mhz accelerator with Lisa's 32-bit Chip RAM bandwidth and Graffiti chunky pixels running Doom. The performance is pretty good.

There is potential, but Commodore's leadership is a failure. 16 million color palette is not useful for games with 320x200/256-pixel resolution. I'll trade for 256 color chunky pixels with an 18-bit palette vs a 16 million color palette.
Like VGA, Graffiti has 256 colors from an 18-bit color palette.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not interested in arcade boards either.

Sega Model 2's texture mapper was based on workstation graphics.

Jay Miner cited a military flight simulator during the original Amiga's design. The original Amiga aimed higher i.e. workstation-like power for lower-cost desktop computer and game console markets a.k.a. power without the price.

Sega applied its cost-reduction methods on the workstation texture mapper IP.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

byte per pixel was a feature of mode h on VGA since the mid 80s, possibly it's IBM developed predecessor (MCGA?)too?

nobody had an answer for the PS1 chipset sold in a £299 console anyway. Everything split into £1500 PC gaming rig vs £300 PS1 in 94/95 so everything else is meaningless to a gamer. Oddly stuff like Final Writer 95 is much more usable on a £600 worth of A1200 than a £600 PC Office 95.

PS1 is about AUD $700 in Australia.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaNDNXHV...pg&name=medium


https://archive.org/details/pc-home-...ge/96/mode/2up
From Silica. June 1994
For £799, Ambra PC with 486SX-25, 240 MB HDD, 4 MB RAM, VLB SVGA GD5424 card, SVGA monitor, 3.5 FDD and 'etc'.

https://archive.org/details/pc-home-...ge/20/mode/2up
For £649, 486SX-33, 4MB RAM, SVGA monitor, 170 MB HDD, 256 KB VGA,

https://archive.org/details/pc-home-...ge/92/mode/2up
For £667, 486DX2-66, 128KB L2 cache, 270 MB HDD, 4 MB RAM, VLB 1 MB VRAM GD5428, KB, mouse, 1 printer, 2 serial

https://archive.org/details/pc-home-...ge/86/mode/2up
PC Home (UK), April 1995.
For £629, 486SX-25, 4 MB RAM, 340 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, 1.44MB FDD, VLB 1 MB SVGA card, KB, mouse.
For £649, 486SX-33, 4 MB RAM, 340 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, 1.44MB FDD, VLB 1 MB SVGA card, KB, mouse.
For £659, 486SX2-50, 4 MB RAM, 340 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, 1.44MB FDD, VLB 1 MB SVGA card, KB, mouse.
Sound Blaster Pro = £58
Sound Blaster Pro 16 = £69

https://archive.org/details/pc-home-...ge/82/mode/2up
PC Home (UK), April 1995.
For £505, 386DX-40, 4 MB RAM, 250 MB HDD, SVGA monitor, 512 KB VGA card, FDD, Keyb, mouse, 2 serial, 1 printer, game ports.

4MB RAM targets Doom.

There's no sugarcoating.

Try again.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by hammer

PS1 is about AUD $700 in Australia.

I would say that has to be a mistake? Or was there a massive drop in inflation in AUD between 1995 and 1997? Or maybe Oz just got buggered on price? The PS1 was the same price as N64 by May 1997 in UK

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PiStorm provides insane performance that we couldn't even conceive of last century

Isn't that a 'little' late? And besides, it's just a CPU emulator.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Thorham

And besides, it's just a CPU emulator.

It's a CPU executing code that translates 680x0. Isn't that what all 680x0's are? They run ROMd uCode on a simpler underlying CPU design no?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

The Amiga wasn't an isolated platform.

In some ways it was, in others not.

In 1993 printer manufacturers were still supporting 'standard' protocols. But in the rush to the bottom this would soon change. Pentium CPUs and Windows 95 allowed 'GDI' printers to take off. No reason they couldn't be used on the Amiga but one - secret proprietary protocols and drivers that only worked in Windows.

Same thing happened with MODEMs. The first 'Wintel' MODEMs were awful because they sucked up all the CPU time. But faster Pentium CPUs eventually fixed that - then external MODEMs disappeared.

Same thing would have happened with PCMCIA network cards too, if 'someone' hadn't ignored the naysayers and said "hey, why can't this work on the Amiga?" and developed a driver for it.

On the software side, most business apps only worked on PCs and their proprietary file formats were not published. My accountants wanted me to use the same DOS accounting package as them (written in Microsoft QuickBASIC) so they could plug my files into their system. I refused, and wrote a file conversion program to give them the required data. Most people wouldn't do that, they would buckle under and buy a PC.

The Amiga suffered because people took the 'easy' route of just using the proprietary file formats of Microsoft Office etc., rather than saving files in standard formats. Even PC users suffered. Office wasn't cheap but you needed it to read that letter or spreadsheet someone sent you.

The Internet had open standards, but that wouldn't last either - how can you force people to use your apps in that environment? So Netscape introduced proprietary HTML extensions that only worked with their browser, including the performance sucking security disaster they called JavaScript. Naturally Microsoft had to do the same, and the rest is 'history'.

Luckily for us some PC game producers still supported the Amiga. Even if they were only EGA ports we still got to play the games so it was OK. But some didn't. John Carmack famously refused to let Doom be ported to the Amiga because a stock A500 couldn't run it. Of course by this time Commodore was gone, and with no new Amigas being produced it was dismissed by mainstream game producers, which is understandable. But some gave up long before that. This was also understandable when porting your PC game to the Amiga might only net 10% more sales, but it still isolated the Amiga platform.

PC VGA has chunky pixels.

And you had to use them if you wanted more than 16 colors. No tuning the number of bitplanes to the colors you needed. No dual playfields, no split resolutions or changing color palettes on a line by line basis, no sprites and no vsync to prevent tearing. All rendering had to be done with the CPU so you needed a fast one. I saw the results on a 16MHz 386SX and it wasn't pretty. Chunky pixels didn't help much if at all.

With EGA cards, the programmer can write pixels to video memory in a chunky way using Write Mode 2, but it's much slower than writing plane-by-plane.

And EGA only had 16 colors from a yucky 64 color palette. Some artists did amazing stuff with it, but those garish colors were so limiting. No wonder PC users went gaga over VGA!

FastDoom supports this particular video mode https://github.com/viti95/FastDoom/b...STDOOM/i_ibm.c

And it looks awful. The Amiga could do better even with only 16 colors, or much better with AGA in 32 or 64 colors. Unfortunately nobody seems to be interested in doing that. But with a 50MHz 030 in the A1200 Doom runs identically to a contemporary PC, so I guess there's not much incentive to 'FastDoom' it.

The Amiga can do chunky pixels with a post-Lisa Graffiti raster addon. http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Graffiti Lisa's raster needs to be modified for different data structures.

I tested DoomAttack on my 50MHz A1200 in Graffiti mode and it was slower. In 'low detail' (2x1 pixels) I got 13.9 fps with blitter-assisted c2p, and 12.2 fps with graffiti.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by alexh

It's a CPU executing code that translates 680x0. Isn't that what all 680x0's are? They run ROMd uCode on a simpler underlying CPU design no?

You got me there

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Same thing would have happened with PCMCIA network cards too, if 'someone' hadn't ignored the naysayers and said "hey, why can't this work on the Amiga?" and developed a driver for it.

And thank all that is good and wholesome for that.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But some didn't. John Carmack famously refused to let Doom be ported to the Amiga because a stock A500 couldn't run it.

Very understandable.

[albino]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

John Carmack famously refused to let Doom be ported to the Amiga because a stock A500 couldn't run it. Of course by this time Commodore was gone, and with no new Amigas being produced it was dismissed by mainstream game producers, which is understandable. But some gave up long before that. This was also understandable when porting your PC game to the Amiga might only net 10% more sales, but it still isolated the Amiga platform.

As i said before, instead of launching a useless CDTV COMMODORE should have design some extra chip enhancement for the A500 inside the A570. It would have allow to port any games coming from the pc.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

John Carmack famously refused to let Doom be ported to the Amiga because a stock A500 couldn't run it.

Here's John's original answer:

The amiga is not powerfull enough to run DOOM. It takes the full
speed of a 68040 to play the game properly even if you have a chunky
pixel mode in hardware. Having to convert to bit planes would kill
it even on the fastest amiga hardware, not to mention the effect it
would have on the majority of the amiga base.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.../c/MZb9cC0FMhw
He didn't refuse to let it be ported. He knew how it ran on NeXTSTEP and (partially wrongly) assumed it wouldn't be feasible on any Amiga. Team 17 later approached id about the Doom license for their engine that became Alien Breed 3D and it simply wouldn't have been profitable to get the license with the expected sold copies.

I know you'll continue to 'spin' this story so that it looks like there was a conspiracy to not let the mighty Amiga™ get a commercial Doom port, but the simple truth is that nobody saw money in it and thus it didn't happen.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by TCD

but the simple truth is that nobody saw money in it and thus it didn't happen.

Yup.
Not to mention an awful lot of companies had long stopped supporting the platform due to huge piracy.

With a company so reliant on the gaming market and with a single, overall modestly successful product (consoles sold 10x and were a WAY more healthy ecosystem due to immensely higher average software sales, too) the writing was on the wall unfortunately, and had been for a long, long time.

Commodore being badly mismanaged only made the inevitable (that is, barring a major shift in the company profile/offering... a-la-Apple, for example) happen sooner.

[sokolovic]

The only one that could have seen money on this was Commodore themselves, not from the game itself, but for the system they were selling.
They did try to secure the rights for Wolfenstein 3D for the CD32 ( source here ) but as we all knows, nothing eventually came out from the discussions with ID.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

They did try to secure the rights for Wolfenstein 3D for the CD32

Securing a licence for a Wolf3D port has to be one of the most un-Commodore things I've ever read, at least at that time. Would be nice to know more details about this though!

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Securing a licence for a Wolf3D port has to be one of the most un-Commodore things I've ever read, at least at that time. Would be nice to know more details about this though!

I know nothing more than posted in the link above. This came from an interview of an ID guy (I suppose this is Jay Wilbur) in french magazine Joystick from november 1993.

Do you think of any other Castle Wolfenstein conversions?

I'm currently talking with people from 3DO and Amiga (for the CD32). We do not want to develop these conversions internally, we want to sell the licenses.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I know nothing more than posted in the link above. This came from an interview of an ID guy (I suppose this is Jay Wilbur) in french magazine Joystick from november 1993.

Yeah I followed your link and was genuinely surprised... to be honest I had never heard about the port either!

I mean Commodore had a history of very successful bundles, but this feels (well, "would have felt" is probably more accurate since it didn't actually materialise) quite different if you ask me.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Yeah I followed your link and was genuinely surprised... to be honest I had never heard about the port either!

I mean Commodore had a history of very successful bundles, but this feels (well, "would have felt" is probably more accurate since it didn't actually materialise) quite different if you ask me.

Commodore did acquires Wings Commander license from Origin so there was someone there that was not totally clueless about the necessity of investing in game development for their machines. But the AGA version was already made and ready to be published.
Buying Wolf3D license and having to convert the game themselves was probably out of range in term of investment for them.

[sandruzzo]

with raspberry Even copper and blitter can be pushed further(more than 68060)?