Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[appiah4]

Unfortunately no, that was the ATARI 800XL.

[Jope]

I can't really agree that the C64 had the best hw out of them all either (surely not the worst either!), but definitely it made the biggest global impact out of all the 8-bitters.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by appiah4

Unfortunately no, that was the ATARI 800XL.

The 800XL was my favourite 8-bit too! The C64 did have some advantages over it, but the XL always felt more "special", and had a few advantages of its own.

[dJOS]

I always found the c64 colour palette disappointing, over all c64 games looked good and sounded great but, for adventure games nothing could beat a Tandy 1000 computer with 16 colour enhanced CGA graphics and 3 voice digital sound. When games used the enhanced 16 colour palette they looked really great (e.g. Sierra games).

Admittedly the Tandy 1000's didn't have sprites so they weren't great at action games.

[Locutus]

If its just about the hardware the MSX Turbo R spanks them all.

But somehow i think that 'greatest' is something that depends on a bit more then just the actual hardware.

[drHirudo]

Are Amiga NTSC only games better than PAL games, because of the faster CPU speed?
Why NTSC is called Never The Same Color again?

[E-Penguin]

PAL handled colour better than NTSC, which suffered from interference between the colour and brightness signals

http://www.filmbug.com/dictionary/pal-ntsc.php

[dJOS]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Are Amiga NTSC only games better than PAL games, because of the faster CPU speed?
Why NTSC is called Never The Same Color again?

Because the way it encodes colour is very prone to artefacts - red's especially are notorious for bleeding into other colours.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Are Amiga NTSC only games better than PAL games, because of the faster CPU speed?

The speed difference of the CPUs are next to nothing: 0.05MHz (i.e. 50KHz) which is less than 1% faster.

What you might be thinking of is the refresh rate of NTSC systems which is 60Hz versus 50Hz for PAL.
That can make a visual difference, and since game logic is typically tied to the refresh rate(framerate) that can make a game intended for NTSC feel slow on PAL systems, or it can make a PAL design feel a bit hyper on NTSC.
The pitch of samples will also be minutely affected, and if the music player is synced to the framerate then it will sound off when played on the opposite display system.

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Why NTSC is called Never The Same Color again?

"NTSC, named after the National Television System Committee" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC).
I prefer Never Twice Same Colour myself. (Yes, the UK spelling becomes kinda ironic too.)
The nickname has been earned because of technical limitations that the US decided on when they added colour to the b&w tv signals originally used when tv was invented. Not that PAL is perfect, they both have bandwidth limitations, but the NTSC encoding limits how colours can relate to each other. It has some interesting characteristics which means that some portions of the signal can change at twice the speed of other parts (which I believe was part of the original non-RGB design of the Amiga chips. Corrections welcome.).

Note that all of this only relates to signals passed "over air" i.e. over an antenna cable to be decoded like a signal from an antenna.
If you use an Amiga with an RGB tv/monitor (like a 1084 with the round DIN(?) plug or a SCART plug) then most of the bad-mouthing of NTSC is void and you are left with differences in framerate and number of lines in the display. (Someone who knows if the PAL effect of adding in 50% colour(?) from the previous line still is carried though with RGB connections?)

60Hz or 50Hz?
Is there some inherent advantage to a 60Hz or a 50Hz update? As coin-op players we(assumption) are used to 60Hz updates which due to being more frequent can feel more fluent and faster (which is probably more often found to be a positive) and it also gives animation frames finer control over its timing. The gap between the lines is also bigger(i.e. stronger) on NTSC and mixes in more black in the visual appearance, which might have trained you for a preference for this.
If the game does not use the full PAL height (which is the advantage you have with PAL - more screen space) then the experience is probably better in NTSC. OTOH an overscan PAL game has a big chance of being unplayable on NTSC so not many did designs that limited their market. If the visuals do not demand seeing 256+ lines then you can auto-adjust to just have a display matching if it is using NTSC or PAL.
Interestingly, I would say that being trained to see demos in PAL there is no inherent advantage to NTSC for demos, quite the opposite as PAL has more cycles available per frame which is often a huge factor for them. But I disgress as games was the topic.

BonusInfo:
The ancestors of the Amiga - the Atari 8-bit line - as well as many other US 8-bit machines (Apple II etc) have screenmodes that depend on NTSC signal decoding to give more colours on screen - also known as artifacting. The signal will bleed one pixel into another and the decoding will decide that this is another colour entirely and so the number of colours possible increases. And as expected this breaks down totally when displayed on a similar PAL machine. The nearest reverse effect is that a PAL display will decode a line based in part on what was displayed in the previous line. This is an effect that has not been used much (consciously at least), though I believe "Mayhem in Monsterland" on the C= 64 does actively do it.

[drHirudo]

@NorthWay Thanks for the detailed explanation. Fortunately the Amiga never had the split PAL/NTSC scene like the C64 had, where you can see NTSC specific demos, as the Amiga was more presented in Europe, so PAL got to be standard, even if the Video Toaster was for the NTSC market and it got professional spread there. I wonder if the French had the SECAM issues. I remember I had some Oric issues back in the days, since my TV was PAL, so with SECAM capable TVs it was capable of only Black&White, and the additional PAL->SECAM adaptor costed around 20$ more.

[Jope]

No SECAM issues, because the French standardized on RGB SCART (Peritel) very early on. There was a certain amount of PAL/NTSC split going on in the Amiga world, but the early stuff wasn't as timing critical, so hardly any games had to be fixed when they were imported.

[s2325]

Was Cyberpunks New Ghostbusters 2 with license problems?

[ Show youtube player ]

[Jackoland]

How on earth did teenagers in their bedrooms learn to code assembly. I find it impossible to learn this language. It looks like gobbledygook. I get to a point and I think I'm understanding and then something else crops up to confuse me. How did they do it!

[prowler]

It's easier if you're already adept at using another programming language. Even BASIC will do.

Another useful thing is an explanation of all the registers and addressing modes used in assembly.

[Jope]

Often a good book also helps to get you started.

[E-Penguin]

Learning from examples, perhaps. That's where I (and presumably most people) learned programming.

Assembly isn't hard so much as verbose. Once you get into it you learn patterns which can be reused in lots of situations.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by Jackoland

How on earth did teenagers in their bedrooms learn to code assembly.

By analysing code other people did and a lot of trial and error.

[ross]

Originally Posted by Jackoland

How on earth did teenagers in their bedrooms learn to code assembly

Forma mentis.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Jackoland

How on earth did teenagers in their bedrooms learn to code assembly.

I knew 6502 already. That I learned from one of the C= 64 programming books.
I had(have) a thin book with only the commands and adressing modes and the thick red Prentice-Hall(?) 68000 book. Both useful in their own ways.
After that it helped a lot with a few source examples to learn how it interacts with the host system and how you operate the assembler and debugger.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Jope

Often a good book also helps to get you started.

There's a very valuable resource not yet mentioned here: magazines.

Maybe this was lost in Amiga mags a bit and that makes me sad, but the question did not mention platform, so for the 8-bit ones, magazines had plenty of lessons and code to play with!

Also since machines came with a BASIC interpreter normally, you could get started right away, you needed nothing extra to start coding. This would ease you into the structure of the machine and paved your way to learn assembler.

8-bit computer manuals also usually included code to play with while they explained how to program your computer, that was huge, the manual of the computer explained how to code for it. Personally that was my first point of contact with programming, fixing their bugged listings or modifying them to get new effects.

The problem with Amiga, mentioned in another thread, is that it is a much more complex machine to program, so even coming form another platform requires a steep learning process (IMO)