Mega Drive questions

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by fishyfish

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.

Sorry, but i don't agree.

Dedicated Amiga games were generally good enough that whilst extra ram would have helped, wouldn't have made a great difference.

most games need very little memory for actual code. Quite a lot of games are extremely simple and need very little memory.

Its graphics and sample data that take up the most, and depending on how the game is structured, wouldn't ultimately make a superior game if it was already preloaded into more ram.

What you're forgetting is that at some point the game has to be loaded into that ram, so either way, floppy disk access avoidance is impossible. Whether or not you sit there for 10 minutes as three or four disks worth of data load up into memory, or you swap disks at certain intervals, doesn't stop disk access.

You still don't seem to appreciate the difference in megabit or megabyte as you didn't address the point I made about it.

Secondly, its great having ROM storage, but in the case of the Megadrive and SNES that have such tiny address space storage for music, the Amiga would in fact appear to win again.

Monkey Island as an example from someone else simply couldn't have meaningfully happened on the SNES and Megadrive, the cost of cartridge production would have been massively prohibitive.

Disks... not so much

[matthey]

Memory was important for extra storage as well as faster processing in the case of fast ram. This should have been pushed more because of the "cheap" speed increase. The 1200 and CD32 with even 1MB of fast memory would have made much more possible. The Amiga was one of the last computers to adopt hard drives too. The "PC" and MAC were way ahead in this. Even the cheap IDE that the 1200 and 600 got was a huge improvement. It would have made "EHB" Monkey Island style games easier and less of a hassle. The 1200 was almost enough to save C= but they wasted production on the 600 and it should have been out a year earlier.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by matthey

The Amiga was one of the last computers to adopt hard drives too.

And that's why there are HDs for the A1000

[Cammy]

Originally Posted by _ThEcRoW

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

It's called The Labyrinth of Time and it is a lot like Myst and very interesting and fantastic, and you can download the entire game for free from Aminet now - http://aminet.net/package/game/role/LABAMIGA

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Thorham

And that's why there are HDs for the A1000

The Amiga 1200 came out in late 1992. What percentage of Amiga's do you think had hard drives before that? Only a few 2000s and all 3000s came equipped with a HD but didn't amount to a large percentage of Amigas. I would guess that less than 10% of Amigas had HDs in 1992 (most owners not being gamers) while HDs were standard on most PCs by that time. The 1200 (and 600) still did not come with a HD in most cases. It also didn't have fast memory which more than doubled the speed. The 1200 was the computer that should have saved C= but it was too little and/or too late.

[khph_re]

I probably wouldn't have been able to afford the A1200 if it had came out with a HDD.

A high density floppy and a tiny bit of nand to allow booting straight to workbench would have been nice though!

[Vectra]

Looking at my old Amiga mags I can see that hard drives in the early days of the Amiga were insanely expensive. To add a HDD to your machine you were looking at around £200. One of the beautiful things about the Amiga back then and what made it appeal to me was that a HDD was optional.

I could run Wordworth, Deluxe Paint and everything else from a floppy until I could eventually afford to put a HDD in my A1200.

One of the games that bugged me on Amiga however was Brian Lara cricket, I felt that the Megadrive had a superior version to this title. Sure the Amiga one had lovely graphics and animation but it lacked sprites for different races which the Megadrive managed to pull off.

This was put in the manual and the press as a technical limitation, what I guess the reason was from that was they were trying to keep the game limited to a single floppy.

[_ThEcRoW]

Thanks for the tip Cammy!!!. Will play it next weekend, or if i can along the week, but lately i'm very busy and have little time for amigaing.
Cheers!

[slk486]

Originally Posted by Vectra

Looking at my old Amiga mags I can see that hard drives in the early days of the Amiga were insanely expensive. To add a HDD to your machine you were looking at around £200. One of the beautiful things about the Amiga back then and what made it appeal to me was that a HDD was optional.

Oh yes, I remember shelling out £450 for the first 1gb drive at consumer level, and I couldn't even get it to work with my A500 at the time.

Original post mentioned that most MD games were full screen. That's not true. Cool Spot may have been, but that would have been a 1 in a 100. 90% of them were the NTSC version under a PAL label, leaving the usual PAL borders.

Edit: Oh wait, is that another kind of full screen you're referring to? I should prolly give Cool Spot a run

[Retro1234]

Maybe a rather stupid question and comparison but what was the size of most Mega Drive games
The Magic Drive seemed to fit most games on a single Floppy - Games that had more Colours and more sprites than there Amiga counterpart.

For Sprites on screen I think Mega Drive would kick Amiga Bottom

[Retro-Nerd]

Most of the Mega Drive games were on 512KB - 1MB cartridges. Though there are quite a lot of 2-4MB games, Super Street Fighter II was the biggest Cart with 5MB.

[Retro1234]

Sorry Im quite simple - For conversions of the same quality on Amiga your looking at more than one disk..............

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

.

For Sprites on screen I think Mega Drive would kick Amiga Bottom

I'd agree with that. with clever coding the Amiga could (almost) match it,
and with clever coding the megadrive could almost match an Amiga for colours.

[LocalH]

MD is gimped by system RAM, 64KB is too small for a 68000 machine, even with access to 4MB or more of ROM.

VRAM is kinda cramped, too. 64KB isn't enough for even two full-screen images (including tile data and pattern maps). DMA helps but it's slow compared to having more data available immediately. I'd liked to have seen some type of support for VROM in addition to VRAM, would have made certain graphical effects much easier to code at the expense of ROM space.

One thing that helps the MD with color vibrance is the fact that the default RF/composite video output very nicely blends adjacent pixel columns together. You know that "horizontal-only" dithering that is so common in MD games (where the dithering appears as a series of vertical lines)? That's why they did that, and why emulator screenshots don't generally do the MD justice. Especially check out Socket on MD, it's completely full of such dithering. Check it out on an emulator that offers a horizontal blur (possibly called "CVBS" or "TV" mode), or even better an NTSC video filter. Compare screens with and without the setting enabled and notice the smoothness of color gradients is much improved, and the general color count will go up.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by LocalH

Compare screens with and without the setting enabled and notice the smoothness of color gradients is much improved, and the general color count will go up.

I think all TV consoles/computers use the phosphor glow to blend colours, certainly there are plenty of ST, Amiga and C64 games that do.

The colour count will only go up in that display mode of course, but I guess it does give an indication of how many colours we all thought were in those games back in the day.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Maybe a rather stupid question and comparison but what was the size of most Mega Drive games
The Magic Drive seemed to fit most games on a single Floppy - Games that had more Colours and more sprites than there Amiga counterpart.

For Sprites on screen I think Mega Drive would kick Amiga Bottom

This is a question I'll ask again how can Arcade games or games like Sonic fit on a single disk? Compared to the Amiga

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

This is a question I'll ask again how can Arcade games or games like Sonic fit on a single disk? Compared to the Amiga

Majority of copiers for consoles had High Density floppy drives, so right away thats a disk capacity typically double over an Amiga low density floppy.

They also uses samples more sparingly on consoles as they would take up valuable cartridge space.

[Retro1234]

Just always amazed me that such good games on the Mega Drive and Snes could be fitted on a single floppy sometimes more than one game.

So loading a 1mb game into the Backup devices memory and then the just 72KB Ram or such like that the console has and you have a very nearly Arcade game just seems mind boggling.

[kremiso]

Cave Story
why the megadrive port runs so good on standard hw, when instead the Amiga one require a monster setting?

i'm playing the MD port atm
i can say, impressing work :

https://github.com/andwn/cave-story-...ses/tag/v0.7.0

maybe a look at the src could help to improve the miggy one?

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by kremiso

Cave Story
why the megadrive port runs so good on standard hw, when instead the Amiga one require a monster setting?

i'm playing the MD port atm
i can say, impressing work :

https://github.com/andwn/cave-story-...ses/tag/v0.7.0

maybe a look at the src could help to improve the miggy one?

Improve = rewrite almost from scratch for native HW in assembly in this case