Real AGA 256 colors game?

[Seiya]

very good, thx

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by PopoCop

Try TinyPic (tinypic.com).

I used to use this but it's a bit spamtastic and you often get redirected to some random page just after uploading and before getting the links; not to mention you have to fill in a those verification windows after uploading more than one image

These days I use https://www.imageupload.co.uk/; it's much better IMHO.

[Seiya]

it seems good also this hosting

[amiga_Forever]

Originally Posted by Akira

That a game is AGA does not mean it has 256 colors on-screen.
Usually 256 colors is a theoretical, improbable number.

It is, particularly when u consider most games (if any) never ever got to that.

Only paint programs really got there.

"The Amiga "could" display" if u allowed it to.

[kolorabi]

The Amiga version of Simon the Sorcerer 2 seems identical to the PC VGA version, Irfanview says there are 256 colours on a screenshot from Mobygames.

[coder76]

The AGA dualplayfield is good compared to OCS dualplayfield, with 16 colors for both layers minus transparency.

If you remember the "dynamic hires" on A500, it had 4 bitplanes and hires+interlace, but copper was used to change all 16 colors for each scanline. The result was nearly photorealistic image quality (dead slow though, DMA stole almost all CPU speed). The same could be used for AGA dualplayfield.. maybe wouldn't work for both layers at same time with copper, but with a little tweaking you could go pretty far. Lionheart , Shadow of the beast and Agony showed what could be done with OCS dualplayfield, but sadly no one has fully exploited the capabilities of the AGA in games yet.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by jayminer

Uhm, no. AGA is not faster than RTG, especially for a game like Quake where you have to do Chunky to Planar conversion for each frame. In that case RTG is way faster, even with a "slow" RTG-card.

This is what I used to think but if you are using a fast processor (060) then something like Quake isn't much faster on RTG. I once did an experimental RTG build of my old AmiQuake port and was told by RTG owners that it only ran 1-2 FPS faster than in AGA mode.

BTW I think Quake 2 AGA might use all 256 colors

[ Show youtube player ]

[Daishi]

That's not correct. As a PC tech of that time period, I can tell you that not all VGA cards even had enough memory on the card to do 256 colour at 320X200 (requiring memory shifting so pretty much breaking everything) but some weren't even capable of enough bandwidth to do so. even when 256 colour games eventually came out they displayed them with as low as 16 colours (which looks horrific).
They were sold as VGA but really they should have been just labeled "Please use as an EGA with the new monitor you bought", which is what a lot of VGA labeled games were.
As for technical reasons - 256 colour takes a lot of room, not just on the many many discs (no CD for you at the time) you but but on the HDD also. Mentioned it before but bandwidth! there is a reason the PC changed it's bus more often than the seasons. VGA over anything previous to VL is a miserable experience, and the fact is there were a lot of PC owners that just didn't have a PC that could really use a VGA let alone optimally. And to add insult to injury VGA was only a standard to IBM with everyone else cloning it, often badly creating many incompatibilities. This itself made companies not want to bring out real mode 13h VGA graphics. SVGA eventually fixed most of this by being standardized.

Originally Posted by idrougge

But then those limitations were not because of technical reasons. If a VGA game uses 32 colours, the VGA chip is still outputting 256 colours, of which most are unused.

[britelite]

I can tell you that not all VGA cards even had enough memory on the card to do 256 colour at 320X200

EDIT: I have a hard time believing there were VGA-cards with less than 64k of RAM (as that would even render EGA-modes unavailable), but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

[Foebane]

Seems odd to offer specific functionality to computer hardware without providing it with the necessary resources, doesn't it? Wasn't this hardware expandable?

[roondar]

I do seem to recall reading adverts for PC's that came with a 16 colour VGA card, but it's been over 25 years so I'll admit I could simply be misremembering here.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Seems odd to offer specific functionality to computer hardware without providing it with the necessary resources, doesn't it? Wasn't this hardware expandable?

You mean like the C128 with only 16k VDC RAM for 80 columns display? :-)

[britelite]

Originally Posted by roondar

I do seem to recall reading adverts for PC's that came with a 16 colour VGA card, but it's been over 25 years so I'll admit I could simply be misremembering here.

There were actually SVGA-capable cards with only 256kB of RAM, which meant all regular VGA-modes worked fine but you only got 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions with 16 colors.

[dreadnought]

I've read this earlier:

The on-board specifications included 256 KB Video RAM (The very first systems could be ordered with 64 KB or 128 KB of RAM, at the cost of losing some or all high-resolution 16-color modes.)

https://www.computer.org/publication...Chips-IBMs-VGA

I think it's possible there were also some more off-standard designs from some less -scrupulous clone makers, given how it was all a bit of a Wild West back then.

[nikosidis]

I think the colours in Reshoot-R is fantastic.

Go to 2.10 min. That is great color use and a great example of how nice AGA can be.

[ Show youtube player ]

[masteries]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

And then there are games that specify AGA simply because they need 2MB of chip RAM - they'll actually run on an ECS machine with 2MB of chip RAM, but such machines were probably rare amongst the gaming target market.

Primal Rage, Dungeon Master 2, and Wasted Dreams.


These are games built around the original Amiga 500 video hardware, but demand 2 MB of chip RAM; that are very rare due to you need an Amiga 500 Plus or an Amiga 600.



That are far to be the common Amiga 500 user base.

[Daishi]

At one time the company I worked for put an ATI SVGA card with zero memory onboard, requiring it to share system memory. And for anyone who remembers the memory configuration back then, this was not just slow (system memory is already much slower than video memory) but it saturated the bandwidth causing the whole system to run even slower. We only sold that for a short while as it was horrific (but cheap) this was the kind of thing going on on the PC market. "Hey it's VGA, and you know know what that means right!!!" Most people had no idea what they were buying only knowing (they had no idea) blerb from magazines which in turn were just trying to make a buck by not alienating the advertising companies. The whole PC market was built on lies, and I made a fortune off it (looking back I'm actually quite sad to say that)

[Daishi]

Just as a reminder VGA was never a standard except for IBM. Everyone else had to reverse engineer it to copy it, and there was no standard by them. Some cards exceeded VGA and even early SVGA specs but did so using their own non-compliant way and were expensive (very). SVGA Did get a standardization but it was not always followed but it was significantly better than VGA.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Daishi

Just as a reminder VGA was never a standard except for IBM. Everyone else had to reverse engineer it to copy it, and there was no standard by them. Some cards exceeded VGA and even early SVGA specs but did so using their own non-compliant way and were expensive (very). SVGA Did get a standardization but it was not always followed but it was significantly better than VGA.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_h.../n603/mode/2up
PC Mag 1992-08, page 604 of 664,
Diamond Speedstar 24 (ET4000AX ISA) has $169 USD.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Originally Posted by Mrz

surely you are comparing this amiga game with the SNES version which is the best one

Nahhh, The Snes version has a smaller playfield, the second level is a mess (more than usual) and the game is actually a "unfinished" beta version.


(dont remember if LOIUS CASTLE said it in that video)
[ Show youtube player ]


but if you activate the cheat in the Snes version it also says "Beta version".


Mega-Drive/Genesis is the better one