An unbiased comparison of Megadrive vs A1200 graphics?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Maybe that's because you seems to think that horizontal scrolling games with parallaxes and many sprites are the only benchmark of 2D gfx abilities ?



A game like Slam Tilt is impossible to do on the Megadrive. And even, look at Worms Megadrive version vs Worms DC on the 1200.



Plus it would be honest to say that Aladdin was designed for the Megadrive first. The Amiga version is a port made by just one coder

No. The blitter was never designed to take advantage of the page-fetch mode of the AGA chipset. Tsak is right.

Using an external cache controller or Fast RAM would have speeded up the A1200 to 2× its original speed. There was a definite bandwidth bottleneck there.

[oscar_ates]

Another thing is the megadrive cartridges uses rom to store game data. Amiga needs to load the data from floppy disks and also limited by ram size. Rise of the robots in Amiga blocked the jumping the other side of the opponent probably because they could not store all mirrored sprites in the limited memory

[Seiya]

Cartdrige vs floppy Disk could was a good point of discussion, but on Amiga you can install an harddisk and so, in theory, you can store much more data then Mega Drive cartdrige. The problem is that they not wanted produce two game version: Harddisk version and Floppy version.
The only consolation for Amiga users was audio quality better as single instruments, but also here Amiga lost the battle about complexity of melody, much better on Mega Drive.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Another thing is the megadrive cartridges uses rom to store game data. Amiga needs to load the data from floppy disks and also limited by ram size. Rise of the robots in Amiga blocked the jumping the other side of the opponent probably because they could not store all mirrored sprites in the limited memory probably

Wasn't there some sort of slot you could put cartridges into? The Atari ST seems to have one, at least

[oscar_ates]

Rom access speeds are similar to main ram memory access speeds. Megadrive street fighter 2 cartridge had 5mb size. Amiga version needs to work on 512k or 1mb. That means you need to sacrifice a lot of things like on screen colors and sprites sizes. 5mb cartridge means you have a machine that has 5mb ram like. That's why megadrive has only 64kb internal ram. You only store the variables in ram and rest of the game data resides in the roms.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Rom access speeds are similar to main ram memory access speeds. Megadrive street fighter 2 cartridge had 5mb size. Amiga version needs to work on 512k or 1mb. That means you need to sacrifice a lot of things like on screen colors and sprites sizes. 5mb cartridge means you have a machine that has 5mb ram like. That's why megadrive has only 64kb internal ram. You only store the variables in ram and rest of the game data resides in the roms.

Honestly, I do think some titles would work better in the cartridge format. Floppy disks are just too slow for stuff like fighting games, and not everyone can afford an hard drive (Or they don't want to bother setting it up on WinUAE)

[oscar_ates]

Harddisk is faster than floppies indeed. But cartridge roms are even faster than amiga harddisk. Cartridge rom memory speed is like the main dram speed

[oscar_ates]

Harddisk cannot compete with rom and ram speeds since the head needs to move to the data track on magnetic disk. That causes quite initial delay. Roms and ram does not suffer from this. Also bandwidth to rom/ram is faster than sustained sequential harddisk reads

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Harddisk cannot compete with rom and ram speeds since the head needs to move to the data track on magnetic disk. That causes quite initial delay. Roms and ram does not suffer from this. Also bandwidth to rom/ram is faster than sustained sequential harddisk reads

Flash memory in recent times has driven even small hard drives into obsolescence. Fortunately CardFlash is just an alternate pinout to IDE cabling.

One of the biggest problems, in addition to Commodore being cheap with their product designs, was customers' slow adoption of upgrades. 4 megs of Fast RAM was a cheap enough upgrade for an A1200 and there was an IDE controller on the motherboard. Use of them were basically mandatory but people were too cheap to buy them.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

No. The blitter was never designed to take advantage of the page-fetch mode of the AGA chipset. Tsak is right.

Using an external cache controller or Fast RAM would have speeded up the A1200 to 2× its original speed. There was a definite bandwidth bottleneck there.

That doesn't make Slam Tilt doable on the Megadrive still.
Or many other games.
Not every games were just relying on parallax scrolls and sprite mayhem.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That doesn't make Slam Tilt doable on the Megadrive still.

Or many other games.

Not every games were just relying on parallax scrolls and sprite mayhem.

Slam Tilt has a 256-byte main loop so it fits in the 020's code cache. Megadrive is an 8 MHz 68-triple-zilch for a CPU I think. No cache at all.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Megadrive is an 8 MHz 68-triple-zilch for a CPU I think.

Clock rate: 7.670454 MHz (NTSC), 7.600489 MHz (PAL)

Source: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Driv...specifications

[Samurai_Crow]

Yikes! Slower than I thought!

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Slam Tilt has a 256-byte main loop so it fits in the 020's code cache. Megadrive is an 8 MHz 68-triple-zilch for a CPU I think. No cache at all.

You're very technical.
Slam Tilt can switch from a low res 320*256 with 256 colors screen to an hi res (640*512) on the fly with no slowdown at all.
This is far beyond any Megadrive graphicals capacities.
On the reverse the Amiga can mimick the Megadrive sprites and scrolling abilities, albeit not as perfect, especially when the game is coded to fit perfectly on the Megadrive hardware (with 10x people making the Megadrive game VS one guy doing thé Amiga port).

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

You're very technical.
Slam Tilt can switch from a low res 320*256 with 256 colors screen to an hi res (640*512) on the fly with no slowdown at all.
This is far beyond any Megadrive graphicals capacities.
On the reverse the Amiga can mimick the Megadrive sprites and scrolling abilities, albeit not as perfect, especially when the game is coded to fit perfectly on the Megadrive hardware (with 10x people making the Megadrive game VS one guy doing thé Amiga port).

And that one guy being given two frickin' weeks to make the port

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

You're very technical.
Slam Tilt can switch from a low res 320*256 with 256 colors screen to an hi res (640*512) on the fly with no slowdown at all.
This is far beyond any Megadrive graphicals capacities.
On the reverse the Amiga can mimick the Megadrive sprites and scrolling abilities, albeit not as perfect, especially when the game is coded to fit perfectly on the Megadrive hardware (with 10x people making the Megadrive game VS one guy doing thé Amiga port).

True. The point I was making was that the code cache on the CPU was just big enough to avoid the bandwidth problems on the A1200. If the blitter was also cached it would have been faster also.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Maybe that's because you seems to think that horizontal scrolling games with parallaxes and many sprites are the only benchmark of 2D gfx abilities ?

No, I said (and I quote) : "for arcade quality like games"
It's clear that for various other genres there isn't much of a competition. F.e. a 256 color adventure game like Bloodnet the Mega Drive would have zero luck.

Originally Posted by TCD

Can we just call it a draw and move on then?

Seriously though, just check the second post in this thread: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=100336

[ Show youtube player ]
Trust your own eyes perhaps?

The amiga 1200 version vs the Mega Drive one has:

1) Quite smaller play area.
2) Lacks all parallax backgrounds.
3) Lacks foreground elements (see f.e. later in the video where Aladdin moves behind certain parts of the level in the Mega Drive version).
4) Has no sprite based UIs (instead it goes for the usual separate top HUD which also cuts away a lot of the vertical in-game resolution).
5) And to add more insult to injury it also runs at 25fps vs 50/60fps in the Mega Drive version!

The one and only single thing the a1200 version is a clear winner (imho) is the music.
Now having said that, I'm not sure if the above result could have been much better in favor of the 1200. Was it lack or resources? Time? Incompetence? Perhaps just a rush job? Or perhaps all these factors together.
Or maybe (just maybe) at least some of the above compromises on the 1200 version were indeed necessary and couldn't have been otherwise.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Tsak

No, I said (and I quote) : "for arcade quality like games"
It's clear that for various other genres there isn't much of a competition. F.e. a 256 color adventure game like Bloodnet the Mega Drive would have zero luck.



[ Show youtube player ]
Trust your own eyes perhaps?

The amiga 1200 version vs the Mega Drive one has:

1) Quite smaller play area.
2) Lacks all parallax backgrounds.
3) Lacks foreground elements (see f.e. later in the video where Aladdin moves behind certain parts of the level in the Mega Drive version).
4) Has no sprite based UIs (instead it goes for the usual separate top HUD which also cuts away a lot of the vertical in-game resolution).
5) Misses a lot of of extra levels and content.
6) And to add more insult to injury it also runs at 25fps vs 50/60fps in the Mega Drive version!

The one and only single thing the a1200 version is a clear winner (imho) is the music.
Now having said that, I'm not sure if the above result could have been much better in favor of the 1200. Was it lack or resources? Time? Incompetence? Perhaps just a rush job? Or perhaps all these factors together.
Or maybe (just maybe) at least some of the above compromises on the 1200 version were indeed necessary and couldn't have been otherwise.

The MS-DOS version was very similar to the Amiga 1200 one, but it had better audio (In the sense that the music wasn't cut off by sound effects all the time) and support for better controllers. I think it ran at 60fps as well? Unfortunately the game suffered from screen tearing

[Retro1234]

The Megadrive would be easier to produce better effects which is ironic considering the fate of the Saturn.

Aladdin is a perfectly good Amiga game but could of used copper to add colour and Sprites for parallax/clouds etc but at extra effort.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Flash memory in recent times has driven even small hard drives into obsolescence. Fortunately CardFlash is just an alternate pinout to IDE cabling.

One of the biggest problems, in addition to Commodore being cheap with their product designs, was customers' slow adoption of upgrades. 4 megs of Fast RAM was a cheap enough upgrade for an A1200 and there was an IDE controller on the motherboard. Use of them were basically mandatory but people were too cheap to buy them.

Commodore was always a cheap company. They were always late to release any advancement to their products. A1200 was too little too late. Users also hung on A500 1mb for long time then they bought a playstation or PC.