An unbiased comparison of Megadrive vs A1200 graphics?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

It's written on the the box " the 32bit arcade upgrade for the Genesis". He will probably tell me that the Genesis isn't a Megadrive and therefore he was right saying that you could'nt upgrade a Megadrive to play Doom...

Here you go:

[sokolovic]

I cannot even understand how you can go that far in bad faith for such a trivial (and incontestable) subject.
I mean, the fact that you could expand a Megadrive to play Doom is a fact, and yet it doesn't make the Amiga a bad machine either nor unable to play Doom, is it ?

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Because it's not for the Mega Drive, it's for the 32x.

If that is just expanding the hardware, then so is the A2386SX bridgeboard for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000, which was released in 1991, or the A2088XT bridgeboard with Roßmöller's 386si 16MHz 386SX upgrade (released in 1990), or a Golden Gate with 50MHz 80486SLC2 (released in 1994).

Unlike the 32x 'Doom' which only had 2/3 of the actual Doom game levels, was missing many textures and had other limitations like enemies always facing you and no save, an Amiga with bridgeboard and VGA card could play the full original Doom in all its glory.

However I consider that cheating, just like adding all the circuitry needed to turn a Mega Drive into the equivalent of a Saturn is cheating.

Some other facts about the 32x:-
- The PAL version was released in 1995. It was cancelled the next year.
- It initially cost £169.99, more than the console itself cost at that time.
- Only 800,000 were made. That means 30 million Genesis / Mega Drive owners were unable to play the 32x version of Doom.

Now as we all know the Amiga did eventually get Doom when it was open sourced in 1997. The Mega Drive never did though, it only got this cut down extended demo version that only ran on an addon that they only produced for a very short time years before the Mega Drive had run its course. The vast majority (97%) of Mega Drive owners couldn't run it.

just to summarize,

there is no way to play Doom either on unexpanded MegaDrive or unexpanded A1200


anyway, both machines are cool

[vulture]

Well there's that question: "Is it cheating if you add ram or even an accelerator to a computer designed to have such expansions installed?"

The answer depends on the premise. I believe the premise of the OP is a stock A1200 vs a stock Mega Drive and, more specifically their gfx capabilities. With that restriction in mind, it is cheating adding an expansion to either one.

[sokolovic]

That's the problem with an "unbiased" comparaison between two differents things, a console which have generally a fixed hardware and a computer which is meant to be expanded.
The conversation is bound to slowly drift to biaised comparaison.

[oscar_ates]

I would say Amiga 1200 does not have a good port of SF2 and Samurai Shodown which MegaDrive versions are quite good. On the other hand, we cannot see a 3D FPS game like Gloom and Citadel on Megadrive while A1200 can handle them easily, except the Gloom was a bit pixellated on an un-expanded A1200.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

...except the Gloom was a bit pixellated on an un-expanded A1200.

That's putting it nicely Doom in lo-res was similarly pixellated and it was really hard to tell anything apart that wasn't right in front of you.

[str0m]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I would say Amiga 1200 does not have a good port of SF2 and Samurai Shodown which MegaDrive versions are quite good. On the other hand, we cannot see a 3D FPS game like Gloom and Citadel on Megadrive while A1200 can handle them easily, except the Gloom was a bit pixellated on an un-expanded A1200.

Zero Tolerance is quite good on the MD

[CCCP alert]

Gotta love that Mega Drive, one hell of a bargain in 1989. It's important not get side tracked with specific games on both, like SF series and Lotus series, because development talent is possibly being tested more than the hardware differences. Can a better version of Lotus on Meg Drive be made to match the A500 performance? Who knows. The OP is asking for technical analysis of the performance of the respective machines, Mega Drive and Amiga 1200 as sold in high streets makes sense, they are vastly different methods of achieving a similar quality of gaming potential. That is what an unbiased comparison is, hard technical facts of pixel mb/s performance on various functions or what their respective audio subsystems can/can't do respectively. Biased is anything but just the features/performance facts alone. Highly technical discussion sans opinions, just the reality of the situation regardless of how good/bad the developer used the respective hardware in released games, or even modern demos. You don't need to be a genius to see Amiga could replicate Mega Drive or PC Engine OutRun, given the talented development required, the cold hard facts of tech specs to back that up is probably what we're looking for. Of course there are many ways to use the complex Amiga chipsets, do you remake Lotus II for A1200 with dual playfield mode giving a respectable 46 colour possibility even without using any copperlists, just bitplanes and sprite pixels. Stuff like that is where knowing the exact capabilities of speed of these screen modes etc is useful to back that up, making it unbiased and irrefutable by fanboys of other systems.

You can improve the performance of the A1200 with extra memory but the A1200 was never ever sold in the high street with 32bit Fast RAM. I never even saw those expensive [compared to individual SIMM cost of upgrading a PC] trapdoor RAM expansions in any high street store, that's a mail order. small group of stores like Gasteiner etc. It's not the OP's fault Commodore decided not to add even 256kb of 32 bit Fast RAM to fix the crippled 020 CPU issue. Adding a CPU is out of the question, 90% of the 6 or 7 million A500/600/1200/CDTV/CD32 low end Amigas never got an 030/040/060/PPC accelerator, I doubt even 600,000 accelerators were sold meaning 90% of low end Amiga never saw more than a 512kb trapdoor expansion of original A500 units. Besides an A1200 with 030 25mbz Blizzard/Apollo is really comparing the Amiga 4000/030 vs Mega Drive, which is not what OP is looking for. A4000/030 vs low end 486 PC is the only thing you need to compare at that level, they cost the same price.

Speed of A1200 vs Mega Drive running game engines I suspect was the purpose of this thread, unbiased aspect is simply to do with technical differences and performance specs of the hardware as sold in the high street, not expanded A1200 or Mega Drive with Mega-CD custom chip additions that increase performance, and the relative cost. Interesting thread, time to make a new cup of tea now as this one is cold!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by str0m

Zero Tolerance is quite good on the MD

The homebrew Wolfenstein 3D port is also not too shabby: [ Show youtube player ]

[str0m]

That's very smooth!

[DisasterIncarna]

1 thing i always wondered about every Amiga vs <random cartridge based console> was, would any amiga games we have, have benefitted from being cartridge based if we had such a port to use cartridges.

Would any amiga downsides/limitations be made better or overcome just by having a cartridge to load from?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I would say Amiga 1200 does not have a good port of SF2 and Samurai Shodown which MegaDrive versions are quite good.

There is nothing really keeping the 1200 from running those games though, especially with its nice 64px wide sprites.

The market just wasn't there.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

Would any amiga downsides/limitations be made better or overcome just by having a cartridge to load from?

Definitely.
It's amazing to just have that unified space of ROM at your disposal without the need to reload stuff.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

1 thing i always wondered about every Amiga vs <random cartridge based console> was, would any amiga games we have, have benefitted from being cartridge based if we had such a port to use cartridges.

Would any amiga downsides/limitations be made better or overcome just by having a cartridge to load from?

I guess it depends on how the cartridges would work. If they could act like "Fast" ROM and "Chip" ROMs, with instant paging for chip memory possibly, then yeah maybe. Having the ability to access all the game data at pretty much full speed was an enormous benefit of carts over having to load data from a storage medium.

But I still don't think you'd get games on the Amiga like the MegaDrive and SNES could pull off. They were just gaming powerhouses of the time and almost every detail of their designs were about squeezing maximum performance for gaming related tasks, whereas the Amiga was a bit more general purpose.

[vulture]

@AestheticDebris

I understand why and how you're saying this, but based on specs and many examples given in this thread, that's not true.