AGA or RTG

[AMIGASYSTEM]

If Amiga had spread RTG it would have been more successful, AGA belongs to the past, RTG is the future.

RTG is comfort, space, more open windows, speed, and above all quality.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by YouKnowWho

I'm going to go this way. The MK3 looks really impressive. It's a no brainer, it's here, it's affordable, and it's needed for use of new monitors as well.

Yup that's why it's great, easy to find a monitor. Well it became difficult 15 years ago or so when flatscreens invaded. We have no idea where CRTs would be today if lamers & noobs (the many) didn't go gaga about screens just for being flat.

IDK how RTG-like the 1280x1024 mode is, again you need power to drive the higher resolution (just as on any hardware platform today) but with the space available in the A1200 case it's a really good, maybe only option and leaves room for accel power.

[Chucky]

I used indivisions high-res modes. yeah they kinda work. but you for sure notices how slow AGA in at those resolutions. it is not fun to use at all.
4 color text for editing. sure yeah. works. anything else. not really

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

If Amiga had spread RTG it would have been more successful, AGA belongs to the past, RTG is the future.

RTG is comfort, space, more open windows, speed, and above all quality.

How DARE you, SIR!!

In all seriousness, is there any AGA compatibility with demos, whatever in the Picasso 2 board? I've asked this elsewhere with no reply yet.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

AGA doesn't work on Shermi RTG, but if you have the right Monitor AGA and RTG can coexist.

On my A4000/060 that now sleeps in the garage, I had the Picasso Video Card, the AGA demos worked perfectly because I had a Commodore Dual Frequency Monitor that worked in both PAL and RTG, the switch between RTG and PAL was automatic and everything worked perfectly.

Also on WinUAE it works like this, you can activate two Monitors and have AGA and RTG, always operating from RTG

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by YouKnowWho

But then I started thinking...do I really NEED RTG on the Amiga? Painting in 256 colours is fun enough and sufficient. Maybe I'm just being silly wanting RTG and 16.7 million colours.

16 colors painting done by Jojo in Deluxe Paint:

[YouKnowWho]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

16 colors painting done by Jojo in Deluxe Paint:

That's beautiful.

Yeah. I'm going to stay AGA. There is a beauty to being limited in tools here. Why is more colors a must? I'm just going to flicker fix it.

[indigolemon]

But do you really want to get rid of the flicker, I mean ultimately it's a part of what makes the Amiga what it is?

[van_dammesque]

How much quicker in games was the RTG cards?

[YouKnowWho]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

But do you really want to get rid of the flicker, I mean ultimately it's a part of what makes the Amiga what it is?

That's the beauty of A1200 flicker fixers, you keep ability to flicker undisturbed. Best of both worlds. I have a CRT for this purpose.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Jpor

I tend to favour RTG now a days, especially if you have a Mediator or G-REX solution. I’m now playing around with using a Voodoo 4 Card as my main RTG and then using software called SuperTV with a PCI TV card to display Demos, Games etc via the Amigas Composite output via a windowed display on my RTG workbench. That way best of both worlds.

I have a few Mediators with Ratte's automatic monitor switch to switch between Voodoo or Radeon to Amiga output on the same monitor. It's more besterlier of both worlds.

Originally Posted by Chucky

the number of games that uses RTG can be counted on the fingers on one hand.

Nope, at least four hands. Maybe closer to six.
Everything in this list that is a game or game like runs on RTG:
https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetA...ry-version%291

[James]

Originally Posted by jbenam

And yeah, about games: unless it's an AmigaCD game (1995+) or a port, it won't use nor support RTG.

No this is wrong, "AmigaCD" has nothing to do with it.
Although many (not all) commercial RTG games were sold on CD, many non RTG games were also sold on CD, and there are games earlier than 1995 that work well with RTG.

Originally Posted by Chucky

the number of games that uses RTG can be counted on the fingers on one hand.

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Nope, at least four hands. Maybe closer to six.

Even this is a massive underestimate, how massive depends on how open minded you are...

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by James

No this is wrong, "AmigaCD" has nothing to do with it.
Although many (not all) commercial RTG games were sold on CD, many non RTG games were also sold on CD, and there are games earlier than 1995 that work well with RTG.





Even this is a massive underestimate, how massive depends on how open minded you are...

There weren't that many RTG games, I wouldn't say it's massive. One could argue simple workbench games like snake or tetris or minesweeper are RTG as well, I'm not that open minded.

[James]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

There weren't that many RTG games, I wouldn't say it's massive. One could argue simple workbench games like snake or tetris or minesweeper are RTG as well, I'm not that open minded.

Fully open mind = Workbench games, interpreted games, text adventures, mods, Angband variants etc. But I know most people are not that open minded.

Just the commercial games are about twice what you estimated though (unless you have very different hands than me ), and there are at least a few PD/shareware games that should also be counted IMHO.

[Damion]

Originally Posted by Foebane

How DARE you, SIR!!

In all seriousness, is there any AGA compatibility with demos, whatever in the Picasso 2 board? I've asked this elsewhere with no reply yet.

No, although many late-era demos support both AGA/RTG. The Retina ZII boasts some fabled AGA compatibility, albeit very minimal/broken IIRC.

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

How much quicker in games was the RTG cards?

Depends: could be massively quicker if the game took advantage of PPC and/or 3D hardware. For software rendered stuff, and the (more typical) scenario of a Zorro RTG card and 680x0, practically no difference from what I recall. (Quake 1 timedemo was ~1 FPS difference between AGA and PIV/CV64 here--the Zorro bus and CPU were limiting factors.) However, the Workbench environment, and things like Mac emulation, are significantly improved even with a "lowly" Picasso 2 or Spectrum.

[Thomas Richter]

What the Retina Z2 offers is most likely a software emulation that converts data by the CPU. I am not aware of a RAMDAC that offers something like HAM, or a VGA chip that supports more (or something different) than 4 planes. Otherwise, the Retina Z2 is a quite useless card as the NCR chip it is based on only supports segmented memory (no linear/flat framebuffer) and only EGS and some very old versions of P96 supported that.

Games and software can profit massively from the chunky mode RTG hardware offers as there is no chunky to planar conversion needed. However, it requires programs to use the Os interface to the hardware, there is no universal "hardware register set" as for AGA. Hardware-banging bye-bye.

[zipper]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

There weren't that many RTG games, I wouldn't say it's massive. One could argue simple workbench games like snake or tetris or minesweeper are RTG as well, I'm not that open minded.

111 on HOL.

[Seiya]

Originally Posted by YouKnowWho

AGA. We love it, or love to say it wasn't enough, but it was the best Amiga would deliver.
But then I started thinking...do I really NEED RTG on the Amiga?
And so, is my pursuit of RTG on Amiga 1200 flawed? Should we just enjoy AGA as the most Amiga offered and be happy?

i think you/we have to watch Amiga history in games and applications. Amiga software run on his chipsets (OCS, ECS and AGA) mainly and RTG is on Amiga a little extra that never make difference.
Yes, with RTG you can have big screenmode, you can play or work with high resolution, but softwares are developed for OCS and AGA (also ECS is very few in comparison).

Myst is AGA and RTG, Quake is AGA and RTG, Napalm is AGA and RTG and also 202x games are AGA, OCS and compatibile with RTG, but you never find a RTG only softwares.

You/we continue to find AGA software now and in the future because RTG is something little alien from Amiga philosofy that have enchated players, developer and fans thanks to his custom chipset (OCS, ECS and AGA),
RTG is good for only high resolution, some little extras in games, but if you notice, you can use Amiga forever also without RTG.

Originally Posted by zipper

111 on HOL.

Exclusive 111 RTG games? It is that the question. Every RTG software you can run also with AGA, ECS or OCS.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Seiya

but softwares are developed for OCS and AGA (also ECS is very few in comparison).

Err... If you replace "Software" with "Games hacking the hardware", this is right, but that's a somewhat limited view. This is due to the rather poor "philosophy" of some (mostly games) authors of considering the Amiga has a games console, and approaching its programming as such, namely go directly to the hardware. This, of course, does not work anymore as soon as you go generic RTG hardware you can only access through the Os, and not hack directly.


Productivity software (Pagestream, Wordworth, the workbench, Multiview, Opus...) all runs on RTG, and takes advantage of it. Ever tried to lay out a page on the rather poor AGA resolutions with poor chip mem speed?

Originally Posted by Seiya

Myst is AGA and RTG, Quake is AGA and RTG, Napalm is AGA and RTG and also 202x games are AGA, OCS and compatibile with RTG, but you never find a RTG only softwares.

You/we continue to find AGA software now and in the future because RTG is something little alien from Amiga philosofy that have enchated players, developer and fans thanks to his custom chipset (OCS, ECS and AGA),
RTG is good for only high resolution, some little extras in games, but if you notice, you can use Amiga forever also without RTG.

That depends on what you want to do, actually. For some productive work - I'm using it for programming - I wouldn't want to go back to native. Too slow, too limited.

Originally Posted by Seiya

Exclusive 111 RTG games? It is that the question. Every RTG software you can run also with AGA, ECS or OCS.

Errr... With painful limitations. Pagestream with 640x512 PAL Hires Interlace on ECS as highest possible resolution? No, thank you, but no.

[Daedalus]

For games that support it, RTG versus AGA is a pretty huge difference. And there are a few games that are graphics card-only. Wipeout 2097, Descent: Freespace and Earth 2140 are three that come to mind. Games like Napalm, Payback and Foundation are borderline unplayable at AGA speeds and resolutions, and are developed with RTG in mind. Being system-friendly games means, like the productivity software mentioned above, they can often also use an AGA screen. This is more a side-effect of the abstraction of RTG meaning any system screenmode can be used, than AGA hardware being deliberately targeted.