Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?

[motrucker]

And Amiga's classic hardware valued for serious business? For education? For running servers? For used in government servers to maintain valuable secret data that is worth billions?

Uh....duh....of course it is only for games. When you stick C= there as an addition to it's record history and WHY at least *I* own it, I am surprised you call it computer in the first place and not a console?

Actually, I call mine a console regardless of your attempt to convince me otherwise, hehe.

As graphics wise I believe we go through the route of Macintosh!!!

So BRING OUT THE GAMES BABY FOR the Amiga!!!

I know Chaos Lord will love me for saying this, but, lately most of the time I spend playing on my A1200 is Total Chaos. I tend to play it for hours usually, because it is not registered, I tend to turn off the monitor and keep my A1200 on for days until I finish it. Of course when my Amiga 1200 decides to crash on me and I bit my nails from frustration that is when I turn her off.

I still use my Amigas for graphics, and DTP. I use the windows machine for games, more often than not. Thank god for ImageFX....

[Linde]

ChaosLord was getting stick for his stance of making high spec games that required an upgraded machine on the grounds that he should aim at a lower spec, I was just pointing out that if you haven't got the spec another choice exists.

Personally I'm neither against the idea of a lot of RAM or games for high-spec Amigas. What I can't stand is ChaosLord's arrogant demeanor, fallacious reasoning and his idea that more RAM is somehow necessary to make better games. I'll gladly argue against anyone who plays dumb in order to try to make a fool of another member, and applies the same reasoning to 2000s PC games to games that need to run on machines with MIPS in the 2-digit range.

Thorham puts it nicely; a 60 frame animation won't somehow magically make a game look good if your collection of assets has no real coherence or follow any sort of style guidelines. Looking at videos of TC: AGA, I think it's not a bad example of a game that could use some coherence in its assets. It looks fun, but in my opinion the graphics could use some work on the existing frames of animation instead of adding more. If this is bashing, so be it, but I hope it is taken as constructive critique, as it was meant.

[Tripitaka]

@Linde

To be honest, it wasn't you my original post was aimed at and constructive critique is all good. Sadly I've seen too many people give up the Amiga due to feeling that although they give good time, and in some cases good money to the hobby and just get grief in return. ChaosLord has done a lot of work to give us Total Chaos, he could have spent that time making a game for iOS and made some proper cash. Kudos to him for that. Anyway, g'night, I'm off to bed.

[ChaosLord]

@AmigaClassicRule & Linde.

ChaosLord was getting stick for his stance of making high spec games that required an upgraded machine on the grounds that he should aim at a lower spec, I was just pointing out that if you haven't got the spec another choice exists.

I made an A1000/A500 Total Chaos for many years.  Low-spec.  Lores gfx.  Ran from a single floppy.  Nobody really cared.  In the present day I know of 3 ppl who prefer the ancient games in the series complete with their gawdawful gfx and sfx that sound like they escaped from a burning buiilding of C64s.

Once I made a higher specced game reuiring AGA Amigas and a hard drive and extra memory more ppl started to enjoy the game.  All the extra colors allowed me to greatly improve the user interface.  Extra cpu power meant I was not afraid to code better AI. etc. etc.

Just for the record, I loathe emulation and would rather use classic hardware anyday and with games like TotalChaos around buying all that RAM and CPU power becomes more worthwhile. Sadly, if it needs an 060, I still need UAE

Whether Total Chaos "needs" an 060 is a subjective opinion.  I say it "needs" it becuase all the compression and decompression goes noticeably faster.  The framerate of the anims is higher.  The unlha time of the archive goes noticeably faster.  The AI in a complex situation goes a bit faster.  its just a whole bunch of little things.  My main reason for recommending 060s is simply that the 060 has dual 8K caches that can hold 7 tiles at once and give the animations a speedboost.  All Amigas should have cheap mass-produced 200Mhz 060s AFAIC.

But alas we live in a different world.

Many ppl play the game on a 50Mhz 030, 33Mhz 030 or (GASP!) 25Mhz 030.  To me this would be agony.  But to them they are totally kewl with it.  "So the onscreen monsters animate more slowly?  so what?  Its the gameplay that counts!"  And I can't argue with that.  The game play is exactly the same no what CPU you are using.  As long as u don't mind waiting an extra few seconds for your Autosave file to be generated each turn then an 030 could be for you.

But for those of you who love ur miggy enough to feed her an 040 or 060 you will get noticeably faster Frames Per Second thruout the game, faster save/load.  Faster AI.

My dream is a hires game where all the onscreen anims move at least 60fps.  060 gets me closest to my dream.

Since you meantioned WinUAE, recently someone complained about how long it takes to start the game.  I immediatlely knew the problem was because he had run Ibrowse and other MUI software first which fraggled out his RAM real bad, this slows -everything- down teribly.  + He is using unmodified plainjain IDE A1200 port.  arrrgh.  slowest IDE on the planet.

So anyway a bunch of ppl got together and raced our startup times.
Lots of interestng times on different configs.  To make a long story short I show you the 2 fastest times:
Amiga 1200      50Mhz 060 old slow ram old SCSI hard drive 15 seconds
PC multicore  3100Mhz Winuae new fast ram new IDE UDMA hard drive 12 seconds.

I was really expecing WinUAE to go faster than that!  C'mon its got SUPERFAST DDR3 RAM and superfast brand new high density drive and superfast brand new hard drive controller.

What if the amiga had a 100Mhz 060 in it?  It might have beaten the 3000 mhz pc or at least tied it.

[Britelite]

So anyway a bunch of ppl got together and raced our startup times.
Lots of interestng times on different configs.  To make a long story short I show you the 2 fastest times:
Amiga 1200      50Mhz 060 old slow ram old SCSI hard drive 15 seconds
PC multicore  3100Mhz Winuae new fast ram new IDE UDMA hard drive 12 seconds.

I was really expecing WinUAE to go faster than that!  C'mon its got SUPERFAST DDR3 RAM and superfast brand new high density drive and superfast brand new hard drive controller.

There's of course also the possibility that your WinUAE is badly configured

[ChaosLord]

There's of course also the possibility that your WinUAE is badly configured

Can you give an example of "badly configured" ?

Where is the "Badly Configured" / "Properly Configured" option located in WinUAE?

[Britelite]

Can you give an example of "badly configured" ?

Where is the "Badly Configured" / "Properly Configured" option located in WinUAE?

That's impossible to answer, considering I don't know what you're trying to emulate. But assuming you're aiming for maximum speed, are you using 040 emulation with JIT enabled and disabled cycle exact chipset emulation?

[ChaosLord]

That's impossible to answer, considering I don't know what you're trying to emulate.

 Fastest Amiga possible.  That actually works.

But assuming you're aiming for maximum speed, are you using 040 emulation

Why did you say 040 instead of 020 or 030 or 060?

Most ppl have their cpu set to 020 or 030 in WinUAE for maximum compatibility and speed.  So why do you suggest 040?

with JIT enabled

Without JIT WInUAE runs at the speed of a 1Mhz a500 if I am lucky.  Less if I am unlucky.  So I -always- have JIT on all the time.  Turning it off is unbearable.

 and disabled cycle exact chipset emulation?"

Yes of course.  But the option says "Fastest possible but maintain chipset timing"

[Britelite]

Why did you say 040 instead of 020 or 030 or 060?

Most ppl have their cpu set to 020 or 030 in WinUAE for maximum compatibility and speed.  So why do you suggest 040?

At least in the past 040 emulation was the best option when developing for the 060, might have changed since.

 Without JIT WInUAE runs at the speed of a 1Mhz a500 if I am lucky.  Less if I am unlucky.  So I -always- have JIT on all the time.  Turning it off is unbearable.

Well, on my Pentium4 running stuff without JIT is surely slow, but not 1MHz A500 slow
I also use JIT all the time, and it makes a huge difference for me, even on my old netbook. The speeds I get are way beyond anything an 060 Amiga can produce, including diskaccess. Which is why I wondered if you have it turned on, considering your loadingtimes don't differ that much.

May I ask what your host system is?

[ChaosLord]

At least in the past 040 emulation was the best option when developing for the 060, might have changed since.


Well, on my Pentium4 running stuff without JIT is surely slow, but not 1MHz A500 slow
I also use JIT all the time, and it makes a huge difference for me, even on my old netbook. The speeds I get are way beyond anything an 060 Amiga can produce, including diskaccess. Which is why I wondered if you have it turned on, considering your loadingtimes don't differ that much.

May I ask what your host system is?

Can you run the timing test on your system and lemme know what you get?

Download TotalChaosAGAr6.lha from aminet.
1. unlha it. (time how long this takes)  This is just for fun since someone mentioned it earlier.
2. Run the game.  This means double click its icon and start your stopwatch.  stop the stopwatch when the blackish screen comes up that allows you to enter your wizard names and teams.  This is for historial purposes.  Just interesting.  The first time the game runs, all the audio in the game must be decompressed.  Its thousands of files, loads of disk thrashing.

Having completely that test  we are about to do the REAL timing test that so many ppl did the other week.  Its called the "2nd run test"

Quit the game


4. Double click the game icon and start your stopwatch.  When the black screen with the wizard names and teams comes up. stop the stopwatch.  This is the meaninful test because this is what the player experiences every time he loads the game.  All that other stuff was just a once in a lifetime thing.

Be sure to say the hardware you used. what kind of Drive, HD?  what size?  SSD?  Is ur drive on SATA 300 OR SATA 600 or PATA ?  How many Ghz you have?  How many cores?  the usual stuff.

Thanxx0rz

[Britelite]

Can you run the timing test on your system and lemme know what you get?

Sure, will do that later today as soon as I get home.

[Ral-Clan]

Fastest Amiga possible.  That actually works.

 Without JIT WInUAE runs at the speed of a 1Mhz a500 if I am lucky.  Less if I am unlucky.  So I -always- have JIT on all the time.  Turning it off is unbearable.

If using RTG in WinUAE, you also need to manually install a special UAE RTG driver to MONITORS in AmigaOS (and a faster picasso/rtg library??).  Otherwise RTG is very slow.  I can't remember how this is done, as I did it back in 2008 and have used it ever since.  It made a BIG difference in speed.

[bloodline]

I noticed on the front page that this thread has 85 replies... That's a lot of replies just to say "no"!



:lol:

[motrucker]

I noticed on the front page that this thread has 85 replies... That's a lot of replies just to say "no"!



:lol:

Point is, the correct answer is YES. You surprise me.

[bloodline]

Point is, the correct answer is YES. You surprise me.

I was making a joke, if there is one rule in computing... It is that you can never have too much memory.

[motrucker]

Sorry, I should have realized that. Gawd, am I getting that serious these days?