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Author Topic: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?  (Read 9808 times)

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Offline FaerytaleTopic starter

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Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« on: November 26, 2012, 09:40:48 PM »
Whdload machines seems to be ok with 2-4 MB of ram.
 

Offline desiv

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #1 on: November 26, 2012, 09:45:54 PM »
Not sure about the full 128M, but I have 64M on my A1200..

Mostly, I use the RAM drive when transferring files and organizing things.
I download to RAM.  

I also do some basic WEB browsing and streaming (I have a MAS Player Evolved also).
And it's nice not to have to worry about memory when I have all those apps open.

My guess is that 128M was chosen for CHIP availability reasons.
Smaller chips probably cost more money nowadays...

desiv
Amiga 1200 w/ ACA1230/28 - 4G CF, MAS Player, ext floppy, and 1084S.
Amiga 500 w/ 2M CHIP and 8M FAST RAM, DCTV, AEHD floppy, and 1084S.
Amiga 1000 w/ 4M FAST RAM, DUAL CF hard drives, external floppy.
 

Offline Thorham

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #2 on: November 26, 2012, 09:49:30 PM »
Probably. I have a 64 megabyte stick in my A1200, and it's very useful when using Brilliance and Adpro together with large images. I used to have 16 megabytes, and that wouldn't be enough here.
 

Offline Oldsmobile_Mike

Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #3 on: November 26, 2012, 10:05:48 PM »
"Nobody will ever need more than 640K!"  ;)
Amiga 500: 2MB Chip|16MB Fast|30MHz 68030+68882|3.9|Indivision ECS|GVP A500HD+|Mechware card reader + 8GB CF|Cocolino|SCSI DVD-RAM
Amiga 2000: 2MB Chip|136MB Fast|50MHz 68060|3.9|Indivision ECS + GVP Spectrum|Mechware card reader + 8GB CF|AD516|X-Surf 100|RapidRoad|Cocolino|SCSI CD-RW
 Amiga videos and other misc. stuff at https://www.youtube.com/CompTechMike/videos
 

Offline paul1981

Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #4 on: November 26, 2012, 10:22:07 PM »
Quote from: Faerytale;716458
Whdload machines seems to be ok with 2-4 MB of ram.

That's fine, but the extra ram comes in handy for preloading much larger games such as Indiana Jones FOA (11 disks). Or CD32 adventure games etc.

On top of that, with 64MB or more ram you can easily load and edit CD quality stereo audio tracks without having to use any form of swap file or virtual memory, as the whole track will load into ram.

I think there's also some AGA demos that require 64MB ram as well.

It's also nice having a large ram disk to extract archives into.
 

Offline ChaosLord

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #5 on: November 26, 2012, 10:26:06 PM »
If you want to play every WHDload game at maximum speed then you need more than 4MB.

Amiga multitasks.  Of course you can use 128MB of RAM.
7zip can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Web browser can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Editing gfx can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Editing music can use more than 128MB.

Now try to do multiple things at once.

Total Chaos AGA takes 32MB.  But that is only because so many people starve their Amiga of memory.  So I had to make the game all cut down and squished into only 32MB.

If everyone had a proper 3GB of RAM.  Or maybe say 2GB Fastram + 256MB gfx card ram then game coders could make better games.

If ppl insist on keeping their Amigas in the 1980s with 1980s memory levels then Amiga gaming will get stuck.

In 1980s my A2000 had 1MB chipram and 8MB fastram.  That was ok because that was just an old game machine for compatibility reasons.  I consumed 4MB on lots of games in the 1980s.  I can't imagine trying to get by with only 4MB in 2012.

My dad was really penny pincher.  He only had an A500 with 4MB fastram and 1MB chipram + SCSI hard drive in 1980s.

I remember watching a lot of 3MB fastram + some chipram required demos in 1980s too.

In 1990 I went to 18MB and never looked back :)

Later on I went up higher and higher.  Always needing more than what was being offered.


Amiga: Sporting a 4096MB memory map since 1985.
Wanna try a wonderfull strategy game with lots of handdrawn anims,
Magic Spells and Monsters, Incredible playability and lastability,
English speech, etc. Total Chaos AGA
 

Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2012, 10:32:28 PM »
Quote from: paul1981;716464
On top of that, with 64MB or more ram you can easily load and edit CD quality stereo audio tracks without having to use any form of swap file or virtual memory, as the whole track will load into ram.
Well, that all depends on how long the track is ;)
Computers: Amiga 1200, DEC VAXStation 4000/60, DEC MicroPDP-11/73
Synthesizers: Roland JX-10/MT-32/D-10, Oberheim Matrix-6, Yamaha DX7/FB-01, Korg MS-20 Mini, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ-80, Sequential Circuits Prophet-600, Hohner String Performer

"\'Legacy code\' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup
 

Offline ChaosLord

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2012, 10:37:59 PM »
18 Mins of CD audio takes around 158MB.  And presumably you would want to have various sound samples in memory also.  So 256MB could be an ok number.

Amiga: Making Beautiful Music since 1985.
Wanna try a wonderfull strategy game with lots of handdrawn anims,
Magic Spells and Monsters, Incredible playability and lastability,
English speech, etc. Total Chaos AGA
 

Offline commodorejohn

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #8 on: November 26, 2012, 10:40:01 PM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
If ppl insist on keeping their Amigas in the 1980s with 1980s memory levels then Amiga gaming will get stuck.
If people insist on pushing for higher memory requirements for games, then fewer people will be able to play them :/
Computers: Amiga 1200, DEC VAXStation 4000/60, DEC MicroPDP-11/73
Synthesizers: Roland JX-10/MT-32/D-10, Oberheim Matrix-6, Yamaha DX7/FB-01, Korg MS-20 Mini, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ-80, Sequential Circuits Prophet-600, Hohner String Performer

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Offline Akiko

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #9 on: November 26, 2012, 10:50:27 PM »
Someone commented recently that the talkie version of Beneath a Steel Sky needs I think it was at least 64MB of Ram.

I was trying to play the Whdload version of Bloodnet recently on my CD32 with 8MB and it stutters a lot, but running on my A1200 with 64MB it works fine.
 

Offline Thorham

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #10 on: November 26, 2012, 11:21:16 PM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
Total Chaos AGA takes 32MB.  But that is only because so many people starve their Amiga of memory.  So I had to make the game all cut down and squished into only 32MB.

I don't see how something like Total Chaos actually needs 32 megabytes. The graphics can be done in lowres with a lower number of colors, for example, and still look good, while at the same time increasing the speed. This makes the same game accessible to more people.

Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
If everyone had a proper 3GB of RAM.  Or maybe say 2GB Fastram + 256MB gfx card ram then game coders could make better games.

Wrong. A quality game depends on the quality of the game engine, not all the hoopla around it. Take games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem for example. Can be done properly on an A1200 with a hard drive and some fastmem in the trapdoor.

Also, what kind of a game are you thinking of that needs 3 gigabytes on an Amiga? Sounds crazy.

Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
If ppl insist on keeping their Amigas in the 1980s with 1980s memory levels then Amiga gaming will get stuck.

Amigas need some fastmem and maybe a '030 for good games.

Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
I can't imagine trying to get by with only 4MB in 2012.

For the more serious persuits, more is obviously better, yes.

Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
Amiga: Sporting a 4096MB memory map since 1985.

Not really. The 68000 has a 24 bit address bus, and can therefore only address 16 megabytes. Same for the 680ec20 in the A1200. Further more, AmigaOS may have issues with anything above 2 gigabytes :(
 

Offline cgutjahr

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #11 on: November 26, 2012, 11:22:48 PM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;716465
Amiga multitasks.  Of course you can use 128MB of RAM.
Of course you can fill 128 MB, that wasn't the question. The question was if people actually do fill them up occasionally during normal use.

I can see how that could happen under OS4 (it did to me), due to the much larger footprint of the OS. But as the original poster is probably referring to the new accelerators from Individual Computers, we're talking OS3 here. With a 68030 CPU.

Quote
7zip can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Web browser can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Certainly not on a classic Amiga, unless you plan on unpacking 7zip'ed movies from the net on your Amiga before you move them to the PC for watching... And there's no web browser that runs on a classic Amiga and requires anything close to 128 MB.

Quote
Editing gfx can use more than 128MB all by itself.
Editing music can use more than 128MB.
It can, yes. But who's editing "CD quality stereo audio tracks" on an A1200 these days?

Somebody mentioned 4 MB for a WHDLoad machine. That should be mostly okay, though having 8 MB wouldn't hurt for preloading the bigger games. If you have a 68020 CPU, there are no games that run at a decent speed on your setup and would require more than 8 MB (maybe 16, what's the game with the most disks?).

If you have a better CPU and would like to run some newer RTG games or the occasional application, you might manage to fill up 32 or 64 MB occasionally. But I can't imagine filling up 128 MB - unless you actually try to.

But having 128 MB doesn't give you any problems, and Jens probably couldn't get his hands on anything smaller at a cheap enough price, so 128 MB it is.

But hey, I'm one of the few who don't edit HD movies on their classic setup, so what do I know ;)

Quote
Total Chaos AGA takes 32MB.
Huh? For what? It seems to be a nice game, but it's still AGA - how do you fill up 32 MB using bitmapped graphics intended for a lores display? That's a serious question, I don't understand how a turn based strategy game for an AGA machine could need that much memory.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2012, 11:25:12 PM by cgutjahr »
 

Offline Karlos

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #12 on: November 26, 2012, 11:25:19 PM »
I have 256MiB of FastRAM in my A1200, 8MiB of VRAM and of course 2MiB of ChipRAM. Whereas Amiga applications may have a small footprint, productivity applications will always require as much memory as the size of the data being worked on. It's possible to put a big dent in even 256MiB if you are editing large images for instance.

If your requirements are more modest, you can get away with less.
int p; // A
 

Offline ChaosLord

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #13 on: November 26, 2012, 11:35:28 PM »
Quote from: commodorejohn;716469
If people insist on pushing for higher memory requirements for games, then fewer people will be able to play them :/


Artists need room to work.  Give them the room they need or they go work somewhere else.

The artists in Team Chaos are perfectly capable of creating giant amounts of animations... like a 4.7GB Aminet archive type of deal.  Artists don't like being told "ur art has too many colors", "ur art takes too much ram", "ur art takes too much hard drive space".  Artists just want to create.  If you annoy them enough they quit.

Our latest artist made his first monster animation.  It had like, 1200 frames of animation.  So that is 1200 x 1152 bytes on AGA.  Multiply by 16 for gfx card, lets say 20MB.  That is 1 little monster. 1.  There are thousands of monster anims in the game.
Wanna try a wonderfull strategy game with lots of handdrawn anims,
Magic Spells and Monsters, Incredible playability and lastability,
English speech, etc. Total Chaos AGA
 

Offline Thorham

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Re: Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?
« Reply #14 on: November 26, 2012, 11:47:06 PM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;716476
Our latest artist made his first monster animation.  It had like, 1200 frames of animation.  So that is 1200 x 1152 bytes on AGA.  Multiply by 16 for gfx card, lets say 20MB.  That is 1 little monster. 1.  There are thousands of monster anims in the game.

And how exactly does that make a game good? Does a good game need 1200 frames of animation for a single monster, or does it need a good game engine with good AI and good controls? Also, quantity isn't the same as quality. Those 1200 frames won't do you any good if they don't look good.