Atari vs Amiga article

[psxphill]

It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.

What it looks like is completely relevant. 3D is basically a marketing term. It doesn't just mean three dimensional.
 
3D TV's are actually stereoscopic, but 3D is catchier. It has other uses than fooling our brains into perceiving depth in the image.
 
For a game to be 3D you need to be able to freely move along three planes and freely rotate around two planes. It needs to give an impression of depth and not just look like a 2D photograph, which is what Dungeon Master looks like.
 
Doom is an interesting case, you can move in three dimensions but you can only rotate around one of them. The map has 3 dimensions, but it's like a voxel where the height is stored within a 2d matrix so you can't have one floor above the other. Only the rooms were rendered at run time, the barrels and enemies etc were just scaled sprites. At the time we called it 2.5D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D
 
In a world where Doom is considered 2.5D, Dungeon Master cannot be 3D.

[Lurch]

I guess to make it a little less boring;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1PyUkVuZk

I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon!  how well does it run on a stock A1200?

slaapliedje

Where's the HUD along the bottom, wheres the gun? Other than that it's not bad :-)

[Iggy]

I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon!  how well does it run on a stock A1200?

slaapliedje

Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.

And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).

I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.

[bloodline]

Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.

 
Don't forget also that the Falcon only had a 16bit memory bus... That poor 030 must have been starving

Still the chunky gfx mode and DSP chip kinda makes up or the crappy bus.

And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).

I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.

I hve to agree, the A1200 always did and still does represent better value.

[itix]

The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.

Dungeon Master is a two dimensional game, because the dungeons are flat maps that are connected via pits and stairs. Hired Guns has a three dimensional world.

Dungeon Master is a first person shooter. It is made to look like it is 3D but it is actually just 2D with an advanced line of sight. It is 2D game from different angle.

Hired Guns has a three dimensional world but you could say it is just stacked 2D maps. Difference to Dungeon Master is just that you can see what is going on another 2D map down or above you.

I would, because it's not three dimensional in any way at all. The maps are flat in the sense that you can't have things like rooms above each other, that's why you can actually see everything on the auto map, which would be impossible if the maps were three dimensional.

I dont think that matters. Modern 3D engines have their own limitations too which of course are not so visible. However...

Then there's the graphics engine which is completely fake 3D. So no, Doom isn't three dimensional.

I agree, almost. I would just it is yet more advanced form of line of sight in a 2D game. But you can also utilize Z direction to some extent which isnt possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Or in Hired Guns.

But back to the original point...

The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.

The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...

[itix]

Reading the article and it seems that both Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon 030 shared the same attribute: lack of raw CPU performance. Falcon due to its 16-bit bus and A1200 due to lack of fast RAM on stock machine. If compared by hardware features in stock machine neither can outweigh another.

The software support did.

[psxphill]

The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...

Yes, that was my point. If commodore had realised that developing chunky bitmaps and crude texture mapping in the late 80's could have saved their company then things would have been entirely different.
 
I believe Hombre was started after they heard about the PlayStation, Sony were nearing the end of development in 1993 (they launched the console in 1994 but hardware of some form had existed for a long time prior to that). The Sega Saturn also wasn't a 3D capable console until they heard about the PlayStation.
 
I wouldn't expect a 3D Amiga released in 1991 to compete with the PlayStation in 1994, but it would have built a user base and commodore would have had money to keep developing new hardware. But in 1988 they decided that the future was AAA.

[Iggy]

AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?

[itix]

AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?

They did ECS :-)

Hardware wise Commodore was in difficult position with Amiga. They could not replace hardware because it would not be backwards compatible and AmigaOS didnt have enough hardware abstraction for real hardware independent software development.

[Linde]

The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.

Both the three dimensional world and the text descriptions are different representational abstractions, and I'm not sure how you can argue for the completely arbitrary distinction between the two that you seem to subscribe to. On a lower level of abstraction the 3D world is just a file in a file system or so.

[psxphill]

AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?

Dave Haynie had nothing to do with AAA or Hombre, he got stuck with putting together the Nyx motherboard for AAA at the end when commodore were pretty much dead.

[Sean Cunningham]

They did ECS :-)

Hardware wise Commodore was in difficult position with Amiga. They could not replace hardware because it would not be backwards compatible and AmigaOS didnt have enough hardware abstraction for real hardware independent software development.

Commodore never seemed to really be able to capitalize on the professional work being done with Amigas that Atari couldn't touch, beyond the music industry.  In fact, professional use of Amigas was often done in spite of Commodore's ability to run its company and provide a decent support structure for either customers or their own retailers.  Putting aside the murky image that could never really balance well between home and professional use.

[Iggy]

Dave Haynie had nothing to do with AAA or Hombre, he got stuck with putting together the Nyx motherboard for AAA at the end when commodore were pretty much dead.

That doesn't seem to be the case as patents held by Haynie are used in both projects.

[slaapliedje]

Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.

And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).

I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.

Ha ha, yeah I more or less meant that as a joke.  By the way, I thought the A1200 ran at 14Mhz?  MC68020EC at 14Mhz if I recall correctly.  The Falcon is rare and so is software for it, so obviously buying an A1200 that actually had decent software support vs the Falcon which really only a couple art and music programs were ever really created just for it... pretty much a no brainer.  Even if you totally ignore the price.

Still... I'd like a Falcon just to say I have one.  But then I'm not really rich, and I'd probably only rarely use it.  I have several Atari STs (1040ST, Mega STe, and TT030) and all of them are just sitting there doing nothing right now.  On the other hand my A4000D is connected to the Internet and happily running Amikit for Real.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Commodore never seemed to really be able to capitalize on the professional work being done with Amigas that Atari couldn't touch, beyond the music industry.  In fact, professional use of Amigas was often done in spite of Commodore's ability to run its company and provide a decent support structure for either customers or their own retailers.  Putting aside the murky image that could never really balance well between home and professional use.

That's a very good point, if Commodore could have actually kept up with what people were trying to do with their hardware, they'd probably still be around.  The IBMs and compatibles were really only good at the 'serious' work, but a lot of the video editing and creative things that Macs are known for now were pretty much all on the Amiga.  Hell, most games around the time had their art developed with DPaint.  I think one of the other issues with the Amiga is that "Oh, it's only a game machine" crap that Commodore more or less pushed with all it's might.  

Now all that's left is a bunch of jerks reminiscing on how awesome computers used to be.  :laughing:

slaapliedje

[Sean Cunningham]

I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993.  All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines."  How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.

I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994.  Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days.   The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).