newb questions, hit the hardware or not?

[itix]

By "you are sure what you are doing" I mean that you cannot, in general, expect that you have a simple old planar bitmap for your screen. Graphics cards exist since a long time, and there working with the blitter is often a bad idea. Whenever possible, use the system calls to get your job done, because then you'll be sure it's done correctly even on non-native hardware.

He was going to use HAM6 which locks out certain configurations anyway.

[itix]

would it not be better to have standard libraries for that with versions for the different target platforms? When I worked on building up Aros Vision I did a lot of search (in both web and aminet) and found a lot of libraries that are dedicated to offer fast graphics hiding what platform you use (partly supporting ECS,AGA and RTG). SamuraiCrow knows one of those (and the owner has permitted to make changes on it). If adapted it would make life a lot easier. The 68k codebase is huge and we should make use of it as far as possible. We should have a set of portable libraries covering all important areas like graphics, sound and so on so that developer do not have to care about implementations/optimizations for a certain core (and it would be possible to port it to AROS/MorphOS/AmigaOS too).

At overall they are not better than OS routines. Maybe some functions are optimized better for some hardware but you still can't get max performance out from older Amigas. Sprites are hard to abstract since they have many HW restrictions on Amiga and Copper is completely missing from RTG.

[itix]

Just because it's easier to make mistakes doesn't mean you can't properly debug your code. Writing good software in assembly language just takes longer. Also, the bug riddled thing makes it sound like you can't write good software in assembly language, which is obviously nonsense.

There is limit how large code base you can manage yourself. With assembly language you hit this limit sooner than with C language. And again in C language you probably hit this limit sooner than with C++. And so on. Very likely your project written in assembly language never grow to "full scale" as you get tired to maintain huge code base.

Asm makes it easier to make bugs because you must remember small details more. Which was not problem to me when I was writing in 68k asm but for example on Amiga you must remember to assign parameters to right registers. Using stack for temporary variables in asm is more difficult than in C. In asm you must count how many bytes you need from the stack and then calculate correct offset to access each variable in the stack. With good C compiler register usage is possibly more efficient because at least in theory it could compute optimal register usage in functions. In practise it isnt so, it seems.

But coding in 68k asm can be fun. I did that several years in the past.

[itix]

More than twenty years ago when I bought the Amiga 1200,

the most annoying thing is that the games does not work with a hard drive,

because some idiots doing these games "optimized" them and read out data from floppy disk

without the operating system.

During 80s harddisks were rare and expensive. It made sense to optimize games for typical Amiga 500 configuration.

On the Amiga with floppy disk only those games were faster maybe about 1%,

but on the Amiga with a hard drive were useless because these games do not use hard disk.

The same games work better on pc because these games use hard disk.

They do. But on amiga you can fit more data to floppies if you throw away filesystem.

The second of most annoying thing on the Amiga 1200,

was that software does not work with VGA monitor.

Because again some idiots "optimized" the software,

users lost the ability to connect at low cost VGA monitor to Amiga.

Those idiots could have gained maybe 1.5% on performance, maybe not.

By using VGA monitor you lose 50% on performance.

Access to the hard disk on the classic Amiga, should be made only through the system,

the original IDE interface is too slow, software for classic Amiga should work with FastATA.

Access to the graphics on the Amiga classic, should be made only through the system,

users should be able to connect at a low cost VGA monitor to Amiga.

Btw if you only have VGA monitor on your Amiga you get into trouble if your system stops booting. AmigaOS cant display early bootmenu nor boot console on VGA.

[itix]

This would change quite a lot though, I think with the way AllocMem works you need BufMemType. I'm not that bothered about that, MaxTransfer is much higher up my list of wtf.

Wasnt MaxTransfer workaround for buggy harddisks that could not transfer more than 64K at once?