AmiQuake 2 - new 68k Quake 2 Port

[ChaosLord]

How'd you get Quake3 running on your machine, Karlos?

He cheated and used a PC gfx card

[ChaosLord]

I am curious to know how your AmiQuake2 AGA compares  with AmiQuake2 RTG?

How does the frame rate compare?
Colors?
Resolution?

Its all very interesting!

I am also interested in what percent of time AmiQuake2 spends doing C2P?

And how much faster framerate could be on Replay+060 Daughtercard.

[ChaosLord]

With my port of Quake I've discovered that RTG is not really much quicker than AGA, it seems that the C2P/AGA is only slowing it down by about 3% at 320x200 vs RTG direct fame buffer writes.

In my gamecoding, which is 100% 2D, RTG is actually slower than AGA.

[ChaosLord]

In this case it's simply easier to render to a chunky buffer in fast RAM, and then copy/translate it to display memory using an optimised C2P routine. But even that's difficult, as you are turning 32 chunky bytes into 8 planar 32-bit words. You inevitably need to store some working data in memory as you are processing things, so a fast large CPU cache comes in very handy.

Luckily for us, the 68040 with dual independent 4K L1 Caches was released in 1990 thus allowing Amiga to do 3D gaming properly.  

Not just a 4K L1 DataCache, but a CopyBack DataCache which massively helps out with this sort of code.   When you store things to memory you don't really store them to memory you just store them in the L1 Cache which is superfast.

My 68040 saved me from a life of slow 68030 drudgery.  Yahoo!

[ChaosLord]

I investigated making the animated parts of my games use HAM8 mode but... it would either not work or be really really complicated and a ton of work... for that much work I could just rewrite the game to use 16.7 million TrueColor gfx cards so I just kinda gave up on HAM8.

When you start going into HAM8 it conflicts with traditional color cycling techniques that I get to use in normal 256 color mode.

You have to avoid fringing.

Its way more complicated.

More coding.  More work.

In the end I settled for 256 color mode because I can do superfast multilayer blitting. Colorcycling the way I want it.  Never have to worry about fringing.

I just use HAM8 for TitleScreens and such.

I would not mind displaying movies in HAM8.  But I could not work out how to use/adapt CDXL video format for HAM8 purposes.  It did not exactly have user-friendly documentation.  I could have figured it all out if I was willing to devote my whole life to it for 30 solid days.  I didn't feel like it was worth 30 days of my life just to play HAM8 CDXL32 movies in my game.  So I passed on it.

[ChaosLord]

RemApollo has always been in my Startup-Sequence.  I was never silly enuff to remove it. :hat: