Amiga.org
Operating System Specific Discussions => Amiga OS => Amiga OS -- Development => Topic started by: Elwood on January 31, 2003, 08:41:40 AM
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Hello everyone and especially demo coders,
2 issues:
1) When Amiga demos will be GFX mode compatible ? I mean, I would like to see some demos in UAE using the P96 emulation, i.e. in full screen mode. But as long as all (all ?) demos are AGA, they can be viewed in window mode only.
Can you please start coding demos using GFX mode (P96 prefered because it will be A1 "native" mode)
Thanks.
2) I noticed that demos are non longer uploaded to Aminet. It's a shame ! :-?
There, the last demos are from parties in 1997 wheras demos can be found in websites for sceners only. Please spread the word, upload your production to Aminet so that every Amigans can download and enjoy your demos.
Thanks a lot.
bye
Philippe 'Elwood' Ferrucci
Jay Miner Society
Amiga Translator Organisation
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The RTG demos are on their way. Take a look at the releases from Mekka&Symposium 2002 and 2001.
Most of the RTG-enabled demos needs a PPC, however.
The reason for this, I guess, is that in many cases AGA is faster than for example a CV64 on a 68k system.
Take the game Doom, for example. Using FBlit, this is faster in Multiscan 320x240 on my 060 than in the same resolution on my CV64/3D!
Then again, demos are made to impress and show off. And it's more impressive to get 50FPS chunky 3D on AGA than it is on a BVision PPC or a Voodoo3!
If you're looking for demos, scene.org is the place to start. It's the Aminet of the demo scene :-)
PS.
I'm not a coder so correct me if I'm wrong ;-)
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I heartily agree - spread the work !
it should be out there to be enjoyed !
perhaps even submit some here for download !
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Then again, demos are made to impress and show off.
You're right. This is the reason I didn't post this before. But I think you can impress people by using design and new effects instead of "I made it fast on a slow machine" ! :-)
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If you like RTG demos, why don't you do them by yourself?
I find the subject a little bit aggressive. Demo coders do demos just for fun not to impress people not having an Amiga showing them what Amiga can do. Usually it's much more fun to code AGA, or OCS than to use RTG. With RTG is too easy, you just use library functions.
There is also a more thoretical reason, connected with your last observation:
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But I think you can impress people by using design and new effects instead of "I made it fast on a slow machine" !
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If one wants to "impress people with design adn new effects" than one can use a gfx program, like Photoshop and create very easily wonderful effects. Then you can spend a lot of time using Photoshop to improve your effect. The same goes for 3D: why code it in assembler, when there exists Lightwave?
My answer is that demo-coding is a particular type of computer-graphics. it's computer graphics with a particular architecture. Otherwise it makes no sense. You don't need programming skill to produce impressive computer graphics, just use good rendering package and eventually an SGI workstation. But you need programming skill if you want to produce good effects WITH A PARTICULAR MACHINE. So demo coding, IMHO is: choose a platform and do stuff with THAT platform. Portability doesn't matter. What is the meaning of a masterpiece like "Arte" produced with a P4. You can appreciate the design, ok, but this is a matter of graphicians. You cound'say that "Arte" is a masterpiece of coding if it run on a P4. but "arte" is a masterpiece of coding because it runs on A500!
So why not to choose RTG as a platform? Because RTG is not a platform, it is a standard. Many different CFX cards use RTG, hopefully more in the future. But all these gfx card are different, they have different features and speed. How can a coder program "the best way"? There is no way which is best for each gfx card.
Ok, this is my opinion. Many coders have different opinions, so there are RTG demos around. But I think most coders have ideas similar to mine. That's why PC scene never became as great as the Amiga one. Nowadays many coders prefer to look at alternative platform, like Dreamcast, Xbox or even Gameboy Advance.
The Dark Coder
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@darkcoder
I totally agree!
Coding is as much a form of art as painting or composing!
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IMHO, RTG is best for those who are interested in exploring really cpu driven effects or those with highcolor rendering etc. RTG is essentially a fast pixel rasterizer and not much else.
Far more interesting things can be done by battering the custom chips and this is an area which is a lot of fun to poke around in (all puns intentional).
My gripe is with those demos that are AGA only yet do bugger all that's particularly AGA specific and could be presented at higher framerates / resolutions etc. under RTG (unless of course the coder has no RTG hw for whatever reason).
New hardware will more than likely breed it's own demo scene so those wanting to see what their turbo charged systems are capable of just need to wait a while. A1 users should be used to that by now ;-)
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You can find a lot of GFXCard compatible demos
at http://www.gfxbase.com ...
and all Up Rough musicdisks are GFXCard compatible.
Go to http://www.ponnyslakteriet.com/uprough and
download all eps/singles/lps (musicdisks) !!...
Enjoy!... =)
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DarkCoder: actually, what you say is exactly what I was fearing :
there won't be any scene on the new PPC machines (powered by morphos, os4) because they're just standard hardware and makes them not different from PCs for demos. ?
And also : nowadays, demos on computers lost their point because computers are getting continuously more and more powerful, coders don't care about optimisation and just add tons of 3D effects.. ?
So the amiga demoscene will die with the AGA chipset, or lose their spirit ?
Can anyone reassure me ? Is there a spirit that can be pursued on the new ppc machine (optimization, passion, ...). ?
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Try back2roots.org they have loads of demos all the way from ecs to hd P96 ones...
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First of all I apologise for being a little bit though in my previous posting.
I agree with carls that coding is an art. What I wanted to specify is that, IMHO, coding is not "the art of producing beautyful effects", but rather "the art of producing beatyful effects BY PROGRAMMING". And because this extra requirment you introduce, you need to specify an hardware
which gives you some limits and you have to reach the limit of the hardware by coding. If you don't fix a limit to the hardware (and with RTG you have no limit) it's useless to use coding, just use gfx applications and an hardware powerfull enough.
@Karlos you gave a good point. However, I still don't see the sense of RTG demos for the following argument: with RTG you can use many differeent gfx boards having very different features (which IS a good thing for everything but demo-coding). If you want a demo running on all the gfx cards, you have to consider the slow ones and you don't use the most powerful features of the others. On the other hand, if you say "this demo requires ATI Radeon card" then you are forcing the use of a particular hardware.
Still anotherr issue is that modern gfx cards are TOO powerful. They implement many many effects in hardware. So IMHO, with these cards there's nothing left to code. For example, a 3d demo could be something like this (I am actually NOT a RTG coder so I invent function names)
lea CyberGfx_base,a6
move.l PoligonList,a2
move NumberOfPolygons,d0
.loop
move.l (a2)+,a0
jsr RotateVertex(a6)
jsr ComputeVisibleSurfaces(a6)
jsr RenderTexturedSurfacesInPhongWithZBuffer(a6)
dbra d0,.loop
where the subroutines are NOT pieces of code but just computation done by the hardware. So, where's the fun in coding such a stuff? You don't need any programming skills just learn how to use an assembler. Is similar to what AMOS was, except that AMOS was not powerful enough to produce good result, while these monster chips are. But if it's so easy to produce wonderfuleffects by programming, why use programming at all? Just use Photoshop and concentrate your efforts just on the aestetical aspect.
@mahen Well..first of all these are just my ideas. But maybe people will have fun coding just doing a sequence of library calls...
Anyway the scene is not only coding: there is also gfx, music, writing diskmag and for all these things RTG is a VERY good thing. I think the spirit will stay alive. But you are interested in optimized coding, IMHO, you better consider different platform: consoles or (very, very interesting IMHO, PDA devices). And use your Amiga or Pegasos for every other thing.
The Dark Coder
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@DarkCoder
The Amiga scene won't die.
Just because it's an A1200 doesn't mean it's not an Amiga!
Look at the C64 scene: it's still alive!
There are so many different platforms to make demos on nowadays that it's getting more and more common to watch demos as recorded DivX films instead of the actual executable (there is a dreamcast scene, PS2 scene, PSX scene etc.)
The Linux scene is also growing and the AOne is already out there running Linux!
There will most likely be an OS4 demo scene, too. If you're just into optimizing code, how about optimizing it for the 68K emulator? :-)
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Some of you are missing som points:
Since the 68030 became standard(~1995?), most of the demos have been 3D effects mixed up in a C2P, trying to tweak as much as possible out of the low memory bandwith...
All this could just as well be made PPC,RTG, whatever, it´s up to the coders.
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>If you like RTG demos, why don't you do them by >yourself?
Stupid argument.
>I find the subject a little bit aggressive. Demo >coders do demos just for fun not to impress >people not
And why should this not be possible on RTG, having fun with coding ? Remember - many people (me included) don't have the HARDWARE anymore to display OCS/ECS/AGA. So if a demo does not support RTG we cannot watch it !
>than to use RTG. With RTG is too easy, you just >use library functions.
Again, stupid argument. There is no such thing
as a "demo effect library" - and if there would be you could choose not to use it. Basic RTG-Coding
is quite primitive. It is just "copying a Chunky
Array to the Screen". I do not see where the
big advantage of putting a planar array to the
screen is ? (okay, you can do some tricks with
transparency and stuff, but on the other hand the
hardware is slower - and there are Demo Effects
which will work better in Chunky Format also).
The PC Demo Scene is using Chunky Format since
a very long time. Sure, some of their demos are
boring, but there are also really great demos there...
>But I think you can impress people by using >design and new effects instead of "I made it fast >on a slow machine" !
Again: Most people will not be able to view a
Demo without RTG Support. And well - what's so
special about AGA that demos should not be allowed to be not AGA ? I don't see anything there...
asides maybe that a lot of demo-coders are very
reluctant (luckily not all of them :) ) to look
into something new. Generally the ones who are
against RTG Demo are the ones who have no clue
about RTG Coding... sounds strange, doesn't it ? :)
BTW: It is easy to code the demos in a way they
run on both Chunky and Planar Hardware. Usually only THREE FUNCTIONS will differ (opening a screen, closing a screen, copying data to the screen). Of course you have to keep some "rules" (no hacky stuff which breaks the OS, everything
in Chunky Format).
>to improve your effect. The same goes for 3D: why >code it in assembler, when there exists >Lightwave?
This proves no argument against RTG-Supporting Demos...
>MACHINE. So demo coding, IMHO is: choose a >platform and do stuff with THAT platform. >Portability
Yes, and on Amiga these days this platform is
a PPC-based RTG-System :)
> masterpiece of coding if it run >on a P4. but "arte" is a masterpiece of coding >because it runs on A500!
The question is: Couldn't the demo be done so that it runs on BOTH an A500 and a RTG-System? i think this should not have been so hard :)
>different CFX cards use RTG, hopefully more in >the future. But all these gfx card are different, >they have different features and speed. How can a >coder program "the best way"? There is no way >which is
Bah. You only have to care about this if you want
to support 3D Hardware (unlikely for Demo coders). If you use the GFX Card only as a Chunky Buffer
you do not need to care about this. There are only so many ways to copy an array into a chunky buffer. Sure, some might be a bit faster, but the same is the case for AGA Demos too... sometimes a programmer has a slightly faster approach (for example c2p).
>Ok, this is my opinion. Many coders have >different opinions, so there are RTG demos >around. But I
An opinion totally - please forgive my words -
unharmed by any knowledge about what RTG is
actually about :) If you want to discuss on an issue, you should at least know the BASICS of the issue - and not say "I don't know what I am talking about, but I don't like it".
>hand, if you say "this demo requires ATI Radeon >card" then you are forcing the use of a >particular
Such a thing would only happen if you would support 3D Hardware (which is highly unlikely for Demo Coders to do).
>Still anotherr issue is that modern gfx cards are >TOO powerful. They implement many many effects in
You do not have to USE the 3D Hardware. Use the GFX Card simply as a chunky Buffer, like the Demo-Coders on PC. Basically your API is
- Open a Screen
- Get the Base address of where the graphics
data of the bitmap starts
- Change the Colors
- Perform Multibuffering
- Close the Screen again
That's *all* you need. What's here so different
to Demo-Coding under Planar hardware (asides from that it is chunky then...).
I fully understand that Demo Coders don't want to
use "lame 3D Hardware Support" - after all they
want to show their coding skills, *not* the powerful 3D Chip.
On the other hand they should go sure people can
actually WATCH their demos. And with requiring
Planar Hardware (most modern monitors do not
support 15 kHz frequencies anymore) people CANNOT.
If you need any help adapting your demos to RTG (so it can run even on both, RTG and AGA) contact
me privately, and I give you some hints. You need
of course to go sure that you render in Chunky-Format (alternatively you could use a p2c algorithm, to convert to chunky format - which will of course cause a slowdown, but on a fast GFX Board the bad effect should not be THAT bad anymore).
There's nothing magic in RTG. The main difference is:
AGA: You first define the first bitplane, then the next, and so on...
RTG: You have all bitplanes in one value...
Simple Example: (4x4 pixels in 4 Bit)
AGA:
1001 1100 0101 1111
1001 1111 1111 1111
0011 0000 1111 0000
1010 1010 1010 1010
RTG:
11 ("1011")
0
12 ("1100")
7 ("0111")
...
Steffen Haeuser
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@MagicSN
First: Correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as you write directly to the graphic card's memory I don't think it could be classified as RTG?
RTG implies some kinde of HAL or it wouldn't be retargetable...
I get your point, but here's how I see it:
There is a big difference between the Amiga and the PC demo scene.
At work, I've got a PIII 667MHz with 256MB RAM and a 32MB 3D graphics card (from Matrox I believe), and an AC97 soundcard. I'm running Win2K with the latest versions of DirectX etc.
Still, many of the demos I download won't work for a number of reasons. Sometimes there's no sound. Sometimes the graphics are distorted. Sometimes it is just plain SLOW although the effect shown on the screen is similar to one that runs smoothly in Amiga demos on my 060! And these are demos that has won compos on big parties so they must have been working on at least the compo machine.
There's also comments in the file_id.diz (or whatever textfile is included): "Will only have fog on graphics card so-and-so", "Sound will be jerky on slower computers". SLOW? My 667MHz PIII is SLOW?
If you download a compo-winning AGA+060 demo, you know that it will look the same on all Amigas. The sound will be correctly synced with the effects, it will keep a decent framerate, etc.
I downloaded some RTG demos from M&S last year and they were so slow on my CV64/3D I could barely watch them.
Custom hardware is what built the demo scene and I can fully understand why many coders stick to AGA.
I am not impressed by a demo doing 100FPS on an NVidia card. If I want to be impressed, I watch Hotstyle Takeover or The Castle (Loonies/Amiga) or Mathematica (Can't remember the group/C64).
Any decent graphician and musician can create the right audiovisual feeling in a demo, but not every coder can make it look as intended using 2MB graphics memory and a 50MHz 060.
Oh well, maybe I'm just a crazy "oldschool" guy :-)
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Hi!
> First: Correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as >you write directly to the graphic card's memory I >don't think it could be classified as RTG?
No, that is still RTG.
>RTG implies some kinde of HAL or it wouldn't be >retargetable...
Well, sure:
LockBitmapTagList
UnlockBitmap
LoadRGB32
OpenScreenTagList
CloseScreen
OpenWindowTagList
CloseWindow
AllocScreenBuffer
ChangeScreenBuffer
I'd say this *is* a HAL :)
> Still, >many of the demos I download won't work for a >number of reasons. Sometimes there's no sound. >Sometimes the graphics are
Bah, stupid PC coders :) Since when is that something is done bad on a PC an argument for us ?
That's exactly the sort of fake-argument I usually read from AGA-fanatics. Please define what's so great in AGA ? If you look at it it boils down to "I like it. I am used to it. I never did anything else.". And nothing more.
>distorted. Sometimes it is just plain SLOW >although the effect shown on the screen is >similar to one that runs smoothly in Amiga demos
> on my >060! And these are demos that has won compos on >big parties so they must have been working on at >least the compo machine.
Well, then an RTG-version of these demos should
be even faster :)
>There's also comments in the file_id.diz (or >whatever textfile is included): "Will only have >fog on graphics card so-and-so", "Sound will
fog == obviously they use 3D Hardware. And we
did agree on that we don't use 3D Hardware for
"oldschool" demos, didn't we ? :)
> If you >download a compo-winning AGA+060 demo, you know >that it will look the same on all Amigas. The >sound will be correctly
Again: There is nothing magic in AGA. You can achieve the same on RTG using the GFX Board
as a simple Chunky Buffer. Only most demo coders (most !!!) "don't like what they don't know". And of course as they don't like what they don't know they never will have a closer look - so will never
know it - so will never like it :)
>I downloaded some RTG demos from M&S last year >and they were so slow on my CV64/3D I could >barely watch them.
Maybe these demos were just coded badly ? Or they
used 3D Hardware (which is simply a PAIN on the CV/3D). Or they used Highres graphics. Which won't be fast on EITHER AGA or RTG (with some exceptions, maybe...) as long as no 3D Hardware
is used.
For a good comparision you should do the same demo - once for AGA, once for RTG. And you will notice the RTG version will be faster (just usually nobody does a demo for both AGA and RTG...). Some early RTG-Demo also still did their graphics layout in Planar graphics (as for AGA) and then converted over while displaying...
But principially you can do what you do in AGA
also on RTG - only faster :)
> Custom >hardware is what built the demo scene and I can >fully understand why many coders stick to AGA.
Believe it or not - a GFX Card is also Custom Hardware. Just custom hardware which implements a standard (but if you look at the direct-hardware coding of a Card it will look very "Custom" to you... no two Cards do the Card Init the same way it seems...).
> I am >not impressed by a demo doing 100FPS on an NVidia >card. If I want to be impressed, I watch Hotstyle >Takeover or The Castle
I did not read any reason yet why we should use
slower Hardware which is less available.
>Oh well, maybe I'm just a crazy "oldschool" guy
No I think just that many people with an attitude
like you have prejudices against OS-clean coding.
That's the matter to what it comes down in the end... and if they don't know something they don't want to have anything to do with it. At least many of them are like this.
Steffen
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@MagicSN
First an example:
Q[r]COV - intro contribution to Flag2001 by Industry and Pas Maters. This runs on both AGA and CGX with some quite simple chunky effects.
I have an A1200/060 50MHz with a Z-IV busboard and a CV64/3D, and one A1200 with AGA and an 030 28MHz. This intro operates best on 060 using AGA, while 060+CGX is not remarkably faster than on the 030+AGA. It runs in 8-bit lowres on all three combinations. Oddly, all games written for both CGX and AGA works like this too, while for example ImageFX, Voyager and the Workbench itself is amazingly fast on the graphics card - not to mention TVPaint!
Now, the Z-IV busboard does not have the same bandwidth as true Zorro-3 slots but at least it should be a LITTLE bit faster than AGA?
And I didn't say I don't like people coding for graphics cards :) I just said I can understand them - I wouldn't want to develop a demo on my graphics card if it was slower than on AGA! I'm guessing a lot of demo coders have a HW setup similar to mine.
A lot of the old PC DOS-demos work just fine (Second Reality is a beauty!) and I guess these are using a technique similar to the one you describe (using the graphics card as a chunky buffer) since they had to work on a lot of different cards.
As for hardware availability, AGA is available to any A1200 or A4000 owner by hooking it up to a TV set - no need for a 15kHz monitor.
But on the A1 the situation will have to change. I'm certain that wonderful demos will be produced for it (otherwise I'll be very sad :-(), and they will _have_ to use RTG.
Anyways, I don't think me ranting will change the demo scene :-) But I'm sure of one thing: The A1 needs something similar to AMOS or Blitz Basic if any "newbie" coders are going to get interested in it. It will also need a good 2D pixelpainter and some nice tracker- sample- and MP3-software if it's going to attract a full demo group.
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Hi!
>Q[r]COV - intro contribution to Flag2001 by Industry >and Pas Maters. This runs on both AGA and CGX >with some quite simple chunky effects.
>I have an A1200/060 50MHz with a Z-IV busboard >and a CV64/3D, and one A1200 with AGA and an 030 >28MHz. This intro operates best on 060 using AGA, >while 060+CGX is not remarkably faster than on the >030+AGA. It runs in 8-bit lowres on all three
But it does not run faster on AGA either,
right ? The point is not the faster speed on GFX Boards (though it exists, see discussion below), the point is that most people just CANNOT view anything which uses AGA, while they can, if it supports RTG.
And it is not really as if one of AGA/RTG would be
cooler/easier-to-do-demo-effects-with or whatever.
It is just a simple choice what to use. And to use the
one people cannot use anymore (and which also definitely won't run on A1 even IF people have still a 1084 monitor) sounds stupid to me.
As to the speed: Try a 16 Bit Display on AGA and compare this then in speed to a 16 Bit Display on GFX Board (We tried this on Heretic II, but the AGA version is really remarkable slower...). Or try 640x480 on AGA... this is also very slow (which is
why Freespace requires a GFX Board). Even in Lowres though GFX Boards are faster. Of course in cases where 90% of speed is for the calculation and only 10% for the screen refresh even a 2x as fast GFX Board won't make much of a difference.
BTW: The CV/3D used for Chunky-Copy is not one of the fast ones... even the old Piccolo SD64 is faster.
But still my point is: It is not SLOWER than AGA, so there is no point in using AGA which only few people can use, and which does not run on A1 anymore.
>And I didn't say I don't like people coding for >graphics cards :) I just said I can understand them -
I cannot... after all don't you want to make it possible for as many people as possible to run your demo ? And that it also runs on future machines ?
>A lot of the old PC DOS-demos work just fine >(Second Reality is a beauty!) and I guess these are >using a technique similar to the one you describe >(using the graphics card as a chunky buffer) since >they had to work on a lot of different cards.
Exactly. And my point is Amiga Demos these days should go this route exactly (I also don't have much love for present-day Demos which are just DivX-Animations rendered with some 3D Package :) )
>As for hardware availability, AGA is available to any >A1200 or A4000 owner by hooking it up to a TV set - >no need for a 15kHz monitor.
Who hooks a TV to his computer ? Maybe 5 years ago :) Also you need a fitting cable for this (don't have this either). Most people just say "If it requires AGA I cannot run it".
>(otherwise I'll be very sad > ), >and they will _have_ to use RTG.
Exactly. And people could prepare for this already now :)
> I'm sure of one thing: The A1 needs something >similar to AMOS or Blitz Basic if any "newbie"
I do not think so. I never liked Basic in any forms.
Well, and if you want functions which can do quick
effects without much coding - use MesaGL, which
will be with OS 4 !!! (That's again the "cheap" trickery with 3D Hardware then, of course).
>coders are going to get interested in it. It will also >need a good 2D pixelpainter and some nice tracker- >sample- and MP3-software if it's going to attract a >full demo group.
As 2D or sample-software is not exactly very CPU-intensive you could use some of the same old 68k software (not DPaint of course, as it does not run on RTG). If I remember right there was some Sound-Package planned for OS 4.
Steffen
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@darkcoder&carls
There's no difference between the way coders make demos for AGA and RTG these days... most of the demo is 3D stuff, and the only thing the coder does with AGA is a chunky2planar, and that's all. So the simplest way to add RTG support is to copy that chunkybuffer to the gfx ram. The first method unexperienced coders will use will be WritePixelArray()... but that's quite slow (but usually faster than AGA). If the coder has a clue about RTG coding he will get the address of the screen as MagicSN has described and write directly to the graphic mem, boosting the speed. I do a trick that sometimes speeds up quite a lot some effects, I use a 32 bit to store the 4 8bit pixels I'm going to write and I put pixels in that variable until it has the 4 pixels, then I copy it to the gfx ram, as I only do one access to write a 32bit number instead of writing 4 times, the speed is higher. Yes, that works (at least with rotozooms), and it's fast.
But what's the point in forcing my friends with a 2060/CV3D to sell their equipment to see AGA demos if I can make them compatible with both really easily?
I don't care if it's a bit slower or faster, that's not going to change the quality of the production. Some people may say ooohh but it's designed for AGA+060... so what? some 040/40 users try to run 060 demos, they run slowly but they are happier than if the code was 060 only and they couldn't watch the demo at all. And I have an A4060 with a picasso4, why can't I see the effects more smoothly if my computer can really do it?
If you don't want to do tricks like storing 4 pixels in a variable, there's no problem, just write to the gfx ram instead of your fast-ram chunkybuffer.
Ummm one, note, the only OS functions you will use will be those used to get the address of the gfx ram and ScrollVPort for the double buffer. That's all. I think that those demos still will be amazing stuff. The demo can be designed/optimized for AGA but at least it should run in RTG hardware.
Mankind for example does that with some of their productions and they run in 68k and are RTG compatible.
Just my thoughts...
ummm yes, if you are a bit lazy the group Mankind has uploaded their init&c2p code to aminet (it supports RTG and AGA) I can't remember the name of the archive... :-( you'll have to search a little :-/
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Ummm what I have said also applies to sound... demos should be Paula AND AHI compatible...
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@carl
Yes that's also my opinion. The spirit won't die.
There are many interesting platform!
Optimizing for the 68k emulator can be a good idea. But one should have any insight on how the emulator works..and ..which emulator? the Pegasos one? the A1? the WinUAE?
Any way I really would like to do demos for some console.
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Carls wrote
Any decent graphician and musician can create the right audiovisual feeling in a demo, but not every coder can make it look as intended using 2MB graphics memory and a 50MHz 060.
Ive heard arguments like this before. It seems like you cannot be a decent coder unless your program pushes the envelope, hence the "I cant belive its 50 mhz" experience. With the new hardware being made available people tends to think that coding is becoming to easy. What people forget is that there is limitations for the new system aswell. The new demos shouldnt be comparable to the old ones.
The target for coding on the new hardware should be: "wow I cant belive its only 800 mhz"
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First of all: YES, QrCov IS faster on AGA than on CV3D on my machine. As is Doom and Heretic. Again: C2P in games & demos is faster than native chunky on my computer (maybe I'm doing something wrong with CyberGraphX?). I'm sure this isn't a problem on for example the BVision.
I can enjoy a good demo on any platform, no matter how fast the CPU is, and I sure understand that creating good code isn't easy no matter how fast your hardware is. It just seems to me like the faster the hardware gets, the lazier the coder gets (hence the bad operation of many PC demos).
I also get more impressed by a good-looking picture if it's pixeled in 256 colours using for example PPaint, than by a similar-looking 24-bit picture made in Photoshop with a Wacom board, where you get all your antialiasing, shading etc. for free.
To put it short: I like nerdy show-offs :-)
And the Amiga scene is moving towards RTG. A lot of new demos even multi-task correctly.
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My take:
Demos should show what the HW can do and how good it is
understood by the coder.
So REAL demos only run on fixed HW like C64,A500,A1200 or
Phase5-PPC+Permedia. Consoles of every type are also quite good
for it. Demos on PC or CGX/P96 sounds even more useless than
demos allready are.
Don't have th HW ? Use a emu, or watch the mpg.
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@crumb & magicSN
First of all I don't understand why you (and also Elwood who started this post)
want to force people do what you want. I am sure that you are all nice guys but
you sound a little bit arrogant. A little like Bill Gates.
(oops..hope you won't be offended to be compared with him..just joking :-))
Everyone can code as he\she prefers, the only rule are those of the programming
language.
The question is not planar vs. chunky. As you know there are several technique to render
chunky gfx on OCS and AGA. Since magicSN seems consider me stupid, I state that I know the staff well since I
coded several c2p (and copperchunky screen) by myself (i.e. not using the latest routine found on aminet).
It is true that I never coded for RTG, but I used OpenGL, the Amiga graphics library and SDL, the multi
platform library ported on the Amiga by Gabriele Greco. SDL in particular is very similar to what you describe
(and I imagined) just a set of functions to open a screen and copy a block of memory into a frame buffer.
What you call "a simple copying of data into a screen" is crucial for the speed of the demo. And it
differs from one board to another. I don't think that you would obtain the same speed and the same visual
apperence from a PicassoIV and a Radeon 7000. What RTG is missing, is *a clear limit*. Without a clear limit
you cannot reach the limit.
Said that, I am not *against* RTG demos. If you like to do them, please do them. I will enjoy looking at it.
But for me it makes no sense and no fun to produce one, because I don't have a limit to reach. Please note, as
I already wrote in previous messages that I really think that RTG is a VERY good thing for the Amiga, which
could have helped a lot if it would be ready on 92 (C= started speaking of an RTG system but never did
anything). And if I wanted to program a game or a gfx application I would certenly use RTG, and propably I
would have fun using it. Because there the aim is different. But a demo for me makes sence only with a well
defined architecture. So I thank Steffan for his kind offer but I am not interested in having my demos run on
RTG. By the way, you know the programs Extreme and Supreme, by darkage Soft? You can do very nice demos using
them, 100% RTG compatible (I helped them a bit with Extreme's copperlists :).
>And why should this not be possible on RTG, having fun with coding ? Remember - many people (me included) don't have the
>HARDWARE anymore to display OCS/ECS/AGA. So if a demo does not support RTG we cannot watch it !
I am sorry for you, but we are not speaking of sofware wich is necessary for using the computer.
If, for example, LHA required AGA, well it would be a real problem but I think you can survive without
watching a demo. BTW, UAE should run OCS and ECS stuff without any problem. And I think that latest
WinUAE versions support AGA, or at least try. And concerning the monitors problem there exist cheap
devices called scandoublers, you know?
>On the other hand they should go sure people can actually WATCH their demos. And with requiring
why should I go sure? As I said I code to have fun, not to "impress people with my coding skills".
Anyway let's talk about compatibility: MagicSN wrote:
> Most people will not be able to view a Demo without RTG Support
??????
which people? If I am right since 1986 about 6*10^6 Amigas were sold. All of them can run OCS stuff.
I think at least 2*10^6 AGA Amigas exist. All these can run AGA stuff. So only A1 are left. How many did they
sell? (and there is UAE for A1 also)
I have many friends who used to have an Amiga. None of them has an Amiga anymore. hence they can't watch
my demos, RTG or not (well there is WinUAE but I think more or less it supports AGA..) Anyway when they come
to visit me, I show them some demos, including mine :-)
But most of all, how many people in the world own an Amiga? Unfortunately, very few.
So I won't say that your argument is stupid because I always respect other's opinion, dear Steffen,
but I do say that it is definitly not convincing. It could be a good argument for PC demo-coding.
If my primal concering was to have my production watched by many people, I would code them for the PC.
Even better I could code them using Java. Java scene exists. Or I could even code them using Mathematica
which is a very nice program for many platform, unfortunately not Amiga. You can very easily experiment
nice formulas with mathematica. Of cource the render is very slow, but I have seen used it on an SGI,
and it's acceptable. (no limit=> I can use an SGI.)
But for the same reason as for RTG, for me
demo coding on PC or using Java makes no sense. Demo coding on Xbox or PS2 or gameBoy advance, that
I find really interesting. I suspect that the most part of the great Amiga coders more or less
thinks like me. In fact, they went to PC...to produce games!!! :-)
@crumb (about the group Mankind). I met at Spoletium 4 a Mankind coder. We had a pizza together.
I think he is the coder of that c2p. Anyway he gave me sourcecode of his nice demo, which of cource
run on RTG, so I should even have an internal version.
Ok, finished for today. I really apologise if I was a bit though but when someone "order" me to do something
against my will, I get a little bit upset.
Friendship RULEZ!
The Dark Coder
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my oppinion is this:
regardless of which is faster for demo makers, - native or rtg
the whole point of demo making is to show off, and practice
so its certainly up to the demo maker as to which hardware they use, the hardware does play a vital part in demo making
the demos IMO are for them, not us!
let THEM decide what hardware to support!
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1) When Amiga demos will be GFX mode compatible ? I mean, I would like to see some demos in UAE using the P96 emulation, i.e. in full screen mode. But as long as all (all ?) demos are AGA, they can be viewed in window mode only.
I'm not sure how you mean - WinUAE at least can display non-RTG stuff in full screen mode (Display tab, tick 'Full Screen'). And I have seen a few RTG demos around, at least.
(Is anyone else unable to log into amiga.org using Opera btw?)
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darkcoder wrote:
And because this extra requirment you introduce, you need to specify an hardware
which gives you some limits and you have to reach the limit of the hardware by coding. If you don't fix a limit to the hardware (and with RTG you have no limit) it's useless to use coding, just use gfx applications and an hardware powerfull enough.
It's true that when comparing the skill of coding a demo, one needs to look at the hardware it runs on, which is easier if you have a fixed level of hardware. But still, even on the PC, I think it can be appreciated that some games/demos/engines are better than others, either in terms of speed or features. I'm not sure what you mean by it being useless to use coding. And demos were popular back in the days when the Amiga's CPU speed was not fixed/limited.
@Karlos you gave a good point. However, I still don't see the sense of RTG demos for the following argument: with RTG you can use many differeent gfx boards having very different features (which IS a good thing for everything but demo-coding). If you want a demo running on all the gfx cards, you have to consider the slow ones and you don't use the most powerful features of the others. On the other hand, if you say "this demo requires ATI Radeon card" then you are forcing the use of a particular hardware.
Or you can say "this demo requires a graphics card that supports x feature". You don't have to choose between either supporting all cards, or only supporting one particular brand.
So IMHO, with these cards there's nothing left to code. For example, a 3d demo could be something like this (I am actually NOT a RTG coder so I invent function names)
First of all, as others have said, making something RTG compatible doesn't mean you have to use the card's 3D features.
I admit that I haven't kept too up to date with graphics card features in the last couple of years, but I don't think they do everything for you. Generally, they'll do things like the rasterisation for you, but other things such as hidden surface removal, particle engines, realistic physics still require coding. In your example of code, there is no magic ComputeVisibleSurfaces function (well you could send everything to the card anyway, but then it'd be slow..)
Of course yes, a simple scene done in OpenGL requires little skill, where as it's a lot of work to do in software, but more complex stuff takes a lot of skill even with OpenGL.
I understand that things like software rendering (which I have done) and AGA 'hardware-banging' (which I haven't) can be fun and require skill - but it can also be that when utilising 3D hardware.
why use programming at all? Just use Photoshop and concentrate your efforts just on the aestetical aspect.
Well some people do do that, they're called artists;) But some people prefer coding - and some of those prefer working with 3D hardware and exploring programming of areas other than low level things like rasterisation.
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darkcoder wrote:
which people? If I am right since 1986 about 6*10^6 Amigas were sold. All of them can run OCS stuff.
I think at least 2*10^6 AGA Amigas exist. All these can run AGA stuff.
AIUI, the problem is not whether Amigas come with Amiga chipsets, but that either a TV or 15kHz monitor is needed. Unfortunately things like multisync monitors are rare (are there any still in production? I remember trying to get hold of one in 1998 with no luck), and things like scandoublers are expensive (if they work at all.. mine didn't), so I can imagine a lot of people preferring to use a standard monitor with their gfx card, and forgetting about chipset output (of course, it's difficult to know how many people actually do this).
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@Darkcoder:
> First of all I don't understand why you (and also Elwood who started this post) want to force people do what you want.
No one is forcing you with a gun to add support, we are expressing our opinions. In my opinion the effort needed to add RTG support is so small that it is a pity that it's not included in most of demos. (that sounds better for you ummm? as english is not my native language I didn't want to make it sound like "everyone should code rtg-compatible stuff or be executed". I mean that it's a good idea because it requires very little effort)
>I am sure that you are all nice guys but
you sound a little bit arrogant.
well, now read again the first lines of your first post in this thread.
You say that demos are not made to impress. Well they are made for fun and to impress. Isn't impressive to see how much can be done with little resources? And one of many people all-time-favourites, State of the Art was designed to impress, not showing the machine limits but a great design. I think that SOTA only moves a little polys most of times and that a A500 can do that without many problems (World Of Commodore for example was made to impress with its code more than its design, for example the rotozoom of the horned demon head is quite impressive for an A500)
You say that you don't know where are the limits. One of the limits is the bandwitch to the graphic card. As Carl has said in his system it's slower than AGA in most of programs, well the Zorro2 bandwitch is a limit, isn't it? As the Zorro3 is (you won't get more speed of pci cards with mediator or prometheus because it goes through the zorro3 bus). But for example most of things (eg games) are faster using Zorro3 cards than AGA.
With 68k systems the main limit from my point of view is the raw cpu power. Of course, the bandwitch to fast ram and to gfx ram are big bottle necks. But now demos are mostly 3D and that needs raw cpu power. For example ppc games like quake run a lot faster even thought that they are using AGA. With AGA and a good c2p you can put 25fps at 320x200 without too much effort. The problem is the 3D stuff you want to show. Some demos run almost equally with AGA or gfx cards because the cpu is the biggest limit now.
>What you call "a simple copying of data into a screen" is crucial for the speed of the demo. And it
differs from one board to another. I don't think that you would obtain the same speed and the same visual apperence from a PicassoIV and a Radeon 7000. What RTG is missing, is *a clear limit*. Without a clear limit you cannot reach the limit.
well, the little tests I've done run at more or less the same frame rates in every graphic card. I've tested with my program a 060 my Picasso4, a Voodoo5 and a CV64. The fastest of the three was the CV64 because it uses Zorro3 to the limit. But it was only slighly faster. The clear limit for AGA and RTG stuff is (90% of times) the CPU. Well I haven't tried a CybervisionPPC, in theory it should be the fastest (but only slightly)
What I call simply copying is that: simple copying. Your graphics will look the same in a Ateo Pixel 64, in a CV3D, a CV64, a Picasso4, a Voodoo3 if you use a 8bit screen. With >8bit ones you will need to check the screenmode to see if its RGB BGR or whatever.
I admit that with 16bits it is more complicated. But many AGA demos only use 8bit. And it's easy to support.
I repeat that no one is ordering you anything, just saying that adding RTG support is quite easy. But that not implies that RTG coding is done with functions (if you use functions it will be faster than AGA but not as fast as it can be)
don't get upset so easy ;D
I have fun coding RTG stuff, the only reason I'm adding AGA supportis for erm tradition, compatibility and well, because it's easy and I can, and some people still don't have a gfx card and I found a bit arbitrary to stopping them from watching what I want to do. I mean that it's easy if you use a chunkybuffer and a c2p routine (like me) because sprites and bitplanes aren't used much these days. If you do demos that use bitplanes etc... well that's harder than a gfx card for most of effects.
DISCLAIMER: I've only expressed my opinion, people who don't agree MUST NOT be fussilated ;-D
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@crumb
>No one is forcing you with a gun to add support, we are expressing our opinions. In my opinion the effort needed to add RTG
support is so small that it is a pity that it's not included in most of demos. (that sounds better for you ummm? as english is not
Yes, that sounds a lot better. Thank you.
>well, now read again the first lines of your first post in this thread.
I know that my very first answer to Elwood was a very bad one, and I already
apologised in the end of the same posting (the first one). It was my very first
reaction to his post which sounded like an order, and in the beginning that was
the only thing I wanted to say. Then after 2 minutes, I changed my mind and I
thought that it was better discussing so I started the longest reply.
nevertheless I decided to keep also the very first answer because if someone
shouts at you, you first have to show that you too are able to shout, and then
you can start discussing.
>You say that demos are not made to impress. Well they are made for fun and to impress. Isn't impressive to see how much can
>be done with little resources? And one of many people all-time-favourites, State of the Art was designed to impress, not showing
>the machine limits but a great design. I think that SOTA only moves a little polys most of times and that a A500 can do that
While am coding an effect, my only concern is enjoy myself doing something
difficult and proving to myself that I can solve the problems. I don't think to
people's reaction when they see my demos. Sometimes the graphicians or the
designers come to me and suggest me to change something to increase
spectacularity, and if I find the thing interesting, I do.
SOTA is basically 2D morphing poligons. But there is great design work.
Maybe I have not explained what I mean when I say that when I don't do demos to
impress people. When I say that, I don't mean that I don't care about design or
gfx or nice music. I am always VERY happy when I can work with some good
graphician or designer (sometime I have to do design by myself, but I am not
good in that). What I mean is that I want to to a demo wich is fun and also
look good TO ME and my co-workers and the friends that are interested in my
work. I don't care about people using PC with emulators or A1s. If someone want
to watch my demos, I am happy. But if someone FREELY DECIDES not to watch my
demos, for me it's no problem. As I said, if I wanted my work to be seen by as
many people as possible, I would use a PC. I think that people who did SOTA
were thinking to do something looking great to themselves, not to have people
saying "ahhh unbelivable", like they were looking Michelle Pfeiffer.
>well, the little tests I've done run at more or less the same frame rates in every graphic card. I've tested with my program a 060
my Picasso4, a Voodoo5 and a CV64. The fastest of the three was the CV64 because it uses Zorro3 to the limit. But it was only
that "more or less"is not satisfactory to me. The "simple copying" of data is
often done using the gfx card blitter, wich is not accessible to the coder.
Different cards have different blitters. We are not only speaking about Zorro3
cards. A1 and Peggies and PC with emulators have PCI and AGP cards. I guess in
some months we will see programs (maybe demos) requiring DE FACTO AGP cards.
This is good for Amiga in general, but not for demo scene.
Moreover, the limit is not only speed. Is also screen resolution and video
refresh rate. With AGA I can decide wich resolution and which refresh rate I
want to use. Gfx board allows each different resolution and rates, hence I
cannot reach their limit.
Moreover, I heard (but maybe I am wrong) that there are 2 different RTG standrd,
the Picasso96 and the CyberGfx. So one should even support 2 different
standards?
But it is time to introduce another argument: in my last post I concentrate so
much in discussing the theoretical reason why I don't support RTG, that I forgot
there is a practical one!
Several posters wrote that "nowadays demos are only 3D stuff done by the CPU".
It is true that many coders do only stuff like that, but not me! GFX boards
usually have just 1 sprite and most of all, they don't have anything similar to
the Copper! To me, using sprites and Copper is much fun! You can change screen
resolution and depth in the middle of the screen (or in any other position of
cource). With sprites, you have a 4 colors 512 pixel wide or 16 colors 256 pixel
wide extra window which you can move around with 5-8 asm instructions! And there
is more. With Amiga chipset you can control how display DMA, audio DMA and CPU
compete to access the chip RAM. Hence (especially using copper) you have many
possibility of optimizing stuff. For example, in certain positions of the screen
you can lower screen depth, or make display window shorter to gain CPU speed
without a viewer noticing it. You have much more possibilities to obtain 100%
(maybe 99.9999%, since youcan never tell you reached 100%) optimization.
And this is very fun, to me.
So with AGA I can do BOTH CPU-only chunky effects AND chipset supported funny
tricks. And you can join these techniques together. (BTW, how many of these "new
generation coders" are able to proper initialize audio state machine to begin
audio output?) With RTG, instead I can only do one sort of effects. I think the
real progress is not the contraposition of old and new, but rather a ynthesis of
old (in this case coding techinques) and new.
So with AGA:
more and fixed speed limit + more possibilities to invent solutions = more fun!
This reminds me that MagicSN stated in his post that it would be easy to make a demo like "Arte" RTG
compatible. I don't think so, since many "Arte" effects for example the
"rectangular" textured tunnel are copper based. Only the 3rd part (the 3D) is
cpu-only.
>I have fun coding RTG stuff, the only reason I'm adding AGA supportis for erm tradition, compatibility and well, because it's
easy and I can, and some people still don't have a gfx card and I found a bit arbitrary to stopping them from watching what I want
I can fully understand you, you do what you enjoy and you freely decide to also
support AGA users, for good reasons. Now I see it was not your intention, but I
suspect it was other intention to blame AGA coders to force them to do something
different to what they freely decided.
>to do. I mean that it's easy if you use a chunkybuffer and a c2p routine (like me) because sprites and bitplanes aren't used much
these days. If you do demos that use bitplanes etc... well that's harder than a gfx card for most of effects.
yes, somtimes it's harder, copperlists+sprites+ direct floppy disk access, with
that damned chip ram bus letting the CPU access sooo slowly..but..
...no problems, no fun! ;-)
See Ya!
The Dark Coder
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@mdwh2
You gave good points
>others, either in terms of speed or features. I'm not sure what you mean by it being useless to use coding. And demos were
>popular back in the days when the Amiga's CPU speed was not fixed/limited.
With Amiga you have a fixed architechture. You can have CPU of different speeds
which gives rice to number of variants, because the speed of the rest is the
same. And not too much variants, you can control all the possibilities. That you
cannot do with gfx cards, because there are many different boards with many
different features.
I admit that I haven't kept too up to date with graphics card features in the last couple of years, but I don't think they do
everything for you. Generally, they'll do things like the rasterisation for you, but other things such as hidden surface removal,
particle engines, realistic physics still require coding. In your example of code, there is no magic ComputeVisibleSurfaces
usually gfxcards have z-buffer, so you don't need hidden surface removal. Ok,
of cource t's better if you filter objects completely outside the picture.
Particle engines or realistic phisics, that's another story. I'll come back in a
moment.
>Well some people do do that, they're called artists;) But some people prefer coding - and some of those prefer working with 3D
>hardware and exploring programming of areas other than low level things like rasterisation.
That is a very good point. An artist can use "Supreme" and produce a nice demos
without even writing a single instruction. I think one has to choose the best
instrument with respect to what he want to do.
For me demo coding is "to reach the limit", i.e. try to do 100% (or 99.9%)
optimization. Yesterday I spent 4 hours on a new line clipping routine.
(there are more than 36 cases, so it's a rather heavy work). The new routine
(when finished) will perform 1 or 2 divisions (depending on the case) less than
the previous one (which I coded years ago). Apart from the fact that many gfx
board do line clipping in hardware, with a PPC or P4 2 divisions less is almost
nothing. With a 060 is something. But with a 000 (yes the routine is meant to
work on a A500) it is a lot! These are the things I can do with Amiga. Speaking
about code optimization, you may know that PPC and P4 do instruction
re-ordering. This mean that it is nonsense to work on the code triyng to reach
100% optimization, because you have not the complete control of the instruction
flow. It can happen that you reach 100% optimization, but it's not merit,
the machine did it for you! Again, for me is no sense to do demos with PPC or
P4.
In fact, many of the new generation coders and most of the PC coders use C and
only write in asm the critical parts. And with instruction re-ordering its very
hard to produce bettern code than that of the compiler, so the tendence is to
not use asm at all. So, using C and gfx board which you cannot fully control
you are no more doing 100% optimization but only 90% of it (which can even turn
out to be 100% because the machine does this for you...and to me there is no fun
in this). But there are people who are happy with 90% optimization (more on that
later).
Here comes back particle systems and realistic rendering. These are very
interesting things to do. However there are very complex algorithms and to code
them with 100% optimized asm code would require much strength and time.
Unfortunately I have already no times for coding a "simple" 3D engine, it would
be impossible for me to code a radiosity algorithm in 100% opt asm. And I
suspect that most of the people who program such nice things don't do 100%
optimization but only 90% (which is a lot, but not "the limit"). SAying that I
don't mean to blame them. Maybe there is someone who code such complex things
in 100% optimized code, he has all my admiration, but I really suspect the most
part do 90% only.
So now it should be clear: I want to do 100% optimization. I can do that with
the Amiga, I cannot do that with RTG PPC "new Amigas", hence I use AGA.
But now. Let's say I decide to do some 90% optimized code, for example to do a
radiosity algorithm. There I don't need a custom architecture, I could do that
with RTG. But I can do 90% opt code also with a PC. So way use RTG "new amiga"?
As magicSN wrote, you use the same basic techniques with Amiga RTG and PC.
Only that PCs are more powerful. So why use RTG amiga? I would certainly use a
PC for that! I like to choose the best tool according to the task I have to do.
I chose Amiga to do 100% optimization because it is the best tool do to that
stuff for the reason already explained (fixed architecture, funny custom chips).
You wrote that you do software rendering, I don't understand if you mean that
you code raytrace algotrithms or that you use software produced by others.
In either case I guess that I chose to do rendering with the Amiga because in
former times it was the best platform to do rendering. We all hope that it will
be the same again. But today, if you want to program 90% optimized code there is
no advantage in using a RTG "new amiga". So to me even doing 90% opt code is no
sense with amiga. But it is with a PC, so I can fully understand people that do
particle engines with PC, I will also do that when I had enough of doing 100%
opt code on AGA Amigas (but for the moment I have not enogh :-)
Anyway, the most importan thing is that everyone is free to do what he likes,
as long as Bill Gates and his italian friend Berlusconi don't suceed in ruling
the world.
See ya
The Dark Coder
PS. about monitors, I know the situation is not good. Multisync are difficult to
find, but not a used one. TV-monitors like 1084 are very common. Scandoublers
are not so expensive, I just seen 2 of them at 100euro on a website (ok, maybe
100 euro is not exactly cheap, but today almost everthing for Amiga is expensive
compared to the PC). But for me 15Khz output is worth the expence. First of all
for pixel's shape: pixel are not "squares" like on a VGA like card, but rather
round spot. This is very important for many demo effects, the appereance is
completely different. Second, with 15Khz you can use so many games and demos...
:-)
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If it all just comes down to the 15kHz output I don't understand the big deal.
Almost everyone who owns a computer also owns a TV. Just hook your TV up to the Amiga output (you can use the Composite out and a normal RCA cable). If you don't have a TV, you can get a used 14" colour TV for almost no money at all.
You don't need an expensive multiscan monitor to watch demos!
I used an old 1084 with the composite out while having my 17" hooked up to the RGB out. Then I moved it to the RGB out when I got my CV64.
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darkcoder wrote:
>In your example of code, there is no magic >ComputeVisibleSurfaces
usually gfxcards have z-buffer, so you don't need hidden surface removal. Ok,
of cource t's better if you filter objects completely outside the picture.
In general, it's a lot better. For simple scenes (like a few spinning cubes), using the Z Buffer only will work fine, but larger more complex scenes will generally benefit from using things like BSP trees to remove polygons that aren't visible. Whilst using OpenGL and 3D cards in some sense makes writing any given 3D demo (or indeed, a game) easier, that just means you can write something more complex, and spend time programming other areas that OpenGL doesn't take care of.
I can see your points that you make; I guess different programmers enjoy programming different things:)
But now. Let's say I decide to do some 90% optimized code, for example to do a
radiosity algorithm. There I don't need a custom architecture, I could do that
with RTG. But I can do 90% opt code also with a PC. So way use RTG "new amiga"?
I guess I'm not the best person to answer this in that most of the 3D programming I've done has been on Windows. But I have ported some of it to AmigaOS (albeit using WinUAE). Partly because I enjoy using and programming AmigaOS (and just because I want to use RTG doesn't mean I need or want to have the fastest CPU available); partly because there seems to be less in the way of 3D engines on the Amiga where as they seem to be plentiful on Windows, so there's possibly more chance of interest if I ever get round to releasing anything:) And partly for the fun of porting to a different OS.
You wrote that you do software rendering, I don't understand if you mean that
you code raytrace algotrithms or that you use software produced by others.
I mean in the sense of 3D "polygon based" engines, not raytracing, without using anything like OpenGL.
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@mdwh2
ok, now I understand what you do and it is also funny and interesting things,
I would also like to to "hi-level" 3D engines. Unfortunately we all have a
limited free time, so we have to choose between interesting things, and I
prefer "low-level" rasterization & tricky effects. So I can understand your fun
in doing such things.
I think we can agree also on another point. As you demonstrate by porting your
windows programs to RTG Amiga systems, from a programmer point of view there is
no difference between Amiga RTG and PC. The basic techniques are exactly the
same. So there is nothing special in Amiga RTG. Amiga OS of course IS different
and better than Win, but (please correct me if I am wrong) for "hi-level"
graphics as well as for low level coding, the OS does not make any difference.
So there is no technical reason to prefer Amiga RTG to PC. Then you say that
you do this because there is "more room" on the Amiga for a new 3D engine, and
this is some sort of "market" reason, although strange since you have to
consider that there is a very little user base in the Amiga, and that you have fun in doing portings,
which are worth respecting reason. (you really have fun doing portings?!?)
I usually choose what system to use for technical reason, and I think many
coders do the same.
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While am coding an effect, my only concern is enjoy myself doing something
difficult and proving to myself that I can solve the problems. I don't think to
people's reaction when they see my demos.
Of course, I agree with you in this: I code for fun. If it wasn't funny I wouldn't do it, but what people thinks about a production is important (although not as important as the fun I have coding). For example in the last Euskal Party I may have been the second in the intro compo because only one intro was going to be presented. But I only had a rotozoom and some plasma with no music and I thought that althought I had fun doing the code, it had not the quality to be presented. The effects are quite optimized (although they are in C) but showing two effects with no music sounds pretty crap for me. My AGA support was crap (I used WritePixelArray) because I couldn't mix asm with my code then. Now I'm adding an asm c2p (but it's done by Azure). I hope someday I show something of quality. But now I'm learning and I still can't.
that "more or less"is not satisfactory to me. The "simple copying" of data is
often done using the gfx card blitter, wich is not accessible to the coder.
The simple copying of data is done by the cpu in 3D demos as people does when they copy their c2p buffer from fastram to chip memory.
When you copy data from the fastram (or you write it directly to the gfx ram) you do it at maximum speed if you have coded it correctly. If I write a 32bit word to gfx ram that is going to run at the maximum speed regardless of if it is running in Zorro3/PCI/AGP.
Ok I think there are some special transfermodes for AGPs but they are only used by the card to take textures from fastram when it has its memory full. That doesn't help if I'm writing pixels directly.
With AGA I can decide wich resolution and which refresh rate I
want to use. Gfx board allows each different resolution and rates, hence I
cannot reach their limit.
With a gfx card you can force it to run at one resolution, you may force it to only use one refresh rate, but it's better to read the frecuenzy of the screen and use that value for the maximum fps. That way you will achieve the limit.
You can use blitter functions for RTG if you want, but most of people don't use them because most of demos are 3D and don't use special custom chip magic ;-D
I respect a lot coders (like you) who still get the max of the chipset. I understand you when you say that you aren't going to support RTG because you use AGA to the max. That's very reasonable because making it work with RTG would be a lot of work.
But I think that you should agree with some of us when we say that with 3D demos it's very easy to add RTG support. When you do 3D stuff and you do a function that uses your cpu at 100% you will get little speedup using RTG. You will have reached the maximum speed because the bottleneck is the cpu.
And if the zorro2 bus has less bandwitch you will have reached the max speed still, because it will not be possible to get more speed.
A1 and Peggies and PC with emulators have PCI and AGP cards. I guess in
some months we will see programs (maybe demos) requiring DE FACTO AGP cards.
This is good for Amiga in general, but not for demo scene
That will not change my point in any way, because a 68k version of that demo still will use the bus to the maximum. You don't do different code for cards with different buses, you code them in a similar way pc users did in MS-DOS, you get the address of the screen and you have almost full control. You have the added bonus of being able to use RTG functions like they do with DirectX, so you have the good things of both worlds.
Moreover, I heard (but maybe I am wrong) that there are 2 different RTG standrd,
the Picasso96 and the CyberGfx. So one should even support 2 different
standards?
no, you don't have to add support for both if you don't want. Picasso96 is CyberGraphX compatible, so you can get the address of the screen with CGX only if you want. I have support for both but I don't see any speedup so supporting CGX will be more than enough.
So with AGA I can do BOTH CPU-only chunky effects AND chipset supported funny
tricks. And you can join these techniques together.
Ok, as I have said I agree with you in not supporting RTG if you use special AGA features like the copper etc... but most of demos are 3D only these days.
(BTW, how many of these "new
generation coders" are able to proper initialize audio state machine to begin
audio output?)
I don't know but "new generation demos" work a lot better in every machine that "old generation demos". I don't have any problem with audio initialization with 99% of modern demos. That can not be said of old demos.
I have an A4000 and some people didn't support us in the old times, so it's funny to read that. The "new generation coders" support everything. That's fine for me.
With RTG, instead I can only do one sort of effects. I think the
real progress is not the contraposition of old and new, but rather a synthesis of
old (in this case coding techinques) and new.
You can do every kind of effects but you will have to use the cpu and gfx card blitter instead of AGA. You loose the copper, that's right. :-/
Sometimes you have to use different techniques with AGA and RTG, RTG effects sometimes are more difficult (for example with a selected palette it's easier to simulate transparency with AGA using bitplanes, but you will have to work hard to make it moove smoothly with RTG) It's fun because you are also limited. :-)
When I see a 3D only demo I only think: Umm they may have done it RTG compatible, that would have made it run smoother. For example Loonies did a great job with "The Castle" supporting both AGA and RTG.
Talk to coders that do stuff for both AGA and RTG and you will see that if your demo is 3D only, they way the code looks is similar and you reach the maximum speed of the machine.
Anyway, keep on milking the power of AGA :-)
I love to see AGA prods that use AGA to the max.
Best Regards ;-)
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umm just some words more, when I talk about 3D demos I'm not talking about 3D hardware accelerated demos that use Warp3D/OpenGl, I was talking about software engines...
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This tread makes me sick!!! (sorry)
but last i checked , well i am not impressed, sure there is like 1 or 2 productions a year that is good (on ANY format)
but i cant say that doing em RTG only would do any real changes in where the scene is atm.
I have been to like 80 scene party's since 1989 and now they all are dead , atleast like how i remebered em to be .
Mekka is dead , TG,TP and ASM are dead (only gamers party's now (the last 3-4 years)
The small parties still have some spirit but they doesnt represent anything really, atleast if you look into the contributions.
Anyway why people use AGA (or used to...) is mainly because then the coder/group ALWAYS had fullcontroll unlike now where we get pc people who suddenly wants em to
run in WINUAE , sure i see this as a problem when we have os4 and has to use uae anyway BUT! the main thing here is "thats why i am keeping my classic".
Also i have seen comments about how all make em rtg now because of the 3d stuff, bleeeeh LOL guys , did you ever consider that its done ONLY because its actually coded
for both systems in 1 go?? , ie leaving out all HWbashing and implementing a 2 way system (ie first for AGA then do it for rtg also...)
We changed to RTG 1.5 years ago but we still do it all for AGA anyway and the engine supports RTG.
anyway my opinion is still "the scene is dead" , and now that mekka also is dead...well it couldnt die more...or ?
Sure i dont want it to die, the scene is really why i am still on amiga (well until 99), but since 1998 i have followed PC,AMIGA,C64 scene and
the last 3 years i havent been really impressed not on a single format (the really worst one is the PC scene).
I think the days of garage code is over ;(
anyway for scene stuff , well its damn hard to find all because 1. SCENE.org delete's AMIGA files ,2. scene.org have CORRUPTED files , 3. Aminet seems to be a place where only WINNERS end up.
but there is still many ways to get the stuff , my advise to you all is to go to #Amigascne (yes written correctly) or #scene on efnet/ircnet (one of them networks...i always mix them)
and a final message here must go to all the great scene groups which still are alive and kicking: PROVE US WRONG and show us that the scene is not dead (if it aint, then i might come back aswell :) )
pps: i dont have a PC , and i dont like PC
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@kronos : wow great post dood, that is really the whole idea and i like ALL of the people in this post to READ kronos 's POST AGAIN! and AGAIN! as he has really UNDERSTOOD it,
Fixed plattforms/systems is the whole idea and thats why i am so booooored over the PC demos and such.
Anyway making a demo for a 800mzh system and to IMPRESS some one, how is that possible??
by good textures??? , who will set the standard??? , its been 8 years on pc now and i am not impressed.
kronos: glad you pointed that out and thats why i think scene demo's have become boring.
anyway to all who still thinks that an 800mzh demo can impress yo, well OK check all ppc demos at the amiga today, and please tell me which of theese that is impossible to do on a 68k system,
on top of all i have only seen 2 really fast ppc demos on amiga , the whole point why so few went ppc with their demos is basically because of this,
the p5 ppc's are really crap and infact only (MAX) 3 times faster than a 68k system, but i would also agree with you on that some of the ppc demos are really goodlooking and such, but thats
why i asked earlier...WHAT makes a good demo...GOOD code or good textures or high RES ?.
dooing demos on a system like A1 or pegasos still makes me like... WHAT?? , why did the scene start really.. , do any of you know?
custom chipsets is always fun to explore except for Playstation 2 and Gamecube (which is like driving a ferrari in norway)...
anyway coders on the new computers and consoles hasnt evolved if you ask me, it seems like its in general that the GFX artists (in 99% of the time this is the CODER)
are the one who shows off (with good textures).
anyway i am sick of 3d.... i want the 2d back ;)
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Maybe one should see it like this:
The Amiga scene is splitting into two parts.
The "oldschool" or "retro" part which still uses AGA and 68k and the "newschool" part which codes for CGX and PPC.
The CGX and PPC people would probably be happy to move on to the A1 or the Pegasos but these demos still wouldn't work on WinUAE because they require a PPC.
The "retro" sceners will probably stick to their old Amiga for scene activities much like you see Atari or C64 people doing today. They bring their old computer to the demo parties but they also use an up-to-date PC for surfing the web etc.
The "retro" demos will also run on any good emulator if you have a fast CPU and you can also view them as DivXs or whatever.
Here's a good starting point for everyone with an emulator who won't run your favourite demo:
http://omr.planet-d.net/amidemos/ (http://omr.planet-d.net/amidemos/) - they have LOTS of demo DivXs and MPEGs.
Viewing tip: Cybercinematastic by Loonies
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@carls
>he "retro" sceners will probably stick to their old Amiga for scene activities much like you see Atari or C64 people doing today. They bring their old computer to the demo
this is probably what will happen. Anyway I am not saying that A1 or Peggy are not good machines!
I will stick with my Amiga for coding demos but that does not mean I will not use A1.
back in the old days, Amiga was the best because it had
1) best hardware perfect for games/gfx applications and demos (and still perfect NOW for demos)
2) the wonderful OS that we all know
the "new Amigas" have only the latter, the OS.
But as far as demos are concerned, the OS is not important so which are the reasons to do demos with RTG amiga? If you are interested in 3D only demos, do them on a PC! Much more people will look at them! There is no technical reason to do demos on the ERTG Amiga, while there are to do demos on AGA Amigas (copper, sprites and more).
And, please, be open minded and don't look only to 3D stuff. With AGA you can do BOTH 3D and special stuff.
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@lempkee
Hey, I am writing hundreds of text lines in this post to defend fixed platform against crappy RTG standards, and you don't say anything! :-)
Kronos just wrote 1 post!! :-))
please credit also me!! :-)))
the scene will continue in our hearts, at least!
BTW why don't you like PS2? I think it's great hardware, it's only very complex to master because it's different from anything else! But I think one could do great things with Emotion Engine!
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You behaved right at Euskal party!
At Spoletium 4 I won the 4K compo. But I was the only one to compete! :-((
My intro was not bad, but I would have preferred to be 3rd out of 5 than 1st out of 1!
Anyway, coding the intro was fun, that's important!
>When you copy data from the fastram (or you write it directly to the gfx ram) you do it at maximum speed if you have coded it correctly. If I write a 32bit word to gfx ram
that is going to run at the maximum speed regardless of if it is running in Zorro3/PCI/AGP.
Ok I think there are some special transfermodes for AGPs but they are only used by the card to take textures from fastram when it has its memory full. That doesn't help if
I'm writing pixels directly.
That sound a bit strange to me. The cards are connected with the system by means of the Zorro/PCI or AGP bus. Hence the speed at which you can write to them is that of the bus. But Zorro, PCI and AGP have diffrent speed. And also the card's memory are different both in size AND speed! So haw can you write always at the same speed? and which is the speed?
maybe there is something I don't understand...
Then as you said, coding RTG is like coding on a PC. Which is the advantage of using RTG instead of a PC?
Other point: please, don't do only 3D stuff! Today most demos are 3D only, but most of them are boring, as lempkey said! You can do beter things if you MIX 3D stuff with old 2D-copper stuff!
(and it's not only copper, there's sprites, hardware scrolling, etc.)
"new generation demos" have no problems with sound because they use AHI or P61, which is a good replay routine. But the "new generation coders" don't know anything about DMA and hardware stuff. many of them know very little of asm and use C!
That's 90% optimization!
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All Amiga demoscene releases from last year etc: http://jpv.wmhost.com/releases/
(click the "more" on bottom too)
It's shame that only small part of the stuff will end up to Aminet... and usually very late. And the quality and amount of the releases have dropped a lot since 2000/2001... until then it was going down slowly, but now it seems quite depressing.
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@lempkee
i cant say that doing em RTG only would do any real changes in where the scene is atm.
no one has talked about making these productions RTG only. The only suggestion is that you can add RTG support to your production easily.
Also i have seen comments about how all make em rtg now because of the 3d stuff, bleeeeh LOL guys , did you ever consider that its done ONLY because its actually coded
for both systems in 1 go?? , ie leaving out all HWbashing and implementing a 2 way system (ie first for AGA then do it for rtg also...)
nahhhhh ROTFL guys should read what I write, I talk about adding RTG support without dropping AGA because you can do this easily and release a dual demo...
I'm always reading that "scene is dead", but I don't care. I was reading that when there were lots of spanish groups alive and kicking and many people said that scene was dead.
Scene will be alive for me if people still tries to optimize and always try to improve their coding/gfx/music skills.
I like 3D stuff in slow machines because goals difficult to achieve are exciting. For example watching the c64 version of second reality was quite funny, other demos show gouraud shaded cubes with only 0.98 Mhz... well, that's amazing.
I am still waiting for a RTG production that makes me say, wow! I didn't think my 060 with gfx card could do that.
I don't care about pc emulators. PC sceners don't make demos for 8086 to run them in pc-task ;P why should we care about that? they should improve their emulators and that's all.
Even using AGA, the Amiga is not really fixed hardware now, with 030/50,040/33,040/40,060/50, 060/66, 060LC/75. You are almost coding for your machine only. The nice effect you are coding may run in one frame in a 060/60 but not in a 060/50. Your excelent and super optimized 882 FPU code may run very well with a 882 but may be dead slow with a 040...
Anyway making a demo for a 800mzh system and to IMPRESS some one, how is that possible??
making stuff that would require a much more powerful machine.
WHAT makes a good demo...GOOD code or good textures or high RES ?.
All that mixed together ;-D
and don't forget the music! :-)
for me the fun is in coding with a limited resources, optimizing so much, that what people thought that was impossible to do, becomes possible. trying to break the limits set by someone...
anyway i am sick of 3d.... i want the 2d back ;)
yes, I liked 2D, but many things have been already invented and it's difficult to find a original 2D new effect. I'd like a mix of that, mixing 2D and 3D, new and old techniques like Darkcoder said.
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That sound a bit strange to me. The cards are connected with the system by means of the Zorro/PCI or AGP bus. Hence the speed at which you can write to them is that of the bus. But Zorro, PCI and AGP have diffrent speed. And also the card's memory are different both in size AND speed! So haw can you write always at the same speed? and which is the speed?
well, my suggestion of adding RTG support is for pure 3D demos, so you will open a screen with twice the width or height of the visible screen and use that as double buffer. So the only thing that will change from one card to other will be the speed of the bus. Well, the speed of the ram also, but it's so fast that the bottleneck is in the bus if we talk about graphic cards. With zorro3 that is arround 9MB/s, but I know that the CV64 is faster (is one of the few cards that use the bus to the limit). With a 040/25 the speed was really slow (12fps? I can't remember, it was SLOW)
I did that test writting rubbish directly to the screen and counting the fps. I got arround 140 (I don't remember the exact number but I saw that bus speed wasn't going to be a bottleneck) With the A4000 PCI solutions the limit is the same because it goes through the Zorro3 bus. With the mediator 1200 the bandwitch to the gfx card may be higher. With an AGP card the speed of gfx memory writes will be amazing... but... the limit here is the cpu (of course I think there's plenty room in my code to run faster) and maybe also the fast ram speed. With a 603/200 it ran a little faster (60fps), i'd like to try it with a cyberstorm MK3, because they have faster memory access and I will see if it's due to the fast-ram memory access or lack of cpu power. I guess that it's due to the bandwitch from the cpu to fast-ram. That would be the reason because it ran at similar speeds with a voodoo5/ppc than with a picasso4/060. But my point is that the speed of the gfx bus doesn't seem to be the limit (if I achieved 140fps filling the screen with my cpu with rubbish I think that the limit is not due to the gfx mem bandwitch speed)
With AGA I think that the limit writing to chip mem is 1.8 MB/s, I think that reading is 4 times faster. That gives us 28fps in 320x200. Quite enough to be smooth :-)
The problem is the effect we are trying to show, I think that the bottleneck is the cpu. If the cpu can show the effect at 25fps, there will be small differencies between the speed of the AGA and the speed of the RTG version... of course the bandwitch to the gfx mem helps, and the RTG version may have a pair of extra frames. The bandwitch to the gfx ram will not help much with complex effects and scenes. If the CPU can do more than 28fps, AGA will reach its limits (talking from a bus bandwitch view, without using any trick) and gfx cards will be able to show that extra frames.
All that is not applicable to gfx cards if the demo is not 100% 3d
For 2D stuff to be 100% sure that the 2D gfx are in gfx ram, there are other methods. As you may do in other system you will set a minimum of ram to make your demo work. The extra ram can be used to store more graphics and sve the time to move them over the bus.
I've talked a lot (maybe too much) :-D
I don't know if I've made the things more clear for you or if I've confused you more :-/
Anyway it's quite fun to talk about this things in Amiga.org, I don't usually saw scene related threads.
:-)
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@darkcoder: well what kronos wrote was dead right on! , and still i didnt mean that any other here was like wrong or right , its just that i have spent so much time in the scene and i see newcommers or generally unknown people baffling about the scene without a clue why or what and that soomewhat mixed it up with u guys (no offence intended)
anyway a demo made of plesaure or intro..well thats how it should be done , FOR FUN!.
but if you look back at it aswell, 3-4 years later... thats when you know if the product is good or not.
maybe i am just getting old and cant tolerate newschool, i have never said that i like newschool but i always told everyone that i am a REALLY oldschool guy in both productions and quality....
sure there is good stuff from time to time, but what makes it all good, now thats the big question...aint it?
anyway a 3d demo is a 3d demo, especially if its on a PC or on a ppc machine, unlimited cpu power ..well i cant see whats fun with making any stuff for it...
demo scene on pc is generally a 3d package and a converter tool and its allabout making the best scene , and run it in realtime (or fake it) as a demo/product.
and i dont see whats hard here, REALLY! and seriously i see this as a problem for all the coders around (including me)..
good textures and music doesnt make a demo, but i agree that MUSIC is very important (in 99% of the time the music is more important than the code) , but then again i am oldschool
and i may have taken the "WAY to Newskool" badly..., i loved the evolution that happened in 94, i loved the scene in 99...but after that....i can count the good products on 1 hand.
where music/design/code/layout (everything) is damn perfect and that i could show this to my grandmother and she would have said "very stylish stuff" (lol)
many of you guys probably doesnt shear my point of view but BEST PC DEMO EVER must be the BOMB demo from tp98 (state of mind) , some of the best demos on Classic amiga must be stuff like "nexus7,traffic,tint,goa,C.dreams,faktory(maybe the best designed production ever?) and so on...
anyway if making scene stuff makes you happy (ALL) then please continue, as thats the whole idea about it have fun and shear the delight and maybe someday win some compos if any compo's are still out there... (tg,TP,Mekka,Asm etc all gone) (atleast so it seems)
anyway it also seems that you guys thinks the scene is alive on all plattforms, well sorry to say...ITS NOT! , c64 has the handbrake on , the amiga fell in a gap , the atari was ressurected and the pc is just plain annoying to call it a scene.
just put your heads together and think of "what made the scene so good and bright back in the late 80's or until 93...compared to 94->99/y2k..
sorry for beeing so negative , i am just trying to prove out some "PoINTS"
good luck to all and please make more demos (i might return one day)
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@crumb:hmm thats exactly what i said , we made em all (after we made a new engine) for AGA and then the engine made sure of that the product worked in rtg.
and i guess u know that allready, i wasnt attacking the way of rtg in anyway, if it was upto me i would have redone all my former products to AGA/RTG or ECS/RTG , but since such stuff would require like 490 days just to find the damn source logic or "WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING OF :P" lol feeling..
also sadly the rtg plattform itself has a few bad turns , like Mediator users have problems showing CGX and CGX have problems otherway around... , as the mediator (and OS4) doesnt use the old p96 direct code (which all CGX people belives (STILL) that it do...
anyway RTG and AGA products is a nessecity, ie if you make a AGA prod theese days then u must MAKE sure of that it works on RTG , or else a majority of people wont see it.
but people making RTG prods doesnt have the same prob with dooing aga support, as in most cases newbies dont even know how aga works and expecting people to make an engine for such.... thats dreaming, but then again... where is the newbies :)
good luck
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@crumb
Excuse me, how have you got these numbers?
Give a look here: http://list-archive.gin.cz/amiga/0010/msg00426.html
there are results of many speed tests. With AGA I think your numbers are wrong.
In fact the AGA bus runs at 7.19Mhz, which is a theoretical 28.8MBytes sec.
(with AGA 1 access=4 bytes, with OCS 2 bytes only hence you have to halve all
numbers).
Unfortunately the cpu is only allowed to acces half of these cycles, which lower
it to 14.2MB/sec. But sadly no CPU can do a write in chip for each cycle.
It depends a lot on what are DMA channels doing but with a standard 320*250*8
screen they don't interfere too much. Since the CPU have to syncronize its clock
with the 7.19Mhz clock more or less it write 1 every 2 cyvles, which is
7.1MB/sec. In practice, as these test show it's a little bit less, more or less
6.8MB/sec (for AGA machines). It's completely false that writing is 4 times
slower than reading, they have the same speed. Maybe you got confused thinking
to write 1 byte at the time, but good c2p as the Azure's on write 1 long at a
time.
Anyway these tests also show that on EACH AGA machine, regardless of the
CPU you have more or less a 6.8 MBsec writes to chipram. That is what I call
a *clear*, *fixed* limit.
With gfx boards things as you can see are different: the conclusions of the long
test are (I consider not-overclocked results):
Card Orginal Overclocked
CV3D 7.2 Mb/sec -> 10.1 Mb/sec
PIV 9.3 Mb/sec -> 12.4 Mb/sec
CV64 13.3 Mb/sec -> 18.6 Mb/sec
well it seems to me that THERE IS a difference! And these are all ZIII boards!
Then there is CVPPC and Bvision which I think are different because they are
directly connected to the CPU with a custom bus (in fact they require CybPPC /
BlizzardPPC). And now, with A1 and Peggy, there are also PCI and AGP cards!
I guess there will be more differences.
So it is a complete mess, each card is different.
You say the bottelneck is the CPU. Maybe, it depends on the effect.
There the situation is less clear, but anyway I think with AGA you have
more stability. (BTW in this whole post with AGA Amiga I was speaking of
680x0 CPU. I only code 680x0, no PPC fo me).
It is true that also the (classic) Amiga can
have a wide range of CPU. But basically (with AGA machines) we only have:
1) 020 at 14Mhz (1200)
2) 030 at 50Mhz (many boards)
3) 030 at 25Mhz (4000/30, not many)
4) 040 at 25Mhz 4000/40
5) 040 at 40Mhz some boards but very rare
6) 060 at 50Mhz CybStorm
In practice, when you code a demo you choose one of these, usually 1) or 2)
and use it as the limit. And since the speed access to chipram is the same
regardless of the CPU (only very small differences, as you can check) many
effects look the same on all CPU. With RTG you have all these possibilities,
and since here the speed is not limited by the chipram, Practical differences
are BIGGER. Then you have 603, 603e, 604, 604e, G3 and G4 in many clock
variations. maybe in the future even more CPUs...
I think with RTG you can have 90% optimization, not more. With AGA 99.9%. :-)
But if you have fun doing 90% optimization, you are fine with RTG!
See Ya!
The Dark Coder
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@lempkee
as the mediator (and OS4) doesnt use the old p96 direct code (which all CGX people belives (STILL) that it do...
Do you mean that direct mem access using p96 doesn't work? with 8 bit screens it seems to behave correctly with mediator and voodoo5 (with OS4 I don't have a clue). If the problem appears with 16bit screens I guess that the problem is the way bits are aligned in CGX/P96, for example the coder may assume that the screenmode is bigendian when it's littleendian and if there's no specific code it may give problems. I can't talk much about that because I haven't tried the 16bit modes... the first Mankind productions that where CGX compatible didn't show the colours correctly, it may be due to the fact that if p96 doesn't emulate correclty the behaviour of cgx and gives wrong info about the aligment of the screen, the colours will look bad.
Although many people has a graphic card I think that those with AGA and real interest in demos will switch the monitor output :-)
I tried the DCE scandoubler of the CV3D and saw that the colours of the demos wasn't perfect (because it wasn't fully 24bits) and thought that I would never use a non-24bit scandoubler/flickerfixer. I think that I will always keep my 4000 to watch AGA demos in the real thing. :-)
I've talked with a friend that just has bought a 060, he has told me that once he has released all the power of the 060 in some prods, He will go back to do plain A500/A1200 demos/intros
It would be nice to see new prods for A500 :-)
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@Crumb
I think it was Spaceballs who did a very nice A500 prod not long ago, called "Hideous mutant freaks". Maybe that could be of interest? It's got kind of a "newschool" design but it's certainly coded for an oldschool machine :-)
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Excuse me, how have you got these numbers?
Give a look here: http://list-archive.gin.cz/amiga/0010/msg00426.html
there are results of many speed tests. With AGA I think your numbers are wrong.
Yes, the AGA numbers are wrong, I thought that the 1.8MB/s were writing longwords, but it was writing bytes. thank you for the URL, it's quite interesting.
well it seems to me that THERE IS a difference! And these are all ZIII boards!
Then there is CVPPC and Bvision which I think are different because they are
directly connected to the CPU with a custom bus (in fact they require CybPPC /
BlizzardPPC).
The use of the custom bus only affects the driver, they way of coding it is the same. Yes, they only work with ppcs or cyberstormMKIII. Ok, each card has different bandwitch, but the bandwitch is enough to do effects in one frame even with the slower cards.
But basically (with AGA machines) we only have:
1) 020 at 14Mhz (1200)
2) 030 at 50Mhz (many boards)
3) 030 at 25Mhz (4000/30, not many)
4) 040 at 25Mhz 4000/40
5) 040 at 40Mhz some boards but very rare
6) 060 at 50Mhz CybStorm
I think that most of demos require at least a 030/50... BTW 040/40 is quite common in Spain.
Here the absolute minimum people has is a 030/50, but they usually don't use much their Amigas (they were quite common a few years ago). Most of the remainder Amigans have 040/40 at least and a gfx card. In my local usergroup the only person who has not a gfx card has the slowest computer with a 040/40. I haven't seen demos designed to run well with a 020 in years.
Yes, 90% of optimization and a 99% compatibility is ok for me :-)
have we got too many CPUs? well, I hope we have one more family soon: the coldfire of the ColdFusion accelerators ;-D
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Ah yes, the coldfire project!
Does anyone know how that is coming along?
I'd love to get a CF card for my A1200!
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@Carls
yes, you have more productions in their web page:
Spaceballs Web page (http://spaceballs.planet-d.net)
I agree, having stylish designs with optimized code running in that legendary machine is cool :-)
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@Carls
Olli_hd is the person who is designing the board, the project seems to be going well, if you want more information you can join the yahoo mail list Amigacoldfire@yahoogroups.com. The 1200 version will probably be released after the 4000 one.
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Anyway making a demo for a 800mzh system and to IMPRESS some one, how is that possible??
by good textures??? , who will set the standard??? , its been 8 years on pc now and i am not impressed.
Just because it's a fast system doesn't mean it's not possible to write impressive stuff. The latest hardware is still a *long* way from making it possible to render scenes as realistic/impressive/complex as you want, *and* without requiring much skill on the part of the coder.
A C64 coder could ask how could anything on an A1200 be impressive, since "any" demo could be done with ease on an A1200. The point is that you don't write C64-level demos on an A1200, you write more advanced stuff.
Fair enough if you enjoy (either from a programmer's, or a viewer's point of view) the level of demos that are common on 680x0/AGA Amigas, but that doesn't mean there aren't others who are interested in pushing the boundaries on more advanced hardware. I still get impressed when I see modern graphics engines running where as there's only so much interest the likes texture mapped cubes and tunnel effects can create for me.
I don't believe making more realistic or impressive graphics is simply a case of increasing the texture resolution; it requires work from the programmer too.
As for who will set the standard, I don't see how that's any different. It's slightly harder if one demo runs better on one machine, and another runs faster on another- but it's not like you run them on different machines when comparing.
anyway to all who still thinks that an 800mzh demo can impress yo, well OK check all ppc demos at the amiga today, and please tell me which of theese that is impossible to do on a 68k system,
on top of all i have only seen 2 really fast ppc demos on amiga , the whole point why so few went ppc with their demos is basically because of this,
the p5 ppc's are really crap and infact only (MAX) 3 times faster than a 68k system,
Presumably the AmigaOne will be quite a bit faster than the current PPC Amigas though. And the question more related to this thread is probably What AGA demos can't be done on a graphics card.
WHAT makes a good demo...GOOD code or good textures or high RES ?.
Good code. Which is possible to show off whether on a PPC gfx card Amiga or PC, 68k/AGA Amiga, or a Vic 20. Which is possible whether the machine can be upgraded or not. Whether the graphics chips sit on a card or live on the motherboard.
What would your response be to a C64 demo coder who put your arguments back towards you?
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Ok men!! I think this has been a very good thread!
We had an interesting discussion, we exchanged different points of view. I learnt something in this discussion, and even though I will stick doing AGA only demos I can understand better the RTG coders point of view. I think this is my las post in the thread because in this days I wrote much text..but now it's time to write much code! :-)
... and I also have a to work, sometimes :)
Anyway I will continue to follow the discussion and if I will have something which I think it's important, I will do.
If someone wants to contact me in the future for exchanging news/ideas/production (especially those mixing old and new style) you can contact me privately, I would be happy.
Go on with this interesting discussion! :-)
Friendship RuleZ
The Dark Coder
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@Crumb
Thanks for the info on the CF project!
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there won't be any scene on the new PPC machines (powered by morphos, os4) because they're just standard hardware and makes them not different from PCs for demos. ?
Can anyone reassure me ? Is there a spirit that can be pursued on the new ppc machine (optimization, passion, ...). ?
I know it is considered very cool and has become a cliche to say that to make a demo it must be in a custom hardware. Well that is not true anymore.
I hang around on a IRC channel #demo-gr and there are pleanty of people that have passion, and they like to optimise their demos. And you know what? Most of them don`t have a custom computer. They use their PCs. Does that makes them non-sceners? I don`t think so. Does that makes them having no passion?
I think we can make an AmigaPPC scene and still have passion, optimization etc.
You`ll say that nowdays computers are more powerfull etc. And A500 was more powerfull than C64, so was A1200 than A500 and now PPC based Amigas are more powerfull than their predecessors. Exploit the power that is given to you to make more cool stuff (whatever you think is cool) that is all I have to say.
Yeah, it is also exciting to code on our old Amigas but that doesn`t mean that we mustn`t do as well with our new ones.
Open your minds, don`t close yourselves in cliches.
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@mdhw2: thanx for pointing out that issue, and if you had bothered to read it all then you would understand why i said it, anyway i will give you a few hints :)
i was a c64 user from 1983->1995 , and i find the c64 still impressive (even with hw upgrades) , the whole point of the discussion is "WHY dO WE WANt DEMOS on A1 (more or less) or pc...
and as i wrote earlier, i havent seen 1 pc demo (which naturally require + 1ghz) in ages, and its all about making a 3d engine, and i dont find 3d impressive at all (except for maybe in games) (3dmark is a kinda good idea)
on top of all , AGA code wasnt impressive AT ALL if you ask me or any real coders from the oldschool times, in 94/5 it all started to look better (but then alot had left) , that was when 2d and 3d became a STYLE and the mission to make the most interesting 2d*3d demo
and back then it was impressive, anyone remebers TINT ? , i remeber that they showed the demo 7 times at TG96 (after it was said "best demo , etc) , if you look at it now....it looks dated but it still have the quality wich makes u want to watch it again.
Anyway i dont see any reason to make demos on pc or on A1 , because unlimited specs and there is nothing secret hiding except for general design, since 1995 pc have been mixed into amiga demo compo's , please tell me why amiga have mostly won or got very good rankings compared to the pc ones,
and the pc had specs that was double or tripple (or like now x20) and still the amiga ones win? , also they dont say if its AMIGA or PC , they quitted that a long way back.
@crumb: the P96 bug with elbox, its because of the changes (its not documented, it has to be seen to be understood) , anyway the p96 devkit (the orginal one) doesnt work on mediators etc, like Openscreentaglists etc , the problem u mentioned about little and big endian is not a prob as v4 and v5 have reversed colormodes.
the main problem is actually opening the main screen , in other words "alot of cgx stuff doesnt work , like Adescent(wos),ADoom(wos),Amhuhn (any),Joyride(all),Alot of demos..... i have heard uncomfirmed rumours that cgx v4.x have a fix for this + documented but i have looked everywhere and no one have given me a good answer, and i wont buy cgx4 mainly beause i cant use it.
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@dagon: Ok since you say it this way , please explain to me why the SCENE is dieing? , please tell me where you get the inspiration from? , have you been to a party the last 3 years (excluding MEKKA) ??..
Have you noticed that a gamer gets more money in the compo compared to the demo/intro ? , have you noticed that pixel compo is very underrated now?
anyway what you say about c64 vs AMIGA back in 88 , and yes this was a big discussion but thats why C64 and AMIGA was never in the same compo,
and besides the c64 was more a hit than the amiga (until 91) if you count the scene activity.
anyway i dont see any reason to be entusiastic and optimistic about any of this but if making demos makes you happy then please do so,
and since i am too oldskool means that i should just shut up and let the newbies or midskool have some fun,
but one last argument 9 productions on asm 02, 4 products on TP02 ,0 producs at mekka 03, 0 products etc from now on doesnt amaze me at all and ofcourse i wish that the scene will be back but i doubt it , unless its a small party like kindergarten/trasc (which is good parties, but its about friendship and not about making demos (in the same way as MEKKA atleast)
good luck to all who wants to continue, i might continue if i see a reason , but making demos for either pc or Amiga1 atm is to me....useless , i would rather do as i do now (developing games for em).
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@lempkee
People have been saying that the scene is going to die "real soon now" ever since I first heard about the scene back in 1992. The scene is not dead and it's not going to die! New coders and artists arrive to the scene every year. Amiga demos still win in a lot of compos, there are even parties dedicated only to the C64/Amiga/Atari scene.
Just because there's a lot of Quake players at the bigger parties doesn't mean there's no demo scene!
If you're no longer impressed by demos, then I feel truly sorry for you but the only thing you really can do to change this is to sit down and produce something impressive yourself! THAT is what the scene is about. This is a discussion that has been going on for as long as I can remember.
As far as I'm concerned, the scene isn't dead as long as someone is out there and works hard to put pixels on my screen.
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So I decided to post again mainly to answer to lempkee.
But first @dagon:
you cannot say we are close-minded saying cliche, I think we gave good arguments for our positions, I wrote many long messages explaining why I don't like doing RTG demos and nobody said that you can't do demos on RTG. I only said that you can't do 100% optimization on RTG and I gave many arguments. You can fight my arguments like Crumb and others did and we had an interesting technical discussion but here everyone is speaking with his brain attached.
@lempkee
I agree with you that sadly scenein a sence *is* dieing since there are fewer and fewer parties and productions and people. But as Carls says in another sense is not dieing since as long as you have in your heart the spirit to do (or try) funny and nice and optimized work.
Anyway since you are good coder, may I ask you infos (if you want by email) about Aki's c2p code?
bye!
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@Darkcoder
Anyway since you are good coder, may I ask you infos (if you want by email) about Aki's c2p code?
Do you find important differences between the Azure and Aki c2p? They seem to achieve very similar speeds, acording to the URL you posted with slow computers (for example a 040/25) Azure's c2p seems to be slightly faster, and the situation inverses with faster computers. Aki's C2P is used in ADoom, Quake etc...
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yes exactly. I am curious about diferences. I coded by myself a routine similar to that of Azure, after reading his tutorials on amycoders.
(but only after I did my routine I looked at his source code ;-). My routine seems to be a very little faster than the azure one (at least of the PUBLIC Azure code) on 060 but it's a little bit slower on 040.
But now I am curious about the Aki routine. Is the technique similar or different? Is the source code of Aki public?
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@Darkcoder:
yes, AFAIK Aki's c2p is public domain, at least that is what is written in the comments of the header. The chunky to planar sources are included in sources of games like adoom in Aminet. You can take a look. I haven't compared both because I know little asm.
You can download adoom's sources from here (http://www.aminet.net/game/shoot/ADoom_src-1.3.lha). There are more c2p done by aki in the shapeshifter gfx driver TurboEVD (http://www.aminet.net/misc/emu/TurboEVD-src.lha). This is published with the GPL licence instead of being public domain.
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Regarding optimisation, I think it's worth remembering that there are different styles of optimisation. Doing things like hand optimising in assembler, trying to optimise every single low level instruction, and using things like fixed point arithmetic are a lot less likely to be useful on modern machines, than something like the A1200. But at the same time, there are still other ways to worry about optimising (usually more related to the algorithms being used), so it's not like one can get away with writing unoptimised code. I guess different programmers will find different things enjoyable.
lempkee wrote:
its all about making a 3d engine, and i dont find 3d impressive at all (except for maybe in games)
*nods* Well I guess this is the point; different ppl prefer different things, and there are those who find 3D stuff impressive.
since 1995 pc have been mixed into amiga demo compo's , please tell me why amiga have mostly won or got very good rankings compared to the pc ones,
and the pc had specs that was double or tripple (or like now x20) and still the amiga ones win? , also they dont say if its AMIGA or PC , they quitted that a long way back.
Presumably they are rating based on creativeness or originality or interest of the effects; if they don't know what machines it is running on, they can't be rating it on how well it's been optimised (well, unless all the PC entries were completely crap;). Indeed, if competitions can be held with demos running on differently specced machines without the viewers knowing which machine each was running on, then surely this further proves the idea that you don't need a single fixed standard platform to run demos on.
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Regarding c2ps..
the aki c2p in the turbo archieve looks pretty standard imho, with the exception of the deltabuffer (which are probably smart for ui stuff like shapeshifter but not for a demo where most of the screen is changed every frame) (*)
Regarding c2p speed in general (well.. I'm talking 060 here, or at least a fast 040, where the conversion itself is faster than copyspeed, and therefore it's mostly a question of a fast->chip copying scheme), you actually have to differ between 1260 and 4060.
For 1260 the best thing to do is to preload as much data as possible into the cache and then c2p and write to chipram (just write 4 longwords at a time, as they become ready..).
For 4060 it's totally different. Here a simple loop like: c2p'ing,read16, write16,c2p'ing, read16,write16 would work pretty well, and should in theory be about 5% faster than the optimal 1260 c2p. (I know.. I SHOULD finish that article on the topic.. ;)
We are ourselves usually using 2 c2ps and choose the fastest one at startup. One for 1260, which prefetches 640 bytes before c2p'ing/writing, and a special one blueberry did a long time ago, which has a loop of less than 256 bytes (good for 030..) and has a copying scheme that works pretty well for 4060 (and escpecially for CSMK2).
(*) Actually it's worth mentioning that the screencopy scheme I did in E2140 would be quite a bit faster than turboevd's :)
- maybe I should even consider it for a general c2p solution ;)
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ohh.. and on the topic in question.. After Valhalla in 99 I decided not to limit myselfes to rtg demos, but on the other hand make a rtg version if possible/easy. I'm not doing RTG only demos, so an RTG version is considered extra on top of the aga version.
These are the basic problems with RTG (as opposed to aga) in demos:
1) mode changes is a bad idea. So no hires (ham8) pictures etc..
2) no hardware sprites. So overlays have to be rendered on top of the buffer, which is slower and doesn't allow smoth interrupt driven movement on top of a less smooth routines.
3) No well known refresh rates. So you can't do an exactly 25/50fps effect, and remember that exactly 25fps on a 50hz display would usually look smoother than 35fps on hz display. (ie. I can only recommend TheCastle.cgx to noaga or winuae ppl).
4) No copper effect (not that we do that a lot) and no palette-synchronization (ie a new palette for every frame in an effect).
5) (ok. this is mosly for adaption of aga demos). For 2D effects we get more and more effects operating without
a chunky buffer at all (doing scanline or block c2p from the cache to chipram), which would therefore need rewriting for a RTG version.
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@psyko
many thanks for your interesting comments about c2p!! I hope not to disturb you too much by asking some clarification
>For 1260 the best thing to do is to preload as much data as possible into the cache and then c2p and write to chipram (just write 4 longwords at a time,
I always tried to put as much c2p instructions as
possible between any two longwords write, i.e.
write 1 long
some instruction
write 1 lone
etc.
You say it's better to do:
write 4 long
some instrucions
write 4 long
??
>For 4060 it's totally different. Here a simple loop like: c2p'ing,read16, write16,c2p'ing, read16,write16 would work pretty well, and should
erm..what do you mean with read16 aand write16?
You mean using the MOVE16 instruction?!
I always thought that such instruction was not supported by Amiga architecture, so never used it!
If this is true shame on me and I think I change my nick to crappycoder!!
Does it works in both chip and fast ram?
>special one blueberry
this short one also does cache preloading?
Can you tell me how much bytes? :-)
I use a c2p who preloads 128 bytes, like Azure tutorial. I have almost the same speed as Azure on 060 but I am a little slower on 040. Do you have any hint?
It you will finish the article on this topic, where can I read it?? :-)))
thanks for you help and congratulations for your
wonderful work!
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@psycho
thanks for joining the thread ;D
you actually have to differ between 1260 and 4060.
I've seen that 1240/40 is slower than a 4040/40 writing in chipram, so I understand that. But looking at the web page of speeds provided by Darkcoder, the speed of a blizzard 1260 & a an CS4060 MK2 seems to be quite similar. I guess you do that because Apollos 1260 seem to write more slowly in chipram. Now I see why you use 2 different c2p :-)
1) mode changes is a bad idea. So no hires (ham8) pictures etc..
what about using an ASL requester before starting the demo? mmm although I guess you do it because some monitors need too much time to switch from one mode to other.
2) no hardware sprites. So overlays have to be rendered on top of the buffer, which is slower and doesn't allow smoth interrupt driven movement on top of a less smooth routines.
And if you use BltBitMapMaskRastPort() with a image you have in the gfx card mem? The blitter of gfx cards is usually faster, doesn't it help? Couldn't be made an interrupt server each 1/50 second for example that makes a BltBitMapMaskRastPort() with the image we want to write? I think that would work at 50fps and we may have a slow routine in the background that goes at 15fps for example that may be interrupted to paint our bob, the slow routine then would continue painting its screen. This is just an idea of how I would try to do it... I haven't tried and I don't have a clue... it may work or not, but I think that it should work.
3) No well known refresh rates. So you can't do an exactly 25/50fps effect, and remember that exactly 25fps on a 50hz display would usually look smoother than 35fps on hz display. (ie. I can only recommend TheCastle.cgx to noaga or winuae ppl).
Yes that's difficult to make with a gfx card :-/
I would try to read the actual hz of the screen and would choose the closest submultiple to the one I want to use. For example, with a 72hz screen I would try to use 24fps. With a 60hz screen 20 or 30, it depends if you want it smoother or think that your graphic functions and graphic buffer will help enough. There's a function called WaitTOF that should help to keep the graphics syncronized with the vsync (afaik the bad point is that some gfx card don't have a vsync interrupt at all). Then you may use all the gfx ram as a buffer as you did in "The Castle". The test to get the maximum fps should be done once you have opened the screen. Anyway AGA is more elegant to do that...
no palette-synchronization (ie a new palette for every frame in an effect).
If you wait until the frame is completed and change the palette it wouldn't work? :-(
And with WaitTOF()?
I'm talking about 8bit screens, with 16bits it would be a lot of work... gfx cards seem to be quite fast changing the palette, I thought that It would be possible to change it in every hz.
I'm sorry for the mistakes I've comitted but I have not much experience. What do you think of some of my ideas? I hope at least one of them works ;-D
@darkcoder:
You say it's better to do:
write 4 long
some instrucions
write 4 long
??
That may be thanks to the small cache the procesor has to write in burst mode? That may be easy to do in asm, but I'm not sure if I could do that in C... maybe using a pointer to the cache address? I'm not sure. I use a 32bit variable that will probably be stored in a register... I don't know how to control with so much detail the cpu cache in C...
I have another doubt... when I write something to ram it goes to the burst cache (I think it's also called write pending buffer), but is it copied to ram if I try to write another longword? or the cpu waits until the burst cache is full? I've read somewhere that when the cpu access zorro3 the caches are flushed.
Best Regards from a newbie ;-D
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I always tried to put as much c2p instructions as possible between any two longwords write
The write buffer of the 060 takes up to 4 longwords, so 4 writes only takes 4 cycles, and won't stall the cpu as long as you don't make another (noncached) mem operation before they are all done. However, in general it is still a good idea to put in a single instruction between each write because of the superscalarity.
erm..what do you mean with read16 aand write16?
just the reading of 16 bytes from fastram.
You mean using the MOVE16 instruction?!
I always thought that such instruction was not supported by Amiga architecture
Move16 is supported for fastram but not for chipram (because of the burst mode)
this short one also does cache preloading?
Can you tell me how much bytes?
There is no preloading there, and it's not 060 specific (ie. the writes are distributed over the loop), it just happens to be fast on 4060, especially CSMK2 - it's a bit weird as it doesn't fit our theory ;)
I have almost the same speed as Azure on 060 but I am a little slower on 040. Do you have any hint?
Maybe because it is cpu conversion and not memory limited on 040, and that azure's is better pipeline optimized. Azure's is very fast on 040.
It you will finish the article on this topic, where can I read it?? ))
I guess that it will at least be on loonies.dk and in some mag.. Actually I feel like writing it :)
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But looking at the web page of speeds provided by Darkcoder, the speed of a blizzard 1260 & a an CS4060 MK2 seems to be quite similar. I guess you do that because Apollos 1260 seem to write more slowly in chipram.
Hmmm.. blizzard1260 (and CSMK1) (at 50mhz) is really the slowest 060 card when it comes to chipram, although it has improved through the different revisions (at least we've seen 3 different speeds for b1260/50). The CSMK2 has the usual 7mb/s chipram write speed but is quite slow in the fastram interface.
And if you use BltBitMapMaskRastPort() with a image you have in the gfx card mem?
Last time I checked (ok, it's a long time ago) BltBitMapMaskRastPort was not accelerated.
If you wait until the frame is completed and change the palette it wouldn't work?
Maybe.. Btw. on rtg you have to use WaitBOVP() as WaitTOF() is still just waiting for the 50hz interrupt.
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@crumb
I think that the CPU tries to write to the ram when the bus is available. Meanwile it keeps values to be written in the write pending buffer.
If the write pending buffer becomes full, and the bus is not yet free to copy values in ram, then the CPU has to stall.
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@psyko
>>rm..what do you mean with read16 aand write16?
>just the reading of 16 bytes from fastram.
So you suggest that on 4060 cache preloading is not useful? I have a CSMk3 and my routine works better with cache preloading.
> guess that it will at least be on loonies.dk and in some mag.. Actually I feel like writing it :)
we all wait for it!! :)
I'll check on the website!
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Last time I checked (ok, it's a long time ago) BltBitMapMaskRastPort was not accelerated.
I haven't tried much... you are probably right (but it's a pity that it's not accelerated). With 16bit screens I guess that it will be done by the cpu, with 8 bits it may be different.
Thanks for the tips about using WaitBOVP() instead of WaitTOF() ;-)
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@darkcoder and carls: i wasnt and still aint trying to attack any of you , just so thats said.
And as i wrote about how to do some good productions and the typical winners and stuff that is easy to remember, and thats why the amiga and c64 have been so
much more interesting that the pc contributions, as if you take a look into the pc scene for the last 8 years i can more or less gurantee you that its basically ALL over again the same stuff,
with better textures and maybe a better engine or a worser one (depending on the contributions) , and since i am like...anti pc doesnt help it either but when i am at parties (or was) then i always watched the demos/productions without knowing what format it was
and put my votes there, and only 1 demo from the pc area won my vote in all of theese parties and that was STATE OF MIND by bomb, but there is like 100 PC WILD DEMOS that i have liked and about 15-20 amiga ones so i am not saying the actual pc people sucks just that
its so damn easy to spot wheter its about to show of 3d or GOOD design and a allround good product.
@psycho , glad to see you around here and as i have said before , your (LOONIeS) mekka 2001 demo is still one of my fav demos, many ask me why but (and i know that not many share the same opnion (tbl shouldnt have won) but i guess its just that i like the style and
the final design and its more or less aimed at oldschool .. love it :)
(the 64kb intro (the castle) is nice also ofcourse but in another way :)
a final note is to them who said, instead of saying the scene is dead then you should sit down and do something yourself... obviously there is some people here who doesnt know who i(or team) am, lol :=)
anyway since i have put the scene behind me means in general that what we released the 3 last years was more or less funding based stuff for our future game dev and some unfinnished stuff that we finnished and released,
but i know we will release 1 new prod this year, but it will be "FUN" based, but then again thats only if there is a party to release it on (if no party then noone will check it out anyway and not be spread (like someone posted here earlier)
check our website for our old demos and intros and eventually when i have some more time (or any of us in the team) then there will be some news regarding the 2(3?) games we are working on.
PPS: the game dev is regarding AMIGA classic (+a1/ppc)/gba/ps2
http://www.push-ent.webhop.net
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@carls: ermm i forgot to say one thing to you , quake people (or gamers) at parties..well as you said it doesnt mean that the scene is dead just because of that.
my comment to you is then: What makes a good party? , have you ever been to a GOOD party? , many have asked me why i travel (light?) without computer (mostly) to party's, i always say the same "BECAUSE I like to talk and have a nice time with all the people, and not travel 600000 km just to sit infront of my monitor dooing the same stuff i would have done at home ,
and yes i admit that i have bringed my computer to party's like TG,TP,mekka and ASm but thats in general because i have unnfinished stuff to finnish and release or that i absolutely fear that i will bore myself to death (like at Tp2001,tg2001).
Real parties like mekka 98,99,2000,2001 is parties that i didnt need my computer there to have fun, but thats me anyway...
also a party trip is (always?) for me a vacation...
gamers at parties, well there is some horrible examples , they travel to another country just to hook up their pc (or amiga or whatever) just to play in network and play and play and play and in the end they didnt even notice that there actually was like 4000 people around em, and a good example from tp and TG is that in general the gamers get pissed over the bigscreen and the soundsystem and
in general hates beeing there and have no understanding of what and why such a party has such things.
but yes i know 1 thing, without gamers the scene would have been even smaller (atleast after 95->) as they are the basic funding for the actual partys (like TG,TP and asm), without them no such party would be alive.
so you can go all haywire on me just because i tell you this or you can face the fact , 30-40 sceners was present at Tp2001 , tg 2001 had MAYBE 5 (and max 40 people who sat at the place when the compo's was active) , on mekka there is like TOTAL silence when there was a compo (ie a real scene party (the only one?).
Tp2002 had actually less sceners than in 2001, and even worser contrbutions ....
anyway the gamers compo's have bigger prices also so my next compo will be in quake or something :P lol...naaah
(but the prices are enourmous....)
anyway i am not the money guy really, but many in our team is due to young age and no work.......
if there is a scene then i will return, without mekka i dont see myself going to any party's again.
pps: regarding the actual topic of the discussion, we made an engine that supported RTG , so when we do a production its always AGA but works also in rtg , for the ppc stuff there is not AGA (atleast not for the games...)
have fun
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Hi!
>are BIGGER. Then you have 603, 603e, 604, 604e, G3 >and G4 in many clock
>variations. maybe in the future even more CPUs...
The differences between various PPC CPUs are
much smaller than for 68k CPUs (as PPC is a "true CPU family"). Basically you have one line "faster on Floating Point" and one line "faster on Integer" - sure, you have various numbers of Floating Point units inside and such... but that won't change much the way you code. After all they are all damned fast CPUs, and limiting yourselves to the much faster 68k as the PPC would give you more options sounds
stupid to me :)
And I do not agree on the "90% optimization" line.
Sure there is a lot of more options for the hardware,
but most hardware just won't make as much of a
difference, if it is then this or that chip...
Only real differences might be
a) Altivec or non-Altivec
b) Certain Features of a 3D Chip (but as most
demo coders won't use 3D Chips anyways,
it is not much of an issue...)
I want again to outline my point:
a) Most people these days cannot use AGA anymore (monitors for 15 kHz are rare, and most people
prefer a cheaper 30+ kHz monitor - and I won't
move my Amiga to the TV-Room, having to climb
several Staircases with the Amiga, putting it
up there, also having to change my preferences
setting so I see anything when attaching it to the
TV Set, just to see an AGA Demo... So if a Demo
is AGA-only I will just ignore it. And most people
do the same. So it is in the interest of the demo
coders that they support RTG, or at least both
RTG and AGA. To be serious I do not know a single
person (asides from in this thread) who even
cares about AGA still :)
b) As to the speed - in most "realistic" tests
RTG is faster (but minor speed differences
are not the issue... the issue is being able
to watch the demo *at all* !!!). I am not
speaking of theoretical maximums, but
real tests. I once wrote such a test myselves
for testing how much speed difference there would be,
and RTG was ALWAYS faster (not on Zorro 2
Boards of course :) ) Also check out Heretic II
(AGA is VERY slow there, despite the PPC ASM
16 Bit c2p, well 16 Bit on AGA is just slow).
Also for Freespace we even did not release
an AGA version, as when we tested it under
AGA (in Pal Interlaced 640x512) it was just
too slow to be playable - while it runs fine
on GFX Boards in even Software-Rendering.
c) AGA-Demos won't run on the AmigaOne.
Demos without hardware-hacking will.
Steffen Haeuser
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@MagicSN
>than for 68k CPUs (as PPC is a "true CPU family").
I don't agree with this. There are many diferences in PPC.
1)Some of them have Altivec and some not. (is it a small difference??)
2) clock speeds range from less than 300 Mhz (I don't remember exacly, I guess the first 603 where even les than 200Mhz) up to 1.4Ghz. And the 970 is coming..
3) the number of functional units=> the digreee of parallelism is different.
Basically you have one line "faster on Floating Point" and one line "faster on Integer" - sure,
"basically"? this is a simplification, i.e. 90%
(or 95%) optimization...
>of Floating Point units inside and such... but >that won't change much the way you code. After
if you search for 100% optimization they change the way you code. have you read the rest of this thread??
We were discussing having 2 060 c2p: one optimized for Blizzard or Apollo 1260 and onother for 4060 like CSMK2 which behaves differently. That is what i mean, I even have interest in optimizing for a specific board, not just for a specific CPU!
>they are all damned fast CPUs, and limiting
apart from the fact that you sound really unpolite saying that other people are stupid, as I explained in previous messages,being limited by the hardware is EXACTLY what I am searching!
>difference, if it is then this or that chip...
you don't have to trust too much on benchmarks, but if they show 6Mb/sec difference between CV3D and Picasso IV.....THERE IS a DIFFERENE.
your points were clear, I wonder whether you read what other people answer to you. I don't think so.
Anyway I repeat what I already said (last time):
a) There exists scandoublers. If someone has a real interest in demos, he will have a hardware to watch AGA demos, since there are so many. If not, I don't care. If nobody but me watch my demos, it's sad, but I will still have fun coding! :)
b) We all agree that RTG is faster than AGA. For me AGA is fast enough the do interesting stuff AND I can use COPPER + SPRITES + DMA control !
For me such things are much important than speed.
c) AmigaOne...ahaha!
Please, MagicSN, answer the following: what's so special with RTG? You can do the same things on a PC. So why use RTG instead of a PC?
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This is an interesting thread. About one of the key
areas which played a very big role in Amigas history.
First, I think Steffen is a bit arrogant/ignorant..
If you where talking about applications it would all make sense, but we arent. As has been said earlier,
democoding is about limits, reaching them, breaking them. Thee is no such thing on RTG systems. Furtehrmore, demos does NOT have the same goals
as applicaitons. They are captures of the present,
using present hardware. They are timeless. THats waht makes them special. Do NOT diss the democoders for choosing specific hardware to play on, its about inspiration, inspiration you dont get from
codig on a PC with RTG. No isnpiration=no demos.
Now some coders may be a little unaware of new
technologies though. Darkcoder: The PPC is actually
mor fun to code directly than the 68k. You can still
easily beat compilers doing it :). It is more "simple"
than the 68k, for example there is no subtract immediate instruction, you have to use add -x,
there compose them yourself using smaller and simpler
instructions (alot of optimisations can be made here)
And.. you can schedule the code by hand, although
rather different scheduling may have to be done on
different PPCs though..
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So you suggest that on 4060 cache preloading is not useful? I have a CSMk3 and my routine works better with cache preloading.
ok.. to some results:
Measured in scanlines for a 320x200 screen with dma on. The pure writing speed on all 3 cards is about 166 lines.
CSMK2 060/50
small: 171 lines, 91 fps
640 byte prefetch: 191 lines, 81 fps
old cache: 171 lines, 91 fps
Azure060: 190 lines, 82 fps
nocache c2p: 167 lines, 93 fps
CSPPC 060/50
small: 171 lines, 91 fps
640 byte prefetch: 184 lines, 84 fps
old cache: 170 lines, 91 fps
Azure060: 185 lines, 84 fps
nocache c2p: 186 lines, 84 fps
CSMK3 060/66
small: 165 lines, 94 fps
640 byte prefetch: 178 lines, 87 fps
old cache: 164 lines, 95 fps
Azure060: 175 lines, 89 fps
nocache c2p: 165 lines, 94 fps
and for completeness: (one of the slower B1260's)
B1260/50
small: 256 lines, 61 fps
640 byte prefetch: 254 lines, 61 fps
old cache: 256 lines, 61 fps
Azure060: 257 lines, 60 fps
nocache c2p: 286 lines, 54 fps
"Small" and "640 byte prefetch" are the 2 beforementioned ones. "old cache" is basicly a fast 16read,16write, 16read, 16write I did a long time ago (and after that wondered why azure has gotten it wrong, but that was on a4k - the prefetch IS faster on a1200s - usually more than in the one above). Azure060 is the one from amycoders. "no cache" is a mmu-messing one I wrote based on our theory - wonder why it doesn't work on that CSPPC above.. (even if it's running at pure writing speed(!) I can't recommend it because of the missing standard for changing the mmu settings)
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I don't agree with this. There are many diferences in PPC.
1)Some of them have Altivec and some not. (is it a small difference??)
2) clock speeds range from less than 300 Mhz (I don't remember exacly, I guess the first 603 where even les than 200Mhz) up to 1.4Ghz. And the 970 is coming..
3) the number of functional units=> the digreee of parallelism is different.
Both families have their peculiarities, but I think that...
Some 680x0 don't have FPU and others don't have MMU. That's a big difference in my opinion. Some 680x0 have caches and other don't have at all. Some are superscalar (like the 060) and other not...
And first generations have instructions that doesn't work with next ones. For example some 68000 instructions or the change from 882 to the 040 or 060 FPU...
On the other hand afaik the instruction set hasn't changed in the ppc series and code written for the first series works without problems in the latests without doing changes or emulating missing instructions. Ok, Altivec is a BIG change, enough to make interesting the development of demos/intros only to get the most of that unit.
Speed. Well from 300Mhz to 1.4Ghz is a 460% increase in the frequency.
From a 7Mhz 68000 to a 50Mhz 68030 is a bigger change, we change from a 16bit bus to a 32bit one, and that is a 714% if we only look at the Mhz figures.
So there's more difference between different 680x0 generations than between different ppcs. PPCs are all superscalar while 680x0 not and you have to take care about this...
A ppc without Altivec and other with Altivec is as different as a 68030 without FPU and other with FPU. And it's more funny because Altivec instructions haven't changed and aren't emulated and 040 instructions are different from 882 etc...
So I think that there are more differences in the 680x0 family than in the ppc family. In the 680x0 family we even have the 68008 with a 8 bit data bus but I will not count it because it hasn't been used in Amigas.
That is what i mean, I even have interest in optimizing for a specific board, not just for a specific CPU!
There's nothing stopping you from optimizing for a specific AmigaOne with G4 and making optimized code for AmigaOne G3 if you want. Ok ;-) I know that you don't have interest in RTG, but if the problem was the cpu it may not be a problem, you may optimize for different cpu modules (and if different boards appear, for different boards)
I'm not going to talk again about different graphic cards, I know that my point is clear: for me the biggest bottleneck is the cpu. Anyway if you don't have problems supporting different cpu boards (that give around 50MB/s with fastram like yours and around 30MB/s like mine), you wouldn't have problems supporting a few gfx boards were the only difference is different bandwitch. You have that problem with AGA too if you are using a cbm 3640 in an A4000 and someone is using another board for example yours... yours will give nearly 7MB/s and the poor 3640 only 4MB/s... so the problem is not bandwitch, the most important thing I see is the use of specific aga features as the ones psyco and you have talked about (blitter, copper, perfect sync, sprites...)
You can optimize a lot but sometimes people who has a machine slower than the one you have decided that is going to be the target machine tries it and it will run unoptimized and slowly. And if a do a demo for my mk2 I'll find that it may be more optimized for mk3... so we have more control with AGA, but you can only optimize at 99% for a few machines. There are always small changes between the machines that make that all machines aren't used at 100%.
Why use RTG instead of a PC? well, you still have the cpu and the rest of the Amiga. I think that doing optimized altivec code could be quite interesting... I'm not talking about converting existing routines to work with altivec (that usually not gives so impressive results), but designing new routines from scratch to make the best use of the vector unit. It could be as fun as coding the DSP in a Falcon.
And talking about 3D libraries, afaik Warp3D works at a lower level than Direct3D and OpenGL, so you can optimize a lot your code. Just look at the Warp3D demos using a Virge and compare that to a Virge in a PC. You will see that Amiga Virge 3D stuff runs faster.
People with real interest in demos usually has scandoublers. For example I have two, both are 24bits. Don't use DCE/phase5 ones like the one included with the CV3D, it's not 24bit and you will notice it soon if you are used to the real colours of demos and see some gradients.
I agree somewhat with MagicSN, it's important to be able to watch the demo. for example, A3000 users may be quite happy watching a RTG production. I guess that A2k users would prefer watching something that nothing. But this is always a decision of the makers of the demo, if they had to care about anything exists (like making a demo that uses at 100% an A500, but if you have a 4000PPC/voodoo5 it uses warp3d and AHI... that would be ridiculous and very tedious, testing every hardware configuration)
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@lempkee
First of all, you were sounding depressed about the state of the scene so I tried to cheer you up :-) I guess it came out the wrong way...
I haven't been to very many parties (maybe nine or ten), but I'd have to say that the ones I've been to were very nice. I've only been to smaller ones (maybe 200 attendants at the biggest one so far) and I've never been to a party without a computer. Not that I get to use it very much because, like you say, in the latest years it has mostly been about socializing and having a good time.
Finishing a production at a party is never fun, except maybe for a surprise compo (but that is a totally different thing IMHO).
I always try to have my contributions ready before I go to a party!
A good party to me, well, it's hard to describe but it's got to have that certain feeling of friendship and community, that all the visitors belong together because they're a part of something bigger, in this case the whole scene "thing".
I couldn't say that I would feel at home at one of the parties with 2000+ attendants, at least I don't think so (but then again I've never tried it ;).
I'm going to a party in my home town in a couple of days, and this is a party I love. Just like you say about M&S there is total silence during all the compos. There are always a few gamers attending the party but this year they will be forced to turn their screens off during the compos ;-)
Just like you I've never understood how people can sit in front of their computers leeching, not talking to anyone - and paying for it - when they do the same thing at home all the time. I can appreciate the fun in playing Quake but I'd rather do it for free in a friend's livingroom during a weekend.
If I had to pick a favourite party I'd have choose one where I was one of the organizers :-)
It was held back in 1996, superb feeling.
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@crumb & blubble
Indeed this a very interesting thread.
>First, I think Steffen is a bit arrogant/ignorant..
What I find irritating is that it seems he doesn't read what other people write. He simple ties to impose it's ideas (who come from a different contex, that of games/application development) like they're God's words.
What makes threads intersting like this is instead reading and thinking about other ideas.
And in fact I thought about what both of you wrote about PPC cpus and I agree that you are right and I was wrong. I also did superficial and inexact calculation about CPU speeds.
Ok, I apologize, now I have no preclusions in doing PPC coding. The only thing I don't like is this fact of instruciotn reordering. Of course you can schedule inst, but at least from what I read about the G4 the CPU reorders them internally. I red these informations on the ArsTechnica web site. There in non-PPC specific articles they say that this technique, together with the increased number of registers of "Post-RISC" CPU (they mean P4, K6, G4, SPaRC, K7 etc) helps a lot compilers so that it is nearly impossiblre to improve on them. But this was not a PPC specific issue, so if you have direct expirience I trust you.
So if it will be true that PS3 will use a PPC, I would really like to code demos on it.
Of cource I still am in favor of "fixed architecture" and also what blubble wote about it is important: a fixed hardware is more fascinating and inspiring to me (but there are also those technical reason I explained in previous post).
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@carls: Hackersnight,remedy,iceing?? hmm ihave forgot the other swede'ish partys, but i can share with u that i have visited them aswell :)
anyway yes its depressing to see the scene disolve like it has the last 4+ years, and thats why in general i left it back in 99, but i came back and helped some
and i kinda liked mekka2001 alot, but after that there has been nothing and since i know mostly all of the mekka people means that i also know why and what about the mekka,
i hope that a good party for SCENERS will come again but a good party aint much if it doesnt have the true sceners feeling + contributions that represent the scene,
back in the early days of mekka there wasnt exactly much groundbreaking demos at that party, and the reason for that is that the bigger parties (TP,TG etc) had better prices and was more known
to the people, that turned around and now (the last 5 years) mekka was the king, now its dead and no one else have stated anything about any scene ONLY party which can drag people from their livingroom to the
party place (except for smaller parties like Kindergarten and trasc but in general they are too small to get well known and get people froom all over the world? to join up.
also i must add that it seems there is like too many people here who doesnt like the amiga as much as me (ie they use pc,mac,linux etc... and say that aga sucks....its kinda opposite on what i think but i sheer the opinion about moving on to PPC and the a1 , but for that we need an OS and thats os4, my XE800 is due soon and os4
will change my life and dreams i hope :)
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@psycho
so thank you very much for this veery interesting numbers. So with 4060 cache preloading is not faster. I hope I will obtain similar results by myself.
How do you use the mmu to improve speed? You detect which part of the buffer have been modified and you only c2p the modified parts?
(oh if you don't have time to answer to all these questions no problem- I still thank you for all the interesting hint!)
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@lempkee
I love th Amiga (classic) for both its hardware and OS.
I really hope and think that OS4 will be a great development of a still great OS. But the A1, from a hardware perspective, to be honest it doesn't seem so wonderful. It's not bad, if it was out 3 years ago it would have been great but today has no great performances and costs a lot. (BTW just today Apple announced a big cut of their prices..)
From the hardware perspective I also prefer Pegasos to A1.
So I think in the future I will use OS4 for "serious" stuff and a different system (XBox? PS3?GBA?) for coding.
(yeah Amiga is by far my favorite computer, but it's not the only one I use)
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>From the hardware perspective I also prefer Pegasos >to A1.
What exactly do you prefer there ? The better propaganda ? :) The two systems are (nearly) the same !!! (Though no OS4 for Pegasos as it seems)
>So I think in the future I will use OS4 for "serious" stuff >and a different system (XBox? PS3?GBA?) for coding.
BTW: That the PS3 will use PPC is in the meanwhile confirmed.
As to your other mail: I don't see anything I said which would be arrogant... as to "imposing my own ideas" - well, I tried several times to make you aware
that not all people CAN use AGA. And that Systems like the AmigaOne CANNOT run AGA Demos also (while RTG Demos could still be compatible). And you come with the same stuff up again and again. Some of the things in your earlier mails (like that one would need to "optimize for different graphics chipsets) were also just bad-researched. And when stating the obvious again and again one CAN get a bit annoyed over time :) Also I still am waiting on a response concerning the slow speed of AGA on 16 Bit c2p and Highres Displays :) (Anyways, as I said before - minor speed differences - which depending on situation happen in both directions - don't really matter... what matters is that every Amiga User with a decent Amiga can use the demos, I'd say...
I hope you did not take offense.
Feel free to followup on private email if you want.
Steffen
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If I was any cop at ppc assembly programming, I'd write a kick arse 2D true-colour effects RTG demo using the benefits of a ppc/graphics card...
Still, I'm not so I'll just shut the hell up now ;-)
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@karlos a good idea, but 2d wont impress many anymore ;( , but for pure fun and entertainment (maybe a backtotheroots kinda demo which follows all from 1988->1995+ would atleast look good and pay alot of respect to people who was or still are in the scene...)
if anyone wants to make such a thing, then i think there has to be quite a few people up for it , its not a singleman's job and as we all know... the 2d world require alot of oldskoolers...
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I had the idea of mucking about for a pure BlizzardPPC/BVisionPPC setup. It used Warp3D for safe allocation of the 3D resources but did hacky 'direct to the texture surface memory' trickery to produce effects and stuff.
Soon found out that the texture memory is organised in rather a perculiar way ;-)
Still, got some interesting animated texture effects out of it. You can do a very nice plasma flame with varying transparency etc (ooh, thats sooo yesterday)
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I am really not interested in A1/Peggy stuff, but to me Peggy is more elegant mtherboard design (is also smaller) it should have a Firewire interface and it seems to cost less. Up to now there is no OS4 for A1 too. But as you know I am interested in AGA, so...:)
I still think you don't read messages. At least not carefully.
>well, I tried several times to make you aware
that not all people CAN use AGA. And that Systems like the AmigaOne CANNOT run AGA Demos also (while RTG Demos could still be compatible)
You may not belive me, but I am really a coder. So I know by myself that AGA stuff won't run on A1.
(well there is UAE, maybe in future it will support AGA). And in a PREVIOUS MESSAGE that maybe you didn't read I explained why I don't see this as a problem (to me). So it's YOU that says again and again the same things (which I already know by myself).
If you read carefully the post you will notice that as long as the discussion went on, I changed a bit my ideas. I discussed with Crumb, Carls, lempkee and many others I forgot (please excuse me) and we all found the discussion interesting and I think many of us learned something.
I never said anyone shoud optimize for various chipset. (please read carefully, as every other in this post did)
I am still waiting for a response about a question that I directed to you in one of my previous post (do you read my posts?).
There is not much to answare about slow speed of AGA with 18 bit HAM8 mode or hires/superhires displays. IT IS slow, I know. But as I explained (oh, yes...you don't read) a limited speed is what I need for having fun.
You say (again and again) that for you small differences in speed are not important and that you think it is more important that every Amiga user can watch a demo. Ok I UNDERSTAND YOUR OPINION.
And I say (again and again because you don't read) that for me small differences ARE important and is less important that A1 user see demos. I gave arguments for this. Hope now you understand. The others in this post (for example Crumb) perfectly understood my opinion.
Not offended, hopy you also did not offended by me. It seems we have difficulties in understanding each others. Things that happens. Friendship Rulez! :-)
The Dark Coder
PS. I prefer to continue the discussion in public (really no time to follow ALSO a private thread.. :-)
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@darkcoder & the AGA gurus ;D
There is not much to answare about slow speed of AGA with 18 bit HAM8 mode or hires/superhires displays. IT IS slow, I know.
HAM8 uses 8bitplanes, so copying a normal 8bitplane screen shouldn't slow it down much... but it requires lots of cpu power... 040s at 40Mhz achieve almost copyspeed when they do chunky to planar, wouldn't be possible with 060/50 to also do the convertion from 16bits to ham8? coneverting from a 16bit screen to ham8 may take cpu power, but once the convertion is done, the AGA display should be refreshed as fast as if it wasn't using a ham8 mode. I'm not sure if a 060 will be able to do this, but a ppc should be able to do this kind of stuff.
If the game is designed to run at least at 640x480, the chunky to planar routines can be done as in "Phase One" of Capsule, if you are using an interlaced screen there's no need to convert from chunky to planar the lines that aren't going to be seen in a refresh, so the amount of data that has to be written to chipram is halved. So the speed using interlaced modes will be even bigger... With a ppc board with a 604e/233 the frame rate should be lower than with a graphic card, but it still should be playable...
Best Regards
Crumb
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@crumb
the truecolor-18bit HAM8 mode is a SHRES screen used to simulate a LORES one. SHRES+8bitplane uses all AGA bandwidth so during displays the CPU cannot write to the mem. And max res. with this technique is 320x512 in PAL.
Unless you mean a more clever scheme (in which I would be very interested) to use "real" LORES
HAM.
best regards
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the truecolor-18bit HAM8 mode is a SHRES screen used to simulate a LORES one.
I read something about that technique in the amycoders web, but I thought that there was a way to do that in plain HIRES or LORES... :-/
I still don't know why a SHIRES is used with HAM8, I understand that HAM6 in SHIRES helps to simulate a hi/true color screen but...
why isn't faster to use a real LORES or HIRES ham8 screen instead of a SHIRES ham8 that needs a lot more of resources?
Sorry for my ignorance... is it to make "independent" each group of 4 pixels thanks to the last pixel written or what? wouldn't be enough fast to store the colour of the previous pixel in a register or variable?
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i really can not understand why so many people are arguing about such a trivial(IMO) subject!
"demos should ALL be RTG"
it doesnt matter!
it doesnt matter which is faster, or has the most features etc...
demos are only for the developer who wants to show off what he can do with particular hardware, i cant see why everyone is so worried about this
applications & games are completly different,
applications should be compatable with all graphics hardware, since they are not demonstrating graphics hardware capabilities
its important to make your apps & games RTG compliant, make it open on any type of screen the user desires, or on the WB screen
ok, so i cant see most demos, because i dont have a monitor connected to the native video port, but if the author wanted to use copper-lists & ham8 and sprites and stuff, what can i do? its the authors choice
i just think people should stop argueing about such trivial nonsense!
:-)
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@crumb: btw that capsule demo aint truecolor btw :) , but its a well designed demo .
@i am a boringperson: that trvial question u seem to be pumping, well in one way what ur saying is correct, but if u turn that upside down and face the fact that AMIGA = CUSTOM CHIPSET thats when what we discuss here makes sense,
anyway i would have loved to see AAA chipset in the A1 more than seeing a gforce 7 card in it, why u might ask...well easy!! BECAUSE ITS CUSTom CHIPSETS!1 :)
i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??
so infact i still prefer aga for demo making etc, but an engine that would allow it to work in rtg mode aswell (as all our last prods is), anyway AMIGA = AMIGA and not UAE or amithlon or what ever..., when OS4 is out then there is a new breed
and i have faith in it but i think it wont change much of our lives atleast for the next 10months (after its release) because the real amiga people (the productive ones) know too little atm.
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and face the fact that AMIGA = CUSTOM CHIPSET thats when what we discuss here makes sense
define custom chipset:
Do you mean that all Amigas have the same chipset?
Because that isn`t true at least the last 15 years. It`s been years that I havent used AGA on my Amiga.(Since I bought CyberVision64 3D which has a Virge chipset) Nor all Amigas have the same hardware (Various Motorola CPUs same as Apple etc..) Since then I almost stopped seeing demos because I had my TV set connected with my A600HD and I couldn`t change all the time the cables, ports can be damaged in time with this procedure.
I bet for you an A4000/A1200 with PPC, PCI slots with voodoo, soundblaster, ethernet, USB with scanner and webcam running AmigaOS 3.9 isn`t really an Amiga because it uses of the shelf chipsets and accessories. The new&old Macs are real macs when they use ATI/nVidia?
i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??
I dont put Amiga in the same fate with C64. Except if you consider Amiga just as a retro hobby. I`m not.
I can perfectly understand you that what you do, you do it for your own fun, that`s okay with me, I just hope that you will do your productions available also for the new Amigas that are about to come. :-)
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i dont use the original amiga graphics, i use a grphics card in my amiga, does that mean that when i use my A4000T, im not really using an amiga?
im sure an amiga can be more than just a bunch of custom chips
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darkcoder wrote:
erm..what do you mean with read16 aand write16?
You mean using the MOVE16 instruction?!
I always thought that such instruction was not supported by Amiga architecture, so never used it!
not supported differs from not working :-D. you can use MOVE16 in chipram with a sliiiiiiiiiiight better speed, but 'coz there's no MOVE16 Rx,Ea it's impossible to copy data in chipram w/out a 16 byte buffer in fastram, but i think this double write can waste a lot of time....
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btw that capsule demo aint truecolor btw :) , but its a well designed demo .
yes, I wrote about that demo because the idea of only making c2p with the lines that are being shown is quite good in my opinion (I haven't seen many hi-res demos).
If the screen is 8bit or ham8 is irrelevant to implement that idea. Well... now that you are here may you explain (if you aren't very busy and if you want) in a few lines why SHIRES is used instead of LORES to make hi/true color screens? sorry for insisting but I'm quite curious about this...
i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??
no, because there's few people with gfx cards in c= 64s... but in Amiga now it's quite usual to have a gfx card, I know more people with gfx cards than people without one... anyway I understand your point because although coding for RTG may be fun, AGA has a lot more interesting features to play with. People should understand that some AGA demos can't be done for RTG easily so there's not much sense in almost rewriting the entire demo to make it RTG compatible. The situation is different with those demos that don't use many special AGA features, they can be easily converted and is a nice present for A3000/A2000 users.
Friendship rules ;-D
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If the screen is 8bit or ham8 is irrelevant to implement that idea. Well... now that you are here may you explain (if you aren't very busy and if you want) in a few lines why SHIRES is used instead of LORES to make hi/true color screens? sorry for insisting but I'm quite curious about this...
SHIRES screen is needed to make hi color screen because you are not rendering a truecolor image to an ham screen, you are simulating a hicolor display, more in deep you are FAKing an hicolor one.
the trick works like the video beams render the "pixels" on your tv. You use 4 pixels (in tv 3) to renderer one (1 lores pixel is 4 SHIRES pixels in wide), so for example if you have 2 write 1 color you write 4 pixels in shires, Red componet Green component and the Blue Blue componet two times for padding pourpose (the blue component is the less important for human's eyes) . In effect each true color pixel splits in a vector of 4 shires pixel the sum of these seems to be 1 real pixel to your eyes. so if you use a hires screen you double the width of pixels (2x resolution) and gain some dma slots, if you use a lores display the result is a joke, a mayhem of dirty colors.
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@Agony
>differs from not working . you can use MOVE16 in >chipram with a sliiiiiiiiiiight better speed, but
that's veeery interesting and cool thing!
I have to try. It's a pity for MOVE16 only workin with mem to mem.
Thanks you for the explanation, Agony, also about 18bit HAM8.
@crumb
the usual HAM8 is a planar mode. The 18bit HAM8 is a technique to do a sort of truecolor chunky mode.
(yep a fake one, as Agony says)
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@Darkcoder
the usual HAM8 is a planar mode. The 18bit HAM8 is a technique to do a sort of truecolor chunky mode. (yep a fake one, as Agony says)
I know that HAM8 is a planar mode... what I want to know is why no one has done a routine that converts
a 24/16bit chunky pixel fastram buffer to lores planar ham8 screens. TurboEVD uses a HAM8 mode to display modes like 640x480 in pseudo 15bits. TurboEVD seems to have done it without using a SHIRES screen mode.
I'm not talking about putting 1 Red 1 Green and 1 Blue pixel in SHIRES very near to fake a 24 bit mode, I'm talking about a screen where each colour depends on the previous pixel... a ham planar one. And a routine that turns a 16bit or 24bit chunky buffer in a ham8 planar screen. Chunky to planar but using more colours in the buffer and ham8 in the screen. Now am I explaining better what I want to know?
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@crumb
because may be slower. and, if deltas from one color to another is big (you can change only 1 component at time) you don't know the result ( in lowres for sure). if you use a hires display the difference may not be so noticeable, but you double writes and calculation from each pixel. oh, you may use the 64 "real" color from the palette in lowres to adjust the difference, but calculating the best or an acceptable palette for each frame is very very slow. try for example to convert a 32bit jpeg to an ham8 screen in PPAint....
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with ham8 you can change only one component of the previous pixel. So if you have two pixels close to each other with 2 different components you are in trouble. Es
$ff00ff $ff8888. You can use a "base color" for the second pixel, i.e. not define the second as a difference from the first one. But you only have 64 base colors, so you can do this only 63 times (the first color of the display have to be a base, I think (well, never tried a HAM display starting with a "changed" color...don'tknow what will happen)). Well, of course you can use copper to change the value of base colors.
But then you need a dynamic copperlist which is very complicated to build. And since copper is "8-pixel slow" I can provide easily an example of rasterline which is imposible to exactly reproduce in HAM8: (all values in hex 24bit)
00000 010101 020202 .... ffffff
It is only 255 pixel long, but you cannot obtain any pixel from the previous one. So the first 64 pixel you use all the 64 base colors. During that time you can only reload 8 color registers, so you have enough till color 64+8. During the extra 8 pixel you gained, you can even reload another color register and gain 1 extra pixel. But then it's over!
You can do an approximate conversion to ham8, i.e. changhing color a bit. Ex say you have
008800 00cc33 here 2 components change, you need to use a new base color. But if you transform the 2 pixels in 008800 00cc00 you change a bit the picture but you don't need a base color. I am not expert of color conversion algorithms, but I suspect as Agony says that they are not very fast. You have to analyse all the color used in the picture, make calculation, divisions..
anyway I'll give a look at Aki's work! maybe there is some possibility I don't see.
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Hi all,
All this AGA HAM-8 technical stuff, whilst most interesting, is melting my head slightly ;-)
I realise that this has probably already been answered, but is it possible to create a reasonable emulation of a 15 or 16 bit display? Something that could be refreshed quickly enough for a low resolution (read 320x256) game-like app?
Also, could it be coded such that it that can be used in conjunction with os legal code?
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It's kinda funny, early on in this thread people worrying that the demo scene is dead/dying etc. Just look at how big this thread is now :-P
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@Darkcoder&Ag0ny
thank you for your explanation. The rasterline example is very good to show the limitations of the ham mode.
Umm remember the values of chipram speed given by that URL? In the TurboEVD documents Aki shows the difference of chipram access speed using different screenmodes, it's quite interesting.
Screen mode Speed in MB/s
PAL: Lores 320x256x2 6.2 MB/s
PAL: Lores 320x256x256 5.2 MB/s
DBLPAL: Lores 320x256x256 4.2 MB/s
PAL: Hires Lace 640x512x2 6.2 MB/s
PAL: Hires Lace 640x512x16 6.0 MB/s
PAL: Hires Lace 640x512x256 4.3 MB/s
Multiscan: Productivity 640x480x16 5.7 MB/s
Multiscan: Productivity 640x480x256 2.1 MB/s
I don't know what machine he used for testing but it gives a good idea about how AGA performance drops when you increase the resolution.
The speed Aki achieves with his ham8 mode is only a bit slower than using a normal 8bitplane screen in shapeshifter... without using the compare buffer it may be even faster.
@Karlos
I don't think that it would produce a perfect picture in lo-res, but it seems to be 100% system friendly and is quite fast...
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Ooh,
If 320x256x8-bit gives 5.2 MB/s, isn't that actually a bit faster than Zorro-2? So does AGA outperform Z2 graphics cards for direct writes to video ram?
I wonder what my BVision gives in a comparable resolution...
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Yes, AGA actually does outperform Z2. (*Z2*, note... :) )
darkcoder:
Firewire would only be relevant if there would
be Drivers (Also it could get added as
PCI Card to A1 if really needed).
As to the price: OS 4 is included in the price, remember this also.
Interested in AGA ? Sorry if this sounds arrogant,
but this sounds like a terrible waste of time
to me. I explained several times that with AGA
a lot of people cannot use your demos... so any
AGA Support should be optional at best.
And I think if there are two option where one (AGA) does not give ANY major advantage (and it
doesn't !!!), and RTG Support would also make
demos run on
a) more current systems
b) AmigaOne
RTG support should be used (And AGA at most optional).
Steffen
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@magicSN
Do you mean that I can add a Firewire interface to an A1 *for free*?? :-D
Os 4 is included in the price but...they don't give it to you because it is no ready! I don't like to pay today for something I will receive in ?? months. And note that the OS4 is included *only* in the earlybird *special* offer.
I think that my best time is the one which i spend enjoying myself. Since I enjoy coding AGA, for me it's not waste of time. Your posting would sound much better if you add "in my opinion" somewhere in between. Your words sounds like orders.
I already explained that for me and my work AGA has many advantages so nothing more to say..