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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Rowbeartoe on March 30, 2008, 02:19:41 AM
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I used to be a computer salesman back in 1989. The store had an Amiga 500 and an Atari 1040ST on display. I have always been an Atarian, but was fascinated by the Amiga. As I'm sure many of you are aware, in many ways the Amiga was the evolution of the Atari 8-Bit computers.
Now when I had side by side comparisons I noticed that the Amiga 500 never could do 60fps animations? We even had Antic software with Cad 3D 2.0 on both computers, but the Amiga was limited to 30fps at best. I remember having several (albeit slightly downgraded graphicly) Amiga HAM-6 animations such as the juggler, or a Scult 3D demo converted to Spectrum 512 running at 60fps on the ST. I could never answer the question to customers if the Amiga animation software could match that speed.
Cyperpaint on the ST was Zoetrope on the Amiga- was the Amiga version capable of 60fps? My question is does any Amiga software for the 500,1000, or 2000 allow full screen 320x200 animations at 60fps? Turbo Silver 3.0, VideoScape 3d, Photon Video Cel Animator, Deluxe Paint III, and Photon Paint II all had animation capabilities on the Amiga. But none of my magazines mentioned how fast these animations could go. The reviewers always neglected to mention if it could. That along with my personal experience suggests the Amiga could not. Am I wrong?
If not, was it the CHIP RAM in the Amiga preventing 60fps animations? Was it the slightly slower clock speed (7.1 MHz vs 8.0 MHz) of the 68000? Was it the more memory intense files of the Amiga- Atari's 4bit versus Amiga's 5bit picture files? Was it perhaps the Amiga 500 only had 512K?
Thanks for you help everyone.
On a side note. Chip Ram was all that could be used for video correct? Or could page flipping animations be stored in Fast Ram?
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What were you using to measure the frame rate?
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On the ST, each function key represented differn't frame speeds.f9 was 30fps and f10 was 60fps. So when I had the same demons up, the Amiga was always doing either f8 or f9. The Software on the ST always claimed 60fps as well.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
On the ST, each function key represented differn't frame speeds.f9 was 30fps and f10 was 60fps. So when I had the same demons up, the Amiga was always doing either f8 or f9. The Software on the ST always claimed 60fps as well.
Ok... So you didn't actually measure the frame rate?
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It was obvious to me. For example, I could count the frames of an animation. It wasn't rocket science. If it was 15 frames, the ST would flip thru all of them 4 times every second at F10 or 2twice at f9. And it was easy to match the exact speed on the Amiga Demos I had at the time. Albeit only a few. I had the machines side by side and the customers loved it.
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Short answer: yes it could.
The bandwidth of 320x200 HAM6 is 2.75MB/sec and the A500 bus (split in half between cpu/co-proc) was 7MB/sec. Since software was often lean (read: in a commercially viable state) simple double buffering and using both cpu and co-proc would problably do the trick quite effortlessly. Though in practic replay in DeluxePaint would probably be mandatory.
Fast ram could be used for storage, but not display - the whole thing must fit into max avail for 60Hz replay and this detail resolves that issue.
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
It was obvious to me. For example, I could count the frames of an animation. It wasn't rocket science. If it was 15 frames, the ST would flip thru all of them 4 times every second at F10 or 2twice at f9. And it was easy to match the exact speed on the Amiga Demos I had at the time. Albeit only a few. I had the machines side by side and the customers loved it.
Ok, I'm not really sure what you are basing this on... Both machines were more than capable of running at the refresh rate of the display device, the Amiga with more colours and at a higher resolution than the ST... simple really.
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JetRacer wrote:
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
It does? Perhaps 10 years ago... but not now...
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Ok, so from the bandwidth point of view, the Amiga could in theory. But what about the software I mentioned? Why was the Scult 3D, juggler, and Antic Cad-3d 2.0 never page flipping at 60fps? I may never have had a frame counter, but clearly the Amiga demos converted to the ST could run at least twice as fast on the ST, suggesting to me either 24fps or 30fps. Now, I want to make it clear, I'm not saying the graphics were better on the ST, they were downgraded slightly in Spectrum 512, but I'm just talking about good old fashion page flipping. The Atari ST used 16MHz RAM, 8 MHZ for Video and 8 MHz for the 68000- it was cheap and effective for this kind of stuff. I'm just curious as to why the demos I saw, and the software reviews never mentioned up to 60fps animations and if in fact the Amiga software allowed it's user to reach such a speed?
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Ok, so from the bandwidth point of view, the Amiga could in theory. But what about the software I mentioned? Why was the Scult 3D, juggler, and Antic Cad-3d 2.0 never page flipping at 60fps? I may never have had a frame counter, but clearly the Amiga demos converted to the ST could run at least twice as fast on the ST, suggesting to me either 24fps or 30fps. Now, I want to make it clear, I'm not saying the graphics were better on the ST, they were downgraded slightly in Spectrum 512, but I'm just talking about good old fashion page flipping. The Atari ST used 16MHz RAM, 8 MHZ for Video and 8 MHz for the 68000- it was cheap and effective for this kind of stuff. I'm just curious as to why the demos I saw, and the software reviews never mentioned up to 60fps animations and if in fact the Amiga software allowed it's user to reach such a speed?
As a programmer, I could flip a page far faster than 60fps... simply by changing the bitmap pointer... But to do so would look terrible, so I would always synchronise it with the VBL of the display this would limit the frame rate to whatever the refresh rate of your display device was.
-Edit- I should point out that the GFX chips have priority over the CPU with Chipram access on the Amiga.
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@ bloodline: notice how I didn't write compressed video replay but raw video (more accurately: animation).
An attemt to make a modern OS display and loop a +16MB raw feed flawlessly in 60fps will in 99.9% of all cases fail miserably. If not at replay then when it "loops" and halt for 0.5 sec to re-loading the whole thing or some similar dumbass behavior.
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Brilliance (at least) lets you set the frame rate to 60 frames/second. Note that using Ham animations is probably the slowest way to animate on the amiga, so comparing ham animation speeds on the amiga with 32 color animations on the atari is not a valid way to do it. i found that when animating-because each frame is on for a short time and because each fame can have its own palette-then ham is usually not needed and indeed a hindrance.
Later Amiga software(eg brilliance, Mainactor, buildanim,Scala, Clarissa) used newer animation formats such as anim8 and anim7, ssa which give smooth playback(50 frames/sec on PAL or 60 frames/sec on NTSC) in resolutions upto 720x 512 hires laced in 256 colors. And yes these utilities late you choose the playback speed upto 60 frames/sec. However I can only confirm this for for AGA machines not OCS/ECS that you mention because thats all I have. There are several software utilities which let you convert the standard anim5 to these animation formats to speed-up playback. You maybe right: the OCS/ECs chipsets may have had the 30 frames/sec limitation but the AGA definately did not
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>Cyperpaint on the ST was Zoetrope on the Amiga- was the Amiga version capable of 60fps? My question is does any Amiga software for the 500,1000, or 2000 allow full screen 320x200 animations at 60fps? Turbo Silver 3.0, VideoScape 3d, Photon Video Cel Animator, Deluxe Paint III, and Photon Paint II all had animation capabilities on the Amiga. But none of my magazines mentioned how fast these animations could go. The reviewers always neglected to mention if it could. That along with my personal experience suggests the Amiga could not. Am I wrong?
There are so many applications written for Amiga, Atari, PC. Perhaps, you want to define the nature of the data that is being animated. Obviously, if the data is for a cartoon with large runs of the same color, decompressing a simple RLE stream into a double buffered video memory would be faster than copying data from RAM (unless the processor is slower than the RAM speed.) Is the original image 320*200 or is it being zoomed/stretched to 320*200?
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>An attemt to make a modern OS display and loop a +16MB raw feed flawlessly in 60fps will in 99.9% of all cases fail miserably.
If you are running stuff in the background. If you are only running the animation, even the VESA local bus VGA card on a 486 can do 15MB/second (as measured on an ATI Mach64 using Rep MOVSD) and a 320*200*16 (5-6-5 VESA mode) at 60 frames/second is only 7.68MB and if you are using Win98SE/ME (and not XP/Vista), you can use the Int 10h to set the VESA BIOS mode and directly write to the A000:0000 memory mapped VGA area.
I guess I see your point if you were using XP with all the virus-scanners running in the background and you can't set the mode to 320*200*16; then you would be forced to write to the entire 1024*768*32 or 1280*1024*32 stretching and converting the image to the color format of the screen.
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On the ST, Cyber software (CAD 3D, Cyper Paint etc) let you page flip 16 color 320x200 pictures up to 60fps (NTSC). Spectrum 512 using unispec allowed 512 color pictures to page flip at 60fps. You could make some nice animations with a MEGA ST4 (4 megabytes of RAM). But on the Amiga 500, when I demonstrated CAD 3D for it, I was able to only get about 30fps (32 color pictures), and I remember some Scult 3D and the juggler animation (HAM-6) graphics, never being able to surpass 30fps. So Again, I was just curious if the software available to the consumer for the orginal Amigas (500,1000,2000) could let you do 60fps animations, be it 32 color, 64 color half bright, or
the very impressive 4,096 color HAM-6?
No doubt, the AGA chipset was more than capable. But I'm trying to settle somthing that has been bothering me when I was a computer salesman back in 1988/1989-- the time when there was only an Amiga 500,1000,2000 and only an Atari 520ST, 1040ST, and Mega ST2/4 in the States.
Thank you EVERYONE for trying to resolve this for me. Again- I'm sure (not entirely) it was possible for programers to achieve this goal, but I just wanted to know if the software available by 1989 for the Amiga could.
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I'd venture the replay routines on the Amiga were optimized/designed to allow replay of interlaced frames. There are only 30 interlaced fps, so the coders didn't include a special faster non-interlace mode replay of up to 60 fps.
The Ataris lack interlace mode, so you'd code for 60 fps from the start.
Maybe as simple as that.
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JetRacer wrote:
@ bloodline: notice how I didn't write compressed video replay but raw video (more accurately: animation).
An attemt to make a modern OS display and loop a +16MB raw feed flawlessly in 60fps will in 99.9% of all cases fail miserably. If not at replay then when it "loops" and halt for 0.5 sec to re-loading the whole thing or some similar dumbass behavior.
I would seriously have to disagree here, since I can run 50 stereo tracks of 24bit audio all at 48Khz on my MacBook Pro... right from its slow laptop drive without problems in Logic Pro... That is something like 25MB/s... not to mention the number of effects and automations running at the same time...
I have friends who are film students, one is able to edit uncompressed HD films in FinalCut on His MacBook Pro... and the other uses Adobe something-or-other on a fairly old WinXP machine...
Even the humble laptop has had this level of performance for many years.
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bloodline wrote:
JetRacer wrote:
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
It does? Perhaps 10 years ago... but not now...
Yeah, now it's crappy chipsets that cause the issue of slow full screen rendering. Thank you, Intel.
I had a workstation with the 810 chipset and it could not do full screen video, even with a high-performance PCI video card. And so now I have a notebook with the 915 chipset, and while it CAN do full screen, the chipset and CPU can reach around 160F during the decode and display process.
And these aren't isolated; Intel is KNOWN for making crappy video-integrated chipsets.
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Please show me a non-crappy integrated video chipset... :roll:
The Whitney chipset had many problems and is best rapidly discarded.
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Zac67 wrote:
Please show me a non-crappy integrated video chipset... :roll:
The Whitney chipset had many problems and is best rapidly discarded.
My laptop has the Intel 855GM chipset and despite it's 5 years old, it works great. I can even watch 720p video on my external 22" tft at 1680x1050 resolution without a glitch.
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The notebook I'm typing this on has an i945GM chipset and I kept experiencing system crashes w/ DirectX in tighter memory situations. Only after expanding to 2 GB this has somewhat grown better.
I had a GIF image that kept bluescreening the system when the Explorer's preview function was used - on all Intel graphics systems I tried it on. I haven't found one single nVidia or ATI driven system to crash with it - I've tested ~25 machines.
Go figure.
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bloodline wrote:
JetRacer wrote:
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
It does? Perhaps 10 years ago... but not now...
Was about to say - I work in a video production house and work with uncompressed digitized video and animations all day long.
I export these for client review a lot of the time to uncompressed (1:1) quicktime for clients to review via ftp when sending a tape isn't viable.
I'm hoping this still works when I get back from vacation - or I might be out of a job... :lol:
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bloodline wrote:
I have friends who are film students, one is able to edit uncompressed HD films in FinalCut on His MacBook Pro... and the other uses Adobe something-or-other on a fairly old WinXP machine...
Even the humble laptop has had this level of performance for many years.
That would most likely be Adobe Premier (and/or After Effects).
I use Avid Adrenaline and Nitrus DS (formally Softimage) at work and Avid Xpress Pro on this system at home.
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Zac67 wrote:
I'd venture the replay routines on the Amiga were optimized/designed to allow replay of interlaced frames. There are only 30 interlaced fps, so the coders didn't include a special faster non-interlace mode replay of up to 60 fps.
The Ataris lack interlace mode, so you'd code for 60 fps from the start.
Maybe as simple as that.[/quote]
Interesting- so you have a theory that say those Anim files were limited to 30fps because the programers scripted them for interlaced modes?
This does get to the heart of my question. Most software by 1989 that allowed non programers such as myself to make animation using programs such as Scupt 3d, or photon paint II, saved the files as ANIM files (?). So these players much like the Atari ST SPC players, could page flip up to only 30fps? Unitl that AGA chipset and ANIM6 or ANIM7 came out?
Thank you everyone for your help. I'm always much more fascinating is what software allowed the user to do versus the specifications. If a paint program was faster on an ST, did didn't matter if the Amiga had a Blitter, the software buyer was at the mercy of the programmers.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Zac67 wrote:
I'd venture the replay routines on the Amiga were optimized/designed to allow replay of interlaced frames. There are only 30 interlaced fps, so the coders didn't include a special faster non-interlace mode replay of up to 60 fps.
The Ataris lack interlace mode, so you'd code for 60 fps from the start.
Maybe as simple as that.
Interesting- so you have a theory that say those Anim files were limited to 30fps because the programers scripted them for interlaced modes?
This does get to the heart of my question. Most software by 1989 that allowed non programers such as myself to make animation using programs such as Scupt 3d, or photon paint II, saved the files as ANIM files (?). So these players much like the Atari ST SPC players, could page flip up to only 30fps? Unitl that AGA chipset and ANIM6 or ANIM7 came out?
Thank you everyone for your help. I'm always much more fascinating is what software allowed the user to do versus the specifications. If a paint program was faster on an ST, did didn't matter if the Amiga had a Blitter, the software buyer was at the mercy of the programmers. [/quote]
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
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The - supposed - limitation would not be due to the file format, but the replay routine. On the Amiga Copper lists are used for most video timings. This suggests to trigger the page flip on the very last video line (only present on the 2nd field), thus limiting the replay speed to 30 fps (for NTSC). There might even be some OS support for this method (can't find my KRM right now).
Hasn't anyone here actually low-level coded something like this?
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bloodline wrote:
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
Good point, but non-interlaced runs at 50 resp. 60 fps. However, the synchronized 'Amiga' way is what I was pointing at.
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Zac67 wrote:
bloodline wrote:
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
Good point, but non-interlaced runs at 50 resp. 60 fps. However, the synchronized 'Amiga' way is what I was pointing at.
All TV displays are interlaced, regardless of what the Amiga is putting out. :-)
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Well, TV displays are interlaced since TV signals are. The Amiga's video signal may be non-interlaced, so that's what the monitor has to output.
My old Mitsubishi EUM even showed black lines between scan lines in non-interlace mode due to its low dot pitch.
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Zac67 wrote:
Well, TV displays are interlaced since TV signals{/i] are. The Amiga's video signal may be non-interlaced, so that's what the monitor has to output.
My old Mitsubishi EUM even showed black lines between scan lines in non-interlace mode due to its low dot pitch.
Exactly! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_television#Display_technology
Anything synced with a TV will referesh at either 25 or 30 fps.
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The Amiga (OCS/ECS or AGA) is capable of outputting animations at the display refresh rate, which is 60Hz for NTSC and 50Hz for PAL -- or other refresh rates (e.g. AGA modes like Super72 at about 72 Hz) -- and this is independent of the TV or display using interlace technique for half-frames. If the Amiga outputs the display in non-interlace mode, the same display lines will be updated, hence it is full 50/60Hz.
What is displayed during each frame depends on the copper list that selects the memory address for the displayed bitplanes. The Amiga is capable of multi-buffering which only requires a few pointers to be changed to switch between animation frames (with 2 MB chipram, about 25 full frames (320*256*8 bit (or HAM8)) can be stored in memory -- an A500 with 512KB chipmem can hold 8 full frames of HAM6 animation in memory). This means, you could play back 8 frames of uncompressed animation with nearly no CPU use (you could also have some of the bitplanes fixed to some graphics (like a colour gradient) and only update one bitplane, like I used this in the tunnel effect for my Tubes game graphics).
But usually an animation consists of more frames. Hence, only double buffering is used, hence while one frame is displayed, the next frame will be rendered using the CPU or blitter (e.g. for polygon gfx).
The anim5/7/8 etc formats use this technique for specifying the deltas between frame x and x-2, so depending on the amount of changes, not all 60KB for a 320*256*HAM6 frame need to be updated. Even a 68000 running at 7.14 MHz is capable of transferring memory that fast for 60 frames per second. As HAM6 is a hardware compression technique for 12 bit (4096 colours) into 6 bit, HAM6 has usually more delta due to digital noise in the image, for example in raytracing animations or movies. If the source of the anim is stored in fast ram, the cpu usually can operate a bit faster on it.
The iff-anim formats 5/7/8 are more or less the same and only differ in the width of the vertical slices that are used for updating the next frame. AFAIR anim5 uses byte (8 pixel wide) slices, whereas anim7 uses word (16 pixel) and anim8 uses longword (32 pixel) wide slices and thus are less cpu intensive -- at worse compression rate.
In summary: Comparing a 6 bit deep HAM6 animation in anim5 format might not be fair to compare against a 5 bit deep 32 colour animation in some other format using different compression. The Amiga itself is very well capable of real-time "one frame" animations.
Most games have "one frame" engines, such as Turrican, James Pond, Lionheart, Jim Power or Zool. Only a few use "2 frame" updates, such as Banshee or Magic Pockets.
Everything answered by now?
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bloodline wrote:
Zac67 wrote:
bloodline wrote:
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
Good point, but non-interlaced runs at 50 resp. 60 fps. However, the synchronized 'Amiga' way is what I was pointing at.
All TV displays are interlaced, regardless of what the Amiga is putting out. :-)
The Atari ST color monitor wasn't interlaced. I'm sure the Amiga monitor wasn't interlaced as well. Correct.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Zac67 wrote:
bloodline wrote:
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
Good point, but non-interlaced runs at 50 resp. 60 fps. However, the synchronized 'Amiga' way is what I was pointing at.
All TV displays are interlaced, regardless of what the Amiga is putting out. :-)
The Atari ST color monitor wasn't interlaced. I'm sure the Amiga monitor wasn't interlaced as well. Correct.
Without knowing which model of monitor you are refering to, how are we to know? :-)
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
The Atari ST color monitor wasn't interlaced. I'm sure the Amiga monitor wasn't interlaced as well. Correct.
Wrong. It isn't the monitor that is interlaced...
PAL and NTSC both allow interlaced modes, and any monitor should be able to display them. It is a shortcoming of the Atari if it wasn't able to generate those signals.
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Zac67 wrote:
bloodline wrote:
It could be that Amiga software was almost always beam synchronised to ensure that the graphics wouldn't tear during redraws... I guess the Amiga was therefore at the mercy of the display device, if that was a TV, then it would be 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC).
Good point, but non-interlaced runs at 50 resp. 60 fps. However, the synchronized 'Amiga' way is what I was pointing at.[/quote]
All TV displays are interlaced, regardless of what the Amiga is putting out. :-)[/quote]
The Atari ST color monitor wasn't interlaced. I'm sure the Amiga monitor wasn't interlaced as well. Correct.[/quote]
Without knowing which model of monitor you are refering to, how are we to know? :-)[/quote]
Well I'm trying to focus on the 1985-1989 time frame. So the Atari RGB montiors were the sc1224- made from goldstar and JVC i believe. The Amiga monitors at the time? not sure- I do know they were bigger than Atari's "large" 12inch displays.
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platon42 wrote:
The Amiga (OCS/ECS or AGA) is capable of outputting animations at the display refresh rate, which is 60Hz for NTSC and 50Hz for PAL -- or other refresh rates (e.g. AGA modes like Super72 at about 72 Hz) -- and this is independent of the TV or display using interlace technique for half-frames. If the Amiga outputs the display in non-interlace mode, the same display lines will be updated, hence it is full 50/60Hz.
What is displayed during each frame depends on the copper list that selects the memory address for the displayed bitplanes. The Amiga is capable of multi-buffering which only requires a few pointers to be changed to switch between animation frames (with 2 MB chipram, about 25 full frames (320*256*8 bit (or HAM8)) can be stored in memory -- an A500 with 512KB chipmem can hold 8 full frames of HAM6 animation in memory). This means, you could play back 8 frames of uncompressed animation with nearly no CPU use (you could also have some of the bitplanes fixed to some graphics (like a colour gradient) and only update one bitplane, like I used this in the tunnel effect for my Tubes game graphics).
But usually an animation consists of more frames. Hence, only double buffering is used, hence while one frame is displayed, the next frame will be rendered using the CPU or blitter (e.g. for polygon gfx).
The anim5/7/8 etc formats use this technique for specifying the deltas between frame x and x-2, so depending on the amount of changes, not all 60KB for a 320*256*HAM6 frame need to be updated. Even a 68000 running at 7.14 MHz is capable of transferring memory that fast for 60 frames per second. As HAM6 is a hardware compression technique for 12 bit (4096 colours) into 6 bit, HAM6 has usually more delta due to digital noise in the image, for example in raytracing animations or movies. If the source of the anim is stored in fast ram, the cpu usually can operate a bit faster on it.
The iff-anim formats 5/7/8 are more or less the same and only differ in the width of the vertical slices that are used for updating the next frame. AFAIR anim5 uses byte (8 pixel wide) slices, whereas anim7 uses word (16 pixel) and anim8 uses longword (32 pixel) wide slices and thus are less cpu intensive -- at worse compression rate.
In summary: Comparing a 6 bit deep HAM6 animation in anim5 format might not be fair to compare against a 5 bit deep 32 colour animation in some other format using different compression. The Amiga itself is very well capable of real-time "one frame" animations.
Most games have "one frame" engines, such as Turrican, James Pond, Lionheart, Jim Power or Zool. Only a few use "2 frame" updates, such as Banshee or Magic Pockets.
Everything answered by now?
Part of what I orginally asked was-
"when I had side by side comparisons I noticed that the Amiga 500 never could do 60fps animations? We even had Antic software with Cad 3D 2.0 on both computers, but the Amiga was limited to 30fps at best. I remember having several (albeit slightly downgraded graphicly) Amiga HAM-6 animations such as the juggler, or a Scult 3D demo converted to Spectrum 512 running at 60fps on the ST. I could never answer the question to customers if the Amiga animation software could match that speed.
Cyperpaint on the ST was Zoetrope on the Amiga- was the Amiga version capable of 60fps? My question is does any Amiga software for the 500,1000, or 2000 allow full screen 320x200 animations at 60fps? Turbo Silver 3.0, VideoScape 3d, Photon Video Cel Animator, Deluxe Paint III, and Photon Paint II all had animation capabilities on the Amiga. But none of my magazines mentioned how fast these animations could go. The reviewers always neglected to mention if it could. That along with my personal experience suggests the Amiga could not. Am I wrong?
If not, was it the CHIP RAM in the Amiga preventing 60fps animations? Was it the slightly slower clock speed (7.1 MHz vs 8.0 MHz) of the 68000? Was it the more memory intense files of the Amiga- Atari's 4bit versus Amiga's 5bit picture files? Was it perhaps the Amiga 500 only had 512K?
Thanks for you help everyone. "
I'm still at a loss if the Amiga software allowed it's users from 1985-1989 for the orginal Amigas (500,1000,2000) could page flip 60fps animations like I could with my Atari ST (albeit a differn't graphic quality)
Thanks everyone for you time and thoughts.
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If not, was it the CHIP RAM in the Amiga preventing 60fps animations? Was it the slightly slower clock speed (7.1 MHz vs 8.0 MHz) of the 68000? Was it the more memory intense files of the Amiga- Atari's 4bit versus Amiga's 5bit picture files? Was it perhaps the Amiga 500 only had 512K?
Sigh.
Using 5 or 6 bitplane modes in OCS/ECS (A500) in lowres will hurt CPU performance when accessing CHIP ram, as even and some odd cycles (normally reserved for the CPU) are used for display DMA. I think it was about 17% slower for 6 bitplanes (six bitplanes for HAM6, not five as you said). I don't know how the ST accessed its memory and if it had to share CPU cycles with the display controller. Probably it had, but I don't know the impact.
And yes, 7.1Mhz vs 8 MHz also has an impact.
And yes, 6 bitplanes is more memory intense than 4 (16 colours) or 5 (32 colours) bitplanes, thus more cpu power is required to process it.
And no, it is not about the less memory.
And I still claim that it was possible to achieve 60fps on a standard A500 with HAM6 animations at 320x200 pixels and only 512KB chipmem (there were some scene demos doing exactly that). But I am not sure that the anim5 was suitable for that due to compression scheme -- hence I cannot confirm that the software players would achieve 60 hz on that particular animation you were mentioning.
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@ varius people: I didn't try to claim some Amiga superiority nut opinion nor anything. -Ofcourse there exist dedicated video editing stuff that does this flawlessly for every platform. I meant some basic form of diplay tool most people use. Such always performs/behaves equally poorly under previusly mentioned circumstances no matter which platform one turns to. That's all.
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JetRacer wrote:
@ varius people: I didn't try to claim some Amiga superiority nut opinion nor anything. -Ofcourse there exist dedicated video editing stuff that does this flawlessly for every platform.
I mentioned clients who don't have any bells and whistles to VIEW this.
As for dedicated video editing stuff - this aint the era of Video Toaster anymore - 10 million cards and a hole in your wallet. You can comfortably edit video with little more than a PC and a copy of Adobe Premier - Mac and final cut... even less - I think xp has a crappy home video slap together program , and I know the Mac has one too.
My home edit system does have the Avid SDI, but then again I edit professionally - my 'muckaround' system doesn't.
Maybe put the old noggin into research mode before announcing these 'facts' :-?
The topic was about a comparison of the Atari ST to the Amiga on an animation program - I don't see what point dragging the PC and what it might and might not be able to do compared to an Amiga has to do do with that anyways...
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The topic was about a comparison of the Atari ST to the Amiga on an animation program - I don't see what point dragging the PC and what it might and might not be able to do compared to an Amiga has to do do with that anyways...
Thats because you are on an amiga site where too many people can't forget that the amiga was ONCE the king (or is it queen) of video.
Going on-topic: the guy wants to know : could a stock A500 do animations at 50/60 frames/sec because he only saw 25/30 frames/sec or was this due to software not letting you create anims that playback at 50/60 frames/sec:
1. The hardware could playback 300x200 at 60 fps.
2. 60 fps is not really 60 full frames every second: its really one frame that has every even scan line displayed, followed by the same frame where every odd scan line is shown ie interlaced, and this flickers. Was the Atari running an interlaced mode? If not are you absolutely sure that it was running at 60 fps? Did the animation look smoother but flicker on the Atari?
2. Its likely that 30 frames per second was chosen because the animations on the amiga were ham6, and this was by far the slowest format. Further AFAIK anim5 was EA's animation format, used by dpaint at the time and I have just run dpaint 2 and 3 and i cannot see a way to change the fps, it seems to be hardcoded to do animations at 30 fps.
3. Its likely that the whilst the A500 could have done 60 fps at 300x200, the animations that you viewed were made to run at 30 fps because a) they were in Ham6 format and b) this was a software limitation of the anim5 format.
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stefcep2 wrote:
Thats because you are on an amiga site where too many people can't forget that the amiga was ONCE the king (or is it queen) of video..
I concur - once was. It's the folks who think 'still is' that make me wonder :)
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>...when I had side by side comparisons I noticed that the Amiga 500 never could do 60fps animations? We even had Antic software with Cad 3D 2.0 on both computers, but the Amiga was limited to 30fps at best. I remember having several (albeit slightly downgraded graphicly) Amiga HAM-6 animations such as the juggler, or a Scult 3D demo converted to Spectrum 512 running at 60fps on the ST....
You need to give some better way of proving that the ST version actually ran at 60fps in 320*200*16 since the naked eye has its limitations of noticing frame rates above 25fps. I'll give you an example how to quantify your results. Without using the blitter chip and with the sound and copper running in the background, I was able to paint 320*200 full frames at the following rate on an A500 running at 7.16Mhz: at 3 planes (8 colors/pixel) 52 fps, at 4 planes (16 colors/pixel) 39 fps and in HAM mode 19 fps. The following is the code used to test and it compiles and uploads to the real Amiga with MPDOS Pro (www.mpdos.com):
ORG $10000
Bra.s ProgStart
CopperList:
DW $E0,$0000,$E2,$4000 ;Bplane#0 at $4000
DW $E4,$0000,$E6,$4028 ;Bplane#1 at $4000 + 40
DW $E8,$0000,$EA,$4050 ;Bplane #2 at $4000 + 80
DW $EC,$0000,$EE,$4078 ;Bplane #3 at $4000 + 120
DW $F0,$0000,$F2,$40A0 ;Bplane #4 at $4000 + 160
DW $F4,$0000,$F6,$40C8 ;Bplane #5 at $4000 + 200
DW $180,$F00 ;red color
DW $2c81,$fffeh ;WAIT for video beam (X,Y) = (112,44)
DW $180,$0 ;black color
DW $5E01,$FF00h ;wait for (x,y) = (0,94)
DW $180,$0F0 ;green color
DW $9001,$FF00h ;wait for (x,y) = (0,144)
DW $180,$00F ;blue color
DW $C201,$FF00h ;wait for (x,y) = (0,194)
DW $180,$FF0 ;yellow
DW $F401,$FF00h ;wait for (x,y) = (0,244)
DW $180,$0FF ;cyan
DW $FF01,$FF00h ;wait for (x,y) = (0,255)
DW $180,$F0F ;magenta
DW $FFFF,$FFFE
ProgStart:
Move.l #CopperList,$DFF080 ;1st copper list.
Move #2,$dff088
Move #$2c81,$dff08e
Move #$F4C1,$dff090
Move.l #$3800D0,$dff092
;Move #$d0,$dff094
Move #$4204,$dff100 ;use $6A04 for HAM mode
Move #0,$dff102
Move #$24,$dff104
Move #0,$DFF106 ;unused in OCS
Move #$C8,$dff108
Move #$C8,$dff10a
Move #$C080,$DFF09a
Move #$8381,$dff096
Move #16-1,D1
Move.l #$DFF180,A0 ;color register #0
Clr.w D0
SetPalette: Move D0,(a0)+
Add.w #$111,D0 ;next shade
Dbra D1,SetPalette
Move.l #1200,D3
;Move.l #$0000FFFF,D3
NextFrame: Lea $4000,A0 ;plane #0 at $4000
Move #200-1,D1
NextLine: Moveq #5-1,D0
SetPixels: ;Move.l #-1,$C8(a0) ;plane #5
;Move.l #$0,$A0(a0) ;plane #4
Move.l D3,$78(a0) ;plane #3
Move.l #$00FF00FF,$50(a0) ;plane #2
Move.l #$0F0F0F0F,$28(a0) ;plane #1
Move.l #$33333333,(a0)+ ;plane #0
;Move.l #-1,$C8(a0) ;plane #5
;Move.l #$0,$A0(a0) ;plane #4
Move.l D3,$78(a0) ;plane #3
Move.l #$00FF00FF,$50(a0) ;plane #2
Move.l #$0F0F0F0F,$28(a0) ;plane #1
Move.l #$33333333,(a0)+ ;plane #0
Dbra D0,SetPixels
Adda #200,A0
Dbra D1,NextLine
Dbra D3,NextFrame
AllDone: Move.w $DFF006,D1
Lsr.w #4,D1
Move D1,$DFF180
Jmp AllDone
DW 2 dup(0)
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You need to give some better way of proving that the ST version actually ran at 60fps in 320*200*16 since the naked eye has its limitations of noticing frame rates above 25fps. I'll give you an example how to quantify your results. Without using the blitter chip and with the sound and copper running in the background, I was able to paint 320*200 full frames at the following rate on an A500 running at 7.16Mhz: at 3 planes (8 colors/pixel) 52 fps, at 4 planes (16 colors/pixel) 39 fps and in HAM mode 19 fps. The following is the code used to test and it compiles and uploads to the real Amiga with MPDOS Pro (www.mpdos.com):
Thanks again EVERYONE for trying to settle this long time question of mine.
Proof- sigh.
Well, this wasn't rocket science. For one, the software on the ST said it was 60fps, and for proof all I would have to do is load 30 frames and play it as 60fps and I'd see all of them displayed twice every second- id notice if it went only once. The HAM-6 juggler demo runs at 24 or 30fps if I recall, and once that was converted to the ST, it was at least twice as fast- but again that was because I tested the speed of the ST and the software package claimed it to be. While I'd be hard press to tell the differnce between 55 or 65fps, I'm sure it was, since F10 for full speed with the viewer software, and f9 was half, and the space bar was frame by frame. Each function keyed allowed a differn't speed, come to think of it, I think the software told me what each funntion key did. with that knowledge, and placing the two computers side-by-side with 3 of the same animation demos, I was shocked to notice the ST was page flipping at least twice as fast- ableit once again with graphic pictures that took up less memory- (well Spectrum 512 pictures uncompressed took up 50kilobytes- versus uncompressed 16 color 32 kilobyte files on the ST).
I hope that is proof enough- as for the interlaced issue, I spent days drawing pictures with my eyeball pressed up against my Atari 12" RGB monitor- it was not flickering.
Thank you everyone for your help. =)
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Most games have "one frame" engines, such as Turrican, James Pond, Lionheart, Jim Power or Zool. Only a few use "2 frame" updates, such as Banshee or Magic Pockets.
I'm not sure and I may remember wrong but some games might even have been "3 frame" ones. I think Magic Pockets was one that felt like running on a very slow FPS rate. The funny thing is that IMO sometimes a slower framerate may look/work better than a faster framerate, if the faster of the two is in a certain range. For example 25Hz framerate may look/work worse than 16Hz because of the way the jerky/non-smooth video update "feels" when seen. Doom was limited to 35 FPS which is a very evil framerate where some people can get motion sickness.
Some amiga games were also cheating somewhat in that they had only the scrolling (and usually the main player sprite) running at full frame rate while the real game or the rest of the game was only running at half the rate. Like several Team17 games.
Another game I remember is Midnight Resistance which to me looked like running in full frame rate although it didn't, because of the way the gfx/colors were chosen/painted.
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>Well, this wasn't rocket science. For one, the software on the ST said it was 60fps, and for proof all I would have to do is load 30 frames and play it as 60fps and I'd see all of them displayed twice every second- id notice if it went only once...
It may skip frames while attempting to play at 60fps. Given the fact that ST is 8Mhz and Amiga 500/1000 are at 7.16Mhz simple processor-based memory transfers would be slightly faster on ST but not 30fps vs 60fps and this is also assuming the RAM chips are not the bottleneck. The code I gave before was running from Chip RAM and copying to Chip RAM the slowest RAM in the Amiga.
>...funntion key did. with that knowledge, and placing the two computers side-by-side with 3 of the same animation demos, I was shocked to notice the ST was page flipping at least twice as fast- ableit once again with graphic pictures that took up less memory- (well Spectrum 512 pictures uncompressed took up 50kilobytes- versus uncompressed 16 color 32 kilobyte files on the ST).
There could be a software limitation on the application used. What's the format of the 50Kb of Spectrum 512-- is that also 320*200*16 with palette changes every scan line? 50Kb per frame at 60fps would be 3Megabytes/second.
>I hope that is proof enough- as for the interlaced issue, I spent days drawing pictures with my eyeball pressed up against my Atari 12" RGB monitor- it was not flickering.
I wasn't asking about interlaced stuff since you can always enable/disable interlace with one bit in register mentioned before (one that was poked with 4204h) without affecting performance.
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"There could be a software limitation on the application used. What's the format of the 50Kb of Spectrum 512-- is that also 320*200*16 with palette changes every scan line? 50Kb per frame at 60fps would be 3Megabytes/second."
Spectrum 512- well believe it or not this graphic program gave the Atari ST some advantages over Amiga HAM-6. Spectrum 512 wasn't the standard way (Apple IIGS like) to achieve lots of colors 16 per scan line.
The enginneers hooked an oscilloscope to teh Atari ST MMU chip and reverse-enginneered its timers. Using this information, they designed a method to manipulate those times and stuff more colors into extra simlulated bit planes, before the signal even gets to that Atari ST's graphic Shifter chip. In short- in 1987 Spectrum 512 allowed the ST to display 48 colors every scan line. Quick math translates into 16 colors about every 100 pixels per scan line. This gave some advantages over HAM-6- but then again HAM-6 could also put 320 colors on a line- it's just HAM-6 allowed you only to modify 1 of the 3 RGB colors at a time.
Now I'm not a programmer, but the files took up 50 kilobytes per file uncompressed. I'm not sure why or how- I understand 4-bit (16 colors) pictures on the ST took only 32 kilobytes uncompressed. The ST was able to page flip these files 60 times per second as well as it's 16 color picture formats with software back in 1987. I purchased a 4 megabyte MEGA ST4 at that time, so I could make large page fliping animations at that time.
Still, I feel I'm getting side tracked. I'm not arguing about graphic quality- surely the Amiga offered way more versatiltiy- especially with it's highres overscan color pictures mixed with other resolutions (nice!). And even though I'm an Atarian, to me the Amiga is more of an Atari than the ST was, since it was the evoluation of the Atari 8-bit computers.
O- to understand the memory in the Atari ST- I read that the engineers gave the ST 16 MHz unified RAM- giving 8-MHz to Video, and 8-MHz to the 68000. The ST didn't have anything fancing like CHIP RAM and FAST RAM.
Thanks everyone for still trying to resolve this. I'm starting to accept that perhaps software engineers didn't feel pressed to push the Amiga to 60fps with there animation software. They appeared to be more focused on graphic quality? (I'm still speculating). To bad I just couldn't buy all the animation software, Scult 3D, zoetrope, etc- purchase an Amiga 2000 or an Amiga 500 with a megabyte expansion and benchmark it's software. I'm still leaning towards Chip RAM, and 7.1 MHz clock speed
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Page-flipping is perfectly possible at full framerate on both machines (well, any machine really), only limit is of course the available memory. I'd say the piece of Amiga-software you tried was limited or badly coded, because there's no reason for page-flipped animations to be less than full framerate.
So no reason to blame chip-ram or the clockspeed, a page-flip takes a few cycles and therefore doesn't require any CPU-power at all.
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I suspect that the juggler animation is running at 30FPS because its a 30FPS animation, not because the amiga can't run it faster.
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I have the May/June Magazine of Amiga World about the Juggler. It's a very in depth interview with how it was made and how HAM-6 works. Sadly the article doesn't discuss why his animation program was set to 30fps. Great article about Ray-Tracing etc though. This is what bothers me though- I have several magazines dealing the Amiga including Info which was my favorite for Amiga- but none of the graphic animation reviews even in 1989 said any of the programs allowed up to 60fps animation. That and my personal experience as a Computer Saleman in 1988 and 1989- really bothers me. Didn't Juggler let you select speeds up to 30fps or was it just one speed only- I can't remember now. The conversion on the ST, like all animations, let me select speeds from frame by frame to 60fps. =(
I loved that Amiga demo- my favoriote next to Fuji Boink from Xanth on the Atari ST.
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xeron wrote:
I suspect that the juggler animation is running at 30FPS because its a 30FPS animation, not because the amiga can't run it faster.
Below is part of the readme file from the juggler program I just found on the internet..
" Juggler
(c 1986 by Eric Graham, All Rights Reserved.
Controls:
Juggling speed is set by typing 0-9 on the numeric keypad. Speed is only changed once per complete juggling pass, so it may seem to take a bit of time before the Juggler responds to your speed change command. ESC exits the program.
This program is being made available by Commodore for use on the Amiga Computer. We encourage you to copy it for your friends who own Amigas. Have fun."
Notice the control speeds- this is much like the Atari ST programs I used. So why would the Amiga need to stop at 30fps? The article from the 1987 Amiga World magazine claimed the program ran at 30fps, and that is what I remembered when it was side by side the Atari ST. I realize this is just one demo- but this along with two others I had from CAD programs (Anitic CAD-3D 2.0 and Cyber Scult) had animations up to "only" 30fps.
Thanks everyone again for trying to help me.
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Britelite wrote:
Page-flipping is perfectly possible at full framerate on both machines (well, any machine really), only limit is of course the available memory. I'd say the piece of Amiga-software you tried was limited or badly coded, because there's no reason for page-flipped animations to be less than full framerate.
So no reason to blame chip-ram or the clockspeed, a page-flip takes a few cycles and therefore doesn't require any CPU-power at all.
I was reading a 1988 issue of Amazing Computing and it's review of Videoscape 2.0. Again nothing about Video speed playback BUT thar article did tell me it's viewers.
"The technique for saving has been improved: a VideoScape 2.0 animation takes up half as much space as a 1.0 animation. These new ANIM files can be played back with version 4.0 of ShowANIM or 4.2 of PlayANIM."
Now VideoScape 2.0 allowed Hold and Modify- these animations could be 4,096 pictures. I wonder did Scult 3D using ShowANIM or PlayANIM? and did these programs offer 0-9 speed selections as the juggler animation- and most important- how fast for the top speed of these programs. And if it was limited to 30fps- WHY?
Thanks everyone again- I'll keep digging thru all more magazines and internet to get more answers if I can find them.
Robert. =)
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Actually, there's no sense in running any anim with >30 fps - your eyes wouldn't see the difference anyway (60 fps vs 30 fps with every other frame skipped). That's the exact reason why cinema/PAL/NTSC work with 24/25/30 fps: their designers wouldn't waste film/bandwidth.
The Amiga programmers were obviously aware of this and just coded that way.
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Zac67 wrote:
Actually, there's no sense in running any anim with >30 fps - your eyes wouldn't see the difference anyway (60 fps vs 30 fps with every other frame skipped). That's the exact reason why cinema/PAL/NTSC work with 24/25/30 fps: their designers wouldn't waste film/bandwidth.
The Amiga programmers were obviously aware of this and just coded that way.
No disrespt, but I so strongly disagree- ever play video games that play at 30fps versus 60fps?- try car games, you'll notice the differnece. In short, especially back in those days, I could see a differnce simply becuase motion blur wasn't working- a trick that works real good with "low" frame rates. Movies drive me crazy at 24 fps when they pan left and right quickly- but this isn't my question- this is a whole entire differn't argument or opinion. I used to make lots of animations on my Atari ST, and 60fps was clearly better when lots of frames where included. Boing on the Amiga, would be smoother for example at 60 verus 30fps.
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If all the frames in raw format would been able to fit on chip ram:
Then 60fps would be not problem and would only use
1% cpu power as just simple changing the mem pointer in the copper list.
But if you use delta compression such as IFF anim when the cpu would have to go to work
And if you have to copy from fast ram to chip ram you could not use the blitter.
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With the frames in raw format, you could end up with 0% CPU load: let the copper handle all the page flipping (rather lengthy list, but with only a few frames to play).
But: if you have no fast RAM and use HAM (6 planes) you end up with 50% less bandwidth during bitplane DMA. Depending on overscan width, you'd get 25-45% speed penalty for the CPU.
In addition (with fast RAM), you would probably store the ANIM data in fast and decompress directly from fast to chip, so you could use the remaining 55-75% of chipram speed to fill the frames; with few enough bytes to change you could just about get away with full 60 fps.
The Atari STs could only do 16 colors, and with only 4 bitplanes you'd have no speed penalty on the Amiga, so 60 fps would be a piece of cake (with or without fast RAM).
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tonyp12 wrote:
If all the frames in raw format would been able to fit on chip ram:
Then 60fps would be not problem and would only use
1% cpu power as just simple changing the mem pointer in the copper list.
But if you use delta compression such as IFF anim when the cpu would have to go to work
And if you have to copy from fast ram to chip ram you could not use the blitter.
I was watching these demos at my work on an Amiga 500- that translates to all Chip RAM. Again, I keep reading the Amiga can, or the Amiga should have no problem, or the Amiga has no need too, but the reality is, in my visual experience at the time, the Amiga animation demos, as with Sculpt 3D, or Antics Cad 3D 2.0, or the Juggler Demo, these animation programs stopped at no greater than 30fps. My question again is, why? And is everyone that says it can, better programmers than the software makers of these programs, or is it because of other reasons? I'm just curious, because the Atari ST was pounded for being inferior by experts all the time, and i really don't care what was better- to me it was a win win, because Amiga to be is an Atari computer (sorry if that upsets Amiga fans), and I enjoyed my Atari ST software very much as well. I keep reading all my old magazines reviewing animation software or demos, and none mention 60fps as was bragged about with Atari ST's Cad 3D and shown all the time with Spectrum 512 page flipping. Again, if the Amiga was limited to this page flipping, was it just the software, the speed of Chip RAM, the 7.1 MHz clock speed, the more memory intense files? I duno. sigh.
Thanks again everyone for trying to help.
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To repeat my theory: The programmers coded that way to allow non-interlaced as well as interlaced anims - you usually program as universally as reasonable. They regarded 30 fps as sufficient (which it usually is, at least if the frames are made for it (video captured / motion blurred).
The Atari programmers didn't have to watch for non-/interlace differences since the STs can't output the former (only with tricks).
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Zac67 wrote:
To repeat my theory: The programmers coded that way to allow non-interlaced as well as interlaced anims - you usually program as universally as reasonable. They regarded 30 fps as sufficient (which it usually is, at least if the frames are made for it (video captured / motion blurred).
The Atari programmers didn't have to watch for non-/interlace differences since the STs can't output the former (only with tricks).
So is this a confirmation that the software writen for all these animation programs by 1989 never let the users to 60fps?
Thanks again everyone.
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An important thing to consider here is the critical flicker fusion frequency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
For the average person under low light levels this about 60 Hz and under bright light this is about 30 hz ( thats why using a refresh of 50 hz ie pal or DBLpal flickers at night and not so much in daytime). Its also why NTSC flickers less than PAL.
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>So is this a confirmation that the software writen for all these animation programs by 1989 never let the users to 60fps?
You need to make it clear whether you want to compare what frame rates the softwares written for both machines can accomplish or what the hardware is capable of doing. My Atari ST disk drive is down right now-- perhaps someone can write code or port the one I wrote previously to see what frame rates they get on the ST at 4bits/pixel. I guess on the ST everything is fast RAM or everything is chip RAM.
Sorry for delay in replying-- was too busy discussing death here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=123710
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A standard ST can be considered 'chip RAM only' since framebuffer data can be put everywhere.
The ST uses a static bus priority scheme where half of the cycles are used by graphics/sound/whatever DMA and the other half is used by the CPU. A plain 68000 can't use any more cycles anyway. This explains why the ST can only do 16 colors in 15kHz and two in 31(?) kHz.
This is in contrast to the Amiga's dynamic bus scheme where up to half of the CPU's cycles can be reissued to chipset DMA (with the blitter nasty bit all of its cycles) - actually it's rather like the CPU is DMAing into the memory belonging to the chipset (i.e. connected to Agnus).
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--edit-- Old progressive resolutions are indeed capable of 50/60 fps :/
Bottom line -- NTSC video (like Amiga/ST used) is capable of displaying 30 frames per second, or 60 interlaced fields per second. Amiga/ST monitors are probably not capable of displaying 60 non-laced (progressive) frames per second.
Conclusion -- there is essentailly *no* difference between Amiga and ST fps capability on non-laced screens (aside from Amiga advantage of better quality graphics). Whatever you were changing with the function keys to get "60 fps" sounds like some kind of marketing gimmick.
Do some research on NTSC video here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntsc
Rowbeartoe wrote:
tonyp12 wrote:
If all the frames in raw format would been able to fit on chip ram:
Then 60fps would be not problem and would only use
1% cpu power as just simple changing the mem pointer in the copper list.
But if you use delta compression such as IFF anim when the cpu would have to go to work
And if you have to copy from fast ram to chip ram you could not use the blitter.
I was watching these demos at my work on an Amiga 500- that translates to all Chip RAM. Again, I keep reading the Amiga can, or the Amiga should have no problem, or the Amiga has no need too, but the reality is, in my visual experience at the time, the Amiga animation demos, as with Sculpt 3D, or Antics Cad 3D 2.0, or the Juggler Demo, these animation programs stopped at no greater than 30fps. My question again is, why? And is everyone that says it can, better programmers than the software makers of these programs, or is it because of other reasons? I'm just curious, because the Atari ST was pounded for being inferior by experts all the time, and i really don't care what was better- to me it was a win win, because Amiga to be is an Atari computer (sorry if that upsets Amiga fans), and I enjoyed my Atari ST software very much as well. I keep reading all my old magazines reviewing animation software or demos, and none mention 60fps as was bragged about with Atari ST's Cad 3D and shown all the time with Spectrum 512 page flipping. Again, if the Amiga was limited to this page flipping, was it just the software, the speed of Chip RAM, the 7.1 MHz clock speed, the more memory intense files? I duno. sigh.
Thanks again everyone for trying to help.
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NTSC and PAL are very well capable of displaying full 60/50 fps NON-INTERLACED. In interlace mode the frame rate drops to half, but vertical resolution doubles (same horizontal scan rate of course).
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Zac67 wrote:
NTSC and PAL are very well capable of displaying full 60/50 fps NON-INTERLACED. In interlace mode the frame rate drops to half, but vertical resolution doubles (same horizontal scan rate of course).
DOH! I stand corrected, 240/288p is indeed capable of 50/60 fps. The fields are scanned one atop the other twice as fast, at half resolution of normal interlace. (I suppose there'd be quite a bit more flicker if it was done the way I was thinking). Seems *I* needed to do a bit more research, LOL ;-)
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One question though:
"We even had Antic software with Cad 3D 2.0 on both computers, but the Amiga was limited to 30fps at best."
Everything I've searched sez CAD 3D 2.0 was an ST only program?? So I'm wondering how you had them both side by side running the same software/animations… It would be interesting to know what exactly the Amiga was running, since (once again from what I’ve researched) Antic CAD 3D 2.0 was basically considered the pinnacle of the genre on the ST (yet, in reading the old reviews I find no mention of the "highy advertised 60 fps" thing)... so if you were comparing that to some ropey PD software on the Amiga, that could definitely explain it.
I also found this interesting bit (more on this (http://www.asterius.com/atari/cad3d) page):
"Yet the biggest new feature by far in CAD-3D 2.0 was the ability to render to the new "delta-compressed" animation format developed by Mark Kimball. The basic idea was to start with a picture, and then for each subsequent "movie frame" store only the parts that change, rather than storing each frame as an entire picture, thus wasting data. Mark Kimball implemented this process as an Atari ST desk accessory called Cyber Smash."
Anyhow, after reading the entire thread (and exercising some common sense), it's obvious the OCS Amiga would have no problem matching/surpassing the ST's animation skillz, one guy even posted the code to prove it. Whatever differences existed were down to file formats (with tricks/gimmicks like posted above) or screenmode differences, not the actual hardware. (I would imagine raising the small MHz difference is a non-sequitur in light of the Amiga's co-processor scheme.) Also (as has been mentioned), there were a ton of 60 fps games/demos running on low-res screens (glad I got that sorted :D) on OCS machines, and a ton of graphics/animation software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_productivity_software#Graphics.2C_video.2C_design_and_CAD_software) available (which was not limited to 320x200 and 16 colors like Cyber Paint btw). As the Amiga was basically the home animation "King" at the time, I’m sure both the hardware and software was able to match whatever the ST could do. :P (As an aside, anything intended for broadcast would obviously be 30 fps/interlaced due to NTSC broadcast regulations.)
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I also found this interesting bit (more on this page):
"Yet the biggest new feature by far in CAD-3D 2.0 was the ability to render to the new "delta-compressed" animation format developed by Mark Kimball. The basic idea was to start with a picture, and then for each subsequent "movie frame" store only the parts that change, rather than storing each frame as an entire picture, thus wasting data. Mark Kimball implemented this process as an Atari ST desk accessory called Cyber Smash."
This is exactly what Magic Lantern (ver. 2.0), written by Michael Todorovic's company, Terra Nova Development, did for 24-bit graphic cards for the Amiga. I've got it & it's pretty impressive.
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Well I just wrote a novel and I forgot to post it. In short, I did some research and have concluded that perhaps I was runing a Antic CAD 3D "demo" on the Amiga. However Antic did release Design disks for the Amiga that were basicly Atari ST designs from it's CAD 3D. O- and Zoetrope on the Amiga was Atari ST's Cyperpaint. My question once again was why did Juggler, Sculpt 3D, and this Demo of CAD 3D on the Amiga never allow speeds to go faster than 30fps as they did on the Atari ST?
As for the Graphic superiority of the Amiga- well overall I agree the Amiga was better- but I would argue and have some proof from pictures I've made using Spectrum 512, that some things at 320x200 looked better than the Amiga Ham-6 pictures. Spectrum 512 wasn't just a 16 colors per scan line program like Apple IIGS graphics were, you could display almost 50 unique colors per scan line- this offered some advantages over HAM-6 which had to modify one of the 16 unique colors RGB values to display up to 4096 colors- the look would look smudgy at times. I had fun converting GIF and BMP pictures to HAM-6 and Spectrum 512. Amiga wasn't always better. And I made some beutiful 512 color pictures on my Atari ST that HAM-6 simply couldn't convert as well. I wish I could upload a PNG file to show. In addition, the monochrom 640x400 non-interlace display was nice for desktop publishing- the Amiga "flicker" at the resolution was greart for pictures, but not text. But- again this isn't about graphics, this is about my question as to why Amiga animation software appeared to always be limited to 30fps on the store Amiga 500. hmmmm.
Thanks again everyone for your help and time.
Below is a link to see some Spectrum 512 examples- some were Amiga HAM-6 pictures converted to Spectrum 512. The other is a picture I made showing all of the Atari ST's colors and the conversion to HAM-6. I realize and acknoledge however, that some HAM-6 pictures looked really bad converted to Spectrum 512- the point is, HAM-6 wasn't always better.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Spectrum_512_power.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/ST_versus_Amiga.png
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O- and the software from Spectrum 512 let you page flip up to 60fps. As for advertising it, the manual I believed in Spectrum 512 mentioned it- but it was obvious just from using my function keys. The Catalog (Antics software store) mentioned 60fps for it's CAD 3D. And without motion blur, you could still see stepping even at 60fps with the naked eye. Wasn't Boing only 30fps as well?
Thanks again for your help everyone.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Below is a link to see some Spectrum 512 examples- some were Amiga HAM-6 pictures converted to Spectrum 512. The other is a picture I made showing all of the Atari ST's colors and the conversion to HAM-6. I realize and acknoledge however, that some HAM-6 pictures looked really bad converted to Spectrum 512- the point is, HAM-6 wasn't always better.
But the "Spectrum 512" trick requires CPU time, a significant amount since you need to interrupt at the end of every scanline... HAM-6 requires no CPU time... HAM-6 is better, in every regard... it is more complex to set up the picture to look good, but it is better.
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bloodline wrote: Rowbeartoe wrote: Below is a link to see some Spectrum 512 examples- some were Amiga HAM-6 pictures converted to Spectrum 512. The other is a picture I made showing all of the Atari ST's colors and the conversion to HAM-6. I realize and acknoledge however, that some HAM-6 pictures looked really bad converted to Spectrum 512- the point is, HAM-6 wasn't always better.
But the "Spectrum 512" trick requires CPU time, a significant amount since you need to interrupt at the end of every scanline... HAM-6 requires no CPU time... HAM-6 is better, in every regard... it is more complex to set up the picture to look good, but it is better.
Spectrum 512 and other paint programs that followed on the ST did offer some advantage over Ham-6. But Ham-6 had advantages 2. But this isnt about spectrum 512 versus Ham-6.
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Juggler, Sculpt 3D,
Sculpt 3D was the first animation program for the Amiga (what Juggler was done with), maybe that had something to do with it. Again, the authors may not have seen a point (for reasons already listed).
and this Demo of CAD 3D on the Amiga
Link?
this is about my question as to why Amiga animation software appeared to always be limited to 30fps on the store Amiga 500. hmmmm.
So all we've really established here is that whatever was running in your store (you seem to not be sure, or think it might have been "demo" software) may have been limited to 30 fps, and not "all Amiga animation software." Why not research the mountain of other Amiga animation titles (aside from the very first one in '86) and see what ya come up with?
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-D- wrote:
Juggler, Sculpt 3D,
Sculpt 3D was the first animation program for the Amiga (what Juggler was done with), maybe that had something to do with it. Again, the authors may not have seen a point (for reasons already listed).
and this Demo of CAD 3D on the Amiga
Link?
this is about my question as to why Amiga animation software appeared to always be limited to 30fps on the store Amiga 500. hmmmm.
So all we've really established here is that whatever was running in your store (you seem to not be sure, or think it might have been "demo" software) may have been limited to 30 fps, and not "all Amiga animation software." Why not research the mountain of other Amiga animation titles (aside from the very first one in '86) and see what ya come up with?
That's why I'm asking. In my first post, I was asking about all the animation software available for the Amiga at the time I was a computer salesman- I've been re-reading all my Amiga magazines up to late 1989 (I had to keep up to answer all the questions people might have had), and all the reviews never mention the speed being able to surpass 30fps- some just don't say at all. In addition Juggler was not Scult 3D. If you look at all the posts, somewhere in here you'll see me talk about the Juggler. The Antic Demo might have been CAD 3D coming soon- or could have been it's Antic Design disks available for Scult 3D and Videoscape. But Zoetrope was Cyperpaint, and we know the ST version did 60fps- so was Zoetrope? The Info magazine review of Zoetrope said the animation files were not the normal Anim files. This really just has to do with the Animation players available for the Amiga. Did the HAM-6 animation players or the 32 color IFF players allow the user to go up to 60fps after they created their animation using paint or animation programs? I had so much fun with CAD 3D- I even made a demo for my store on the ST. O- the good ol days.
Thanks again for all your help
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On the Amiga that you saw, was it running the original Juggler version or the revised bug-fixed version?
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In addition Juggler was not Scult 3D.
Not technically, but kind of:
http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html
"Eric rendered the frames in a raytracer he wrote called ssg, a Sculpt precursor. The rendered images were encoded in the Amiga's HAM display mode and then assembled into a single data file using a lossless delta compression scheme similar to the method that would later be adopted as the standard in the Amiga's ANIM file format."
In regard to Zoetrope, I have no idea what the limit was. (Nor can I find anything about max fps with Cyber Paint, btw.) I will stress again though that anything intended for NTSC broadcast would obviously be limited to 30 fps. (Some Amiga programs did however take advantage of "field rendering" (60 fields/sec) in interlaced modes, for the appearance of smoother motion. Naturally, this would be a non-issue on the ST since there were no laced modes.)
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>As for the Graphic superiority of the Amiga- well overall I agree the Amiga was better- but I would argue and have some proof from pictures I've made using Spectrum 512, that some things at 320x200 looked better than the Amiga Ham-6 pictures.
I have one of those pictures you linked to in a Newtek Demo and it's better on the Amiga-- there are more shades in the picture. The Atari ST is limited to 8 shades/color whereas Amiga is 16 shades/color.
> Spectrum 512 wasn't just a 16 colors per scan line program like Apple IIGS graphics were, you could display almost 50 unique colors per scan line- this offered some advantages over HAM-6 which had to modify one of the 16 unique colors RGB values to display up to 4096 colors- the look would look smudgy at times. I had fun converting GIF and BMP pictures to HAM-6 and Spectrum 512. Amiga wasn't always better...
I would not give credit for scan line changes to Apples IIGS-- they were trying to imitate the Atari/Amiga DLI/CLI on their platform. I heard that Newtek invented a mode called Dynamic HAM which changed colors every scan line in HAM mode to prevented that problem where you had to wait up to 3 pixels to change a RGB completely. Perhaps, someone knows the link to that new mode.
By the way, you mentioned Mega ST w/4MB RAM for animations; well if you are going to go to high end machines, I just ran that same code on the Amiga 4000 and it does 120fps in 16 color mode and 85 frames/second in HAM-6 mode. And that code was brute force frame painting with no compression.
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amigaksi wrote:
"I have one of those pictures you linked to in a Newtek Demo and it's better on the Amiga-- there are more shades in the picture. The Atari ST is limited to 8 shades/color whereas Amiga is 16 shades/color."
That picture was an Amiga picture just converted to Spectrum 512- so of course it would look better on the Amiga- I'd love to have the orginal photograph and then convert it to Spectrum 512- otherwise at best, it can only look the same. BTW- two of those pictures were also VGA 256 color GIF pictures converted as well (I wonder how they would look in HAM-6?. The picture on the top right I believe was an Amiga SHAM picture converted to Spectrum 512 format- so that too would look better on the Amiga since that's what it was.
SHAM was HAM-6 per scan line, so same limitations only you get a fresh 16 colors every line. Sham was soon after I left the computer store I believe. 1990 probably or even later- and by that time- Amiga and Atari had better machines available. I'm sure there was better hacks after Spectrum 512 for Atari ST as well to display more colors per scan line with overscan etc. But back to my comparison- around 1987-1989 the software available for the ST and Amiga used HAM-6 and Spectrum 512 for animations.
amigaksi wrote:
"By the way, you mentioned Mega ST w/4MB RAM for animations; well if you are going to go to high end machines, I just ran that same code on the Amiga 4000 and it does 120fps in 16 color mode and 85 frames/second in HAM-6 mode. And that code was brute force frame painting with no compression."
I mentioned the Mega ST4 because it was available in 1987 about the same time Amiga released the 500 and 2000. As I'm sure you know, the 500 and 2000 were basicly a 1000 with either more expansion slots, or a closed case like the 1040ST. The Mega ST2/4 offered the ST its first Blitter Chip and limited expansion- it was more like the Amiga 1000. These computers are what I'm trying to compare for animation speed as these were what was available when I was a computer salesman. By 1990- Atari released the STE (4,096 colors, blitter, better sound) and the TT- the first true next generation Atari after the ST.
But lets get back to my question.. this can get way out of hand. =)
Thanks again everyone for your help.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
By 1990- Atari released the STE (4,096 colors, blitter, better sound) and the TT- the first true next generation Atari after the ST.
Note that while the STE palette was 12bit (like the OCS Amiga) upgraded from the ST's 9bit palette, it was still only able to display 16 colours at any one time on the screen without the interrupt tricks we have already mentioned.
You must not confuse the palette width with the display depth.
If the palette width of the STE is 12bit, that means each colour gun has 4 shades associated with it... But the STE's RAMDAC can only hold 16 of these 12bit colour registers, this means that the display has a 4bit depth... So each of the 16 colours that can be displayed can be any one of 4096 colours.
And the addition of 2 PCM audio channels isn't really much of an improvement over the original ST... Certainly nothing on the Amiga's 4 PCMs :-)
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Like I said we can easily get side trackd from my question on this forum. The STE was a slight improvement but it was overall outdated when it was released in my opinion- when compared to the Amiga 1000 or the 520ST released 5 years prior. Lets keep with the Amiga 500/1000/2000 versus 520/1040/Mega ST RAM and Animation comparison. Thanks again everyone.
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>SHAM was HAM-6 per scan line, so same limitations only you get a fresh 16 colors every line. Sham was soon after I left the computer store I believe. 1990 probably or even later-...
It's not the same limitations since you have fresh 16 colors out of 320 pixels and the hold-and-modify option for those 16 colors.
Well, if we are talking hardware capabilities, it was possible to have a better HAM in 1985. I'm sure people were modifying palettes on the Amiga using copper list before the dynamic HAM mode.
>But back to my comparison- around 1987-1989 the software available for the ST and Amiga used HAM-6 and Spectrum 512 for animations.
Was the animation compressed with delta compression? How much space did it take up on the disk?
>I mentioned the Mega ST4 because it was available in 1987 about the same time Amiga released the 500 and 2000.
Didn't they make accelerated Amigas or accelerator boards by 1987? The 120fps I got was in OCS mode on an Amiga 4000. I got 39 fps on Amiga 500/1000 at 7.16Mhz.
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I said "SHAM was HAM-6 per scan line, so same limitations only you get a fresh 16 colors every line. Sham was soon after I left the computer store I believe. 1990 probably or even later-..."
amigaksi
"It's not the same limitations since you have fresh 16 colors out of 320 pixels and the hold-and-modify option for those 16 colors.
Well, if we are talking hardware capabilities, it was possible to have a better HAM in 1985. I'm sure people were modifying palettes on the Amiga using copper list before the dynamic HAM mode."
Isn't that what I said "a fresh 16 colors every line" plus hold and modify? Well if not, that's what I meant. Still even so- I could do some things in Spectrum 512 that would still cause even SHAM problems. But obviously, the reverse is possible as well- even more so with SHAM. And like I said, by the time SHAM was available (I'm not sure if paint programs supported it?) I know the demo world was even pushing the ST with more colors on scan lines and overscan etc.
BUT! and this is a big BUT (notice the one T) my question was to the common folk who could only make animations using programs such as Scult 3D for example or CAD 3D for the ST. Followed by was it possible at all for the Amiga since I still witnessed demos such as Juggler (a HAM-6 demo) not doing 60fps. Or boing (a low color demo) apparently wasn't doing 60fps either. I know for a fact, the Atari ST did allow users of Spectrum 512 and it's 16 color programs such as CAD 3D and Cyper paint to do 60fps as well. And the time frame of course I was asking was no later than 1989 when I was a computer salesman. I'm just fascinated by this. The ST got away with this apparently because of it's 16 MHZ RAM- 8MHz for 68000 and 8MHz for video. Simple, cheap, and effective at a time when RAM was faster than CPU's. It's MMU and Shifter chip allowed some cool intrupts too, but required major CPU time to edit the pictures, but once you put those pics in memory- BAM- you had up to 60fps 320x200 500 color page flipping animations. Not bad at all. As for the Amiga- Well Im not sure about it's 4,096 color HAM-6 mode or it's 32/64 color modes being able to page flip at 60fps at 320x200. Amiga clearly was graphicly more capable overall, but I'm just curious if the software or demos ever did 60fps for the Amiga 500/1000/2000. That's all. And if future demos could, why did the orginal ones fail? BTW- I loved Fuji Boink on the ST- it was boing, but with raster color intrupts back in 1986. It was the first "high color" demo I saw on the Atari ST about the same time I saw the "high color" Juggler demo on the Amiga. Boy that was an exciting time.
Thanks everyone.
amigaksi
"Didn't they make accelerated Amigas or accelerator boards by 1987? The 120fps I got was in OCS mode on an Amiga 4000. I got 39 fps on Amiga 500/1000 at 7.16Mhz."
Yes, and by 1989 I remember Transputer boards available for everybody- Atari really went crazy with that for a bit too. But I'm not asking about board accelartors- I put one in my ST too. Just curious about the stalk machines, because as a saleman, I could never answer that question.
Thanks again everyone for your help.
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As for the Amiga- Well Im not sure about it's 4,096 color HAM-6 mode or it's 32/64 color modes being able to page flip at 60fps at 320x200. Amiga clearly was graphicly more capable overall, but I'm just curious if the software or demos ever did 60fps for the Amiga 500/1000/2000. That's all.
Is it so damn hard to understand that the hardware is perfectly capable of full framerate pageflipped animations? I don't know why the few pieces of software you used didn't allow you to do this, but they probably had their reasons. So to put an end to this discussion: both the amiga and st (and 99% of all other computers) are able to flip screens at full framerate. The only limitation being how much memory is available for the individual frames.
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JetRacer wrote:
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
I beg to differ. Having programmed low level VGA stuff, I can assure you that this is not an issue. Maybe if you're running XP with little memory and virus scanners and {bleep}, but well... that's not a proper comparison.
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bloodline wrote:
And the addition of 2 PCM audio channels isn't really much of an improvement over the original ST... Certainly nothing on the Amiga's 4 PCMs :-)
Most true, no offence, didn't you sort of miss the point with the original post?
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Now when I had side by side comparisons I noticed that the Amiga 500 never could do 60fps animations?
Ofcourse it could. Maybe you watched som early Amiga material or something, because it definitely could. I remember some older games being completely crap on the amiga, since they were basically straight off ports from the ST (and bad ones, too) (for example, Bubble Bobble has a horrible framerate at times, when in fact it could run perfectly if using the sprite hardware). And for the record - I'm an Atari geek.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Spectrum 512- well believe it or not this graphic program gave the Atari ST some advantages over Amiga HAM-6. Spectrum 512 wasn't the standard way (Apple IIGS like) to achieve lots of colors 16 per scan line.
I wouldn't call it an advantage over HAM at all. It's about HBL interrupts and code running synchronized with the electron beam. It chews up like 75% of the CPU, if not more, which is not the case with HAM.
Rowbeartoe wrote:
The enginneers hooked an oscilloscope to teh Atari ST MMU chip and reverse-enginneered its timers. Using this information, they designed a method to manipulate those times and stuff more colors into extra simlulated bit planes, before the signal even gets to that Atari ST's graphic Shifter chip.
You're making it sound like rocket science, which it is not. The MMU has no timers, maybe you're referring to the MFP.
O- to understand the memory in the Atari ST- I read that the engineers gave the ST 16 MHz unified RAM- giving 8-MHz to Video, and 8-MHz to the 68000. The ST didn't have anything fancing like CHIP RAM and FAST RAM.
Well, the TT and Falcon (and any 020+ machine) made a distinction between ST-RAM and Fast Ram, where the former could be accessed by the SDMA, blitter and shifter, and the latter could not.
Thanks everyone for still trying to resolve this. I'm starting to accept that perhaps software engineers didn't feel pressed to push the Amiga to 60fps with there animation software.
Dude, you've got it wrong. The Amiga, and the software for it, was able to do 60fps. You've watched some old software which couldn't, and based your opinion on that. When people claim you've got it wrong, you still return to your perception from the old days. That's silly, no offence, but it really is. I'm an Atari guy too, for the record.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
My question once again was why did Juggler, Sculpt 3D, and this Demo of CAD 3D on the Amiga never allow speeds to go faster than 30fps as they did on the Atari ST?
Perhaps because the Amiga versions of those apps were crap?
Just a theory.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Spectrum 512 and other paint programs that followed on the ST did offer some advantage over Ham-6. But Ham-6 had advantages 2. But this isnt about spectrum 512 versus Ham-6.
Spectrum 512 is not even a videomode, whereas HAM is. It cannot be compared. The Amiga could do the same thing even without using the CPU (Copper). You're talking apples and oranges.
Ok, not quotes, but anyway:
"Can the Amiga display animations at 60FPS? I've only seen 30FPS".
- Yes.
"But I've only seen 30FPS. Can it really play at 60FPS."
- Yes.
"But I've only seen 30FPS."
- But it can.
"No it can't, I've only seen 30FPS."
- Sure it can.
"But I watched this app 1988 which couldn't."
- It can.
"No, are you sure?"
Get a grip, dude.
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@shoggoth
Hi, Atari-friend. :-D
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Never heard of Spectrum 512 before, but as I understand it, it's a software hack to change the ST's palette beam synced on each scanline. Of course this puts a load on the CPU, allows for >16 colors on the screen but OTOH doesn't allow >16 colors per scanline.
The same method can be used on the Amiga, only that - of course - you'd use the Copper instead to do the palette rewrite stuff, completely supported by the OS.
Also you could use 5 bit planes to display 32 colors, use EHB or even HAM which could definitely display better colors. In other words: you could convert a Spectrum 512 pic to the Amiga (16 color lores plus dynamic palette). Actually SHAM uses the same method, so it MUST look better - provided the same care is taken when converting the pic. All examples I could find on the 'net seem to support this statement...
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shoggoth wrote:
bloodline wrote:
And the addition of 2 PCM audio channels isn't really much of an improvement over the original ST... Certainly nothing on the Amiga's 4 PCMs :-)
Most true, no offence, didn't you sort of miss the point with the original post?
Ok, then... on topic...
The Original poster states, from memory, he felt that the Amiga seemed to only play at 30fps when the Atari ST appeared to play at 60fps.
First off, this statement is based on apparent observation, not a testable examination, of an event that happened 18 years or more in the past.
Secondly, no one seems to be able to test this... are there really that few Atari ST's around? Does no one have the software in question?
Thirdly, in answer to the OP question... Yes the Amiga can display animations at 60fps with out problems. In fact, these animations can even be in HAM-6 mode and use very little CPU time. I or in fact anyone with a modicum of programming ability can easily write a program to prove this, if need be.
Fourthly, The ST used an alternate bus cycle design, to share the memory between the CPU and the Display chips. This means that on a 16Mhz bus, each chip only gets access to the memory half the time, ie 8MHz. On the Amiga the GFX chips could steal (dynamically allocate) cycles from the CPU if needed (beneficial since the GFX chip do most of the work on the Amiga). On a related note the Atari Scanline Interrupt trick, to increase the effective number of colours displayable (essentially a new 16 colour palette every scanline) was also available on the Amiga (and probably every other 68k based machine of the time), but it uses a huge amount of CPU time, leaving nothing left for any other code to run.
I hope that sums everything up.
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bloodline wrote:
Ok, then... on topic...
The Original poster states, from memory, he felt that the Amiga seemed to only play at 30fps when the Atari ST appeared to play at 60fps.
First off, this statement is based on apparent observation, not a testable examination, of an event that happened 18 years or more in the past.
Secondly, no one seems to be able to test this... are there really that few Atari ST's around? Does no one have the software in question?
Well, my bad. I replied to your post before having read all of his posts. I tend to agree with you in this case. The topic in itself is off topic. The whole discussion is silly imo.
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>Isn't that what I said "a fresh 16 colors every line" plus hold and modify? Well if not, that's what I meant. Still even so- I could do some things in Spectrum 512 that would still cause even SHAM problems. But obviously, the reverse is possible as well- even more so with SHAM. And like I said, by the time SHAM was available (I'm not sure if paint programs supported it?) I know the demo world was even pushing the ST with more colors on scan lines and overscan etc.
Even Spectrum 512 is allowing only 48 unique colors for 320 possible pixels. And there's a half-bright mode that does 64 unique colors and I'm sure you can toggle between half-bright and HAM-6 using the Copper list as well as change palette colors every scanline. Everything the Spectrum 512 does with producing more colors can be done with the Amiga as well along with having more shades.
And comments about more shades are pertinent to the topic since the animation that uses more shades compresses less and thus requires greater processor power to display. That's why I was asking whether the animation was compressed? If they were uncompressed, a 1040ST only would hold 32 frames in memory (half a second of ST video at 60 fps since 32K*32=1Meg) assuming the application is highly optimized and does not hog up memory.
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>Thirdly, in answer to the OP question... Yes the Amiga can display animations at 60fps with out problems. In fact, these animations can even be in HAM-6 mode and use very little CPU time. I or in fact anyone with a modicum of programming ability can easily write a program to prove this, if need be.
He's talking about minimum of 320*200*16 frames. He can't be talking just about changing pointers of the display memory since that would only allow for 32 frames even on a 1040ST. Perhaps, if you have an animation running at 60fps on an Amiga 500, you can give him a link.
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>The whole discussion is silly imo.
He does a valid point that 8Mhz vs 7.16Mhz and given that ST videos would compress better and produce smaller files given less shades at 320*200*16 that decompressing from RAM to display buffer would be faster on ST. But the question becomes is that sufficient to prevent the Amiga from displaying 60fps and is the ST actually doing 60fps?
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He's talking about minimum of 320*200*16 frames. He can't be talking just about changing pointers of the display memory since that would only allow for 32 frames even on a 1040ST. Perhaps, if you have an animation running at 60fps on an Amiga 500, you can give him a link.
No, he IS talking about pageflipping animations, which IS just changing the pointers in memory.
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We are trying to understand him not pick on some word he used-- "page flipping". You do see that he claimed 320*200*16 frames and on an A500 and Atari 1040ST? Let him speak for himself as to how many seconds was the animation.
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amigaksi wrote:
We are trying to understand him not pick on some word he used-- "page flipping". You do see that he claimed 320*200*16 frames and on an A500 and Atari 1040ST? Let him speak for himself as to how many seconds was the animation.
Well, he was mentioning Spectrum 512 animations as an example of stuff running at 60fps on his ST, and somehow I doubt those are done by any other method than pageflipping + a tight loop for the colorswitches. He also mentioned running animations on a 4MB machine, which can fit quite a lot of frames (as it can be used as gfxmem, in contrast to the 512/1024kB limit on the OCS-amigas).
And finally, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he actually has a clue, and therefore if he talks about pageflipping, I assume he knows what it means ;)
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WOW- I'm sorry for doubting the Ability of the Amiga- but again all I have is what I saw as a computer salesman and tons of magazines with software reviews never mentioning doing more than 30fps. Understand I'm in the states, so we had the 60hz monitors for 60fps.
Spectrum 512 was NOT 16 colors per scan line. That would be very limiting graphicly as is evident from Apple IIGS pictures. To clarify and understand Spectrum 512. Every scan line was interupted 3 times- meaning 16 colors about every 100 pixels PER scan line. I have a link to a picture I made in Spectrum 512 that gave HAM-6 a hell of a time. The reason- well the picture has 33 colors on a scan line with the color black between each one. That will give Ham-6 hell. The other link is just an example of what Spectrum 512 pictures could do, including converting 2 famous 256 color GIF pictures and 1 Amiga HAM-6 and 1 Amiga SHAM or DHAM picture. Followed by some BMP pictures and 2 pictures I made displaying the colors. I included both links. Overall- they are impressive and comparable to 320x200 HAM-6 in my opinion.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/ST_versus_Amiga.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Spectrum_512_power.png
Now I hope that clarifys the 16 colors per scan line misunderstanding of Spectrum 512.
Spectrum 512 included at slideshow program and a simple script editor that allowed me to type in each picture in what ever order and then page flip them using the functions keys- 60fps being the fastest. What many Atarians did was take some Amiga HAM-6 demos and run them on the ST up to 60fps. The juggler for example was on the ST and would run faster with the spectrum 512 slideshow program- as was the Scult 3D raytrace demo of that 5 ball thing bouncing under a lamp. Again the ST could run this demo faster.
So, every demo I saw on the Amiga was not going at 60fps. Every magazine review of animation never mentioned they could. That's why I question and could never honestly tell people if the Amiga could at that time.
My ST still works- I'd love to just show people what I'm talking about here. I wish I also had an Amiga 500 with some HAM-6 demos runing at 60fps. Perhaps an improved juggler with that feature would be satisfying enough to me?
I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on.
O and yes my MegaST4 was a blast at home, because I could have 60 or more 500 color pictures displaying at 60fps (the pictures were compressed SPC- because SPU files took up 50K versus about 20-30K). But most demos, would have about 10-30 frames like the juggler just repeating. The juggler demo is below. I paid $1800 for my 4 megabyte Atari ST in 1988. I had to sell my 520ST to help pay for it then. But 4 megabytes was great to digitize music and page flip large animations.
http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html
Thanks everyone.
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shoggoth wrote:
JetRacer wrote:
Fun fact: even modern PC's have major difficulties working under similar conditions (read: massive MB 320x200 raw animation replayed with flawless 60hz fps). It's ofcourse the OS of Win/Linux/Mac that bogs down performance and nothing else.
I beg to differ. Having programmed low level VGA stuff, I can assure you that this is not an issue. Maybe if you're running XP with little memory and virus scanners and {bleep}, but well... that's not a proper comparison.
Not to get sidetracked, but my Dad was a PC guy, and around 1990 when 256 color VGA was afforadable and common along with 16MHz 80286 clones, he had demos doing 60fps page flipping as well. This was the DOS days, and the program used GL files I believe. I remember a 256 color jolt can spinning around. But by this time, Amiga and Atari have been doing these kinds of demos for almost half a decade. =) The PC was very slow in catching up. Prior to 1990 you had to pay over $5,000 to use a Mouse, 3.5" disket, Soundblaster card, VGA, and a 16-Bit 80286 with a megabyte of RAM. All about 5 years after the ST and Amiga.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on.
Dude, why ask a question if you don't want to trust the answers you get anyway?
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If you link to me 30 frames of an animation, I will write a program to play back in HAM6 at a user selectable speed on an A500. Will that help?
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I just fired up DPaint4... you can set the frame rate in that... I can happily run an animation 60fps.
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shoggoth wrote:
Rowbeartoe wrote:
I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on.
Dude, why ask a question if you don't want to trust the answers you get anyway?
Because I'm a skeptic, and must be convinced. Some people are just so biased, that they will say it can. I know you understand that. I was hoping to hear someone say, for example, that old ANIM players were limited to 30fps then improved.
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
shoggoth wrote:
Rowbeartoe wrote:
I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on.
Dude, why ask a question if you don't want to trust the answers you get anyway?
Because I'm a skeptic, and must be convinced.
No you are not. A true skeptic would not have made the original post without a fully testable example or at least some evidence to support the initial theory.
Some people are just so biased, that they will say it can. I know you understand that. I was hoping to hear someone say, for example, that old ANIM players were limited to 30fps then improved.
When I opened up DPaintIV, it defaulted to 30fps, but was more than able to run the Animation at 60fps...
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WOW- I'm sorry for doubting the Ability of the Amiga- but again all I have is what I saw as a computer salesman and tons of magazines with software reviews never mentioning doing more than 30fps. Understand I'm in the states, so we had the 60hz monitors for 60fps.
I'm no supertec, but I thought US was 29 fps with NTSC (Mains supply frequency 60Hz) and UK is 25 fps with PAL (Mains supply frequency 50Hz). Am I missing the point here :-?
I must admit, I thought this thread was flamebait from the start, but please prove me wrong :-D
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Homer wrote:
WOW- I'm sorry for doubting the Ability of the Amiga- but again all I have is what I saw as a computer salesman and tons of magazines with software reviews never mentioning doing more than 30fps. Understand I'm in the states, so we had the 60hz monitors for 60fps.
I'm no supertec, but I thought US was 29 fps with NTSC (Mains supply frequency 60Hz) and UK is 25 fps with PAL (Mains supply frequency 50Hz). Am I missing the point here :-?
In the UK, TV signals images are transmitted at 25frames per second... but each frame is split into two fields (Odd and Even lines), which need to be transmitted at twice that rate in order for the complete image to be shown at the correct rate :-)
(Each field is displayed for 1/50th of a second.)
I must admit, I thought this thread was flamebait from the start, but please prove me wrong :-D
I was, but no one took the bait :-D
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Rowbeartoe wrote:
Because I'm a skeptic, and must be convinced. Some people are just so biased, that they will say it can. I know you understand that. I was hoping to hear someone say, for example, that old ANIM players were limited to 30fps then improved.
If you're so desperate for proof, why not get an Amiga to try it out for yourself? It won't matter what anyone says here, because that won't be proof enough anyway. If someone replies "Yes, the Amiga can do 60FPS" that could just as well be bias to you. So why ask?
No offence dude, but you deliver a fair amount of bias in your own posts. And that's an understatement. Being a skeptic is one thing. Asking a question and not accepting the answer because you didn't like it is another. At some point it gets silly and annoying.
I'm mainly an Atari user, with an interest in the Amiga scene. Even though I have a preference for Atari machines, I recognize that the Amiga 500 always beat the ST when it came to animation and graphics. You most likely tried an old animation player which was limited to 30FPS, or watching an animation in an interlaced screen mode (in which case 60FPS isn't applicable due to obvious reasons). Later ones didn't have that limitation.
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>...The reason- well the picture has 33 colors on a scan line with the color black between each one. That will give Ham-6 hell...
I would need the original image that you believe will give HAM-6 hell. JPG will distort the image. Halfbrite mode can do 33 unique colors easily and the copper can change 32 color registers in a scanline without involving the processor.
>I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on. ..
>http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html
If that's one of the animations (juggler) then you can calculate yourself the frame rate given the speed of full frame updates vs the percentage of changes in the picture (in this case appears to be less than 1/3). Do you have a more complex animation where more things change? I remember Amiga had a demo of cat walking and spinning. The jolt can demo has the same issues of less than 1/3 of the screen updating.
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amigaksi wrote: >...The reason- well the picture has 33 colors on a scan line with the color black between each one. That will give Ham-6 hell... I would need the original image that you believe will give HAM-6 hell. JPG will distort the image. Halfbrite mode can do 33 unique colors easily and the copper can change 32 color registers in a scanline without involving the processor. >I have a hard time just accepting people saying it could. But I'll just take the word of everyone here. The Amiga could, the software demos just sucked at achieving 60fps, and move on. .. >http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html If that's one of the animations (juggler) then you can calculate yourself the frame rate given the speed of full frame updates vs the percentage of changes in the picture (in this case appears to be less than 1/3). Do you have a more complex animation where more things change? I remember Amiga had a demo of cat walking and spinning. The jolt can demo has the same issues of less than 1/3 of the screen updating.
Sure, i know it's off topic, but i can give u several spectrum 512 pictures in bmp or png format. how u want them?
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BMP would be good since I have programs that can read and convert it other formats. Email just the one you claim is the worst one for Amiga to display: krishna@krishnasoft.com.
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Since I was curious to see what a 640*480 30 second mpg would look like at 320*240 in HAM-6, I decided to convert one... it took quite a while, but here is the results.
If you have enough ram in your Amiga you can try this out (you'll need at least 20 meg fastram).
Although Delta encoded, it doesn't help as pretty much every pixel changes every frame...
Load it into DPaintIV and it will run at 60fps.
http://www.troubled-mind.com/vulcan.anim
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>Although Delta encoded, it doesn't help as pretty much every pixel changes every frame...
>Load it into DPaintIV and it will run at 60fps.
What's your Amiga spec? 68030-25Mhz?
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amigaksi wrote:
>Although Delta encoded, it doesn't help as pretty much every pixel changes every frame...
>Load it into DPaintIV and it will run at 60fps.
What's your Amiga spec? 68030-25Mhz?
Actually I currently have my 50mhz 030 Blizzard installed.
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Ok here is a more A500 friendly Anim, with only 30 frames... it should be more usable for an A500...
http://www.troubled-mind.com/5002.anim
And before any of you ask... no, you can't see the rest of the video... it's certainly not suitable for a family site :-D
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Ok another little clip... :-D
http://www.troubled-mind.com/5001.anim
I only wish you could see the rest of it... oh wow :-o