Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: slaapliedje on June 05, 2013, 05:20:26 AM
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So, I did some calculations;
I have an Amiga A4000D, decked out with the following hardware;
Mediator 4000Di
Radeon 256MB
Zorram 128MB
Spider 2
10/100 Ethernet
Indivision AGA
and soon to be Cyberstorm MK1 with 64mb of ram.
Now according to my calculations, that gives me 2mb of chip ram, and 16MB Fast, along with 113MB (from Radeon's first bank), 128MB (From Radeon's second bank, just need to add it in), 128MB from the Zorram card, and the soon to be 64mb from the Cyberstorm.
That's almost 450mb of Fast memory. Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?
I'm still shocked that a computer that was released in 1992 can address this much. It's too bad that Chip RAM is limited to 2MB. Would be nice if that little jumper that says 2MB or 8MB actually did anything. But that's all in hindsight of an architecture that otherwise had a lot of rather 'futuristic' notions at the time.
slaapliedje
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A BIG FAT
NOTHING!
the video ram on the ati is only rtg ram, only rtg games would use it anyway.
so you can knock that off the list.
but yeah nothing mate.
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Only 15mb of that needs to go to RTG memory, the rest is counted as Fast Memory. Right now I'm downloading TotalChaos off of Aminet and it says I have 238,386,832 other mem. That's without adding that second bank of memory on the Radeon and as stated, I don't have the cyberstorm yet.
It's a nice benefit of the Mediator. Since the Radeon doesn't support 3D at all on the Amiga, you may as well use that memory for something.
slaapliedje
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I guess according to this; http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=736731&postcount=18
There are plenty of reasons to have 64mb of ram. But I think I've gone just a tad over that...
slaapliedje
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So, I did some calculations;
I have an Amiga A4000D, decked out with the following hardware;
Mediator 4000Di
Radeon 256MB
Zorram 128MB
Spider 2
10/100 Ethernet
Indivision AGA
and soon to be Cyberstorm MK1 with 64mb of ram.
Now according to my calculations, that gives me 2mb of chip ram, and 16MB Fast, along with 113MB (from Radeon's first bank), 128MB (From Radeon's second bank, just need to add it in), 128MB from the Zorram card, and the soon to be 64mb from the Cyberstorm.
That's almost 450mb of Fast memory.
No.
That is all dreadfully slow memory except for the 64MB of fastram on the accellerator card.
The 1985 Amiga architecture allows 4GB of memory address space and 2TB of HD size.
Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?
You can play my game I coded specifically for Amiga Lovers like urself. It uses 32MB and multitasks. Now you just hafta figure out what to multitask in the other 418MB :)
You can just barely run 7zip.
You can use a really big RAM: disk.
You can edit high quality audio to your heart's content.
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A BIG FAT
NOTHING!
the video ram on the ati is only rtg ram, only rtg games would use it anyway.
so you can knock that off the list.
but yeah nothing mate.
With the mediator the RAM from the Radeon can be used as fast RAM. :-)
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That's almost 450mb of Fast memory. Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?
Very easy: Help us at the Debian project to ressurrect the m68k port. We need people who provide build daemons which compile packages (see: http://unstable.buildd.net/index-m68k.html).
We need everyone with a fast Amiga who can help. The more buildds, the better. Please consider helping us, you can get into touch with us here: debian-68k@lists.debian.org.
Cheers,
Adrian
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Very easy: Help us at the Debian project to ressurrect the m68k port. We need people who provide build daemons which compile packages (see: http://unstable.buildd.net/index-m68k.html).
We need everyone with a fast Amiga who can help. The more buildds, the better. Please consider helping us, you can get into touch with us here: debian-68k@lists.debian.org.
Sounds interesting, what's needed to get involved?
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No.
That is all dreadfully slow memory except for the 64MB of fastram on the accellerator card.
The 1985 Amiga architecture allows 4GB of memory address space and 2TB of HD size.
[/q]Isn't all of it dreadfully slow compared to current memory? :D Yeah, the whole 'Fast' ram is just how me and the system sees it, I suppose. Chip and 'Fast'. I could have sworn I had read that the Zorram at least was pretty close to the speeds of the CPU Slot memory, but I could be way off on that one. Maybe I'll have to benchmark the different memory blocks.
[q]You can play my game I coded specifically for Amiga Lovers like urself. It uses 32MB and multitasks. Now you just hafta figure out what to multitask in the other 418MB :)
[/q]
I downloaded it last night! Wow, did that take a long time to extract all the files. Ended up falling asleep last night waiting for it, will be giving it a shot when I get home.
[q]You can just barely run 7zip.
You can use a really big RAM: disk.
You can edit high quality audio to your heart's content.
I recall the first thing I did when I expanded my Atari MegaSTe to 4mb of ram was put all of Ultima 6 into a RAM Disk and play it out of there. It was AWESOME, near 0 load times. I am sure I could do things like that, copy it to ram, play for a while, save out to disk.
slaapliedje
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Very easy: Help us at the Debian project to ressurrect the m68k port. We need people who provide build daemons which compile packages (see: http://unstable.buildd.net/index-m68k.html).
We need everyone with a fast Amiga who can help. The more buildds, the better. Please consider helping us, you can get into touch with us here: debian-68k@lists.debian.org (debian-68k@lists.debian.org).
Cheers,
Adrian
I've always wondered how fast Debian would run on my Amiga, but wouldn't providing build daemons using one of UAE's many ports be faster than real hardware? Not to mention on Linux I could probably just leave it going all the time and provide multiple emulations running to compile it all.
Or I always thought the Buildds were running cross-platform compilations.
But yeah, I certainly wouldn't mind helping out Debian, I absolutely love it, and use it everywhere except my two most used workstations (at work and at home, but running Arch Linux), and the only reason I don't use it there is for living on the bleeding edge. I have always have the option to boot back into Debian if needed (at work and at home :D)
slaapliedje
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Sorry to hijack the thread - but I've found debian install instructions (http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/m68k/amiga/install.txt) and the current port packages (http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/). The instructions are probably quite out of sync with the current builds.
Is there a dummies "click here to download" and "do this to start installer" guide? I'm very familiar with Linux but it's the install (from AmigaOS) I'm unsure about. The files listed in the FAQ no longer seem available from the ports tree.
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Only 15mb of that needs to go to RTG memory, the rest is counted as Fast Memory. Right now I'm downloading TotalChaos off of Aminet and it says I have 238,386,832 other mem. That's without adding that second bank of memory on the Radeon and as stated, I don't have the cyberstorm yet.
It's a nice benefit of the Mediator. Since the Radeon doesn't support 3D at all on the Amiga, you may as well use that memory for something.
slaapliedje
I didn't read the thread (or this msg) before I made my previous post.
I realize that you can add your gfx card memory into the system and it will go into the category known as "fast memory" but it won't actually be fast or anything. It should be a tad under 10 MB/sec. The ram on your cyberstorm should be at least 5x that speed. Feel free to measure it with bustest from Aminet.
You really should not add any of the first bank as fastram. Add it all as gfx card ram.
I may or may not be rumored or not rumored to be working or not working on a new or old version of Total Chaos for gfx cards. I won't comment on silly rumors but I will say that if I ever did code a gfx card version of Total Chaos it would damn well for sure require a bare minimum of 128MB of gfx card ram and I would dearly love to use about 200MB but the silly RTG drivers won't work with 2 banks of gfx card RAM. RTG drivers can only understand a single contiguous bank of RAM.
If I have 256MB of gfx card RAM to work with then I can intentionally not use some of that (so u can still multitask happily). But I could use say 192MB and it would make things really convenient for coding, testing, speed, gfx, animation, gaming, fun, and stress reduction.
Trying to make a 1280x1024x32-bit (16.7 million colors + Alpha Channel) game that contains many thousands of intricate animations on a puny 16MB gfx card is absolutely no fun for me at all.
If u add the 128MB to the system as RTG gfx memory then all gfx internal to the gfx card can use that RAM at some amazing phenomenal speed like 256MB/sec or whatever (someone should write a testing proggy to figure it out because bustest cannot perform such a test). What does the instruction manual or box claim is the bandwidth of the gfx card?
Please add 1 full bank of 128MB as RTG gfx card ram for all us poor starving gamecoders to make use of. Thanxx0rz.
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I could have sworn I had read that the Zorram at least was pretty close to the speeds of the CPU Slot memory,
No way Jose :)
but I could be way off on that one. Maybe I'll have to benchmark the different memory blocks.
Yes u should do that. I would guess the Zorram should clock in around 12 MB/sec. Amkit didn't post any bustest results on its website so that means the ram is really slow. They always post bustest results for fast products.
I downloaded it last night! Wow, did that take a long time to extract all the files. Ended up falling asleep last night waiting for it, will be giving it a shot when I get home.
What cpu are u using right now? An 030 is really really really slow with almost no L1 Cache.
Also there is a "trap" that ppl fall into. They use Ibrowse and/or AmIRC and/or WookieChat and/or other fancy MUI software that totally thrashes the memory into many thousands of fragments. This causes the computer to become very very slow. At this exact point in time they suddenly decide it would be a good idea to uncompress one of the largest Amiga games ever made. :laugh1: :rofl:
Please Dear God, please, reset your Amiga before you attempt to run the game the first time. :biglaugh: Or it could takes hours to decompress all the losslessly compressed audio in the game. (This only happens the first run, after that it becomes just another regular game.)
A 50Mhz 060 will also decrunch the audio around 10x to 20x faster than a 50Mhz 030 because an 060 performs floating point math massively faster than the antique 030. There are many factors that affect the speed, such as the speed of your HD controller, I hope you are using IDEfix97?
I wrote the game specifically for the 060. But I am not a member of the Nazi party so I allow 020 users to play my games. :D Just don't expect certain things to be speedy on an 020.
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if I ever did code a gfx card version of Total Chaos it would damn well for sure require a bare minimum of 128MB of gfx card ram
I'm guessing that will limit you only to Amiga users who have Mediator/Radeon configs, then, and eliminate any Amiga users with graphics cards like Cybervision, Picasso, etc.? Oh well, it's your game! :D
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I'm guessing that will limit you only to Amiga users who have Mediator/Radeon configs, then, and eliminate any Amiga users with graphics cards like Cybervision, Picasso, etc.? Oh well, it's your game! :D
Correct :)
Picasso is too lame to ever be interesting. I could maybe possibly make a 256 color version of the game for Picasso but it would definitely be worse, lower resolution and slower than the AGA version so I don't see the point. I could force a Picasso version to use the same hires gfx as the AGA version but then everyone would have to create a custom screenmode, which of course they won't do so the game wouldn't work. Then there is the fact that sprites don't work on gfx cards so the AGA version will be much better. Then there is the part about it being much slower so the AGA version would be much better. And all the parent/child screens BREAK on all gfx cards so the AGA version is better. And the perfectly smooooooth 50fps AmigaOS autoscroll full screen scrolling is broken on gfx cards so the AGA version is better. argh!
In order for gfx cards to be better than AGA they need 16.7 million colors and 1280x1024 resolution. Once you do that then you need giant amount of memory to hold all the gfx for the animations. Like, say 128MB minimum.
Luckily Elbox has provided us with a gfx solution that has finally achieved actual real bonafide advantages over AGA.
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So, according to this post;
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=563681&postcount=15
The Zorram should be around 13.5mb/s. The Mediator claims (from elbox's site) that it has a full bandwidth of 132MB/s (or 264MBs/ with the mythological SharkPPC board!).
Of course they also say that the A4000Di has 4 PCI slots, but I can't use my Radeon in slot 1 because the heatsink is too fat, so it touches the main Mediator board that has all the controller chips.
According to Elbox;
SDRAM/SGRAM of PCI gfx card as a DMA buffer
Mediator PCI 4000Di can use part of the graphic card memory for Amiga system needs. Thus, the entire system gains in performance as graphic card's SDRAM/SGRAM memory modules are about 10x faster than FastRAM memory in Amiga turbo cards. With very short access time in SDRAM/SGRAM, several PCI busmaster cards may use this memory simultaneously. The PCI cards may then rush at the data transfer rate of up to 132MB/s without any CPU load.[/SIZE][/FONT]
I couldn't quickly find info on how fast the motherboard "Fast" Ram is, but I have always known that the CPU card memory is the fastest (despite claims of the Radeon's speed).
For what it's worth TotalChaos, I don't think the Mediator is at fault for the Radeon's split 256MB, I think it's just the way the cards are created (possibly for Dual-Head, not sure though) but they are in different memory 'banks'.
You're probably right though, in that if I gave all 128mb of the first bank to Video RAM, it'd make the second bank of 128MB faster.
I would gladly be rumored to or not rumored to be testing or not be testing an RTG version of the game! :D
Right now I am running an A3640 board with the 040/25mhz on it. I was extracting it with only it running, I believe I had quit AWEB and Genesis before I started it the extracting. Haven't ran it yet, maybe I'll wait 'til the 060 is in my machine!
slaapliedje
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So, according to this post;
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=563681&postcount=15
The Zorram should be around 13.5mb/s.
Sounds about right.
The Mediator claims (from elbox's site) that it has a full bandwidth of 132MB/s
That would be internal bandwidth from itself to itself.
When using the CPU to access the memory on a mediator card you will only get about 10MB/sec. I can't remember the exact number but that is approx what I get on my Mediator. Of course mine is A1200.
According to Elbox;
SDRAM/SGRAM of PCI gfx card as a DMA buffer
Mediator PCI 4000Di can use part of the graphic card memory for Amiga system needs. Thus, the entire system gains in performance as graphic card's SDRAM/SGRAM memory modules are about 10x faster than FastRAM memory in Amiga turbo cards.
Sure they are 10x faster from themself to themself. From themself to yourself you will only get around 10MB/sec which is much much slower than the ram on any decent accellerator card.
For what it's worth TotalChaos, I don't think the Mediator is at fault for the Radeon's split 256MB,
True. Its just the way the cards are built.
I would gladly be rumored to or not rumored to be testing or not be testing an RTG version of the game! :D
hehehehehehhehe
Right now I am running an A3640 board with the 040/25mhz on it.
Ok kewl. 040 was a great chip in 1990. Fast, beautiful, lots of L1 cache.
I was extracting it with only it running, I believe I had quit AWEB and Genesis before I started it the extracting.
Once the memory list of the OS is fragmented, quitting AWEB will not solve the problem. It takes a reset. Use the Frags cli command free from aminet to see how many fragments your memory has been thrashed into.
I also recommend to run TLSFmem which greatly fantastically reduces memory fragmentation problems.
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I've always wondered how fast Debian would run on my Amiga
It's quite usabale, actually. At least on my A1200 with ACA-1230/56 and on an A4000 with 68060/50.
but wouldn't providing build daemons using one of UAE's many ports be faster than real hardware?
One of the buildds is actually ARANym with an emulated 68040@170MHz and >700MB RAM (see the link I posted). However, some people provide real hardware.
Not to mention on Linux I could probably just leave it going all the time and provide multiple emulations running to compile it all.
Well, all of the Amiga buildds are running Debian Linux with Kernel 3.2.0.
Or I always thought the Buildds were running cross-platform compilations.
That doesn't work in all cases. Sometimes the compilation requires to run some tests of the binaries after compilation which won't work when cross-compiling.
Adrian
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Is there a dummies "click here to download" and "do this to start installer" guide? I'm very familiar with Linux but it's the install (from AmigaOS) I'm unsure about. The files listed in the FAQ no longer seem available from the ports tree.
The current recommended and easiest way is to use the filesystem tarball created by Thorsten Glaser. You hook up your Amiga harddive to a PC running Linux, create the additional Linux partitions and extract the filesystem tarball to the newly created Linux partition which will be your root partition.
Then you copy amiboot-5.6 (the beta version of 6.0 crashed for me) plus the kernel onto your AmigaOS partition and run amiboot like this:
amiboot -d -k //kernels/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga -r //cdrom/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram fb=false
Adrian
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shouldnt the PPC version of Debian more suited than the 68k ? of course you need a PPC equipped Amiga.
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Once the memory list of the OS is fragmented, quitting AWEB will not solve the problem. It takes a reset. Use the Frags cli command free from aminet to see how many fragments your memory has been thrashed into.
I also recommend to run TLSFmem which greatly fantastically reduces memory fragmentation problems.
Holy crap, right when you mentioned 'frags' I had a 20+ year flash back of using that, I'd completely forgotten about it!
I'll have to remember that, 'cause I was thinking the other night that with so many different banks of memory, something has to be getting confused somewhere. Are there really any fixes for MUI to prevent memory fragmentation? Like maybe using Zune?
slaapliedje
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The current recommended and easiest way is to use the filesystem tarball created by Thorsten Glaser. You hook up your Amiga harddive to a PC running Linux, create the additional Linux partitions and extract the filesystem tarball to the newly created Linux partition which will be your root partition.
Then you copy amiboot-5.6 (the beta version of 6.0 crashed for me) plus the kernel onto your AmigaOS partition and run amiboot like this:
amiboot -d -k //kernels/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga -r //cdrom/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram fb=false
Adrian
Would be nice for ClassicWB to add quick howto for multiboot, I know there is some sort of multiboot already set up for it, I just haven't gotten around to trying it out yet.
So what sort of Desktop Environments run on an Amiga w/Debian?
slaapliedje
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Sounds about right.
That would be internal bandwidth from itself to itself.
When using the CPU to access the memory on a mediator card you will only get about 10MB/sec. I can't remember the exact number but that is approx what I get on my Mediator. Of course mine is A1200.
[/q]If I recall correctly, the overall bus speed on the A4000 is faster than the A1200, right? (I swear I remember reading it was more like 30mb/s, but maybe I'm pulling that out of some dark recess of my brain).
[q]Sure they are 10x faster from themself to themself. From themself to yourself you will only get around 10MB/sec which is much much slower than the ram on any decent accellerator card.
[/q]
Ha, yeah that's why I said it's 'According to Elbox'. Internally doesn't mean jack, when you are dependent on the bus speed between the PCI backplane and the CPU. It's like I've always said about PCs, the real bandwidth bottleneck is now the hard drives.... SSDs are helping with that, but if we had 12GB/s SATA 4 or whatever, the systems would be way faster. Then again if we had Amiga sized software, everything would be basically instant. Instead we get fatter bandwidth, but games that are getting around 30GB in size!
On a side note, why settle for 1280x1024 and 16.7 million colors? I run my desktop at 1920x1080 at 16.7 million colors :D I even have a 2D-3D conversion style monitor. Workbench looks pretty sick on it :D
slaapliedje
P.S. Important safety tip, don't type a forum reply while having an Ale in front of you. I had the lid on partially and tipped it over, and while I caught it quickly enough that it initially didn't spill, the jolt caused the carbonation to fizz up and overflow all over my table and drip onto my lap so it looked like I just wet myself. Either that or I was thinking about the 68060 that's on the way. ;)
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A BIG FAT
NOTHING!
the video ram on the ati is only rtg ram, only rtg games would use it anyway.
so you can knock that off the list.
but yeah nothing mate.
Errr... why do you guys post things like this that arent accurate at all? I dont understand that?
If you use your amiga for something other than gaming or os hacking/tweaking or whatever there are many uses for a lot of ram.
VIDEO TOASTER, LIGHTWAVE, ANIMATIONS, MUSIC RECORDING, HI RES GRAPHICS, DTP, ETC ETC these things all need a lot of ram.. Even Demo watching sometimes needs 64mb of ram...
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Would love to help out with the debian prodject but i need a step by step installation instruction on how to get things working.
Have a 3000T with an 060@ 72mhz and atm i have nothing to do with it :)
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Even playing some games today, I have 128mb and recently nearly filled it all with the 'talky' WHDload version of beneath a steel sky - i wondered why it was taking so long to load and then saw all the memory being slowly eaten up!
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Would love to help out with the debian prodject but i need a step by step installation instruction on how to get things working.
Have a 3000T with an 060@ 72mhz and atm i have nothing to do with it :)
Whoa! Get that bugger building some packages! :D That's a nice beefy processor for it. I'm going to see if I can't get Debian-m68k on a UAE install (or Aranym) and start helping with the builds. I use Debian everywhere where I want a dependable operating system.
slaapliedje
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So according to this thread;
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=54411
My system is slightly faster than HammerD's, which is odd, considering I have the 68040@25mhz and he has a 68060@66.7mhz.
For a proper comparison, this is with CPU Cache turned off with the boot menu, and I ran this in 1920x1080x32bit resolution on the Radeon.
10.System:Temp> showconfig
PROCESSOR: CPU 68040/68040fpu/68040mmu
CUSTOM CHIPS: AA PAL Alice (id=$0023), AA Lisa (id=$00F8)
VERS: Kickstart version 45.57, Exec version 45.20, Disk version 45.4
RAM: Node type $A, Attributes $505 (FAST), at $7000000-$7FFFFFF (16.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $405 (FAST), at $70000000-$77FFFFFF (128.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $2005 (FAST), at $40C00000-$47EFFFFF (115.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $703 (CHIP), at $4000-$1FFFFF (~2.0 meg)
BOARDS: Board (Index Information Ltd): Prod=2206/161($89E/$A1)
(@$40000000, size 512meg, subsize same)
Board (Index Information Ltd): Prod=2206/33($89E/$21)
(@$60000000, size 16meg, subsize same)
RAM (unidentified): Prod=3643/32($E3B/$20)
(@$70000000, size 256meg, subsize autosized Mem)This is the ZorRam memory
10.System:Temp> bustest addr=71000000
BusSpeedTest 0.19 (mlelstv) Buffer: 262144 Bytes, Alignment: 32768
========================================================================
memtype addr op cycle calib bandwidth
user $71000000 readw 247.6 ns normal 8.1 * 10^6 byte/s
user $71000000 readl 489.0 ns normal 8.2 * 10^6 byte/s
user $71000000 readm 491.0 ns normal 8.1 * 10^6 byte/s
user $71000000 writew 439.3 ns normal 4.6 * 10^6 byte/s
user $71000000 writel 878.3 ns normal 4.6 * 10^6 byte/s
user $71000000 writem 869.6 ns normal 4.6 * 10^6 byte/sThis is the Radeon's memory (second bank? I set the RadeonMem file to 128MB)
10.System:Temp> bustest addr=41c00000
BusSpeedTest 0.19 (mlelstv) Buffer: 262144 Bytes, Alignment: 32768
========================================================================
memtype addr op cycle calib bandwidth
user $41C00000 readw 831.2 ns normal 2.4 * 10^6 byte/s
user $41C00000 readl 842.6 ns normal 4.7 * 10^6 byte/s
user $41C00000 readm 844.8 ns normal 4.7 * 10^6 byte/s
user $41C00000 writew 567.4 ns normal 3.5 * 10^6 byte/s
user $41C00000 writel 567.9 ns normal 7.0 * 10^6 byte/s
user $41C00000 writem 564.0 ns normal 7.1 * 10^6 byte/s
slaapliedje
P.S. Sorry if you read this mess while I was trying to fix the formatting. I tried to post it with the Amiga.org Proxy and it turned out to be a horrible mess.
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All your speeds were 8MB/sec or less when using the 040 on your A3640 card.
The speeds will be a bit different once you upgrade to your 060 card. That is because every accelerator card has different statistics and your memory tests will go up or down a bit here and there on different tests.
For example some 060 cards access chipram really really fast like the Apollo cards, while other 060 cards are noticeably slower at accessing chipram.
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That sounds logical. I can't recall where I read it at, or even the specifics, but someone I thought had said something about the cyberstorm mk2 being faster than the mk3? (as I said, I could be getting that wrong, it could have been the mk1 was faster than the mk2).
So I did know that it really was dependent upon the particular model of accelerator.
Which is why something like the Natami or other newer full Amiga platforms would completely rock, updated memory bandwidth!
Should be getting the 68060 tomorrow. Then I'll be sure to fire your game up and give it a play. From what few screen shots I've seen of it, it looks awesome!
slaapliedje
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So, I did some calculations;
I have an Amiga A4000D, decked out with the following hardware;
Mediator 4000Di
Radeon 256MB
Zorram 128MB
Spider 2
10/100 Ethernet
Indivision AGA
and soon to be Cyberstorm MK1 with 64mb of ram.
Now according to my calculations, that gives me 2mb of chip ram, and 16MB Fast, along with 113MB (from Radeon's first bank), 128MB (From Radeon's second bank, just need to add it in), 128MB from the Zorram card, and the soon to be 64mb from the Cyberstorm.
That's almost 450mb of Fast memory. Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?
I'm still shocked that a computer that was released in 1992 can address this much. It's too bad that Chip RAM is limited to 2MB. Would be nice if that little jumper that says 2MB or 8MB actually did anything. But that's all in hindsight of an architecture that otherwise had a lot of rather 'futuristic' notions at the time.
slaapliedje
when i run doom or heretic it takes 10 meg fast ram just to start ..only program that eats ram is my picture viewer on slideshow ..let it run with huge cache an it can eat 100meg fast ram down to 20 meg in a hour or so..mysticview..still my favorite though ..
i WISH someone would come up with a way to increase chip ram ..how much faster would a 1200 be with 20 meg chip ram !!
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Agreed! There was supposedly work done to do this at some point, since there is a jumper on the A4000D that says 2mb or 8mb, but as far as I know, it doesn't do anything. There are a few other jumpers on the board that don't do anything as well. Is the limitation in one of the custom chips? I know WinUAE can use 8mb of chipram, so I'm guessing that it's not an Operating System limitation, or even a kickstart one.
slaapliedje
Edit: It's Alice's fault! http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/8mbchip.html
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So if this is Alice that limits the memory, and thinking about how the Indivision ECS works (or how I had read that it works) by basically replacing the ECS graphics chip with an FPGA equivalent, wouldn't it also be possible to do this with Alice, and replace it with the emulated Alice that WinUAE uses to enable 8mb of Chip RAM?
Just a thought..
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Which is why something like the Natami or other newer full Amiga platforms would completely rock, updated memory bandwidth!
Yes any new Amiga with faster fastram and faster chipram would make our old Amigas so much better!
Should be getting the 68060 tomorrow. Then I'll be sure to fire your game up and give it a play. From what few screen shots I've seen of it, it looks awesome!
Its more about the gameplay than the gfx. ;) Just imagine a gfx card version of it that takes 16x as much memory. 1280x1024 is 4x bigger than 640x512 AGA and 32-bit pixels are 4x bigger than 8-bit AGA pixels = 16x the memory and 16x the bandwidth. So it would look 16x as beautiful but have the exact same gameplay from AGA 1992 days.
I hope ur Radeon has 16x the bandwidth of AGA chipram.
I accidentally found a video to keep u company until u get ur 060:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nr0WMnCXTE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nr0WMnCXTE)
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I'm still shocked that a computer that was released in 1992 can address this much.
In theory, your 32bit computer should be able to address 2^32 = 4Gb memory, not only 450Mb... As to what you can do with it, using real apps would quickly fill it... A real browser for example.
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Good point. A modern webbrowser can burn a gig of RAM while it warms up before breakfast. :)
Especially an Amiga browser, since Amiga browsers invented Tabbed Browsing.
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how much faster would a 1200 be with 20 meg chip ram !!
It wouldn't be faster at all :p
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Someone needs to take a closer look at busboard(s). I was a little shocked to hear you can't play some games at very high resolution. If the busboard is capable of 66Mhz bus with a CPU card then I think it warrants a closer look. I do not own a busboard (not yet) but I will be taking a closer look at one soon.
The year is 2013 and from my point of view there's no excuse,none whatsoever as some of you have very good GFX card(s).
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Yes any new Amiga with faster fastram and faster chipram would make our old Amigas so much better!
[/q]Sure would make our old Amigas seem slower! That goes off topic and I'm sure those conversations have been done to death.
[q]Its more about the gameplay than the gfx. ;) Just imagine a gfx card version of it that takes 16x as much memory. 1280x1024 is 4x bigger than 640x512 AGA and 32-bit pixels are 4x bigger than 8-bit AGA pixels = 16x the memory and 16x the bandwidth. So it would look 16x as beautiful but have the exact same gameplay from AGA 1992 days.
I hope ur Radeon has 16x the bandwidth of AGA chipram.
I accidentally found a video to keep u company until u get ur 060:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nr0WMnCXTE
Awesome video! Really does look like 'Total Chaos'. Name is very appropriate. Well, with '32bit' color, you'd have an 8-bit alpha channel, and could add some transparency effects that could (not sure how) apply to the gameplay. Then again I guess with sprites you don't really need that. I'm thinking the biggest benefit would be larger maps!
Oddly, I bet the Radeon (in itself) probably does have 16x bandwidth of the chip ram. Sadly, the Amiga won't take advantage of it, as we've already established. (I found a reference to the AGP Radeon that says it has 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth).
But i agree, graphics definitely don't make the game. Only type of games where graphics really matter (in my opinion anyhow) would be simulators, since that's kind of the point of them, to simulate realism.
slaapliedje
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In theory, your 32bit computer should be able to address 2^32 = 4Gb memory, not only 450Mb... As to what you can do with it, using real apps would quickly fill it... A real browser for example.
Yeah, I knew that. And actually on the Amiga hardware book, it says the 4000D can have up to 3GB of memory (I think this is probably due to Alice in the same way that you can only use 2mb of chip instead of 8mb, though I could be completely wrong on that).
I would love to have a real browser. Netsurf is getting there, but it requires at least truetype fonts, and I hadn't spent the time looking on a better way to get that without AfaOS (which ClassicWB doesn't like all that much).
slaapliedje
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Someone needs to take a closer look at busboard(s). I was a little shocked to hear you can't play some games at very high resolution. If the busboard is capable of 66Mhz bus with a CPU card then I think it warrants a closer look. I do not own a busboard (not yet) but I will be taking a closer look at one soon.
The year is 2013 and from my point of view there's no excuse,none whatsoever as some of you have very good GFX card(s).
I will let you know how it goes with Genetic Species when I get the 68060. As it is, you're right, the 33mhz speed isn't quite fast enough to play it at full settings and be smooth.
slaapliedje
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If I had had that much RAM a few years ago when I was editing audio using my Amiga 2000, it would have come in really handy. I could have edited almost an entire CD with 450MB+ RAM at once. As it was, I had to use virtual RAM (HD RAM) and it was very slow.
Like the other fellow above said, any Amiga productivity software could benefit from that much RAM, but if all you do is play classic games, etc., then I guess that much RAM wouldn't be much use.
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Yeah, I plan on doing more than just gaming.
Though I did run out of memory extracting Total Chaos's audio files! I'm guessing (hoping) it was because of just having the one 64mb bank, and not wanting to utilize anything else?
I gave the game a play, it's pretty fun, but I was really tired last night. Looks like what Archon 3 could / should have been! (Loved Archon 1 and 2)
Ha, the 060/50 is still too slow to smoothly play Genetic Species in 640x480 though. I'm guessing a faster 060 would help on this?
slaapliedje
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Yeah, I plan on doing more than just gaming.
Though I did run out of memory extracting Total Chaos's audio files! I'm guessing (hoping) it was because of just having the one 64mb bank, and not wanting to utilize anything else?
WTF?!? Something is very wrong.
I have extracted the audio files on my 32MB Amiga many many times and never got an out of memory error.
So something in your system is/was using a huge giant hunk of ram... or.. your memory list was super super fragged out and there were no hunks large enuff to hold the audio file. The very largest file is around 1.2MB I think. So if ur memory got all fragged out and there was not a single 1.2MB hunk anywhere in memory then u could get an out of memory error.
Maybe you have many hard drive partitions and giant AddBuffers for each partition?
The audio files decrunch into the RAM disk so maybe you are using some buggy hackpatched RamDisk.device?
I gave the game a play, it's pretty fun,
The Game will suxx if half the audio files never unpacked!!!
You might miss the funny speech samples, or some kewl muzax, or the names of all the units.
Did it speak the name of the monster when u clicked on it?
(only during your Movement Phase)
Did it say something like "Select your spell" once you passed all the setupscreens and got the actual game started?
but I was really tired last night. Looks like what Archon 3 could / should have been! (Loved Archon 1 and 2)
Exactly!!!!!! Its 8-player MegaArchonOfDeathOnSteroidsEnhancedProfessional++ :)
I coded in the Archonian PowerPoints option just for you.
I liked Archon on the C64, but I didn't like the Amiga version. EA games were really primitive in 1985-1986.
Ha, the 060/50 is still too slow to smoothly play Genetic Species in 640x480 though. I'm guessing a faster 060 would help on this?
slaapliedje
Maybe... but it still has to copy all the gfx data over at 8MB/second. (or whatever speed u currently get using bustest.)
640x480x256 colors = 307200 bytes
8MB/307200 = 26 but the CPU can sit there copying 26fps, it also has to generate the frames in the first place so you couldn't realistically get more than 13fps if u were really REALLY lucky.
You need to play it in 320x256.
Or wait for a new superAmiga to come out, like the Replay or Tina or Natami or whatever...
Just because Total Chaos AGA runs in 640x512 doesn't mean u can just go round running everything at that resolution. I had to use some really hardcore darque majique and break a few laws of physics to achieve that. :)
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WTF?!? Something is very wrong.
I have extracted the audio files on my 32MB Amiga many many times and never got an out of memory error.
So something in your system is/was using a huge giant hunk of ram... or.. your memory list was super super fragged out and there were no hunks large enuff to hold the audio file. The very largest file is around 1.2MB I think. So if ur memory got all fragged out and there was not a single 1.2MB hunk anywhere in memory then u could get an out of memory error.
Unless I have something jacked that at start up (I have just OS3.9 with BB3 with ClassicWB slapped on top, along with the mediator drivers and the Cyberstorm drivers off of Aminet), then I shouldn't have had any fragmented memory. Started the extraction off of a cold boot.
Maybe you have many hard drive partitions and giant AddBuffers for each partition?
I have three partitions, System is on FFS, and Work and Games are both on SFS.
The audio files decrunch into the RAM disk so maybe you are using some buggy hackpatched RamDisk.device?
This sounds most likely. It's whatever BB3 is using.
The Game will suxx if half the audio files never unpacked!!!
You might miss the funny speech samples, or some kewl muzax, or the names of all the units.
Did it speak the name of the monster when u clicked on it?
(only during your Movement Phase)
Did it say something like "Select your spell" once you passed all the setupscreens and got the actual game started?
I think most of the sounds were there, and they were AWESOME!! Music was seriously epic too!
I'm giving it another play right now, hopefully my Amiga doesn't overheat again...
Exactly!!!!!! Its 8-player MegaArchonOfDeathOnSteroidsEnhancedProfessional++ :)
I coded in the Archonian PowerPoints option just for you.
I liked Archon on the C64, but I didn't like the Amiga version. EA games were really primitive in 1985-1986.
I'd have to agree with this! Though instead of the C64, I played the Atari 8-bit version. Loved it. Though I distinctly recall punching the crap out of my younger brother when he somehow managed to slay my dragon with a knight... There are two of my favorite all time EA games from this time; Racing Destruction Set and Mail Order Monsters. I'd like them to remake them, but they'd just ruin them like they did Syndicate. Though... if you have ideas for a Total Chaos 2... Mail Order Monsters was, to me, a direct descendant of Archon. After all, it was Archon with upgradeable beasts.
Maybe... but it still has to copy all the gfx data over at 8MB/second. (or whatever speed u currently get using bustest.)
640x480x256 colors = 307200 bytes
8MB/307200 = 26 but the CPU can sit there copying 26fps, it also has to generate the frames in the first place so you couldn't realistically get more than 13fps if u were really REALLY lucky.
You need to play it in 320x256.
Or wait for a new superAmiga to come out, like the Replay or Tina or Natami or whatever...
Just because Total Chaos AGA runs in 640x512 doesn't mean u can just go round running everything at that resolution. I had to use some really hardcore darque majique and break a few laws of physics to achieve that. :)
I did a bustest after getting the Cyberstorm in there. It scored around 30MB/s! I'll run it again after my current game of Total Chaos and post the exact numbers.
slaapliedje
Edit: Since when does using q between brackets and /q not work for quotes?
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That was a quick game. The enemy summoned a wraith, though I'm pretty sure he said rape, because that's what just happened to me!
Ill get the hang of this eventually...
slaapliedje
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Cyberstorm's memory is;
readw 32.0 * 10^6 bytes/s
readl 38.4
readm 38.8
writew 25.5
writel 25.5
writem 25.5
Interesting, the showconfig command shows that the Zorram and the 16mb on the motherboard are using the same memory addresses.
16.0 meg is addressed at $7000000-$7FFFFFF and the 128 meg is addressed at $7000000-$77FFFFF.
Isn't this a terribly bad thing? Though bustest does show that block of memory at 14.7, 16.0, 15.8, 9.4, 9.4, 9.4.
slaapliedje
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Unless I have something jacked that at start up (I have just OS3.9 with BB3 with ClassicWB slapped on top, along with the mediator drivers and the Cyberstorm drivers off of Aminet), then I shouldn't have had any fragmented memory. Started the extraction off of a cold boot.
I have three partitions, System is on FFS, and Work and Games are both on SFS.
Why is it that every time something bizzarre happens it always happens to someone using SFS? Then I always hafta say "Well SFS is on my list of prime suspects because I never use it. I use FFS and am about to switch to PFS3 because PFS3 has always been the fastest and its been free and opensource for a long time now. Also all the guys in Team Chaos switched to PFS3 around 10 years ago. They say it is faster and more reliable and burns less cpu cycles than SFS."
Half the time when something bizarre happens it eventually gets traced to something completely unrelated to SFS. But the other half the time, the mystery never gets solved. (Who wants to solve boring mysteries when u can be smashing monsters? :D )
There are other guys who play Total Chaos AGA on their ClassicWB/060 Classic Amigas and they swear ClassicWB works 100% perfectly. This is a major accomplishment as Total Chaos AGA bangs the AmigaOS hard and will detect bugs in many hacks.
Maybe your problem was caused by the way you unlha'ed the game?
lha x #?.lha is what I use from CLI. Lha does thrash the memory list when dealing with giant archives like this but not enuff thrashing to cause a failure, I would think. So I will guess that you used one of those buggy, sloppy, extrasuperduper memory thrashing GUI frontends for LHA and that is what caused the problem.
I bet if u repeat the test and then type "frags" from cli u will see 5000 memory frags.
I'd have to agree with this! Though instead of the C64, I played the Atari 8-bit version. Loved it. Though I distinctly recall punching the crap out of my younger brother when he somehow managed to slay my dragon with a knight... There are two of my favorite all time EA games from this time; Racing Destruction Set and Mail Order Monsters. I'd like them to remake them, but they'd just ruin them like they did Syndicate. Though... if you have ideas for a Total Chaos 2...
Ur playing Total Chaos 7 right now (assuming u downloaded the right one). Total Chaos 2 was back in A500 days 320x256. With 32 or 64 colors. Came on 1 or 2 floppy disks. It used the AmigaVoice (narrator.library) to speak the names of the monsters. Those were the days :knuddel:
Mail Order Monsters was, to me, a direct descendant of Archon. After all, it was Archon with upgradeable beasts.
Darnit! I never played Mail Order Monsters! We had the game. I remember seeing the disk all the time. One of my brother's had it. And I remember it loading from disk for multiple eternities. But I can't remember anything about the gameplay... I missed a classic? :(
So u r saying you could move your monsters around on a board and fight them against each other in Mail Order Monsters??? How could I not have known that?!?!?!
I clearly remember Racing Destruction Set. We played that a lot. I clearly remember Archon and M.U.L.E. and Space Taxi and Jumpman and Frogger and Wizard and Rally Speedway and Le Mans and Radar RatRace and Sword of Fargoal and Temple of Apshai and Zork and Farmer's Daughter and Battle Thru Time and all those great old C64 gamez.
I did a bustest after getting the Cyberstorm in there. It scored around 30MB/s! I'll run it again after my current game of Total Chaos and post the exact numbers.
That's kewl and all, because Total Chaos AGA sucks up every byte of that bandwidth to make the framerate faster... but when I was talking about the bandwidth limiting the framerate in your 3D FPS gamez I meant the bandwidth from your 060 cpu across your Mediator Bus into ur Radeon Gfx card. That should be something like 9.1 MB/sec Though it might still be stuck at 8MB/sec. I would be very interested to know the result.
The ramchips in the radeon give crappy bandwidth during random access. They only give their stellar bandwidth when accessing memory locations in sequential order. I am afraid that going across the mediator always counts as "random access" because it can't do the weird bursts that Radeon Ram requires for highspeed bandwidth.
Edit: Since when does using q between brackets and /q not work for quotes?
I don't think that has ever worked on this forum. You hafta write out the word quote. You must've been thinking of some other forum.
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Cyberstorm's memory is;
readw 32.0 * 10^6 bytes/s
readl 38.4
I wrote TotalChaosAGA to be super efficient and almost always use move.l instead of moving words or bytes. That way I scam a bunch of extra bandwidth for free. :)
Interesting, the showconfig command shows that the Zorram and the 16mb on the motherboard are using the same memory addresses.
That is scary :huh:
16.0 meg is addressed at $7000000-$7FFFFFF
Sounds plausible.
and the 128 meg is addressed at $7000000-$77FFFFF.
Either u wrote the number wrong or something is terribly screwed up. That only works out to 8MB of RAM. The other 120MB just vanished. :confused:
Isn't this a terribly bad thing? Though bustest does show that block of memory at 14.7, 16.0, 15.8, 9.4, 9.4, 9.4.
Those speeds would be quite excellent for a Zorram or a Radeon plugged into a Mediator PCI slot.
But what I am thinking is that those speeds are really measuring your onboard 16MB of RAM speed.
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Rather than attempting to quote the big mess, I'll just try to answer them all;
When I had first set up my Amiga with larger partitions, PFS3 was in talks about being open sourced and so I was waiting for it, but haven't ever gotten around since then to convert it over (namely because it took me a long time to give into the idea that I needed to recap my system to fix all the random crashes, finally did that and now it's rock solid). I'm going to have to figure out where the 'frags' command is, since it says 'Unknown command'. I know I've used it before... a few decades ago.
If I recall (it's been a LONG time since I played Mail Order Monsters) you had several game modes, one was against "The Horde" where the both of you were on a map and tried to prevent the computer controlled creatures from getting to the bottom, then once you encountered one, it'd zoom in like Archon did, and you'd roam around the map trying to defeat the creature.
I have played the majority of those! I love Temple of Apshai (and the precursor, Gateway to Apshai) I still fire it up occasionally. In fact recently my brother and I were playing Jumpman on my Atari 130XE connected to my 55" LED TV.. It was AWESOME! M.U.L.E. is one of the awesome games I never got around to playing, and I think some of those didn't come out for the Atari, since I don't recognize them.
More creatures you killed, the more money you got, the more you could improve your creature. It was awesome, I'd recommend firing up the C64 or Atari 8-bit emulator and give it a play! Add some elements to Total Chaos 8!
Sorry, I figured it was Total Chaos revision 7, not a full blown sequel of a sequel of a sequel... etc. :D
Radeon memory is running at 3.0, 6.0, 6.0, 4.9, 9.8, 9.8. That's some crappy read. Still not sure why that's showing up as 115 meg with 128 in the RadeonMem file. I'll have to play around with that a bit.
slaapliedje
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I wrote TotalChaosAGA to be super efficient and almost always use move.l instead of moving words or bytes. That way I scam a bunch of extra bandwidth for free. :)
Free is always good!
That is scary :huh:
Yeah, I figured "Okay, it's addressing over what the other memory address is, I'll move it down in the slot, and hope the mediator can do it's work and change the addressing for me. So here's the weird part; It didn't change the memory address, but it did seem to fix my overheating issues, the Zorram card was in the highest slot on the motherboard, and after adding in the Cyberstorm card, it seemed the mediator was getting really hot, but after moving that card to the lowest (the furthest away from the cyberstorm's memory module I could get) to seems to be running much cooler now.
Sounds plausible.
Either u wrote the number wrong or something is terribly screwed up. That only works out to 8MB of RAM. The other 120MB just vanished. :confused:
Definitely DID write it down wrong. Just ran showconfig again and it shows;
Node type $A, Attributes $505 (FAST), at $8000000-$BFFFFFF (64.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $505 (FAST), at $7000000-$7FFFFFF (16.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $405 (FAST), at $70000000-$77FFFFFF (128.0 meg)
Node type $A, Attributes $2005 (FAST), at $40C00000-$47EFFFFF (115.0 meg)[/code]
I feel like a retard now :D
Those speeds would be quite excellent for a Zorram or a Radeon plugged into a Mediator PCI slot.
But what I am thinking is that those speeds are really measuring your onboard 16MB of RAM speed.[/QUOTE]
Zorram numbers are 10.0, 10.5, 10.4, 6.3, 6.3, 6.2
slaapliedje (the one who missed an extra 0.)
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In fact recently my brother and I were playing Jumpman on my Atari 130XE connected to my 55" LED TV.. It was AWESOME! M.U.L.E. is one of the awesome games I never got around to playing, and I think some of those didn't come out for the Atari, since I don't recognize them.
If u r ever in my area we need to have a Jumpman party and/or a M.U.L.E. party! 2 of the best games of all time! (Along with Total Chaos of course ;)
Sorry, I figured it was Total Chaos revision 7, not a full blown sequel of a sequel of a sequel... etc. :D
The "r" was supposed to mean "Release" not "revision" but I could maybe change it to "s" for "Sequel"...
Radeon memory is running at 3.0, 6.0, 6.0, 4.9, 9.8, 9.8. That's some crappy read.
Yeah the Read speed suxx0rz but luckily most programs never read the gfx card memory. Normally they just write to it. And you have 9.8MB/sec move.l write speed which is about as good as you could hope for.
I can't remember the exact numbers for a Replay ottomh but let's just say you should get about 3x that, or 30MB/sec.
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Zorram numbers are 10.0, 10.5, 10.4, 6.3, 6.3, 6.2
Hehehe the Zorram numbers are the reverse of the Radeon. Now you get good Read Speed and crap write speed. Luckily you were smart enough to get a CPU with COPYBACK Cache so it hardly ever needs to write anything to your slow ram. So you get maximum amount of value for your investment.
Copyback cache is so totally completely awesome.
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Darnit! I never played Mail Order Monsters! We had the game. I remember seeing the disk all the time. One of my brother's had it. And I remember it loading from disk for multiple eternities. But I can't remember anything about the gameplay... I missed a classic? :(
Mail Order Monsters was one of the greatest games ever for the C64. Pretty much everything by EA (Deathlord, Legacy of the Ancients, Wasteland, etc. etc., at that time) was, and it's a huge loss that they were never ported to the Amiga. Skipping all the technical details in the above posts, are you guys saying that Total Chaos is anything like M.O.M.? If so.... aaaargh! I might have to somehow make room on my coffee table for an AGA system! ;-)
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If u r ever in my area we need to have a Jumpman party and/or a M.U.L.E. party! 2 of the best games of all time! (Along with Total Chaos of course ;))
Agreed! Hmm, a Jumpman remake with a nice scrolling background and more detailed graphics would be awesome!
Mail Order Monsters was one of the greatest games ever for the C64. Pretty much everything by EA (Deathlord, Legacy of the Ancients, Wasteland, etc. etc., at that time) was, and it's a huge loss that they were never ported to the Amiga. Skipping all the technical details in the above posts, are you guys saying that Total Chaos is anything like M.O.M.? If so.... aaaargh! I might have to somehow make room on my coffee table for an AGA system! ;-)
I've thought many times that someone needed to make an updated version of it. From what I've played of Total Chaos, It's similar to Archon 2, but with a crap ton more options and absolutely amazing sounds / music.
A new verison of M.O.M. would be epic as well. I think ChaosLord needs to give that one a try and put some of the ideas into Total ChaosAGA/RTG 8!
slaapliedje
Edit; Oh, I have attempted to switch my partitions over to PFS3, so I have 4GB for System: 31GB for Work: and 41GB for Games:, but damned if I can get the last partition to STAY. Whenever I reboot, it says it's uninitialized! Any ideas/suggestions?
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Mail Order Monsters was one of the greatest games ever for the C64.
I just watched it on the ut00be. Can't believe I never ever ever saw this game b4!@??!?
Pretty much everything by EA (Deathlord, Legacy of the Ancients, Wasteland, etc. etc., at that time) was, and it's a huge loss that they were never ported to the Amiga.
+999
Skipping all the technical details in the above posts, are you guys saying that Total Chaos is anything like M.O.M.? If so.... aaaargh! I might have to somehow make room on my coffee table for an AGA system! ;-)
Total Chaos is "anything" like it, in that I wanted to make a game where you fight your monsters against each other in an arena. But I did it as a boardgame cause I am a big fan of board games.
I had thought about having an optional arcade battling option (like the battling of Archon or M.O.M.) but I decided not to code it myself due to I wanted the game to be 100% netplayable and you can't do good 2D battling over the net. The random lag ruins it. (3D games get around the problem by LYING and CHEATING and FAKING everything. In 3D games everything is a big illusion and you can't get away with that stuff in a 2d game that needs 100% accuracy.)
Ok so I added in some code to Total Chaos so that any random person could code in gfx fx for the game using any random programming language of their choice. I did that and it worked. I also offered to put in "subgames" using the same technique. One guy coded a breakout subgame in Blitz Basic. Nobody coded an "archon / M.O.M arcade battling subgame" tho.
I have 4096 unfinished tasks on my plate already so there is just no way I can code an action battling subgame. But if someone else wants to code one then I am sure we can integrate it into the main boardgame.
Basically when a battle is supposed to happen the game calls a CLI command (which is the battling game written in any language by anybody) with some parameters such as a big block of chipram that can be used for the screen, the player names, the player units involved in the battle, etc.
Then we'd have it.
In M.O.M. you get money and they u get to go BUY any body part or weapon you want.
In Total Chaos you have to go out and FIND the body parts, weapons or whatever and then you cast them (with magic) onto whichever monster you want. M.O.M. had like 12 body parts and 11 weapons while Total Chaos has a megabajillion different ways to customize your monsters. Total Chaos just plain has a lot more "statistics" for each monster so there are more ways to customize them and build them up.
Many ppl have played Total Chaos continuously for several years and they still write in with crazy stories of new combinations they found that created some totally wacked out new type of monster.
Sometimes you will find an addon that doesn't seem very good but then you realize later that if you could find just exactly the right kind of monster to put this addon onto then you could win the game! Yar!
Other addons are obviously excellent but then you must strategically decide which of your many monsters do u want to add this awesome addon onto?
One statistic that I did not see in the youtube video was FLYING. All the monster battles I saw were conducted by ground units only. In Total Chaos there can be walls, rocks, castles and things on the battlefield that get in the way of walking and fighting. But FLYING creatures just fly right over them.
Also any unit might gain the ARCHERY skill which lets your monster shoot OVER the walls.
When fighting in a maze, either of the above 2 skillz is quite good to have.
In Total Chaos there are a few monsters that you can ride around on, like Centaurs and Unicorns but you can obtain magic spells that let you make ANY monster be Rideable (mountable) even a Tyranasaurus Rex or a Triceratops or a Red Dragon or anything! And Red Dragons Fly! That means you could ride around on a flying Monster!
I didn't see any wizards casting magic spells onto their monsters in M.O.M.
In Total Chaos you are a wizard and you are dealt a deck of random spells each game that you can strategically decide to cast on your monsters (or against the enemy monsters). For example maybe you just got lucky and have a Replicate spell in your spellbook. It lets Replicate anything on the gameboard. Do u have the patience to wait until you build up your monster into something like Godzilla? Or do u you just cast it right now onto the best good monster you have?
You can also play with the Scrolls option which litters the battlefield with a random collection of Magic Scrolls. Now you not only have to decide which magic spell to cast from ur hand and which monsters to move and which monsters will attack and which will stay back and be defensive but now u have to decide which Magic Scrolls you will pick up and which u will pass by. Sometimes there can be powerful scrolls that you just hafta have but zomg! its right next to a Monster Generator! Or maybe it is closer to your enemy than it is to u. What do u do? Do u run after it? Or just declare it a loss? Or do u do something devious to distract your opponent(s) so they won't grab it for themselves and u can sneak over and grab it later? Augh! Its Total Chaos!
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Edit; Oh, I have attempted to switch my partitions over to PFS3, so I have 4GB for System: 31GB for Work: and 41GB for Games:, but damned if I can get the last partition to STAY. Whenever I reboot, it says it's uninitialized! Any ideas/suggestions?
I donno anything about it.
If u start a new thread about it then Thomas will see it and he will know the answer for sure.
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I did find another post with people talking about the same issue. I ended up just wiping it, and creating one large partition after System (So now I just have System: and Work: instead of System:, Work:, and Games:. Good thing I can create whatever Assigns I want :D
slaapliedje
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One advantage to having 1 big partition is that you save a lot of hard drive buffers.
Instead of needing 1000 buffers (0.5 MB) for 10 different partitions (5MB total) you can give urself 2000 buffers on 1 big partition.
Though in fairness there are various advantages to having a few different partitions as long as you don't have to many of them.