Amiga.org
Operating System Specific Discussions => Other Operating Systems => Topic started by: Oldsmobile_Mike on February 11, 2014, 06:30:59 PM
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Was doing a google search for something completely unrelated and came across this article on an Atari website. Seems to be pretty fair and unbiased (considering the source), although the reviewer fails to mention that the A1200's expansion slot can be used to add so much more than memory... 040/060/Mediator/etc. Pretty good article though, just wanted to share:
http://www.atarimusic.net/featured-articles/atari-hardware/263-the-falcon030-vs-the-amiga1200
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Too bad he didn't look at an 030/50Mhz, would have had his mind blown ;)
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Interesting article, I will read it through later. Falcon is a nice computer, spec wise, but I can't understand why Atari opted for a 16bit wide data bus. Why? Where they really that desperate to save a few microcent on copper tracks? It's 1992. Even PC were up to 32 bit standard by then. With a full 32 bit bus this would have been a serious competitor for A1200, especially with that sound system. And despite the graphics.
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Actually pretty well written article. I never used a Falcon, but I did have a friend that had a 1024st (think it was that number or something close to it). I remember we used to compare it to my Amiga (had a 500 with 4meg busboard expansion) and we had a fun time doing that
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He did mention accelerators in the expansion bay.
16 bit data pipe on a 32 bit 68030. Sounds like something Sinclair would do. On a machine with 8 channel 16 bit sound, a midi interface and DSP. Crazy hobbling for what was at the time a dream spec machine.
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Interesting article, I will read it through later. Falcon is a nice computer, spec wise, but I can't understand why Atari opted for a 16bit wide data bus. Why? Where they really that desperate to save a few microcent on copper tracks? It's 1992. Even PC were up to 32 bit standard by then. With a full 32 bit bus this would have been a serious competitor for A1200, especially with that sound system. And despite the graphics.
With a full 32 bit bus it would have left the A1200 for dust ;)
I actually had an STFM when they announced the Falcon, I remember reading in the Atari mags of the time about how Atari were struggling to get some units to retail before the company folded....sad times.
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My own Falcon hardly ever gets used, even though it's a nice computer.
The reason..? Just not enough software. Compatibility with older ST games was not good, which doesn't help... A real shame.
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Where they really that desperate to save a few microcent on copper tracks?
32 bit needs double the number of ram chips than 16 bit. Even if they halved the size of the ram chips it would still be more expensive.
The rumour is the prototype used a 68000 that could take upgrades (like an A1200) and they had designed a prototype 030 card. I imagine after the A1200 was released they knew they couldn't compete if they shipped with a 68000. Putting a full 030 in there instead of an EC020 in the A1200 gave you an increase in the perceived value. The 030 has more cache, they probably hoped that people would be able to write software that didn't need too much access to RAM.
Jack Trammiel was always about selling shoddy computers cheap. When he was at commodore it worked quite well, because his competitors used to charge a lot for shoddy computers. An industry of fast loaders for the c64 was created because they shipped it as soon as it sort of worked.
The Atari ST was never a competitor to the Amiga because he did the same thing after buying Atari.
The Falcon 030 had a chunky 16 bit colour mode, which AGA desperately needed. If commodore had not gone down the path of AAA in 1988 then AGA could have been better. They turned AA around in a year. AAA is a good example of second system syndrome.
It was game over in 1993 for home computers, the PC was taking them on with doom etc. A games console that offered similar games for a lower outlay would have sold well in some countries (until maybe Sony entered the market). I believe AGA with chunky 16 bit modes and texture mapping in the blitter would have been a game changer. Commodore just didn't think of doing it.
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Oddly, it seems to me that the thing that sort of killed both Atari and Commodore were the console wars. They both tried one last foray into the video game consoles, and it killed them.
But at least with Atari, the "Intellectual Property" didn't just disappear into oblivion and everyone is confused on who owns it, unlike the Amiga. So much great tech and great operating systems, bouncing from one legal mess to another.
I even think TOS for the Atari was fully open sourced, where AROS was created to reverse engineer the AmigaOS. Which makes me want to play with AROS Vision :D
slaapliedje
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The A1200 should have shipped with some onboard fast ram - 1 MB would have done the trick which doubles the speed of the machine without even upgrading the processor/clock. Seems silly that it shipped with chip ram only which effectively halves the speed of the base machine.
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Oddly, it seems to me that the thing that sort of killed both Atari and Commodore were the console wars. They both tried one last foray into the video game consoles, and it killed them.
Consoles did have an effect, but it wasn't until the PS1/Saturn that the Amiga really had no hope.
A PC with a CD drive, sound card, network card & VGA card could produce better games in 1992 than an A1200. People who managed to persuade their employers to put a "multimedia" computer on their desk weren't even having to pay the high cost of all that hardware.
Seems silly that it shipped with chip ram only which effectively halves the speed of the base machine.
Shipping with 1mb of chip and 1mb of ram would have been more expensive to and more expensive to upgrade the chip ram to 2mb and add more fast ram. So I think they made the right choice.
I'd have rather seen maximum of 4 or even 8mb of chip ram though.
AGA was too weak, the CPU speed shouldn't even have been an issue. The whole point of the Amiga architecture was using custom chips to take a load off the CPU so it doesn't have to be so fast. Shipping a slight upgrade to a 1985 chipset in 1992 was lunacy.
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Here is another comparison from back in 1992 comparing the Atari Falcon, Amiga 1200, and Apple Performa 400: http://cd.textfiles.com/atarilibrary/atari_cd07/INFO/MISC/MTRLACPU.TXT
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32 bit needs double the number of ram chips than 16 bit. Even if they halved the size of the ram chips it would still be more expensive.
I wouldn't neccesarily say that. It's a matter of how many chips you have, the width of the chips and how many 'symbols' you can store per chips. Althought 32 bit chips would probably have been more expensive that 16 bit chips, at least as cent/bit is concerned, the total amount of RAM would affect the price more that width of the chips.
However, you need a more sofisticated RAM controller and custom chips for 32 bit memory access. Maybe the design decision was made because they had 16 bits designs for custom chips etc. that could easily be added to the Falcon (reuse=lower development cost)? I would call that a lazy approach;)
I found this development document for AAA. It looks pretty neat on paper and much, much better than AGA. It was cancelled in 1993 in favour of more advanced architectures. Probably a good thing by -93. But imagine an Amiga with this architeture in 89-91. Awesome!
http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/nyx/docs/AAA.pdf
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"The Atari & Commodore machines can operate at many different screen resolutions and would require a multisync monitor for optimum flexibility. Also, the Commodore Amiga 1200's maximum resolutions are interlaced(i). It's maximum non-interlaced resolution is 640x480. Both the Atari Falcon & Commodore Amiga 1200 will also overscan, giving them more resolution in that mode and making them suitable for Desk Top Video (DTV). The Apple Performa would require an analog VGA type monitor. With additional Video Ram, the Performa can display up to 32,000 colors maximum."
Maximum non-interlaced resoulution for the A1200 is 1280 x 256 or 1472 x 290 (with overscan) not 640 x 480. Oh, and wasn't the apple a bag of %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!e.
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He did mention accelerators in the expansion bay.
16 bit data pipe on a 32 bit 68030. Sounds like something Sinclair would do. On a machine with 8 channel 16 bit sound, a midi interface and DSP. Crazy hobbling for what was at the time a dream spec machine.
Not only sinclair:
https://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_performa/specs/mac_performa_400.html
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Althought 32 bit chips would probably have been more expensive that 16 bit chips, at least as cent/bit is concerned, the total amount of RAM would affect the price more that width of the chips.
I can't find a hires picture of an Atari falcon motherboard, but the schematic suggests they use 4bit ram (which is likely for the time). You put 4 next to each other for 16bit, 8 next to each other for 32bit. If you use the same size ram then for 32bit you either have double the ram, or you halve the size of each chip. Either way having 16bit access to ram is considerably cheaper than 32 bit access.
However, you need a more sofisticated RAM controller and custom chips for 32 bit memory access. Maybe the design decision was made because they had 16 bits designs for custom chips etc. that could easily be added to the Falcon (reuse=lower development cost)? I would call that a lazy approach;)
They could have kept 16 bit custom chips (pretty much like AGA did), but the memory controller would need to be changed. It's no more complex, just more lines. They would need to do another spin of the hardware and relayout the motherboard. If they had changed to 32bit after development began then it's unlikely that they'd have ever shipped anything.
I found this development document for AAA. It looks pretty neat on paper and much, much better than AGA. It was cancelled in 1993 in favour of more advanced architectures. Probably a good thing by -93. But imagine an Amiga with this architeture in 89-91. Awesome!
http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/nyx/docs/AAA.pdf
It would have been too expensive. They weren't considering selling it in A500/A1200 type systems. It was when someone finally remembered that commodore was supposed to be selling high volume of cheap hardware that it got cancelled.
I'd take AGA with 16 bit chunky and a texture mapper in the blitter over AAA any day (texture mapping is not much more complex than line drawing). The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.
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8 16 bit sound channels is what the a1200/a4000 SHOULD have had...
Falcon would have made a very nice early daw. at that time 8 channel
recording solutions were pretty expensive.
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Speaking of sound chips and how the AGA machines should have had an upgraded one, I find it hilarious that in comparing The Chaos Engine 'remake' that it sounds better on the Amiga. Almost like there is one of the sound channels were missing.
It's amazing that after all this time, they still can't quite get the sound working the same via emulation.
They also haven't been able to emulate the DSP of the Falcon, from what I understand.
slaapliedje
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8 16 bit sound channels is what the a1200/a4000 SHOULD have had...
More channels would definitely have been good. I'm not sure 8 would be enough, but having a left/right volume for each channel rather than 2 left and 2 right channels would have been a huge improvement.
I'm not sure that moving to 16bit would have helped the games market, which is the only one that really ever generated commodore any money.
They also haven't been able to emulate the DSP of the Falcon, from what I understand.
The falcon DSP should be relatively trivial to emulate these days, I guess nobody has tried very hard (which could be true).
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The falcon DSP should be relatively trivial to emulate these days, I guess nobody has tried very hard (which could be true).
I'm just going by Hatari, which is the only emulator I've seen that has attempted to add Falcon support. And I know that (last I used it was a few versions ago) it said the DSP support was very minimal. I'll have to check it again to see if they fixed it.
Sadly, there isn't a whole lot of Falcon specific software out there, whereas AGA actually had a fairly decent library.
slaapliedje
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Sadly, there isn't a whole lot of Falcon specific software out there, whereas AGA actually had a fairly decent library.
I suspect that is the real reason they haven't tried too hard to emulate the DSP (and why nobody else has bothered either).
Although obscure systems can be more interesting.
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Ah, looks like they've added full DSP support to it. The last time I'd played around with Hatari, it was marked as Experimental.
slaapliedje
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Frankly, I wouldn't mind owning a blitter equipped Atari, but they sell for a fairly high price (particularly the '30 models).
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I currently have an Atari 1040ST (I think there is a capacitor broken in it, last I used it the video display had random lines all over it), a Mega STe (not sure if it's still working, need a monitor to connect it to) and an Atari TT030, again, haven't connected it in a long time.
My A4000D is funner :D Couldn't ever get a hold of a video card, or connect them to the network.
slaapliedje
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Either way having 16bit access to ram is considerably cheaper than 32 bit access.
I agree with that. I'm just questioning if that saving would be worth it due to the decrease in performance. But anyway, I'm not here to argue so I'll be quite regarding this from now on :D
The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.
You can say that again. Mid-ninties had heaps of horrible looking 3D games. Suddenly when 3D became possible, everything should be 3D. I still think Castlevania - Symphony of the Night was the best game on Playstation. Why? Because is was 2D, something the console did really well.
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@Oldsmobile_Mike
Thanks for the link :hat:
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You can say that again. Mid-ninties had heaps of horrible looking 3D games. Suddenly when 3D became possible, everything should be 3D. I still think Castlevania - Symphony of the Night was the best game on Playstation. Why? Because is was 2D, something the console did really well.
Well, if the only quality of these games was the graphics I would agree with you, but 3D literally enables another dimension of gameplay. Good looking or not, it afforded these consoles a new type of gaming experience at the time, and that proved to be extremely popular and interesting to the market. Really crude looking 3D titles have left lasting impressions in the gaming world. Wolfenstein 3D, Elite, Sentinel... You name it, the graphics obviously weren't as important as the interaction with a 3D space was.
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I wasn't just talking about graphics, 3D games did revolutionize gaming. I'm not questioning that. But to move a game to the third dimention doesn't nessesary make for a better game. It still have to be a good game. PSX did have some really good 3D games but there were also a lot of bad 3D games. Games that seems to be sold for the only reason that is was 3D. But 3D was hot at this time and everyone wanted to jump on the train without having a good grasp how to design a 3D game (I'm talking about a game that plays better in 3D). Personally, I'm not too picky about graphics as long as I enjoy the game.
2D or 3D, I still consider SotN to be one of the best game on Playstation. Gameplay, music, plot and puzzle solving. Epic! It is a true classic game.
Seems like I'm starting an argument with everyone in this thread...
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Wolfenstein 3D
How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.
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How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.
DM is 3D. It is 3D because you can only see what the camera is pointing at. Enemies etc. can hide behind object you are seeing, thus being ínvisible' from you. This is not the case with 2D games where you can see anything on the screen.
Think of a football game. The field is flat but it doesn't make it less 3D. If you are a player, you might still not be able to see an opposing player because they are behind you or behind another player.
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DM is 3D.
No, it's not.
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I'm just questioning if that saving would be worth it due to the decrease in performance.
That is very difficult to quantify. You'd have to know whether that was the reason that the Falcon only lasted a year, if it wasn't then spending any additional money on it would have been worse.
You would also have to know whether they could have hit the same release date by switching to 32bit. If it would have taken additional time and money then would it recover it. It's the same argument for any compromise in any computer. i.e. how many C64's would have been sold if they'd have fixed the slow floppy drives before shipping and how much would it have cost to fix? Yeah it's annoying that it was slow & some people were probably put off by it, but without the figures you can't calculate it.
I'd say that by the time the Falcon shipped there weren't enough people with ST's that were looking to buy another 680x0 based computer. The majority of Amiga owners wouldn't jump ship, it had a few interesting pieces of hardware but nothing that couldn't be added to an Amiga. Plus MultiTOS was awful when the Falcon was released.
How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.
Wolfenstein isn't flat, the walls have a height even though it's fixed. The graphics are effectively rendered in 3d, even though the player is limited to 2 dimensions.
There are plenty of 2d games where the player is limited to 1 dimension, we don't call those 1d games.
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Wolfenstein isn't flat, the walls have a height even though it's fixed. The graphics are effectively rendered in 3d, even though the player is limited to 2 dimensions.
The maps are flat, therefore the game world is 2D. How that 2D space is visualized is completely irrelevant.
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Personally, I'd say that if there are calculations within the program of X Y and Z, then the game is 3D. I believe in Dungeon Master, when you'd throw something, it had a specific distance that it would travel before it fell to the ground, and I think if it hit a creature at a particular distance, it'd do more or less damage.
So I'd say it qualifies as a 3D game, in both play and visualization. You could even go up and down levels.
I do always find it funny that Wolfenstein 3D is always brought up as being the first 3D game. Alternate Reality had fully textured walls many years before Wolf3D did, and apparently in the original design, he was planning on doing full 360 degree movement. He just thought that the players at the time would be really confused, and the maps would be more difficult to make. Amazing that the creators had managed to do the things they did on the 8-bit machines. It's a sad thing that AR: The Dungeon was never released for the Amiga or any 16/32bit machine for that matter.
slaapliedje
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I believe in Dungeon Master, when you'd throw something, it had a specific distance that it would travel before it fell to the ground, and I think if it hit a creature at a particular distance, it'd do more or less damage.
Can you throw things up and down? No.
You could even go up and down levels.
Stairs and pits in Dungeon Master are simply connections between two dimensional maps.
In Dungeon Master and Wolfenstein all of the action takes place on a two dimensional plane, therefore the games are two dimensional.
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therefore the games are two dimensional.
So http://www.easports.com/uk/fifa/fifa14/xbox360 is a 2d game?
wolfenstein has 3d graphics by any definition I can find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics
DM is 3D. It is 3D because you can only see what the camera is pointing at.
I think it's a stretch to say it's 3D, the way the graphics are drawn is not in any way like a traditional 3D render.
There is no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection, afaik all graphics are just blitted.
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So http://www.easports.com/uk/fifa/fifa14/xbox360 is a 2d game?
Is a third dimension relevant to soccer? If so, then soccer is 3D.
wolfenstein has 3d graphics by any definition I can find.
I don't care about the graphics, the game world is 2D. The way it's visualized isn't relevant. Not to mention the fact that Wolfenstein's 3D view is completely fake, just like Doom (only simpler).
I think it's a stretch to say it's 3D, the way the graphics are drawn is not in any way like a traditional 3D render.
By that logic a game with blitted graphics that takes place in a 3D world wouldn't be 3D. Dungeon Master isn't 3D because the levels aren't 3D.
There are two things to consider here. The game world and the graphics engine. One of these can be 3D while the other doesn't have to be.
An example of a 2D world with a 3D graphics engine would be a shoot'm up like Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun. The graphics are 3D, but the game world isn't.
An example of a 3D world with a 2D graphics engine would be Hired Guns if I'm not mistaken. Or the turn based stratagy parts of Ufo.
I personally interpret a game as 3D if the game world is 3D.
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Define 3D. Moving x, y, and also z. I'm pretty sure you could go up and down stairs in wolfenstein.
Dungeon Master was a 3D pre rendered dungeon.
It can't be classed as the first, because there were other kinds of 3D games before it. Was it one of the first SVGA games on PC?
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I swear I've seen this very conversation before... Some people define '3D' differently than others. I figure if it looks 3D, has 3D movement, even though it's still technically on a 2D display, than it's 3D.
slaapliedje
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So we're discussing semantics? Wowza... :-/
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So we're discussing semantics? Wowza... :-/
Yup, pretty much... That's why I had said that if the calculations are in there somewhere for x y and z coordinates, then it's by definition a 3D game, since it has to do 3D calculations.
slaapliedje
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ST vs Amiga discussions were never this boring in the past! ;-)
-Edit- I'll throw my $0.02 in... A game is 3D if it presents the user with a 3D environment. So side scrollers and isometric games don't count, thus dungeon master does count IMHO. I know was was basically a slideshow, but that doesn't really matter to the user, what Dungeon Master wasn't was a First Person shooter... And this is where things get confused.
Then we have Wolfenstein (arguably the first "First Person Shooter"), which doesn't add much to the "3D genre", as we had flight/racing sims in true 3D and even carrier command which although a real time strategy game at heart had plenty of 3D shooter gameplay.
What Wolfenstein did, was take the sidescroller and put it into a 3D context. The sidescroller/platformer was the most common/popular type of game so... All games which would have been side scrollers and platformers (and thus all the games machines like the Amiga/Megadrive/SNES/etc which had dedicated hardware for 2D games) suddenly needed to be better at 3D.
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ST vs Amiga discussions were never this boring in the past! ;-)
This ones not very exciting, no. Go to Atari forums to see some real action.
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Considering the sound capabilities of the A1200 (and the A500 for that matter), in-game sound was still unbeaten in 1992, I mean, back then I had a sound blaster pro clone, and maybe it could do some neat 16 bit sound playback, if I compare it to the Amiga sound playback in most games, the Amiga totally blows it away. Only when the wavetables became common the Amiga sound became obsolete. (apart from, like the SID, irreplaceable unique sound)
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I personally interpret a game as 3D if the game world is 3D.
Generally people refer Wolfenstein 3D as defacto 3d as the graphics are calculated with 3d algorithms. Dungeon Master therefore has not been considered 3d. Not that I do not agree with you, as your argument is logically sound, it's just that as far as I know, this is the concensus. A nice 3d game as well is Pandemonium, it has 2d platform gameplay, yet it's fully 3d rendered.
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Maximum non-interlaced resoulution for the A1200 is 1280 x 256 or 1472 x 290 (with overscan) not 640 x 480. Oh, and wasn't the apple a bag of %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!e.
No, ECS and AGA provided more modes. i used the 640x480 60Hz mode for workbench intensively before I got a gfx card.
The only bad thing about these productivity/Euro72 and multiscan mode was that they were not 15.x Khz and hence not 1084 comaptible. But with a multiscan mode these modes were quite useful.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/resolute.html
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it's just that as far as I know, this is the concensus.
Yes, I don't doubt it is. Doesn't make it true, of course.
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Then we have Wolfenstein (arguably the first "First Person Shooter"),
It's not the first first person shooter (Catacomb Abyss, I think, is), nor is it the first texture-mapped 3d game (Again, Catacomb Abyss preceded, as well as Ultima Underworld).
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Yes, I don't doubt it is. Doesn't make it true, of course.
No but it communicates a bit easier :)
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I guess to make it a little less boring;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1PyUkVuZk
I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon! how well does it run on a stock A1200?
slaapliedje
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how well does it run on a stock A1200?
Probably like crap.
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Just checked on this thread again...
The maps are flat, therefore the game world is 2D. How that 2D space is visualized is completely irrelevant.
You can't really talk about spatial dimensionality of a game in any other sense than representationally, can you? To say that the visualization is irrelevant is kind of an arbitrary idea that I don't think anyone will agree with you on, but let's pretend that we do for a moment and consider this situation:
Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.
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Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.
What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.
Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.
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What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.
On what basis? Since the C64 is perfectly capable of 3D games and game engines, I'm assuming that that alone isn't what your argument is based on. If you literally have consider situations that arise in the game spatially in three dimensions, how can you argue that it isn't 3D?
Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.
In thorham's opinion, if x, y and z all actually matter to the game and not only visually, as far as I understand him, it' 3D.
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It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D. Doesn't really matter visually speaking. For example, the newer Rayman games have this giant mushroom that bounces you from one playing level to another, and it's moving you in a third dimension. So it technically is a 3D game, even though most people wouldn't consider it as such.
This is in the same way that Dungeon Master lets you move up and down floors. The only reason you can't do that in real-time so to speak, was due to memory constrictions at the time. So the argument that it's only a 2D game is rather off, in my opinion.
slaapliedje
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It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D.
What the world understands as a "3D" game is different to implementing something in three dimensions. And language is supposed to be used to convey meaning to others.
What the majority would regard as "3D" it something that is 3D rendered as well as being able to move freely on the three different planes. Something that dungeon master fails at on all counts. You could use your same argument that pong was 3d, but the technology just wasn't there to display it.
Dungeon Master allows you to move one screen at a time, you don't have a character that walks around the screen. Therefore it's not a 3d game. Stuff like Mario 64 is a 3D game, you walk, you turn and you see yourself moving through a 3d rendered landscape. Dungeon Master is not that at all.
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That's arguing semantics about a third person game vs first person. Realistically a '3D' game is anything that represents 3 dimensional movement. In Dungeon Master you can move forward, and you can move left and right. Which would still basically only be 2 dimensional in a 3D landscape. But since you can travel up and down stairs (even though it's not represented in real time) it still is a 3D game. If you draw a map of Dungeon master out, you would need some sort of 3D rendering software to do the full thing, would you not? It has a height, length and depth to it.
Pong has none of those things. It plays completely on a 2D plane. Now they do have a 3D version of Pong...
slaapliedje
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i don't think you can move up and down in Doom, but no-one would seriosly say its not 3D.
3D is not about how you can move.
Its about whether depth is show on screen, and how this depth varies to mimic the real world as the viewing perspective changes. Look at a cube for example, as you move around or "above" it you see all of its sides,and the top and bottom and the view changes to match your viewing angle as it does in the real world. Limiting your view to only horizontal and vertical viewing positions doesn't stop it from being 3D.
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You can't really talk about spatial dimensionality of a game in any other sense than representationally, can you?
The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.
This is in the same way that Dungeon Master lets you move up and down floors. The only reason you can't do that in real-time so to speak, was due to memory constrictions at the time. So the argument that it's only a 2D game is rather off, in my opinion.
Dungeon Master is a two dimensional game, because the dungeons are flat maps that are connected via pits and stairs. Hired Guns has a three dimensional world.
i don't think you can move up and down in Doom
Sure you can, have you even played it?
but no-one would seriosly say its not 3D.
I would, because it's not three dimensional in any way at all. The maps are flat in the sense that you can't have things like rooms above each other, that's why you can actually see everything on the auto map, which would be impossible if the maps were three dimensional.
Then there's the graphics engine which is completely fake 3D. So no, Doom isn't three dimensional.
3D is not about how you can move.
It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.
Its about whether depth is show on screen, and how this depth varies to mimic the real world as the viewing perspective changes.
Even that isn't actually three dimensional, because it's just a flat surface. And besides, humans can't see in three dimensions or we would be able to see an object from all sides at the same time. We see two completely flat images, and two flat images don't make a three dimensional image. The brain creates a three dimensional approximation of what you see (whether you have one or two eyes), but the brain's visual input is as two dimensional as it gets.
3D is all about the internal representation, and three dimensional visualization would be where you can actually stick your head inside the viewing system so that you can look behind things, etc.
Basically it all comes down to the difference between the way humans normally talk, and how things really are. You say it's three dimensional, even when it's not, because it looks like it's three dimensional.
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It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.
What it looks like is completely relevant. 3D is basically a marketing term. It doesn't just mean three dimensional.
3D TV's are actually stereoscopic, but 3D is catchier. It has other uses than fooling our brains into perceiving depth in the image.
For a game to be 3D you need to be able to freely move along three planes and freely rotate around two planes. It needs to give an impression of depth and not just look like a 2D photograph, which is what Dungeon Master looks like.
Doom is an interesting case, you can move in three dimensions but you can only rotate around one of them. The map has 3 dimensions, but it's like a voxel where the height is stored within a 2d matrix so you can't have one floor above the other. Only the rooms were rendered at run time, the barrels and enemies etc were just scaled sprites. At the time we called it 2.5D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D)
In a world where Doom is considered 2.5D, Dungeon Master cannot be 3D.
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I guess to make it a little less boring;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1PyUkVuZk
I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon! how well does it run on a stock A1200?
slaapliedje
Where's the HUD along the bottom, wheres the gun? Other than that it's not bad :-)
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I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon! how well does it run on a stock A1200?
slaapliedje
Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.
And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).
I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.
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Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.
Don't forget also that the Falcon only had a 16bit memory bus... That poor 030 must have been starving :'(
Still the chunky gfx mode and DSP chip kinda makes up or the crappy bus.
And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).
I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.
I hve to agree, the A1200 always did and still does represent better value.
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The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.
Dungeon Master is a two dimensional game, because the dungeons are flat maps that are connected via pits and stairs. Hired Guns has a three dimensional world.
Dungeon Master is a first person shooter. It is made to look like it is 3D but it is actually just 2D with an advanced line of sight. It is 2D game from different angle.
Hired Guns has a three dimensional world but you could say it is just stacked 2D maps. Difference to Dungeon Master is just that you can see what is going on another 2D map down or above you.
I would, because it's not three dimensional in any way at all. The maps are flat in the sense that you can't have things like rooms above each other, that's why you can actually see everything on the auto map, which would be impossible if the maps were three dimensional.
I dont think that matters. Modern 3D engines have their own limitations too which of course are not so visible. However...
Then there's the graphics engine which is completely fake 3D. So no, Doom isn't three dimensional.
I agree, almost. I would just it is yet more advanced form of line of sight in a 2D game. But you can also utilize Z direction to some extent which isnt possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Or in Hired Guns.
But back to the original point...
The problem was that nobody at commodore had the vision that cheap crappy 3d rendering would be such a big deal.
The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...
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Reading the article and it seems that both Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon 030 shared the same attribute: lack of raw CPU performance. Falcon due to its 16-bit bus and A1200 due to lack of fast RAM on stock machine. If compared by hardware features in stock machine neither can outweigh another.
The software support did.
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The deal with cheap crappy 3D rendering is that it allows making games from new perspective without game looking ultimately crappy. There were times when filled polygons were the state of art of 3D rendering...
Yes, that was my point. If commodore had realised that developing chunky bitmaps and crude texture mapping in the late 80's could have saved their company then things would have been entirely different.
I believe Hombre was started after they heard about the PlayStation, Sony were nearing the end of development in 1993 (they launched the console in 1994 but hardware of some form had existed for a long time prior to that). The Sega Saturn also wasn't a 3D capable console until they heard about the PlayStation.
I wouldn't expect a 3D Amiga released in 1991 to compete with the PlayStation in 1994, but it would have built a user base and commodore would have had money to keep developing new hardware. But in 1988 they decided that the future was AAA.
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AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?
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AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?
They did ECS :-)
Hardware wise Commodore was in difficult position with Amiga. They could not replace hardware because it would not be backwards compatible and AmigaOS didnt have enough hardware abstraction for real hardware independent software development.
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The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.
Both the three dimensional world and the text descriptions are different representational abstractions, and I'm not sure how you can argue for the completely arbitrary distinction between the two that you seem to subscribe to. On a lower level of abstraction the 3D world is just a file in a file system or so.
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AAA, and then Hombre, are you all still sure Dave Haynie was some kind of genius?
For crying out loud, couldn't they just get their act together and release some kind of upgrade?
Dave Haynie had nothing to do with AAA or Hombre, he got stuck with putting together the Nyx motherboard for AAA at the end when commodore were pretty much dead.
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They did ECS :-)
Hardware wise Commodore was in difficult position with Amiga. They could not replace hardware because it would not be backwards compatible and AmigaOS didnt have enough hardware abstraction for real hardware independent software development.
Commodore never seemed to really be able to capitalize on the professional work being done with Amigas that Atari couldn't touch, beyond the music industry. In fact, professional use of Amigas was often done in spite of Commodore's ability to run its company and provide a decent support structure for either customers or their own retailers. Putting aside the murky image that could never really balance well between home and professional use.
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Dave Haynie had nothing to do with AAA or Hombre, he got stuck with putting together the Nyx motherboard for AAA at the end when commodore were pretty much dead.
That doesn't seem to be the case as patents held by Haynie are used in both projects.
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Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.
And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).
I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.
Ha ha, yeah I more or less meant that as a joke. By the way, I thought the A1200 ran at 14Mhz? MC68020EC at 14Mhz if I recall correctly. The Falcon is rare and so is software for it, so obviously buying an A1200 that actually had decent software support vs the Falcon which really only a couple art and music programs were ever really created just for it... pretty much a no brainer. Even if you totally ignore the price.
Still... I'd like a Falcon just to say I have one. But then I'm not really rich, and I'd probably only rarely use it. I have several Atari STs (1040ST, Mega STe, and TT030) and all of them are just sitting there doing nothing right now. On the other hand my A4000D is connected to the Internet and happily running Amikit for Real.
slaapliedje
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Commodore never seemed to really be able to capitalize on the professional work being done with Amigas that Atari couldn't touch, beyond the music industry. In fact, professional use of Amigas was often done in spite of Commodore's ability to run its company and provide a decent support structure for either customers or their own retailers. Putting aside the murky image that could never really balance well between home and professional use.
That's a very good point, if Commodore could have actually kept up with what people were trying to do with their hardware, they'd probably still be around. The IBMs and compatibles were really only good at the 'serious' work, but a lot of the video editing and creative things that Macs are known for now were pretty much all on the Amiga. Hell, most games around the time had their art developed with DPaint. I think one of the other issues with the Amiga is that "Oh, it's only a game machine" crap that Commodore more or less pushed with all it's might.
Now all that's left is a bunch of jerks reminiscing on how awesome computers used to be. :laughing:
slaapliedje
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I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993. All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines." How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.
I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994. Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days. The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).
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I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993. All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines." How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.
I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994. Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days. The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).
Yeah, it really is messed up when you think about it. It really is a big part of why the 'PC' kept getting bigger and faster hardware, all for those extra frames in games. Granted now it also helps with streaming video, and ripping, etc.
Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI. SGIs were way expensive.
Reminds me of the Mega STe and TT030 line of computers. Atari were 'getting serious' and trying to make a dent in the DTP market. What happened with that? Well Pagestream got it's start on the Atari ST, but then stopped supporting it around 2.0-2.2 or something, yet Pagestream still make an Amiga Classic version, along with OS4.
Same thing with the big box Amigas, I think they were trying to market them toward being professional systems. It's a shame that computers went the way they did. The fact that something that should be fairly simple (browsing the Internet to get some information) has become this bloated mess that requires gigabytes of memory. Just sad.
slaapliedje
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Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI. SGIs were way expensive.
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There was some pro work being done on Macs up at ILM, a small division started by John Knoll (co-creator of Photoshop). The Macs at the time, Quadras and later the PPC models, were as capable as the Amiga but the software just wasn't really there. You had Electric Image and...Electric Image.
Meanwhile, on the Amiga, you had Lightwave at the forefront which took over the low and midrange of CGI production as soon as Newtek uncoupled it from what we used to call "the dongle" (ie. the Video Toaster). There were still some kooky folks that were diehard Imagine users and then you had Caligari make a bit of a blip.
I really wanted the Hash software to go someplace because their spline/patch technology was pretty cool but it was wholly unreliable software and they never could produce a renderer that was worth a damn so I instead turned my attention to Real3D which was actually the only CGI software available for any microcomputer platform (at the time) that was designed and worked like high end software. Here too, however, you had some stability issues and a fatal flaw in their animation architecture. For all its limitations, Lightwave was solid and it gained a lot of users.
Meanwhile, at work, in the 1994 time frame the SGI Impact at my desk was about $55K and the SESI Prisms license that was my weapon of choice until they released Houdini was $20K per seat. I think Softimage was $60K at the time and a full-on Alias Power Animator could run as much as $90K depending on options. My A4000 wasn't cheap, and cost more than the base price of the current PowerMac if I recall, but at the same time a Quadra 700 was about $6K or $7K, keyboard extra.
A couple years after Amigas started disappearing Windows NT started eating at SGI from the bottom up, eventually killing their hold on the workstation market like SGI killed the mini and super-computer market in the '80s, and for a couple years the platform of choice was based on the DEC Alpha + Lightwave and pretty much everything else from the Amiga that got ported, until all roads led back to Intel.
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Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.
I find myself looking at PPC macs so that I can get a MorphOS machine, if they had something like the Sam boards in a laptop, that would be better, since I would rather not own anything ever made by Apple... But most of it is just so I can say that I own a PPC... Now if they ported MorphOS to something like the Raspberry Pi....
slaapliedje
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Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.
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That could very well be true but sooner or later folks had to get passed engineering and design infatuation and accept reality. Faster + cheaper trumps fetish (if you're out there trying to run or create a business or be competitive, I don't apply that to taking interest in things for their own sake as a hobby or pleasurable pursuit).
When my Amiga blew up I got a DEC Alpha because it meant I could run some of the software I still wanted to use at home and wasn't Intel. It was RISC so that was cool. I was even able to justify Windows-NT because they were kind of a marginal group at MS at the time and it used a kernel based on MACH, like NeXT (though NT 3.whatever was painfully ugly). There was even something exceedingly cool about how FX32 worked, the engineering behind it, that let me run Intel apps at full speed (eventually, the more you ran it the faster your performance as it refined the emulation).
Back then the DEC machines killed anything Intel on floating point, which meant everything for CGI. But Intel closed the gap and then surpassed DEC even here, until the Alpha solution was no longer slightly more expensive with much more performance, it was more expensive and slower in every respect. Ultimately, DEC didn't even care. They weren't really interested in being competitive long term or in desktop applications anymore than Motorola + IBM would be in later years. Engineers with no lasting ambition or at least none sympathetic to what desktop users wanted.
We (Digital Domain) absorbed the "NT Group" from Amblin who came in with their DEC Alphas so I got to see the transition go down in a serious way. What I had at home was kind of incidental because I never had the time or inclination to do anything but plink around at home. But the ugly transition from IRIX to everyone having Intel based Windows-NT, including horribly designed, failed attempts to stay relevant by SGI, was a sad era at the company.
Eventually we moved to LINUX and the hardware simply ceased to matter because "who cares?". It either works or it doesn't, is fast or slow, basically. The hardware isn't sexy anymore or interesting. It's all about what software you want to run and how much of a pain-in-the-ass you're willing to put up with to use it.
I got enough exposure to LINUX at work to know I wasn't going to put up with that at home so I've been mostly Mac since NeXT took over. I was sad when Apple dumped Motorola. My Mom worked, over the years, at Motorola, at Freescale and at the Apple-Motorola-IBM facility (Somerset) during the early days of PPC development. But those people were and are complete boneheads, the folks controlling the keys to the PPC castle, and their inability to get their act together meant Apple had no choice. They gave Intel the knife and stretched out their own necks. Lumbergh in Office Space might as well be based on the management culture of Motorola. When that movie came out I got the impression from Mom that it might as well have been a docudrama, they were that incompetent and wasteful. And look at them now.
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Ha ha, that last bit about Linux is is so true. Supports all the architectures out there, and it really gets to the point where you just pick and chose some hardware based on how well it works under Linux, slap it together then it's all about the software stack.
I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.
I'm still kind of curious about putting System V on my TT030, but since I don't have any graphics card in it, it'd basically just be another terminal, not to mention no network connectivity.
slaapliedje
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I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.
Back in the day I tried it on my 50mhz 68030 with 48mb ram and it was so slow it was just pointless, so I think you made the right choice.
Linux on the PS2 was equally disappointing.
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X-Windows, unless you have serious GPU and CPU, is the suck in many cases (and in my case I wasn't interested in being an IT manager at home). Back when Personal Irises were still running IRIX with the NeWS interface, which was Display Postscript like NeXT and snappy and pleasant to look at, X was mostly an academia thing.
NeWS made working on even a PI25 doable and a PI35TG was the bomb. Then they came out with the Indigo and dumped NeWS for X and the ugliness of Motif and all of the sudden workstations that used to be seriously comfortable workstations felt instantly old and slow, necessitating the purchase of the newer hardware because anything less than a top of the line Iris was now a complete dog.