chunky pixel mode

[lassie]

Hi i have been thinking about 3D on Amiga and read about something called chunky pixel mode, if they had used that in an Amiga 1200 and CD32 would it have made the Amiga better at 3D games? or should there more to it, maybe more ram etc?

I have an Super Nintendo and Sega Cd and they are quite good at making (fake) 3D games but they also have something called mode 7. But Sega CD only have 128 kb ram but it sure can make some decent 3D games, i know it is not real 3D but it looks great. so i have been thinking what Amiga could have done to keep up with the newer games from the 3D era. But i have seen some demos on a stock Amiga 1200 and they were quite cool 3D demos

[lassie]

For SNES-like*mode-7 style effects check out "Brian The Lion", it was coded by sceners and they programmed blitter to make it rotate and zoom bitmaps with higher accuracy than SNES
and quite fast (the intro screen rotozoom runs at 25fps on a stock amiga with no fastmem)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-IDcTW8JQ4

Chek out minute 9:24, 9:30 to see the big platforms rotated using Amiga Blitter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-IDcTW8JQ4&feature=player_detailpage#t=564s

IMHO*the problem with AGA was
1. Not enough sprites
2. That caused that people used blitter to draw the remaining gfx but it was more or less as fast as the OCS/ECS ones
3. Since blitter was slow some coders of modern games draw the stuff in fastmem and copy to chipmem and that's when you realize chipmem's top speed of 7MB/s with a good accelerator (faster than most ISA cards) is not enough
4.*Chunky modes would have been useful at the beggining with slow cpus but from 040 upwards you can perform c2p as fast as you perform a copy from fast to chip. Even if you had a chunky mode if your game gfx are moderately complex you probably won't like to draw byte by byte to chipmem, you'll prefer to do that in fastmem and copy the result to chipmem at the end. So with 040+ cpus chunky modes are not a problem. In fact first IDSoftware games ran in planar 16-colour EGA mode on peecees and ray^tscc showed some years ago wolf3d was possible on a 8Mhz Atari

More sprites would have made a real difference. Check out Neo Geo games. These are 2D only but impressive anyway. CBM*should have added more sprites or a 32bit blitter and that would have made a lot of difference in the quality of Amiga games. Chunky games usually looked like sh*t anyway.

Although challenges are always fun (doing chunky games on Amiga) I think more effort should have been done in taking advantage of AGA+fastram and doing some great neo-geo like games.

You are right, there were something like mode 7 on Amiga i could see now i have never seen that before.

[lassie]

For a certain type of games sure. We'd all have loved to have UFO Enemy Unknown be less pokey. But there were plenty of areas where CPU power was important: Coding, all sorts of applications (including graphics which was a popular use of the amiga community), and later games.

It'd also permit more advanced games. Look at things like Genetic Species and Onescapee for some simple things that were possible with a decent 030 and AGA.

Hi i just tried Genetic Species quite a good game

[lassie]

The real problem IMO was 030 was a weak improvement on 020 but from 286 to 486 Intel made genuine improvements. The A4000/030 was available for £999 but then was both crippled by the bitplane system of 256 colour modes AND the fact for the same money you got an 040 class CPU in the £1000 486 SX25

Textured 3D was coming whether you liked it or not and 3DO/Saturn/Playstation all instantly aged the Jaguar/SNES/Megadrive over night. The 486 PC + byte per pixel VGA screen mode also did the same to the Atari and Commodore computers.

I don't think it was so much a matter of money with AGA as such, although I agree they didn't have the money to do much with anyway, but the problem is they left it really late, A1000,500,2000,1500,3000,600,CDTV all had the same abilities for 320x256 resolution. All of a sudden the sales started dropping off and Commodore needed 256 colour graphics FAST. TIME that's what Commodore didn't have, even if R.J. Mical and Dave Needle still worked for Commodore in 1990 I don't believe there was enough time between A500Plus launch and A1200/4000 launch to actually create a true successor regardless of loss of engineering talent and loss of cash.

I suppose they could have done what Sony did with PS3, essentially put all the custom chips of the previous generation inside the new machine AND add the new more advanced incompatible custom chips. So a sort of firmware based emulation. This would have allowed 0-64 colours as before and only needed a simple 24bit chip for 256,65000 or 24 million colour modes. Very expensive way of doing it though, would probably have added £100 to price of A1200 and at £400 it was too high already with 880kb floppy and only 4 channel sound (easily fixed with a dual Paula motherboard mind).

There is one thing nobody considered, they could have implemented a mini version of the A3000s video slot inside the A1200 too and left the ECS chipset as is. Then all you need to do is buy hundreds of thousands of cheap powerful graphics chips as used in PC cards and put them on a simple videoslot adaptor to give the extra features of 24bit colour.

Essentially this would then be like the Commodore 128, when you switch from different screen modes it used a different chip after power off/on cycle. VDU or VIC-II. Bil Herd and Dave Haynie who designed a lot of the 128 still worked at Commodore at that time so I'm sure that was possible. And probably would have cost less in R&D than making the ECS compatible AGA chipset.

Hi nice written was the 060 CPU produced around 1993 or was that later? but if it was, i would imaging it will cost to much to put in an Amiga and sell in stores. But it sure could compete with the PC from that time if it could be done