Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

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The Amiga architecture is like a boat anchor on an F1 car... I'm sure it would look cool, and you could come up with 9 billion reasons why an F1 car would need half a ton of barnacle covered wrought iron bolted to the side... but at the end of the day, your F1 car is gonna suck.

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Engineering is always a compromise. The Amiga was a damn near perfect set of compromises for the technology of the 1980s... But when technology moved on the compromises that made the Amiga great became a millstone around the engineers necks... The 90s killed the 5year old Amiga design as it simply wasn't relavant any more.

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@ejstans

The sideport is basicly a direct bus to the 68k (which is all zorro really was), if you want to have both the side port and fastram, you need to have some bus arbitration hardware (ie buster)... The A500 was a cheap device, so opted to have a single zorro slot and a single memory expansion (that was arbitrated by agnus to save costs).

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And the (fast) ROM ?

The Kickstart ROM is addressed via gary, IIRC.

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Ah, ok, I looked at schematics. I basically forgot about DRAM...Agnus had to do the DRAM address translation (+refresh). That does explain it...Still, I think it's a bad compromise. I think it would have been worth it to add DRAM support to eg Gary in order to have cheap fastram...

But of course, that's in hindsight. Maybe Commodore thought cheap fastram sideport expansions would flouris?

Well, by the time Commodore took control, it was all about saving money! Agnus has a DRAM controler, so they just used that.

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The penny pinching you have identified became a cancer in the Amiga Development... That is why the outdated AGA wasn't released until 92... When it needed to be out in 88...

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The penny pinching you have identified became a cancer in the Amiga Development... That is why the outdated AGA wasn't released until 92... When it needed to be out in 88...

Also communication between the dev teams in commodre was nonexistent!!! The CDTV team had no idea that the ECS chipset was even being worked on let alone ready to ship...

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The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}

You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?

It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...

On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...

Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.

Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

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@stefcep2

It doesn't matter that the Amiga lacked development after '92 The topic of this thread askes if the amiga architecture is relevant today, what I (and others) point out is that the Amiga architecture wasn't even relevant in '92... As someone who was writing software for the amiga at the time, I remember the hoops one should have to jump through to do any that looked even remotely modern.

Yes the amiga has some cool hardware to do some specific effects, but this hardware was to compensate for the level of technology at the time... As chip technology improved the amiga architecture became a bottleneck, the Commodore engineers were working hard to rid themselves of it, and produce something at least comparable to off the shelf chips... But commodore folded.

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Akiko was a poor solution... Well, it was cheap anyway... A better solution would have be a nice chunky pixel mode added to Lisa... Perhaps only a single 800x600x8 mode but that would have kept the wolf from the door!

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Akiko's C2P converter just used some spare die area on a chip they needed anyway, probably it won the 'hey, what else could we do with xx spare transistors?' contest.

A somewhat decent solution would've been a converter sitting in Lisa's data path, converting the pixels on the fly. Next gen Lisa  could have included those functions. As mentioned above, it wouldn't have been too big a pain to have included chunky modes at least for AGA.

Thinking about it, a faster blitter and a separate framebuffer (physically separate from the chip ram) would also have been a good idea...