>There are decent games like Diablo, Age of Empires or Starcraft that run happily on a >640x480 8bit screen.
this are not so speed critical stuff, as a action shooter or jump and run with scrolling.
Well, if your scrolling is not hw accelerated and blitting functions are non existant you´ll also depend on bus bandwitch unless you have some gfx memory to store some parts like backgrounds and draw them using blitter.
>I quite happily play 14bit multi channel ADPCM music on my A1200/030, and it sounds >brilliant. And the machine has plenty of bandwidth for other tasks.
can you post a link of such a song and player ?.and the 7 khz filter of your amiga need set to off.have you hear the music over headphone or a good stereo sound system ?
Do you use the horrible audio filter? I never met anyone who liked it :-) there are plenty of players that will allow you to output more than 7Khz sounds (e.g. HippoPlayer). In fact many games use higher frequency sounds.
Use paula directly at 28Khz 8bit instead of AHI and you´ll get a nice speedup.
@Crumb
>what? sorry, I strongly disagree because Quake on classics is mostly cpu limited and >its use of SDL is limited to:
>a) locking display bitmap, writting the pixels directly to gfx ram or...
>b) performing a raw copy (just like WritePixelArray on RTG)
and this copy operations are limit by GFX Bus access.
On Amiga it´s limited by cpu speed, not bus access. If you use AGA or a CV64 you won´t see much difference. If you are talking about emulators... well, uae behaviour will be different than a real Amiga.
sdl is very fast, it convert any bitmap format to screen bitmap format.
if somebody want write a game for amiga RTG, he must write code for do this.P96 or CGX functions are not so fast, because i test what happen when i use instead of SDL blit operations the CGX functions direct.was slower seem CGX do also have more calling overhead.a simple 1 pixel blit was slower in P96 too
Are you talking about real Amiga with real CGX/P96 drivers or WinUAE p96 driver that draws all the stuff in memory and later copies the graphics to the graphic card? I mean: I don´t believe blitting a rectangle in the screen with SDL on a real Amiga is faster than copying it using real blitter with CGX functions. With a CV64/CV3D/Picasso4/AnythingPCI? I seriously doubt it. WinUAE results are FAKE because the p96 driver doesn´t act like a real Amiga driver. BTW, I hope you don´t mean you tried to blit a 1pixel x 1pixel bitmap with p96, that would be useless and ridiculous... why would you want to do that? use 8x8 or 16x16 at least.
and when you write a game that run on RTG you have of course no copper or can do some display tricks smooth scroll etc.
You can use ScrollVPort() to change the base address of the screen even with RTG cards, and you can also design your game to maximize the use of rtg blitter and avoid touching the bus as much as you can: load the most (recently) used graphics in graphics memory and use blitter to draw backgrounds and so on.
you can also keep a copy of the graphics in fastram to avoid reading and just compose the parts you need and update only the parts with transparent graphics on top. If that sounded problematic you could use MMU to mark what parts you need to transfer and which ones you don´t.
If we talk about 3D games you should simply use Warp3D or OpenGL and avoid software rendering. And if we talk about games using 3d card you could use it for 2d stuff too: Kas1e and Karlos have done that, the former with his mag and the later with his small apps.
Classic Amiga results != WinUAE results
