Amiga AGA RTG

[alexatkin]

Sorry to takeover the thread, although I think the question has been answered sufficiently to be safe.

So, you can support RTG with standard AGA hardware?

If I understand that right its because one of the major limitations with AGA games is they were designed for stock A1200 with 2MB CHIP RAM for EVERYTHING. Whereas RTG stuff will vary as its NOT for stock hardware so will use higher colour modes.  And as more CHIP RAM will be available you CAN use higher colour modes than stock AGA games could have.

If all the above is true, is there a guide to installing Workbench on Amigas with accelerators and how customised would you recommend for a stock AGA system running a 50Mhz 030?  Will it be worth getting an FPU?  I understand that an FPU can take HUGE burdon off the CPU and does number crunching a lot faster too for things like archivers, but will it be any major benefit such as speeding up graphics operations?  The more I can push out of the AGA chipset the better, in fact thats part of the challenge. To see how much I can get out of the A1200 without spending stupid amounts of money that would be better spent on upgrading my PC.

And to get back on topic.  I presume that RTG is very similar (although on a more basic level I expect) to Direct X in that respect.  Its a middleware API so you only have to speak one language and RTG handles translating into something the graphics card understands, right?

[alexatkin]

When I was referring to chip RAM it was because I was trying to find out what AGA RTG was.  If its RTG but sat on top of normal AGA chipset then surely it IS related to chip RAM as that IS one and the same as graphics RAM. The higher the bitdepth the more of that 2MB it will use up. Therefore if you have FAST RAM it follows that you can use a higher bit depth because more graphics memory is available due to most of the stuff that previously was in graphics memory is now in FAST RAM instead.

[alexatkin]

AGA still couldnt use more than 8 bit planes at once. But AGA could be wrapped inside RTG where offscreen bitmaps were allocated from fast ram and chip ram was reserved for screens. Unfortunately manipulating planar bitmaps by CPU is insanely slow, 8bit AGA screens are insanely slow, not to mention insanely slow chip ram bus.

Sounds like that is what this does
http://aminet.net/package.php?package=util/boot/fblit.lha only it doesnt use RTG its patching the OS directly instead.