Amiga Vs Neo-Geo (scaling and rotation)

[cantido]

Neogeo carts are nice because you can map ~300megabits of data directly into the address space of the graphics system... so you can afford to have lots and lots of preprocessed data instead of having to create it on the fly.

Metal Slug n does look nice,... bit it slows down a lot once there are a few sprites on the screen (on real hardware).

[cantido]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
cartridge (in the sideslot, maybe?)

The neogeo has separate buses for graphics and the 68k cpu... if you look at a neogeo cart there are two boards; The top prog board is wired to the 68k, the other is wired to the graphics system with separate data and address lines.

I forget where the z80 gets the audio from but I think it's a separate bus again.

So you have the ability to have a program that is pretty big mapped into the 68k's address space and then the graphics chipset has a big lump of data mapped into it's own. The 68k program tells the graphics chipset what to do but never gets involved in shifting that data around or processing it.
That basically sums up the neogeo's main advantages; Big roms and parallel-ness.

The neogeo's chipset has to do rotation etc because it's not efficient to pass data to the 68k to process and back again. Note the neogeo has very little work ram.


In the Amiga the custom chips are mapped into the address space of the 68k and the custom chips fetch data from the shared chip ram. For a cartridge to be of any advantage you would need to be able to map it into the address space both the cpu and custom chips can address (8Mb max?), so where chipram is.. but it would still be a contended resource unless the 68k's program is in fastram...

[cantido]

Psy wrote:
arcade boards of the time as game consoles of the time was narrowing the gap.

Consoles and arcade platforms have always been closely related since consoles came about. The consoles usually being a slightly less powerful version of the arcade platform.

The Amiga is a multimedia computer which can do games but isn't limited to just that and that is why the designs differ.
The Amiga also cost a fraction of what a MVS board + carts would have set you back when they were released.

[cantido]

Psy wrote:
The Sega Master System is no where near as powerful as Sega's System 16 arcade board.  

I'd say the System 16 is pretty close to the Megadrive..
The Master system uses a Z80 as it's main processor and is probably more closely related to Z80 based boards sega made, and specifically the System E which has the same VDP as the mastersystem, only it has two of them. Funnily enough they were both released in 1986.. weird that eh?

More recent consoles like the Saturn and Dreamcast are directly related to the STV and the Naomi hardware respectively.

The Amiga is also a game console or did you forget about the CD32?

The CD32 was an afterthought not the original intention.

Also Commodore lasted for 4 years after the release of the Neo Geo, it says something if Amiga in 4 year couldn't at least catch up to the Neo Geo.

Not if you are talking the high end Amiga models to the AES home console

The A500 was released at around 100 dollars less than the AES. Which is the more (generally speaking) capable machine?

You're comparing oranges an apples.. The neogeo was designed for games, and the amiga was designed for "multimedia", one has hardware rotation and scaling, the other has a keyboard and enough ram to run an OS and applications.