Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[commodorejohn]

I don't hate it, though I do think that 8bpp is the point where planar bitmaps become officially Not Worth It. My problem with AGA is less with the thing itself and more with the way it's become the de facto minimum standard for most Amiga homebrew - some of us don't have an AGA machine, durnit!

[commodorejohn]

Really?

According to the poll "Choose your main / most used Amiga" 50% of us use AGA based Amiga's as our most used Amiga's     :rtfm:

Yeah, and the rest of us (50% minus the UAE users, among them people like myself, who have neither the money for a 1200 plus all the necessary upgrades, let alone the obscene amounts of money a 4000 commands) get left in the lurch. That was, in fact, the very basis of my complaint :/

[commodorejohn]

Going by some of the posts I've been reading on various forums it seems even today people seem to think new software should run on a A500!

Not a stock 500 - requiring an modest accelerator, fast RAM, and a hard disk is semi-reasonable because most modern Amiga users (who aren't just using it for the games they used to play as a kid) can reasonably be expected to have that. But the chipset isn't something you can replace or upgrade - you have to get a computer with an AGA board to have AGA. (And, as has been pointed out earlier in the thread, too much AGA software relies on hardware-banging to use software emulation with a separate video card.)

That means that by writing AGA-only software, you're excluding anybody who doesn't own a 1200 (pricey after upgrades) or a 4000 (obscenely expensive to begin with, plus expansion means finding Zorro III cards!) It'd be fine to have an enhanced AGA mode and a standard OCS/ECS mode, but apparently very few people can be arsed to do that. I suppose that those of us with neither could cross our fingers and wait for NatAmi to be available, but it'd be a lot nicer if modern Amiga programmers could just be a little more considerate of those of us whose Amiga setup consists of a 2000 nabbed from a senior citizen's attic and whatever inexpensive upgrades we could scrounge from AmiBay...

[commodorejohn]

I'm a little surprised to hear that everybody has such trouble with the Genesis/Mega Drive - the sound on my model 2 is perfectly fine. Guess I just got lucky?

In any case, say what you want about whatever the console board does to it, but the Yamaha OPM is a damn fine chip. It's just a shame so few Genesis titles really utilized it to any significant portion of its potential.

[commodorejohn]

The Amiga did have BOBs and a Blitter, but I don't exactly know how many BOBs could be blitted per frame in, e.g., 32 colours.

It's pretty much a function of object size and number of planes versus the amount of blitter time available per frame. I don't have any specific numbers, though.