Curse of the SDL

[commodorejohn]

I agree completely with the OP. Don't get me wrong, SDL is a great thing, but it's just plain not designed for hardware like 68k Amigas. (This is why when I do get moving on my game-dev projects for the Amiga, it's going to be all-native.)

[commodorejohn]

So, if I am going to write something serious for 68K Amigas, I will most probably do it in SDL to be able to easily port it on other machines, than having to rewrite it for SDL in later stages.

I prefer the approach of having an abstract engine for the game designed around an Amiga backend, and just adapt the backend to SDL for off-platform ports...

[commodorejohn]

Talking about 68k apps and games, sound many time like it would be impossible to do anything to 68k amigas. Wich makes me wonder, how good they were, I mean those who made amaizing apps and games to amiga years ago?? Were they humans or some kind of super creatures with big brains and super natural skills??

Even a stock A500 is a pretty capable machine. The problem is that a lot of these projects are written for modern machines, and aren't really designed around the limits of the hardware, so even using native hardware/firmware access is only going to get you so far. Certainly there were Amiga coders back in the day who dazzled with raw skill, but a large part of why things seemed to work so well is that programmers were willing to tailor and compromise their designs in order to work well on the hardware. Which is why, as I said, my approach would be to design a game for the Amiga and port it to other systems afterward - it's a lot easier to take a program from a less-powerful system onto a more-powerful one than vice-versa.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, but how many people have one? I didn't even have an RTG card until fairly recently.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah. Speaking for myself, I have an A3000 with a 28MHz G-Force 040 accelerator, 8MB accelerator RAM, 8MB motherboard fast RAM, 2MB chip RAM, and a 2MB RTG card. Aside from perhaps a simple sound card and maybe a 40MHz 040, this is as much as I'm likely to ever have, as the Amiga is just a hobby for me, not something for which I could justify the prices high-end accelerators with lots of RAM command. Of course, I don't think people should be obligated to target my system, but it would be nice to see some more Amiga development for something less than the creme de la creme (to say nothing of the poor neglected unexpanded OCS Amiga.)

[commodorejohn]

You should add more ram to your system. I do understand that amiga is hobby machine, but hobbies cost. Does it require GVP sims or can you use standard 72 pin sims? It would be about 200$ to get 64mb to your accelerator with GVP sims, but I'm sure that you woun't repent it.

1MB GVP SIMMs only. I'd have to swap out the accelerator entirely to get it above 8MB. $200 is within reason for the occasional purchase, but the fact is that I just don't use my Amiga for enough to justify spending that money on a RAM expansion instead of, say, buying a few games or saving towards another interesting old system. 18MB should be plenty for a lot of purposes, certainly for a lot of non-3D gaming, but with so many programs that are just PC ports via SDL that bring with them PC expectations of RAM capacity and CPU horsepower, not so much.