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Author Topic: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?  (Read 21979 times)

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Offline Karlos

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Re: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?
« on: August 16, 2009, 11:48:44 AM »
Quote from: stefcep2;519406
I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista.


It's horses for courses, really. I have Vista x64 simply to provide a DX10 gaming environment. It does that job very well indeed.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2009, 11:38:38 AM »
Quote from: stefcep2;519639
Doing what?  Measured how?  Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?

Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.

Well, perhaps the comparison was out of the box. A 486 out of the box is significantly faster than an A1200 out of the box.

Textured 3D games were a lot faster and smoother on a 486 with VGA than a non-RTG amiga, even with an 030 at a faster clockspeed. Just compare Doom on a 25MHz 486 with VGA to a 40MHz 68030 with AGA, let alone a stock 020.

Not that you could actually run Doom at the time, as it hadn't been ported. Try comparing, say, TFX to see the difference. It isn't particularly great on an 060, but works fine on a modest 486.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2009, 01:10:10 PM »
Quote from: stefcep2;519645
3D was CPU intensive.  The amiga was never just about the CPU, the PC was mostly about the CPU. The architecture was never designed with chunky graphics in mind.


Something Jay Minor openly admitted he would have changed later. Besides, it wasn't the CPU load in Doom that made it infeasible on the amiga, it was principally the lack of chunky pixel displays. A fast 030 powered amiga, the likes of which were available at the time, can play doom just fine provided there's a graphics card (or even an akiko as in the cd32).

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If it wasn't for Doom, it might not have mattered, for a bit longer any way.  But then again, that 486 ney even Pentium  PC could do what an 68020 with 4 meg and Scala could do at the time.


Doom was riding the wave of increasing CPU/gfx power, not driving it.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2009, 11:48:17 AM »
Quote from: Raffaele;519881
You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?

It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...

That's not true though, now is it. Breathless had a very simple orthogonal map structure that had more in common with Wolfenstein 3D than Doom. In fact, I'd say from an engine perspective it essentially was Wolfenstein 3D with variable height floors and zone lighting.

Doom, OTOH, had a complete 2D BSP based engine that allowed a plan view of the map to have any arbitrary geometry.

What Breathless had going for it was the fact it was one of the first, if not the first game of it's class to use C2P rather than chunky display emulation. In the long run, that gave it a significant advantage on faster machines.

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On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...

Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.

Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.

Alien Breed 3D 2 was technically way more advanced. Like Doom, it allowed for arbitary geometry (though it required you to do the job of a BSP tree generator when creating levels, manually subdividing your map into convex zones) and unlike doom, it allowed two levels of floors in the same zone, allowing the creation of bridges. The use of vertex illumination (goraud shaded) and support for polygon models was also more advanced. Lightsourced sprites were also supported. The water refraction effects were peerless on the amiga.

The principal problem was that it was also very, very slow.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2009, 11:58:14 AM »
Not sure if it used the akiko in any case.

The akiko, I believe, is able to take a block of 32 8-bit chunky pixels and spit them out as 32 words to separate bit planes at about the same speed as a 68040 is. By the time you get to 68040, the time it takes to physically push the data to chip ram has actually become the dominating factor. Of course, your 68040 could be doing something better with it's time, eg calculating the next frame.

It's probably fair to say that with an accelerator, the akiko is quite handy. Though it'll never be as quick and easy as just having a chunky display card.
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