Atari vs Amiga article

[slaapliedje]

Oddly, it seems to me that the thing that sort of killed both Atari and Commodore were the console wars.  They both tried one last foray into the video game consoles, and it killed them.  

But at least with Atari, the "Intellectual Property" didn't just disappear into oblivion and everyone is confused on who owns it, unlike the Amiga.  So much great tech and great operating systems, bouncing from one legal mess to another.

I even think TOS for the Atari was fully open sourced, where AROS was created to reverse engineer the AmigaOS.  Which makes me want to play with AROS Vision

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Speaking of sound chips and how the AGA machines should have had an upgraded one, I find it hilarious that in comparing The Chaos Engine 'remake' that it sounds better on the Amiga.  Almost like there is one of the sound channels were missing.  

It's amazing that after all this time, they still can't quite get the sound working the same via emulation.  

They also haven't been able to emulate the DSP of the Falcon, from what I understand.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

The falcon DSP should be relatively trivial to emulate these days, I guess nobody has tried very hard (which could be true).

I'm just going by Hatari, which is the only emulator I've seen that has attempted to add Falcon support.  And I know that (last I used it was a few versions ago) it said the DSP support was very minimal.  I'll have to check it again to see if they fixed it.

Sadly, there isn't a whole lot of Falcon specific software out there, whereas AGA actually had a fairly decent library.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Ah, looks like they've added full DSP support to it.  The last time I'd played around with Hatari, it was marked as Experimental.

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[slaapliedje]

I currently have an Atari 1040ST (I think there is a capacitor broken in it, last I used it the video display had random lines all over it), a Mega STe (not sure if it's still working, need a monitor to connect it to) and an Atari TT030, again, haven't connected it in a long time.  

My A4000D is funner  Couldn't ever get a hold of a video card, or connect them to the network.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Personally, I'd say that if there are calculations within the program of X Y and Z, then the game is 3D.  I believe in Dungeon Master, when you'd throw something, it had a specific distance that it would travel before it fell to the ground, and I think if it hit a creature at a particular distance, it'd do more or less damage.

So I'd say it qualifies as a 3D game, in both play and visualization.  You could even go up and down levels.

I do always find it funny that Wolfenstein 3D is always brought up as being the first 3D game.  Alternate Reality had fully textured walls many years before Wolf3D did, and apparently in the original design, he was planning on doing full 360 degree movement.  He just thought that the players at the time would be really confused, and the maps would be more difficult to make.  Amazing that the creators had managed to do the things they did on the 8-bit machines.  It's a sad thing that AR: The Dungeon was never released for the Amiga or any 16/32bit machine for that matter.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

I swear I've seen this very conversation before...  Some people define '3D' differently than others.  I figure if it looks 3D, has 3D movement, even though it's still technically on a 2D display, than it's 3D.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

So we're discussing semantics? Wowza... :-/

Yup, pretty much...  That's why I had said that if the calculations are in there somewhere for x y and z coordinates, then it's by definition a 3D game, since it has to do 3D calculations.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

I guess to make it a little less boring;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1PyUkVuZk

I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon!  how well does it run on a stock A1200?

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D.  Doesn't really matter visually speaking.  For example, the newer Rayman games have this giant mushroom that bounces you from one playing level to another, and it's moving you in a third dimension.  So it technically is a 3D game, even though most people wouldn't consider it as such.

This is in the same way that Dungeon Master lets you move up and down floors.  The only reason you can't do that in real-time so to speak, was due to memory constrictions at the time.  So the argument that it's only a 2D game is rather off, in my opinion.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

That's arguing semantics about a third person game vs first person.  Realistically a '3D' game is anything that represents 3 dimensional movement.  In Dungeon Master you can move forward, and you can move left and right.  Which would still basically only be 2 dimensional in a 3D landscape.  But since you can travel up and down stairs (even though it's not represented in real time) it still is a 3D game.  If you draw a map of Dungeon master out, you would need some sort of 3D rendering software to do the full thing, would you not?  It has a height, length and depth to it.

Pong has none of those things.  It plays completely on a 2D plane.  Now they do have a 3D version of Pong...

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Wow, the blistering performance of a 16 MHz '030 contrasted with the mundane performance of a 12 MHz '020.
Still laughing my ass off about that one.

And I can find and buy an A1200 (although I think I'd rather have the New Jersey '030 equipped A2000 that is on eBay right now for about $60).
Locating a rare as hen's teeth Falcon is far too difficult (AND pricey).

I think I'd just dig up an A1200 and add an easily obtained accelerator.

Ha ha, yeah I more or less meant that as a joke.  By the way, I thought the A1200 ran at 14Mhz?  MC68020EC at 14Mhz if I recall correctly.  The Falcon is rare and so is software for it, so obviously buying an A1200 that actually had decent software support vs the Falcon which really only a couple art and music programs were ever really created just for it... pretty much a no brainer.  Even if you totally ignore the price.

Still... I'd like a Falcon just to say I have one.  But then I'm not really rich, and I'd probably only rarely use it.  I have several Atari STs (1040ST, Mega STe, and TT030) and all of them are just sitting there doing nothing right now.  On the other hand my A4000D is connected to the Internet and happily running Amikit for Real.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Commodore never seemed to really be able to capitalize on the professional work being done with Amigas that Atari couldn't touch, beyond the music industry.  In fact, professional use of Amigas was often done in spite of Commodore's ability to run its company and provide a decent support structure for either customers or their own retailers.  Putting aside the murky image that could never really balance well between home and professional use.

That's a very good point, if Commodore could have actually kept up with what people were trying to do with their hardware, they'd probably still be around.  The IBMs and compatibles were really only good at the 'serious' work, but a lot of the video editing and creative things that Macs are known for now were pretty much all on the Amiga.  Hell, most games around the time had their art developed with DPaint.  I think one of the other issues with the Amiga is that "Oh, it's only a game machine" crap that Commodore more or less pushed with all it's might.  

Now all that's left is a bunch of jerks reminiscing on how awesome computers used to be.  :laughing:

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993.  All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines."  How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.

I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994.  Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days.   The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).

Yeah, it really is messed up when you think about it.  It really is a big part of why the 'PC' kept getting bigger and faster hardware, all for those extra frames in games.  Granted now it also helps with streaming video, and ripping, etc.  

Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI.  SGIs were way expensive.  

Reminds me of the Mega STe and TT030 line of computers.  Atari were 'getting serious' and trying to make a dent in the DTP market.  What happened with that?  Well Pagestream got it's start on the Atari ST, but then stopped supporting it around 2.0-2.2 or something, yet Pagestream still make an Amiga Classic version, along with OS4.  

Same thing with the big box Amigas, I think they were trying to market them toward being professional systems.  It's a shame that computers went the way they did.  The fact that something that should be fairly simple (browsing the Internet to get some information) has become this bloated mess that requires gigabytes of memory.  Just sad.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.  

I find myself looking at PPC macs so that I can get a MorphOS machine, if they had something like the Sam boards in a laptop, that would be better, since I would rather not own anything ever made by Apple...  But most of it is just so I can say that I own a PPC... Now if they ported MorphOS to something like the Raspberry Pi....

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