The fall of amiga, just a thought :)

[saimo]

@bloodline

I'd say "it _may_ get pushed" ;-)
Unfortunately, there are several reasons (laziness, hurry, business, etc.) because of which it often isn't exploited decently.

Greets,
saimo

[saimo]

@Crumb

Now this does get me started :-p
You see, for years I have been working hard on a freeware library that pushes AGA & M68k to the max (at least, the max I could) to create new and fast video modes to be used for demos and games for - guess what - classic Amigas.
After the release I got some feedback, yet I never heard of any production that makes use of it, which felt a bit sad... does anybody know anything about this? The piece of software in question is the tcs.library, which, among a lot of features, offers fast c2p (320x256 at 50+ FPS on an A1200+Bz1230) and things like dual playfield made of 2 separate and indipendent 8-bit screens blended with freely selectable degree of transparency (yes, that makes 65536 colors on screen)... listing all the features would be too long here, but this should be enough for identification.
I admit it: this is a piece of self-advertising :-p but anyway is an example (just one of the many) of how our beloved HW can be twisted, differently from what happens today with standard HW and libraries (please note that I'm not saying that they are bad - at most, I'm complaining about the programmers' attitude).

Well, I guess you all have enough of this, so I'd better sign off.
saimo

[saimo]

@KennyR

You are almost 100% correct, in fact I was not advocating "modern HW banging".
Why "almost"? Because there are still platforms not powerful enough to bear the burden of complex layers (f. ex. the GameBoy, which - it's no coincidence - is blessed by countless jewels of tech beauty). Of course this will change... and I'll be glad to have lived and been part of an exciting era of computing.

saimo

[saimo]

@minator

What are you thinking of, exactly? Copper-chunky? Writing to the BPLxDAT registers directly with the CPU? Unfortunately, for bandwidth/clock limitations, it's impossible to get decent resolutions with these methods (well, with some further tricks it's possible to increase it, at the cost of losing flexibility and ease of use).
Yet, this never stopped Amiga coders to make the most of them to achieve impressive effects :-)

[EDIT]

The tcs.library I mentioned above actually offers a method to get "native" (i.e. without Copper/Blitter/CPU manipulation) c2p at the cost of a restriction on resolution: the one visible is LORES, but actually only 1pixel every 2 (horizontally speaking) can be modified by the CPU (the "untouchable" ones are a kind of average of the surrounding 2, giving a nice blur effect - all for free, of course ;-)). Then with some CPU (optionally with the aid of Blitter), also "full" LORES is possible - but this, of course, costs CPU cycles (as said, a 030 can handle a 320x256 8-bit screen at 50+ FPS; a 060 can reach 75 FPS).

[/EDIT]

saimo

[saimo]

@Kellisra

Who ever in this thread said that the classic HW is enough even today? Some (including me) have just been discussing about the possibilities offered by the custom chipset (and the fun one can have with it), but I don't think there's anybody trying to sell the old chipsets as immortal pieces of HW that need no replacement.
Anyway, to stay on topic (sorry for my wandering off... I just can't help when it comes to coding fun :-P), it's rather simplistic affirming that the cause of the death of Amiga is the total exploitation of its limited resources; that may have played a role (but I'm not that sure about it), but there are many other and more important reasons that involve more than just programmers/users.
And, if you think about it for a minute, you'll see that, instead, Amiga managed to survive just because there has been people who squeezed everything out of it. And remember that if the Amiga name is so tied to the concept of excellence is just because of that spirit... if the spirit of using the available resources (which is different from HW banging) at their best were applied even in modern productions (on any platform), we would live in a better - and funnier - computing world.

saimo

[saimo]

@pwest

You forget a third category, then (I'll be less "abstract" than you): those who are happy to make the most of what they currently have and who are eager to make the most of what is to come ;-)
Unluckily, being a subset of your second category, this is also the less numerous, but just by a trifle.

Note that nowadays "making the most of the hardware" translates differently from the good ol' days: HW banging must be left aside, and what remains is algoritmic optimization and smart design... which are sadly rare to find anyway (of course I am mostly thinking of "certain" platforms), because the "spirit" is different - or better, non-existent: the abundancy of resources has pulled out all of our human laziness (not to mention business reasons... but I won't dig further).

In all I'd say I agree with what you said - all but the last line: have those people from category 2 & 3 killed the Amiga? No: if there had been only people from category 1, the Amiga would not have been born at all ;-)

saimo

[saimo]

@MAD

The passionate spirit can (and should) remain even today, although I think that it's undeniable that the total control of the machine gave it a peculiar flavour and significance.

HW rapidly changing these days concerns only OS people, so the bitterness I read in your remark (correct me if I'm wrong) is a sort of non-issue.

Have you ever considered how lucky we have been in living just in the period when the HW was powerful enough to do funny things but not too powerful to allow those things in a non-funny way? So, we can always look back and enjoy what the new generations will never know (I wish they'll find other things just as interteresting, though).

saimo

[saimo]

[SNIP]

Doubled post, sorry :-P - I'm posting with a handheld and it's not as easy as with a normal keyboard.

saimo

[saimo]

@bloodline

Sorry for this laaaaaate reply, but I'm way too busy and have no net connection at home (yet).

But if you think about what you are saying you realise I'm right :-)

I do think about what I say ;-)

Your library is using the Amgia Chipset as nothing mroe than a LowRes Frame buffer

[NITPICKING/KIDDING MODE]

I wonder which software that displays graphics on screen does not use part of the Amiga chipset as a frame buffer ;-)

[ENOUGH OF THAT MODE]

(and  lame one at that).

Do you say so because it's what the hints I gave suggest to you, because it's what you think in general of c2p engines or because you have seen the library in action and you did not like it (in that case, were you using HW that supported SHRES? A 15 kHz monitor or a suitable scandoubler? For example, the Picasso IV output is not good)?
I'm just asking - if that's criticism, it's very welcome.

You are moving more and more work on to the CPU, which in turn requires you to upgrade the CPU.

If you had read (carefully) the posts I did in this thread or the documentation I distributed with the library, you would not have said so (I guess), because the primary goal of my library is exactly providing c2p for free (i.e. _no_ CPU calculations), and it succeeds in that. Thus, I'll assume that your comments came from the concept of c2p in general.
It's true, however, that for better visuals than the ones of no-CPU modes (because of intrinsic HW limitation) the CPU (+Blitter, optionally) must be used - but, again, that is _not_ strictly necessary.
Still, the aim is having a fast c2p just because of the slowness of M68ks, and so the library tries to relieve the CPU from the load as much as possible by using what the HW offers.
Note that if I had relied on CPU upgrades I would have had no reason to sweat so much on my c2p engine.

Your argument has the illusion of working because we are able to upgrade the CPU.

What? Absolutely not! :-o
Believe it or not, the library was entirely coded on a A1200+Bz1230... I could never afford a 060 card!
That is exactly what made me try so hard and produce that library: trying to squeeze everything I could out of my weak (but flexible) HW.

but if you tried to do any complex modern effects with a Stock A1200, you would soon realise the hardware is a massive limitation.
And for the record, Lowres displays are not suitable for modern effects. I'm embarrased if I see anything less than 800*600 now.

I never said that our old HW is good even for todays standards.
I just said that it's fun to program and it's so flexible that allows incredible things, as coders keep proving still today.

And, apart from all this, you can't judge the quality without taking into account the resources used. F.ex. I have recently discovered games for the C=64 that are really impressive (real high quality prods), unlike most of the crap published for today's powerful machines.


saimo

[saimo]

@ bloodline

I mean not using any of the Chipset features :-D

Ah, now it makes sense.
Anyway, the point is exactly that my library exploits the HW features and not just the CPU - this is why I brought it in this discussion, as an example of how the chipset can be useful.

No, I was not talking about your software.

Phew, being bashed that way after spending years of works is not nice :-D
But I would have accepted the criticism anyway, really :-)

I mean the Amiga chipset makes a very poor frame buffer. It has limited memory, limited resolution and useless bandwidth. Modern AGP cards make very good frame buffers :-)

Yep, the low bandwidth and all the rest are big downsides, but at least they push us until we bleed because of coding ;-)

I'm sorry, I haven't looked at your code.

You don't even need to: the distribution includes massive documentation (maybe a bit hard to read) ;-)

I thought about c2p myself and the only why I could do it was using the CPU alone.
My idea was to take an 8bit chunky buffer and turn it into 8 1-bit buffers that correspond the the bitplanes of the AGA amiga hardware, then coppy them over in one go to the chipram. It was very CPU intensive.

Yes, that's incredibly expensive.
But other coders have come up with amazing c2p engines... regards to them!

BTW: out of curiosity: do you (or anybody else) have any benchmarks of the best c2p engines around? I'd be very curious to see how mine compares to them...



saimo

[saimo]

@bloodline

:-) That is fun. But you did upgrade your CPU :-D

Huh! I missed this bit, before! - IE (don't blame me, I'm at the office ;-)) rendered everything until ":-)" and then stopped... a bug of XOOPS, maybe? :-?

Anyways: the library was started when I already had the card, but its main objective was CPU-free c2p so that even an unexpanded A1200 could do well with it - and given that it does offer CPU-free modes, the 020's little CPU time can be used for other things ;-)



saimo

[saimo]

bloodline wrote:
So how does your C2p work without the CPU then?

Urgh! A full explanation would require 200 kb of text... in practice I should re-write the documentation :-o

Anyway... OK, here's the core: the resolution used is SHRES (that's why the right video HW is necessary) to reproduce the effect that CRTs use to draw coloured pixels. To do so, the appropriate bitplanes shifts, masking... well, a many settings ;-) are required... in practice, you make the same bitplane - to which you write as if it were a chunky buffer - overlap with itself...

Excuse me if I don't say more because it's 9.5 hours that I'm at the office and it's almost time to go back home ;-) Yet, if you are really curious, you can download the archive dev/misc/TCS.lha from Aminet and read the docs, in which I explain the technique step-by-step.
The archive includes a few demo programs to see it in action and you could also download dev/misc/TCS_demo.lha to see a "live" introduction to the system (it shows graphically the basics of how it works and some of the offered functionalities).
Finally, if you want to see a "serious" app exploiting that c2p, you should get hold of the MOM stuff at http://saimobvq.interfree.it/MOM/index.html - I'm mentioning this app also because I created it exactly with the spirit I've been talking about in this thread: the spirit of making effective, clean & lean things by banging nice HW (in practice the app is an emulator of a handheld machine I designed myself for this purpose).

- EDIT -
Ah, and don't forget that you need native video output + a 15 kHz-capable monitor (or, alternatively, a scandoubler which supports SHRES screens, but I dunno if it even exists)
- EDIT -

- EDIT 2 -
I've forgotten an important thing: I've tried the library on UAE 0.8.22 on my AmigaOne and it works, but graphics are not rendered correctly - I'd say that that version can't handle SHRES perfectly; dunno about 0.8.25... could anybody check it out, please?
- EDIT 2 -

- EDIT 3 -
I forgot the most import thing of all, too!  :-o
The idea of emulating a CRT is _not_ mine, but belongs to Fabio Bizzetti (AFAIK), who used it in his Virtual Karting.
Seeing that game really started a flow of thoughts that did not end until I figured out a way to implement the concept and exploit to the max (like the library does :-)).
- EDIT 3 -

Have fun and let me know!
saimo

[saimo]

pwest wrote:
I agree.. I think that it is the explosive creative force that has drive aside the boundaries of computing power to give us a space in which to work. Now it's not so much a matter of getting past the boundaries in a clever manner, but of using what's inside the boundaries in a clever manner. The focus has shifted from expanding capabilities to using capabilities.

I like this way of putting it in words :-)
Yet, it's a pity that, in practice, the people that can _and_ want to use the wealth inside the boundaries are so little :-(
I'm tempted to say that the boundaries are enormous now (though, on second thought, maybe it's only a matter of muscles, not of architectural freedom), but, anyway, that would be no excuse for the countless lame things produced nowadays! :pissed:

saimo

[saimo]

@Waccoon

I wish I could quote, but this browser (handheld stuff) does not seem to be capable.

Anyway, about what you say until "WORSE": grab my hand and shake it, pal! :-)
I could not agree more!
I say the same things all the time, but most if the people look at me as if I was an alien :-(

As for triple buffering, a good implementation does perform VB synchronization... actually I think that without it is entirely spoiled of its meaning.

saimo

[saimo]

@Waccon

The problem is not writing the tags, but reporting the text ;-)

Lag? What lag, exactly?
In the scenario you mentioned above (i.e. machine so fast that it is able to render a frame in less than the time of a refresh), the triple buffering (a well done one) gives the same results of double buffering (of course it eats more memory and it's a bit more complicated).

- EDIT -
Yet, it is a better solution because it does not require assumptions on the power of the machine; besides the particular case already discussed, there is:
 - the case of the machine that _on average_ can render a frame in the time of a refresh: triple buffering allows to achieve an almost perfect refresh, without missing frames
 - the case of the machine that is even slower: triple buffering helps even more because there is no idle wait (i.e. the computing power is exploited to the max - this is the main aspect of triple buffering, which makes what has been said at the previous point possible) - not to mention that adding frame skipping becomes trivial, so keeping the "game cycles" synchronized with the video refresh is very easy.

[Indeed these two cases are the same thing, but I thought that exposing them this way would be clearer.]
- EDIT -

OK, the battery is dying, so see you later.

saimo