Animations still better on Amiga than rockin' PC

[guest3217]

So I followed Defender's suggestion...

 :rtfm:
"DPaint only works on native screen modes (PAL, NTSC) it cannot be used on graphics cards (uaegfx).

Have a look at PersonalPaint. It's similar to DPaint and works well on RTG screen modes. Should already be installed on AmigaForever. If not, it's free on Aminet."

...and I checked PPaint out.  Not DPaint, that's for sure, but the great thing about it is that it does serve as a good port to Photoshop file formats. For some reason, neither my Art Department Pro nor my Dpaint V can read the  "mangled IFFs" that Photoshop creates with its IFF loader/saver, but Ppaint can!!

Another thing that doesn't cease to amaze me:
Since I finally managed to figured out Amiga Forever emulations for Dpaint V, I spent the other night getting back into generating some animations (which I haven't done in over 10 years) and I had a blast! The funny thing is that running the animations (Win XP / Amiga Forever 2006 / DPaint V) in Amiga emulation were perfect while porting the frames to Photoshop CS and creating Gif Anims to run on the web looked really shaky...

Even after so many years, Amiga OS still rocks over Micro$$oft even in an emulated environment!!!
 :crazy:

When...I ask...when...will the PC have the smooth graphic capability Amiga always had!!!!?

[Tomas]

When...I ask...when...will the PC have the smooth graphic capability Amiga always had!!!!?

I doubt it will ever happen... Even 3d hardware accelerated stuff does not run completely smooth on a pc.

[Chain]

hey hey! can you post somewhere your latest anim work? pleasee :-)

[guest3217]

hey hey! can you post somewhere your latest anim work? pleasee :-)

Hi  Chain,
Sure could....  but its not much; just some 3d spinning of my monogram. As mentioned, I was concentrating on figuring out how I could port stuff over to the PC side to add to my web design. Anyhow, here it is:

Monogram 1

Monogram XYZ

Monogram Z

They are in Anim5 format...DPaintV format.

 :idea:

Since you asked, I'm inspired to share some really old stuff... the last remaining Anim5s which are still uncorrupted enough to be seen OK. Though I don't have the original files of most of my stuff any more, I do have S-VHS copies which I am slowly adding to my site.  For now though, I mostly have static images in my Digital Arts collections.

Any how, here they are (again...Anim5) :

Creative Communications Title

Numbers

Reflections

Rotational Nothing

Time For Thought

Most of these were done...ummm...years ago... LOL ~ 1989 - 1991...

Enjoy!!

Wizardo

[cynkronyze]

Hey people,

Talking about animations....pray please tell me why do the Atari 060 demos look better than the 060 demos on Amiga?... maybe its just me but i went to www.youtube.com and i looked at both demos and i found the atari 060 demos super smooth and the Amiga not-so-super smooth (it was shakin).... is it the OS that i am currently viewing it in?

any reasons......I am expecting to get kicked hard where the sun dont shine by some tech Guru so take your best shot and help me find peace in the fact the Amiga was the best there was.....

[guru-666]

You guys must not be doing it right!  The PC and Linux like totaly smoke what the amiga can do....(mind you I still like the amiga, my flyer and my PAR disk) NO! this is just wrong. Get something like framecycler and or shake for playback (or many others), it's important not to become delusional about your `fav computer... I don't think maya or houdini  will run on the amiga anytime....

@cynkronyze
because you think so does not make it so.  (nothing technical it's phycological!) beside video on youtube blows, you will need to run the real thing holms... then you can make a statment....

[Waccoon]

Tomas:  I doubt it will ever happen... Even 3d hardware accelerated stuff does not run completely smooth on a pc.

This is like blaming WinUAE if you can't get smooth framerates from your Amiga demos on a PC.  If the Amiga runs at 60Hz and your PC runs at 75Hz, perfect sync isn't possible

I've seen plenty of Direct3D and OpenGL demos run perfectly smooth on the PC.  The problem is that very, very few people these days are interested in applying throttling and vsync, especially in games.  Usually, they just run their engines as blazing fast as possible.  That's good for benchmarking, and thus bragging rights about your FPS numbers, but the end result is that things look terribly ugly.

Most of the time, framerates are either TOO FAST, so updates are out of sync with the monitor refresh rate, or vsync is not used, so screens are updated at the wrong time, causing tears.

Unfortuanately, even game console companies are starting to do this now that HD resolutions are becoming the next big thing.  It's strictly a developer issue, and has nothing to do with the hardware.

Note that the Amiga used TV refresh standards, so things were either 50Hz or 60Hz.  PC refresh rates can be pretty much anything.  Also note that many Amiga games ran either too slow in PAL or too fast in NTSC.  Thankfully, PC developers at least understand the concept of time-based events, so game speed doesn't go out of control if a monitor works at, say, 72Hz instead of 75Hz.

[shoggoth]

cynkronyze wrote:

Talking about animations....pray please tell me why do the Atari 060 demos look better than the 060 demos on Amiga?... maybe its just me but i went to www.youtube.com and i looked at both demos and i found the atari 060 demos super smooth and the Amiga not-so-super smooth (it was shakin).... is it the OS that i am currently viewing it in?

Nah, in this particular case, this has very little to do with the OS. The 060-accellerators for the Atari Falcon runs at 100Mhz and uses SDRAM (100Mhz bus), which gives them quite a speed boost compared to most Amiga 060 accellerators. The reason for this is that the Atari didn't get 060s until >2000.

Apart from this, both systems are quite similar in this context. Chunky framebuffer, slow graphics memory etc, music doesn't use much horsepower (Paula vs Motorola 56k) ..

There are not that many 060-demos for the Atari though, and generally very few of them are comparable to recent Amiga 060 stuff (DHS & Evolution stuff looks great though).

-- Peter

[guest3217]

hey hey! can you post somewhere your latest anim work? pleasee

Hi again Chain, :idea:

It occured to me that I should have linked more refined/finished products that I did entirely on the Amiga.  The link below shows various projects (though they aren't in Amiga format but Windows Media & Real Media formats.) They were completely generated on Amigas, and trust me when I say that they really opened mouths at the time....(back in the early 90s when multimedia wasn't associated with the digital realm at all...except in Amiga/SGI circles.)
The two first projects were done with Imagine (by a collaborator,) Scala, and Dpaint IV (these last 2 by me)...the others are other video stuff with a little Amiga niceness...


Presentations using Imagine - Scala - DpaintIV

Regards,
John
 

[DonnyEMU]

Please I helped write api's that were the first full screen animation on the pc back in the 486 PC days that were full screen and did 24 to 30 frames per second. I would just suggest to you that if you want this kind of thing on the PC you should consider a new toolset..

If I look back at programs that really rock on the PC and do the same thing that you are asking about doing on the PC..

I would first surf to Cosmigo's ProMotion 5 home page..
Cosmigo Promotion Paint Program Site


They have cloned the capabilities (with all the speed DPAINT) and even made it shortcut key compatible. Of course they use updated formats, but you will find all the speed you are used to with Anims including Anim 5's)..



it also supports the following formats:
File Types
Compuserver GIF89a (.gif)
Deluxe Paint image (.lbm)
Dr.Halo CUT (*.cut)
Amiga Interchange File Format (.iff) / with Anim5 support
Windows Bitmap (.bmp) up to 24bit
JPEG (.jpg)
PC Paintbrush (.pcx)
Portable Network Graphics (.png)
Tagged Image (.tga)
Autodesk Flic (.fli/flc)
Windows AVI (.avi)
Sprites (.spr)
Windows Icon (.ico) / 16 and 256 colors
Windows animated Cursors (.ani) / 16 and 256 colors
WBMP via WAP export plugin




You only have to go to Nvidia's realtime 3d Demos on their pages, or even Newtek's PC lightwave animation page to see the reality of Today's PC animation.

I also haven't even touched on flash, or WPF in .Net 3.0 including the WPF boing demo which as a tribute to Amiga was the WPF's first demo (http://blogs.msdn.com/danlehen/archive/2004/11/23/268252.aspx)

I love the Amiga for what it is all that it has done etc. I just think people need to be realistic aboutwhere computer graphics are today..

We can thank the Amiga for all of that..

If you just wanna play back ANIMs on the PC, you can do it.  There is a really great Java and MacOS based player.

Multishow ANIM PLAYER

Also I could mention that scala for pc windows (not sure it's available anymore) could play any Amiga files..

You can load IFFs into Photoshop still..

(more cosmigo)

[guest3217]

If I look back at programs that really rock on the PC and do the same thing that you are asking about doing on the PC..     I would first surf to Cosmigo's ProMotion 5 home page..  Cosmigo Promotion Paint Program Site

Hi DonnyEmu,

Thanks for the link. I downloaded the trial version and enjoyed playing around with it last night.  Might look into getting the lite version at some point. You are right in saying that this program was based on DPaint...It's screen icons look almost identical to the old familiar EA package.

 

You only have to go to Nvidia's realtime 3d Demos on their pages, or even Newtek's PC lightwave animation page to see the reality of Today's PC animation

I always had lots of respect for Lightwave/Toaster & Imagine users....It seems they had to study the equivalent of a Master's course to learn the software... :lol:
I guess, having started with PhotonPaint, I was stuck in the the 2D learning curve....


 

Also I could mention that scala for pc windows (not sure it's available anymore) could play any Amiga files..    You can load IFFs into Photoshop still..

I researched the Scala issue last year (the program was renamed...something like "info channel" or "info kiosk" not sure. But I do recall that I found several forum entries/users stating that it did not port over older Amiga Scala files...Perhaps they updated that feature?

Also, MultiShow looks nice, and its Freeware which is a bonus! I also downloaded that too.

Thanks for your post!  :-D

It has been very useful to me!
Wizardo