Why Amigas never had a chunky mode ?

[jltursan]

It was expensive, only had 8k of ram, the sound chip is horrible. It had  lots of colours (like the Atari 2600), but limited sprites.

POKEY has a distinctive sound and well used usually beats the Texas or GI rivals. It's just a matter of taste but it's far from horrible

 Miner's chipset design was mindblowing from the beginning, I'm not going to say that it's superior that VICII+SID (that I really believe it's not); but given the date, it's an extremely powerful design.
Last years we've been enjoying developments pushing the architecture to its limits and are truly amazing for a 79' dated machine.

[JimmiG]

and the CD32... I really liked it. BUT come on, a main selling point was the 32bits...they used a NINE year old 32 bit CPU. (the 020) came out in 84.

Well the '020 was still being produced in 1993 so it's not like C= picked them up at some yard sale..
Back then, old CPU models stuck around for much longer, at a lower price, while new models were introduced. For exmaple, the 68000 started in 1979 as a super high-end chip in expensive workstations etc., then in expensive arcade machines, then it filtered down to the A500, A600, Atari ST etc 8 - 10+ years later. Same thing happened to a lesser extent with the '020 and '030.

It's easy to see the CD32 as underpowered today, but tech moved incredibly fast in the 90's, more so than the 80's IMO. What was fine in 1993 was outdated in 1994 and worthless in 1995. At launch in 1993, the A1200 and CD32 were not cutting edge, but great machines at their pricepoints. While Doom also came out in 1993, it required a £1000+ PC to run. Even with a chunky mode and '030, the CD32 wouldn't have handled 3D games that well compared to later consoles like the Playstation, because it had no dedicated 3D hardware. It was built for 2D, with lots of support chips to handle 2D graphics, sprites, smooth scrolling etc. C= had Hombre which would have been in their 3D-capable console if things had worked out.

[psxphill]

Well the '020 was still being produced in 1993 so it's not like C= picked them up at some yard sale..

The EC020 they used was essentially the cheapest cpu they could get. It was for embedded designs, it was not really aimed at desktops. 14mhz was probably a bit slow as well. They would have been limited by the chp ram speed though.

[guest11527]

I played it on the c64, I don't remember if I played the Atari version. How different is it?

Faster, better. The Ataris had a very canonical screen layout which made it very easy to draw graphics, i.e. a simple rectangular screen array. x position shifted, plus y times bytes per row = screen address.

The C64 was good at character map graphics and sprites, but as soon as you had to render graphics for any kind of simulation (Rescue, soloflight, FS-II, the Eidolon, ...) it was quite horrible due to its non-canonical screen-addressing. You first had to find the 8x8 block on the screen the pixel lies in, then compute its address, then compute the position within the 8x8 block. This plus the lower CPU frequency typically slows such games down to a crawl.

[paul1981]

Faster, better. The Ataris had a very canonical screen layout which made it very easy to draw graphics, i.e. a simple rectangular screen array. x position shifted, plus y times bytes per row = screen address.

The C64 was good at character map graphics and sprites, but as soon as you had to render graphics for any kind of simulation (Rescue, soloflight, FS-II, the Eidolon, ...) it was quite horrible due to its non-canonical screen-addressing. You first had to find the 8x8 block on the screen the pixel lies in, then compute its address, then compute the position within the 8x8 block. This plus the lower CPU frequency typically slows such games down to a crawl.

In other words, the C64 version is a very good port.

ROF used to scare me to near death when I was a kid! As a kid I never figured out that the aliens had green heads when approaching your ship. But, even so, sometimes they're out of sight when walking towards your ship, so can still suprise the player.

Fantastic game, fantastic atmosphere - my favourite C64 game I think.

[psxphill]

i.e. in each chunky byte some of the bits would be "don't care" and thus wasted. Hence, a chunky mode would have been a waste of precious RAM unless it would have been a 256-colour chunky mode (there are 16-colour chunky modes in some PC gfx cards where each pixel takes on nibble). 256-colour modes were hardly feasible in 1985. When they eventually were, Commodore were too cheap or lazy or stupid to add them.

The wasted ram isn't the biggest problem, it's the wasted ram bandwidth. A lores screen would be as slow as 16 colour hires turned out as and hires itself would be impossible. You could do packed nibbles when you used 16 or less colours, but that has it's own issues.

Commodore management didn't really want AGA in the first place, they then tried to kill it, but when they couldn't kill it they managed to starve it of development so it was as small an upgrade as they could get away with.