Demos using a GFX mode please !

[Crumb]

@lempkee

i cant say that doing em RTG only would do any real changes in where the scene is atm.

no one has talked about making these productions RTG only. The only suggestion is that you can add RTG support to your production easily.

Also i have seen comments about how all make em rtg now because of the 3d stuff, bleeeeh LOL guys , did you ever consider that its done ONLY because its actually coded
for both systems in 1 go?? , ie leaving out all HWbashing and implementing a 2 way system (ie first for AGA then do it for rtg also...)

nahhhhh ROTFL guys should read what I write, I talk about adding RTG support without dropping AGA because you can do this easily and release a dual demo...

I'm always reading that "scene is dead", but I don't care. I was reading that when there were lots of spanish groups alive and kicking and many people said that scene was dead.

Scene will be alive for me if people still tries to optimize and always try to improve their coding/gfx/music skills.

I like 3D stuff in slow machines because goals difficult to achieve are exciting. For example watching the c64 version of second reality was quite funny, other demos show gouraud shaded cubes with only 0.98 Mhz... well, that's amazing.

I am still waiting for a RTG production that makes me say, wow! I didn't think my 060 with gfx card could do that.

I don't care about pc emulators. PC sceners don't make demos for 8086 to run them in pc-task ;P why should we care about that? they should improve their emulators and that's all.

Even using AGA, the Amiga is not really fixed hardware now, with 030/50,040/33,040/40,060/50, 060/66, 060LC/75. You are almost coding for your machine only. The nice effect you are coding may run in one frame in a 060/60 but not in a 060/50. Your excelent and super optimized 882 FPU code may run very well with a 882 but may be dead slow with a 040...

Anyway making a demo for a 800mzh system and to IMPRESS some one, how is that possible??

making stuff that would require a much more powerful machine.

WHAT makes a good demo...GOOD code or good textures or high RES ?.

All that mixed together ;-D
and don't forget the music! :-)

for me the fun is in coding with a limited resources, optimizing so much, that what people thought that was impossible to do, becomes possible. trying to break the limits set by someone...

anyway i am sick of 3d.... i want the 2d back

yes, I liked 2D, but many things have been already invented and it's difficult to find a original 2D new effect. I'd like a mix of that, mixing 2D and 3D, new and old techniques like Darkcoder said.

[Crumb]

That sound a bit strange to me. The cards are connected with the system by means of the Zorro/PCI or AGP bus. Hence the speed at which you can write to them is that of the bus. But Zorro, PCI and AGP have diffrent speed. And also the card's memory are different both in size AND speed! So haw can you write always at the same speed? and which is the speed?

well, my suggestion of adding RTG support is for pure 3D demos, so you will open a screen with twice the width or height of the visible screen and use that as double buffer. So the only thing that will change from one card to other will be the speed of the bus. Well, the speed of the ram also, but it's so fast that the bottleneck is in the bus if we talk about graphic cards. With zorro3 that is arround 9MB/s, but I know that the CV64 is faster (is one of the few cards that use the bus to the limit). With a 040/25 the speed was really slow (12fps? I can't remember, it was SLOW)

I did that test writting rubbish directly to the screen and counting the fps. I got arround 140 (I don't remember the exact number but I saw that bus speed wasn't going to be a bottleneck) With the A4000 PCI solutions the limit is the same because it goes through the Zorro3 bus. With the mediator 1200 the bandwitch to the gfx card may be higher. With an AGP card the speed of gfx memory writes will be amazing... but... the limit here is the cpu (of course I think there's plenty room in my code to run faster) and maybe also the fast ram speed. With a 603/200 it ran a little faster (60fps), i'd like to try it with a cyberstorm MK3, because they have faster memory access and I will see if it's due to the fast-ram memory access or lack of cpu power. I guess that it's due to the bandwitch from the cpu to fast-ram. That would be the reason because it ran at similar speeds with a voodoo5/ppc than with a picasso4/060. But my point is that the speed of the gfx bus doesn't seem to be the limit (if I achieved 140fps filling the screen with my cpu with rubbish I think that the limit is not due to the gfx mem bandwitch speed)
With AGA I think that the limit writing to chip mem is 1.8 MB/s, I think that reading is 4 times faster. That gives us 28fps in 320x200. Quite enough to be smooth :-)
The problem is the effect we are trying to show, I think that the bottleneck is the cpu. If the cpu can show the effect at 25fps, there will be small differencies between the speed of the AGA and the speed of the RTG version... of course the bandwitch to the gfx mem helps, and the RTG version may have a pair of extra frames. The bandwitch to the gfx ram will not help much with complex effects and scenes. If the CPU can do more than 28fps, AGA will reach its limits (talking from a bus bandwitch view, without using any trick) and gfx cards will be able to show that extra frames.
All that is not applicable to gfx cards if the demo is not 100% 3d
For 2D stuff to be 100% sure that the 2D gfx are in gfx ram, there are other methods. As you may do in other system you will set a minimum of ram to make your demo work. The extra ram can be used to store more graphics and sve the time to move them over the bus.
I've talked a lot (maybe too much) :-D
I don't know if I've made the things more clear for you or if I've confused you more :-/
Anyway it's quite fun to talk about this things in Amiga.org, I don't usually saw scene related threads.
:-)

[lempkee]

@darkcoder: well what kronos wrote was dead right on! , and still i didnt mean that any other here was like wrong or right , its just that i have spent so much time in the scene and i see newcommers or generally unknown people baffling about the scene without a clue why or what and that soomewhat mixed it up with u guys (no offence intended)

anyway a demo made of plesaure or intro..well thats how it should be done , FOR FUN!.
but if you look back at it aswell, 3-4 years later... thats when you know if the product is good or not.

maybe i am just getting old and cant tolerate newschool, i have never said that i like newschool but i always told everyone that i am a REALLY oldschool guy in both productions and quality....

sure there is good stuff from time to time, but what makes it all good, now thats the big question...aint it?

anyway a 3d demo is a 3d demo, especially if its on a PC or on a ppc machine, unlimited cpu power ..well i cant see whats fun with making any stuff for it...

demo scene on pc is generally a 3d package and a converter tool and its allabout making the best scene , and run it in realtime (or fake it) as a demo/product.

and i dont see whats hard here, REALLY! and seriously i see this as a problem for all the coders around (including me)..


good textures and music doesnt make a demo, but i agree that MUSIC is very important (in 99% of the time the music is more important than the code) , but then again i am oldschool
and i may have taken the "WAY to Newskool" badly..., i loved the evolution that happened in 94, i loved the scene in 99...but after that....i can count the good products on 1 hand.
where music/design/code/layout (everything) is damn perfect and that i could show this to my grandmother and she would have said "very stylish stuff" (lol)

many of you guys probably doesnt shear my point of view but BEST PC DEMO EVER must be the BOMB demo from tp98 (state of mind) , some of the best demos on Classic amiga must be stuff like "nexus7,traffic,tint,goa,C.dreams,faktory(maybe the best designed production ever?) and so on...

anyway if making scene stuff makes you happy (ALL)  then please continue, as thats the whole idea about it  have fun and shear the delight and maybe someday win some compos if any compo's are still out there... (tg,TP,Mekka,Asm etc all gone) (atleast so it seems)


anyway it also seems that you guys thinks the scene is alive on all plattforms, well sorry to say...ITS NOT! , c64 has the handbrake on , the amiga fell in a gap , the atari was ressurected and the pc is just plain annoying to call it a scene.

just put your heads together and think of "what made the scene so good and bright back in the late 80's or until 93...compared to 94->99/y2k..

sorry for beeing so negative , i am just trying to prove out some "PoINTS"

good luck to all and please make more demos (i might return one day)

[lempkee]

@crumb:hmm thats exactly what i said , we made em all (after we made a new engine) for AGA and then the engine made sure of that the product worked in rtg.

and i guess u know that allready, i wasnt attacking the way of rtg in anyway, if it was upto me i would have redone all my former products to AGA/RTG or ECS/RTG , but since such stuff would require like 490 days just to find the damn source logic or "WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING OF " lol feeling..
also sadly the rtg plattform itself has a few bad turns , like Mediator users have problems showing CGX and CGX have problems otherway around... , as the mediator (and OS4) doesnt use the old p96 direct code (which all CGX people belives (STILL) that it do...

anyway RTG and AGA products is a nessecity, ie if you make a AGA prod theese days then u must MAKE sure of that it works on RTG , or else a majority of people wont see it.
but people making RTG prods doesnt have the same prob with dooing aga support, as in most cases newbies dont even know how aga works and expecting people to make an engine for such.... thats dreaming, but then again... where is the newbies


good luck

[darkcoder]

@crumb

Excuse me, how have you got these numbers?

Give a look here: http://list-archive.gin.cz/amiga/0010/msg00426.html

there are results of many speed tests. With AGA I think your numbers are wrong.
In fact the AGA bus runs at 7.19Mhz, which is a theoretical 28.8MBytes sec.
(with AGA 1 access=4 bytes, with OCS 2 bytes only hence you have to halve all
numbers).
Unfortunately the cpu is only allowed to acces half of these cycles, which lower
it to 14.2MB/sec. But sadly no CPU can do a write in chip for each cycle.
It depends a lot on what are DMA channels doing but with a standard 320*250*8
screen they don't interfere too much. Since the CPU have to syncronize its clock
with the 7.19Mhz clock more or less it write 1 every 2 cyvles, which is
7.1MB/sec. In practice, as these test show it's a little bit less, more or less
6.8MB/sec (for AGA machines). It's completely false that writing is 4 times
slower than reading, they have the same speed. Maybe you got confused thinking
to write 1 byte at the time, but good c2p as the Azure's on write 1 long at a
time.
Anyway these tests also show that on EACH AGA machine, regardless of the
CPU you have more or less a 6.8 MBsec writes to chipram. That is what I call
a *clear*, *fixed* limit.
With gfx boards things as you can see are different: the conclusions of the long
test are (I consider not-overclocked results):

 Card       Orginal        Overclocked

 CV3D      7.2 Mb/sec  ->  10.1 Mb/sec
 PIV       9.3 Mb/sec  ->  12.4 Mb/sec
 CV64     13.3 Mb/sec  ->  18.6 Mb/sec
 
well it seems to me that THERE IS a difference! And these are all ZIII boards!
Then there is CVPPC and Bvision which I think are different because they are
directly connected to the CPU with a custom bus (in fact they require CybPPC /
BlizzardPPC). And now, with A1 and Peggy, there are also PCI and AGP cards!
I guess there will be more differences.
So it is a complete mess, each card is different.
You say the bottelneck is the CPU. Maybe, it depends on the effect.
There the situation is less clear, but anyway I think with AGA you have
more stability. (BTW in this whole post with AGA Amiga I was speaking of
680x0 CPU. I only code 680x0, no PPC fo me).
It is true that also the (classic) Amiga can
have a wide range of CPU. But basically (with AGA machines) we only have:
1) 020 at 14Mhz (1200)
2) 030 at 50Mhz (many boards)
3) 030 at 25Mhz (4000/30, not many)
4) 040 at 25Mhz 4000/40
5) 040 at 40Mhz some boards but very rare
6) 060 at 50Mhz CybStorm

In practice, when you code a demo you choose one of these, usually 1) or 2)
and use it as the limit. And since the speed access to chipram is the same
regardless of the CPU (only very small differences, as you can check) many
effects look the same on all CPU. With RTG you have all these possibilities,
and since here the speed is not limited by the chipram, Practical differences
are BIGGER. Then you have 603, 603e, 604, 604e, G3 and G4 in many clock
variations. maybe in the future even more CPUs...

I think with RTG you can have 90% optimization, not more. With AGA 99.9%. :-)
But if you have fun doing 90% optimization, you are fine with RTG!

See Ya!
The Dark Coder

[Crumb]

@lempkee

as the mediator (and OS4) doesnt use the old p96 direct code (which all CGX people belives (STILL) that it do...

Do you mean that direct mem access using p96 doesn't work? with 8 bit screens it seems to behave correctly with mediator and voodoo5 (with OS4 I don't have a clue). If the problem appears with 16bit screens I guess that the problem is the way bits are aligned in CGX/P96, for example the coder may assume that the screenmode is bigendian when it's littleendian and if there's no specific code it may give problems. I can't talk much about that because I haven't tried the 16bit modes... the first Mankind productions that where CGX compatible didn't show the colours correctly, it may be due to the fact that if p96 doesn't emulate correclty the behaviour of cgx and gives wrong info about the aligment of the screen, the colours will look bad.

Although many people has a graphic card I think that those with AGA and real interest in demos will switch the monitor output :-)

I tried the DCE scandoubler of the CV3D and saw that the colours of the demos wasn't perfect (because it wasn't fully 24bits) and thought that I would never use a non-24bit scandoubler/flickerfixer. I think that I will always keep my 4000 to watch AGA demos in the real thing. :-)

I've talked with a friend that just has bought a 060, he has told me that once he has released all the power of the 060 in some prods, He will go back to do plain A500/A1200 demos/intros
It would be nice to see new prods for A500 :-)

[carls]

@Crumb
I think it was Spaceballs who did a very nice A500 prod not long ago, called "Hideous mutant freaks". Maybe that could be of interest? It's got kind of a "newschool" design but it's certainly coded for an oldschool machine :-)

[Crumb]

Excuse me, how have you got these numbers?

Give a look here: http://list-archive.gin.cz/amiga/0010/msg00426.html

there are results of many speed tests. With AGA I think your numbers are wrong.

Yes, the AGA numbers are wrong, I thought that the 1.8MB/s were writing longwords, but it was writing bytes. thank you for the URL, it's quite interesting.

well it seems to me that THERE IS a difference! And these are all ZIII boards!
Then there is CVPPC and Bvision which I think are different because they are
directly connected to the CPU with a custom bus (in fact they require CybPPC /
BlizzardPPC).

The use of the custom bus only affects the driver, they way of coding it is the same. Yes, they only work with ppcs or cyberstormMKIII. Ok, each card has different bandwitch, but the bandwitch is enough to do effects in one frame even with the slower cards.

But basically (with AGA machines) we only have:
1) 020 at 14Mhz (1200)
2) 030 at 50Mhz (many boards)
3) 030 at 25Mhz (4000/30, not many)
4) 040 at 25Mhz 4000/40
5) 040 at 40Mhz some boards but very rare
6) 060 at 50Mhz CybStorm

I think that most of demos require at least a 030/50... BTW 040/40 is quite common in Spain.
Here the absolute minimum people has is a 030/50, but they usually don't use much their Amigas (they were quite common a few years ago). Most of the remainder Amigans have 040/40 at least and a gfx card. In my local usergroup the only person who has not a gfx card has the slowest computer with a 040/40. I haven't seen demos designed to run well with a 020 in years.

Yes, 90% of optimization and a 99% compatibility is ok for me :-)

have we got too many CPUs? well, I hope we have one more family soon: the coldfire of the ColdFusion accelerators ;-D

[carls]

Ah yes, the coldfire project!
Does anyone know how that is coming along?
I'd love to get a CF card for my A1200!

[Crumb]

@Carls
yes, you have more productions in their web page:
Spaceballs Web page
I agree, having stylish designs with optimized code running in that legendary machine is cool :-)

[Crumb]

@Carls
Olli_hd is the person who is designing the board, the project seems to be going well, if you want more information you can join the yahoo mail list Amigacoldfire@yahoogroups.com. The 1200 version will probably be released after the 4000 one.

[mdwh2]

Anyway making a demo for a 800mzh system and to IMPRESS some one, how is that possible??
by good textures??? , who will set the standard??? , its been 8 years on pc now and i am not impressed.

Just because it's a fast system doesn't mean it's not possible to write impressive stuff. The latest hardware is still a *long* way from making it possible to render scenes as realistic/impressive/complex as you want, *and* without requiring much skill on the part of the coder.

A C64 coder could ask how could anything on an A1200 be impressive, since "any" demo could be done with ease on an A1200. The point is that you don't write C64-level demos on an A1200, you write more advanced stuff.

Fair enough if you enjoy (either from a programmer's, or a viewer's point of view) the level of demos that are common on 680x0/AGA Amigas, but that doesn't mean there aren't others who are interested in pushing the boundaries on more advanced hardware. I still get impressed when I see modern graphics engines running where as there's only so much interest the likes texture mapped cubes and tunnel effects can create for me.

I don't believe making more realistic or impressive graphics is simply a case of increasing the texture resolution; it requires work from the programmer too.

As for who will set the standard, I don't see how that's any different. It's slightly harder if one demo runs better on one machine, and another runs faster on another-  but it's not like you run them on different machines when comparing.

anyway to all who still thinks that an 800mzh demo can impress yo, well OK check all ppc demos at the amiga today, and please tell me which of theese that is impossible to do on a 68k system,
on top of all i have only seen 2 really fast ppc demos on amiga , the whole point why so few went ppc with their demos is basically because of this,
the p5 ppc's are really crap and infact only (MAX) 3 times faster than a 68k system,

Presumably the AmigaOne will be quite a bit faster than the current PPC Amigas though. And the question more related to this thread is probably What AGA demos can't be done on a graphics card.

WHAT makes a good demo...GOOD code or good textures or high RES ?.

Good code. Which is possible to show off whether on a PPC gfx card Amiga or PC, 68k/AGA Amiga, or a Vic 20. Which is possible whether the machine can be upgraded or not. Whether the graphics chips sit on a card or live on the motherboard.

What would your response be to a C64 demo coder who put your arguments back towards you?

[darkcoder]

Ok men!! I think this has been a very good thread!
We had an interesting discussion, we exchanged different points of view. I learnt something in this discussion, and even though I will stick doing AGA only demos I can understand better the RTG coders point of view. I think this is my las post in the thread because in this days I wrote much text..but now it's time to write much code! :-)

 ... and I also have a to work, sometimes

Anyway I will continue to follow the discussion and if I will have something which I think it's important, I will do.
If someone wants to contact me in the future for exchanging news/ideas/production (especially those mixing old and new style) you can contact me privately, I would be happy.
Go on with this interesting discussion! :-)


Friendship RuleZ
The Dark Coder

[carls]

@Crumb
Thanks for the info on the CF project!

[Dagon]

there won't be any scene on the new PPC machines (powered by morphos, os4) because they're just standard hardware and makes them not different from PCs for demos. ?

Can anyone reassure me ? Is there a spirit that can be pursued on the new ppc machine (optimization, passion, ...). ?

I know it is considered very cool and has become a cliche to say that to make a demo it must be in a custom hardware. Well that is not true anymore.
I hang around on a IRC channel #demo-gr and there are pleanty of people that have passion, and they like to optimise their demos. And you know what? Most of them don`t have a custom computer. They use their PCs. Does that makes them non-sceners? I don`t think so. Does that makes them having no passion?

I think we can make an AmigaPPC scene and still have passion, optimization etc.

You`ll say that nowdays computers are more powerfull etc. And A500 was more powerfull than C64, so was A1200 than A500 and now PPC based Amigas are more powerfull than their predecessors. Exploit the power that is given to you to make more cool stuff (whatever you think is cool) that is all I have to say.

Yeah, it is also exciting to code on our old Amigas but that doesn`t mean that we mustn`t do as well with our new ones.

Open your minds, don`t  close yourselves in cliches.

[lempkee]

@mdhw2: thanx for pointing out that issue, and if you had bothered to read it all then you would understand why i said it, anyway i will give you a few hints

i was a c64 user from 1983->1995 , and i find the c64 still impressive (even with hw upgrades) , the whole point of the discussion is "WHY dO WE WANt DEMOS on A1 (more or less) or pc...
and as i wrote earlier, i havent seen 1 pc demo (which naturally require + 1ghz) in ages, and its all about making a 3d engine, and i dont find 3d impressive at all (except for maybe in games) (3dmark is a kinda good idea)
on top of all , AGA code wasnt impressive AT ALL if you ask me or any real coders from the oldschool times, in 94/5 it all started to look better (but then alot had left) , that was when 2d and 3d became a STYLE and the mission to make the most interesting 2d*3d demo
and back then it was impressive, anyone remebers TINT ? , i remeber that they showed the demo 7 times at TG96 (after it was said "best demo , etc) , if you look at it now....it looks dated but it still have the quality wich makes u want to watch it again.

Anyway i dont see any reason to make demos on pc or on A1 , because unlimited specs and there is nothing secret hiding except for general design, since 1995 pc have been mixed into amiga demo compo's , please tell me why amiga have mostly won or got very good rankings compared to the pc ones,
and the pc had specs that was double or tripple (or like now x20) and still the amiga ones win? , also they dont say if its AMIGA or PC , they quitted that a long way back.


@crumb: the P96 bug with elbox, its because of the changes (its not documented, it has to be seen to be understood) , anyway the p96 devkit (the orginal one) doesnt work on mediators etc, like Openscreentaglists etc , the problem u mentioned about little and big endian is not a prob as v4 and v5 have reversed colormodes.
        the main problem is actually opening the main screen , in other words "alot of cgx stuff doesnt work , like Adescent(wos),ADoom(wos),Amhuhn (any),Joyride(all),Alot of demos.....  i have heard uncomfirmed rumours that cgx v4.x have a fix for this + documented but i have looked everywhere and no one have given me a good answer, and i wont buy cgx4 mainly beause i cant use it.