Demos using a GFX mode please !

[Karlos]

If I was any cop at ppc assembly programming, I'd write a kick arse 2D true-colour effects RTG demo using the benefits of a ppc/graphics card...

Still, I'm not so I'll just shut the hell up now ;-)

[lempkee]

@karlos a good idea, but 2d wont impress many anymore ;( , but for pure fun and entertainment (maybe a backtotheroots kinda demo which follows all from 1988->1995+ would atleast look good and pay alot of respect to people who was or still are in the scene...)

if anyone wants to make such a thing, then i think there has to be quite a few people up for it , its not a singleman's job and as we all know... the 2d world require alot of oldskoolers...

[Karlos]

I had the idea of mucking about for a pure BlizzardPPC/BVisionPPC setup. It used Warp3D for safe allocation of the 3D resources but did hacky 'direct to the texture surface memory' trickery to produce effects and stuff.

Soon found out that the texture memory is organised in rather a perculiar way ;-)

Still, got some interesting animated texture effects out of it. You can do a very nice plasma flame with varying transparency etc (ooh, thats sooo yesterday)

[darkcoder]

I am really not interested in A1/Peggy stuff, but to me Peggy is more elegant mtherboard design (is also smaller) it should have a Firewire interface and it seems to cost less. Up to now there is no OS4 for A1 too. But as you know I am interested in AGA, so...

I still think you don't read messages. At least not carefully.

>well, I tried several times to make you aware
                                   that not all people CAN use AGA. And that Systems like the AmigaOne CANNOT run AGA Demos also (while RTG Demos could still be compatible)

You may not belive me, but I am really a coder. So I know by myself that AGA stuff won't run on A1.
(well there is UAE, maybe in future it will support AGA). And in a PREVIOUS MESSAGE that maybe you didn't read I explained why I don't see this as a problem (to me). So it's YOU that says again and again the same things (which I already know by myself).
If you read carefully the post you will notice that as long as the discussion went on, I changed a bit my ideas. I discussed with Crumb, Carls, lempkee and many others I forgot (please excuse me) and we all found the discussion interesting and I think many of us learned something.
I never said anyone shoud optimize for various chipset. (please read carefully, as every other in this post did)
I am still waiting for a response about a question that I directed to you in one of my previous post (do you read my posts?).
There is not much to answare about slow speed of AGA with 18 bit HAM8 mode or hires/superhires displays. IT IS slow, I know. But as I explained (oh, yes...you don't read) a limited speed is what I need for having fun.
You say (again and again) that for you small differences in speed are not important and that you think it is more important that every Amiga user can watch a demo. Ok I UNDERSTAND YOUR OPINION.
And I say (again and again because you don't read) that for me small differences ARE important and is less important that A1 user see demos. I gave arguments for this. Hope now you understand. The others in this post (for example Crumb) perfectly understood my opinion.

Not offended, hopy you also did not offended by me. It seems we have difficulties in understanding each others. Things that happens. Friendship Rulez! :-)

The Dark Coder

PS. I prefer to continue the discussion in public (really no time to follow ALSO a private thread.. :-)

[Crumb]

@darkcoder & the AGA gurus

There is not much to answare about slow speed of AGA with 18 bit HAM8 mode or hires/superhires displays. IT IS slow, I know.

HAM8 uses 8bitplanes, so copying a normal 8bitplane screen shouldn't slow it down much... but it requires lots of cpu power... 040s at 40Mhz achieve almost copyspeed when they do chunky to planar, wouldn't be possible with 060/50 to also do the convertion from 16bits to ham8? coneverting from a 16bit screen to ham8 may take cpu power, but once the convertion is done, the AGA display should be refreshed as fast as if it wasn't using a ham8 mode. I'm not sure if a 060 will be able to do this, but a ppc should be able to do this kind of stuff.

If the game is designed to run at least at 640x480, the chunky to planar routines can be done as in "Phase One" of Capsule, if you are using an interlaced screen there's no need to convert from chunky to planar the lines that aren't going to be seen in a refresh, so the amount of data that has to be written to chipram is halved. So the speed using interlaced modes will be even bigger... With a ppc board with a 604e/233 the frame rate should be lower than with a graphic card, but it still should be playable...

Best Regards
Crumb

[darkcoder]

@crumb

the truecolor-18bit HAM8 mode is a SHRES screen used to simulate a LORES one. SHRES+8bitplane uses all AGA bandwidth so during displays the CPU cannot write to the mem. And max res. with this technique is 320x512 in PAL.
Unless you mean a more clever scheme (in which I would be very interested) to use "real" LORES
HAM.

best regards

[Crumb]

the truecolor-18bit HAM8 mode is a SHRES screen used to simulate a LORES one.

I read something about that technique in the amycoders web, but I thought that there was a way to do that in plain HIRES or LORES... :-/
I still don't know why a SHIRES is used with HAM8, I understand that HAM6 in SHIRES helps to simulate a hi/true color screen but...
why isn't faster to use a real LORES or HIRES ham8 screen instead of a SHIRES ham8 that needs a lot more of resources?
Sorry for my ignorance... is it to make "independent" each group of 4 pixels thanks to the last pixel written or what? wouldn't be enough fast to store the colour of the previous pixel in a register or variable?

[iamaboringperson]

i really can not understand why so many people are arguing about such a trivial(IMO) subject!
"demos should ALL be RTG"
it doesnt matter!
it doesnt matter which is faster, or has the most features etc...
demos are only for the developer who wants to show off what he can do with particular hardware, i cant see why everyone is so worried about this
applications & games are completly different,
applications should be compatable with all graphics hardware, since they are not demonstrating graphics hardware capabilities
its important to make your apps & games RTG compliant, make it open on any type of screen the user desires, or on the WB screen
ok, so i cant see most demos, because i dont have a monitor connected to the native video port, but if the author wanted to use copper-lists & ham8 and sprites and stuff, what can i do? its the authors choice

i just think people should stop argueing about such trivial nonsense!
 :-)

[lempkee]

@crumb: btw that capsule demo aint truecolor btw , but its a well designed demo .

@i am a boringperson: that trvial question u seem to be pumping, well in one way what ur saying is correct, but if u turn that upside down and face the fact that AMIGA = CUSTOM CHIPSET thats when what we discuss here makes sense,
anyway i would have loved to see AAA chipset in the A1 more than seeing a gforce 7 card in it, why u might ask...well easy!! BECAUSE ITS CUSTom CHIPSETS!1

i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??

so infact i still prefer aga for demo making etc, but an engine that would allow it to work in rtg mode aswell (as all our last prods is), anyway AMIGA = AMIGA and not UAE or amithlon or what ever..., when OS4 is out then there is a new breed
and i have faith in it but i think it wont change much of our lives atleast for the next 10months (after its release) because the real amiga people (the productive ones) know too little atm.

[Dagon]

and face the fact that AMIGA = CUSTOM CHIPSET thats when what we discuss here makes sense

define custom chipset:
Do you mean that all Amigas have the same chipset?
Because that isn`t true at least the last 15 years. It`s been years that I havent used AGA on my Amiga.(Since I bought CyberVision64 3D which has a Virge chipset) Nor all Amigas have the same hardware (Various Motorola CPUs same as Apple etc..) Since then I almost stopped seeing demos because I had my TV set connected with my A600HD and I couldn`t change all the time the cables, ports can be damaged in time with this procedure.

I bet for you an A4000/A1200 with PPC, PCI slots with voodoo, soundblaster, ethernet, USB with scanner and webcam running AmigaOS 3.9 isn`t really an Amiga because it uses of the shelf chipsets and accessories. The new&old Macs are real macs when they use ATI/nVidia?

i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??

I dont put Amiga in the same fate with C64. Except if you consider Amiga just as a retro hobby. I`m not.


I can perfectly understand you that what you do, you do it for your own fun, that`s okay with me, I just hope that you will do your productions available also for the new Amigas that are about to come. :-)

[iamaboringperson]

i dont use the original amiga graphics, i use a grphics card in my amiga, does that mean that when i use my A4000T, im not really using an amiga?

im sure an amiga can be more than just a bunch of custom chips

darkcoder wrote:
erm..what do you mean with read16 aand write16?
You mean using the MOVE16 instruction?!
I always thought that such instruction was not supported by Amiga architecture, so never used it!

not supported differs from not working :-D. you can use MOVE16 in chipram with a sliiiiiiiiiiight better speed, but 'coz there's no MOVE16 Rx,Ea it's impossible to copy data in chipram w/out a 16 byte buffer in fastram, but i think this double write can waste a lot of time....

[Crumb]

btw that capsule demo aint truecolor btw , but its a well designed demo .

yes, I wrote about that demo because the idea of only making c2p with the lines that are being shown is quite good in my opinion (I haven't seen many hi-res demos).
If the screen is 8bit or ham8 is irrelevant to implement that idea. Well... now that you are here may you explain (if you aren't very busy and if you want) in a few lines why SHIRES is used instead of LORES to make hi/true color screens? sorry for insisting but I'm quite curious about this...

i have a feeling that next u want the c64 guys to make RTG demos also, eh??

no, because there's few people with gfx cards in c= 64s... but in Amiga now it's quite usual to have a gfx card, I know more people with gfx cards than people without one... anyway I understand your point because although coding for RTG may be fun, AGA has a lot more interesting features to play with. People should understand that some AGA demos can't be done for RTG easily so there's not much sense in almost rewriting the entire demo to make it RTG compatible. The situation is different with those demos that don't use many special AGA features, they can be easily converted and is a nice present for A3000/A2000 users.
Friendship rules ;-D

If the screen is 8bit or ham8 is irrelevant to implement that idea. Well... now that you are here may you explain (if you aren't very busy and if you want) in a few lines why SHIRES is used instead of LORES to make hi/true color screens? sorry for insisting but I'm quite curious about this...

SHIRES screen is needed to make hi color screen because you are not rendering a truecolor image to an ham screen, you are simulating a hicolor display, more in deep you are FAKing an hicolor one.
the trick works like the video beams render the "pixels" on your tv. You use 4 pixels (in tv 3) to renderer one (1 lores pixel is 4 SHIRES pixels in wide), so for example if you have 2 write 1 color you write 4 pixels in shires, Red componet Green component and the Blue Blue componet  two times for padding pourpose (the blue component is the less important for human's eyes) . In effect each true color pixel splits in a vector of 4 shires pixel the sum of these seems to be 1 real pixel to your eyes. so if you use a hires screen you double the width of pixels (2x resolution) and gain some dma slots, if you use a lores display the result is a joke, a mayhem of dirty colors.

[darkcoder]

@Agony

 >differs from not working . you can use MOVE16 in >chipram with a sliiiiiiiiiiight better speed, but

that's veeery interesting and cool thing!
I have to try. It's a pity for MOVE16 only workin with mem to mem.
Thanks you for the explanation, Agony, also about 18bit HAM8.

@crumb
the usual HAM8 is a planar mode. The 18bit HAM8 is a technique to do a sort of truecolor chunky mode.
(yep a fake one, as Agony says)

[Crumb]

@Darkcoder

the usual HAM8 is a planar mode. The 18bit HAM8 is a technique to do a sort of truecolor chunky mode. (yep a fake one, as Agony says)

I know that HAM8 is a planar mode... what I want to know is why no one has done a routine that converts
a 24/16bit chunky pixel fastram buffer to lores planar ham8 screens. TurboEVD uses a HAM8 mode to display modes like 640x480 in pseudo 15bits. TurboEVD seems to have done it without using a SHIRES screen mode.
I'm not talking about putting 1 Red 1 Green and 1 Blue pixel in SHIRES very near to fake a 24 bit mode, I'm talking about a screen where each colour depends on the previous pixel... a ham planar one. And a routine that turns a 16bit or 24bit chunky buffer in a ham8 planar screen. Chunky to planar but using more colours in the buffer and ham8 in the screen. Now am I explaining better what I want to know?