Amiga movies possible on stock OCS machine?

[Amiga_Nut]

I was wondering just how far you could take the OCS chipset with a fast IDE or CF adaptor storage medium using say an Amiga 600 or A500/2000/1000 with a fast hard drive. (well fast for 2003/2004 etc when 6gb was a lot!)

I have a similar thread in another Amiga board about this but hoping some people here could help.

The dream is 24FPS or as close as possible on a stock 7mhz OCS/ECS Amiga in either 320x200 or 320x256.

Now if you had the frames stored in an uncompressed format is it possible to pull in a 6 bitplane image (48kb) uncompressed for each frame with a palette per frame and througput it in the OCS/ECS chipset bandwidth @ 20FPS. So about 1mb/s sustained speed for EHB/HAM6 20FPS movie @ 320x200x6bitplanes.

Can the blitter write this much data per second....can you use DMA to load in the data without the blitter into assigned screen memory from  the IDE hard drive interface?

Any technical advice appreciated on this....would like to end up with something  that can show the world what really was possible technically in 1985...and how little things have actually changed in one quarter of a century with winbloze and arty farty OSX computer for sale today

[Crumb]

Using 6bitplanes instead of 4 will slowdown chipmem access. I remember watching an impressive video at youtube from a north american amiga group showing an A2000 playing a pair of ham videos. I don't know the software they used but I always wonder about the sound part. You could try cdxl anims although these are usually quarter-screen.

[orb85750]

Interesting, but if you're using CF, then how is that still 1985?  Might that defeat your own purpose?  Why not use a Vlab Motion board with MovieShop or how about a Toaster/Flyer system?  (both older than CF and very much Amiga-centric)

[Tension]

Those demo coders can do some crazy things on stock machines, depends how creative you are.

[Lando]

I'm sure it's possible, there's a video on Youtube of the Matrix Reloaded playing on a 1Mhz Atari 800XL.

[AmigaHeretic]

Yeah, I think it's possible.  The only you issue you might run into streaming it off an HD(CF Card) on 7mhz machine would be if you aren't using DMA.

Are there DMA IDE adapters for the A500?

There are probably SCSI DMA controllers.  Worst case you need to buy a CF->IDE->SCSI adapter.

[B00tDisk]

Hm, I recall watching four windowed Eric Schwartz animations on my stock A500 (512/512) back in the day - all Turbo Silver created and animated ones...his F117 flyby was one of them, IIRC.

Of course, in a 320x256 screen or whatever resolution it was, you figure a quarter of that size...not too demanding even for a 7mhz machine!

[omnicron10]

I saw an A500 with 1 meg of ram with stock CPU playing at least 15 FPS HAM 348x240 animations at the World of Commodore Pasadena back in the day.  I guess it would have been 92?  

A company had a DMA HD sidecar and a A2000  card (same card) that could do this.  I think it was playing like Star Wars or something.  Looked great!

I want to say it was the Trifecta card by ICD.  

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=557

Link says it was IDE... wow.

FOUND IT!

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/woc92.txt

"ICD was showing their new Trifecta hard drive.  It was running 4.5
minutes of Star Wars (where they escape from the Death Star)  Full
screen lores nolace HAM at 30 fps & audio on a stock Amiga 500 w/1Mb
of chip RAM.  The drive was transferring data at 1.9Mb/sec, total
size of video was 350K.  I honestly though they had a VCR plugged
into the monitor when I first saw it.  I had to walk around behind to
check if there was a composite connection.  I'd heard about these
kinds of demos before, but I don't think it really sinks in until you
see it in person." quote from Matt Davidian

[omnicron10]

Of course, in a 320x256 screen or whatever resolution it was, you figure a quarter of that size...not too demanding even for a 7mhz machine!

CDXL was 1/4 screen due to the fact the CD drive could only stream data that fast.  CDXL format was not limited to 1/4 screen.  Remember CDTV was 1x CD-Rom.

On CD32 you could a lot better CDXL animation.  

I think the CDTV had the best video play back from 1x CD on the market without MPEG.

[Crumb]

@omnicron10

it's a pity that a libcdxl is not available so ffmpeg or memcoder could use it to encode cdxl anims easily. I saw some instructions to create cdxl files and it was quite painful :-(

[B00tDisk]

CDXL was 1/4 screen due to the fact the CD drive could only stream data that fast.  CDXL format was not limited to 1/4 screen.  Remember CDTV was 1x CD-Rom.

On CD32 you could a lot better CDXL animation.  

I think the CDTV had the best video play back from 1x CD on the market without MPEG.

This was 1989, well prior to the CDTV, well prior to CDXL.  These were bog standard IFF anims.  They're probably up on aminet if you go looking for them.

[Amiga_Nut]

When I say 1985 all I really mean is the OCS/ECS chipset bandwidth was capable of this task.

And I thought as there are IDE adaptors for A500/1000 machines using the ICD kits to install notebook 2.5" IDE drives technically it is possible to fit a CF card to these internal boards (they go in the 68000 CPU socket I believe)

But really it is A600 and up to use easily on a real machine I guess. I've seen the HAM animations on youtube they're 15fps using a custom format on an 030 A2000 machine I believe.

My idea was if you take a standard set of uncompressed frames that literally slot directly into screen memory to minimize the CPU bandwidth negating any decompression which you can then use for DMA transfers of the frame from your storage device etc. Hell compared to even Win2000 we are talking peanuts in file sizes really

Also there are two packages I remember. One was Clarissa's SSA animation format and also another program for playing IFF anims direct from the hard drive called BigAnim or something? Don't know if SSA has HD playback routines or if BigAnim has provision for sound.

The goal is to make something that people can at least run on UAE on an A500 config if they don't have the hardware like an IDE --> CF solution etc. You can still get incredibly fast 40Gb 7200RPM Toshiba/Fujitsu/IBM 2.5" IDE drives which are very good, speed up XP execution on sub-optimal memory size (<256mb) very well so the through put and seek times are just where you want them and probably man enough for the job.

It's something to make people who don't know about the Amiga sit up and look in amazement at how little things have really changed in 1/4 of a century as far as a desktop computer for the home goes. A bit of fun too yes but it just struck me as it is the right time to do this You just know no Mac v1/ST/PC of the era had the technology....maybe the Amiga was only lacking fast media in 1985....which is a powerful point to show...and what better way than through the medium of youtube so a new generation can go "Really? that's awesumz d00d" etc ha

So I guess what we are asking is...is it possible for the Amiga to load in 48k images of uncompressed HAM6 @ 320x200 in 1/25th of a second AND put them into the display area. I'm not fussed about compression in the era of HD drives being measured in Terrabytes on new PCs. Someone said the Blitter bandwidth for this is 2mb per second divided by 2 (need two channels for a straight copy) so it's almost there...technically.

[omnicron10]

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My idea was if you take a standard set of uncompressed frames that literally slot directly into screen memory to minimize the CPU bandwidth negating any decompression which you can then use for DMA transfers of the frame from your storage device etc. Hell compared to even Win2000 we are talking peanuts in file sizes really

Problem is, DMA is a hardware thing.  None of the 68000 socket HD controllers have DMA.  The CPU has to be involved.  The Zorro slot Trifecta card by ICD has DMA IDE support.  That is why it could do full HAM 30 FPS on a stock A500/A2000.

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So I guess what we are asking is...is it possible for the Amiga to load in 48k images of uncompressed HAM6 @ 320x200 in 1/25th of a second AND put them into the display area. I'm not fussed about compression in the era of HD drives being measured in Terrabytes on new PCs. Someone said the Blitter bandwidth for this is 2mb per second divided by 2 (need two channels for a straight copy) so it's almost there...technically.

On a non DMA controller stock OCS/ECS machine 68000?  Maybe.  With DMA?  Yes.  It has been done.

[Piru]

I thought as there are IDE adaptors for A500/1000 machines using the ICD kits to install notebook 2.5" IDE drives technically it is possible to fit a CF card to these internal boards (they go in the 68000 CPU socket I believe)

These devices don't handle DMA.

My idea was if you take a standard set of uncompressed frames that literally slot directly into screen memory to minimize the CPU bandwidth negating any decompression which you can then use for DMA transfers of the frame from your storage device etc.

Except that there is do DMA, not with ICD and similar kits at least. So basically each word will be copied from the 16-bit IDE data register by using the CPU. Writes to chip memory aren't fast either.

So lets do some math. 320 x 256, 6 planes at 24fps would require 1474560 bytes per second transfer speed.

When display DMA is set up to display HAM6 (or EHB) and you're writing the the chip memory I believe the display DMA will slow the operation down (IIRC, not sure about this one, it's been a while..). This combined with the fact that the IDE data I/O register reads aren't free either makes me think it won't be possible with PIO.

If you get real DMA to the chip memory, then it is easily possible (assuming you can reach the calculated limit of 1440KB/s, of course).

[Zac67]

No real sense in DMAing into fast RAM and then transferring to chip RAM, so it's easiest to DMA (or PIO read) directly into double frame buffers. If there's a bit of fast RAM (for PIO overhead) there's probably no large penalty on PIO vs DMA. Access to IDE registers will happen in fast memory, as will ROM access. Driver and system structures residing in chip RAM will slow operation considerably however.

6 bitplane gfx costs you half CPU (or SCSI DMA) bandwidth on chip RAM during bitplane DMA. Since you're using no overscan, you can make up for part of the bandwidth loss during horizontal and vertical blanking.
You've got 225 DMA slots in each line, 312 lines/PAL frame. From the 225 cycles, the  CPU can potentially use 112 (113?), 40 are lost to gfx, leaving 72. 72*256 + 112*56 = 24704 cycles per frame

16 bit chip RAM allows you to write 49408 bytes per frame, the A3000's 32 bit chip RAM would double that to 98816 bytes. Running 25 fps means you've got two frames for a full refresh (61440 bytes), so it shouldn't really be a big problem with optimized code, possibly even with a chip RAM only system!