what machine to run amiga FPS comfortably?

[runequester]

Along the way, I want to be able to play the following games on my 1200 comfortably.

Alien breed 3D
Gloom
Breathless

Not interested in doom, quake etc, just the above three.


What sort of processor/ram should I be looking for, to run those pretty well ?

[Karlos]

Any decent 030 card with 8MB+ should be enough for those titles.

Caveats:

If you plan to run breathless in fullscreen 1x1 pixelmode, you may need more poke. Never tried it on anything less than an 040, so I can't say. The same applies to Gloom Deluxe.

If you meant Alien Breed 3D 2, then you need at least an 040 for any serious joy. Even then, I played it at 2/3 screen size.

[Cammy]

I'm very, very happy playing all of those games, and even DOOM as well, on my A1200 030/28. It runs even smoother on my friend's A1200 030/50.

Actually all these games are still playable on the 020 with extra RAM, so the 030 just makes them run much smoother.

[Karlos]

Do you know, I actually completed AB3D on a bare A1200? Not even any fast ram. The last few levels were fun, you'd need several goes on most of them so you could use foresight on your final attempt. You needed it, since it could literally drop to like 2 frames a second

[Cammy]

Cool, you finished it, that's further than I've got so far in AB3D. I used to play it on my stock CD32 before I got a SX32 for it, and it was fine on that too. It's just a shame that game never had the option to play full screen for expanded Amigas, but it was designed to run as well as possible on stock 2MB systems.

[Karlos]

You can play fullscreen, as long as you don't mind it using what appears to be some 3x3 pixelmode.

On the A1200, pressing the numeric pad enter key seemed to toggle it IIRC.

I would have loved to have seen a proper C2P/RTG capable version of the original. Peter McGavin (I think) did make a C2P hack of the original 1 level demo.

Despite the slowness, I had a lot of fun with AB3D 2 once I figured out how the modding tools worked. I made some additional weapons and improved the animation for the existing ones. I still have that mod somewhere.

[runequester]

Good to hear.

Anyone tried the split screen in Gloom on an 030 ?

as far as AB3D, you can indeed hit enter for full screen. Its wicked pixelated and it gets a bit hard to see the end of a big room, but it also obscures your health and ammo bars, which adds to the tension

[whiteb]

MMMMM what an Interesting thread, writes the game names down

Imagine what the games will be capable of, on a Cyberstorm MK-II (060) 50 Mhz and 128MB of ram

[runequester]

Wont have the accelerator for another week or two, but for comparison, I loaded up Alien Breed 3D and it runs surprisingly well on a stock 1200.

Im sure with a lot going on, it'll croak and groan, but I was impressed playing through the first level.

Can't wait to see it with some more oomph

[Karlos]

Wont have the accelerator for another week or two, but for comparison, I loaded up Alien Breed 3D and it runs surprisingly well on a stock 1200.

Im sure with a lot going on, it'll croak and groan, but I was impressed playing through the first level.

Can't wait to see it with some more oomph

It was very fluid on my old 040. So much so that you end up wishing it had a 1x1 pixel mode.

[Hattig]

We need some disassembler ace to mod the game's renderer to have a 1x1 mode.

I presume the game renders to a (guessed from the screenshots) 128x100 chunky bitmap, and then there is a C2P module to copy and expand that onto the screen.

I remember playing the demo of this game, in some ways on a fuzzy monitor the chunkyness of the rendering added to the atmosphere, it didn't feel too crisp and angular.

[Khephren]

Good to hear.

Anyone tried the split screen in Gloom on an 030 ?

Yes, I used to play it that way every friday back in the day. Ran lovely on a 030/50. Always ran super smooth. Then we did two player trick or treat (freeware FPS with wizards, very fun).

Genetic species ran nice as well, looked lovely too.
Trapped ran ok'ish, as did nemacIV.

Never did try doom on the Amiga.

[ddniUK]

You should try Genetic Species. Best Amiga FPS of all time!

[KThunder]

ok now you did say what "machine" right? so could someone say "any modern pc with any newer version of winuae" without dodging thrown objects?

seriously though I had a 1200 with and without an '030 50mhz accel, and a 3000 with and without an a3640, and gloom, quake and breathless ran ok on all of them. last i ran an amiga fps was on a athlon 900 with winuae, that ran really well too.

[Cammy]

Wow, I finally got around to trying the A1200 version of AB3D and it does indeed run full screen if I hit Enter! I never knew about this option before, but I only ever played it on my CD32 so I wasn't using a keyboard. Being stuck in a small window was the one thing that always bugged me about AB3D, I don't mind so much that it uses blocky pixels for the full screen mode, it's more atmospheric playing this way. It runs nice and smooth on my 030/28 too.