I read somewhere that Atari ST emulation requires more precise CPU emulation that is necessary for Amiga and MAC emulation. I don't believe I have ever seen an actual Atari ST in action.
Sounds reasonable yes. On Amiga, most time-critical stuff is done with the copper, not the CPU. So the copper emulation needs to be very precise, but the CPU generally doesn't.
Atari is more like a C64, where you often craft code to run exactly X cycles, then you change some hardware registers at exactly the right pixel.
Perhaps this is not the best place to admit it...
But I have an Atari ST myself. I got it after its prime though, somewhere in 1997 or so I think. See, one of my other hobbies is music, and I wanted an Atari for Cubase. I've tried a few games and demos on it, but concluded they were not as good as the Amiga. Partly because I didn't 'get' them, I suppose. I mean, a lot of Atari demos use fullscreen parallax scrolling effects. To an Amiga guy that's a bit of a 'so what?'. But if you know what hoops the Atari guys had to jump through to make it possible on their machine, it's a different story.
There's not a lot of 3d stuff on Atari ST... But this one is pretty incredible:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=109And that's just software too, not even using the blitter found on the later models.
I have no excuse for the music though... even a C64 sounds better than the Atari ST, if you ask me.
I remember seeing Ultraforce Vector demo back when I had a 286 with Tsing et4000 VGA and that demo was the first demo I had seen on the PC that impressed me. I also had an A500 at the time. Most everything else up to that was just some fake raster bars and scrolling text done with pure CPU brute force. the other impressive thing to consider about the Vector demo is that the PC's SandBlaster card of that day had one grainy 8 bit channel so they are doing some CPU sound mixing there too.
Yea, that's when PC scene started to get serious. Around 1990/1991 the first modplayer routines appeared on PC, and soundcards started getting support.
3d was still mostly bruteforce, but that was exactly what the PC was good at. The 286 was already a much faster CPU than the 68000, with speeds up to 25 MHz.
And VGA was nicer for chunky effects, as it had a native chunky format.
VGA was not really bad hardware at all. The bigger issue was the brain-dead CPU it was attached to with the 64K segmented architecture.
I think the sad part is that the 386 had been around since 1985, but it took until about 1992 before 32-bit code became commonplace. DOS did not support the 32-bit mode, and there were no alternatives, until eventually the DOS extenders arrived.
But it makes the Vectordemo even more impressive I guess, because it just runs in 16-bit mode. I believe Triton's Crystal Dream is also purely 16-bit (Crystal Dream II is 32-bit though).
I'm still a bit in two minds about VGA. Some parts of it are nice... other parts are nasty. Chunky mode is nice, unchained mode is nice... But the latches being only 8-bit large is rather limited. Lack of proper blitting and shifting is also a shame. And the fact that you can only address 64k of memory at a time. That means that in chunky mode, you cannot use a backbuffer in videomem. In fact, having to use separate videomem in itself is nasty. Reading back videomem has always been a bottleneck. The only way to avoid that was to have a buffer in sysmem. But that meant you had to memcpy() it to videomem every frame. And with the slow ISA bus and no proper DMA to do that for you... it wasn't pretty. It wasn't really feasible until 486 and VLB arrived, and the copy speed was getting good enough.
