chunky pixel mode

[Pentad]

... Because AGA was little more than a bug fix to ECS...(

I could not agree more.  The Amiga was wonderful in 1985 but Commodore never did anything to the hardware after.  Oh, there were minor upgrades but the Amiga's amazing designs of the 80's became a liability in the 90's.  

I could be wrong about this in 1988 didn't R&D show some amazing chip designs that would have be the next gen for the Amiga?  I thought I recalled that they said -looking back- it would have been like the Voodoo I from 3DFX for the PC years later.  

Sad, really....

-P

[runequester]

I get that it wasn't the upgrade Commodore maybe needed, but I'll be honest, I  don't recall anyone bitching about AGA back in the day. We were all pretty stoked about, and the games suddenly looked nicer.

[bloodline]

I could not agree more.  The Amiga was wonderful in 1985 but Commodore never did anything to the hardware after.  Oh, there were minor upgrades but the Amiga's amazing designs of the 80's became a liability in the 90's.  

I could be wrong about this in 1988 didn't R&D show some amazing chip designs that would have be the next gen for the Amiga?  I thought I recalled that they said -looking back- it would have been like the Voodoo I from 3DFX for the PC years later.  

Sad, really....

-P

You mean the legendary "Ranger Chipset"... Designed by the original team while still at Commodore... But never put into production... Apparently it would have been a killer!!!

[itix]

But the 486s were in £1000+ systems, and the A1200 was a £400 (then £300) system.

Which brings us onto the other failing: No £600 A1230 with 40MHz '030 and 4MB RAM at release. Upselling - Commodore hadn't heard of it, apart from that hard drive included SKU.

At Release:
A1200 2MB '020 14MHz: £399
A1200 4MB '020 14MHz: £479
A1200 4MB '030 25MHz: £549
A1200 4MB '030 40MHz: £599
A2200 4MB '030 40MHz: £799 (A1200 in desktop case w/ separate keyboard)

People would have easily been persuaded to get a higher level A1200 in shops because the price increments aren't too shocking.

On PC games got better with faster CPU but on Amiga (2D) games rarely got better with faster CPU.

[lassie]

For SNES-like*mode-7 style effects check out "Brian The Lion", it was coded by sceners and they programmed blitter to make it rotate and zoom bitmaps with higher accuracy than SNES
and quite fast (the intro screen rotozoom runs at 25fps on a stock amiga with no fastmem)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-IDcTW8JQ4

Chek out minute 9:24, 9:30 to see the big platforms rotated using Amiga Blitter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-IDcTW8JQ4&feature=player_detailpage#t=564s

IMHO*the problem with AGA was
1. Not enough sprites
2. That caused that people used blitter to draw the remaining gfx but it was more or less as fast as the OCS/ECS ones
3. Since blitter was slow some coders of modern games draw the stuff in fastmem and copy to chipmem and that's when you realize chipmem's top speed of 7MB/s with a good accelerator (faster than most ISA cards) is not enough
4.*Chunky modes would have been useful at the beggining with slow cpus but from 040 upwards you can perform c2p as fast as you perform a copy from fast to chip. Even if you had a chunky mode if your game gfx are moderately complex you probably won't like to draw byte by byte to chipmem, you'll prefer to do that in fastmem and copy the result to chipmem at the end. So with 040+ cpus chunky modes are not a problem. In fact first IDSoftware games ran in planar 16-colour EGA mode on peecees and ray^tscc showed some years ago wolf3d was possible on a 8Mhz Atari

More sprites would have made a real difference. Check out Neo Geo games. These are 2D only but impressive anyway. CBM*should have added more sprites or a 32bit blitter and that would have made a lot of difference in the quality of Amiga games. Chunky games usually looked like sh*t anyway.

Although challenges are always fun (doing chunky games on Amiga) I think more effort should have been done in taking advantage of AGA+fastram and doing some great neo-geo like games.

You are right, there were something like mode 7 on Amiga i could see now i have never seen that before.

[runequester]

On PC games got better with faster CPU but on Amiga (2D) games rarely got better with faster CPU.

For a certain type of games sure. We'd all have loved to have UFO Enemy Unknown be less pokey. But there were plenty of areas where CPU power was important: Coding, all sorts of applications (including graphics which was a popular use of the amiga community), and later games.

It'd also permit more advanced games. Look at things like Genetic Species and Onescapee for some simple things that were possible with a decent 030 and AGA.

[lassie]

For a certain type of games sure. We'd all have loved to have UFO Enemy Unknown be less pokey. But there were plenty of areas where CPU power was important: Coding, all sorts of applications (including graphics which was a popular use of the amiga community), and later games.

It'd also permit more advanced games. Look at things like Genetic Species and Onescapee for some simple things that were possible with a decent 030 and AGA.

Hi i just tried Genetic Species quite a good game

[Digiman]

But the 486s were in £1000+ systems, and the A1200 was a £400 (then £300) system.

Which brings us onto the other failing: No £600 A1230 with 40MHz '030 and 4MB RAM at release. Upselling - Commodore hadn't heard of it, apart from that hard drive included SKU.

At Release:
A1200 2MB '020 14MHz: £399
A1200 4MB '020 14MHz: £479
A1200 4MB '030 25MHz: £549
A1200 4MB '030 40MHz: £599
A2200 4MB '030 40MHz: £799 (A1200 in desktop case w/ separate keyboard)

People would have easily been persuaded to get a higher level A1200 in shops because the price increments aren't too shocking.

The real problem IMO was 030 was a weak improvement on 020 but from 286 to 486 Intel made genuine improvements. The A4000/030 was available for £999 but then was both crippled by the bitplane system of 256 colour modes AND the fact for the same money you got an 040 class CPU in the £1000 486 SX25

Textured 3D was coming whether you liked it or not and 3DO/Saturn/Playstation all instantly aged the Jaguar/SNES/Megadrive over night. The 486 PC + byte per pixel VGA screen mode also did the same to the Atari and Commodore computers.

I don't think it was so much a matter of money with AGA as such, although I agree they didn't have the money to do much with anyway, but the problem is they left it really late, A1000,500,2000,1500,3000,600,CDTV all had the same abilities for 320x256 resolution. All of a sudden the sales started dropping off and Commodore needed 256 colour graphics FAST. TIME that's what Commodore didn't have, even if R.J. Mical and Dave Needle still worked for Commodore in 1990 I don't believe there was enough time between A500Plus launch and A1200/4000 launch to actually create a true successor regardless of loss of engineering talent and loss of cash.

I suppose they could have done what Sony did with PS3, essentially put all the custom chips of the previous generation inside the new machine AND add the new more advanced incompatible custom chips. So a sort of firmware based emulation. This would have allowed 0-64 colours as before and only needed a simple 24bit chip for 256,65000 or 24 million colour modes. Very expensive way of doing it though, would probably have added £100 to price of A1200 and at £400 it was too high already with 880kb floppy and only 4 channel sound (easily fixed with a dual Paula motherboard mind).

There is one thing nobody considered, they could have implemented a mini version of the A3000s video slot inside the A1200 too and left the ECS chipset as is. Then all you need to do is buy hundreds of thousands of cheap powerful graphics chips as used in PC cards and put them on a simple videoslot adaptor to give the extra features of 24bit colour.

Essentially this would then be like the Commodore 128, when you switch from different screen modes it used a different chip after power off/on cycle. VDU or VIC-II. Bil Herd and Dave Haynie who designed a lot of the 128 still worked at Commodore at that time so I'm sure that was possible. And probably would have cost less in R&D than making the ECS compatible AGA chipset.

[Karlos]

The real problem IMO was 030 was a weak improvement on 020 but from 286 to 486 Intel made genuine improvements.

Of course, you skipped a generation on the intel side. The odd numbered 68K parts were intended to be refinements. The 68010 cleaned up the 68000 instruction set (from a virtualization perspective at least) but didn't do much for performance. It was the even numbered parts where you got significant updates to the silicon.

That said, the 030 did make some significant improvements over the 020 when you consider the non-EC parts. The full 030 added on-die MMU and can run at 50MHz (the latter feature being more significant for Amiga machines).

[NorthWay]

Chunky would have bought you mindshare, something that would have been way more important than cpu/system performance.

The thinking was "you can't to Wolfenstein on Amiga because it doesn't have chunky" - which is of course bollox, but any kind of 3D on the Amiga at that time was (AFAIK) centered around doing blitter or bitmanipulation directly when drawing the screen, and not adding an extra step with a chunky buffer you convert to planar later.

A 68000 or 68020 is relatively slow, but pc games typically just let you set what size the view should have if you thought it was running too slow (i.e. scale it down), and so you can of course do on any computer.

By the time 'everyone' used c2p the train had left the station.
(And it typically adds 1 frame extra per update so it is a bit disadvantaged, but you can live with that.)

[lassie]

The real problem IMO was 030 was a weak improvement on 020 but from 286 to 486 Intel made genuine improvements. The A4000/030 was available for £999 but then was both crippled by the bitplane system of 256 colour modes AND the fact for the same money you got an 040 class CPU in the £1000 486 SX25

Textured 3D was coming whether you liked it or not and 3DO/Saturn/Playstation all instantly aged the Jaguar/SNES/Megadrive over night. The 486 PC + byte per pixel VGA screen mode also did the same to the Atari and Commodore computers.

I don't think it was so much a matter of money with AGA as such, although I agree they didn't have the money to do much with anyway, but the problem is they left it really late, A1000,500,2000,1500,3000,600,CDTV all had the same abilities for 320x256 resolution. All of a sudden the sales started dropping off and Commodore needed 256 colour graphics FAST. TIME that's what Commodore didn't have, even if R.J. Mical and Dave Needle still worked for Commodore in 1990 I don't believe there was enough time between A500Plus launch and A1200/4000 launch to actually create a true successor regardless of loss of engineering talent and loss of cash.

I suppose they could have done what Sony did with PS3, essentially put all the custom chips of the previous generation inside the new machine AND add the new more advanced incompatible custom chips. So a sort of firmware based emulation. This would have allowed 0-64 colours as before and only needed a simple 24bit chip for 256,65000 or 24 million colour modes. Very expensive way of doing it though, would probably have added £100 to price of A1200 and at £400 it was too high already with 880kb floppy and only 4 channel sound (easily fixed with a dual Paula motherboard mind).

There is one thing nobody considered, they could have implemented a mini version of the A3000s video slot inside the A1200 too and left the ECS chipset as is. Then all you need to do is buy hundreds of thousands of cheap powerful graphics chips as used in PC cards and put them on a simple videoslot adaptor to give the extra features of 24bit colour.

Essentially this would then be like the Commodore 128, when you switch from different screen modes it used a different chip after power off/on cycle. VDU or VIC-II. Bil Herd and Dave Haynie who designed a lot of the 128 still worked at Commodore at that time so I'm sure that was possible. And probably would have cost less in R&D than making the ECS compatible AGA chipset.

Hi nice written was the 060 CPU produced around 1993 or was that later? but if it was, i would imaging it will cost to much to put in an Amiga and sell in stores. But it sure could compete with the PC from that time if it could be done

[bbond007]

That said, the 030 did make some significant improvements over the 020 when you consider the non-EC parts. The full 030 added on-die MMU and can run at 50MHz (the latter feature being more significant for Amiga machines).

The same is true with the upgrade from the 286 to 386... most of the speed improvement was the higher clock...

I had a 286  clocked at 25mhz it was quick like a 386 and most software still ran in 8088 mode anyway.

I was going to buy a 386 20mhz mb but my system builder guy convinced me should take the faster 286 and the (more expensive) Tsing video over the Trident

[Pentad]

You mean the legendary "Ranger Chipset"... Designed by the original team while still at Commodore... But never put into production... Apparently it would have been a killer!!!

Yep!  I could not think of the name for anything.  I am hoping that On the Edge - Part II will shed some more light on this, the original team, and how this all got shuffled around.

If memory serves, it would have put CBM insanely far ahead of everyone else.

Alas, what could have been.

-P

[Karlos]

The 386 was a major architectural improvement over the 286 though, at least when running in non-segmented mode.

[bbond007]

The 386 was a major architectural improvement over the 286 though, at least when running in non-segmented mode.

It certainly made a real UNIX possible on PC hardware. That segment/offset crap was a major PIA. I recall trying to track down a bug in something I was writing caused by the use of a "near" pointer when I should have used a "far" pointer.... whatever... don't miss that nonsense.

By the time games started to use 32bit modes of the 386, they really needed a 486....

[Cammy]

If Amiga had a chunky mode, this would be even faster!

[YOUTUBE]RKixK1gxOns[/YOUTUBE]

Unfortunately it's only AGA.