Quote:

pavlor wrote: Really good for 600 USD computer (A1200), really bad for 3000 USD computer (A4000).

Full ack.

When the Amiga came up with OCS it was much better than a PC, when AGA came it was only a slow version of something you could have on a PC.

ppcamiga1 Quote:

Wolfenstein 3D is playable on 10 MHz 286 computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gvz6PMtEuU

Wolf is not so demanding. An Amiga with 68000@7MHz can do similar.

Wolfenstein 3D Amiga 500 technical demo by britelite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qsY8tXRFh0

Amiga 600 68000 7.14MHz runs Dread demo. A new Doom clone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yHmop0o21A

ppcamiga1 Quote:

And DOOM is playable on 386DX 40MHz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2qGaIOvjs

Doom is nearly playable at half screen and low detail there but still a poor frame rate. At full screen and high detail it is unplayable. Did you read comments from the video where more people mentioned it was unplayable?

Brian Beeby Quote:

On my AMD 386DX/40 mhz w/8 mb RAM and Soundblaster Pro, this is exactly how Doom ran--barely. Doom II was unplayable. On that PC, I played Doom: Episode 1 on Ultra-Violence full-screen w/status bar on "low detail" (F5) which yielded about 5-6 fps, like at 3:05. During a lull in the action, I could press F5, switching to "high detail," and briefly admire the "intended" way Doom was meant to be played--all at 2-3 fps like at 3:17. Good luck playing on Ultra-Violence like that. Doom was really intended for 486s, like a 486SX/25mhz or a 486DX/33mhz. On those, you could play full-screen on high detail, but you were still playing at 5-6 fps. That's why the monsters move so slowly. In the mid-'90s, 386s were still viable while 486s were considerably more expensive. A Pentium cost several thousand dollars. You needed a pretty high-end, and expensive, PC to play Doom decently back in the day.

A 68030@50MHz is higher performance than a 386DX@40MHz but still too slow IMO. There are videos online showing ADoom on a 68030 but many of them run ADoom in PAL 320x256 instead of NTSC 320x200 which is the resolution of the original Doom. ADoom on a CD32 with original 68EC020@14MHz but with fast ram and Akiko c2p does appear to run nearly as fast as a 68030@50MHz but still too slow (also using PAL 320x256 instead of NTSC 320x200). Perhaps a 68030@50MHz with fast memory and Akiko c2p could have handled Doom barely.

Amiga CD32 can it play doom?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uc9a5wpx9o

The chunky support probably helps a few fps but a 68040 or 486 does more for Doom performance.

ppcamiga1 Quote:

So 2D, retro was over before 486 was popular.

No. Wolf and Doom are pseudo 3D. Even the 486 is barely adequate performance for 3D which came later with the likes of Quake where the 486 generated the slide show and people upgraded to the Pentium. The S3 Virge in 1995 was joked about as a 3D hardware decelerator even though it was one of the first PC clone graphics cards to have 2D and 3D acceleration. It was 1996 when the 3dfx Voodoo 3D add-on board and the ATI 3D Rage came out which had much improved 3D support. It was 1997 before the Pentium MMX came out with integer SIMD unit support to help accelerate 3D (games like Quake were already starting to use floating point so integer only SIMD acceleration had limited use).

ppcamiga1 Quote:

Alladin AGA is rare exception. pc developers were too lazy to made 256 color graphics. Usually AGA games were worse versions of pc games. Amiga was nice alternative computer but after 1992 games were better on pc.

The problem was that Amiga support was already waning before AGA came out due to CBM having trouble getting competitive products out the door quick enough. AGA wasn't out for long before CBM went bankrupt so there weren't that many AGA specific games. Many AGA games only have minor enhancements from OCS/ECS games which were still being released and were a larger market. Still the AGA increased graphics bandwidth, enhanced colors, enhanced sprites and enhanced dual playfield support were a descent upgrade, especially for 2D games like Aladdin. The upgrade from 68000@7MHz to 68EC020@14MHz was also a nice upgrade. Yes, it all should have come at least a year earlier and with at least Akiko c2p support.

pavlor Quote:

Comparing 1997 GPU with 1992 GPU certainly is not fair. However, your example shows Commodore had nothing to offer to people with moderately high budget for a computer. As I wrote, AGA was really good GFX for a 600 USD computer in 1992 (compare to cheap PC clones with 256 kB ISA SVGA back then).

Good points. The original Amiga chipset was high performance in 1985 and certainly no longer high performance in 1992 with AGA. It was cheap which was good for low end hardware but there is a fine line between low end and obsolete which CBM had trouble recognizing along with value. CBM's answer for noncompetitive products was almost always to drop the price.

pavlor Quote:

I think one of the core issues of the Commodore/Amiga demise was something I can call user demographics: Commodore left bussiness market after the failure of CBM-II (early 1980s) and concentrated its efforts on the lower segment of the market (fairly successfully). Its attempts to reach higher margin markets (eg. big box Amigas) were a failure. So, you have bussiness model with low margins targeting users not willing to pay too much for hardware or software. Add ridiculously low Commodore R/D investments and see how fragile this strategy was in the era of a dynamic hardware progress (PCs with better features for even lower price) and cheap and capable video game consoles targeting the very same core market.

I agree. The high tech Amiga became the computer for the masses while not even high end Amigas died off with the Video Toaster and North American markets. It was good to use the low end Amiga sales to the masses to increase volumes for mass production of the chipset but the failure to upgrade it quickly enough made it inadequate for the high profit margin higher end markets. AGA was probably only a few more dollars to produce than ECS and AA+ likely only a few more dollars than that. CBM was the ultimate in cheapness and lethargy.

Last edited by matthey on 03-Dec-2021 at 11:52 PM.

@matthey

DOOM after all was playable on pc that cost as much as a1200 plus fast ram.
Back in the dec 1993. It was 28 years ago.
AGA has no chunky pixel. Which means no DOOM. And the rest is history.

@ppcamiga1

C2P was possible as was A1200 Akiko support which could have been added to the Official C= CD1200 add on (if released at the same time as CD32) and bundled with Akiko C2P accelerated Doom in 1993! Work arounds made Doom possible but the market was already too small to entice iD Software and C= couldn't afford to pay for the porting/Amiga development like Wing Commander. Paying Gould/Ali $3 million a year while starving Amiga R&D killed the Amiga not AGA. AGA was a lifeline but the XOR patent dispute and hence no way to sell the 'good enough' CD32 in the USA sunk them.

America could have embraced the CD32 and A1200 even in 1993 with the right marketing and CD1200 release plus Akiko Doom.

_________________
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@NutsAboutAmiga

option I miss... more or less what competition offered

that was the problem... too little too late. One or two years earlier who knows. At 1992 it was more or less on a similar level as PC but there was much more software. The problem with missing chunky pixels already was mentioned. On the other hand 68k + chipset certainly was more efficient. But it was already too late.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 04-Dec-2021 at 04:07 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

Amiga 600 68000 7.14MHz runs Dread demo. A new Doom clone.

Based on the video you linked, that looks like ray casting, not BSPs. So it's more like Rise of the Triad.

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@OlafS25

Quote:

But it was already too late.

It was not supposed to tide us by through the year 2000 which it ended up doing but it was fine for a stop gap. The A1200 was mostly compatible with OCS and ECS games, a feature that allowed it to see off the otherwise superior Atari Falcon!

It was an ideal home computer through to 1995 when an 030 50Mhz with fast ram and hard drive was needed. Ideally a 060 would have been order of the day by 1999 with new graphics chips at the same time. 3D graphics hardware could have been fully implemented in 1999 and I'd have been happy.

PPC and the graphics card route the Amiga took was rocky so maybe Amithlon was the answer but we were to stubbornly anti-64-x86 to accept it?

AGA was THE high point for the Amiga for me. The glory A500 days did not separate the Amiga out from the ST enough for me to be jealous never mind see the Amiga for the special unique machine it was until the A1200 and that extra Ram and AGA games. Lemmings 2 and the Team17 games were the turning point and that was 1991-1996 i.e. the AGA years give or take a year! I'm quite fond of 1997-1999 as well though admittedly the best games were badly supported through shady outfits like Alive Mediasoft at that time or found on Cover Discs as for TFX!

_________________
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John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Thread

I like watching AmigaLive Twitch streams of Silkworm and SWIV because if I'd have had an A500 that would have been my jam! As it was I didn't miss what I never knew and was quite happy with 2-player Fire and Forget on the ST and Gauntlet 2/Time Bandits. Batman The Movie was also great on the ST but with much worse sound. Lemmings 2 on the ST had appalling sound...the end! AGA Amiga here I come whether C= is dying or not!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@NutsAboutAmiga

Sadly, I never owned an Amiga with AGA, so I won't comment further.



redfox

Last edited by redfox on 05-Dec-2021 at 02:09 AM.

@bison

It runs on an unexpanded amiga 500, but it ain't no ray caster.

Quote:

Two corrections: 1. Dread is not a raycaster. It renders polygons. 2. Raycasters are crap. Sorry.

eab>new amiga 500 doom like !

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The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@pixie

Who is KK/Altair? Did he write the game?

Last edited by bison on 06-Dec-2021 at 07:31 PM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

Yes

You must have been lost under some rock to have missed out on the whole Dread thing… :)

Last edited by kolla on 07-Dec-2021 at 04:07 AM.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@BigD

Quote:

@ferrels I am glad that the PC was viewed with such affection in the US but in the UK a 1992 era PC was a joke. The RM Nimbus machines in schools and crappy sound card-less home PCs with a single analogue game port if you were lucky could barely run Xenon 2 or MK and most played on their own with a flight stick! Real arcade perfection

You're only proving my point. I was living in Germany in the early 1990s and at that time, the Amiga was viewed as a toy or a gaming system for home users and the Amiga was shunned by companies that used computers for real work. There was the the occasional videographer who used Amigas in my area of Deutschland (Germersheim/Heidelberg) but the Amiga simply couldn't compete when it came to CAD/CAM or business applications. The Amiga never had any business software development that would have helped it gain a foothold in the business market which along with Commodore's mismanagement foreshadowed the Amiga's doom. Yeah, there was a bad port of WordPerfect for the Amiga but that wasn't enough and by 1993, PCs outperformed the Amiga in all areas, including graphics.

Last edited by ferrels on 07-Dec-2021 at 07:12 AM.

@bison

indeed! :)
Here's the first episode from a series where he presents his game and and its evolution.

_________________
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The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@ferrels

Quote:

Yeah, there was a bad port of WordPerfect for the Amiga but that wasn't enough and by 1993, PCs outperformed the Amiga in all areas, including graphics.

The Amiga was a plenty good enough home computer in 1992 and the idea if dragging in a IBM PC into the home environment with MS-DOS and its clunky hardware is an abomination. You may well have seen the way it was gaining traction in the business sphere but the Amiga apps were more than good enough for home office needs. I think dragging a PC into the home was more of a status symbol perhaps? No practical need were serviced by replacing an AGA Amiga with a PC in the home environment until at least 2000 whether you wanted to play Magic Carpet or not!

CAD and Excel requirements may have necessitated the use of a PC but the Amiga could also use ShapeShifter for Mac productivity software so really it was all covered. It was just habits had been formed in the office and workers wanted to replicate them at home. The actual PC systems were a disgrace and had no place in the home until Windows XP.

Last edited by BigD on 07-Dec-2021 at 08:46 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@NutsAboutAmiga

In 1992 my father bought an Amiga 1200 and I remember at that time we were undecided if to take an PC or Amiga. But as good Commodorians we were, we chose the latter. In our country (Italy) you couldn't buy a good pc at similar price of the A1200, maybe just a low-spec 386 or a decent 286, and they weren't good enough for what we wanted to do. I saw Wolf 3D at a my father's colleague and, although it looked interesting, it didn't impress me a lot, because that game run pretty slow (surely the machine wasn't high-spec).
For me the AGA chipset was a bit above the average PC gfx cards that year.

Last edited by dipsomania on 07-Dec-2021 at 10:38 AM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 07-Dec-2021 at 10:34 AM.

@dipsomania

I hope your dad bought you Flashback one of the best games that year and the best version was on the Amiga! My PC owning friend had it but we never got the sound to work properly and he didn't have a gamepad - story of the time! I bet he claimed the Amiga was rubbish because it didn't have MS Works Because PageStream and TurboPrint didn't walk all over a 1992 PC on their own!! Of course they did!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

When I bought the A1200, I also rather randomly bought a game for it... WingCommander AGA. It was so so on the stock A1200. Then the A1200 was updated with fast RAM, and then blizzard 1230 III and it became playable. Then I tried it on a 040 A4000 and it was tricky, and lastly on A1200 with 060 it is darn difficult. So the bottleneck wasn't really AGA, at least not for that game, which I understand was a rather "quick&dirty" port from PC.

What I do like about AGA is that I, as a user, could chose between a range of modes with different sizes and depths and find what fit my needs. Occationally I could run super highres laced WB with max overscan, monochrome or 4 colours for max work space. Or I could opt for lower resolution and more colours. And this I could do for almost each and every program individually. On PC? In 1992? Win 3.x 640x480 16 colours, congrats.

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@kolla

Quote:

You must have been lost under some rock to have missed out on the whole Dread thing… :)

I was AWOL from 1993 to 2007, for the most part.

@pixie

Thanks for the link.

Last edited by bison on 07-Dec-2021 at 03:15 PM.

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