@Hammer

Your're missing the point, which is simply that this "AGA" game isn't restricted to AGA as long as you have RTG. Running on the CDTV was quite a pleasant surprise.

And frankly a surprise it ran at all, even to be because in RTG mode the menus are not RTG. They are stil being rendered in chip ram, using the native copper and blitter. It just turns out that the menu code works on ECS anyway.

When you play on RTG, the corresponding chip ram planes converted back to chunky VRAM for display. Quite possibly the first game to make actual use of planar to chunky graphics

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@Karlos

but it did not... you needed a "Indivision ECS"

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@Karlos

The Indivision ECS V4's P96 RTG on a drop-in Denise socket presents an interesting "What If" upgrade path for all DIP socket Denise Amigas.

The net result is all 16-bit Amiga 500 majority has 256 color gaming upgrade path potential when coupled with a popular GVP A530's 68EC030 @ 40 Mhz or "fat" PPS 040-28 / 040-33 CPU accelerator.

CDTV is just an A500 with ECS Agnus A 1MB Chip RAM and CD-ROM drive.
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PiStorm-Emu68-RPI 4B with Indivision ECS V4's P96 RTG would be an interesting experiment since PiStorm removes the CPU bottleneck and shifts the entire bottleneck into CPU's I/O with Chip RAM and Denise I/O.

I have an Indivision AGA V3 for my A1200.

From Commodore - The Final Years


Products (GVP) the prior year at Mehdi Ali’s request. Within a month,
Ali was forced to reverse his decision, but GVP had continued
growing since then and surpassed Commodore in 1992. “I wasn't
anymore at Commodore and GVP is, let's say, doing all the profitable
part of the Amiga. We were at about thirty five million dollars per
year eventually, which wasn't that big compared to the size that
Commodore was,� says Gerard Bucas. “But believe it or not, that is
still more than Commodore’s peripheral sales.�

One of GVP’s most profitable and popular peripherals relied on the
Amiga 500 and 2000’s CPU expansion capabilities. “It's all made
possible because the A500 and the A2000 had the CPU expansion
slot,� explains Bucas. “That implies that you can literally disable the
CPU on the motherboard and plug in another board. Now it's as if
you have a much faster motherboard, which was totally an incredible
architecture in the PC world.�

In 1992, GVP released a CPU accelerator called the A530 Turbo.
Amazingly, it boosted the A500’s 7 MHz speed up to 40 MHz using a
Motorola 68EC030 processor. “In A500 we had a box that you plug in
the side slot because it also had the CPU expansion board,� says
Bucas. “Bottom line, that's why GVP could do all those CPU
accelerator products which were super successful. We made tonnes
and tonnes of money on those.�



GVP A530 made GVP "tonnes of money", but A500+A530 was locked out of 256 color gaming. Amiga 256 color gaming couldn't exploit the Amiga 500 install base with a full 32-bit 68EC030 40Mhz. Meanwhile, the PC counterpart with Am386DX @ 40 MHz can exploit fast VGA 256 color gaming.

Like A2500/030 and A3000/030 owners, many of the Amiga owners with GVP A530 were burned from being locked out of Amiga 256 color gaming with fast 32-bit 68K CPUs.

Last edited by Hammer on 02-Nov-2025 at 11:55 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 02-Nov-2025 at 11:40 AM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

I am not following the point you are making. The Indivision ECS provides a compatible 8-bit RTG mode.

I'll say it again, just to be clear: Current AB3D2 works on any ECS system that has a suitable 8-bit RTG mode available. It only requires AGA specifically when there is no RTG mode available.

The game still needs either ECS (OCS might work, unknown) or AGA since Paula is still used for audio and the game menus continue to be rendered by the native chipset and are just displayed on the RTG framebuffer via P2C conversion.

Hope that's clear.

The engine needs a complete menu replacement because the code for it is very coupled to the hardware and equally it needs a new sound engine before it can become fully independent of the native chipset.

Last edited by Karlos on 02-Nov-2025 at 12:33 PM.

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@Karlos

Specifically, Indivision ECS v4 has hardware-accelerated P96 RTG with a framebuffer.

Games such as Reshoot Proxima 3 need AGA, not RTG.

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In case it's in any doubt, here is AB3D2 (original Team17 levels) running on an A500 with PiStoetm+RTG

https://youtu.be/SGipR7O31hs?si=ZFvUNPSzdxhwMkzp

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@Hammer

I agree. Games that need AGA specific features cannot work without it, or emulation. We got lucky with AB3D2, the menu code works even without it. Pipper implemented a planar to chunky transfer process to get it to display on RTG.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: In case it's in any doubt, here is AB3D2 (original Team17 levels) running on an A500 with PiStoetm+RTG https://youtu.be/SGipR7O31hs?si=ZFvUNPSzdxhwMkzp

I already tested your AB3D2 build on C= A500 ECS with PiStorm-RPi 4B-Emu68 (version 1.0.5 with P96 RTG). A500 ECS enables 56 kHz Paula with RTG.

There are other AGA games, hence why I have a C= A1200 with PiStorm32-RPi CM4-Emu68.

I haven't run AB3D2 on a Draco-type AmigaOS-only machine.

Last edited by Hammer on 08-Nov-2025 at 11:02 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 08-Nov-2025 at 10:57 PM.

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@Hammer

Pretty sure a Draco or similar system won't work.

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