@saimo

Quote:

You are comparing a software solution that gets AGA to work in chunky mode (without any CPU, Blitter or Copper assistance) against a third-party hardware add-on: that's a total disconnect.

But it would be the ultimate dongle for doom, if it allowed the extra speed needed for it to run.

Last edited by pixie on 29-Feb-2024 at 03:22 PM.

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@saimo

Quote:

You are comparing a software solution that gets AGA to work in chunky mode (without any CPU, Blitter or Copper assistance) against a third-party hardware add-on: that's a total disconnect.

so what?
there is nothing special in AGA
use graphics card or graffiti

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

so what? there is nothing special in AGA

But is this true?

1) Amiga offers sprites.
With AGA you can create 8 Sprite with 4 colors or 4 very big sprites with 16 colors each.
This gives you nice options for games.
You can even make a complete background playfield with the sprites..

2) The Planar hardware support smooth scrolling for free.

3) You can do nice effect like Dual Playfield

4) You can use the Copper to make add a lot more colors to the Display.



AGA offers a lot very nice features for games..

PC GFX card did not provide the same features at the time.

The trick with Amiga chipset is that the hardware does all this for free.
This means you can smooth scroll dualplayfield with many colors thanks to Copper - without eating CPU time. Or with a slow and low cost CPU.
This is a huge advantage that Amiga had over PC at that time.

@pixie

Quote:

Quote: You are comparing a software solution that gets AGA to work in chunky mode (without any CPU, Blitter or Copper assistance) against a third-party hardware add-on: that's a total disconnect. But it would be the ultimate dongle for doom, if it allowed the extra speed needed for it to run.

The OP was exclusively about what Commodore could have done to provide a native chunky mode and that's all that I've focused on. The rest - add-on hardware included - is OT (and I have no interest in it).

Last edited by saimo on 29-Feb-2024 at 06:27 PM.
Last edited by saimo on 29-Feb-2024 at 05:52 PM.
Last edited by saimo on 29-Feb-2024 at 05:52 PM.

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@saimo

So put it back into topic, would you think that it would be feasible to adapt your solution to doom?

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@saimo

Quote:

The OP was exclusively about what Commodore could have done to provide a native chunky mode

As we know Commodore did develop a native chunky mode in the AAA chipset.
So yes this was on the roadmap.
But not included in AGA.

It goes without saying that a native Chunky mode would make coding games like Doom easier.
Doom needs a lot CPU and quite some memory ..
So for a stock A1200 this would maybe not changed much.

But for a upgraded with maybe 030 CPU and some fastmem - This would have helped to get DOOM run faster.

@pixie

Quote:

So put it back into topic, would you think that it would be feasible to adapt your solution to doom?

It's the other way around: it's Doom that has to be adapted to the graphics architecture.
And, yes, Doom could be adapted to PED81C.

EDIT: swapped "Doom" and "that" around - these days I'm losing the ability to lay words down in the proper order...

Last edited by saimo on 29-Feb-2024 at 10:51 PM.
Last edited by saimo on 29-Feb-2024 at 10:48 PM.

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@saimo

Sorry, that's what I meant, to make use of PED81C.

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@pixie

No problem!

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@saimo

Quote:

And, yes, Doom could be adapted to PED81C.

Can you explain what advantage this will give?


* We know with normal Amiga Planar good 2D games can be made.

* its obvious that real Chunky will help to make 3D games easier.
But with a fast CPU e.g. 68040+ and fast fastmem you have another option
you can render the screen in fastmem and do the C2P conversion on the copy to chipmem.
With a good routine and fast CPU we can do this on the fly... Basically for free during the copy.

* Maybe you can explain us the PED idea again?
As far as I understood you use 4 planes Super Hires Screen in PAD to simulate lowres chunky?
As far as I understand, this looks a bit different then real chunky,
and this needs twice the DMA to display compared to normal 8 planes lowres,
Is this correct?

For what CPU configuration do you think PED makes most sense?
Did you try to add this into a game like DOOM or QUAKE?

@Gunnar
Quote:

@cdimauro Cesare, 38 years after the Amiga came to market you write essays to "proof on paper" that if they would have done this or that different in the Amiga layout it would have been better., This is like 38 after a super bowl to mathematically proof that if the Quarterback would have thrown more Hail Mary passes and if they would have been all catched the game would have scored more.

This mathemical proof (so, not something like: "my cousin told me") was already given by me TO YOU around 11/12 years ago, on Olaf's forum.

Don't you recall? You were saying that it wasn't possible that packed graphics was more efficient than planar graphics. But after my demonstration you touched the reality and accepted it.

That was the first time that I've publicly shown it, but the idea was already there in 1990-91, when I started working at my PC emulator for Amiga, once I started looking at the IBM's PS/2 hardware manual (which reported all VGA registers and information = 256 colours mode).

Anyway, nothing special: it's easy to get to the same conclusion if you start comparing both graphic formats with some concrete, real-world, scenarios.

The only requirement is that you should have an open mind, which can think out of the ordinary schemes and not framed by them. So, nothing for you, clearly.
Quote:

For sure this forum is super lucky to have such an Amiga expert like you able to make such great analyses:

Thanks. A least I'm proposing new ideas instead of just blindly patching some stuff "to get more" without any creative solution.
Quote:

How about we analyze this Amiga design here? [...] What do you think could we improved on this? What is this picture? This is a fake Amiga schematics that you and your friends published, right? And you and your friend claimed this would be the new Amiga you did develop? What could have been improved with your Amiga design? Maybe we should also brainstorm about this? First of all your Amiga design was 100% FAKE, all the PCB layout on your website were fake/stolen from other websites, and contrary to your and your friends claims this never worked. And it could never have worked at all. Because its all childish nonsense and everything in it is technically wrong. [...] Cesare Di Mauro, lets get this straight I think everyone here feels sad for you, that you "make up" fake stories on your CV. Probably everyone here feels sad for you, that you made a hoax a website about a fake Amiga you did invent. For sure everyone here feels sad for you, that you give false interviews to Amiga newspaper about a your fake inventions on a nonexisting Amiga you did.

And here, as usual, Gunnar entered Goebbles's Propaganda of Lies mode: continuously repeating the same lies, pretending to sell them as the truth, and without giving a single fact supporting it, of course: people should trust him only by his word, because he's "BigGun".

Well, as I've said before, I've already rebutted every single thing on the previous thread, so I just copy & paste my writings (like you did).

Oh, poor Gunnar: you are so desperate that you aren't able to sustain the discussion that you entered again the Goebbles' propaganda of lies to defend your crappy 68080, miserably trying to avoid talking about it and moving everything towards me.

As usual, because you've already done it here:
https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=44169&forum=17&start=100&viewmode=flat&order=0#855068
and continued all over the thread.

However I've already punctually and precisely replied to all your pile of LIES starting from here:
https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=44169&forum=17&start=100&viewmode=flat&order=0#855074
and all over the thread until my last comment:
https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=44169&forum=17&start=240&viewmode=flat&order=0#855444

After that you disappeared, as it happens with you when you recognize that you're able to sustain the PURE LEIS that you report to sully what you identified as your enemy.

And here you start with your personal attacks offending your "enemy" to discredit his reputation, with the clear purpose of invalidation his statements.

Needless to say, it's a very well know logic fallacy, the Poisoning the well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

But you've already proved several times that logic is not your friend, and there's PLENTY of proof in the links that I've provided above.

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Why the Amber chip was developed then? It costed. And the 384kB of memory which it used costed as well. The Amber chip also existed in Amiga 2000's A2320 card (https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=360)

You don't even understand the stuff that YOU post. Have you've took a look at the pictures of its motherboard? Clearly not!

(C) 1990.

Guess what: the same year that the Amiga 3000 was introduced...
Quote:

To match VGA's 640x480p 16 colors, Amber solution delivered 640x512 16 color flicker-free as a workaround for "no new chips" directive.

So, they spent TONS of money and time on the development of a chip ONLY for this purpose and for a MICRO-NICHE, and NOT for having a newer chipset which could have this feature already embedded (as I've proved on my two articles about the ECS).

"no new chips" remain just an excuse of the engineers: they had the chance to do something better because they had the resources (for Amber) but they wasted them with this useless solution for a micro-niche.

Ah, the resources for Amber were not needed anyway to get both a 640x480@16 colours not interlaced AND a much better ECS chipset: again, take a look at my two articles.
Quote:

Quote: Irrelevant. That's two more BITS added on the address registers and two more PINS used on Agnus. WOW, what a big change!! It's relevant when 2MB Chip RAM Agnus ECS is considered for 1989 A500 Rev 6A.

Relevant for what? What do you want to prove here?


@saimo

Quote:

saimo wrote: @Hammer [Except for the Akiko's C2P mention, which is somewhat related to the topic, this is all OT junk - and therefore goes into the trashcan.

That's called: Hammer's PADDING.

He reports wall-of-non-sense-text which he thinks might be related to topic and be useful. He thinks, but the reality is different, of course...

@cdimauro

Quote:

This mathemical proof (so, not something like: "my cousin told me") was already given by me TO YOU around 11/12 years ago, on Olaf's forum.

Cesare Di Mauro,

every coder on the planet knows and understands the advantages of CHUNKY versus PLANAR.
This topic is common knowledge and this was never disputed.

Why do you want to "proof" mathematically something that everybody on the planet knows and understand and agrees too?
This makes absolutely no sense.

Do you think you told anyone something new?
Everybody knew what you think you "invented".

Are you crazy?


Cesare Di Mauro I think you need a reality check.

Last edited by Gunnar on 01-Mar-2024 at 06:24 AM.

@Gunnar

That chunky is better was never his point. His point has always been that planar use just as much ram as chucky does, that the argument that Amiga used planar to save cost (ram) is a myth.

Now, with that out of the way… have you open sourced Super-AGA yet? Your announcement on that is soon reaching age of two-digit number of years - were you … ahm… lying?!

Last edited by kolla on 01-Mar-2024 at 06:51 AM.

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@Gunnar

Quote:

Gunnar wrote: @ppcamiga1 Quote: so what? there is nothing special in AGA But is this true? 1) Amiga offers sprites. With AGA you can create 8 Sprite with 4 colors or 4 very big sprites with 16 colors each. This gives you nice options for games. You can even make a complete background playfield with the sprites.. 2) The Planar hardware support smooth scrolling for free. 3) You can do nice effect like Dual Playfield 4) You can use the Copper to make add a lot more colors to the Display. AGA offers a lot very nice features for games.. PC GFX card did not provide the same features at the time. The trick with Amiga chipset is that the hardware does all this for free. This means you can smooth scroll dualplayfield with many colors thanks to Copper - without eating CPU time. Or with a slow and low cost CPU. This is a huge advantage that Amiga had over PC at that time.

It's not free when AGA consumes DMA and memory bandwidth resources. The main point with Amiga's custom chipset is to shift the bottleneck towards the available memory bandwidth since 68000 doesn't have 1 IPC (instruction per cycle).

At a certain point, the accelerator turns into a decelerator when the fast CPU is faster than the aging fixed-function ASIC. I'm not making jokes about S3 Virge, the decelerator.

My main reason for AGA usage is new software targeted AGA e.g. RESHOOT R, Reshoot Proxima 3.

Last edited by Hammer on 01-Mar-2024 at 07:23 AM.

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@kolla

Quote:

That chunky is better was never his point. His point has always been that planar use just as much ram as chucky does, that the argument that Amiga used planar to save cost (ram) is a myth.

PLANAR has certain advantages and CHUNKY has certain advantages.
- This is clear to everyone.


Same way as for cars
- front wheel drive
- rear wheel drive
- and 4 wheel drive

All have different advantages.



When the AMIGA was originally designed to go for PLANAR made a lot sense.
The Amiga 1000 could in theory have supported Chunky Byte pixel from bandwidth.
Everybody knows this.

But a chip with 256 color register would have made the A1000 ridiculous expensive at this time.
I can understand why this was not done.

But technology changed and when the Commodore Team could add 256 colors they did plan to add Chunky.

They had many nice improvements in their plan.
Chunky, Truecolor, 16bit audio. This was HUGE improvement over OCS.

And the improvements were so big that they were a lot to do.
And they were not market ready - there was still a lot to debug.

And because the new development was not debugged and market ready : AGA was done as stopgap solution.

This is the history.

The development work on A1000 began in 1982.
Mind that this is the same year the C64 came out!
256 color register were out of scope at this time.

But later in the 80th the Amiga team already worked on adding CHUNKY to Amiga.
The Commodore team worked on this already before many of the Amiga fans here, got their first Amiga.


So what Cesare is proofing us in 2013 ...
Everybody including the Commodore team knew already in the 80th.

This makes his whole "mathematical proof" totally ridiculous.

@Gunnar

Quote:

Gunnar wrote: @saimo Quote: The OP was exclusively about what Commodore could have done to provide a native chunky mode As we know Commodore did develop a native chunky mode in the AAA chipset. So yes this was on the roadmap. But not included in AGA. It goes without saying that a native Chunky mode would make coding games like Doom easier. Doom needs a lot CPU and quite some memory .. So for a stock A1200 this would maybe not changed much. But for a upgraded with maybe 030 CPU and some fastmem - This would have helped to get DOOM run faster.

What's the point of having a roadmap when AAA wasn't completed in a timely manner?

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@saimo

Quote:

You are comparing a software solution that gets AGA to work in chunky mode (without any CPU, Blitter or Copper assistance) against a third-party hardware add-on: that's a total disconnect. On top of that, the OP wondered whether Commodore could have added a chunky mode to the Amiga chipset using a certain method, so third-party add-ons are totally OT.

Wrong, my point with the Graffiti example is A1200's Chip RAM bandwidth with Lisa is fast enough for Doom's 320x200 with 256 colors and smooth enough frame rate.

For context, read the 1st post on this topic https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=43687&forum=2#832378


I've just been reading up on CGA, EGA and VGA graphic modes. What I found was interesting. CGA had a standard 2-bit packed pixel format. But EGA used planar graphics and VGA was natively planar as well! Well except for Doom Mode 13h.

I found something else. On EGA it had bitmasks and different write modes. And one write mode in particular allowed it to write packed pixel data that the EGA hardware split up internally and write to all bitplanes! That's write. EGA had built in chunky to planar hardware almost ten years before Commodore could say Akiko. And it was superior!

What's more, EGA could even do split screens similar to the Amiga. And colour cycling. Even the C16, with a superior palette and split screen raster interrupts, is looking under a shadow.

Given these hardware tricks were known about it makes me wonder, why didn't they include them in the Amiga? The Amiga would have benefited greatly with a packed to planar hardware register. Including allowing the blitter to blit to parallel planes. Though a CPU only mode would have sufficed. Workbench would have been fast. 3d and all games could just written pixels in linear fashion. By comparison, the Akko hardware is an inferior design, as data must be written to it then read out again and finally written to chip ram. The EGA way is one way where you write data and the EGA hardware does the rest itself in the bitplanes.

I actually wonder if this was why particular PC games weren't released on the Amiga or ran slowly. For example, in the early 90's, Wolfenstein 3d. Basic looking game, not as pretty as most Amiga games. I read it initially had been planned to be EGA then they changed it to VGA. No wonder, it would have needed VGA, and only AGA could match the closest.

I've heard arguments that he Amiga should have had VGA instead of AGA. Now I used to dispute that because of lack of copper, sprites, blitter, 24 bit RGB and the like. We know the C16 almost killed Commodore because it lacked sprites, Commodore had enough blunders. But after finding out that VGA is in fact natively planar, up to four bitplanes as it may be, I'm softening to the idea. It doesn't look so bad after all. I think it may have been a good idea to include some VGA features. Packed write mode for a start. And packed pixel mode to finish it off. Now that would have finished off the Amiga on a higher note!


OP argued for additional hardware features.

My post is an example of alternative timeline implementation.

Quote:

Except for the Akiko's C2P mention, which is somewhat related to the topic, this is all OT junk - and therefore goes into the trashcan.

For context, read the 1st post in this topic https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=43687&forum=2#832378

The topic starter mentioned Akiko. Your post is trash.

Last edited by Hammer on 01-Mar-2024 at 07:44 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

What's the point of having a roadmap when AAA wasn't completed in a timely manner?

That's called life.


If you look around then you see that every company makes plans ...
And _very_ often they fail to reach them.

I myself worked at IBM on developing new CPUs that never came to market.
Yes this is frustrating but this is totally normal.

INTEL, IBM, SONY, AMD, ARM, MOTOROLA, SUN, ATARI, COMMODORE
= every company on this planet made plans which they fail.

As more ambitious your plans are - as higher is the risk they fail.

The problem that Commodore had with AAA are not exceptional and everybody should understand this. This is just how life and development work in reality.

Commodore did react on this in a good way and made a smart move,
they brought outAGA - as smaller improvement which they got market ready.

People complain why AGA not has chunky - show their lack of understanding.
AGA on purpose dropped features from AAA that were not debugged yet.
So they on purpose did limit the changes - to lower the risk.

If you think about this, this should made sense.

@Gunnar

Quote:

Gunnar wrote: @Hammer Quote: What's the point of having a roadmap when AAA wasn't completed in a timely manner? That's called life. If you look around then you see that every company makes plans ... And _very_ often they fail to reach them. I myself worked at IBM on developing new CPUs that never came to market. Yes this is frustrating but this is totally normal. INTEL, IBM, SONY, AMD, ARM, MOTOROLA, SUN, ATARI, COMMODORE = every company on this planet made plans which they fail. As more ambitious your plans are - as higher is the risk they fail. The problem that Commodore had with AAA are not exceptional and everybody should understand this. This is just how life and development work in reality. Commodore did react on this in a good way and made a smart move, they brought outAGA - as smaller improvement which they got market ready. People complain why AGA not has chunky - show their lack of understanding. AGA on purpose dropped features from AAA that were not debugged yet. So they on purpose did limit the changes - to lower the risk. If you think about this, this should made sense.

You didn't factor in Commodore management's "read my lips, no new chips" directive from Dave Hydie's statement.

Commodore management's reaction amounts to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKxzI4LuNSU too late.

For AMD, an upper management purge was executed to remove the failed Bulldozer advocates e.g. https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=85582
During the December 2014 timescale, Mike Butler, Chief Architect of the Bulldozer architecture, apparently doesn't work for AMD anymore. Bulldozers were also established during Hector Ruiz (ex-Motorola)'s tenure as AMD's CEO. Stupidity should have consequences.

For real follow-on from K10, Zen R&D continued as a rebel underground movement within AMD.

Last edited by Hammer on 01-Mar-2024 at 08:02 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 01-Mar-2024 at 07:58 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 01-Mar-2024 at 07:56 AM.

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