@ppcamiga1

Quote:

c2p on 040 is something not interesting

Well, the excuse is CHIP is slow, so CPU has to wait and can execute few instruction between writes, is it good excuse? What if the instruction were used for something else. in-between writes, calculate vectors or something useful.
So interesting, is c2p not wasting CPU cycles? Or is wasting CPU cycle’s but no one noticed LOL

of course in beginning many c2p routines where slow. But then they figured out how to improve it, to the point Akiko became kind of useless.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 27-Feb-2023 at 10:09 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 27-Feb-2023 at 09:59 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 27-Feb-2023 at 09:58 PM.

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@Hammer

Worms DC was AGA Amiga exclusively, many of us were there on IRC with Andy and he never ever did he mention DC on any other platform. Rather the contrary, DC was made as a salute and tribute to the Amiga.

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@ppcamiga1

There was no Worms DC for chunky, so it sucked.

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@ppcamiga1

Quote:

it is better to just forget about it. switch to gfx card.

Is that an empirical fact or based on your own opinion? Do you know the difference any more?

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

@Hammer

Quote:

Worms DC, Not exclusive.

Worms DC was ALWAYS exclusive! It didn't even TRY to be anything other than Worms 1.5. It was the second best version of the Worms 1 engine (after the CD32 version which was far more professional and polished with CD audio and animations) but had the best compliment of weapons outside of Worms Armageddon! And so it was a special oddity just for our Amiga AGA machines!

Thank you Team17 and Andy Davidson in particular but you should have tried harder patching the game for compatibility with the infamous CU Amiga cover CD 7!

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

@Hammer

Quote:

- Banshee 1994, aging gameplay presentation. PC has Wing Commander (time exclusive), Star Wars: X-Wing, and Tyrian. Refer AGA's Boss Machine and Reshoot·R presentation.

Wing Commander is a completely different game, and the fact that 2d shooters are an old genre is moot. Theyre still popular even today, a good game is a good game, and Banshee is a good example of the genre.

Quote:

- Super Stardust, Not exclusive. Amiga AGA version is good. AGA's Boss Machine and Reshoot·R wasn't released from 1992 to 1993 time period.

Your OCD is slipping. It *is* exclusive. Closest thing to it is Super Stardust '96, which came 2 years later and release date of unrelated, different titles is moot.

Quote:

- Breathless (1996), PC has Quake, Duke Nukem, Rise of Triads, Star Wars Dark Forces and 'etc'. Refer to Amiga's Dread or Grind for presentation and good frame rate performance on stock Amiga 1200 hardware.

What other platforms have is moot. The point was what AGA bought to the table. What other system had/have is irrelevant in this regard.

Quote:

- Worms DC, Not exclusive.

Another instance of your OCD slipping. It *is* exclusive. There's Worms titles on other platforms, but this entry is AGA Amiga exclusive.

Quote:

- Fightin’ Spirit, inferior experience.

That's for an individual to decide. Its not for you to quantify.


Quote:

- Roadkill, Not exclusive.

Point blank wrong. You're really off your game today.

Quote:

- The Chaos Engine 2, Not exclusive. Aging top-down shooter gameplay when PC has Doom. Refer to Amiga's Dread or Grind presentation.

Amiga only title that has an AGA version. Again, a genre that is still popular today, ergo the fact its an old game style is moot. And comparing it to different game styles is a clutching of straws.


Quote:

- Guardian, aging 3D without textures. PC has Descent, SW X-Wing, and Wing Commander (time exclusive)

AGAIN comparing it to different game styles is just weird and reeks of a clutching at straws. And the fact it has no textures is moot.

Quote:

Not exclusive

Irrelevant.
Whether or not something is exclusive is moot in regards to the topic at hand.

Quote:

Aging platform gameplay

Irrelevant.
Whether or not something is innovative and fresh is moot in regards to the topic at hand.
A tried and tested game formula is still popular to this day.


Given your usually anal responses Im surprised how sloppy your responses are.
Youre point blank wrong in many instances.

Was the fact that human perspective and personal tastes are involved throwing you off your game?

Last edited by fishy_fis on 27-Feb-2023 at 11:30 PM.

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

to the point Akiko became kind of useless.

At the risk of sounding like a hater, that was the day it was implemented. Akiko requires that you write 8 32-bit words of planar data to it and then read it back. It has absolutely no ability to read and write memory itself. So your Akiko C2P is even more constrained by the bus than software C2P is: Read chunky pixels from ram, write to Akiko. Read back planar data from Akiko and write it to chip ram.

To be truly effective, Akiko should have been in the display controller somewhere as a mostly hidden implementation or failing that, at least able to write the planar data back to chip by itself using some auto incrementing plane pointers.

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@Karlos

As far as I know Wing Commander CD32 had a bug that affected the Akiko functionality (similar to the Colonial Marines AI bug during the PS3/XBox 360 generation), whereby a single typo stopped Akiko acceleration dead (just as in the other example ALL the Aliens became dumb cannon fodder)!

The single biggest raison d'etre for the Akiko to exist was also a dud! That says it all!

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

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: NekTek Video Toaster's video editing market is niche and smaller than PC's general business market. Commodore can't survive by attaching themselves to Video Toaster sales and social media YouTube content creation market didn't exist in 1992.

Of course the nascent desktop video market was not enough on it’s own, but Commodore could’ve done a better job at serving what is essentially a high-margin market for big box Amigas. The high margins from one segment funds the initiatives to sustain a business until it gets to profitability from low margins in high volume SKUs.
I’m sure somebody in the Commodore C-suite had a MBA.

Quote:

The PC has a longer time to build up the install base with 386DX, 486, and VGA clones for Q4 1993's Doom release

You make it sound like some finely orchestrated strategy by a single mastermind.
It was (and still is) an Open Computing Platform, which meant that things where occurring organically, initiatives piggy-backing on multiple feedback loops, like amplification circuits.

Quote:

Commodore failed to release A1200 with 68LC040@ 25Mhz out-of-the-box SKU to "zero-sum" PC clone's 486SX-25 price range ($1000 USD). For Doom Q4 1993 (for Xmax 1993), Commodore failed to release Amiga 1200 with 6EC8030 @ 50 Mhz out-of-the-box SKU to rival PC clones with 386DX40 ET4000AX in Q3 1993.

Yes, if Commodore were more attuned to the market, and a reasonably operated business, they could and should have released “plus” SKUs of the A1200 with faster CPUs and FAST RAM and it could still be a sub-$1,000 computer a year after the A1200 020 was originally launched.

What we know now is that the AGA batch of hardware was a ballistic (Hail Mary) launch. By the second half of 1993, Commodore had so little left in the proverbial tank, they couldn’t release a helium balloon tethered down with toilet paper.

Quote:

Sometime in 1993, big game developers told Commodore management about the need for higher spec Amiga 1200 SKU with Mehdi Ali telling them to fukc-off

See above.

Quote:

3DFX's Voodoo was released in 1995 with floating-point format support and hardware Z buffer acceleration.

The Voodoo 1 was released in 1996

Last edited by agami on 01-Mar-2023 at 01:48 AM.
Last edited by agami on 28-Feb-2023 at 09:36 AM.

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@Karlos

Quote:

BigD wrote: @Karlos As far as I know Wing Commander CD32 had a bug that affected the Akiko functionality (similar to the Colonial Marines AI bug during the PS3/XBox 360 generation), whereby a single typo stopped Akiko acceleration dead (just as in the other example ALL the Aliens became dumb cannon fodder)! The single biggest raison d'etre for the Akiko to exist was also a dud! That says it all!

Discussed HERE
... but Nick Pelling denies all knowledge! My patched AGA version installed to Hard Drive from the CD32 CD-Rom makes mention of the bug in the intro animation though!

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

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @agami - PC has … - Not exclusive - Inferior experience - Aging platform gameplay.

You seem to neglect the fact that entertainment value is subjective. We don’t all like the same music, we don’t laugh at the same jokes, decorate our homes with the same furniture, nor follow the same sports, and we don’t all stream the same TV shows.

You strike me as one of those people dining at a restaurant, after receiving their selected meal, who proceeds to eat their food with continued regret of not ordering the thing the person sitting across from you had ordered.

My gaming enjoyment with the A1200 was every bit as genuine and elating as that of those who derived their enjoyment from other gaming platforms. One does not invalidate the other. Doom enjoyment does not fetch more on the Monsters Inc. market than Alien Breed 3D enjoyment.

Last edited by agami on 28-Feb-2023 at 09:52 AM.

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@BigD

Akiko was faster at 256 colour C2P than the basic 020, even with fast memory (in fact, it likely worked better with fast memory since the source data isn't being read from chip ram), but the overall PIO implementation was a bit bobbins.

The claim was it could do C2P as fast as a good algorithm on the 040, and that may even be true. The issue is that the implementation lost all that gain thanks to the specific need to feed and read the data manually.

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@Karlos

But like coding for multiple SPEs on a CELL in 2006, there was hardly anyone that knew what they doing on the developer side! Heck Nick Pelling can't even remember paying the Akiko any attention while coding! This is disastrous for a game (and console) that was supposed to prove that the Amiga was "keeping up" with the PC/SNES/MegaDrive etc! Did no one at 'Chicken Lips HQ' think to help the man with the documentation on that chip in order to get this key bundled game working as fast as possible? They even tried to sink it further by putting the stinking turd (IMHO) of a game Dangerous Streets on the same CD-Rom disc! C= really did suck by that point!

Last edited by BigD on 28-Feb-2023 at 11:55 AM.

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

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

Well, the excuse is CHIP is slow, so CPU has to wait and can execute few instruction between writes, is it good excuse? What if the instruction were used for something else. in-between writes, calculate vectors or something useful. So interesting, is c2p not wasting CPU cycles? Or is wasting CPU cycle’s but no one noticed LOL

Chip is slow. I did some custom tests using doom engine to see some results. My tests were limited to an A4000 060 configuration so provided a high end set of results.

I found that when Doom rendered direct to chip ram, assuming a native packed mode with no chunky conversion, it was slower than both a fast copy from fast to chip as well as a fast packed to planar logic copy. A fast copy is a 128 bit copy. The logic conversion is working on 32 bits at a time. It was only slightly slower.

RTG was slightly faster but not by much. Slightly crippled by Zorro bus likely. It really needed VRAM to speed it up.

@Karlos

Quote:

To be truly effective, Akiko should have been in the display controller somewhere as a mostly hidden implementation or failing that, at least able to write the planar data back to chip by itself using some auto incrementing plane pointers.

That would be better. Of course a simple native packed mode would be best but takes time to retrofit. It would have involved taking chunks of pixels direct over the multiword combination from planes into pixel indexes.

I think an EGA like feature would help. Where direct values could be written that the hardware splits into the planes. Perhaps Akiko could have assisted by being write only and when long words were written into it write the result into the planes.

That would have helped the CD32 only. As would have fast ram. That and fast ram would have let it at least compete to some point.

@Hypex

One of the results from PiStorm with the latest TKG shows that the full frame c2p time is completely chip-write limited at about 9ms/frame (equivalent to about 8.5MB/s)

So even if the game engine took literally no time at all to draw the frame and there was no copying, just direct 32-bit writes to chip, that comes to ~110 FPS.

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@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @Hammer Worms DC was AGA Amiga exclusively, many of us were there on IRC with Andy and he never ever did he mention DC on any other platform. Rather the contrary, DC was made as a salute and tribute to the Amiga.

Worms: The Director's Cut (1997)'s artwork and gameplay style are not unique i.e. PC has Worms Reinforcements (1996) and "Worms-and-Reinforcements United" (1996) which includes the original Worms game.

Worms: The Director's Cut's 1997 release is too late from the 1993/1994 time period and only sold about 5,000 copies.

Worms Remake was released in 2007 for Xbox 360 and in 2009 for PS3 and the iPhone.

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@fishy_fis

Quote:

Wing Commander is a completely different game, and the fact that 2d shooters are an old genre is moot. Theyre still popular even today, a good game is a good game, and Banshee is a good example of the genre.

Unit sales matters. Your argument is flawed.

Quote:

Your OCD is slipping. It *is* exclusive. Closest thing to it is Super Stardust '96, which came 2 years later and release date of unrelated, different titles is moot.

Gaming PC has 1994 Descent which makes Super Stardust 1994's tunnel scene gameplay restrictive.

You can't handle the real truth.

Quote:

What other platforms have is moot. The point was what AGA bought to the table. What other system had/have is irrelevant in this regard.

This topic is "How good or bad was the AGA chipset in 1992/1993" which includes multi-platform comparisons.

Your argument is irrelevant.

Quote:

Point blank wrong. You're really off your game today.

Roadkill (Amiga AGA, CD32, 1994) overhead racing game.

For 1994,
NASCAR Racing (3D) is available for PC DOS and Macintosh. Follows 1993's IndyCar (3D) Racing on PC DOS.

Wacky Wheels (2.5D) is available for PC DOS.

Stunt Race FX (3D) is available for SNES.

Daytona USA (3D) is available for Saturn.

Ridge Racer (3D) is available for PS1.

Off-World Interceptor (3D) is available for 3DO.

Need for Speed (3D) is available for 3DO.

Commodore went bust in Q1 1994. LOL

Roadkill's 1994 release for Amiga AGA is too late and dated when racing game competitors are in "3D".

Commodore is aware Amiga Hombre (OpenGL 3D capable platform)'s late 1994 to 1995 release window is important!.

Your argument does NOT address the "How good or bad was the AGA chipset in 1992/1993" topic!

Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2023 at 03:26 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2023 at 03:21 AM.

_________________
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@agami

Quote:

You seem to neglect the fact that entertainment value is subjective. We don’t all like the same music, we don’t laugh at the same jokes, decorate our homes with the same furniture, nor follow the same sports, and we don’t all stream the same TV shows.

Sony's PS1 smashed your illusions.

Quote:

You strike me as one of those people dining at a restaurant, after receiving their selected meal, who proceeds to eat their food with continued regret of not ordering the thing the person sitting across from you had ordered. My gaming enjoyment with the A1200 was every bit as genuine and elating as that of those who derived their enjoyment from other gaming platforms. One does not invalidate the other. Doom enjoyment does not fetch more on the Monsters Inc. market than Alien Breed 3D enjoyment.

You're not addressing the "How good or bad was the AGA chipset in 1992/1993" topic.

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@agami

Quote:

Of course the nascent desktop video market was not enough on it’s own, but Commodore could’ve done a better job at serving what is essentially a high-margin market for big box Amigas. The high margins from one segment funds the initiatives to sustain a business until it gets to profitability from low margins in high volume SKUs. I’m sure somebody in the Commodore C-suite had a MBA.

At least NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is a real engineer, unlike marketing-led Commodore.

Quote:

You make it sound like some finely orchestrated strategy by a single mastermind. It was (and still is) an Open Computing Platform, which meant that things where occurring organically, initiatives piggy-backing on multiple feedback loops, like amplification circuits.

1987 VGA is a defacto standard established by IBM and many independent hardware vendors (IHV) cloned and improved upon it. PC won the VHS vs Betamax home computer war.

Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) was established in 1988 that established VL-Bus (Intel 486-based bus) and SVGA direction against IBM's MCA and XGA direction.

Intel created the PCI standard against IBM's MCA. The PCI Special Interest Group was formed in 1992, initially as a "compliance program" to help computer manufacturers implement the Intel specification. Intel is the primary IP provider of the gaming PC platform to this day!

Intel's and AMD's modern X86 reference motherboard designs are under NDA and the x86 CPU socket design is protected i.e. any attempts to provide CPU for Intel CPU socket will face Intel's lawyers. AMD departed from Intel's Socket 7 and created its own CPU socket design with help from DEC.


Quote:

The Voodoo 1 was released in 1996

On COMDEX on November 6, 1995, 3Dfx announced the Voodoo chipset.

In late 1995 Fujitsu announced it would use 3Dfx in a new series of gaming PCs it was planning to bring out. During that same period, several AIB suppliers like Orchid and Diamond also announced plans to use 3Dfx’s chipset.

Prior to the announcement of the Voodoo chipset, the founders Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers were showing their SST-1 graphics engine for 3D acceleration to various arcade and AIB companies.

At the B2B phase, 3Dfx offered their SST-1 chipset to AIB businesses in 1995 and it was marketed as Voodoo.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3Dfx Press Release, Nov. 6th, 1995 MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 6, 1995--3Dfx Interactive, Inc., a company focused solely on developing technology for interactive 3D electronic entertainment, today announced Voodoo Graphics(tm), a 3D graphics accelerator specifically designed for 3D entertainment applications in the coin-operated/arcade and home consumer markets. Designed to enable a new class of realistic and highly interactive 3D games, Voodoo Graphics offers expanded capabilities above and beyond the basic 3D functionality that will be found in commodity Windows and multimedia accelerators. Major consumer and coin-op OEMs and developers have announced support for the chipset. "Voodoo Graphics was designed specifically to provide the highest quality, most intense 3D game experience available anywhere," said Gordon Campbell, chairman and CEO, 3Dfx Interactive. "While other manufacturers have designed 3D for a diverse set of graphics applications, our focus has always been interactive entertainment. The support we're receiving from the industry indicates our course of action is the right one." In separate announcements, 3Dfx Interactive revealed that Orchid Technology and FMI Graphics Products, a business unit of Fujitsu Microelectronics, Inc. have signed OEM agreements to develop consumer 3D game boards based on Voodoo Graphics. In the coin-operated entertainment market Data East and Jaleco have announced support and are developing next generation arcade games utilizing Voodoo Graphics. 3Dfx Interactive is working with leading PC and coin-op game developers including Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Interplay Productions, Acclaim Entertainment, Mindscape, Sierra On-line, Looking Glass Technologies, Accolade, Domark, and over 50 other developers worldwide. Voodoo Advantage "All of the graphics processors that have been introduced for the PC barely meet the basic requirements for 3D," said Gary Tarolli, vice president and chief scientist, 3Dfx Interactive. "Our design goals were much higher and Voodoo Graphics incorporates state-of-the-art 3D features such as advanced texture-mapping techniques including texture compositing, texture morphing, and animated textures as well as superior filtering and MIP mapping functionality. When combined with our performance capabilities developers can produce really cool, interactive game experiences." 3D games require the combination of interactivity and visual realism. To achieve elementary 3D functionality, a graphics chip needs to support perspective correct polygons with point sampled texture mapping, Z- and double-buffering, Gouraud shading capabilities and standard VGA resolution. To take the gaming experience to the next level, 3Dfx Interactive has included level-of-detail (LOD) MIP mapping, bi-linear and advanced filtering and SVGA resolution support. In addition, the chipset delivers realistic imagery through sub-pixel correction, alpha blending, and anti-aliasing. Most importantly however, unlike other multimedia accelerators that suffer significant performance degradation when available 3D features are used, Voodoo Graphics was designed to simultaneously offer all of these features at real-time frame rates. Voodoo Graphics also supports special effects for even greater game impact. These include per-pixel effects such as fog, translucency, and transparency, texture compositing, a variety of lighting techniques, texture morphing, animated textures, and reflection mapping. These features let game developers deliver the most realistic interactive entertainment on the market. The Voodoo Graphics chipset supports full screen games under popular PC operating systems including Microsoft Windows 95, MS DOS, and Microsoft Windows 3.1 using 3D APIs including Microsoft's Direct3D, DirectDraw, 3D-DDI, and Reality Lab 2.0, as well as Intel's 3DR. The chipset also supports embedded operating systems for coin-op/arcade platforms. Development environments supported by the chipset include MS DOS, WindowsNT, Windows95, and Silicon Graphics' IRIX. Important development tools and APIs supported by Voodoo Graphics include Silicon Graphics' IRIS GL and OpenGL, AutoDesk's 3D Studio, MultiGen's GameGen, and Gemini Technology's OpenGVS. "As a long-time SGI developer we're pleased that 3Dfx Interactive has gone beyond the basic 3D checklist by providing workstation-quality features and performance in their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator," said John Archdeacon, vice president, Gemini Technology. "Voodoo Graphics is a powerful, low-cost PC-based alternative to high-end graphics workstations. The combination of our OpenGVS software with 3Dfx hardware technology is going to offer our developers unprecedented 3D graphics price/performance." Packaged in a two-chip set, the Voodoo Graphics architecture is a PCI Bus 2.1 compliant device that operates transparently with existing VGA and Windows accelerators via analog pass through or shared frame buffer implementations on Intel or RISC-based PCI platforms. The Voodoo Graphics chipset is priced at less than $75 in 20,000 piece quantities. On perspective correct, texture mapped, Z-buffered, filtered, LOD MIP mapped, fogged, alpha blended, 50-pixel triangles Voodoo Graphics delivers more than 45 megapixels per second fill rate and over 350,000 triangles per second polygon rates on a Pentium 90. The first chip, pixelfx, is the primary graphics controller and contains interfaces to the PCI bus and companion texture processing unit, texelfx. The 3Dfx Interactive pixelfx graphics controller is packaged in a 240-pin PQFP. texelfx, the advanced texture processing unit, is packaged in a 208-pin PQFP. "3Dfx Interactive's announcement reflects a growing recognition that the Pentium(r) processor is ideal for multimedia applications and games," said Dev Bose, director of software development, Intel Software Technology Lab. "Complimentary solutions like the 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo Graphics accelerator are great for today's Pentium processor-based systems." 3Dfx Interactive, Inc., founded in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. 3Dfx Interactive brings together a team of leading professionals from the PC, video game, semiconductor, and 3D graphics industries to provide new levels of interactive 3D electronic entertainment.

Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2023 at 04:14 AM.

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