Click Here
home features news forums classifieds faqs links search
6071 members 
Amiga Q&A /  Free for All /  Emulation /  Gaming / (Latest Posts)
Login

Nickname

Password

Lost Password?

Don't have an account yet?
Register now!

Support Amigaworld.net
Your support is needed and is appreciated as Amigaworld.net is primarily dependent upon the support of its users.
Donate

Menu
Main sections
» Home
» Features
» News
» Forums
» Classifieds
» Links
» Downloads
Extras
» OS4 Zone
» IRC Network
» AmigaWorld Radio
» Newsfeed
» Top Members
» Amiga Dealers
Information
» About Us
» FAQs
» Advertise
» Polls
» Terms of Service
» Search

IRC Channel
Server: irc.amigaworld.net
Ports: 1024,5555, 6665-6669
SSL port: 6697
Channel: #Amigaworld
Channel Policy and Guidelines

Who's Online
16 crawler(s) on-line.
 119 guest(s) on-line.
 2 member(s) on-line.


 BigD,  OlafS25

You are an anonymous user.
Register Now!
 BigD:  42 secs ago
 OlafS25:  1 min ago
 zErec:  7 mins ago
 amigakit:  10 mins ago
 retrofaza:  39 mins ago
 kolla:  53 mins ago
 edwardsjethro:  1 hr 45 mins ago
 joeyunderwood:  1 hr 46 mins ago
 Sikharubel:  1 hr 49 mins ago
 Musashi5150:  2 hrs 12 mins ago

/  Forum Index
   /  Amiga Development
      /  Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Register To Post

Goto page ( Previous Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 Next Page )
PosterThread
Hypex 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 11-Sep-2022 13:27:12
#261 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Our Amiga Worldly founding father has been fooling us and his first name is Keith? Well I can see why he removed it. David Doyle has a ring to it. Yes Keith would have ruined it.

But I'll from the discussion this stand out:
Quote:
I'd rather see a new Amiga that went to 12 (or 24 or whatever ) bit planes at 640x400 NTSC (yes, interlaced)



Is he serious? 12 or 24 bitplanes? Nooo! Is he a masochist?

IFF24 with this idea of splitting 24 bit pixels into 1 bit planes was bad enough. 24 bit planes of RGB? Bitplane hell I tell you.

Last edited by Hypex on 11-Sep-2022 at 03:50 PM.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hypex 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 12-Sep-2022 11:00:01
#262 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@bhabbott

Quote:
Just take a course in computer science and it will all become clear. ;)


A computer science course will make it become clear how to display sprites on the Amiga using graphics.library? I don't know what's more shocking. Still having a course in Amiga computer science or that the AmigaOS API is so complicated you need a computer science degree to understand it!

A number if years ago there were Amiga courses available locally I considered. But they were user courses and not programming courses so I wasn't interested. I already knew how to use it but an Amiga course in real life was also a one time opportunity.

Quote:
It was still a toy though, not a workstation.


What more could they add to turn it into a workstation? They needed to keep the price down. And AFAIK they didn't target the workstation market.

Quote:
When you say 'fancy FM synth' you pretty much mean Yamaha, which patented the technology in the 1970s. They developed it for synthesizer keyboards or 'electronic pianos', which needed a lot of channels to emulate a real piano.


Yes, pretty much, as an IC. But I notice there is a blur between channels and polyphonic. Polyphonic ability used to be listed. But it is meaningless as it needs to be in some hardware channel. Last time I looked online it wasn't explained how the polyphony was implemented in the channels. At the end of the say, it doesn't matter how many piano notes it can play or any other instrument, since they all need to be spread into some kind of hardware channel but online explanations (or maybe just Wikipedia) are never technical enough.

Quote:
In 1983 (when the Amiga was being designed) the only computer sound chips Yamaha made were the YM2149 (a clone of the General Instruments AY-3-8910, which had 3 channels of square waves, not FM), and the YM2151 which had 8 channels of basic FM synthesis. FM sound chips with 32 channels were not considered for inclusion in the Amiga because they [i]didn't exist,[\i] and creating one from scratch would be problematic legally.


I see in 1983 there is the Yamaha YM21280 (OPS) / YM21290 (EGS). Which can do 16 channels. But I don't know if they sold it as a chip.

Quote:
Other home computers of the day had a variety of sound systems ranging from a single bit-banged I/O pin (ZX Spectrum) or programmable timer output (PC 'speaker'), a proprietary sound generator (Atari Pokey, Commodore SID), or one of the few off-the-shelf square wave sound chips available (GI AY-3-18910, Ti SN76489), all of which were very limiting. In comparison the Amiga's 4 channels of PCM sound were a quantum leap forward because they could reproduce any sound with excellent fidelity and minimal system loading.


With the Commodore branding people may have expected a dual SID or even a quad SID in stereo. But the Amiga wasn't a Commodore design. And the major Amiga design chips were done in house.

Quote:
Would 8 or 32 channels have been better? Sure (apart from the cost), but 4 channels was already more than other machines had, with vastly more realistic sound. It was the ability to play multiple sampled sounds at once that gave the Amiga the edge over sound systems that were limited to cheesy synthesized music. That can easily be extended to 8 channels with small CPU loading if you can be bothered. Other systems could maybe play one channel of PCM sound at very low fidelity with 100% CPU loading.


Would have been better if they doubled it or quadrupled it with AGA since they liked to expand things in AGA with bank switching. This would have made 4 or 8 channel AM and FM synthesis achievable.

But soft mixing tracks is only realistic if two sounds play at the exact same time. Then just pre-render it. If the sounds need mixing at not only different volumes but frequency then that's more complicated and suitable for a live action game.

Quote:
Perhaps you are forgetting the other popular home computers that didn't have a text mode, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC series. Of course if you wanted a GUI then bitmap graphics was essential. Machines with text mode as their primary display generally had poor bitmap graphics which was not well supported in the OS, if at all. This lack of proper bitmap graphics was keenly felt by users who wanted more than plain text. It was pretty much the only reason that PC users ran Windows.


The ZX Spectrum didn't have a character text mode and only displayed bitmap graphics?

It has colour attributes which blurs the lines. Again, I cannot any information technical enough to describe these graphic modes. And I read a few Spectrum sites.

So it looks like the Spectrum has a kind of hybrid bitmap mode, that was also common, with a 1 colour bitmap and 8x8 colour matrix. Even so this is strange as a bitmap takes up more space than a text matrix if memory was an issue. And it renders character sets as a software construct, if the hardware didn't support text directly, so any code wanting to customise the character set would take more space if memory needed to hold both bitmap and character set.

Quote:
Hardware limitations are a bummer, but such is life when you are producing something to a price. The Amiga only had a 32 color CLUT, so sprites had to share it. The upper 16 colors were used to make this less onerous. Limited colors per sprite etc. is simply a result of limited silicon. Most other popular home computers of the day either had no sprites at all or a single color per sprite. The Amiga had a blitter to render objects so it didn't suffer from the extreme CPU load of other bitmap based systems, and didn't need to rely on sprites for efficient animation.


The benefit of a sprite is so the screen doesn't have to modified. Needing to deal with scrolling layers is extra work if you need a static sprite in the centre of the screen. As objects that move along with scrolling layers they can be blitted in. But I wonder, since sprite control was embedded inside the sprite data, if a sprite palette could have been included as well.

Quote:
What did 'emerge' is relatively poor OS support for games. But it was always intended to be programmed 'bare metal' for games, just like other home computers and gaming consoles etc. OS support in most home computers was limited to setting the screen mode and perhaps some BASIC commands, after that you were on your own.


I thought the OS had good support for games. Well, it had support for displaying graphics and playing sounds. Graphics API is quite comprehensive. It has always been more capable than the official Workbench interface. The audio device interface was awkward, though, since anything needing multiple vectors like channels, needs to duplicate an IORequest and process it separately. But what else did games need? Locking out the OS was one thing which usually could be done. But a game needed to own the screen so other screens were blocked out.

Quote:
The Amiga was not alone in this. Even PC users suffered from it, which why the phrase '100% IBM compatible' quickly became so important to them. My first experience of this was when I bought a 'Genius' serial mouse for my IBM JX. The driver wouldn't work because instead of letting the OS set the baud rate it poked the hardware registers directly. But the JX (like the PC Jr) has a different baud rate generator clock frequency from the PC. The PC didn't get proper OS support for games until 1995 with Direct X. Most home computers never had it.


I read on how a serial bus mouse worked and they were a hack. They needed power and serial ports don't provide power. So they devised a way to signal output pins so voltage could be collected and used by the circuit. A neat software trick. But it's still a hack. I found this when trying to find info on serial port power on pin 9 and hardly anything showed up. Turns out I had read about power on pin 9 but it's not part of the serial standard. It's really a hardware hack on the serial port where some devices provide power there, but it's not standard, so cannot be relied on either.

Quote:
If Commodore had given us a lesser single-tasking OS like TOS or MSDOS, nobody would be complaining!


Ha!

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Karlos 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 12-Sep-2022 13:40:22
#263 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

Off topic (lol), but "fancy FM synthesis" is a total misnomer and my inner synth nerd is triggered.

FM is a marketing term. Yamaha did not implement Frequency Modulation, they implemented Phase Modulation. There's an important difference. In FM, you are changing the pitch of the carrier wave, like vibrato but at audio rates. If you were to stop the modulation at any particular point, the current frequency of the carrier would be offset by that value, like a detune. With phase modulation, the frequency isn't changing, it's the wave phase, like sliding when carrier forwards or backwards in time. This achieves a similar result as long as the modulator value is varying. As soon as it stops, no matter what the instantaneous value it has, the carrier is still playing it's base frequency.




_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hammer 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 13-Sep-2022 6:07:50
#264 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Mar-2003
Posts: 5246
From: Australia

@bhabbott

Quote:

The Amiga was designed to be a games machine, but with computing capabilities too - just like all the other home computers of the day. But they decided to put a 68000 in it (an excellent decision as it really was a 'quantum leap' over 8 bit CPUs), and then got carried away with an efficient multitasking kernel and GUI OS. It was still a toy though, not a workstation.

Primitive CP/M was the old "business" OS and followed by "business" MS-DOS (a.k.a IBM PC-DOS). MS-DOS is stone age just like CP/M.

At first, Unix was not designed to be portable or for multitasking. Later, Unix gradually gained portability, multi-tasking, and multi-user capabilities in a time-sharing configuration.

In 1980s, Unix's cost is not low cost e.g. AT&T announced UNIX System III – based on Version 7, and PWB – in 1981. Licensees could sell binary sublicenses for US$100 (equivalent to $298.06 in 2021)(ref 1).

AT&T issued the System V Interface Definition (SVID) in 1985, hence this was too late for the Amiga.

There are "Unix wars" and legal troubles between AT&T/Novell and the University of California's BSD.

Since the early 2000s, Linux is the leading Unix-like operating system, with other variants of Unix (apart from MacOS X) having only a negligible market share. Linux has it's own legal battles against SCO (ref 2).

Google Android/ChromeOS is Linux kernel based but with Google's userland middleware.

Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x's project manager was Valve's CEO Gabe Newell and SteamOS's pushed for a Windows-based Proton/DXVK userland ecosystem.

Labeling AmigaOS as a "toy" reveals your UNIX elitism that masked the high cost of entry with 1980s UNIX.

Retro PC gaming includes f__king 640K management and I hated it.

Reference
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1980s
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes



Last edited by Hammer on 13-Sep-2022 at 06:15 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 13-Sep-2022 at 06:11 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hammer 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 13-Sep-2022 6:56:41
#265 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Mar-2003
Posts: 5246
From: Australia

@cdimauro

Quote:

On PCs the o.s. was ultralightweight for obvious reasons and it wasn't needed to kill it. However, developing games was more or less bare metal, while still keeping the basic o.s. functions which were very useful.

FYI, the "hit the metal" 8088 Domination Bad Apple demo doesn't work (i.e. graphics corruption) on PCs with NVIDIA's GTX 1050/Intel Core i7-3770K/MSI Z77 MPower mainboard booted from MS-DOS 7.1 8 GB USB flash drive.

I may try "hit the metal" 8088 Domination Bad Apple demo on PC based on Intel Xeon X3480 (liberated from DELL R210 rack server)/Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3L mainboard/ATI Radeon HD 5770.

Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3L mainboard has PCI slots, hence I can try my old 1996 era S3 Trio 64UV PCI.

On the Amiga, one of the main reasons for kicking the OS is to implement a custom track disk format to stop casual disk copying, but it wouldn't stop professional disk copiers.

Quote:

You "forgot" the VESA standard (stan...dard. Do you know?) which came before the '90s. And Windows GDI.

Very low-level VESA BIOS standard wasn't strictly followed, hence implementation can be broken, incomplete, and misbehaving.

On modern PCs, Direct3D/Vulkan APIs don't guarantee strict API conformance from vendors e.g. Intel ARC's render bugs.


Last edited by Hammer on 13-Sep-2022 at 06:59 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hypex 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 14-Sep-2022 18:15:32
#266 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Karlos

Quote:
Off topic (lol), but "fancy FM synthesis" is a total misnomer and my inner synth nerd is triggered.


Yeah sorry I feel somewhat responsible for that one.

That interesting to know. I read Yamaha licensed it from some inventor and math wiz of the FM synthesis. Rather disappointing then if it was relegated to a marketing term.

Not the first time I've heard of a misnomer being used in the music industry. No pun intended. I read somewhere that the classic guitar tremolo effect isn't actually a tremolo but a vibrato. But they started using the term so much it stuck and ran with it. Then like a tradition didn't correct it and kept using it as a marketting term.

I wonder if the original synthesis really is FM as named or if Yamaha changed the technicalities of it like you described to be more practical or easier to implement.

Last edited by Hypex on 15-Sep-2022 at 01:59 AM.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Karlos 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 15-Sep-2022 6:37:20
#267 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@Hypex

It's fine. Audio synthesis is one of my other interests. As part of the "doing stupid things for fun" early midlife crisis, I implemented a complete sequencer and synth suite for my PHP demo scene engine (yep, you read it right).

I believe FM was chosen because it was a familiar term and in the end you are modulating the apparent frequency of a carrier, just as long as the modulator value is moving and not stationary.

In terms of the implementation, the Yamaha variant is pretty computationally efficient. It used a fractional precision format (not sure if fixed or float) and to avoid expensive multiplication, operates in logarithmic space so that multiplications can be achieved using additions. There's a log to linear lookup table that eventually gets the sample value out.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
bhabbott 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 16-Sep-2022 21:12:58
#268 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 6-Jun-2018
Posts: 330
From: Aotearoa

@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote:
Off topic (lol), but "fancy FM synthesis" is a total misnomer and my inner synth nerd is triggered.

FM is a marketing term. Yamaha did not implement Frequency Modulation, they implemented Phase Modulation. There's an important difference.

That's not nerd, it's pedant. Just because Yamaha implemented it as phase modulation doesn't mean it isn't FM, and they were justified in using the term.

Frequency modulation synthesis
Quote:
Digital FM synthesis (implemented as phase modulation) was the basis of several musical instruments beginning as early as 1974. Yamaha built the first prototype digital synthesizer in 1974, based on FM synthesis, before commercially releasing the Yamaha GS-1 in 1980. The Synclavier I, manufactured by New England Digital Corporation beginning in 1978, included a digital FM synthesizer, using an FM synthesis algorithm licensed from Yamaha. Yamaha's groundbreaking DX7 synthesizer, released in 1983, brought FM to the forefront of synthesis in the mid-1980s...

The implementation commercialized by Yamaha (US Patent 4018121 Apr 1977 or U.S. Patent 4,018,121) is actually based on phase modulation, but the results end up being equivalent mathematically

What is vastly more important is that Yamaha had a patent on this technique, which meant the Amiga's designers would either have to find some other way of doing it that didn't infringe on Yamaha's patent, or pay them for it via their chips - which at that time would have meant getting Yamaha to make a special chip just for them. This obviously was a non-starter.

A more 'sensible' option would have been to use the AY-3-8910/YM2149, but they figured (correctly) that 4 channels of PCM sound was more worthwhile. We are lucky that they made this decision because without it the Amiga wouldn't have its unique sound, which is far richer and more flexible than the toy-like synth music produced by other computers of the time.

The big 'mistake' they made was not considering the needs of musicians. If they had implemented a buffered serial port and built in MIDI ports then the combination of that with PCM sound would have wiped the floor with Atari and boosted sales significantly. But the Amiga was designed to be a gaming computer, not a tool for professional musicians.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Karlos 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 16-Sep-2022 21:26:27
#269 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@bhabbott

Pedantry is one of the key pillars of nerdism. Not just to be correct, but technically correct. The best kind of correct.

And if you made it past the first sentence, you'd see that I state that Frequency Modulation is achieved regardless.

Nevertheless, it's more than a technicality. I think you'll find the character of actual audio range frequency modulation to be rather different than phase modulation. Phase modulation is much more extreme and useful, than FM. If you've ever experimented with genuine FM in the analogue (or virtual analogue) domain, you can really appreciate the difference. Calling it FM rather than PM probably helped sell it though, since many synth users that had used modular kit would have some understanding of the sort of sounds it should be capable of. I don't think calling it what it actually was would have been as intuitive. And therein lies the final irony because there's almost nothing intuitive about it. And I say that with years of experience in FM synthesis, lol.

Last edited by Karlos on 16-Sep-2022 at 09:40 PM.
Last edited by Karlos on 16-Sep-2022 at 09:34 PM.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
bhabbott 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 16-Sep-2022 22:27:10
#270 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 6-Jun-2018
Posts: 330
From: Aotearoa

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote:

Primitive CP/M was the old "business" OS and followed by "business" MS-DOS (a.k.a IBM PC-DOS). MS-DOS is stone age just like CP/M.

Stone age perhaps, but the market for MS-DOS was huge and lasted for well over a decade. Today many businesses are still running DOS applications in point of sale terminals etc. Why? Because it's still what they want, a machine dedicated to doing one task well.

Quote:
Labeling AmigaOS as a "toy" reveals your UNIX elitism that masked the high cost of entry with 1980s UNIX.

You misunderstand me. I love toys, and I don't think home computers like the Amiga were less valid for being toys. Business and academia are boring. My only interest in Unix is what I can scavenge from it for my hobby (for example I examined the Linux source when developing Amiga drivers for PCMCIA Ethernet and Parallel Zip drive). I have zero interest in making my Amiga multiuser or bogging it down with virtual memory etc., and even less interest in a Unix-like command line environment. I want to have fun! not be 'serious'.

I also love doing things 'on the cheap'. Price was a big factor in all of my computer purchases apart from the A3000 (which was ostensibly bought for business use). And not just computers. When I see something I want that is too expensive, I don't take out a loan. I wait until I can get it cheap - even if that means it's second-hand and worn out or outmoded - then enjoy refurbishing and improving it.

Finally, I love hacking hardware and software to get more done for less. My latest purchase is an old ISA network card that I bought just to get the edge connector, which I will use to make a ROM cartridge for my Timex Sinclair 2068. But why bother mucking around like that when I could buy a pre-made cartridge or just emulate the machine on my PC? Because it's not about using the computer as a tool (that's boring) but as a toy. It's what makes life worth living!

Quote:
Retro PC gaming includes f__king 640K management and I hated it.
Me too. What's worse is I had to do it for a living (I owned a computer store selling Amigas and PCs back in the 90's. Guess which platform was a pain to maintain?).

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
cdimauro 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 17-Sep-2022 2:45:14
#271 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Oct-2012
Posts: 3621
From: Germany

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote:
@cdimauro

Quote:
I think that the problem is that you should rewrite & integrate the Kickstart code which is called by those lame games. Rewrite, because you cannot just copy & adapt them on WHDLoad, for copyright reasons.


I considerer this somewhat redundant since every Amiga running WHDLoad has a Kickstart.

Yes, but Kickstarts CHANGED over the time, so applications relying on specific code sequences won't work anymore.
Quote:
Like Snipes said in Blade 3, about 3 times; use it, use it, use it. But they don't. They won't They shon't.

It makes it harder to install. I must have spent one or two hours installing the damn thing on my A4000. Tracking down every Kickstart I needed and then the extra Kickstart files. Downloading all this crap and copy it over until the errors stop. Sheesh! I just wanted to play a simple game! I almost went back to floppy. It would have loaded faster!

Then "just" buy an Amiga 500 for OCS/ECS games and an Amiga 1200 for AGA games and you're done! But, yes: you've to insert the floppies!
Quote:
Quote:
That could be too much effort, hence the idea of directly loading the proper Kickstart.


Too much effort for the programmers so force the user to locate a bunch of pirated ROM files and then some.

With Cloanto's Amiga Forever you don't need to pirate the ROMs: you've a regular license for them. For just a bunch of money.
Quote:
Quote:
Anyway, that was the way to safely and (o.s.) friendly load additional sectors if it was needed by the game (or demo).


Related. I also simulated it. Tired of needing to reboot when ever I wanted to run a game or bootblock I wrote my own loader. RunBB. For Run BootBlock. Was easy to do. Reduced game reboots to one reboot after.

I used to reboot and run the complete game only when I needed to test the complete game (e.g.: new graphic assets and/or new audio assets to be integrated and tested).
Quote:
Quote:
I don't have to wait that long to recognize that I don't like my code: I'm always not satisfied.


Richard Marx could have a theme song for your code.

Please share it, if you recall some.
Quote:
Quote:
Fortunately I don't write much code anymore, since I've switched to a manager role. Problem "solved"...


Ha.

Sometimes I find all the projects I've created exhausting. Because I need to keep them updated and I know what more they need and what my roadmap is for them. But no one else is going to code all my ideas for me or if even they did they wouldn't do it right.

So I have an old memory. I have some computer book from years ago, looked past it when I was in my 20's. It spoke about System Analysts which would be an old term now but Google still knows it. I recall it explained it something like being above a developer, a managerial position, where other people coded. But at the time I thought, no, I'd never want to give up the coding. However, now I imagine I would also feel fortunate, if I had ended up working in the field.

That's what I'm doing now: moving my existing code to some external developers (which are working for us) so that they could maintain & expand it and I can better focus on more management tasks.

So, when I code it will be only for my personal projects.
Quote:
Quote:
And my first computer was Plus4: the C16 bigger brother...


I'll avoid another story. So I first wanted a C64 as all my friends had one. But I ended up with a C16 and was converted. Somehow after the C16 the Plus/4 became my dream computer. I recall one local holiday we went to a bulk store and they had stacked boxes of Plus/4 computers. Price must have been good. I said we have to get one now. My mum said to leave it and we'll get one on the way back. Bad idea. Come back and they were all gone. Typical. Mum stiffed me again!

Also, I think of the C16, and more so for the Plus/4, as a programmers computer. It had the built in monitor and simple assembler. For what it lacked in the games department it made up for in coding. Sure, you can buy a monitor and assembler for a C64, but you needed to buy a floppy drive first to load it off and wait for it to load, unless there was a cartridge. The C16 had it built in, ready to go, seconds after power on. We know what happened to the music industry when Atari put midi ports on the ST and Commodore didn't put them on the Amiga. Having built in makes all the difference.

Similar thing, but I've swapped my Plus4 with a C128 after just one month because of lacking of software for this new hardware platform (plus, the Amiga 1000 was too much expensive).
Quote:
Quote:
It's also difficult for me, because I'm getting older. But some people got a degree well above 80 years old, so there's hope.


Yes there is. A friend tells me I should study as uni is full of women. Most practical advice I've ever had I think. A degree and dating. Two birds with the one stone!

Maybe you can meet Reneé: she also needs some background on computer science.
Quote:
Quote:
No, unfortunately the Vampire made the things even worse, by just patching the chipset (and processor) based on the contingent needs. So, there was/is no good vision about the design.


The Vampire gives people what they want. A computer that is compatible with those Amiga games. This is why the AmigaOne series failed, because they dropped any Amiga hardware chipsets and replaced it with a more practical and up to date solution. So when Amiga people find out, they don't understand what the point of it is, because it can't load all their old A500 floppy games. A Vampire SA can't load floppy games either but some how it's still better because the AGA compatibility.

If compatibility is the focus then Vampire is still the wrong choice.

But, again, I don't want to start talking about it: I just don't share the project vision. That's it.
Quote:
But soft mixing tracks is only realistic if two sounds play at the exact same time. Then just pre-render it. If the sounds need mixing at not only different volumes but frequency then that's more complicated and suitable for a live action game.

Indeed. Software mixing audio channels wasn't realistic on a plain 7Mhz 68000 platform, because it took too much (raster) time.

Bruce doesn't know it because, despite claiming to develop for the Amiga in assembly, he never developed a (commercial) game. So he doesn't know all challenges that it takes.

BTW, I've developed a software mixer (albeit there were still some bugs to be fixed: cracks were popping-up from time to time), so I know how it "costed" in performance terms.
Quote:
But I wonder, since sprite control was embedded inside the sprite data, if a sprite palette could have been included as well.

No, there's not so much space for it. Sprite's control data was already almost fully used. Only 4 bits left: http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node00BB.html
But if you use them, then you can say bye to bigger resolutions...

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
cdimauro 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 17-Sep-2022 3:00:47
#272 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Oct-2012
Posts: 3621
From: Germany

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote:
@cdimauro

Quote:

On PCs the o.s. was ultralightweight for obvious reasons and it wasn't needed to kill it. However, developing games was more or less bare metal, while still keeping the basic o.s. functions which were very useful.

FYI, the "hit the metal" 8088 Domination Bad Apple demo doesn't work (i.e. graphics corruption) on PCs with NVIDIA's GTX 1050/Intel Core i7-3770K/MSI Z77 MPower mainboard booted from MS-DOS 7.1 8 GB USB flash drive.

I may try "hit the metal" 8088 Domination Bad Apple demo on PC based on Intel Xeon X3480 (liberated from DELL R210 rack server)/Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3L mainboard/ATI Radeon HD 5770.

Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3L mainboard has PCI slots, hence I can try my old 1996 era S3 Trio 64UV PCI.

I don't follow the demo scene, because I don't like them (yes, it was OK to watch some demo from time to time, but definitely not that much interesting).

Demos are a big source of incompatibilities because of the stupid idiots that coded them doing tricks against the guidelines. I don't know if there exist some demo which is fully compliant with the guidelines, but if yes then kudos to the coders!
Quote:
On the Amiga, one of the main reasons for kicking the OS is to implement a custom track disk format to stop casual disk copying, but it wouldn't stop professional disk copiers.

No, it was because we wanted to squeeze the most from the system. Primarily for the memory (which wasn't that much). Secondarily for the performances.

Custom disks were also used because they allowed to pack more data on a single track. 12 sectors per track were easily achievable. My custom loader pushed it to 12.25 (12 x 512 bytes + 1 x 128 bytes sectors).
Quote:
Quote:

You "forgot" the VESA standard (stan...dard. Do you know?) which came before the '90s. And Windows GDI.

Very low-level VESA BIOS standard wasn't strictly followed, hence implementation can be broken, incomplete, and misbehaving.

In fact it was enough to:
- query & set the graphic mode;
- get the linear address to the frame buffer;
- set the CLUT.

This could be achieved without incompatibilities.
Quote:
On modern PCs, Direct3D/Vulkan APIs don't guarantee strict API conformance from vendors e.g. Intel ARC's render bugs.

ARC is still in development phase for the drivers. In fact those are bugs and bugs usually are fixed.


@bhabbott

Quote:

bhabbott wrote:
@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote:

[quote]Labeling AmigaOS as a "toy" reveals your UNIX elitism that masked the high cost of entry with 1980s UNIX.

You misunderstand me. I love toys, and I don't think home computers like the Amiga were less valid for being toys.

Again? The Amiga 1000 was NOT a home computer, rather a Personal Computer!!! And it was quite EXPENSIVE!

The Amiga became a toy with the 500, which was the ideal successor of Commodore's home computers: standalone (keyboard integrated) and cheap.
Quote:
Business and academia are boring. My only interest in Unix is what I can scavenge from it for my hobby (for example I examined the Linux source when developing Amiga drivers for PCMCIA Ethernet and Parallel Zip drive). I have zero interest in making my Amiga multiuser or bogging it down with virtual memory etc., and even less interest in a Unix-like command line environment. I want to have fun! not be 'serious'.

Specify: for YOU and people like you (maynaf is another one... SIC!) which continue to live in your assembly-language cave.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Karlos 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 17-Sep-2022 10:54:19
#273 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

I'm sure we all understand that the Amiga was trying to fill two niches at once. There were the desktop "big box" machines intended for professionals and the keyboard wedge intended for home use. The only Amiga clearly intended to be a "toy" was the CD32 and perhaps the A600 due to its obvious cost reduction and removal of expansion capabilities relative to the 500+.

This of course hasn't stopped people using the machines however they see fit. Like many users I have a Frankenstein 1200 in a full tower case, with accelerator, RTG, network, etc. This was my main PC until 2001 or so. I completed my degree with it, albeit using shapeshifter to run the Mac various software we were expected to use (office and various chemical applications).

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
kolla 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 17-Sep-2022 12:27:47
#274 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 20-Aug-2003
Posts: 2859
From: Trondheim, Norway

@cdimauro

What guidelines do you have in mind?

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
cdimauro 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 17-Sep-2022 19:14:21
#275 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Oct-2012
Posts: 3621
From: Germany

@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote:
I'm sure we all understand that the Amiga was trying to fill two niches at once. There were the desktop "big box" machines intended for professionals and the keyboard wedge intended for home use. The only Amiga clearly intended to be a "toy" was the CD32 and perhaps the A600 due to its obvious cost reduction and removal of expansion capabilities relative to the 500+.

To me the Amiga started as Personal Computer. In fact, there were also several (serious) applications which were quickly released, also from Commodore.

Games were developed as well, sure, because of its intrinsic multimedia capabilities of the 1000, but it was with the 500 that it became THE gaming platform.
Quote:
This of course hasn't stopped people using the machines however they see fit. Like many users I have a Frankenstein 1200 in a full tower case, with accelerator, RTG, network, etc. This was my main PC until 2001 or so. I completed my degree with it, albeit using shapeshifter to run the Mac various software we were expected to use (office and various chemical applications).

Indeed. I completed the high schools using IBeM on my Amiga 2000 for running Turbo Pascal. It was a slow motion (the emulator wasn't well implemented: speed wasn't the priority), but it worked-out anyway.


@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote:
@cdimauro

What guidelines do you have in mind?

Not in my mind, because they came from Commodore:
http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node000B.html
http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node000C.html
http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node000D.html
http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node000E.html

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hammer 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 19-Sep-2022 6:58:48
#276 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Mar-2003
Posts: 5246
From: Australia

@cdimauro

Quote:

I don't follow the demo scene, because I don't like them (yes, it was OK to watch some demo from time to time, but definitely not that much interesting).

Demos are a big source of incompatibilities because of the stupid idiots that coded them doing tricks against the guidelines. I don't know if there exist some demo which is fully compliant with the guidelines, but if yes then kudos to the coders!

I use the demo scene to check software legacy support.

Quote:

No, it was because we wanted to squeeze the most from the system. Primarily for the memory (which wasn't that much). Secondarily for the performances.

Custom disks were also used because they allowed to pack more data on a single track. 12 sectors per track were easily achievable. My custom loader pushed it to 12.25 (12 x 512 bytes + 1 x 128 bytes sectors).

Anti-piracy measures included the practice of distributing software on disks that contained secret "keys" on high-numbered tracks that were officially unused. The Amiga disk drive officially supported tracks 0–79 from a double-density disk, but could actually read tracks 80 through 82. Standard disk-imaging software ignored these tracks, so that a duplicate of a boxed disk would not contain the key and the software would not work.

Turrican 2 is not extended tracks, but it uses long track copy protection. Long tracks have more data written to them than is normal for a standard Amiga format. This is why some cracked versions of long-track protected games came on more disks than legitimate copies.

Custom disk format stops AmigaDOS's standard DiskCopy functions, hence NiB, XCopy and DCopy. Mortal Kombat used Copylock and it can defeat XCopy.


Quote:
In fact it was enough to:
- query & set the graphic mode;
- get the linear address to the frame buffer;
- set the CLUT.

This could be achieved without incompatibilities

DOS Duke Nukem 3D's VESA/SVGA 640x480 mode is broken on modern EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU's VESA 3.0 implementation https://youtu.be/bS9hiSwL1KY?t=490

Last edited by Hammer on 19-Sep-2022 at 07:06 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 19-Sep-2022 at 07:01 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hypex 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 19-Sep-2022 15:17:07
#277 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Karlos

That sounds pretty good. How was the sequencer controlled? And where did the synth send the audio?

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hypex 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 19-Sep-2022 15:32:00
#278 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@bhabbott

Quote:
The big 'mistake' they made was not considering the needs of musicians. If they had implemented a buffered serial port and built in MIDI ports then the combination of that with PCM sound would have wiped the floor with Atari and boosted sales significantly. But the Amiga was designed to be a gaming computer, not a tool for professional musicians.


That's what I think with MIDI. I think having it built in makes all the difference. People say you just need to buy a box or build one. Well that might be a simple solution but it's still clunky and the CIA chips aren't exactly MIDI baud exact. I haven't looked into the technical specs but the Atari was known as having excellent MIDI ports years after the PC had MIDI on PCI soundcards and somehow couldn't match it. So, proper timing with built in MIDI ports is likely why Cubase became a staple of the ST and music industry. And why the Amiga got relegated to articles about musicians using MED or ProTracker before moving on to other instruments.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 19-Sep-2022 16:38:29
#279 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@cdimauro

Quote:
don't know if there exist some demo which is fully compliant with the guidelines, but if yes then kudos to the coders!


Well two demos’ groups come to mind.
Elude & Decadence, everything else is just crap as you say. If you really, really want things to work on everything, it’s not easy, I see OS4 demos breaking because of wrong resolution or image format, ARGB or BGRA, RAGB some graphic drivers / resolutions don’t give you what you expect, not carefully checking what it is, will break sh*t. where did the 15bit go, no one knows, 24bit was replaced by 32bit. Many demos don’t know what 16bit is. Kind of problem you run into when trying to run newer demos from late 99’s and early 2000’s, they do support RTG but wrong resolutions and modes.

Uprough made a few demos that system frendly, really love planethively, really creative.
French demo group Universe made few system friendly demos.

There are some polish diskmags / music disks from POTION that are remarkable system friendly. They use an external music player library.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:58 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:55 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:54 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:50 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:48 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:38 PM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
kolla 
Re: Packed Versus Planar: FIGHT
Posted on 19-Sep-2022 19:17:51
#280 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 20-Aug-2003
Posts: 2859
From: Trondheim, Norway

@cdimauro

Any modern demo in particular that you find is breaking the guidelines? It’s typical a compo rule that demo must exit cleanly. I find it much more annoying with productivity software that “plays dirty”, but I can understand why it was done, as differences in performance between “correct” and “dirty” can be formidable and a matter of whether the software is at all useful or not.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Goto page ( Previous Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 Next Page )

[ home ][ about us ][ privacy ] [ forums ][ classifieds ] [ links ][ news archive ] [ link to us ][ user account ]
Copyright (C) 2000 - 2019 Amigaworld.net.
Amigaworld.net was originally founded by David Doyle