@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: SNES is not a PC compatible.

SNES is not a computer.

Quote:

Mac big-endian is not PC compatible. Mac has 256 colors and chunky pixels.

Until late 1990 the only Mac with 256 colors was the Macintosh II, a hideously expensive machine that only a few rich people could afford. All the other Macs were one bitplane monochrome. The LC aimed to be a 'low cost' Mac that would appeal to the masses. It was moderately successful because it had color (nobody cared about the chunky part, hardware details were hidden by the OS). However by 1992 Apple's market share had only gone up from 8% to 9%, then it crashed down to 3% by 1997. The reason? It wasn't IBM compatible.

Quote:

Amiga AGA optimized C2P didn't have Michael Abrash's published VGA optimization guide and advocacy in 1991 to 1993.

So you admit that IBM didn't provide enough developer support for VGA optimization, leaving it up to 3rd parties. And the VGA card BIOS didn't help much either (set screen mode and print text was about it, for anything else you were on your own).

In comparison, Commodore published detailed information on how to program the Amiga chipset with practical examples, as well as putting functions in the OS to make it easier for programmers. I have programmed several commercial titles for the Amiga (including the CDTV and CD32) and never once had to bang the hardware to get what I wanted.

But that didn't matter. The PC was where it was at, so developers didn't care that some other platform had better support. One of their favorite pastimes was porting Amiga programs to the PC even though it generally stank, because they could get a lot more sales that way. Games like Defender of the Crown for example, which looked pretty ugly in EGA and even worse in CGA, yet PC gamers lapped it up.

@Hammer

Atari's bitplane organisation is rather different to the Amigas. Whether that allows for faster C2P or not, I can't say. However, if you want to know what a 16MHz Falcon 030 with additional RAM can do with it's 16-bit chunky mode and DSP alone: https://youtu.be/RTxwfRl_I0U?si=2efy6I4dLvF431Bz

Now, imagine that applied to a simple 2.5D renderer.

Not sure why you are worried about 030 mul/div, it's no different to earlier or later models in that regard. Also, only an idiot uses multiplication for 8 bit on a machine that takes tens of cycles when you can do the whole sum or differences of squares approach on a 256 entry lookup table. Hell, that was a thing even in the 8-bit days.

Last edited by Karlos on 17-Jun-2024 at 12:32 PM.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Whether that allows for faster C2P or not, I can't say.

Well it should because ATARI plains are better packed, at least for any CPU with data cache, it should be more efficient.

Amiga you need at least a row between the plains, and old CPU’s does not have a lot of data cache.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

That assumes the cache is enabled for the planar destination, which is almost certainly not true if the same memory is updated by other chips, e.g. blitter.

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I look at this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kDM3S7gQTk
And still impressed. Chunky pixel in AGA was everything what amiga needed 30 years ago.
What a wonderfull games may be made for 1200 if it only have chunky pixel.
It is pity that AGA has not chunky pixel and thats why Commodore bankrupt,

Surely it must have be a glitch with amigaworld.net

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bhabbott Quote:

Until late 1990 the only Mac with 256 colors was the Macintosh II, a hideously expensive machine that only a few rich people could afford. All the other Macs were one bitplane monochrome. The LC aimed to be a 'low cost' Mac that would appeal to the masses. It was moderately successful because it had color (nobody cared about the chunky part, hardware details were hidden by the OS). However by 1992 Apple's market share had only gone up from 8% to 9%, then it crashed down to 3% by 1997. The reason? It wasn't IBM compatible.

I don't think IBM compatibles deserve all the blame for Mac market share losses from 1992 to 1997. The Mac transition to PPC started in 1994. There was initially a boost in sales but low end problems including poor PPC 603 performance resulted in many disappointed customers. High end PPC systems were expensive and had loud fans. Steve Jobs lies and promises about performance were not enough to make PPC successful so Mac became IBM compatible with x86 which was more successful.

Karlos Quote:

Not sure why you are worried about 030 mul/div, it's no different to earlier or later models in that regard. Also, only an idiot uses multiplication for 8 bit on a machine that takes tens of cycles when you can do the whole sum or differences of squares approach on a 256 entry lookup table. Hell, that was a thing even in the 8-bit days.

I tried to explain to Hammer in another thread why MUL and DIV with byte datatypes are barely useful. Loading a cache line or directly from memory with a memory using lookup table is far from free too. It's just that MUL and DIV with at least 16 bit datatypes can be nearly the same performance as with byte datatypes and support a more useful range of numbers. Small datatype hardware MUL and DIV doesn't matter much when compiling for a 68000 where lookup tables from the "8-bit days" are used. It's fast enough with emulation for retro use just not competitive enough outside retro use.

@bhabbott

Quote:

SNES is not a computer.

The Amiga is not Mac.

Quote:

Until late 1990 the only Mac with 256 colors was the Macintosh II, a hideously expensive machine that only a few rich people could afford.

Reminder, Apple gained a customer base who can spend 1.2 million PowerMacs during 1994 year.

Phase 5 and all Amiga NG PowerPC attempts think Amiga's customer base is like Apple Macs. Even Amithlon ("we don't care about games!" - Bernd Meyer, "AmigaOS X86!" - Bill McEwen) couldn't reboot the Amiga platform into the mainstream.

Quote:

So you admit that IBM didn't provide enough developer support for VGA optimization, leaving it up to 3rd parties.

1. IBM provided chunky pixels VGA hardware and Mode 13h. IBM lost its platform provider status when IBM didn't own MS-DOS or MS Windows 2.x/3.x.

VGA BIOS was cloned by SVGA cloners.

2. Mode X is based on Mode 13h with register change. For Mode X, you use Mode 13h and execute the register change.

3. Michael Abrash exists for the gaming PC community at the right time.

4. Microsoft and IDsoftware hired Michael Abrash.

5. Popular SVGA clones offered faster VGA Mode X/Mode 13h performance when compared to IBM's original VGA.

6. IBM's original VGA is trash regardless of throwing the 1.8 Ghz K7 CPU at it. Michael Abrash's Mode X wouldn't resolve the original VGA's crap performance.

A500 HAM6 is faster when coupled with PiStorm's ARM Cortex A53 @ 1.4 Ghz.

AGA is good enough when matched with higher compute power (e.g. DSP3210) AND optimized C2P techniques are discovered.

Quote:

In comparison, Commodore published detailed information on how to program the Amiga chipset with practical examples, as well as putting functions in the OS to make it easier for programmers. I have programmed several commercial titles for the Amiga (including the CDTV and CD32) and never once had to bang the hardware to get what I wanted.

Where's Commodore's "game ready" optimized C2P when Commodore's supplied C2P OS function is very slow?

Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 07:59 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 06:28 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 06:00 AM.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Atari's bitplane organisation is rather different to the Amigas. Whether that allows for faster C2P or not, I can't say. However, if you want to know what a 16MHz Falcon 030 with additional RAM can do with it's 16-bit chunky mode and DSP alone: https://youtu.be/RTxwfRl_I0U?si=2efy6I4dLvF431Bz

I knew somebody would post your argument.

The Atari Falcon solution doesn't have the performance headroom for an actual fixed-point Quake game. PS1's Quake port is also a fixed-point version.

http://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/atari_st_review-issue_07.pdf

From Atari ST Review Nov 1992:

Falcon 030, 1 MB RAM = 479 UKP
Falcon 030, 4 MB RAM 65 MB IDE HDD = 879.99 UKP



DSP56K's 24-bit integer would require refactoring from 32-bit CPU assumptions. It's well known that DSP56 has quick MUL instructions, it's too bad it's 24 bits.

Sony selected MIPS R3000 CPU @ 33 Mhz with good 32-bit integer math for PS1.

Quote:

Not sure why you are worried about 030 mul/div, it's no different to earlier or later models in that regard. Also, only an idiot uses multiplication for 8 bit on a machine that takes tens of cycles when you can do the whole sum or differences of squares approach on a 256 entry lookup table. Hell, that was a thing even in the 8-bit days.

386 has a faster byte MUL. Where's Doom in your 8-bit C128?

256 entry lookup table is not free i.e. it consumes memory IO and memory storage.

Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 06:34 AM.
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Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 06:09 AM.

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@ppcamiga1

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: I look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kDM3S7gQTk And still impressed. Chunky pixel in AGA was everything what amiga needed 30 years ago. What a wonderfull games may be made for 1200 if it only have chunky pixel. It is pity that AGA has not chunky pixel and thats why Commodore bankrupt,

Too late.

There are two paths for chunky pixel issue for AGA:

1. Commodore hires demo scene AGA optimizer for "game ready" optimized C2P and makes it official in SDK. Commodore creates "game ready" optimized C2P evangelist to help 3rd party game studios.

Commodore didn't have a Michael Abrash-like optimized game-ready evangelist for the Amiga's chunky pixel issue.

2. Commodore's Jeff Porter didn't focus on "8-bit planes with 16 million colors" i.e. "moooore colors" mindset. Includes 8-bit chunky with AGA instead of wasting time on moonshot AAA (failed like the Russian N1 rocket) and C65 R&D programs.

Read Commodore The Final Years by Brian to discover the Commodore employee in a management position who pushed "8-bit planes with 16 million colors".

Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 06:49 AM.

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@matthey

Quote:

I don't think IBM compatibles deserve all the blame for Mac market share losses from 1992 to 1997. The Mac transition to PPC started in 1994. There was initially a boost in sales but low end problems including poor PPC 603 performance resulted in many disappointed customers.

68K emulation prefers a large cache.

Motorola didn't have a unified low-high CPU product segmentation since the 603 core is a different design from the 604 core. PowerPC 603 processor was used from April 1995.

Meanwhile, Intel moved the P54 Pentium into the lower tier while the P6 Pentium Pro has the higher tier.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997.

Quote:

High end PPC systems were expensive and had loud fans. Steve Jobs lies and promises about performance were not enough to make PPC successful so Mac became IBM compatible with x86 which was more successful.

Steve Job's 3 Ghz PowerPC 970 promise is most likely come from IBM. CPC925's high power consumption wasn't good for laptops.

For AMD's K8 and to avoid another VIA problem, AMD integrated Northbridge inside the CPU package. For the X570 PCie 4.0 chipset, due to ASmedia's PCIe 4.0 solution being late, AMD took over its R&D.

Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 07:11 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 19-Jun-2024 at 07:08 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: Quote: Not sure why you are worried about 030 mul/div, it's no different to earlier or later models in that regard. Also, only an idiot uses multiplication for 8 bit on a machine that takes tens of cycles when you can do the whole sum or differences of squares approach on a 256 entry lookup table. Hell, that was a thing even in the 8-bit days. 386 has a faster byte MUL. Where's Doom in your 8-bit C128? 256 entry lookup table is not free i.e. it consumes memory IO and memory storage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tDflgqJlTw

@Hammer

Quote:

I knew somebody would post your argument. The Atari Falcon solution doesn't have the performance headroom for an actual fixed-point Quake game. PS1's Quake port is also a fixed-point version.

What actual ****ing planet are you on? You are shown a 3D BSP renderer capable of rendering Quake 3 maps, complete with textures and colour light maps, on what is basically a stock Falcon 030 (with a large amount of RAM added due to the demands of the data involved) and watch it render said map, which is by far the largest per-frame overhead of a typical FPS game, and decry that it's not actaully capable of running a less complex workload - specifically a 2D BSP with columnar renderer, e.g. Doom, which is what I asked you to consider? But I mean while we're about it, what part of rendering quake 1's geometrically much simpler BSP and mono lightmapping do you think is unachievable?

You should stick to your legal software development because you clearly know nothing about what any given hardware is capable of in the right hands.

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Again I look at this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kDM3S7gQTk
Wonderfull

Chunky pixel in AGA was everything what amiga needed 30 years ago.
No chunky pixel no DOOM and Commodore kaput.

Amiga retro fans should made cheap graphics for classsic.
68020 was good enough back in 1992.
amiga os was also ok in 1992.
just aga was too slow.
pistorm is shit. real retro on amiga should be 020 3.1 and new better graphics at least on 1992 level.

"The Commodore Story" according to ppcamiga1.

"Everything was going great: we had plenty of money, profits were good, no debt, our software partners were happy, the users loved our products, and then one day some idiot forgets to include chunky graphics in the AGA chipset, and that was it."

The End.

Tell me you're delusional, without telling me you're delusional.

Last edited by agami on 20-Jun-2024 at 03:17 AM.

_________________
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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: @Hammer Quote: I knew somebody would post your argument. The Atari Falcon solution doesn't have the performance headroom for an actual fixed-point Quake game. PS1's Quake port is also a fixed-point version. What actual ****ing planet are you on? You are shown a 3D BSP renderer capable of rendering Quake 3 maps, complete with textures and colour light maps, on what is basically a stock Falcon 030 (with a large amount of RAM added due to the demands of the data involved) and watch it render said map, which is by far the largest per-frame overhead of a typical FPS game, and decry that it's not actaully capable of running a less complex workload - specifically a 2D BSP with columnar renderer, e.g. Doom, which is what I asked you to consider? But I mean while we're about it, what part of rendering quake 1's geometrically much simpler BSP and mono lightmapping do you think is unachievable? You should stick to your legal software development because you clearly know nothing about what any given hardware is capable of in the right hands.

There are no player objects and no explosions. Quake 3 has graphics settings including geometry, lighting, and textures!

You didn't play Quake 3 from crap S3 Virge to good NVIDIA RIVA 128.

Reminder, Rendition Verite v1000's MIPS-like RISC CPU with 3D extensions has a 25 Mhz clock speed. It's well-known that a certain DSP or RISC CPU has fast math instructions.

https://youtu.be/-Zx2avDkbZM
Rendition's original Verite v1000 running Quake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXF_VhAhlI
Rendition Verite v1000E running Quake.

Atari Falcon is a dead end, with no headroom for the actual Quake game and a very weak road map for higher performance.

Quake 3 was released in 1999 and there are superior hardware configurations that delivered a superior gaming experience.

https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World_9310_October_1993.pdf
October 1993, Page 13 of 354,
ALR Inc, Model 1 has a Pentium 60-based PC clone for $2495 USD.

Atari Falcon failed for valid reasons.

Falcon's Quake 3 ports require more than 4 MB of RAM i.e. 14 MB Atari Falcon SKU in 1993 had 999 UKP price without HDD.

"I think it was 64MB for these tests" - @doug694

You made an error with Atari Falcon's missing 8-bit chunky feature. Look in the mirror.

You're in LALA land.

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@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tDflgqJlTw

Where are Doom's textures? Castle Master 3D on C64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJvi1Blsna0

Last edited by Hammer on 20-Jun-2024 at 06:50 AM.

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Hammer Quote:

68K emulation prefers a large cache. Motorola didn't have a unified low-high CPU product segmentation since the 603 core is a different design from the 604 core. PowerPC 603 processor was used from April 1995.

I guess they didn't have the RISC-V research back them to tell them that fat PPC needs 4 times the instruction cache to provide the same performance as a 68k instruction cache. The PPC 603 with double the instruction cache of the 68040 was not enough. The quick upgrade to the PPC 603e has 4 times the instruction cache just as the RISC-V research predicts would be necessary due to the code density difference. The RISC small core advantage was already greatly reduced by the transistors used for caches.

Year | CPU | Pipeline | Caches | Transistors
1990 68040 6-stage 4kiB_I+D 1,200,000
1994 68060 8-stage 8kiB_I+D 2,500,000
1994 PPC603 4-stage 8kiB_I+D 1,600,000
1995 PPC603e 4-stage 16kiB_I+D 2,600,000

More pipeline stages requires more transistors too but provides more performance and higher clock speeds, which the shallow pipeline PPC 603(e) lacked.

Hammer Quote:

386 has a faster byte MUL. Where's Doom in your 8-bit C128? 256 entry lookup table is not free i.e. it consumes memory IO and memory storage.

It makes sense that a 16 bit CPU with 16 bit ALU and 16 bit registers would have an 8x8=16 bit multiply. This is what early 16 bit 808x/x86 CPUs had and it makes sense to keep for compatibility. The 68000 was 16 bit but had 32 bit registers so the ISA designers opted for 16x16=32 bit instead which was a good decision. Early 8 bit 6502 family CPUs did not have hardware MUL or DIV and did not have barrel shifters either of which may have used more transistors than the whole CPU.

agami Quote:

"The Commodore Story" according to ppcamiga1. "Everything was going great: we had plenty of money, profits were good, no debt, our software partners were happy, the users loved our products, and then one day some idiot forgets to include chunky graphics in the AGA chipset, and that was it." The End. Tell me you're delusional, without telling me you're delusional.

Chunky is down the list a ways for increasing the 3D performance of an Amiga 1200.

1. fast memory (also adds more memory)
2. higher performance CPU
3. more graphics memory bandwidth
4. chunky graphics

An Amiga 1200 with 68060 and fast memory can play Quake on AGA better than a stock Amiga 1200 can play Doom on AGA. A stock CD32 with chunky has trouble playing Doom and no chance at Quake. It's obvious that lack of chunky is not the bottleneck for 3D with AGA. Mr. Delusional will tell us 2+2=5 though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_+_2_=_5

Last edited by matthey on 20-Jun-2024 at 09:00 AM.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: Again I look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kDM3S7gQTk Wonderfull

Wonderful, but...

Notice how it slows down when the scene is more complex. The bottleneck here isn't C2P, it's the 3D calculations and rendering. Chunky pixel in AGA is not enough for Doom - it also needs a fast CPU and several megabytes of RAM. Make that CPU a little faster again and C2P is 'free', making it a non-issue.

Quote:

Chunky pixel in AGA was everything what amiga needed 30 years ago. No chunky pixel no DOOM and Commodore kaput.

No. 'No Doom' is because the A500 didn't have the CPU power of a 33MHz 486, and a hard drive, and 4MB of FastRAM. If Commodore had sold over a million A4000s by 1994 then John Carmack might have reconsidered.

Quote:

just aga was too slow.

Bear in mind that AGA was only supposed to be a mild upgrade to ECS. The next version would be much more powerful. Unfortunately Commodore died before they they could release it. But AGA is still a big step up on OCS, compared to which it isn't slow at all.

Quote:

pistorm is shit. real retro on amiga should be 020 3.1 and new better graphics at least on 1992 level.

I agree. Technically speaking PiStorm is amazing (or will be when they finish it), but retro-wise it's poison. Far from preserving the Amiga's essence, it's destroying it.

A few years ago I bought an A600 and put a Vampire in it, on the basis that it was a worthy successor to the A3000 with 060 and RTG that I used to have. But I find myself using the A1200 far more. Now I realize why I got rid of the A3000 all those years ago and just kept the A1200.

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: Where are Doom's textures? Castle Master 3D on C64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJvi1Blsna0

https://youtu.be/FUEcr7XnbuA


Castle Master is spoiled by the horribly slow frame rate. I'd have been too embarrassed to release a game with such poor performance.