Atari v Commodore

[atarian63]

Problem is there are games of this type much earlier in the A8 history that appear better. That was the problem, customers were not willing to pay money for a step backwards in software. Especially having had better versions than c64 for years of many titles.

 

Appear better possibly, but that's only at a superficial level and Spellbound's looks on all formats are somewhat misleading; as a game it's got more in common with the SCUMM-driven games that came after than anything else, puzzle solving, interaction with NPCs, time-based events... it's a remarkably complex little beast.

 

I am no programmer but other companies made a better effort it would appear and this one certainly did on c64. No music on a8? doh!

 

Spellbound probably didn't receive much more effort on the C64, there's probably less work gone into it visually since the graphics aren't bespoke and have instead been dumped from the Spectrum original, the only thing the C64 code is doing differently is running a couple of hardware sprites over the top for the Magic Knight (and a few other rare objects that move in realtime) to avoid colour clashes. The Spectrum only had the soundtrack on the 128K version as well, and it lost quite a bit in the AY translation...

I'll have to give it a go, wish it had sound but that won't stop me. I sometimes forget that pretty doesnt always mean fun or good.

 

Thanks!

[atariksi]

That's fine by me because i honestly can't see many places it'd really help. And in character based modes (which Red Max and Last V8 use, for example) the A8 is doing the same 40 cycles per eight scanlines fetch that the C64 is... actually, since it's using horizontal scroll that means it's grabbing more than 40 bytes a character line now i think about it?

 

Better to look at cycles left per scanline. Even with HScroll (bit 4 of DL) enabled, you would end up with more cycles per scanline.

 

Those extra cycles can't be translated into more colours though because in cases like Zybex...

I wasn't talking about Zybex, but in general about having DLIs to make things more fair in cycle comparison.

 

Ahm, similar to double bufferring two 320*200 screens to get 1/2 color clock scrolling

 

Actually, the C64 doesn't have to double buffer and a lot of the more primitive games simply update the current screen RAM on the fly; i've done it myself a few times in the past and it's just a matter of crash dumping the data on a single frame and splitting the job in two so that you don't try moving anything as the refresh goes past.

I wasn't talking about C64 double buffering.

 

you double buffer GTIA mode 9/11 with GTIA mode 10 and you get one color clock scrolling (if that's essential to the game), but you get 9 colors instead of 16.

 

So considerably less than the forty or more you were talking about previously...

 

Let's not mix up the points of being able to scroll 1 color clock with ability to do more colors in with horizontal re-use.

 

i've never actually seen a screen being scrolled in this manner (i've seen HIP pictures and assume this is how the interlace is handled, i must admit that did puzzle me because Atari800Win used to allow half pixel scrolling in GTIA modes before it was made more accurate and my experiments unwittingly relied on that!) so are there any examples out there at all?

That's not an argument-- "I haven't seen any." There aren't many GTIA games to begin with what to speak of ones using 1 color clock scroll. It's logical that you can do it just be toggling modes between GTIA mode 9/11 and 10. You don't have to double buffer either.

 

(remember sprites still run at 50/60Hz and one color clock scroll):

 

i hadn't forgotten, but i'm also aware that the sprites will stand out like sore thumbs since they're far more limited in colour than the backgrounds will be.

 

I don't see how that follows. There's no relationship with sprites looks and the background. You need to rethink before you write.

 

I already showed example of sprites of Atari 2600 that look beautiful.

[atariksi]

Interesting that I missed so many Ian Copland games... the soccer one, this one and few others...

 

Yeah, I think you also missed out on my text-based version of Baseball game for Atari 800 written in BASIC. I'll put it up for downloading once I find it...

 

Yeah, but you're not so interesting because you didn't write the A8 version of Draconus as well, did you? =-)

 

Oh and Heaven, check your PMs mate!

 

I guess you were joking here, but I was illustrating the point that it's not that difficult to find some games that are superior on one system than another. And here's example of pretty sprites (A2600):

[popmilo]

I may need to place an order for these titles for C64 and A8 and test them out.

You can get them at http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=4293&d=18&h=0

and at http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=6276&d=18&h=0

[Jetboot Jack]

Has anyone really considered the timeline of the hardware that results in the complexity and quality of software on a platform being a key contributor to the C64's library?

 

Aside from a simple way to get more moving objects and more individual colors on the screen the C64 benefited from being a third generation personal computer.

 

The 800 was a first generation machine, it's contemporaries are the Apple 2, TRS 80 and PET chronologically.

 

Software development for the C64 benefited from an industry that had been coding and designing games for 6502 systems for around 5 years, at least 3 of those with hardware similar to the C64 (A8, Ti99 etc) - all that experience fitting great games into 48K was a known problem - teaming up that expertise with the simple to use C64 hardware HAD to create the right space for good quality games...

 

The games that occur at the END of the Atari's commercial success period are appearing on the C64 it's near the start of it's life as a platform...

 

sTeVE

[frenchman]

Software development for the C64 benefited from an industry that had been coding and designing games for 6502 systems for around 5 years, at least 3 of those with hardware similar to the C64 (A8, Ti99 etc) - all that experience fitting great games into 48K was a known problem - teaming up that expertise with the simple to use C64 hardware HAD to create the right space for good quality games...

 

The games that occur at the END of the Atari's commercial success period are appearing on the C64 it's near the start of it's life as a platform...

 

sTeVE

 

We keep mentioning this here, but the C64ers don't seem to understand this. (But I also mentioned that good titles on A8 still kept coming on A8, eg Mindscape The Halley Project, Infocom titles and SSI)

Edited September 23, 2009 by frenchman

[Heaven/TQA]

I wouldn't generalize that technically you see better games on C64. All he essentially mentioned is having scrolling in 1/2 color clocks which is not essential to having technically better games.

 

Depends on the game itself. Higher resolution makes it possible to have more exact displaying of screen content.

A good example is "Arkanoid" on the A8. The ball moves too coarse, compared to all other versions, or it moves in a weird horizontal speed..

 

Ofcourse, we can have it on the A8 aswell, but where to find the coders for programming hires with full PM overlay?

 

...

What's the ball in Arkanoid-- a sprite or a playfield graphic? I have some clone of Arkanoid but I didn't notice any problems with the ball.

 

the Ocean/Imagine original port uses PMs for the player and the ball and the ball(s) move not in 320x resolution and esp. when catched a "S" extra for slow it gets visible very soon.

 

But what it uses is softsprites for the nasties... at least...

 

I was quite happy when I bought it that it turned out relativly good.

[andym00]

Has anyone really considered the timeline of the hardware that results in the complexity and quality of software on a platform being a key contributor to the C64's library?

 

Aside from a simple way to get more moving objects and more individual colors on the screen the C64 benefited from being a third generation personal computer.

 

The 800 was a first generation machine, it's contemporaries are the Apple 2, TRS 80 and PET chronologically.

 

Software development for the C64 benefited from an industry that had been coding and designing games for 6502 systems for around 5 years, at least 3 of those with hardware similar to the C64 (A8, Ti99 etc) - all that experience fitting great games into 48K was a known problem - teaming up that expertise with the simple to use C64 hardware HAD to create the right space for good quality games...

 

The games that occur at the END of the Atari's commercial success period are appearing on the C64 it's near the start of it's life as a platform...

 

sTeVE

 

And look what all that experience brought us in the first gen titles..

Hardware sprites ? Hardware sprites are for girls!!

[andym00]

On chunky display like VGA, you have to use 320*200*256 and update 64K at a time.

[snip]

One other thing as that Standard VGA is stuck at A000:0000 whereas Amiga can dynamically point it's graphics buffer anywhere.

 

VGA isn't necessarily chunky.. You're confusing your graphics adapters.. The 320x200x256 is an MCGA mode.. And since I think I know what you're saying, I have to disagree

 

And yes whilst VGA cards only typically had a 64K window and (256K internally if I recall), you have to bear in mind that the graphics hardware is more than appears on the surface.. You have your normal linear modes.. But you have to remember that the planar modes can be used in 8bpp modes to, although they aren't internally planar modes! So reading 8 bits allows you to move 32 bits of memory internally thanks to seperate latches (which was a hangover from the lower coloured planar modes but extended to support all 8 bits) on each of the 8 bits internally.. With 16 bit writes you're moving 64bits internally.. And 32bit writes are irrelevant since they breakdown into 2 16bit writes anyway, but they still save a few cycles.. Using these modes allowed you to used the graphics ram properly, and use the cpu to transfer memory internally within the VGA card using the CPU only as a sequencer for addresses.. Also for filling polygons, it made life very easy since one mov [di],ax would write out 8 8bpp pixels for you..

It's the VGA planar modes (in 256 colours) that made the PC suddenly a very viable games platform for making available the current 2D trends.. It allowed a huge amount of memory to be shifted around on (at the time) very modest processors, and also facilitated very fast polygon fills..

 

The Planar 256 colour modes[1] were (imho) a delivery from heaven for games on the PC.. So your distinction between chunky and planar modes just got very very blurry indeed

 

And although Abrash got all the credit for these modes, they were in use by people long before he surfaced and popularised them in his book, mainly by those who'd bothered to read the VGA hardware documentation..

 

[1] I should use their proper name, Chained modes, specifically in the above Chain-4 mode, but I thought I'd stick to planar to avoid confusing matters..

Edited September 23, 2009 by andym00

[TMR]

Those extra cycles can't be translated into more colours though because in cases like Zybex...

I wasn't talking about Zybex, but in general about having DLIs to make things more fair in cycle comparison.

 

i mention Zybex because that's something we've looked at previously (this is, after all, a game comparison thread rather than anything else) but as i said feel free to have DLIs in a theoretical context because they're not really able to help much.

 

Let's not mix up the points of being able to scroll 1 color clock with ability to do more colors in with horizontal re-use.

 

Surely those things are part and parcel for a significant number of games...

 

i've never actually seen a screen being scrolled in this manner ... so are there any examples out there at all?

That's not an argument-- "I haven't seen any." There aren't many GTIA games to begin with what to speak of ones using 1 color clock scroll. It's logical that you can do it just be toggling modes between GTIA mode 9/11 and 10. You don't have to double buffer either.

 

It's not an argument no, it's a question! i know that i've not seen everything on the machine and was asking if there are examples out there including demos that do it.

 

I don't see how that follows. There's no relationship with sprites looks and the background. You need to rethink before you write.

 

No, i'm thinking about it as a designer as well as a programmer; if the backgrounds are at GTIA resolution with nine colours and the sprites can only put single or three colour objects over that it's going to look wrong. That's why the only example of a game i can think of that scrolls GTIA vertically does software sprites i suspect...

 

I already showed example of sprites of Atari 2600 that look beautiful.

 

And apart from that beauty being a subjective opinion, that's not an A8 and not everything the 2600 does can be applied directly.

[frogstar_robot]

[quote name='Jetboot Jack' date='Wed Sep 23, 2009 3:28 AM' timestamp='1253690910' from being a third generation personal computer.

 

The 800 was a first generation machine, it's contemporaries are the Apple 2, TRS 80 and PET chronologically.

 

 

True but in its debut era it was a designed as a powerful expensive machine with as few compromises as possible. The chipset was particularly designed to overcome the biggest shortcomings of the 2600. It's competitors from the debut era weren't in the same class either graphically or sonically. Time, economy of scale, and consolidation of hardware functions got the original stratospheric pricing down.

 

The C-64 though a later design was intended from the get-go to be inexpensive though it still benefits from almost 4 years of advances. The Apple II, PET, et al don't even begin to compete with it though the A8 still can with a mixed bag of shortcomings and advantages.

 

Though I'm curious where you get "third generation" from. If anything I'd call machines like the Altair and Apple I 1st, Apple II, A8, et al 2nd, and Speccy, C-64 and so-forth 3rd.

[Jetboot Jack]

frogstar_robot, you seem to have quoted yourself not me

 

1st generation, 1977 to 1979 - not hobbyist kits - Apple 2, PET, TRS 80, Atari 800 - the first generation of hardware designed and built for the mass market, the home user, not the soldering iron clutching types...

 

2nd generation, 1980 to 1981 - Vic 20, CoCo, Ti99/4a (not the earlier model)

 

3rd generation, 1982 to 1984 - C64, CoCo 2, etc

 

sTeVE

Edited September 23, 2009 by Jetboot Jack

[Heaven/TQA]

frogstar_robot, you seem to have quoted yourself not me

 

1st generation, 1977 to 1979 - not hobbyist kits - Apple 2, PET, TRS 80, Atari 800 - the first generation of hardware designed and built for the mass market, the home user, not the soldering iron clutching types...

 

2nd generation, 1980 to 1981 - Vic 20, CoCo, Ti99/4a (not the earlier model)

 

3rd generation, 1982 to 1984 - C64, CoCo 2, etc

 

sTeVE

 

well... 800 shines if we count it as first generation... esp. to the second wave VIC20, CoCo and TI?

[ANTIQ]

No, i'm thinking about it as a designer as well as a programmer; if the backgrounds are at GTIA resolution with nine colours and the sprites can only put single or three colour objects over that it's going to look wrong.

 

These were nice though:

 

 

(from Atarimania)

 

Project M's transparencies look promising too.

[atarian63]

Alley Cat from Synapse is 83 and really nice, very smooth motion,nice neon sign with movement,great mini games and excellent sound!

I played it just the other day. If anyone has the video please upload for full effect!Very fine,small details in the cats movement!Not to mention it's pretty funny at times!

Edited September 23, 2009 by atarian63

[oky2000]

...

And that's before you even consider how bad the Amiga would cope with the new 'craze' of texture mapped pseudo 3D games like Doom and Descent which ran OK on 2nd hand £400 PCs. A1200...released 1992...Doom appears...instantly AGA is obsolete even in the A4000 which costs more than any other PC for sale BUT would run Doom at best like a 16mhz 286 due to the Amigas 8 bit planes per 256 colour screen compared to the 800% faster to manipulate VGA byte per pixel screen on PCs.

I never understood that bitplane thing. It only has disadvantages.

 

...

 

Bitplanes are advantage if you want to optimize the memory useage for the colors you need to use. You always have the blitter to do the moves for you. None of the PCs of various eras (8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and now 64-bit) ever standardized on sprites so people are just relying on BitBlt() to do everything for them or rely on DirectX which is also indirect method of accessing the hardware efficiently. At least Amiga gave you full access to the hardware and at register level and you can bet it would work the same on all AGA machines or if you targetted OCS/ECS, it would still work on AGA.

 

You can also update a single bitplane and quickly put up a graphic rather than update huge chunks of data.

 

The only difference is if you are displaying something which there is no help with from the Amiga Blitter/Copper etc in 256 colours like in a Doom clone for example. The Amiga requires 8 writes to 8 bit planes the PC VGA screen requires only 1 write. That's a huge saving of time compared to the Amiga and that's before you consider that Amigas always had significanlty slower CPU speeds than the PC even since the PC-AT in the mid-late 80s with 16mhz. Sure for most 80s arcade games better to have a blitter but in the 90s everyone wanted Doom or other 3D textured games.....Doom doomed traditional hardware custom chips as on the Amiga

[oky2000]

Wing Commander...did you ever play it? It was a terrible game both technically and playability wise....only nobs jumped on that bandwagon fearing to speak the truth and following the herd.

 

I played it and SOLD it - in large numbers, it brought a level of visual polish people could not ignore - and proved VERY attractive to consumer. That it was a very average game did not matter - it was visually and audibly exciting, it compelled people to buy a machine just to play it - I sold lots of PC's off teh back of demonstrating Wing Commander - 256 color graphics were very compelling when compared to the 8bit and early 16bit Atari and Commodore systems...

 

In 1989 the PC as a HOME machine was a joke in the UK trust me, I remember it well 286 or 386 at that time there was no VCD or kickass games, glitchy graphics, unimaginative games.

 

I don't trust you. I trust my experience of selling the machine and the games, 256 color adventures from Lucasarts and Sierra, MT32 audio and Microporose Simulations that ran at a good framerate not a 10fps slideshow were very compelling to people...

 

only idiots who didn't have a clue what they wanted and were sold some overpriced unusable junk like a 'multimedia PC' for their home

 

Not at all PC's were not sold as Multimedia in 1989, had the term been coined then? They were sold as upgradable, future proof, and the next step from proprietry closed systems from what was percieved as "toy" computer comapnies. That's my experience of selling the beige beasts!

 

sTeVE

 

Wing Commander/Strike Commander/Day of the Tentacle etc are all early 90s games at best though, I know because as these games were being released CD-ROM was still in its infancy and so was super duper sound cards like the Gravis or AWE32 etc though, nothing to do with games of the late 80s. I already admitted AGA was too little too late in 1993 for Commodore and the CD32 was the final nail in the coffin for C=

 

I would still say Doom sold a lot more PCs, and quite rightly so it was an excellent slickly programmed game that was invented for the PC architecture (fast CPU/fast chunky VGA screen memory model) and a more telling example of the shift in paradigm of game styles could not be more starkly shown than two games developed uniquely for the architecture/features of the machine.

 

Shadow of the Beast - Amiga....this is literally a case of writing a game around the custom chips and extracting the best of the machines capabilities. I don't think there is a single satisfactory conversion on any platform because they don't have the same architecture/design features of the Amiga.

 

Doom - PC....massively more impressive game to the new computer buyer as it is very detailed and the gameplay is 3D not just the graphics...a million miles away from the 3D polygon games of old, and only the PC architecture really made this possible in the early 90s and by doing so responsible for killing off all old school competitors whose custom chips can only help you in 2D 80s arcade style games.

 

In both cases you might not think much of the game, doesn't matter both were technical tour de force examples of what your platform could do and as such many machines are sold on the back of those games.

 

But essentially in the late 80s...PC sales for the home were nothing, and there were some very strange machines built to try and convince buyers the Windows was a viable option...Tandy even built a machine with Windows (version 2?) in ROM if I remember and then there was Amstrad's Sinclair PC (a bulbous Amiga style case with an 8088 PC inside) but the European home users were having none of it in the 80s, the facts speak for themselves so check out the sales of such machines and compare with the competition

[emkay]

No, i'm thinking about it as a designer as well as a programmer; if the backgrounds are at GTIA resolution with nine colours and the sprites can only put single or three colour objects over that it's going to look wrong.

 

These were nice though:

 

 

(from Atarimania)

 

Project M's transparencies look promising too.

 

 

Other stufff is also possible ...

[oky2000]

I sat, and then I sat some more.....

 

I was surfing through this forum (through my Iphone)..... Then I shat myself.

 

I couldn't believe my eyes. ATARI ST vs AMIGA........ I wiped... I looked at the tissue and saw the ST on my piece of bog roll.

 

Jesus... I feel as though my great grandmas, uncles dad had come back with an 'uninformed ad-hoc reckon' about horse racing.

 

We all know there is nothing the Atari ST (512k) can do that the Amiga 500 (512k for all you cynics) can't.

 

Okay, Okay, mention the MIDI why don't you????

 

MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

Lets's get back to the A8 v c64

 

Regards

 

Aaron

 

Except for solid 3D...the ST was 12.5% faster at it because interestingly enough it had a 12.5% faster CPU

[oky2000]

I sat, and then I sat MIDI was just there internally... but who used it? (lots of musicans) £15 amiga was sorted for that too. Who reckoned Xenon 2 - The Megablast sounded better on the ST??? Only people who had an ST. The independant adjudicator knows otherwise.

 

 

AMIGA had a great sound chip. But it had many flaws. One is that separated stereo... 2 channels to the left and 2 channels to the right. This kills many tunes. Some trackers used software mixing to enhance stereo, but then the sound got noisy.

There is actually one game where I prefer the ST YM chip sound : Chambers of Shaolin. The "plastic" sound seemed to fit better to those tunes...

The AMIGA tunes won often by the samples used... Amiga was not cheap, but it seems again to be a money issue, not to use a "balance" logic for the channels, and to add some filter for each channel, to reduce the sampling noise on deep sounds. And so on...

 

The good and bad point of the Amiga sound hardware is it was literally 4 8bit DACs you could do anything you wanted with. This gave Amiga musicians a distinct advantage even over the Roland MT-32 LAPC etc as these had custom burned instruments. Whilst that was a superb 16bit output you couldn't produce the fantastic David Whittaker tunes of Shadow of the Beast with as much artistic/creative licence.

 

A lot of people going from SID to Paula really didn't get that the key was all in the creative use of samples, yes sure there were no tricks like ring modulation and synchronisation and no 'bugs' etc but at the same time it was a blank sheet of paper in terms of writing music. 4 channels were a bit of a problem though for music AND sound effects at the same time as you will see in most Amiga games.

[emkay]

 

Except for solid 3D...the ST was 12.5% faster at it because interestingly enough it had a 12.5% faster CPU

 

It was explained in this thread before. AMIGA has the better hardware and can do 2 threads at the same time, but it has the slower CPU ...

Well, depending on the 3D usage, the A8 has the faster CPU and can do 2 "threads" at the same time to create fullscreen 3D stuff...

[oky2000]

Has anyone really considered the timeline of the hardware that results in the complexity and quality of software on a platform being a key contributor to the C64's library?

 

Aside from a simple way to get more moving objects and more individual colors on the screen the C64 benefited from being a third generation personal computer.

 

The 800 was a first generation machine, it's contemporaries are the Apple 2, TRS 80 and PET chronologically.

 

Software development for the C64 benefited from an industry that had been coding and designing games for 6502 systems for around 5 years, at least 3 of those with hardware similar to the C64 (A8, Ti99 etc) - all that experience fitting great games into 48K was a known problem - teaming up that expertise with the simple to use C64 hardware HAD to create the right space for good quality games...

 

The games that occur at the END of the Atari's commercial success period are appearing on the C64 it's near the start of it's life as a platform...

 

sTeVE

 

Except that the PET was never designed to do anything other than display business applications on its monochrome 80-column screen. The first true Commodore home computer which took into account games software in its design was the VIC-20 and even that was only as a stalling tactic to throw off the Japanese from copying the design of their intended home computer market assualt, Jack was paranoid about people reverse engineering the Commodore home computers to copy and sell similar hardware at lower cost in competition. But still the PET is not really in the same market or ever intended to be in the same market as the VIC and C64 and it's price and physical design will point that out (no colour, no sound, no TV output, 80 column text display and standard business computer all in one styling)

[atariksi]

Those extra cycles can't be translated into more colours though because in cases like Zybex...

I wasn't talking about Zybex, but in general about having DLIs to make things more fair in cycle comparison.

 

i mention Zybex because that's something we've looked at previously (this is, after all, a game comparison thread rather than anything else) but as i said feel free to have DLIs in a theoretical context because they're not really able to help much.

...

Not theoretical, but logical which means they can be implemented. Here's one example of 128 colors from palette of 256 every scanline using a DLI in Graphics 9; it does 7 palette changes midscreen and an extra set of 16 shades from missiles combined into a player. Four players are still available and put on edges (overscan area) to show an extra 6 colors.

ATARIHC.zip

[atariksi]

I wouldn't generalize that technically you see better games on C64. All he essentially mentioned is having scrolling in 1/2 color clocks which is not essential to having technically better games.

 

Depends on the game itself. Higher resolution makes it possible to have more exact displaying of screen content.

A good example is "Arkanoid" on the A8. The ball moves too coarse, compared to all other versions, or it moves in a weird horizontal speed..

 

Ofcourse, we can have it on the A8 aswell, but where to find the coders for programming hires with full PM overlay?

 

...

What's the ball in Arkanoid-- a sprite or a playfield graphic? I have some clone of Arkanoid but I didn't notice any problems with the ball.

 

the Ocean/Imagine original port uses PMs for the player and the ball and the ball(s) move not in 320x resolution and esp. when catched a "S" extra for slow it gets visible very soon.

 

But what it uses is softsprites for the nasties... at least...

 

I was quite happy when I bought it that it turned out relativly good.

 

I did my mainly text-based baseball game using a perfect ball (CTRL-T, or CHR$(20)) and I was able to move it smoothly although I never put in the motion into the game. I suppose they could toggle to hires on bottom part of screen at least and get smoother motion (if needed).

[atariksi]

On chunky display like VGA, you have to use 320*200*256 and update 64K at a time.

[snip]

One other thing as that Standard VGA is stuck at A000:0000 whereas Amiga can dynamically point it's graphics buffer anywhere.

 

VGA isn't necessarily chunky.. You're confusing your graphics adapters.. The 320x200x256 is an MCGA mode.. And since I think I know what you're saying, I have to disagree

...

No MCGA is a subset of VGA standard. VGA implemented the chunky 320*200*256 mode (as seen by software) and it uses up 64K video RAM. Yes, there's a way to poke the VGA registers to get planar mode and 360*480 that can access 256K of video RAM, but that does take away the simplicity which was a point of contention. And if you do REP MOVSD, you will find that non-planar mode is much faster than planar. It does do 32-bit writes in chunky mode (where it doesn't write to many planes at the same time). I am going to check the statistics I calculated on memory read/writes. Nonetheless, you can't have a 320*200*8 like you can with Amiga in planar mode.