Atari v Commodore

[andym00]

Well if we think cartridges were not doing so well in the mid 1980s, it was not Atari or Commodore that took over the game market, it was Nintendo. That was why Atari started manufacturing 64k and 128k carts for the XEGS&7800 in attempt to compete with Nintendo 8. But by the time Atari had it ready to market, Sega came onto the market with the Genesis. So they were going nowhere fast.

 

The other main thing are cartridges load, access and transfer data at the internal speed of the computer. Where things happen almost instant with a cartridge based game, it will take many seconds with a disk based game. You know I am talking about games that cannot be crammed into 64k with lots of fonts, backgrounds, sprites, sound tracks, sound effects, etc.

 

But the NES didn't hit the market until '86, and I didn't really pay the thing any attention.. I've no idea of what its penetration in the UK was like, but I hardly noticed the thing, if in fact I even did, though maybe that was the circles I was in.. I mean by the time the NES was out the Amiga and ST was here too and suddenly you had 720K/880K games on disk of which cartridges of that size would have been mentally expensive at that time.. I'm guessing because I remember all the fighting over PC-Engine cartridge sizes, can we go from 128K to 256K ? No! Too expensive.. And hell, that was several years later..

 

But of course Nintendo was there later on, but I think in the UK at least the market was Commodore, Amstrad & Spectrum (with Atari, Dragon, MSX all playing 2nd fiddle in terms of releases), up until 1985, and it was cheaper and easier for the software houses to target development of a title that had a common set of features that could easily be accomodated by all of the main platforms, for nothing other than costs reasons.. They could just churn out stuff after stuff rather than spending much longer on developing cartridge games that would cost more, and I question whether they would have been readily received by the public when people were paying 5.99-9.99 for a game, suddenly paying 20+ pounds would likely be a bit of a turn-off..

 

Just look at what happened with the so-called Mega-games from Imagine.. Nothing but big ROM cartridges.. But the cost they were planning to go for was astronomical.. In the video of that time on google video somewhere, you can see the kind of prices they were planning to get away with (~40 pounds.. In 1984!), had they shipped the thing.. I'm almost glad that large cartridge games didn't hit the home computer market around that era.. Of course it's not the cost the tipped them, but it's worrying that they were planning to sell Carts games for that price, especially in 1984..

 

"Commercial Breaks - A documentary about the Imagine and Ocean Software"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986#

It's a great watch in case you haven't seen it.. Priceless in many ways, but primarily for the cameras being there on the day Imagine got shutdown in July 1984

Edited September 25, 2009 by andym00

[peteym5]

On the Atari 8-bit, the cartridges were harder to hack than the disks. One reason why Atari disks were hacked because people were able to purchase the happy enhancement. I would image someone probably did the same with the Commodore drives.

 

It seems Atari and users were making more of an effort to use more than 64k on their 8-bit machines. We had Rambo and Axlon upgrades as well as a 128k 130XE. That and along with using bank switching carts, that does give the Atari the ability to play larger games without having to pause to load files from the disk. I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode? I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

Edited September 25, 2009 by peteym5

[andym00]

On the Atari 8-bit, the cartridges were harder to hack than the disks. One reason why Atari disks were hacked because people were able to purchase the happy enhancement. I would image someone probably did the same with the Commodore drives.

 

It seems Atari and users were making more of an effort to use more than 64k on their 8-bit machines. We had Rambo and Axlon upgrades as well as a 128k 130XE. That and along with using bank switching carts, that does give the Atari the ability to play larger games. I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode? I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

 

From my observation point it seems that due to the rather large historical importance of Atari and cartridges that it would be only logical that you're more cartridge orientated than Commodore land, or indeed any other home computer land.. Except maybe for MSX-land..

 

It's part of what Atari were.. I mean, back in the very early 80s an Atari game wasn't an Atari game unless it was on a cartridge

[frenchman]

SMS came before NES in UK. SMS did quite well due to Sega's excellent advertising (TV, plug me into a Sega), and Mean Machines/C&VG promoting SMS games. SMS games were approx 29.99, and when NES came ashore, games retailed for 49.99.

Quite a difference. That is why the NES failed in UK (Europe actually). Also, most UK software houses where at the time not able to purchase into a publishing contract with Nintendo. Sega was more open minded, as many UK publishing houses produced games for the SMS, as a matter of fact the SMS did better in UK/Europe than in US/Japan. The only Japan-made system which has a bigger Europe software range than a US/Japan one.

 

VCS games sold for 29.99 in UK in the early 80s. people purchased those, and when the Spectrum came along with those awful 2.99 cassette titles, computers did take over.

Spectrum came first in the UK computer wars, C64 second, but only due to UK software houses being able producing and selling cheap tape games, almost no C64 cartridge games ever sold in UK (not talking about C64GS carts), they would have been approx 49.99 too (Activision/Broderbound/Fisher Price/Spinnaker/Sierra or any other USA publishing house who made C64 carts), and as I mentioned earlier C64 had over 300 carts during its early lifetime. Mind you, C64 International Soccer on cart sold very well in Europe, that was one exception.

 

1986 ST became very popular with software houses, and when the A500 came along, it was Spec/C64/A500/ST....SMS...further along...the rest.

PC Engine was popular for a short while due to Julian Rignall praising the console in C&VG over and over and over....and it was never even released in UK, but it was a good selling import machine.

[TMR]

On the Atari 8-bit, the cartridges were harder to hack than the disks. One reason why Atari disks were hacked because people were able to purchase the happy enhancement. I would image someone probably did the same with the Commodore drives.

 

Well, there were software and hardware based dupilcators but even the best of them would struggle with the more evil protection schemes like Vmax. Breaking the nasty protection schemes was down to the cracking scene really.

 

It seems Atari and users were making more of an effort to use more than 64k on their 8-bit machines. We had Rambo and Axlon upgrades as well as a 128k 130XE. That and along with using bank switching carts, that does give the Atari the ability to play larger games without having to pause to load files from the disk. I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode?

 

There's a modified version of Turbo Assembler that can use the C128's extra RAM as a storage space from C64 mode (actually, that might be using VDC RAM, i never used it personally because i was a Zeus user) so it's possible, but the MMU itself is disabled as part of the startup sequence for C64 mode. There were RAM expansions made available including Commodore's own hardware, but they didn't get any real support from the games side of things (at least from the companies, the oldie cracking crews love 'em) for some reason. There was less diversity of devices though, as far as disk went it was either a 1541 or acted like a 1541, so very few people saw the point of putting in the extra programming time to support anything else really.

 

I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

 

No sprites is right, but the entire font is dumped into RAM at startup so it can be overwritten at will. There are also hardware scroll registers for X and Y (with the former being the equivalent of a quarter of a colour clock), the option of repointing the start of the screen, linear RAM layouts in bitmap mode, options to adjust the width and height of the display, characters can be up to sixteen pixels high (it defaults to eight pixels, but the space is allocated but blank in the font) and there is a DMA to shunt data around the VDC RAM at speed. The shortcoming was accessing that RAM since it's all done through the registers rather than the CPU having direct access to it in a similar way to what the NES does with the PPU's memory.

[Tezz]

"Commercial Breaks - A documentary about the Imagine and Ocean Software"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986#

It's a great watch in case you haven't seen it.. Priceless in many ways, but primarily for the cameras being there on the day Imagine got shutdown in July 1984

Great, thanks for pointing that out! It was an interesting watch, I've never seen it before. Amazing that it was '84, it looks much older looking back at it now. The good old days going into Boots to check out the new games. I still have one of those Ocean mugs seen in the vid

[TMR]

It's a great watch in case you haven't seen it.. Priceless in many ways, but primarily for the cameras being there on the day Imagine got shutdown in July 1984

Great, thanks for pointing that out! It was an interesting watch, I've never seen it before. Amazing that it was '84, it looks much older looking back at it now.

 

Yeah, s'a great video that; the Ocean stuff is all pretty much faked because they were brought in at the last minute to fill air time after buying up what was left of Imagine (source for that is former Ocean employee Joffa Smiff, apparently the trip to the local school to get feedback on Hunchback was something that never happened before or after!) but it's still interesting to see Imagine go down with a whimper rather than a bang. And that moment where the Imagine rep tells the distributor what the retail price of the mega games... you can just tell from his eyes that he was about to say something very rude, then remembered the cameras! =-)

 

Got to love the clattery keyboards on the Sage minicomputers they had for cross assembly...

[oky2000]

8x faster? possibly more actually. For planar modes you have to load, OR a bit in (or AND it out) and store 8 times, that's 3 operations per bit, 24 operations total (excluding how you get the and/or masks to start with). chunky is a load and store to get a pixel onscreen. potentially it could be up to 20 times faster like-for-like.

 

Finally someone gets what I am talking about!

 

For the rest............I was only talking about screen memory format in terms of displaying frames in Doom style games, planar is nothing but a disadvantage IN THIS CASE when after spending 10000s of cycles calculating what your next frame should look like in 256 colours the Amiga then has to mess about generating this 256 colour screen by manipulating 8 separate bit planes independently as opposed to one single 8bit value to be written somewhere to set the same single pixel.

...

As far as copying data from off-screen buffers to video area, it's not going to be 800% slower. You would update one plane at a time not write to 8 planes for every pixel. Or you can do 32 pixels at a time on each plane:

 

Move.l (a0)+,P1Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a1)+,P2Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a2)+,P3Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a3)+,(a4)+ ;assume one plane is at 0 offset

 

Bit planes were kept for compatability and it was cheaper to expand and clean up the original chipset than redesign it again to add completely alien screen modes like chunky pixel VGA style. AAA and other chipset prototypes do not use bitplanes except for legacy Amiga screen modes and there's a good reason why

 

It's good that they kept backward compatibility. That's the problem in modern graphics cards-- they all have their own methods of accessing the screen and different I/O ports so you are forced to go through some API and thus not being able to take full advantage of the hardware.

 

 

What 'you' do is irrelevant, the Amiga chipset needs to manage 8 bit planes on the A1200/A4000 AGA Amigas, whether you want to change 1 pixel or none or all 320x256 at once makes no odds the Amiga chipset still needs to work with 8 seperate bitplanes for every pixel of a 256 colour screen of any resolution. The simple fact is for the flavour of the month (Doom style FPS games) it made the Amiga look technologically far worse than it was to the novice computer purchaser.

 

I have already stated that planar is not a problem in essence, look at Super Stardust 96 and Lotus Turbo Challenge 3 on PC and you will need a 100mhz Pentium PC to play these games in the same fluid manner as a 14mhz 50% CPU speed crippled 68020 based A1200 Amiga so clearly it is manipulation of the situation of PeeCee marketeers when everyone wanted their own version of Doom. PCs were quick and dirty (everything is done via CPU+software) and chunky pixel modes as standard therefore it was the perfect machine for 256 colour Doom clones. Doing the game in less colours obviously helps on planar systems bet I was talking about doing perfect clones of Doom VGA and Amiga AGA ie technically identical resolution and max colours.

 

*no FAST RAM on A1200 as stock and without it the machine runs at 50% maximum effective CPU speed approx for stuff like Starglider II)

 

It's not what "I" do. There are examples where planar is better even with SAME number of colors. I know some word processors used colors in such a way that they can update the fonts just by writing to one bitplane although the software itself used 4 bitplanes for coloring the side bars and other items. And no, I don't think just for supporting Doom's 256 chunky buffer, all hardware in the world should be modified.

 

And here's another point-- the VGA speed is not much affected by the processor speed. The I/O bus speed runs at it's own pace regardless of the processor speed. On ISA-based VGA cards with 16-bit data bus, the max was about 2MB/second memory -> VGA memory transfer and you don't get any better whether you use 12Mhz or 25Mhz CPU. I have a Pentium 90Mhz with PCI VGA currently and the VGA writes are at 30MB/second and on another system with 1Ghz CPU, the VGA writes are at 32MB/second.

 

Obviously the cream of Amiga games programmers know more than you and they ALL told Commodore not having the 256 colour mode set up as byte per pixel model was a massive mistake...ergo Commodore put the Akkiko chip in the CD32 to do it for them at 75% efficiency of a native byte per pixel mode. They knew it and a few Amiga coding dabblers here know it but you don't get it, Doom came along...the ST/Amiga could never do it, the A1200 especially as it was using 8 bit plane writes to one byte written on PC Doom so end of the road for the ST/Amiga and welcome to PC gaming. By 66mhz Pentiums most PCs had both PCI graphics AND onboard 32bit blitters running at a high clock rate than even the Amiga A1200.

 

PS do you read my posts?...Doom came out in 93 this was after IBMs PS/2 and EISA(OK nobody bought those machines) and then there was VESA Local Bus (many fast 486 PCs had this but not guaranteed) and finally PCI graphics with all Pentium motherboards supplied as standard all BEFORE Doom was released. So by the time Doom was released (which is realistically 486 and Pentium only) ISA only graphics cards were dead and for 386 or lower PCs and bargain bucket 486SX machines so I fail to see why word processors in 1 bit colour windows and ISA PC architecture is being mentioned. Why would you want a 16 colour 4 bit plane (for speed reasons) Doom clone on a £400 Amiga in 1993 that looked 4x slower than the original on a £500 486 PC?

 

You don't get it I give up.

[TMR]

VCS games sold for 29.99 in UK in the early 80s. people purchased those, and when the Spectrum came along with those awful 2.99 cassette titles, computers did take over.

 

One of the other differences was how the computers were perceived compared to consoles; computers had tapes and disks, consoles had cartridges and of the "big three" in the UK only the C64 directly supported cartridges straight out of the box anyway; the Spectrum required a hardware interface if memory serves, the Amstrad CPC didn't get a cartridge port until the CPC Plus revamp and it took on a lot of other features at the same time.

 

Spectrum came first in the UK computer wars, C64 second, but only due to UK software houses being able producing and selling cheap tape games, almost no C64 cartridge games ever sold in UK (not talking about C64GS carts), they would have been approx 49.99 too (Activision/Broderbound/Fisher Price/Spinnaker/Sierra or any other USA publishing house who made C64 carts)

 

Well, it was at least partly a case of nobody importing the cartridges; Commodore's own sold to a degree (International Soccer, Jack Attack, Avenger, Gorf, Jupiter Lander and so on, not massive numbers sold but as i said earlier they're relatively easy to copy) and at least some of the Atarisoft and Activision titles made it over here in large-ish numbers as cartridges too, but after that we didn't see much of the US output in cartridge form and most of it was simply translated to tape for our market.

Edited September 26, 2009 by TMR

[oky2000]

Let's look at Hardball, I believe this game was full price and very expensive on the A8 and made in the USA the home of Atari coders by Accolade.

 

C64 Title shot.

 

C64 in game shot.

 

A8 title shot.

 

A8 identical in game shot.

 

Not very colourful or even the correct colours for a 256 colour palette This clearly shows the limited colour resolution of the A8 160x200 screen mode compared to the superior flexibility of the C64s 16 colours @ 160x200. 3 colours for the grass alone not bad for neon eye cancer inducing 16 colours only eh?

 

The players are extremely blocky on the A8 and smaller and the story doesn't get any better with the animation. The sound is not as good (although both pretty rubbish but the SID sounds don't grate quite as much forcing you to reach for the volume control instantly like the A8 Pokey tune). This is a damning A8 game because Accolade were not cheap ass coders they were one of the best out there and certainly this was meant to be a quality full price title, but the C64 version is better in almost every way. This can not be blamed on the low wages or lack of effort this was a high profile title from a well respected Atari supporting software house.

[carmel_andrews]

On the Atari 8-bit, the cartridges were harder to hack than the disks. One reason why Atari disks were hacked because people were able to purchase the happy enhancement. I would image someone probably did the same with the Commodore drives.

 

It seems Atari and users were making more of an effort to use more than 64k on their 8-bit machines. We had Rambo and Axlon upgrades as well as a 128k 130XE. That and along with using bank switching carts, that does give the Atari the ability to play larger games without having to pause to load files from the disk. I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode? I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

 

 

 

 

 

Slightly incorrect in saying that all atari disks were hacked...there were some UK/european games from the 90's period that refused to copy properly if it detected a happy or super archiver

[oky2000]

Congo Bongo again an early full price title from well paid programmers for both systems. Here we go.

 

C64 title screen

 

C64 in game screenshot

 

 

A8 title screen

 

A8 same level.

 

Tears of laughter are streaming down my face as I try and handle the irony of the 256 colour palette producing such nuclear fallout levels of colour burning my eyes!

 

Anyway for the blind and deaf here we go...the tunes and sound effects on the C64 are just awesome, the 16 colour graphics beautiful and the animation superb. All four levels of the arcade are included so nothing missing. This is the best home conversion of Congo Bongo ever produced. Then we have the Atari A8 version which gives you eye cancer, makes your ears bleed and the graphics animation looks about ZX81 quality or Mattel Intellivision.

 

Yet again a full price A8 game in 1983 written for both by companies with plenty of experience and buckloads of money to pay talented programmers to do both and this is what they come up with.

 

The title screen says it all and it's downhill all the way from there baby yeehaaaaaaa.

[oky2000]

On the Atari 8-bit, the cartridges were harder to hack than the disks. One reason why Atari disks were hacked because people were able to purchase the happy enhancement. I would image someone probably did the same with the Commodore drives.

 

It seems Atari and users were making more of an effort to use more than 64k on their 8-bit machines. We had Rambo and Axlon upgrades as well as a 128k 130XE. That and along with using bank switching carts, that does give the Atari the ability to play larger games without having to pause to load files from the disk. I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode? I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

 

The C128's 80 column mode was only intended for serious applications really, the C128 whilst being expensive did offer some improvements compared to a 128kb RAM expanded C64 in it's native C128 40 column mode so more of an upgrade than the 130XE which is 65XE+64K RAM and nothing more, which is essentially a 1979 800+60K RAM It Was just too much money compared to an Amiga+FD drive. As an example Elite when run on the C128 runs about 15-20% faster than a C64 and it has nothing to do with the RAM....I don't think Rescue on Fractalus runs any faster on the 130XE or Mercenary or (add every A8 game ever written in 1978-1988)

 

 

Slightly incorrect in saying that all atari disks were hacked...there were some UK/european games from the 90's period that refused to copy properly if it detected a happy or super archiver

 

By 1990s in the UK there was probably only 3 Atari A8 users still active The rest either got an Amiga a C64 or spent their welfare checks on food instead of a new computer anyway haha.

[andym00]

I've played Congo Bongo on most machines, but stone the crows I had no idea the A8 got it so bad on that version Even the 2600 pulls off a better show than that..

Whichever Artist/Programmer was responsible for that should have been repeatedly hit with the big clue stick and never ever allowed near an art package or assembler again..

 

That is absolutely criminal..

 

But that aside, the C64 version does look especially sexy

[Goochman]

Let's look at Hardball, I believe this game was full price and very expensive on the A8 and made in the USA the home of Atari coders by Accolade.

 

C64 Title shot.

 

C64 in game shot.

 

A8 title shot.

 

A8 identical in game shot.

 

Not very colourful or even the correct colours for a 256 colour palette This clearly shows the limited colour resolution of the A8 160x200 screen mode compared to the superior flexibility of the C64s 16 colours @ 160x200. 3 colours for the grass alone not bad for neon eye cancer inducing 16 colours only eh?

 

The players are extremely blocky on the A8 and smaller and the story doesn't get any better with the animation. The sound is not as good (although both pretty rubbish but the SID sounds don't grate quite as much forcing you to reach for the volume control instantly like the A8 Pokey tune). This is a damning A8 game because Accolade were not cheap ass coders they were one of the best out there and certainly this was meant to be a quality full price title, but the C64 version is better in almost every way. This can not be blamed on the low wages or lack of effort this was a high profile title from a well respected Atari supporting software house.

 

Ummm - sorry, but you must live overseas cause in the US they play on a dirt infield, not snow colored - and is that Michael Jackson batting on the C64 version? The color choices on the Atari show the advantage of being able to pick colors you want - they might only have 4 or 5 but they are correct. I give oyu this, the crowd looks better on the C64 version.

[Goochman]

Congo Bongo again an early full price title from well paid programmers for both systems. Here we go.

 

C64 title screen

 

C64 in game screenshot

 

 

A8 title screen

 

A8 same level.

 

Tears of laughter are streaming down my face as I try and handle the irony of the 256 colour palette producing such nuclear fallout levels of colour burning my eyes!

 

Anyway for the blind and deaf here we go...the tunes and sound effects on the C64 are just awesome, the 16 colour graphics beautiful and the animation superb. All four levels of the arcade are included so nothing missing. This is the best home conversion of Congo Bongo ever produced. Then we have the Atari A8 version which gives you eye cancer, makes your ears bleed and the graphics animation looks about ZX81 quality or Mattel Intellivision.

 

Yet again a full price A8 game in 1983 written for both by companies with plenty of experience and buckloads of money to pay talented programmers to do both and this is what they come up with.

 

The title screen says it all and it's downhill all the way from there baby yeehaaaaaaa.

 

This turd was delivered by the same guy that wrong the original Galaga for the C64 - well paid programmer on the Atari side doubtful.........

[+SpiceWare]

The C128's 80 column mode was only intended for serious applications

Oh, I dunno

[invisible kid]

This is the c64 Congo Bongo I found at http://www.c64.com/ :

It played pretty bad. They did say there was a better version and to search on the internet.

Also Congo Bongo looked different in my emulator:

[desiv]

Ummm - sorry, but you must live overseas cause in the US they play on a dirt infield, not snow colored...

 

Ummm... No.. we don't..

 

Unless you are talking about Softball???

 

Baseball is played on a grass infield, with dirt for the pitching mound and the bases and base paths..

 

desiv

[www.atarimania.com]

The C64 Congo Bongo screens shown earlier are from the recoded disk version...

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[Lazarus]

I know Commodore had the 128, but wasn't the 128k only available in C128 mode?

VDC RAM (16k or 64k, depending on revision) can be used in C64 mode. But the C128 mode isn't much different to the C64 mode anyway, only the memory banking is different. IO registers, CPU, ROM jump table... all the same. Porting a C64 game to C128 is not hard to do.

 

I also know that the 80 column mode was not useful for games because it had no sprites and the fonts could not be reprogrammed.

Actually the VDC is quite flexible. It lacks important features like sprites and multicolor mode, but offers stuff like 512 character fonts (8x2 to 8x16 size), hires bitmap mode with color cells (8x2 to 8x16 size), smooth scrolling, real interlace, copy/fill feature for VDC RAM. Games COULD have been done with it, but the VIC2 was a much better choice for doing a game since it's so much easier there.

[+SpiceWare]

This is the c64 Congo Bongo I found at http://www.c64.com/ :

It played pretty bad. They did say there was a better version and to search on the internet.

That's the version I had. Hadn't seen the other version with the fancy title screen.

[+SpiceWare]

Actually the VDC is quite flexible. It lacks important features like sprites and multicolor mode, but offers stuff like 512 character fonts (8x2 to 8x16 size), hires bitmap mode with color cells (8x2 to 8x16 size), smooth scrolling, real interlace, copy/fill feature for VDC RAM. Games COULD have been done with it, but the VIC2 was a much better choice for doing a game since it's so much easier there.

Very true - I was working on a version of asteroids that used the copy feature to quickly rotate the asteroids. I had the asteroids flying around and the ship flying, but sadly never finished it.

 

I also had a small program that would switch the display to 80x50 (using interlaced) and it patched the KERNEL to properly support the full screen. Editing BASIC programs was really handy with twice the number of lines! I also discovered that wearing polarized sun glasses reduced the interlace flicker enough to be tolerable.

[atarian63]

Let's look at Hardball, I believe this game was full price and very expensive on the A8 and made in the USA the home of Atari coders by Accolade.

 

C64 Title shot.

 

C64 in game shot.

 

A8 title shot.

 

A8 identical in game shot.

 

Not very colourful or even the correct colours for a 256 colour palette This clearly shows the limited colour resolution of the A8 160x200 screen mode compared to the superior flexibility of the C64s 16 colours @ 160x200. 3 colours for the grass alone not bad for neon eye cancer inducing 16 colours only eh?

 

The players are extremely blocky on the A8 and smaller and the story doesn't get any better with the animation. The sound is not as good (although both pretty rubbish but the SID sounds don't grate quite as much forcing you to reach for the volume control instantly like the A8 Pokey tune). This is a damning A8 game because Accolade were not cheap ass coders they were one of the best out there and certainly this was meant to be a quality full price title, but the C64 version is better in almost every way. This can not be blamed on the low wages or lack of effort this was a high profile title from a well respected Atari supporting software house.

it's 1985 on this.. I recall having the title for both. This is the era where poor programming for Atari began, the title did not sell well as graphically they did a poor job.

Easily could have been much better and more colorful, see other 1985 title which look better than the c64 counterparts..

[atariksi]

8x faster? possibly more actually. For planar modes you have to load, OR a bit in (or AND it out) and store 8 times, that's 3 operations per bit, 24 operations total (excluding how you get the and/or masks to start with). chunky is a load and store to get a pixel onscreen. potentially it could be up to 20 times faster like-for-like.

 

Finally someone gets what I am talking about!

 

For the rest............I was only talking about screen memory format in terms of displaying frames in Doom style games, planar is nothing but a disadvantage IN THIS CASE when after spending 10000s of cycles calculating what your next frame should look like in 256 colours the Amiga then has to mess about generating this 256 colour screen by manipulating 8 separate bit planes independently as opposed to one single 8bit value to be written somewhere to set the same single pixel.

...

As far as copying data from off-screen buffers to video area, it's not going to be 800% slower. You would update one plane at a time not write to 8 planes for every pixel. Or you can do 32 pixels at a time on each plane:

 

Move.l (a0)+,P1Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a1)+,P2Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a2)+,P3Ofs(a4)

Move.l (a3)+,(a4)+ ;assume one plane is at 0 offset

 

Bit planes were kept for compatability and it was cheaper to expand and clean up the original chipset than redesign it again to add completely alien screen modes like chunky pixel VGA style. AAA and other chipset prototypes do not use bitplanes except for legacy Amiga screen modes and there's a good reason why

 

It's good that they kept backward compatibility. That's the problem in modern graphics cards-- they all have their own methods of accessing the screen and different I/O ports so you are forced to go through some API and thus not being able to take full advantage of the hardware.

 

 

What 'you' do is irrelevant, the Amiga chipset needs to manage 8 bit planes on the A1200/A4000 AGA Amigas, whether you want to change 1 pixel or none or all 320x256 at once makes no odds the Amiga chipset still needs to work with 8 seperate bitplanes for every pixel of a 256 colour screen of any resolution. The simple fact is for the flavour of the month (Doom style FPS games) it made the Amiga look technologically far worse than it was to the novice computer purchaser.

 

I have already stated that planar is not a problem in essence, look at Super Stardust 96 and Lotus Turbo Challenge 3 on PC and you will need a 100mhz Pentium PC to play these games in the same fluid manner as a 14mhz 50% CPU speed crippled 68020 based A1200 Amiga so clearly it is manipulation of the situation of PeeCee marketeers when everyone wanted their own version of Doom. PCs were quick and dirty (everything is done via CPU+software) and chunky pixel modes as standard therefore it was the perfect machine for 256 colour Doom clones. Doing the game in less colours obviously helps on planar systems bet I was talking about doing perfect clones of Doom VGA and Amiga AGA ie technically identical resolution and max colours.

 

*no FAST RAM on A1200 as stock and without it the machine runs at 50% maximum effective CPU speed approx for stuff like Starglider II)

 

It's not what "I" do. There are examples where planar is better even with SAME number of colors. I know some word processors used colors in such a way that they can update the fonts just by writing to one bitplane although the software itself used 4 bitplanes for coloring the side bars and other items. And no, I don't think just for supporting Doom's 256 chunky buffer, all hardware in the world should be modified.

 

And here's another point-- the VGA speed is not much affected by the processor speed. The I/O bus speed runs at it's own pace regardless of the processor speed. On ISA-based VGA cards with 16-bit data bus, the max was about 2MB/second memory -> VGA memory transfer and you don't get any better whether you use 12Mhz or 25Mhz CPU. I have a Pentium 90Mhz with PCI VGA currently and the VGA writes are at 30MB/second and on another system with 1Ghz CPU, the VGA writes are at 32MB/second.

 

Obviously the cream of Amiga games programmers know more than you and they ALL told Commodore not having the 256 colour mode set up as byte per pixel model was a massive mistake...

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What logic! Amiga games programmers know more than you therefore blah blah blah. You haven't established the cream of programmers know more than me first of all and second of all that's irrelevant to the FACT that there are advantages to the planar mode.

 

They knew it and a few Amiga coding dabblers here know it but you don't get it, Doom came along...the ST/Amiga could never do it, the A1200 especially as it was using 8 bit plane writes to one byte written on PC Doom so end of the road for the ST/Amiga and welcome to PC gaming. By 66mhz Pentiums most PCs had both PCI graphics AND onboard 32bit blitters running at a high clock rate than even the Amiga A1200.

As I already stated above Doom cannot be a reason to modify the hardware and make it backward incompatible or redo the entire hardware. You yourself were talking about 14Mhz CPUs earlier on 286 which implies ISA, but I also mentioned PCI.

 

PS do you read my posts?...Doom came out in 93 this was after IBMs PS/2 and EISA(OK nobody bought those machines) and then there was VESA Local Bus (many fast 486 PCs had this but not guaranteed) and finally PCI graphics with all Pentium motherboards supplied as standard all BEFORE Doom was released. So by the time Doom was released (which is realistically 486 and Pentium only) ISA only graphics cards were dead and for 386 or lower PCs and bargain bucket 486SX machines so I fail to see why word processors in 1 bit colour windows and ISA PC architecture is being mentioned. Why would you want a 16 colour 4 bit plane (for speed reasons) Doom clone on a £400 Amiga in 1993 that looked 4x slower than the original on a £500 486 PC?

 

You don't get it I give up.

YOU don't read or DON'T understand that some stupid game like DOOM is no reason to convert the entire hardware to CHUNKY at more expense and/or less compatibility with existing hardware. I forget, you are the one who has all those commodore machines that are incompatible with each other and prefer the Amigas were the same. Doom (the game) did not spell the doom of Amiga nor it's chipset as you speculate. If someone were targetting the game originally on Amiga chipset, he could have done similar 3D stuff and it would have been harder to port to CHUNKY architecture. As I told you before, get your facts straight.