Most graphically Impressive 3D games on the Atari ST/Falcon?

[oky2000]

13 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

Dude, it was the 80s and early nineties... everything on the planet had a garish palette at that time! There has to be a reason why bermuda shorts were socially acceptable then

 

I suppose really though back then these colour palettes were novelties and the more colour you had, the more powerful system. Nowadays with millions of colours available less is more.

Elite, a white on black wireframe game being turned into a 3 bit palette of CMYK,RGB and White for ST/Amiga port is nothing to do with being limited to 8 or 16 colour palette registers or 320x200 rez. There were more than enough colours to do it justice, like I said I hacked my copy of Elite and ended up with a nice blue/grey palette and instantly the game looks more in keeping with Sci-Fi. Frontier Elite II has the same problem in idiotic palette choices. Rescue on Fractalus on the Atari 800 certainly did not have an idiotic choice of 4 colours

 

Most 3D games were sci-fi or space related. 3D Galax I can understand, as Galaxians were naturally in a 3bit palette but the idiotic late 80s/early 90s pastel affliction for decor and in fashionista stuff like Miami Vice has nothing to do with Sci-fi movies like The Fly, Alien2/Alien3/Predator etc. Everything about the late 80s and early 90s was tacky, doesn't mean development houses should be staffed with no taste losers dreaming of Don Johnson's latest pastel outfit this season of Miami Vice using their Visa Electron card in French Connection clothing stores lol 

[oky2000]

20 hours ago, calimero said:

You can find, in this thread, link to YT video that I posted about AnimaInCorpore 3D demo of Spaceship. 
In comments on YT for thar video, you can find Anima claim that DSP can speed up 3D calculation up to 20x times compared to 68030 in Falcon. 
In comments you will also find number of vertices and faces for that 3D spaceship model...

Checked that video out, it does not look like 20x faster than ST running Frontier/F1GP at all. 20x ST speed is Pentium II/Celeron A territory and that is not Pentium II performance shown in that video to me. Maybe 2-3x faster than an Acorn A3010 (ARM 2.5 12mhz) running Starfighter 3000. That machine is about the same as a 20-25mhz 030 or 386DX40. so about twice as fast as my A1200 was, which also looks about right when you check out Zarch (AKA Virus) again running on a real stock Acorn A3010 on youtube vs my ST and later as I played it on my A1200. The channel name is petevanpeebles I think, loads of polygon games recorded from that machine with a TV capture card so no emulation speed boost trickery.

 

Maybe the speed boost is just in dataset management and geometry setup engine side not the screen manipulation side? 

 

 

[calimero]

9 hours ago, oky2000 said:

Maybe the speed boost is just in dataset management and geometry setup engine side not the screen manipulation side?

...yes, like Matt_b suggested in post #65.

Anyway, in Anima video there is data about number of Faces and Vertex so you should probably need similar 3D model on Amiga, ST or PC to be able to say: it looks "faster", "similar"...  

Edited August 11, 2021 by calimero

[Leeroy ST]

On 8/10/2021 at 9:52 PM, oky2000 said:

I meant in how is it compatible technically, I know as a computer architecture the Falcon is completely different design ethos.

 

What is the hardware doing to remain compatible, no make that be more compatible, with Atari ST software, because correct me if I am wrong but I think the Falcon is more compatible than a TT030 at running ST games yes?.

 

On the A1200 it is the same way a PS2 is PS1 compatible. More A500 etc games fail due to Kickstart 1.x not being a direct map in design (which is like a huge complex BIOS not really an OS). If the 68020 was 100% 68000 compatible and Kickstart 3 was not so radically different to Kickstart 1.3 then almost every Amiga program would boot and run faultlessly 99% of the time due to the multiprocessor design being exactly the same timings as the first Amiga 1000 on the memory bus and the two new A1200 AGA specific custom chips align with the original chipset, logically speaking. 

 

All I remember about the Falcon hardware is that it has compromised memory somehow so it is not as fast as it could be on the code execution. I am assuming the odd screen colour palette assignment layout of the ST low/med resolution has been retained too and I assume it still has access to the original ST/STE sound features just as the A1200 has the same audio options as the A1000 onward.

 

So in essence I don't know how close a Falcon running a machine code commercial ST game is to when it runs on an STE vs running GEM apps on those plug in PC cards (Gemulator?) that had hardware assisted ST emulation available for the old Win 95(?) 90s PCs.

Yes the Amiga 1200 should have wider compatibility with the other than the Falcon does with the ST family, but you already mentioned the bottleneck preventing that.

 

By no means either are perfect, or even really satisfactory with the compatibility they have.

[Cyprian]

3 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Yes the Amiga 1200 should have wider compatibility with the other than the Falcon does with the ST family, but you already mentioned the bottleneck preventing that.

are you sure? the only cpu 68ec20 introduces an important incompatibilities with A500, plus new hardware, new bugs, lack of old bugs etc, and also you have to use WHDLoad to play old games on A1200

 

Anyway, for a clean games applications the Falcon is transparent, in some cases you have to use the Backward application or just modified games by PPera

 

 

[oky2000]

By the time I had an A1200 (launch day) I was already 99.99999% playing copied games for the price of blank disk(s) and there may have been cracks to address the AGA incompatibility that original disks did not.

 

For me using Zkick/Relokick to load in Kickstart 1.3 and turning off the CPU caches in the special boot mode of the A1200 sorted out almost all the games I ever tried. There are so many games on the Amiga that are not worth the price of a blank disk as far as coding talent goes I can't think of a game that doesn't work from original disks that I cared about...Lotus II, I had to use an AGA fixed crack disk of that game.

 

At the time though I wasn't interested in the backward compatibility of Falcon or Amiga AGA, I just wanted things to get better and have SNES/Megadrive quality graphics and game engines. I suppose if you sold your old computer to finance a new one it's understandable to want to run old stuff but really in 1992/93 who wants to play half a decade old stuff. Even though I still owned my C64 when I got my 520STM, Amiga 1000, Japanese Megadrive and SNES I can't say I ever dug out my C64 for a quick go of Manic Miner, Beach Head or Blue Max. I missed that sort of quality control on ST and Amiga but not so much the older spec of graphics or CPU for game engine execution. I don't know about you but I wanted games like Vulcan Venture/Salamander or OutRun/Afterburner in arcade quality like the Sharp x68000 got not the rubbish shat out by people like Ocean and US Gold where these arcade conversions like Ghouls n Ghosts or Chase HQ looked like a digital turd shat out their ass just to defraud you out of £20-30. I was sad neither the Amiga 1200 or Falcon got a game worthy of the hardware and I finally gave up and went console only until end of PS3/360 generation and if I needed a PC I used my work laptop and later I sold ex corporate laptops on the web so there was always one to use without wasting my money on the Windows Mac OS bullcrap). 

 

What I did notice is that after the Falcon/A3010/A1200 years and Atari/Acorn/Commodore no longer had something on the shop shelves to buy I completely lost interest in computers until about 1998 when ebay/yahoo auctions was a thing and I could buy some of this old stuff I missed out on like Mega STE, Atari 800 etc etc. My cousin still has my 520STM I gave her a quarter of a century ago...she won't give it back!!! lol took ages to find a nice boxed one of those and I am still missing the Atari ST specific RF cable you got in the box dammit. Looking back maybe it was a mistake to always be impatient for the next big thing but then again perhaps that's only today because Xbox/PS5/Mac/Win PC is just the same thing with a slightly different OS and games today are bollox...they may be realtime raytraced 4k bollox but bollox nonetheless  Give me an hour to play games and you can bet your ass I will be playing Rescue on Fractalus not that Elite 2 or No Man's Sky bollox...projector bulbs are damned expensive.

[Leeroy ST]

On 8/12/2021 at 4:56 PM, Cyprian said:

are you sure? the only cpu 68ec20 introduces an important incompatibilities with A500, plus new hardware, new bugs, lack of old bugs etc, and also you have to use WHDLoad to play old games on A1200

 

You just described the bottlenecks/problems I was talking about lol. 

[Luposian]

A few years late to the party, but... what computer (today) would be closest to the Atari Falcon030 or the Atari TT030, performance-wise?  Or is that a dumb question, since almost anything made today (or in recent years) would outperform a Falcon030/TT030 in every way (graphics, audio, processor)?

 

[mikro]

Buddy, you are late about 30 years with this kind of question.

[Matt_B]

Yeah, pretty much anything modern could comfortably outperform a Falcon or TT, even a microcontroller that costs a couple of bucks.

 

The closest you'd get would be something like the Arduino. Until relatively recently they were still 8-bit devices, although the latest ones use ARM cores.

[TGB1718]

I terms of a computer and not a controller, then maybe the Raspberry Pi Zero (not 2 W)

But even it has a 1GHz clock and has 512MB RAM, which still makes it 125 times faster

than a standard ST, and 31+ times faster than a standard TT