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Gildo Addox

Posts 31
01 Jun 2018 10:13


Thanks a lot for the information.

This means to me: I'll start coding now. I'm really, really impressed of SAGA.

I'm sooo excited to use SAGA... many, many thanks for this.

:-)


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
01 Jun 2018 10:30


I do not understand what he wants...

if only interest to get something 100% compatible and staying more or less at that level there is the original hardware, Mist and FPGA Arcade. Why is he interested in Vampire then?


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
01 Jun 2018 10:43


Roman S. wrote:

      @Gunnar - you are comparing a business oriented machine (which didn't have any gaming features) with gaming/multimedia machine. Apples vs oranges. PC started being a gaming machine in early 90's - with VGA/SVGA and SoundBlaster. And the Amiga approach (slow CPU, but HW capable of raster effects) proved to be inferior rather quickly.
     

     
      PC never became gaming machine exclusive or only gaming machine, nor is today (you have consoles). It was extended to be one with gfx and sound cards. As explained, Direct3D has made it possible, but its obvious e.g. PS3 with much lower performing CPU, RAM avail and gfx card can have nice games when optimized vs same game demand on x64.
     
      Simply because big box Amigas and Zorro cards had a limited suppliers and high prices we failed to do the same. DraCo System shows it was possible with existing components, abeit to a huge price.
 
  Otherwise we could upgrade the same way (by inserting additional cards). It took ages for PC to have at least sound and LAN integrated onboard, and gfx onboard and in CPU later. But it was not until full SVGA and 16-bit sound it did surpass AGA abilities, which as PC standard, is closer to late 90s and early 2000s.
     
      We are catching up late, but there is nothing bad in having 32-bit gfx and 16-bit sound finally.

Surely, 3D revolution remains out of our hands for now.
     
     
Roman S. wrote:

      Such approach was used, because CPUs didn't have that much power to waste it on abstraction layers, and the chipset remained compatible between OCS for A1000, A500 and A2000, ECS for A600 and A3000, etc. But it's not the case anymore, CPUs tend to be much faster than 14MHz 68020 in just about any current project, and SAGA is only a Team Apollo way of extending the chipset - definitely not an universal standard. Things like AHI or CGX were created for a reason.
     

     
      In chipset terms, SAGA will defenetely be a new standard, just extending the registers and abilities, just like ECS/AGA did.
     
      This is right approach in creating standard (for Vampires).
      Being both best accel card for existing Classics and only new
      Classic avail (with standalone) will make it de facto standard
      in classic community, in few years.
     
      Wait and see how fast is implementation before judging it.
     
      ECS/OCS chips were faster then 00,as you mention AGA was matching 020, and I hope SAGA will match 080.
     
      So you will again have a CPUs best friends.
     
      AS you know SAGA is/will be AHI/RTG compatibile (driver pack supplied), but at same time giving you ability to directly adress 16-bit sound and 24-bit gfx, which was the reason why these replacements were made.
     
      So in a way it does make layers obsolete (and they arent sadly developed anymore) while keeping them availiable for backward compatibility and new software development.
   
   
Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

    I do not understand what he wants...
   
    if only interest to get something 100% compatible and staying more or less at that level there is the original hardware, Mist and FPGA Arcade. Why is he interested in Vampire then?
   

   
    It seems to be more of a doubt in SAGA/Amiga future and thus reverting just to old software libarary.
   
    Surely, future will never be past repeated, but its better to have one.


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
01 Jun 2018 16:21


Roman S. wrote:

.
  SAGA via Picasso96 driver = cool, tons of software will benefit!
  SAGA giving more bitplanes and useable with copper = meh...
 

But there are uses for both here, depending on what you wanna do.
Just like having Warp3D support, at least when making new games.
Sure, you can make games this way that won’t work on let’s say an A4000 with the best upgraded thinkable, except a vampire, just because he doesn’t have a vampire with AMMX, but if one make games smarter, they could work on even his computer


Roman S.

Posts 149
01 Jun 2018 17:13


* deleted 3 pages ranting of style *
"you are all stupid and have no clue"




Nixus Minimax

Posts 416
01 Jun 2018 17:47


We don't have GHz 68k processors and we don't have GPUs with billions of Transistors. So what's the point of all this "the PC did it differently"? Sure it did. We are moving an 80s Technology into the 90s by adding a Pentium-class processor, hicolor and trucolor chunky modes and 16 bit audio. If all this is pointless, then improving anything on the Amiga is pointless. That's certainly a valid point of view but really nothing anyone here would like to discuss.


Renee Cousins
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 142
01 Jun 2018 19:00


Roman S. wrote:
@Gunnar - you are comparing a business oriented machine (which didn't have any gaming features) with gaming/multimedia machine. Apples vs oranges. PC started being a gaming machine in early 90's - with VGA/SVGA and SoundBlaster. And the Amiga approach (slow CPU, but HW capable of raster effects) proved to be inferior rather quickly.

  At what point did platformers on the PC stock sucking? Oh right, they didn't, they gave up, moved onto 3D assuming every gamer on the planet only want to play FPS all day.
 
 
Roman S. wrote:
What is obvious, is that you won't have greatest games without good programmers and artists. And they are gone - they are selling games on Steam, Apple Store, etc. They won't be willing to spend time writing great games for the Vampire to sell... maybe 3000 copies of the game? Not to mention the learning curve - todays' programmers don't use raster effects to move objects, taking care now many planes they have to their disposal, which planes are available at this moment, etc. - they just pass new location to their vertex shader. Puff - done.

  Not at all true -- new stuff to Aminet has definately slowed since it's peack in the 90's, but a steady trickle continues.
 
  Besides, you're belaboring the point.
 
  Making an Amiga into a Windows or Ubuntu machine begs the question of, "if there's no difference, why write for Amiga at all?" Not everyone is in love with the idea of ultra-bloated operating systems for the computer-illiterates who only use their computer to fight flame wars on Facebook.
 


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
01 Jun 2018 19:58


Roman S. wrote:

  * deleted 3 pages ranting of style *
  "you are all stupid and have no clue"
 

HARDWARE LEVEL WISE STUPIDITY
 
  Well, Vamp v4 should bring it up to about late Pentium MMX level of performance, with 2D acceleration via chipset, 32-bit gfx, 16-bit sound and with USB and LAN and standards. In Amigaland that is a vast jump foward.
 
CODING STUPIDITY

  Will it require VASM, assambly knowledge and some knwoledge of SAGA registers and AMMX ones to use its potential fully? Surely.
 
  Would it be that hard. Looks like if you never coded
  (Crash Course at Reaktor.com)
  EXTERNAL LINK  but other option could be Holywood.


Renee Cousins
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 142
01 Jun 2018 21:01


Roman S. wrote:
  ".. double buffering..."
 
  PCs were not always ISA... in SVGA and PCI times (AFAIK this is the performance level the Vampire aims to achieve, more-or-less) double buffering was being used a lot... and noone really needed Copper for double- or tripple-buffering, much less flexible V-Sync support could do.

  PCI did not fix this sufficiently. It wasn't until chips like the 600MHz AMD K6 when we could adequately do decent 2D games on a PC. But by then, 3D had put the pin in 2D. For the record, the V2 beats a 600MHz AMD K6-II.
 
  And --==again==-- the COPPER has nothing to do with double buffering. Any system that can page flip (e.g., the 1977 Apple II) can do double buffering. Nor does the COPPER even help.
 
 
Roman S. wrote:
  "3D killed sprites, not fast blitters"
 
  Believe me, this wasn't the reason. Sprites are tied to particular HW, you have limited amount of them, you often need really careful coding to get all of them, it was hard to abstract them in efficient way as different HW had quite different capabilities - so portability was a nightmare. They had to go...
 

  Tackling the limitations of a particular platform was a tiny part of porting a game and most companies had their own in-house developers anyway. This is still done today.
 
  I should be more clear. Sony and the PC killed 2D.
 
  Pre-PlayStation, all consoles were sprite machines. Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, NEO GEO, PC-FX. Some were even released in 1994. Post-PlayStation it was 3D0, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64.
 
  In PC land it was a little less clear cut, as 3D was a part of gaming from the original Flight Simulator, but in 1993 with DOOM, and 1994 with Wing Command III, would could still see the shift.
 
  And it had little to do with developers feeling challenged with 2D hardware -- quite the opposite. 2D was old. Every trick had been done. And frankly, PC's just couldn't do 2D, so 3D won by default.
 
  2D was dead. With it, sprites.
 
 
Roman S. wrote:
  "Sorry, but no one (here anyway) cares about FPGAArcade and it's slow 68060 (or worse, the silly idea of using a Pi Compute Module as a soft-CPU)"
 
  I care - I don't mind the soft/hard-CPU, I want the chipset in FPGA (as my MiSTer does - the chipset emulation is always perfectly fluent, no matter what!), I want the Kickstart be the very first thing that gets displayed (within a second or 2 since power-on, without any "MSI/Asus/Gigabyte Gaming Motherboard" logo before),

  With you so far -- mostly. Having the Apollo-Core for the MiSTer would be amazing, but stretching the resources the team has.
 
  But the 68060 isn't half as fast as the Apollo and even that isn't fast enough for somethings. The Pi 3 with JIT is about the same speed and would benefit a LITTLE by offloading the chipset to FPGA, but not much.
 
  However, leveraging the Pi has a downside -- why not just use Linux? Again, you're relegating AmigaOS to "toy" status. Its the same problem UAE has. Why make a great game in UAE when the same amount of effort can capture a much larger audience?
 
  Making the Amiga more PC-like won't draw them back, it will only make porting a handful of PC apps a little easier. And really, if you want to play the best version of Quake, it's still best on a real PC. Just like if you want to play the best Ghost Pilots, it's on a NEO GEO.
 
 
Roman S. wrote:
I want AmigaOS/WHDLoad/P96/AHI/Poseidon/RoadShow compatible HW and drivers, I want as much of the original ports as possible,

  And who's going to write all these drivers? AHI is slow and useless for games. Roadshow is quick but terrible to configure and the inconsistency of the TCP/IP stack on Amiga makes net-gaming problematic. Poseidon is slow because the rather proprietary (even for an Amiga) clockport bus can't do USB2.0 (fwiw, neither can Zorro).
 
  But I agree on P96 covering all our RTG needs, just not for gaming. It's okay for PC ports, but if you want PC games, a PC powerful enough to CRUSH the fastest Vampire-accelerated Amiga on Quake is $200 at Best Buy.
 
 
Roman S. wrote:
I want reasonably fast flash storage, I want reasonable form-factor, I want power-efficient HW.

  Want some cheese with that whine? Seriously, how about you contribute to the community instead? As you so clearly pointed out, we need developers, even if it's making a little game demo in AMOS BASIC. So if you CARE, then DO SOMETHING POSITIVE for the Amiga community instead of just shitting on what other people have actually accomplished.


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
01 Jun 2018 21:57


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  I was comparing a 8 MHz PC with 640 KB and bitplane GFX
  with the AMIGA with 8 MHz and 512 KB Ram and bitplane GFX.
  Both machines are from the same time and both have roughly the same hardware "spec".
  Of course the clever Amiga Chipset gave the AMIGA 10 times more gaming power.
 
   
  When you think of a PC with 100MHz and VGA card - then you have no AMIGA to compare this with.
 


A Pc that compared to an Amiga with AGA and an 040 cpu then? Same era?


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
01 Jun 2018 22:04


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

   
 
Roman S. wrote:

    What is obvious, is that you won't have greatest games without good programmers and artists.
 

   
    Even if there might be not an army of game coders waiting now -
      why should we not be allowed to improve the AMIGA chipset?
   
    You spend here a huge amount to talk the idea to improve the Amiga down. This attitude helps no one.
    How about spending your time to do something for Amiga instead?

True! I’m tired of nay sayers in here...
I may not be a programmer, but I’m a pretty good artist, when it comes to both graphics and music. I’d GLADLY make BOTH of those for a game for the Vampire!!
In fact, I WANT to do this! Even if it would sell only 3000 kopies. To me, that would be pretty nice!
I also have a pretty good understanding on how computer graphics, cpus and all that, works! If any programmer wants to work with me? :) just let me know!


Eric Gus

Posts 477
02 Jun 2018 06:55


Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

  but other option could be Holywood.
 

 
  My hope is AMOS PRO is "enhanced" to support SAGA/AMMX etc.. thats what I would love to see and would really excite me..
 
  But myself I am waiting for core3 to come out so I can get 2+mb chip ram on my little NTSC A500 (and no, zero interest in doing mega chip mods or anything else destructive -- which is needed for my rev mobo .. and whats the point w/core3 on the horizon) ..
 
  Once I get core3, I plan on starting to look at my old Amiga Star Trek game and enhance it within the limits of the language its written in (and ironically on the very Amiga I wrote it on now vamped).. eg better graphics, sound, more of them and namely lots of long over due bug fixes.. hello "save game" .. :-D, Last year I was able to recover the source code from a floppy a friend dug out of storage box .. (we both forgot I had given him a copy that included the source)..



Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
02 Jun 2018 09:15


eric gus wrote:

Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

    but other option could be Holywood.
   

   
    My hope is AMOS PRO is "enhanced" to support SAGA/AMMX etc.. thats what I would love to see and would really excite me..
   
    But myself I am waiting for core3 to come out so I can get 2+mb chip ram on my little NTSC A500 (and no, zero interest in doing mega chip mods or anything else destructive -- which is needed for my rev mobo .. and whats the point w/core3 on the horizon) ..
   
    Once I get core3, I plan on starting to look at my old Amiga Star Trek game and enhance it within the limits of the language its written in (and ironically on the very Amiga I wrote it on now vamped).. eg better graphics, sound, more of them and namely lots of long over due bug fixes.. hello "save game" .. :-D, Last year I was able to recover the source code from a floppy a friend dug out of storage box .. (we both forgot I had given him a copy that included the source)..
 

It’s great that you’re making games, but isn’t Star Trek copyrighted?

AMMX and SAGA supported by AMOS is a great idea, and it should be supported in anything that you can program with, but I wonder if AMMX and SAGA are finalized (Gunnar?) and if they wouldn’t have to be, in order to have the supported by eg AMOS... just a thought


Ian Parsons

Posts 230
02 Jun 2018 11:04


Gunnar described the planned enhancements to the first public core realease  of AMMX as AMMX2 and they are always evaluating new instructions but they don't add them without a lot of consideration. So if an instruction is publicly released and documented the chance of it be deprecated or modified are slim and it can be used without much (if any) fear of it breaking in a future release. The same probably applies to SAGA, new features and any changes shouldn't break well written code that means 'unused' bits in hardware registers should usually not be set.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
02 Jun 2018 11:08


Mallagan Bellator wrote:

I wonder if AMMX and SAGA are finalized (Gunnar?) and if they wouldn’t have to be, in order to have the supported by eg AMOS... just a thought

Yes of course AMMX2 is finalized.
AMMX2 was released to the public.
AMMX2 is a powerful extension with a flexible set of instructions.

The future might bring AMMX3 which might add a few more instructions to AMMX2.




Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
02 Jun 2018 11:59


Ian Parsons wrote:

... used without much (if any) fear of it breaking in a future release. The same probably applies to SAGA, new features and any changes shouldn't break well written code that means 'unused' bits in hardware registers should usually not be set.

Same exponation is completely valid to explain the way SAGA is enhanced to AGA (just extending the limit of registers for colours, bitplanes etc.) and how 080 CPU is "most compatibile newer 68k CPU"
in terms of running plain 68k code. (which does not equal to 101% A500 compatibility for other KS,OS,chipset etc. related features).

Its nice approach, its way evolution was supposed to happen, not just by complete standard and tech replacements.


Thellier Alain

Posts 141
02 Jun 2018 19:59


@Mallagan Bellator
What kind of game would you like to design for the Vampire ? If it is a kinda Ghost Goblins or Xenon2 it may interest me




David Wright

Posts 373
02 Jun 2018 20:14


I was always hoping Deluxe Paint could be upgraded and fully functional in saga.
I know there are others that are better but I have always been partial to DP.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
02 Jun 2018 20:30


thellier alain wrote:

Ghost Goblins or Xenon2 it may interest me 

Yes those jump and run games like "Bubble and Squeak" or "Lionheart" or like "Ghost n Goblins" were ideally for AMIGA.




Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
02 Jun 2018 21:04


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    Yes those jump and run games like "Bubble and Squeak" or "Lionheart" or like "Ghost n Goblins" were ideally for AMIGA.
 

 
  Dont forget great SAGA pinball in 2D and great Roadkill style 2D race :-)
 
  While "Giana Sisters style never die" :-) I liked more a bit of logic and intelligence in it. Or adventure. Benefactor, Lost Vikings, Another World, Bubba n Stix ...
 
  There is some 3D 80/90s style we can do :-) POLYGON 3D
 
  Another thing that 060+ SAGA can be great is polygon 3D. Voxel graphics over it at best. A bit enhanced Gunship 2000, Trex Warrior, Virus and Conqeror, Robocop 3, Damocles, Elite/Frontier, THX/F117, No Second Prize, Virtual Grand Prix ...
 
  My favourite is open world HUNTER on A500 (Activision 1991). An "SAGA remake" would be great.
 
  I hear Blitter can help in polygon 3D. I wonder could some a bit Voxel 3D added using MMX like in Comanche game series.
 
  On Amiga I remember just a few Voxel late experiments, like ... a use in TBL demo, some AGA demos ... and on MOS/OS4 Voxel Bird SAGA.
 
  I liked that "pixelated 3D texture simulation" style :-)
 
  Also isometric 3D was name of the day since 8-bits. This psudo 3D can be done with no warp3D and 3D cards.

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