Overview Features Coding ApolloOS Performance Forum Downloads Products Order Contact

Welcome to the Apollo Forum

This forum is for people interested in the APOLLO CPU.
Please read the forum usage manual.
Please visit our Apollo-Discord Server for support.



All TopicsNewsPerformanceGamesDemosApolloVampireAROSWorkbenchATARIReleases
Running Games and Apps.

Open Lara Port to 080+SAGA - How Much?page  1 2 3 

Richard Statham

Posts 49
24 Jan 2022 23:21


Hope a new version of Riva will arrive soon with full play back controls and is stable when switching from window mode to full screen and back. As of yet all the versions and different versions of the core and Apollo OS I have not had one yet where it can go from window to full screen reliably without freezing. Not a moan just saying


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
24 Jan 2022 23:40


Richard Statham wrote:

Hope a new version of Riva will arrive soon

Yes we are indeed working on improve Riva. But lets not hijack this thread here. This would be rude. This topic is not at all about Riva.



Richard Statham

Posts 49
27 Jan 2022 22:48


Cool I will look forwad to a new Riva and Lara's Boobies bouncing around my monitor screen soon powered by Vampire :)


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
28 Jan 2022 08:27


Richard Statham wrote:

  Cool I will look forwad to a new Riva and Lara's Boobies bouncing around my monitor screen soon powered by Vampire :)
 

 
Btw the Video fullscreen issue is fixed.
Switching between Pip and Fullscreen works perfect now.
We will release an update soon.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
29 Jan 2022 07:46



Regarding RTG - maybe it helps people if we talk explain what it is.
RTG is a patch of AmigaOS graphics functions.

RTG is not from Commodore but there are 2 competing solutions from 2 different companies.

CyberGFX was the first of the two standards and - is tdefacto the standard that all RTG games on Amiga use. Picasso the other options is a "clone" of CyberGFX. Some people say that Picasso was developed by disasm CyberGFX, there is based on a pirate copy of it.

CyberGFX from the Phase5 team and Picasso from a competitor from them.
Both solutions replace/overwrite all AmigaOS GFX functions with their own functions. These new functions have a switch in them and check on each call if you want to access a PLANAR or CHUNKY screen and then use the appropriate subroutine matching it.

Of course these function add a significant overhead.
This is why Amiga RTG games  not draw all their graphics using the RTG functions but instead often just ask for the memory address of the screen and then direct lowlevel POKE the memory on their own - therefore bypassing all RTG calls.

Maybe this helps you to understand what we talk about.

As we know the Amiga has a Zorro Bus which allows you to plug in graphic cards. This Zorro II bus is limited to 3.5 MB/sec max speed, the Zorro III bus can do more in theory up to over 20 MB/sec but building a card able to do this is a difficult an many Zorro III cards barely reach 10 MB/sec.

For games this bus limitation is a huge drawback as for playing a Doom game in resolution 640x480 in 16bit and 50 FPS you need realistically 60 MB/sec bus speed.
 
As you see 3 MB/sec versus needed 60 MB/sec - the bus is a huge problem.

This is where the integrated memory of the Vampire cards shines.
The Vampire reaches 500 MB/sec to its local memory.
And therefore allows reaching game performance never seen before.




Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
29 Jan 2022 08:39


Does RTG provide 3D functions?
   
No, RTG does not provide any 3D functions.
This means any Amiga 3D game will render the 3D screen by its own, using selfmade code. RTG is not used for rendering any 3D content on Amiga. RTG is used for open the screen only.
The Amiga game will has to render all on its own and then memcopy to screen to the memory address on the GFX card.
So we understand RTG offers no 3D API on Amiga!
   
   
   
When we talk about 3D then we need also to understand that there are 50 shades of 3D.
You can have very low quality 3D rendering, medium quality and super high quality.
All of them have hugely different CPU cost.
   
  * Low-end 3D texturing cost about 10 instructions per pixel.
   
  * Medium-quality cost about 100 instructions.
   
  * High end-quality cost about 500 instructions per pixel.

And many different levels in between them. 
   
On Amiga all games use very low end quality.
Doing a 3D game on Amiga is very stressful for the CPU.
You really want to have the fastest CPU possible.
A 68030 CPU is really to slow for anything except the very lowest quality texturing. Even a 68060 CPU can only do very low texturing.
   
The 68080 is faster than the 68060 and can do better texturing - but the key advantage is HW 3D support.
 
To do Medium Quality Texturing you need a CPU with over a Gigaherz clock speed - or you need HW 3D acceleration.
HW acceleration as the V4 does provide.
   
The V2 can NOT provide 3D acceleration as the FPGA on the V2 cards is only 50% of the size of the V4 cards.
   
The software interface that today games use to access HW 3D acceleration is called OpenGL. There are some variants of OpenGL under different names as for example Glide, MiniGL, DirectX.
OpenGL rendering without HW acceleration is not useful.
You can with OpenGL render in CPU only mode - but this is so slow that it becomes a slideslow.


NoXLar - DemoSceneLover

Posts 63
29 Jan 2022 12:31


i learned something.  thanks for explaining.


Nick Fellows

Posts 176
29 Jan 2022 12:35


If Tomb Raider can run even at this frame rate on a non 080 e-optimized version of PC-Task
EXTERNAL LINK 
Then Id wager that a native port would run at playable speed because you have removed the overhead of emulating a PC and all its parts.

I see you deleted my post.


NoXLar - DemoSceneLover

Posts 63
29 Jan 2022 13:27


i think he mentioned what kind of tombraider we want.  one that shine or just one that is just like original.  both are possible.  he just said why the one that would shine wouldn't be possible on v2.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
29 Jan 2022 15:35


nick fellows wrote:

If Tomb Raider can run even at this frame rate on a non 080 e-optimized version of PC-Task

 
The original tomb raider was designed for a 30 Mips machine.
Original Tomb raider ran fine on an 68040 class CPU.

The original Tomb raider was low quality and also low requirements.
  - 320 pixel resolution,
  - 256 color,
  - very simple, direct texture mapping
  - only low texture quality
 
Open Lara supports not only low quality but also real good quality.
  - it supports HD textures
  - Its designed for a machine with HW 3D acceleration.
  - you can run it in much higher resolutions
  - support truecolor texture
  - high quality bilinear texture filtering.

So you can run open Lare in real good quality. 
The difference in quality is huge!
This is like comparing the same game once done for Playstation 1 game and one done for Playstation 3.
 
So its the question what do we want.
Do we want to have another Amiga 3D game using the lowest possible texture quality only?
Or do we want to finally have an Amiga game with GOOD 3D quality?
 
What do you want to have?


Nick Fellows

Posts 176
29 Jan 2022 20:13


Im interested in a common target. Its obvious that a more powerful setup provides a better quality.

If the V2 is only capable of
"another Amiga 3D game using the lowest possible texture quality"
then quite frankly its junk.
 
you and i both know that the V2 card can do better than that and im surprised you would slate your own product this way.

Is the V2 really that crap ?


Tim Trepanier

Posts 132
29 Jan 2022 22:06


nick fellows wrote:

  If the V2 is only capable of
  "another Amiga 3D game using the lowest possible texture quality"
  then quite frankly its junk.
 
  you and i both know that the V2 card can do better than that and im surprised you would slate your own product this way.
 
  Is the V2 really that crap ?

It's called honesty. Something very rare these days. Although in this case i don't think BigGun is completely accurate. The V2 can do better then "the lowest possible texture quality", but without hardware acceleration it still can't do good quality.

The extra FPGA space of V4 provides more room for more 3D hardware functions and therefore even more quality.


Sean Sk

Posts 488
30 Jan 2022 03:34


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Do we want to have another Amiga 3D game using the lowest possible texture quality only?
Or do we want to finally have an Amiga game with GOOD 3D quality?

 
I would like to see both, provided that whoever takes on the project has the time and skills to do this.
 
The V2 could run Tomb Raider at Playstation 1 quality, and I would actually be happy with that since I love the Playstation version.
But why not also make another version for the V4 with better 3D accelerated graphics?
 
The problem with game development for the Amiga these days is that they always target the lowest common denominator (A500) which, in my opinion, stifles progress.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
30 Jan 2022 08:43


nick fellows wrote:

you and i both know that the V2 card can do better than that and im surprised you would slate your own product this way.

 
Of course the V2 can do 3D games much better than an 68060 Amiga with Zorro GFX card - this is clear.
But I speak here about doing even more - doing games a lot better than any existing Amiga games.
 
 
So what do you need for a good 3D game?
1) Fast CPU
2) Fast FPU
3) Fast Memory
4) 3D Acceleration
 
 
What do we have:
1) The CPU of the V2 is very fast. Faster than 68060
2) The FPU is also fast but the V4 is even faster.
3) The Memory Controller of the 68080 is very fast. Many times faster than 68060.
4) The V2 has no 3D Hw acceleration
 
 
If you aim for "low quality" 3D games like all Amiga demos and games are. (PS1 style) then the V2 can do much better than any 68060 system.
 
Lets get back to the numbers that I explained before.
Numbers will make this easy to see.
 
Lets say you have 85 MHz CPU.

And that you need 25% of its CPU power for 3D projection.
And that you can use the other 75% for texturing.
 
This leave you with 64.000.000 CPU cycles for rendering.
We gestimated that you need around 10 cycle per each low quality textured pixel. This means you can texture around 6 Million texel per second.
 
This equals to low quality texturing of 320x240 with 80 FPS
or  640x480 reaching 20 FPS.
So this is what you can "aim" for with good coding.
 
 
Higher quality texturing does not need 10 clocks per texel but mode in the order of 100 clock per texel.
This means its roughly 10 times for costly in CPU terms

This means with "good" texturing you can aim for
320x240 with 8 FPS or  640x480 with 2 FPS without 3D hardware support.
 
But if you have 3D Hardware acceleration then you can offload this to the HW accelreation
And then 640x480 with 20 FPS in good quality is possible.
 
 
The numbers are of course estimates...
I hope they make clear what we talk about.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
30 Jan 2022 09:33


sean sk wrote:

The problem with game development for the Amiga these days is that they always target the lowest common denominator (A500) which, in my opinion, stifles progress.

I agree with you.
When the A1200 did came out, then AGA games were developed and this was good. Of course those AGA games not ran on A500 but it was good progress.



Christopher Stokes

Posts 36
30 Jan 2022 10:15


Gunnar, thanks for the clear explanation.

I was reminded of when a mate sold me a Voodoo card and without any other hardware, I was then able to play 3D games at a much higher quality or run games which would not previously work. He said I would not regret it and he was right.

One of the reasons for the demise of the Amiga was there were very few games that were targeted towards higher end hardware, so little incentive for the masses to upgrade from an A500 base.

I personally want to see the best game possible.


Nick Fellows

Posts 176
30 Jan 2022 17:10


I cant disagree with any of those points so i concede.


DiscreetFX Studios

Posts 140
02 Feb 2022 06:54


Christopher Stokes wrote:

Gunnar, thanks for the clear explanation.
 
  I was reminded of when a mate sold me a Voodoo card and without any other hardware, I was then able to play 3D games at a much higher quality or run games which would not previously work. He said I would not regret it and he was right.
 
  One of the reasons for the demise of the Amiga was there were very few games that were targeted towards higher end hardware, so little incentive for the masses to upgrade from an A500 base.
 
  I personally want to see the best game possible.

I agree, I also want to see the best game possible.


NoXLar - DemoSceneLover

Posts 63
02 Feb 2022 11:11


me too:)


Paul the Tall

Posts 7
01 Apr 2022 12:29


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  Yes the Apollo-Team works on very many big projects.
   
  I can quickly name you some examples:
    - ApolloOS improvemets in general
    - Amiga OS Network Stack improvements
    - V4 Network driver updates
    - RIVA video player updates
    - 3D tech-demos
    - developing Drivers /Libraries to use 3D functions (OpenGL)
    - improve OS Filesystem Caches
    - the works on 3 PC games which we ported to Amiga
    - in addition to this team has three new selfdeveloped Amiga games in the pipeline in various progress states.
    - we try to look into improving Amiga webbrowsers
    - I work on new content for Amiga home schooling to teach people how to develop demos for Amiga.

  So yes we are working on many topics
   
 


 
  Which 3 PC games?
 

posts 41page  1 2 3