[HN Gopher] Grind - A first person shooter for Amiga 500
___________________________________________________________________
Grind - A first person shooter for Amiga 500
Author : harel
Score : 305 points
Date : 2023-10-11 21:06 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indieretronews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indieretronews.com)
| vardump wrote:
| Looks absolutely amazing considering Amiga 500 limitations. Same
| renderer as in Dread, a newish Amiga game.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The video is on a A1200
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Still amazing compared to what was out in say, 1992 on the
| Amiga. (3D games wise.)
| ekianjo wrote:
| Yes still very impressive
| rasz wrote:
| with fast ram. That pretty much means additional accelerator
| card because Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory
| controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms
| or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest
| contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a
| meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994. You
| could argue it still cheaper than PC, lets count.
|
| A1200 bare system PS276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-
| magazine-050/page/n28/mo...
|
| 4-8MB fast ram PS200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-
| magazine-050/page/n49/mo...
|
| 340MB PS380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-
| magazine-050/page/n28/mo...
|
| 14 multisync monitor ~PS320
| https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-
| magazine-050/page/n52/mo...
|
| ~PS1200-1400. 1994 PS/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170. To
| quote a classic I feel like Im taking crazy pills.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp.
| ..
|
| 486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA
| monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840
| tuukkah wrote:
| Fast RAM is not in the minimum requirements, but I don't
| remember how 10 FPS compares to Doom.
| vardump wrote:
| ~8-10 fps is about what this game gets on an Amiga 500
| without true Fast RAM.
|
| Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with that.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| > Early 1990s me would have been more than happy with
| that.
|
| I was happy with 5 fps or less on the gameboy with
| Faceball 2000.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Back in the day, I was playing DooM 2 on a 386DX 40MHz
| and was very fine. And Rebel Assault on 14fps. Also, I
| managed to play DooM 3 on a GeForce 2 MX DDR (using the
| patch sets to allow it to run on Voodo cards).
| ekianjo wrote:
| 512k Fast RAM Extension on the Amiga 500 was VERY common
| back in the days, as many games benefited from it.
| snvzz wrote:
| >512k Fast RAM Extension
|
| Has never been common on Amiga 500.
|
| Perhaps you mean 512k SLOW RAM Extension.
|
| Or CHIP RAM (after a motherboard solder-jumper
| adjustment) with the ECS Agnus common in late A500
| models.
| einr wrote:
| And after all that, you'd still have a _68020_ under the
| hood. You could, of course, spend an eye-watering amount of
| money on a 68040 accelerator... and then... you 're still
| not going to beat the DX2/66. (Let's not even talk about
| the performance of AGA versus a local bus SVGA card)
|
| It feels like I've heard _so many_ Amiga users say that
| they finally broke down and jumped ship when Doom and the
| DX2 /66 dropped. It really was a gamechanger. Before then
| it was possible to argue that a '040 Amiga 4000 still held
| its own against a DX/33 or maybe even a DX/50, but not
| this.
|
| There were a lot of things that came together to kill the
| Amiga, mostly Commodore's mismanagement, mismarketing and
| complacency, but as the final blow to it being a viable
| computer with a future in the eyes of consumers, I feel
| like the DX2/66 was it. It would have killed the Mac too if
| Apple hadn't woken up to smell the coffee a few years prior
| and had Power Macs ready to go.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Graphics look amazing and the game looks fun. I get the feeling
| the player in the first video has played the game many many times
| lol.
|
| Are they still making those new Amiga systems implemented on an
| FPGA?
| ekianjo wrote:
| The Vampire series? Yes
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Dang. $750 USD is a lot. Do you own one of the products
| listed on their site? Is the Amiga scene fun?
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I love the imaginative, alt-history attention to detail: rather
| than a derivative clone of Wolfenstein or Doom, this looks like
| something The Bitmap Brothers might have produced in 1993 if
| they'd had access to another 30 years of community knowledge
| optimizing for the Amiga's great-for-2D but not-great-for-3D
| architecture.
| lttlrck wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. What a masterpiece.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Look, I don't want to talk down on this beautiful thing...but
| let's be honest: it's barely more than a doom reskin. It's _not
| trying_ to be, either.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I think the Bitmap Brothers mention is because the 2D
| graphics feel very Amiga-ish / BB-ish. When i read the
| comment i wondered "why the Bitmap Brothers reference?" but
| once i saw the screenshot i thought "ah, i see". Compare the
| textures/2D artwork of, say, Doom, Duke3D or Blood and then
| the sprites of something like Chaos Engine, Gods (even the
| DOS versions) or even some of their 90s PC games like Z and i
| think you'll see how the visual style of Grind is closer to
| that of Bitmap Brothers' games than to Doom/Duke3D/Blood/etc.
| whizzter wrote:
| It's on a Amiga 500, it has about 3 MIPS of performance or
| about 4x less than a 486sx25 that has about 12 (yes, 68k had
| a couple of extra registers).
|
| On top of that the Amiga500 graphics chip placed all graphics
| in bitplanes, that was a great move for just copying 2d
| graphics in the mid 80s with the help of simple hardware
| acceleration, but it really became a pain for anyone wanting
| to do 3d graphics.
|
| To call it a reskin is quite a disparagement of the amount of
| work they've probably had to put in to get in running
| decently (unless they figured out a very clever way to make
| the hardware do a fair chunk of the work for them, kudos
| either way).
|
| And as others have pointed out, it's that they've chosen a
| more "amiga-y" artstyle.
| nxobject wrote:
| My knowledge of the Amiga chipset is _very_ cursory, but
| peeking at the source code, there are some blitter routines
| that _look_ like they 're used for texture scaling (i.e.
| stretching + drawing vertical strips/walls.) I don't know
| whether that (alone) accounts for the significant speedups
| needed. A good comparison would be to any bottlenecks the
| original NeXT engine, which had the 68k, but didn't have
| any of the accelerators...
|
| https://github.com/Krzysiek-K/Dread-source-
| drop/blob/master/...
| whizzter wrote:
| Hmh, browsing a bit it seems that the Dreadtool part of
| the source seems to be some kind of editor built with
| Visual C++. The Dreadmake folders seems to have actual
| Amiga sources.
|
| https://github.com/Krzysiek-K/Dread-source-
| drop/blob/master/... (This feels reminiscent of the
| "generate-y-fillers" that ID did for Wolf3d)
|
| https://github.com/Krzysiek-K/Dread-source-
| drop/blob/master/... (Browsing this reminds me of Fabien
| Sanglard's Doom/Duke3d walkthroughs)
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > To call it a reskin is quite a disparagement
|
| No it isn't!
|
| You just outlined all the reasons that a Doom reskin on the
| Anus is impressive!
|
| > And as others have pointed out, it's that they've chosen
| a more "amiga-y" artstyle.
|
| That's great! I wasn't replying to that.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| in a Amiga 500! This is amazing!
| vidarh wrote:
| Consider that Doom is sometimes blamed for single-handedly
| causing the downfall of the Amiga's position in gaming
| because of how long it took to get even a half-decent Doom-
| like game for it, as a result of how badly mismatched the
| Amiga graphics chipset was for 3D graphics.
|
| That is why is this is impressive.
|
| The number of gamers who switched to PC's _just because of
| Doom_ was huge. After Doom _everything_ was measured against
| it for a long time. Even many diehard Amiga fans suddenly
| decided the game was up and switched.
|
| That your reaction is that it is "barely more than a Doom
| reskin" demonstrates why it is incredible.
|
| To the extent that if a "barely more than a Doom reskin" had
| been achieved near the time Doom came out, computing history
| might have looked quite different (though Commodore was so
| badly mismanaged at this point that they'd probably still
| have managed to mess things up even if they'd been handed
| this kind of reprieve on a silver platter, but one can dream)
| mock-possum wrote:
| It doesn't have any of DOOM's verticality though - this is
| far closer to a slightly upgraded Wolfenstein imo
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Playing Wolfenstein3D on a friends PC was one of the reasons I
| thought "It's over for the Amiga" [0]. When talking to
| Commodore management at conferences back then, they didn't want
| to see 3D coming [1] (For reference I had a A4000/40 Retina(Z3)
| around that time).
|
| So it is nice to see this :-)
|
| [0] Both demo scene coders [1] Funnily I was a Sega Saturn
| zealot around the time too, which was also 100% 2D focused and
| Sega didn't see 3D coming (Though I loved Panzer Dragoon, a 3D
| game squeezed out of 2D hardware, and Daytona was great too).
| And yes there was Starglider2 for the Amiga (Loved the space
| whales, was recently reminded of them when watching Ahsoka).
| wiz21c wrote:
| Sega didn't see 3D coming ? What about Virtua Racing (1992!)
| ?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Yes you're right, my wording wasn't exact. I've meant 3D
| taking over the home market (and arcade market) and killing
| 2D plattform games and RPGs. Sega was very successful
| running "3D" games on 2D hardware (that could scale
| sprites, like Outrun or Space Harrier). So they were aware
| of 3D from early on. But they've released the Saturn with a
| main 2D focus, squeezed out some 3D games (Panzer Dragoon,
| Nights into Dreams, Tomb Raider, Burning Rangers and some
| arcade conversions) - the takeover was going on, people
| realized, with Mario 64 and Wipeout for example - and then
| added 3D hardware to the Dreamcast. But if they had
| anticipated the taking over of 3D, the Saturn would have
| been the Dreamcast (or not, I think my first PC 3D card was
| a Voodoo and that was after the Saturn).
|
| The first 3D I remember having played was Major Havoc or I
| robot - so yes there were "real" 3D games in the market,
| but 3D completly took over the home market, except handheld
| like the Gameboy/Advanced/DS/... (I think the 2D revival
| came with the indy developer movement, but I'm not sure).
|
| Also see e.G. the transition from Bards Tale 3D (small
| window) to Dungeon Master 3D (main window, 3D interaction)
| and then Ultima Underworld 3D (all in, tilt, up/down) as an
| example of 3Dification of games and genres.
| anthk wrote:
| Sega had Scud Race. It had 3D mainly in arcades.
| mojo74 wrote:
| Ah scud race. I'll never forget finding that machine in a
| bowling alley arcade and noticing the coin feeder wasn't
| closed. Surreptitiously opening it to find a little
| button that could be pressed to automatically add a
| credit for free each time. That was one Saturday I'll
| never get back and I don't care.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Still quite inexact.
|
| Sega released Saturn as a full fledged, 3D focused
| hardware. A year before the PlayStation 1 was out.
|
| Some chronological refresher:
|
| Sega had already been successful in making arcade 3D
| games and were the first to effectively transition true
| 3D to the home markets with multiple early flagship
| releases such as Virtual Fighter, beautifully ported to
| the home console.
|
| The reason not many decent 3D games were shipped on
| Saturn was not down to the hardware capabilities or goal
| from sega to embrace expected 3D market demands. It was
| rather due to the horrific developer experience. It was
| so terribly difficult to program it, only those at sega
| were comfortable with it, if that.
|
| Saturn's hardware architecture complexity, having
| multiple CPUs, and other design aspects prove bad choice
| as it jeopardised 3rd party game developers productivity.
| Words were that most games shipped leveraging a single
| CPU given how obscure dual cpu programming was.
|
| Ironically Sega designed a more powerful machine than the
| PS1 and got it out a whole year earlier, yet games on PS1
| were significantly superior. All down to ease of
| development.
|
| Wipeout was an early game on PS1 and indeed among many
| other popular games sealed the fact home gaming would be
| 3D. But sega had already produced a full fledged 3D
| capable Saturn, they didn't wait to see wipeout in
| 1995/1996, or Mario 64 another 2 years later. Saturn was
| capable of running wipeout 2097, metal gear solid, grand
| tourismo, and other late PS1 games that pushed the ps1 to
| its limits. But it missed the momentum and studios were
| not anymore invested in the saturn. Its marketshare kept
| shrinking.
|
| what the Dreamcast got added was primarily developer
| friendly features, the rest was simply leaps forward in
| compute power, especially on the GPU. Bump mapping if I'm
| not mistaken was supported by the Dreamcast first among
| home consoles. It was not "added" 3D, for sega that was
| its 2nd generation of 3D focused hardware, also their 2nd
| attempt, both ultimately failed for different reasons.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The Saturn had two graphics chips VDP1/VDP2, where on one
| you could draw (distorted) sprites and on the other large
| planes e.g. for backgrounds [0].
|
| If you'd implemented a z-Buffer in software you could
| sort these sprites to draw them in the right sequence to
| use the distorted sprites as 4-corner polygons to render
| 3d models.
|
| The Dreamcast added a 3D GPU with the PowerVR2.
|
| [0] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-
| saturn/#graph...
| phire wrote:
| You are forgetting the Sega Model 1 and Sega Model 2
| arcade platforms. So many great 3D games (Virtua Fighter,
| Virtua Racing, Daytona USA)
|
| Sega's problem wasn't that it didn't see 3D coming. They
| did, despite the common claims on the internet, the
| Saturn was designed to be a 3D capable console, with
| dedicated 3D hardware.
|
| Sega's problem is that they bet on the wrong 3D
| technology. Like Sega's arcade systems. the Saturn was
| designed for quads, and could only do forwards texture
| mapping (which doesn't allow for UV coordinates).
|
| While the playstation went for triangles and inverse
| texture mapping. It turns out that was the correct
| direction, and the whole industry settled on that as a
| standard. All game engines and tooling would assume
| triangles.
|
| To make things worse, the Sega's hardware 3D
| implementation wasn't that good even at the techniques it
| was trying to implement.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "[...] and Daytona was great too"
|
| "You are forgetting [...] Daytona USA"
| broast wrote:
| As i understand 3D was considered an afterthought for the
| Sega Saturn, their 1995 flagship console, only adding a
| separate processor for 3d late into the design. This made
| the 3d capabilities of the Saturn very hard to program for.
| Razengan wrote:
| Loved the metallic palettes of the Bitmap Brothers! Speedball,
| Z (one of the best RTSs), Xenon (one of the best shoot-em-ups)
| kristopolous wrote:
| I know nothing about this. What's up with the vertical lines for
| color variations here? Is there some kind of hardware trick why
| that technique is used?
|
| The last time I wrote a 2.5D engine was over 25 years ago so
| please be gentle
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I suspect it's a way to dither with few colors, and possibly a
| way to render textures very quickly into the Amigas peculiar
| pixel format. One pixel is not a triplet or bytes, or even a
| single byte. One byte is 8 pixels!
|
| And that's for monochrome. (Pure black and pure white.)
|
| To have more colors, you add more of these "bit planes" on top
| of each other.
|
| So if you have say, 32 colors and want to update a single
| pixel, you have to write four bytes, changing only the _one_
| bit in every one of these four bytes.
|
| This is not very nice when you try to sweep textures on a
| 3D-ish mesh.
|
| (But very good for 2D graphics with large chunks bobbing up and
| down.)
| kristopolous wrote:
| ah that would explain why the rendering is a bunch of
| rectangles. Is this a classical vga mode (320x(either 200 or
| 240) x 256 color)?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| My guess without looking to closely, it's 32 colors,
| because that's max what the Amiga 500 could display at a
| time. Definitely 320x200 something.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The Amiga could display more colors than that with copper
| hacks though. Look at Shadow of the Beast.
| z303 wrote:
| I expect you are correct.
|
| The Amiga (except some early 1000s) also had a Extra Half
| Brite mode that has 6 bitplanes, 64 colours with the
| second 32 being half the brightness of the others.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode
|
| The extra data fetching does slow things down.
|
| https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102990#:~:text=And
| %20....
|
| The panel at the bottom looks like it uses the copper to
| have a different palette to the rest of the screen. That
| is a very common effect.
|
| https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-
| bea...
| vardump wrote:
| Other than using copper to change palette entries at
| desired scanlines, Amiga 500 can display 64 colors in EHB
| (Extra Half Brite) mode with 6 bitplanes. Since there are
| only 32 palette entries, the upper 32 colors are
| otherwise same, but half the brightness.
|
| And of course 4096 in HAM mode, but the mode has severe
| limitations and is completely impractical for textured
| 3D-games.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Well. Have a look at this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbWGAFIkA5E&list=PLRdmatu
| CYA...
|
| https://youtu.be/SXmGGiZ-ttY?t=39
| gpderetta wrote:
| Well, it is impressive for sure, but it on an emulated
| 060.
| vardump wrote:
| I'm speechless.
| vardump wrote:
| > ...32 colors and want to update a single pixel, you have to
| write four bytes...
|
| A small correction, you have to write 5 bytes (or 16-bit
| words, same performance).
|
| 4 bytes changed gets you only 16 colors.
| pornel wrote:
| It's probably doing two things:
|
| 1. simulates texture filtering and dithering hiding low
| resolution and low number of colors in textures, and
|
| 2. renders two or four columns at once.
|
| Amiga had planar graphics, which did not support setting
| individual pixels. To set a pixel you'd have to set appropriate
| bit in up to 6 bytes (64 colors max) scattered around in
| memory. Writing one byte modified one _bit_ of 8 adjacent
| pixels, which was terrible for textured 3D graphics.
| JD557 wrote:
| I was ondering about it as well, and it appears to be explained
| in detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00B3uE5FV8
|
| I think it's a similar technique to Sonic 3D's Intro FMV on the
| Genesis/Megadrive
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTawyLNoRhU).
|
| The original image is squashed vertically, so that you only
| compute half the pixels and then you stretch it back up. When
| you do this, you can't have the usual dither patters, so you
| end with something like this (unless you cheat shift every
| other line, like in Sonic 3D, but then you have dither patterns
| everywhere).
| bogantech wrote:
| A later video expands on this too: https://www.youtube.com/wa
| tch?v=y9fQw1W22i8&list=PL-3inz2kpS...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Did the Amiga 500 have better graphics than the PCs of the early
| 90's? Because those graphics look a bit better than Wolfenstein
| 3D.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Yeah they did at the time for sure. When the A500 was released
| PC games were generally CGA/EGA. The A500 was way ahead of its
| time, especially when you account for how much they cost.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What really impressed me is that I was born around the same
| time as the A500 but I remember playing PC games that looked
| worse than this, hahaha.
|
| Part of it is surely that I was using hand-me-down PCs and
| there was probably some time lag on the games that my dad
| would get through the sneaker-net.
|
| The art style is also really solid and modern which I'm sure
| helps hide some of the limitations.
| markmark wrote:
| Around the time I got my A500, my neighbour's dad bought a PC
| that ran California Games in CGA at about one frame per
| second. I'm sure there were much better PCs available, but it
| didn't impress us kids much. They _did_ have Leisure Suit
| Larry though...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes and no. It's complicated. For textured 3D games, even with
| 256 colors, the PCs with VGA were better. Wolfenstein catered
| to EGA, with 16 colors.
|
| For smooth frame synced 2D games (no lag, no jitterynes, no
| tearing) Amiga was hands down better, but those kinds of games
| were falling out of style in the early 90s.
| spitfire wrote:
| Wolfenstein was mode 13h 256 VGA colour.
| quadcore wrote:
| Certainly it was mode X rather.
| polpo wrote:
| Just looked at the Wolf3D source (https://github.com/id-
| Software/wolf3d/tree/master/WOLFSRC) - it uses VGA in
| unchained mode but still at 320x200. So not exactly Mode
| X, but "Mode Y".
| mysterydip wrote:
| You may be thinking of catacomb 3D, which was a predecessor
| and EGA
| HappyDaoDude wrote:
| For 2D stuff definitely, but that was because of some neat
| dedicated graphics processor and a fixed platform for
| developers to target. The Amiga range in that sense was WAY
| beyond others in terms of audio/visuals when it came out. In
| that sense it was closer to the home consoles than a typical
| PC.
|
| It led to the odd situation where you had PC's that had these
| killer CPU's but everything else about the system was holding
| them back. The Amiga had an average CPU (8Mhz 68K) but
| everything else was picking up a lot of slack.
|
| As for this example, this is exceptionally good for the Amiga.
| I don't recall there being anything even remotely close to this
| in its time. Hackers are just gonna optimise way beyond reason
| and I love it.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Are hackers optimizing? Or are they writing the same code
| they always did but now code-generation targeting these
| platforms is optimizing?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Optimization and hardware tricks
| alxmdev wrote:
| Tooling and code generation improvements no doubt help a
| lot, but IMO those improvements must be coupled with
| creative manual optimizations in order to get something
| like this out of a platform that was tailored for
| rectangular 2D bitmaps.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| It's extremely impressive in any case.
| tuukkah wrote:
| There isn't much the compiler can optimize on such a simple
| CPU as the m68k when the source is simple C or hand-
| optimized assembler code to begin with.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Contemporary compilers definitely do a lot of CPU-
| agnostic optimizations that ye olde compilers weren't
| capable of. The only new CPU features that fundamentally
| change this are vector instructions, and compilers still
| suck at autovectorization.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Contemporary compilers are "optimized" to optimize for
| superscalar, fully pipelined, out of order cpus with
| plenty of ram and caches. Literally nothing in common
| with a 68k. Also modern compilers wouldn't even know how
| to produce code for the amiga coprocessors.
|
| This engine very likely is written in hand optimized,
| clock-exact, asm.
| wk_end wrote:
| This was almost definitely written in asm, no code
| generation involved.
| tom_ wrote:
| They are optimizing, probably. Thanks to the internet,
| knowledge sharing is substantially simplified compared to
| the 1990s, and it's massively easier to find people to
| collaborate with. Hard to understate how difficult it was
| to find useful info back in the day.
|
| Additionally, anybody that grew up coding on the Amiga has
| had 30, 35 years to think about it since! - and they are
| probably still young enough (or, more accurately, probably
| not yet properly old enough...) that time has, for now,
| added more to their abilities than it has taken away.
|
| And: modern PCs are ridiculously fast! A table or routine
| that would have taken your Amiga days to produce, even
| assuming you'd have considered the idea feasible in the
| first place ("b-but - you'd need a temporary 512 MByte
| table for that!!") can be generated in 5 minutes with some
| python code on your 10 year old laptop.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| The IBM PC (and clones) at the time of launch of the Amiga
| 500, had at best an 80286 at 6 to 12Mhz . I would call it
| roughly equivalent CPU with the 68000 at 8Mhz (16 bit
| segmented addressing vs 16/32bit hybrid with planar ram
| addressing)
| ekianjo wrote:
| Until Wing Commander came out, mostly yes.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The Amiga really struggled to handle Wolfenstein/Doom clones
| due to the layout of it's video memory making if even harder
| for the already-slow CPU. The chips that made it great at 2D
| games held it back at 3D.
|
| This new engine is an absolute masterpiece of Amiga coding. The
| many mid-90s attempts to do similar things tended to need more
| powerful Amigas (at least an A1200, preferably with an 030 or
| better accelerator card and extra RAM) for less impressive
| results.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| more info:
| http://oldwww.nvg.ntnu.no/amiga/amigafaq/AmigaFAQ_16.html
| bitwize wrote:
| The Amiga smoked PCs when it came out. PCs didn't really come
| into their own until the 486 became commonplace, but once it
| did the Amiga was struggling to keep up, games-wise. For
| example, the PC port of Mortal Kombat was the most arcade-
| accurate home port of any system. The Amiga port was nearly,
| but not quite, as good.
| simne wrote:
| Yes and no. PCs from beginning was very simple business
| machines, for accounting, but later benefited from free market
| and cheap clones.
|
| As for me, VGA was wonder, I now think from marketing
| considerations, PCs way was to make Super-EGA, with little
| colors, but high resolution. But, sometimes wonders happen.
|
| Amigas, or to be more exact, Commodore computers, from
| beginning made as home computers, with decent integrated
| graphics and sound.
|
| Unfortunately, Amiga parent company was very aggressive against
| clones, and from what I hear, was not effectively managed (or
| may be, just tried to made too complex architecture). So after
| some time, initial superiority was lost, and PCs not just
| dominated market, but also, once become better technically
| (because of constant competition on free market).
|
| Approx after 1987-middle 1990s, Amiga become technically lagged
| behind forever, then parent company bankrupt and now, each
| year, Amigas become more history artifacts.
| badpun wrote:
| Notice the large black borders around the gameplay area. That's
| due to hardware being too weak to render the game on entire
| screen.
| aidos wrote:
| This is not how I remember games on the Amiga. Having said that,
| I loved the games and graphics on the Amiga. It just felt like a
| beautiful visual experience.
| pornel wrote:
| Back in the day Cytadela (Citadel) has been the first and
| probably the only Wolfenstein clone supporting Amiga 500:
|
| https://youtu.be/BpiqAN8URAU?t=376
| nathell wrote:
| There was also Ubek, but it required a 68020.
|
| https://www.ppa.pl/gry/ubek.html
| cyberax wrote:
| Want something to blow your mind?
|
| Here is a 3D FPS on ZX-Spectrum:
| https://youtu.be/tiV8ZPmmoJI?t=106 or
| https://youtu.be/3v7cFGneuaw?t=66
|
| This is running on a computer with a 3.5MHz CPU, no hardware
| multiplication, and only 48K of RAM.
| Findecanor wrote:
| "Just" a demo with no enemies, but on a Commodore 128:
| https://youtu.be/1tDflgqJlTw
| ruk_booze wrote:
| It is originally from the C64 demo "Andropolis" by Booze
| Design and Instinct. Coded by Andreas Larsson, the guy/genius
| who ported Eye of the Beholder to the C64.
|
| Here is the same thing in turbo mode on an Ultimate 64:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/fF2IXTwWDPQ?si=ds5-5Kwm95Zj2vtf
|
| And with no vsync:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/hvmNnwz7ENQ?si=mDVQLWx3T8hnrbuC
| pbj1968 wrote:
| Once people know something is possible with video games, they
| tend to imitate it fairly well across platforms. I like to use
| Street Fighter 2 as an example... good ports on PCE, SNES,
| Genesis.. and surprisingly decent bootlegs on NES and others.
| But until it hit arcades, there was nothing else like it.
| bgeeek wrote:
| No, it's a 128. The obvious giveaway being the audio.
| malfist wrote:
| This is different than Grindr, a couch co-op shooter
| sgt wrote:
| Shoot-em in.
| lizardking wrote:
| Reddit is that way, sir
| bartread wrote:
| Oooooooookay, so I'm not about to do this down, because I think
| it's awesome, but I do think it's time for a little more up-front
| transparency here.
|
| When I clicked through and hit play on the first video I braced
| myself for the worst framerate in human history and/or a tiny
| viewport, and so my jaw briefly dropped when I was greeted with
| neither of those. The game is basically fullscreen and runs
| great: a perfectly respectable (for the time - I know a lot of
| you will moan about games that don't run at a constant 60fps but,
| man, maybe you don't know what it was like back then) 25 - 30fps,
| and a frankly amazing framerate for the Amiga. Plenty of 2D games
| couldn't have reliably held that and just forget it for any kind
| of 3D.
|
| Then my rational mind kicked in with, "There's no effin way
| that's running on an A500 with a stock 68k CPU running at
| 7.16/7.09MHz."
|
| And, sadly, I'm right: there is no effin way. The footage was
| recorded from an A1200 with a stock 68020 running at 14MHz. The
| graphics are OCS compatible, and I've no doubt the engine is
| caning the OCS blitter to within an inch of its life, so it looks
| exactly the same as it would on an A500, but you ain't getting
| that kind of framerate without more horsies than the A500's 68k
| can supply.
|
| With that being said, the game runs at 10 - 12 fps on a stock
| A500 with 1MB RAM (512K chip + 512K fast, so you need the 1.3
| ROMs and the Fatter Agnus), which is still incredibly impressive.
| For a lot of solid polygon 3D games back in the day - think
| F/A-18 Interceptor, F-19 Stealth Fighter, and even games like
| Starglider 2 - drops to single digit framerates if not exactly
| the norm, were certainly commonplace (I remember F-19 being
| particularly bad for this). I seem to remember the Amiga version
| of Elite held a pretty decent framerate but, to be fair, the
| polygon count was very low, and it had a pretty small viewport.
| By comparison with these games, the Grind visuals, at 10 - 12
| fps, on a bog standard A500 with an absolutely era appropriate
| amount of memory are nothing short of extraordinary.
|
| If, in 1990 - 1993, or even after I'd first played DOOM on a
| mate's dad's 486SX in summer 1994, you'd shown me Grind running
| on my Amiga 500 at 10 - 12 FPS I would probably have fainted or
| jizzed myself or something equally ridiculous. It would have
| literally blown my mind.
|
| Incredible work.
|
| EDIT: Is it me or is the shotgun sound effect a slightly edited
| version of the DOOM shotgun sound effect? Not complaining,
| because it's an awesome sound, but just wondering if others are
| hearing the same thing I am.
| snvzz wrote:
| >a stock A500 with 1MB RAM (512K chip + 512K fast)
|
| Not Fast RAM, but Slow RAM.
|
| Fast RAM is exclusive to the CPU. On A500, it needs to be on
| the CPU socket, or on the left expansion port.
|
| Trapdoor RAM, as in the common 512K expansion, can only be Slow
| or Chip.
|
| Slow because the chipset can block access to it, but can't
| access it itself.
|
| Chip on newer A500 boards with ECS Agnus, after a small
| motherboard jumper mod.
| prvc wrote:
| >There's no effin way that's running on an A500 with a stock
| 68k CPU running at 7.16/7.09MHz.
|
| Could you be specific about the envelope math used to arrive at
| this conclusion? What are the essential bottlenecks?
| DennisL123 wrote:
| In the nineties this would have saved the entire platform.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Nah, might have helped give it a bit more life for another year
| or two, but even if the Amiga (and Commodore) survived the era
| of Doom (386/486s), it was never going to survive the arrival
| of Quake and Pentiums, let alone the arrival of GPUs that was
| to follow shortly after.
| vidarh wrote:
| The thing is, Commodore might have been as little as months
| away from getting the next gen chipset to production if
| they'd had just a bit better sales through '92 and '93. They
| were producing samples '92 onwards but struggled to afford
| iterations.
|
| They were mismanaged enough that they might well have failed
| to leverage that and just failed a year or two later as you
| said, and it might very well be that even the best case of
| completing AAA[1] would just have bought them another extra
| couple of years.
|
| But Commodore had faced crunches like that several times and
| survived and bounced back massively. So who knows what things
| might look like if AAA had gone to market (with chunky
| graphics modes, and massively increased memory bandwidth) and
| bought them enough sales and by extension time to complete
| the next-iteration - Hombre[2] - as well.
|
| Though Hombre was based on PA RISC, so might well have ended
| up being the death-knell instead a bit later. Though their
| "backwards compatibility" story for it was based on options
| of either a "classic Amiga on a chip" or emulation, so maybe
| they'd have gotten to a sufficiently CPU agnostic position to
| be able to make further architecture switches survivable.
|
| It's fun to speculate.
|
| I'm a bit of two minds about it - I'd have loved the Amiga to
| have survived longer - I still miss it -, but I'm unsure if
| I'd have liked the direction Commodore would have taken it in
| with Hombre (which was being designed to also run Windows
| NT... _Shudder_ ). It's easier to have nostalgia when later
| iterations haven't ruined the original experience...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture
| _ch...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
| bemmu wrote:
| It's wild to me that now people are making something like this
| just for fun, while if this had actually been released at the
| time it would have been a best-selling game.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| getting Doom vibes...
|
| Looks nice GG
| simne wrote:
| From PC perspective, very unusual view, when control panel is
| rendered much better than game itself :)
|
| - Looks like Mona Lisa paint in 8 bit, but it's frame is 16 bit.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| I'm sure it looks miles better with a CRT
| dansalvato wrote:
| Fellow Amiga game dev here. The Amiga dev scene is alive and
| well, and I feel like these past five years especially, we've
| seen some mindblowing stuff on the platform.
|
| If you haven't seen any recent Amiga demoscene entries, you're in
| for a treat. I'm tempted to share a whole list of demos, but here
| is a particularly amazing one released earlier this year that
| runs on a stock A500: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jciCr8zEhw
| postmodest wrote:
| Are people doing this on vintage hardware or new hardware? (Or
| emulation?)
| qingcharles wrote:
| If I was doing it (as an ex demo coder) I would do as much as
| I could in emulator to make my life easier and then test it
| on the hardware and hope for the best. Demo coding is one of
| those annoying things where real hardware is absolutely
| essential because you are often doing things which aren't
| properly emulated.
|
| This demo didn't impress me that much, I was actually hoping
| for more. Maybe I've just forgotten how underpowered the
| Amiga OCS was for things like this? Second Reality by Future
| Crew on the PC is still my #1.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The Amiga 500 is _extremely_ well emulated by now though.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| A 33 MHz 486 CPU (the recommended spec for Second Reality
| to run smoothly) is MUCH more powerful than the 7 MHz 68000
| of the A500... It's not just nearly 5 times faster, the 486
| is way more cycle efficient, not to mention having a nice
| byte-addressable bitmap screen to draw into (vs 2-6
| separate bitplanes).
|
| So yeah you forgot how underpowered OCS Amigas are :)
| Narishma wrote:
| That's just the CPU though. The Amiga has a bunch of
| custom chips for doing things you would have to do on the
| CPU in a PC.
| Flow wrote:
| For this Amiga demo it's mostly just the sound mixing the
| hardware handles. On a PC, mixing a couple of sound
| channels is pretty quick.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| The Amiga hardware doesn't really help much with 3D
| effects, which the demo is loaded with. Audio is a big
| help for a 68000 but a 486 can mix 8 PCM channels and not
| even notice.
| dansalvato wrote:
| I believe a number of the devs who have been around for
| decades are still writing actual code with their preferred
| tools that run on Amiga. But I wouldn't be surprised if even
| there, most of the coding is being done in emulator, because
| the modern workflow is so much snappier that way.
|
| However, the cross-platform build stack has gotten
| comprehensive, and straight modern hardware has become the
| method of choice for a lot of devs (including myself). There
| is an "Amiga Assembly" extension for VS Code which does a ton
| of heavy lifting for you, including setting up the build
| tools, and even grabbing a fork of the emulator that has DAP
| support so you can use VS Code's built-in debugger.
|
| I personally use Neovim and a couple plugins for syntax
| highlighting and DAP support. As part of my build process, I
| run Python scripts which convert images and SFX to Amiga-
| friendly formats and assemble them into a custom binary file.
| I can't imagine how long that would have taken me to set up
| in an Amiga-only environment--Python is just too convenient.
|
| I think a lot of what you see possible on Amiga today is
| thanks to modern tools allowing for very rapid iteration as
| well as some crazy preprocessing for effects that depend on
| lookup tables, etc.
| livrem wrote:
| FreePascal still has official support for creating Amiga
| binaries. I never tried it since I have no idea about how
| Amiga development works in general, but I tried FreePascal
| a bit for other systems and it seems pretty good
| (underrated?) (both the language and the compiler; fast,
| low on bloat, mostly safe memory, huge standard library).
| jonahx wrote:
| So beautiful.
|
| To be clear, this is a trailer/demo and not an actual game you
| can play?
| popmilo2 wrote:
| This is a fully playable game on real hw :)
| tetris11 wrote:
| That while 8 main demo was the whole game. I've not seen any
| other gameplay videos for it.
| dansalvato wrote:
| Correct, the demo I linked is a non-interactive audiovisual
| demo that is designed to show off the leet coding and
| artistic skills of the team. ;) The OP is a fully-playable
| game, though.
|
| When designing a game, you probably have to code a game
| engine that has certain capabilities and certain restrictions
| that persist through the entire game. But for these demos,
| you can write an entire isolated program that runs one
| 15-second visual effect before flushing it out and loading
| something totally different for the next effect. The effects
| are also usually designed with a lot of tricks that make them
| inflexible (like preprocessed data tables) and usually also
| take up every CPU cycle available, leaving none for stuff
| like game logic.
| wernsey wrote:
| Any pointers on getting started?
|
| I was fascinated by the Amiga when I was young, but they
| weren't widely available in my country.
|
| Lately I've had an itch to do some retro programming work and
| was looking at the Amiga specifically. I tried Aztec C natively
| in UAE and VBCC as a cross-compiler, and got some command-line
| and hello world Intuition programs working.
|
| But going beyond that has proven somewhat difficult.
| Documentation seems to be scattered all over the internet. I
| found a bunch of books on archive.org, but they mostly seem to
| focus on Intuition applications or beginner programmers.
| quincunx wrote:
| I don't think you can follow the path originally trodden
| (competing on asmone 68K/hw with your fellow local coders,
| exchanging snippets of hw reg info and source) however
| there's a terrific short series of videos on youtube you
| might consider:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@WeijuWu
|
| Wei-ju Wu lays out how to code directly on the hardware in an
| accessible manner and, importantly, from C, instead of 68K,
| with lots of examples. Then, if (or rather: when) you have
| to, you can always step down a level into 68K assembly to get
| better performance.
| ilvez wrote:
| This is truly amazing. I've always adored demoscene, but not
| done anything other than consume, so I would appreciate more of
| those demos here if you can share some highlights of recent
| times.
| dansalvato wrote:
| Certainly! Here are some of my personal favorites from recent
| years. These all run on a stock A500 (with the ubiquitous
| trapdoor memory expansion).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wpXOsEm7M0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OzX7plbeY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIV4AhfugIs
| scrame wrote:
| man, I remember the "chunky vs planar" usenet megathreads when
| DOOM came out, amazing that it's still producing results 30 years
| later. I miss my old A500, but not slip/ppp, x/y/zmodem downloads
| and the terrifying floppy checksum errors.
| blue1 wrote:
| In the last years I remember also using ftp (and its now-
| forgotten relative fsp)
| dalant979 wrote:
| You can find great videos documenting development of the "Dread"
| engine (which this game is based on) here:
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-3inz2kpSUPGYZwBUAbJjaj-...
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I bought an Amiga 500 about 10 months ago. Haven't touched one
| since way back when (89-90?).
|
| If you are considering doing the same, I recommend going to
| YouTube and look up two keywords: PiStorm and FS-UAE. These two
| allow me to prepp a hard-disk image in emulation on my PC,
| transfer the image to a rPi inside the Amiga and mount it. My
| Amiga 500 now boots a workbench with all the things I was looking
| for.
|
| I also bought a new case and keys, because the Amiga was very
| yellowed. And a new power supply because the old one looks like
| it wanna burn my house down
| darkwater wrote:
| I wonder how many people working on the Amiga scene were not even
| born when Amiga was in its best days.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| Judging from Amiga retro channels on youtube, they all look
| like GenX-ers to me. I suspect nostalgia drives you to this,
| not because these are particularly interresting machines today.
| (shots fired, I know)
| royjacobs wrote:
| This is true for the demoscene in general, as well. Not
| completely, thankfully, but it seems like that it is becoming
| even more niche than it already was.
| beezlewax wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of Quake stylistically. A series that
| took a wrong turn after the first one.
|
| More sequels in the style of the first one would have been
| amazing.
|
| The visuals here though are lovely. Well done to the team
| junon wrote:
| Wow this is beautiful. The artwork rivals even modern retro
| games.
| stuaxo wrote:
| The artwork really works with the engine - everything looks a bit
| grimy and muddy which means the vertical stripes you get as part
| of the implementation fit in really well.
| skywal_l wrote:
| The sound, animation and gameplay is also great. I love the
| sound of the machine gun starting and stopping when the
| character get in the line of sight of the enemy. Great
| attention to detail.
|
| I kind of wish they port it to PC !
| bluedays wrote:
| Not to be confused with grindr.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| I'm assuming this game would have worked in the original console.
|
| Imagine if this game was released back then. It would absolutely
| blow everyone's mind.
|
| Now think what's possible on a PS5, someone 30 years from now
| will create an awesome retro game for it
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