[HN Gopher] Grind - An epic first person shooter for Amiga 500 g...
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Grind - An epic first person shooter for Amiga 500 gets another
playable tease
Author : ibobev
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-07-14 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indieretronews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indieretronews.com)
| basementcat wrote:
| Minimum requirement is an Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM (512 kB chip
| ram).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Pure witchcraft. Maybe this is how the singularity is alpha
| testing on innocent targets? Had I seen this back in the day it
| would have been downright scary. Now, it's still surreal.
| basementcat wrote:
| I feel like this type of technical achievement is difficult
| to appreciate without some understanding of the underlying
| hardware. For example, those of us who had an Amiga many
| years ago might stare dumbfounded and gasp in bewilderment as
| we try to understand how this was made to work on a 7.14 MHz
| 16 bit machine with half the memory only available to the CPU
| every other clock cycle. Is it possible to help others
| appreciate this technical achievement or is this "art form"
| destined to die out in a few years?
| jailbirdBD wrote:
| The capture is from an A1200 with fastram, but A500 with 1 MB
| also provides a playable experience at roughly 10-12fps. Which
| is still faster on A500 than Alien Breed 3D on a stock A1200,
| and at more or less 4x the screen size.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Could this have been possible almost 5 years before Wolfenstein
| 3D? Wolfenstein was a huge technical achievement!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| This gives me goosebumps.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Unlike Wolfenstein, it even has shadows and a sky!
| tom_ wrote:
| Possibly not without modern hardware to develop on!
|
| (We also don't seem to have been given any info about which
| system the video was recorded from. It's possible it was
| recorded from an A1200, maybe even likely in order to show the
| game looking its best. The performance might be worse enough on
| a genuine OCS Amiga that you wouldn't actually want to play it,
| impressive though it might be that it does actually run in some
| form. Similar to Wing Commander or Frontier: Elite II.)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You could put a VGA (or MCGA for that matter) card in a 386 in
| 1987, the same year the Amiga 500 came out. It would have set
| you back a lot more than an Amiga 500 though.
|
| [edit]
|
| The PS/2 Model 80 shipped in June of 1987 and AFAICT exceeded
| the minimum requirements for Wolfenstein 3D.
|
| 1: Compaq Deskpro 386 was launched in Q4 1986 and the first
| PS/2 with a VGA card shipped in Q2 1987. I don't know when the
| first VGA cards were sold on their own, but nothing was to stop
| you from swapping the card from a PS/2 to a Deskpro.
| gmueckl wrote:
| The hardware is evidently capable of running all of this.
| However, I believe that the algorithmic side wasn't fully
| fleshed out at that time. I'm not going to sift through old
| computer graphics papers, but the Amiga 500 came out at a time
| when real time 3D was still making baby steps, more or less. It
| just took a few more years until the academic research was put
| together into engines that could render nicely textured 3D
| environments on home computers.
|
| By the time that happened, there was no more economic incentive
| to optimize super hard for a platform that was already dying.
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(page generated 2024-07-14 23:01 UTC)