NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/programmer/6070

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 16.8 KB | 383 lines

Path: news.vol.it!news
From: [e-mail] (Fabio Bizzetti)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer,comp.sys.amiga.games,alt.sys.amiga.demos,comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: AB3D II beats Quake....
Date: 22 Mar 1996 00:55:45 GMT
Organization: Video On Line
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <00000305748693794383@BIRDLAND>
NNTP-Posting-Host: molcl15.vol.it
X-Newsreader: THOR 2.22 (Amiga;TCP/IP)


> bizzetti%mbox.vol.it@INTERNET wrote :

>>
>>
>>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Fabio
>>>Bizzetti) writes:
>>>>
>>>> >They're suppose to make a GFXcard version, or? If thats the case, the
>>>> >chipmem problem  will be gone :-)
>>>>
>>>> Maybe for you pal, not for the many A1200 owners.
>>>>
>>
>>>Until the Picasso III or IV or whatever version comes out for the 1200 (as
>>>they plan....)
>>
>>
>> But why should I spend, say, 500 US$ for a Gfx Board when 95% of Amiga
>> games users will not buy it? I am a professional developer, frustrated of
>> the Amiga games market.

>Because, in no relation to games, you will have a MUCH BETTER system with
>some  nice resolution at a decent speed... :) Add a 17-inch monitor, work in
>a
>800x600 WB with a nice 64000 color background, have SEVERAL editor windows
>open with all the sources you need, without getting chaos on the WB... :)
>And if you already HAVE it... well, then youz might SUPPORT it too... :)

Hey! ;) no need to say this to me, I've every expansion that can be fitted
into my A1200 (including 68060 and 16Mb ram). What I tryed to show is the
"mentality" of many of the game users.
If we trust that Amiga games market go up because someone release the Picasso
for A1200, we're wrong: common game buyers will not buy the gfx board just
because they didn't get it in the pack when they bought the A1200. :(


>>
>> We need a standard Amiga platform, or g'bye Amiga. 8-((((
>>
>> I heard that AT is going to make the biggest error about the Amiga in its
>> history: the one that IMO killed the A1200/CD32 games market.
>> They said (already about the project Walker, and mostly about PowerAmiga):
>> "no hardware banging anymore, *everything* will have to be done using the
>> OS".

>I think the "Walker" is a really FINE step... no longer a "keyboard" computer

I fully agree, and I also like a lot the way it looks (after some doubts). :)

>(what was in MY opinion the biggest mistake by Commodore... sticking so long
>with keyboard computers... we would not have all that problems about sticking
> GFX Boards to A1200, otherwise...) and especially the slot, that, if i
>remember right shall be able to put Zorro III Boards to it later...

Yes.

>About "no hardware banging", that surely is, because Power Amigas might no
>longer be AGA compatible (i do not know). But if they are not longer AGA
>compatible, that of course would be a problem for HW banging... grin... and
>AGA compatibility would make a system EXPANSIVE (why do A1200 and A4000T cost
> so much ? I assume without AGA they could be made much cheaper... look at
>VGA  hardware on PC...)

This way the PowerAmiga would become a PC,with just a different (and lame) cpu.
This would mean that the PowerAmiga will not be interesting for games
developers, that will prefer to not risk their money and just code for PC
instead. Here we're talking about people that have to mantain theirself and
some also a family, or die of hunger. I got 1549 UKP for more than 1 year of
fulltime work for VK.
Jag Σr tjugoett σr gammal, and fucking angry to not have money just because
I supported a dead machine hoping that AT would have saved it, while they now
decided to transform it into a PC clone.

Because of AT, there'll be no games market for the PowerAmiga, exactly as for
the Mac, but with the difference that PAmiga will not have the small eredity
that instead PMac got from Mac. This is about games. ( = no games anymore ).
So we can say the PowerAmiga will be an utilities-only computer instead.
But this is not true also: A BeBox will be probably cheaper, with the same
versatility and much more power (and multiprocessing capability).
So, the PowerAmiga borns dead IMO, unless it keeps not only the name of the
Amiga, but also its phylosophy.
Escom wanna just sell PC's also to the most "fanatic" Amiga owners, they found
how to do it: making a PC, with a IBM CPU (PowerPC, laaaaame) and a fake AmyOS.
But it's *not* an Amiga, it's a PC with more IBM components and phylosophy
than the one you can find in a Pentium.

Definitively, for the professional games developer, better to code for a crap
Pentium than for a dead Power"Amiga". For the utilities developer: much better
a BeBox than a PowerAmiga.


Hopefully, Escom will not exploit the glorious name of the Amiga to sell their
PC, I hope they just get financial problems and sell Commodore and Amiga to
someone with better intentions.

The Walker will be the last Amiga: the rest is only PC with the label "Amiga",
and no hardware or phylosophy in common with the real Amiga.

This is my analysis, and I've never been known to be pessimistic about the
Amiga future (I'm still here, while thosands left the Amiga).

>Another thing is ... to have a chance, Power Amigas should fit to a Power PC
>Reference Platform sort of thing... there Custom Chips are not in... PCI is
>in... but to tell you... PowerAmiga will HAVE a custom chipset, AFAIK... but
>of course AT wants people to code "nice" from the beginning, will make future
> expansion more easy (but remember, as AGA was introduced, there was the same
> talk... and people found out... :) )

Nope, people didn't really find out. Commodore UK helped them. And, in a
PowerAmiga with no copper, you can't neither disassemble OS copperlists..

>BTW, another argument ? Do you know PSX ? It has really fast games, AND it
>has  a OS... games are coded with OS calls... why shouldn't this work on
>Amiga ?

I know PSX, and its case is an exception:
1) The "OS" is game specific, from the start to the end.
2) The "OS" is just "devices" to handle the hardware (PSX will be expanded),
   and it allows compatibility in case of simple registers remapping, etc..
3) The PSX is based on texturemapped polygons, a thing that you can find also
   in OpenGL. All the other game applications that come to my mind (scroll,
   parallax, 2D/3D sprites, copper, .....) cannot be made with a generic OS.
4) PSX is not a multitasking system, and thus the OS can be extremely good
   when it comes to handle custom chips. (no layer.library, no intuition.lib)

PlayStation's OS is *custom made* for PSX hardware, not for generic GfxBoards.
You dont have the limited standard range of features that all the very
different GfxBoards can give to the Amiga (only 8 bit chunky is standard).
You know, PSX is much more than this, and they know that any new PSX model
will still have these features and more..
PSX's OS do not assume you can have *only* a 8bit chunky screen on all PSX.

>(Assuming a major rework of all game relative parts of the Amiga OS... and
>optimization for PowerPC...)

I dont believe in optimizations made by people that have to make an entire OS..
It's not realistic. Just watch "WritePixel" function, it makes lotsa MULs
and if I recall also a DIV (!!!!) when it would have been easy to make a
look up table in a structure of the screen/window to plot quickly the pixel in
the rastport.
But, ofcourse, they said "the 680x0 is too slow", not "we aren't skilled".

:(

>> The truth is that they have no capacity to make new innovative custom
>> chips, and this means *the death of the Amiga* to me, expecially about
>> games.

>According to what i heard, the new custom chips will be made by a company
>outside AT...

I heard from CeBit that they will use only standard PC chips.

>>
>> If the great A1000, A500 and A2000 had normal chips, who would have bought
>> them and loved them as we did? They had *custom* chips, the OS of the Amiga
>> has been only a secondary quality in the past, and now it seems good only
>> because we compare it to the current custom chips, and only the OS remains
>> *acceptable* (dont tell me that Unix sucks).

>Well, if they had someting similar like a Cybervision Board inside (what you
>call "normal chips" ??? :))) )

NormalGfxChip = GfxChip made to support GUIs, Operative Systems. Thus:
No copper. No PAL/NTSC modes. No coprocessors to draw quickly 3D gfx.
No 2D sprites. No 3D sprites. No flexibility in bpldata pointers. No scroll.
No parallax. No multiple playfields. No raster tricks (such as scale/rotation).

What is a custom GfxChip? One made by clever people for clever programmers.
Examples: PlayStation, 3DO-M2, AmigaOCS (lotsa years ago), C64's VicII,
Atari800..

>they would have been much faster as to GFX...
>of course Trio S3 was not around in A500 times... okay... .) )

Trio S3 is what I call a "standard chip" (read above definition). Ofcourse it's
an impressively fast chip, that can allow high resolution in static screens,
like for a GUI. It has a "blitter" to copy windows, sometimes to scale GUI
images, not for games. And so on..

>>
>> Why should *I* (and the whole games developers/users) buy an Amiga just for
>> its OS? If things will go this way, the Amiga will not exist anymore, it
>> will be an anonymous computer with only a glorious name from the past.

>Well... you can't continue with "games for A1200 2 MB RAM". This machine is
>just too low powered.

Surely 14Mhz is the "exception" today, although it still deserves support.

>And if you have to buy a new machine anyways, why
>bothering about HOW you code the things (if it will work different anyways...
> with new custom chips or OS calls... it will look different than AGA
>coding...)

Because, any generic developer, having to learn a new machine from zero,
will prefer to invest this sacrifices for a PC, not for the same PC called
"born to be a dead market" PowerAmiga.

I prefer the "crap and expensive" AAA than the best of the standard gfxchips.

>>
>> And, AT, stop saying that custom chips aren't worth to be made anymore, if
>> only PlayStation had a KEYBOARD, an Unix OS, and an HardDisk, it would be
>> the best *computer* around.

>BTW, as i said... PSX uses *ALL OS coding* NO HW bashing !!!

As I said before:
PlayStation's OS is *custom made* for PSX hardware, not for generic GfxBoards.
You dont have the limited standard range of features that all the very
different GfxBoards can give to the Amiga (only 8 bit chunky is standard).
You know, PSX is much more than this, and they know that any new PSX model
will still have these features and more..
PSX's OS do not assume you can have *only* a 8bit chunky screen on all PSX.

Trust me: AT/Escom doesn't understand anything about games programming.
They will discover soon though, sooner than Commodore needed.

>Ah, and if you want a PSX + Unix OS, why are you against OS coding on Amiga ?

Come on.. I meant "Unix" for utilities, not for games.
When I write a development utility, it uses 100% AmigaOS, *no kind* of trick.
But when I write a game, I allocate legally all the resources and then forget
what a standard generic OS is, and make custom made routines for custom chips,
for a custom game. Not for just another Doom.
When we'll run out of Dooms and Descents, when we'll start pseudo-RayTracing,
any standard chipset will be back good for wordprocessing.
Is it better to know now, and let the PowerAmiga have a real future, or not?

>Unix+X Window coding is the NIGHTMARE of all people who like HW basing...

But it's cool for utilities programming. Games are *totally* different matter.

>you  can't access the HW directly in ANY WAY... you not even can access the
>Video  Hardware directly !!!

OS calls is the only and best way to interface any hardware, for utilities.

But games are not utilities.

>> I am sick of C/C++ programmers, with the title of "engineer", that invade
>> fields that they dont understand at all. They see that the utilities are
>> better made using the OS (and I fully agree), and bother that also the
>> games have to be done this way. They dont neither *imagine* what's games
>> programming, besides.. Civilization or SimCity that are "utilities" more
>> than games.

>:))) Well, i fear you think i am such a kind of person...

No ;) You're surely open-mind, since you're a kind of bridge between the 2
worlds (RTG). :)

>i am NOT :)

Jag tror pσ dig :) dont worry pal, no need to prove it furtherly.

> I am ASM/C programmer and think that C++ is waste of processing time :)

Also C is IMHO. O:)
I write my utilities in HLA, a kind of VERY-CISC Assembly language. 8)
Although for games RISC programming fits my mind more. (AND BTW: PowerPC is
not a RISC; it's a crap IBM mass of useless circuits fitted in a chip). :)

>> I am sick of people that drool behind PC's shits as Doom, and then realize
>> (totally wrong) that since you can do Doom with RTG.library, you can do any
>> other 3D game that way. I am sick of managers that put their ignorance at
>> the service of users and developers.

>Well... you can do 3D stuff better with it anyways than with slow AGA :)

Hmm!!!!!
Because today they all make Doom, the most "hardware not dependent" programming
method ever existed. It's temporary though. My game VR takes advantages from
AGA as much as from VGA. But with a simple custom hardware, I could speed up
it a lot of times (not that now it's slow.. :), and allow more RayTracing style
effects. Then go and convert it for PentiumPro 250Mhz and TrioS3 if you can ;)

But it seems that today, besides the dumb&money PC market, only consoles makers
invest in custom hardware, with excellent results.
The PSX with CDROM and 4Mb Ram costs less than A1200 with floppy and 2Mb SLOW
ram!

>>
>> Patience has a limit..

>Well, yes... i do not want to insult in any ways...

Why should you m8? |~(

;)

Dont forget I am Sicilian, I have my gun also when I go to the bathroom. =;^)
Joking,the only gun I've can't be removed (only with an undesidered operation).

:D

>i want to argument...
>about SOME things i know about... i do not know about 2D games and that
>stuff,

They're the future: 2D+Z = 3D. Texture mapping is only a parenthesys.
Let's look beyond today's needs, this is what we need. The alternative is to
live in the shadow of the worst hardware ever immagined: the PC.

>OK, but i think i know about the others, and about GFX Board
>coding..

Sure you do.

>have a  look at it before you say it is bad... and have a look on
>some PC demos maybe

I know many are great, on a Pentium.
But they end to be great when you can't do it on the simplest chunky based
screen with no modulo and scroll and sprites and raster effects and copper.
Is really the limit what we know today?

>(okay, i like Amiga demos better, too, but they do some things people say
>would only be possible with custom chips...)

I am not among this people. ;)

What I am talking about can't be done neither on AGA, we need something *new*
and, "sorry", custom.

>Steffen Haeuser

Think about what I said; I've no doubts about this topic.

:(

If enough people want to support me, I propose now, before it's too late, to
mass-email Amiga Technologies to make them understand how short-sighted they're
planning the PowerAmiga hardware, and to reconsider their policy about it all.
A comprimize would be to get PlayStation or, better, 3DO-M2 chipset in license,
accepting the deny to not produce low-end machines (leaving this right only to
3DO) but only mid and high end computers, compatible with 3DO-M2 games but
with also AmigaOS to get the best from the two worlds, for multimedia and video
applications.
It's possible, and many 3DO's designers previously created the Amiga, so I
believe they wouldn't oppose to this joint-venture. Moreover, as far as I know
3DO-M2 uses PowerPC too.
To have a totally new chipset not AGA compatible is fine, but standard crap is
short-sighting like IBM has been in the past.

Let's make the world hear our voice, the Amiga is ours because *we* have
supported both hardware and software, not Escom. They want success for the
PowerAmiga, let's drive it as we think it's the really most wise and best way.
After all,WE will buy or not the hardware. WE will develop or not its software.

Escom is only business.

Hejdσ.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                                                                            |
|           Stop that fucking imperialist embargo against Cuba.              |
|                 Hasta Siempre Comandante Che Guevara.                      |
|                                                                            |
|                                                                            |
|    Fabio "Maverick" Bizzetti - [e-mail] - Maverick* at IRC     |
|              The maker of "CyberMan" and "Virtual Karting"                 |
|   working on "Virtual Rally" and "StarFighter", the 3D game that will      |
|                        bring the Amiga to the top                          |
|                                                                            |
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