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Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Amiga had a few graphics modes with rectangular pixels, some upright (e.g. 640x200) and some across (e.g. 320x400, both are NTSC modes). That would be 256 or 512 vertical pixels on PAL machines, respectively.
Were they actually rectangular or was that an artifact of the hold and modify color mode? I mostly remember playing with dpaint and f18 interceptor in the a1000.
The pixels were actually rectangular. Imagine that 640x400 has square pixels (which it pretty much does on a then-contemporary screen). When you have half the amount of vertical pixels at 640x200, you can either have square pixels at half the image height, or double the height of the pixels (making them rectangular) and fill the entire vertical space.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were they actually rectangular or was that an artifact of the hold and modify color mode? I mostly remember playing with dpaint and f18 interceptor in the a1000.
The pixels were actually rectangular. Imagine that 640x400 has square pixels (which it pretty much does on a then-contemporary screen). When you have half the amount of vertical pixels at 640x200, you can either have square pixels at half the image height, or double the height of the pixels (making them rectangular) and fill the entire vertical space.
CRT TV screens and monitors come in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so you need 320x240 or 640x480 for a "true" square pixel grid. (Unless you manually adjusted the horizontal and vertical stretch on the monitor to letterbox the image, but very few people would've done that). None of the common screen resolutions on the Amiga matches that exactly, though the 320x256 and 640x512 (interlaced) PAL resolutions were reasonably close for casual purposes.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#34The PC has always been such a mess of incompatible peripherals, it made for a terrible demo platform in the DOS days when the OS didn't abstract any of the graphics and sound stuff in a normalized form. Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.
Early DOS days. By the early 90s the raw processing power of a 486 with VGA and a Soundblaster pretty easily trounced the Amiga in raw capability, inelegant as it may have been. A bunch of demos of the period document this conflict.
Smooth 60 Hz scrolling was still a challenge on VGA.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#35The Amiga isn't remembered as a technology. It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". It's the little computer that could. Where indies would hack cool stuff. It had a well understood spec that didn't change so much, so you could push the metal to its limit. It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. T…
We had Amiga vs Atari vs PC instead. :)
Exactly. Sure you guys has the better color palette, but we have cd rom.
sweeps config.sys under the rug
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#36The Amiga isn't remembered as a technology. It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". It's the little computer that could. Where indies would hack cool stuff. It had a well understood spec that didn't change so much, so you could push the metal to its limit. It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. T…
The Amiga was a hotrod to eveyone else's sedan, basically.
An all-Ford comparison: While IBM PC was an Econoline, Apple Macintosh was an Escort and Commodore 64 a Pinto, but Amiga was a flashy Mustang.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#37As a kid, I remember upgrading from the Apple ][ to the Amiga 500. The Amiga was a superior machine in every way. I could do more with Amos than I ever could with Integer BASIC :) Moving from an Amiga 1200 to a 486SX with Windows 3.1 after it was clear the Amiga platform was dying was disappointing.
I followed a similar path. Apple II -> Amiga 500 -> Amiga 3000 -> 486. I still remember the day I got Shadow of the Beast on my A500 back in 1989. It was incredible. Sadly, by the the time the AGA machines (A1200/A4000) were released, it was clear the Amiga was on its way out. It was just too little, too late. Too bad Commodore let the platform stagnate for years.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Early DOS days. By the early 90s the raw processing power of a 486 with VGA and a Soundblaster pretty easily trounced the Amiga in raw capability, inelegant as it may have been. A bunch of demos of the period document this conflict.
Smooth 60 Hz scrolling was still a challenge on VGA.
That might be because VGA ran at 70Hz rather than 60 in its 256 color mode.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#39Lots of Amiga concepts live on today with DragonflyBSD.
And it’s shockingly performant (on par with Linux, sometimes even better), given the tiny development team.
Messaging passing, etc are core Amiga ideas that exist today only in Dfly.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#40Lots of Amiga concepts live on today with DragonflyBSD. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ And it’s shockingly performant (on par with Linux, sometimes even better), given the tiny development team. Messaging passing, etc are core Amiga ideas that exist today only in Dfly.
Message passing in some form dates from at least as far back as the 1970's, possibly the late 60's. Generally, BSDs were influenced by Mach to the extent that they've adopted some microkernel ideas. I'd be surprised to learn there's any genuine link between AmigaOS and Dragonfly.