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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#11

Post by actionfromafar »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's…

Commodore operations were very, very poor, too.

If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.

Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.

And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#12

Post by cmrdporcupine »

spogbiper wrote: post #7
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's…

its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games

I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs.

So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"

Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#13

Post by zozbot234 »

louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#14

Post by actionfromafar »

spogbiper wrote: post #7
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's…

its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games

Yeah. It was very much the same with DOS games, too.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#15

Post by louthy »

zozbot234 wrote: post #13
louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#16

Post by zozbot234 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #12
spogbiper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games

I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs. So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked…

> So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"

> Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.

The Amiga had retargetable graphics too. No real difference there.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#17

Post by actionfromafar »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #12
spogbiper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games

I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs. So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked…

It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same. But only like some turned based games, and like some chess games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which lacked some of the keys.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#18

Post by Someone »

zozbot234 wrote: post #10
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's…

> the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems? There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and hardware graphics.

The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#19

Post by actionfromafar »

louthy wrote: post #15
zozbot234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.

I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.

Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.

Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

#20

Post by samastur »

louthy wrote: post #8

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once. Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games. I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games. PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.
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