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Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)

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

#31

Post by cmrdporcupine »

actionfromafar wrote: post #27
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the advantage of the TRAP approach is more amenable to supervisor/user mode switch and memory protection and the like? Separate topic from graphics and device independence though

Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.) Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its ow…

Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think supports MMU + protection on 030 machines.

Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our fathers.

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

#32

Post by zozbot234 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
actionfromafar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean the advantage of the TRAP approach is more amenable to supervisor/user mode switch and memory protection and the like? Separate topic from graphics and device independence though

The original Amiga platform had no MMU, hence no support for memory protection or virtual memory addressing. Some Motorola processors included it (the 68030 and up) but these were only used on high-end Amigas that were not the most common platform, and are more comparable to contemporary workstations. The AmigaOS just used the single address space approach, that's not necessarily incompatible with protected memory.

The Intel 80386 and its successors were quite exceptional in being "killer micros" with a workstation-class feature set for the time.

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

#33

Post by tomfucksdan »

runjake wrote: post #5

In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC. The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.

[flagged]

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

blackhaz wrote: post #28
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.

In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it. As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - tha…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

We might be able to circle back to this now by putting some portion of memory and video on the die along with the CPU, but that was not going to happen for Atari and Commodore back in the 90s. Motorola wasn't going to shove 128KB or whatever of RAM into a 68k just for them, and even if they did it would have been so expensive

Memory speeds plateau'd while CPU speeds skyrocketed. Almost all the complexities of modern architectures have to do with this. There used to be "no need" for something as funky as L1/L2/L3 caches really because often your memory was faster than your CPU (hence why something like the C64's VIC-II or the Atari ST's "Shifter" are even possible).

Hell there were systems back then that didn't even have onboard registers in the CPU, but used external memory for it (TI's TMS series). The 6502's "zero page" is another example.

You can't do that anymore. The CPU will run many laps around your memory.

Still it'd be interesting to see what Jay Miner would have come up with in the late 90s or 21st century, if he was still around and in the game.

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

#37

Post by badc0ffee »

louthy wrote: post #29
samastur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture…

> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.

I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro.

Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.

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

#38

Post by drivers99 »

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 don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).

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

#39

Post by fulafel »

Someone wrote: post #18
zozbot234 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.

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

#40

Post by drivers99 »

louthy wrote: post #29
samastur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> computers built on closed architecture Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures? The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time. The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture…

> Do you honestly think that the general public gave ... about closed architectures?

Not consciously, but they could see more and more capable and affordable systems and upgrades available from a lively and competitive industry.

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