Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
datagubbe.se
Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#2Yeah 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 just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses.
Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#3[deleted]
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#4(2024)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#5In 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.
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#6Yeah 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…
Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#7Yeah 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
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#8A 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.
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#9Yeah 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…
Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
Yes, that was indeed the gateway. Among others.
Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT.
The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
Re: Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (2024)
#10Yeah 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.