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The big problem tended to culminate in per-pixel rendering which was really slow on Amiga (with planar bitmaps) and really fast on VGA (writing one byte per pix
by yason 9y ago
The big problem tended to culminate in per-pixel rendering which was really slow on Amiga (with planar bitmaps) and really fast on VGA (writing one byte per pixel).
Theoretically there was no difference as you could, ideally, just rewrite your renderer to render in planar modes directly instead of rendering to chunky (per-pixel) modes and then converting to planar. And chunky-to-planar converters eventually became quite fast but it was too late and nevertheless an overhead.
Amiga did quite fine until 3D graphics. "Modern" games like Dune 2, Syndicate, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Settlers, etc. were hugely popular but still complex games, yet playable, and no less good looking on Amiga than on PC. But then Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and others with full-screen 3D graphics with texture mapping happened and Amiga just couldn't even start the race.
If Amiga had had a chunky graphics mode it would've certainly had a few more years until complete technical obsolence. Commodore basically had that chance with Amiga 1200 with the new AGA graphics chip but they chose to extend bitmap planes instead.
For anything else, Amiga was competitive despite the lack of cpu power. I remember the last years of my personal Amiga use. Productivity software, editors, programming etc were still snappier and a much more friendly experience on the Amiga even if PCs at the time had 10x the cpu speed and Windows software was maturing up (and subsequently getting bloated beyond all usability).
- whywhywhywhy 9y agoI went from the Amiga 500 to a 486, yeah Doom and Wolf3D were very impressive in terms of graphical detail but some little known gems on the Amiga really pushed boundaries in scale that wouldn't really be repeated till the likes of GTA 3 or Daggerfall "Hunter"[1] which was flat shaded 3D, had a very large play area of multiple islands and had multiple drivable vehicles, you could ride bikes, row boats, gunboats, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, surf boards, hovercrafts. All on an Amiga 500, all on 1 floppy disk. "Mercenary 3" [2] also flat shaded, had a fully simulated solar system with day/night cycles. You could go in buildings, go in taxis, get on a space ship fly up to orbit, go to another planet, land in the city go in a building. The scale of this game is insane for the time. [1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MzByYlnvaN0/hqdefault.jpg [2] https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis-aus/mercenary-iii-the-dion-crisis_3.gif https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/m/mercenary-...
- yason 9y agoOh my, Hunter was so captivating! I played it a lot even if I never made much progress, at least as in how they maybe officially intended! Amiga could certainly do vector graphics but without texturing. The Blitter chip could easily fill large areas with the same color. Hunter was an older game still but for example Frontier (Elite II) was also more than playable on Amiga and it was a "late" game, around the time where texture mapping was already getting common on PCs. A bit earlier F1GP offered very competitive detail at the time, again with non-shaded polygons only (you would get some textures in the PC version).