3 ms·
In Commodore's defense, Ranger needed (at the time) very expensive VRAM to work, and would have made Ranger-equipped Amigas prohibitively expensive.
by LeoPanthera 4y ago
In Commodore's defense, Ranger needed (at the time) very expensive VRAM to work, and would have made Ranger-equipped Amigas prohibitively expensive.
- snvzz 4y agoThat was CBM's argument line. CBM didn't see value in having the best machine, or being first to market.
- rasz 4y agoVRAM requirement suggests it was BW starved. Easiest was of adding BW without bumping clock is going wider, thats what AGA did. Ranger wouldnt matter anyway with its 7 bit color, planar arrangement like AGA when games went all in on high color bitmaps. Wing Commander runs at ~1fps on AGA (CD32) because of planar to packed conversion.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Wing Commander runs at ~1fps on AGA (CD32) because of planar to packed conversion. Are you sure about that? It was running decently on Amiga 500, I would expect it would run much faster on A1200 hardware (including the CD32)
- rasz 4y agoOk, it drops to 1fps, normal AGA Wing Commander framerate is around 3-6fps https://youtu.be/n5wXmeI8w9k?t=479 https://youtu.be/n5wXmeI8w9k?t=479. A500 is ~2-6fps https://youtu.be/iR1Nc4hLKq4?t=936 https://youtu.be/iR1Nc4hLKq4?t=936 ? and this was full 25pount/$50 retail release game with 85-90% ratings, simply amazing :o
- snvzz 4y agoThe never released AAA, unlike AGA, had non-planar aka packed aka chunky modes. CD32, unlike A1200/A4000, had an extra chip handling many tasks specific to that console, and that chip also had specific hardware for planar to packed conversion.
- actionfromafar 4y agoCommodore biz decisions were, to steal an expression, a Fractal of Bad Biz Design. Even the tragically underpowered CD32 and Amiga 1200 machines would have been twice as fast for gaming if they had 64 kilobytes of extra RAM. Why? They had 2 megs, of "slow" RAM, slow because it shared bus cycles with the graphics and because CPU caches had to be turned off. It they had just a sliver of dedicated CPU RAM, games could have put inner loops in that RAM and achieved 2 to 4 times the speed in many calculations. You could buy expansion RAM (2 megs or 4 megs were common) which did that, but very few customers did, and almost no games took advantage. This was at the tail end of Commodore life, but it's such an obvious example of penny wise, pound foolish decision.
- icedchai 4y agoThey could've also gone with a different configuration: 1 meg chip, 1 meg fast. Or even have spent a couple bucks more and made it hardware configurable! Few Amiga games needed 2 megs chip. Remember, the original systems only had 512K chip RAM.
- snvzz 4y ago>Few Amiga games needed 2 megs chip. Can you name any? Non-AGA that is. (As AGA machines all came with 2MB chip) I can't even name any that require 1MB chip. There were machines like the A500+ and A600 that shipped 1MB chip, but they didn't sell anywhere as much as the a500. Some A500 (like mine) have an Agnus that supports 1MB chip but unfortunately, unless the board is modified (a trace needs to be cut and replaced by another, a "solder jumper"), trapdoor expansion will show up as slow rather than extra chip.
- icedchai 4y agoI really can't. I was being optimistic, assuming there were some late-stage Amiga games that required more chip RAM. Seems unlikely, I agree.
- fulafel 4y agoAn alternative history where Amiga originally shipped at the same or higher price point than Macintosh is interesting to imagine. Follow ons would then presumably have had more budget headroom for advanced custom hardware designs. Less initial users but possibly a shot at longevity.
- snvzz 4y ago"low-end" A500 could have been ECS, with Ranger being A2000-only. Instead, A2000 was that much more expensive, while not adding anything that'd justify its pricing. Insanity.
- icedchai 4y agoSo true. The base A2000 was way over priced. All you got for the extra money was empty expansion slots!