Coding the anime "woosh" screen on Amiga(dansalva.to) |
Coding the anime "woosh" screen on Amiga(dansalva.to) |
> Didn't know there were people still trying to squeeze more out of that chipset nowadays.
You will be amazed. The demoscene has gotten insanely good since around 2017. Here are some of my favorites that all run on a stock Amiga 500 (with the trapdoor memory):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jciCr8zEhw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYtleuGV7ok
I don't know enough about amiga chipset limitations to know which bits I should be impressed more by, but a doing this on a 68k @ 7mhz with 1MB RAM is impressive enough.
In any case, it's very cool, so thanks for sharing.
Today, I work full-time as an independent game developer. I think it's fair to say that making an Amiga game has been a lifelong dream of mine, and I finally have the skills to make it happen. I want to help demonstrate that with today's tools and proliferation of knowledge, we can breathe new life into our beloved classic hardware by creating gaming experiences with modern design principles.
Now that you're.a grown-up with.a full-time job, and likely some personal life, working for the game industry known for its time pressure — how do you find the time to work on an Amiga game?
To a lot of people, nothing is as fun as the Amiga (or C64, or Atari, or ZX Spectrum...).
> which you could use to keep up to date for instance
If you make everything in life about your career, all of your life will turn into work.
Why practice oil painting when there's Photoshop? Why restore vintage cars when there are Teslas?
Maybe not young enough to count in this group, but I love a lot of computers that were a bit before my time. I've went through the trouble to acquire a Commodore 64, recap it, and install some third-party modifications (needed to replace the PLA, but also added a mod for dual SID and a "region switch" - the region switch one is quite involved since it needs two VIC-IIs and two oscillators you can switch between.) Not the only computer I have enjoyed digging into: I have an MSX2 as well that I find very charming, though I haven't done a whole lot.
The one thing I will say is that finding time to actually try to write code for these machines is hard :) But I imagine it's just simply a matter of devoting some nights and weekends to it when inspiration strikes, not unlike most hobby work done by people who have day jobs.
I think retrocomputing is a fantastic hobby that is fascinating and rewarding. If I had one complaint, it would not actually be the amount of time it takes, it's honestly the price and difficulty in acquiring components. Seems like a lot of people have cashed in on anything that is "antique" or "vintage" in the computer market and hope for large returns. This is a shame.
As for older folks, I can't speak to it directly. But it certainly seems that some of the folks who are still writing Commodore 64 demos are doing so in large part to reconnect with their childhood. Possibly one of the most obvious artifacts of this are demos that pretty much tell a story as such, like the relatively recent demo "Mojo" by Bonzai and Pretzel Logic[1]. And obviously, attempting to do "serious" story telling in something like a demoscene production is a bit corny, but I find it very endearing in spite of that, so I'm glad they're doing it.
In any case, it's a hobby that takes a lot of time... but I guess if you want to find time that badly, you find ways.
[1]: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=232966, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXi3oJ9huiI
My reasoning was because I worked from home, I would have more spare time. Sadly the reality is... no. Oh well, time to continue working on those :D
Bonk got a fab conversion by Factor 5 but they were wizards.
Nitpick: a stock A500 had just the 512kB Chip RAM. Many users opted to add the A501 RAM expansion with an additional 512kB Fast RAM which was not directly accessible by the graphics hardware. Although labelled as Fast RAM, it was slower than actual Fast RAM due to the expansion architecture.
Most A500 owners had the 512KB trapdoor expansion. Much software, including games like Monkey Island, would not run w/o at least 1MB total ram.
Today, there are widely-available, cheap trapdoor expansions of open hardware design that offer 1.5MB slow, 512KB (for 1MB total) chip, as well as RTC.
Still, very cool to show how these animations were made
Even the SNES didn't come close. Wasn't until the Sega Saturn era that we saw something that could outperform it.
One major reason is sprites: Amiga can display 8 4-color sprites, or 4 16-color sprites, and the colors are shared with the bitplanes.
SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves.
This leads to much more colorful-looking visuals on SNES. Since Amiga is all bitplanes, enabling more colors and higher resolution results in a massive performance hit. Most game entities would need to be blit on top of the background, and then the background "restored" every frame that entity moves. SNES' native support for multiple tile layers and good sprites means that the CPU can do a lot less work to achieve a lot more.
Amiga can do some very cool stuff that SNES can't, especially with the blitter, but SNES is much more practical and powerful for video games.
Assuming you are not rewriting the palette scanline-by-scanline...
Amiga is stuck with 16 colors for the whole bitmap screen unless extra-halfbrite mode is used, then it goes up to 32 colors (extra colors must be half as bright as the base colors). Using the hardware sprites (3 colors + transparent) can add up to 12 more colors.
Meanwhile on the SNES, the most-used video mode has two background layers with 15-color tiles (plus transparent), and one background layer with 3-color tiles (plus transparent). 8 different palettes can be selected, for 128 colors.
Then there are sprites too, lots of sprites can be on the screen at once. 15-colors (plus transparent) for a sprite, and 8 different palettes can be selected.
Then afterwards, color math can be applied, you can make graphics use additive blending (light effects), subtractive blending (darkness effects), or 50% transparent blending.
They found time to do something they enjoyed and found a little more time to share it with like-minded people. That’s all that matters.
Per scanline. However, you can multiplex them with copper to your hearts content.
"SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves."
32 per scanline, but then almost all of those sprites would need to be 8x8. Just 17 of 16 pixels wide sprites.
BTW. On AGA (Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32) each sprite could be 32 or 64 pixels wide but I don't think that feature was used much by games.
So was the Amigas chipset - it was originally designed as a games console and pivoted to a home computer when the games console market tanked in the early 80s.
The copper was also used to multiplex sprites, so again the limitation is per scanline.
And assuming things wouldn't be changed per scanline is assuming a shoddy job - very few games on the Amiga would not make at least some use of the copper to extend the number of sprites or number of colours on screen.
Though the Amiga does allow changing the positioning of the screen over a larger bitmap, so e.g. panning the levels without much/any copying might have been an option? Doesn't require the copper, though.
A few of the more sophisticated efforts could be argued to be technically superior to anything on the SNES; consider Shadow of the Beast 3 or Lionheart.