Some Amiga 500 Advice

[bbking67]

22 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Yeah, the 500 and 600 trapdoor options are basically just a cheap way of filling the complement of RAM available to the chipset. Anything beyond that needs more significant expansion. But the chip versus fast RAM explanation above is pretty good. I'll elaborate with some more information  The two main types are chip and fast (sometimes also referred to as graphics and other). The chipset can access chip RAM without the CPU, leaving the CPU free to go do other things and adding to the system's efficiency. Fast RAM is out of the chipset's reach, so the CPU can work on that while the chipset's working on chip RAM. This means the fast RAM is much faster, because it doesn't have to share the bus with the chipset. However, some fast RAM is faster than others - early A500s, for example, have the second 512K of RAM in the trapdoor assigned as fast RAM, but it's on the chip RAM bus. This makes it no faster than chip RAM of course, so it was a pretty common modification on later models to enable it for chip RAM use. That "slow" fast RAM is sometimes called "Ranger" RAM, and there are a couple of poorly coded games that are hard-coded to use it at its expected address.

 

From a coding / OS perspective, the RAM model's pretty simple. If your data needs to be used by the chipset (e.g. bitmaps, sounds), then you put it in chip RAM. Anything else you put in any RAM. The OS will allocate that RAM from whatever the fastest RAM is, moving onto the slower RAM as the faster RAM is exhausted, eventually using the slowest chip RAM for other data if no fast RAM is available at all. Some early games as I mentioned above unfortunately bypassed this elegant allocation system and assumed certain types of RAM were at certain addresses, resulting in instant crashes when you tried to run them on a different configuration (later Amigas, including the 500+, don't have Ranger RAM). I guess these coders were coming from the 8-bit world where you own the hardware and there's no OS memory management to speak of...

 

While it's true that a lot of games appeared very similar between the ST and the Amiga, unfortunately this was often because developers would simply write code that would work on both platforms with a minimum of changes. This of course reduced the work involved, but also meant the features unique to either platform were never used. Examples where the ports were developed separately tend to show a more dramatic difference. Pac-Mania is a good example, where the Amiga's overscan, blitter and sprites are used to good effect, while the ST lacked equivalent capabilities. The fairly recent port for the STe fixes some of these shortcomings, but of course won't work on the ST.

Yeah as a former ST guy I've noticed that it goes both ways... some games (often for non technical reasons) are just better on the ST (Defender of The Crown for example).  The "lowest common denominator" thing has always been a problem for every computing generation.  On the Atari 8-bits we were often held back because of the 16K 400/600XL or the Apple ports that didn't take advantage of the hardware.  There is no doubt that the Amiga custom hardware is capable of some stuff that the early ST's just cant do like proper smooth scrolling (there's a sizeable list).

[desiv]

On 1/7/2021 at 5:45 PM, oracle_jedi said:

The stock Amiga allows for easy expansion to 1MB RAM via the trap door, and you really need that 1MB because a 512K single drive Amiga was pretty useless - yes even in 1987.

I wouldn't say that.  As someone who had an Amiga in 1987, most of the games back then (and for quite a while) only required 512k.

Dragon's Lair was the first game I remembered that required 1M (or 512k in an Amiga 1000...  Neat trick that...).

 

Because of the lowest common denominator effect, a single drive 512k Amiga was the target for most game devs for quite a while.

And that lasted much longer than it should have...

 

If you are planning on just playing games, and A500 with 512k and a single drive will be fine.

Of course, more memory and drives is always nicer.  ?

 

A lot of early productivity software even worked fine with 512k for quite a while.

What you couldn't do was multitask with it much, which was a bummer as that was kind of a neat feature. 

 

I was happy with 512k and one drive tho.

(And I was happier with 1M and 2 drives later.   And ecstatic with that 40M SCSI drive I finally got...  And don't get me started on the 1200 with 2M and IDE!!!)

[oracle_jedi]

On 1/12/2021 at 9:08 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

 

While it's true that a lot of games appeared very similar between the ST and the Amiga, unfortunately this was often because developers would simply write code that would work on both platforms with a minimum of changes. This of course reduced the work involved, but also meant the features unique to either platform were never used. Examples where the ports were developed separately tend to show a more dramatic difference. Pac-Mania is a good example, where the Amiga's overscan, blitter and sprites are used to good effect, while the ST lacked equivalent capabilities. The fairly recent port for the STe fixes some of these shortcomings, but of course won't work on the ST.

14 hours ago, bbking67 said:

Yeah as a former ST guy I've noticed that it goes both ways... some games (often for non technical reasons) are just better on the ST (Defender of The Crown for example).  The "lowest common denominator" thing has always been a problem for every computing generation.  On the Atari 8-bits we were often held back because of the 16K 400/600XL or the Apple ports that didn't take advantage of the hardware.  There is no doubt that the Amiga custom hardware is capable of some stuff that the early ST's just cant do like proper smooth scrolling (there's a sizeable list).

 

Seems a real shame that so many games released back in the 80s/90s didn't better exploit the Amiga's abilities.  From what I have seen, I would even go so far as to say most games of the era looked pretty much identical on the Amiga and the ST.  Thankfully they sounded so much better on the Amiga.

 

I moved from the 400/800 machines to an ST, and was disappointed that the 16-bit machine was so bad at arcade games where scrolling was used.   Having been spoilt by the silky smooth scrolling of Dropzone, Ballblazer, Elektraglide and so many others, the jerky scrolling of ST games seemed like a step backwards.   A clear case in point was R-Type.  On the ST version the scrolling was terrible.   I expected the Amiga version would be smooth, knowing what the hardware can do, but in my opinion, the game looks no better than the ST version.

 

My Amigas havn't been used recently.  Just been busy with my weird 8-bits (Sord M5, Camputers Lynx), but I am going to have check out Pacmania when I get them powered up next.   Any other games you guys would recommend as a showcase of what I know the Amiga can really do?

 

[bbking67]

7 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

 

Seems a real shame that so many games released back in the 80s/90s didn't better exploit the Amiga's abilities.  From what I have seen, I would even go so far as to say most games of the era looked pretty much identical on the Amiga and the ST.  Thankfully they sounded so much better on the Amiga.

 

I moved from the 400/800 machines to an ST, and was disappointed that the 16-bit machine was so bad at arcade games where scrolling was used.   Having been spoilt by the silky smooth scrolling of Dropzone, Ballblazer, Elektraglide and so many others, the jerky scrolling of ST games seemed like a step backwards.   A clear case in point was R-Type.  On the ST version the scrolling was terrible.   I expected the Amiga version would be smooth, knowing what the hardware can do, but in my opinion, the game looks no better than the ST version.

 

My Amigas havn't been used recently.  Just been busy with my weird 8-bits (Sord M5, Camputers Lynx), but I am going to have check out Pacmania when I get them powered up next.   Any other games you guys would recommend as a showcase of what I know the Amiga can really do?

 

Yeah, the ST sound gets annoying after a while.  Some games support external midi which is cool, but the scrolling was a far bigger issue for me.  Don't get me wrong I love the ST... but the other annoyance is the single sided disk drive's existence.  I never owned a SS drive, but it's mere existence forced most games to release on SS disk.

[Daedalus2097]

On 1/13/2021 at 3:46 PM, bbking67 said:

The "lowest common denominator" thing has always been a problem for every computing generation.  On the Atari 8-bits we were often held back because of the 16K 400/600XL or the Apple ports that didn't take advantage of the hardware.  There is no doubt that the Amiga custom hardware is capable of some stuff that the early ST's just cant do like proper smooth scrolling (there's a sizeable list).

Yep, and it didn't end with the 16/32-bit era either - even in recent times, some games are written for the lowest common denominator (typically a console), and later ported to more powerful consoles and the PC, not using the full capabilities of either. Or, going the other way, PC versions of games not properly scaled back for console, resulting in a clunky and slow experience.

 

On 1/14/2021 at 6:29 AM, oracle_jedi said:

 

I moved from the 400/800 machines to an ST, and was disappointed that the 16-bit machine was so bad at arcade games where scrolling was used.   Having been spoilt by the silky smooth scrolling of Dropzone, Ballblazer, Elektraglide and so many others, the jerky scrolling of ST games seemed like a step backwards.   A clear case in point was R-Type.  On the ST version the scrolling was terrible.   I expected the Amiga version would be smooth, knowing what the hardware can do, but in my opinion, the game looks no better than the ST version.

 

Yeah :/ From memory, R-Type was a bit smoother on the Amiga, but it's not something I've played a lot of, especially in recent times. It's funny though, the Amiga inherited many features from the Atari 8-bits, like the hardware scrolling, the display lists and related palette & split screenmode tricks, the sprite functionality, since Jay Miner was a key designer of both chipsets. The ST didn't get that opportunity, so lacks those features in the chipset.

 

Quote

My Amigas havn't been used recently.  Just been busy with my weird 8-bits (Sord M5, Camputers Lynx), but I am going to have check out Pacmania when I get them powered up next.   Any other games you guys would recommend as a showcase of what I know the Amiga can really do?

Yeah, Pacmania is like night and day. If you have an AGA machine, give Banshee a look. Very impressive looking shoot-em-up with co-op play. Worms DC too has some lovely smooth scrolling and lots of parallax, but is AGA only. The original Worms is still great though, if not quite as pretty... On older Amigas, games like Shadow of the Beast and Agony are a decent display of what can be done on an A500

 

[bbking67]

Yeah no aga just Amiga 500 graphics... Should be fun once I get my stuff in the mailbox and get the gotek rolling.  I'm thinking of mounting the gotek buttons and screen on a little panel on top of the Amiga...