Amiga Thread.

[Ian J]

I believe everything he did was able to run on the a500, until the CD32 came along.

If you look at some of his other video's or search his name on the net / youtube he did the CD32 rolling demo, at 1:04 it has the same underwater scene from the 20,000 leagues video but with a modern submarine to replace the Nautilus.

He's the guy that did the GFX for Defender of the Crown and lots of other GFX, including the excellent demo screen for the Amiga Brilliance art package.

 

[levi]

I'm mainly thinking of the scenes with the illumination from the ripples affecting almost everything in the scene. Maybe there are enough reds missing in the scene that that could be done with pallete shifting, but I recall on the Archimedes 256 colour modes you could only palette shift a few of the bits of the colours. Maybe the AGA palette control was more fine tuned though, to allow this. And the music sounds 16-bit to me rather than 8-bit mu-law and seemed to at least be using a lot more samples that was common in tracker music. But as a demo-reel, I guess you'd not be using the real music anyway.

 

[TrashyMG]

well with HAM6 mode even on the original Amiga 1000 back in 1985, you could display 4096 colors at once. Amiga has some fairly advanced chipsets, Paula is capable of 14-bit audio output, not that many took advantage of that back in the day. But that said with Paula it could handle sampled audio, so It could do some pretty impressive music tricks back in the day.

 

[Ian J]

This was on a demo disc that came with the CDTV, basically an A500 with a CD drive.

 

[levi]

Yeah, but 14-bit audio running for over 3 minutes at something like 30kHz would take up just over 9 mebibytes uncompressed as PCM. Maybe it is built up from samples, as I said earlier, but I'd need to listen to it again to be sure. And I'm not sure how much CPU power would be taken up throwing around samples of 14-bits and retuning them to different pitches, to do it at the same time as redrawing large parts of the screen.

Edit: Maybe this was a CD32 targetting game, but at the same time the audio in that clip doesn't sound like 16-bit CD audio to me, and the video's cropped to various different screen ratios to limit the bitrate, as well as running at sub 15 fps in places I think.

 

[ZXDunny]

Most of Jim Sachs' stuff on the Amiga (when it came to animation) use palette cycling which was really, really simple to do in packages like Deluxe Paint. I can almost guarantee that he uses two or three sets of four-colour patches that cycle independently of eachother, just based on knowing his previous work.

 

[pmprog]

Slightly off-topic, but related to the current chat

 

[levi]

Awesome talk, thanks. I rarely listen to anything that length on youtube, but that caught my interest. For me personally, the older colour cycling 256 colour stuff if what I'm interested in, and is what we were discussing in this thread, and that stuff's there from the start up to about 15 minutes in (where he starts to talk about thimbleweed park) and again from about 27 minutes. The first span's really just look at the pretty pictures, while he goes into detail about how he did it all from 27 minutes on. When he goes into questions about an hour in, that runs until the end although he does show one of two things that would be pretty essential if you actually planned to make any of these pictures yourself, although I'd say he doesn't really show anything after about 1h10m in from where the questions get a bit more gushy, and he's really just reiterating stuff in the main, if you wanted to quit early, although if you got that far you'll probably stick to the end anyway.

 

[Caine]

Here are those color cycling demos he is talking about: http://effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

Pretty awesome stuff.

 

[sm0kew0n]

 

[TrashyMG]

Think the funding campaign on the A500 cases are not quite as strong as the A1200 reinvention... likely because A500 cases are plentiful and cheaper "retrobriting" solutions to de-yellow cases have been revealed in the last few years.

I'm also torn between funding that, and this which is close to being kickstarted and it targets a bunch of system: https://www.amigasystems.com/

 

[sm0kew0n]

For anyone less informed about the Vampire cards, this is a good watch;


It's a recent presentation from an Apollo team member, very interesting and he mentions the A1500 case which looks pretty awesome too. My A500 is in a shit state, buried in the loft but I think this summer it could get a revival.

 

[levi]

Maybe it's just me, but non-techies trying to talk techie like that really rubs me the wrong way, especially when they're trying to sell me stuff.

 

[TrashyMG]

Maybe it's just me, but non-techies trying to talk techie like that really rubs me the wrong way, especially when they're trying to sell me stuff.

He means well, I talk to him a bit on IRC, but some of the facts are slightly off and it would have been nice to have one of the core developer members there to back up his statements.

 

[levi]

https://www.nethack.org/devel/deprecation.html

There's a new nethack release, but the reason I post it here is that the maintainers are threatening to drop Amiga support unless someone steps forward from the Amiga community to give it some love.

 

[ZXDunny]

I'm afraid the genre peaked on the Amiga at Hack 1.03e so there's really no point in having Nethack too.

 

[Ian J]

I've purchased a PCMCIA compact flash adaptor but I only have a 128mb card, can anyone recommend a memory card seller in the UK that has compatible cards?

Have tried a 4GB transcend card but it wasn't recognised.

 

[TrashyMG]

I've purchased a PCMCIA compact flash adaptor but I only have a 128mb card, can anyone recommend a memory card seller in the UK that has compatible cards?

Have tried a 4GB transcend card but it wasn't recognised.

Okay, it looks like it's not just me, so I've had no luck getting PCMCIA CF cards to work as storage. I've tried a 4GB one from Amigakit and a variety of 16 to 64GB Sandisk Ultra/Extreme CF cards. It recognizes the CF adapter just fine. but right now I'm using the PCMCIA with an ethernet adapter, just using an IDE to CF adapter.

 

[sm0kew0n]

@Ian J I saw some in Currys the other day, still sold for cameras. Unless I'm mistaken by the PCMCIA bit, they're just CF cards right?

 

[levi]

CF cards like SD cards have been through a number of transitions. Since I started buying them they went first UDMA then I think UDMA 2. For me though, even my 64GB card still supports the plain old IDE commands over parallel pins. I think it's more likely the formatting's changed, since FAT32 doesn't handle over 2GB well IIRC so most card makers went to something more recent and patent encumbered like ExtFAT. Can you see enough of it to format it to something of your liking?