Amiga Frontier - What speed?
Mark Robertson
I've just discovered these games and am having a blast with Amiga Elite on a
bog-standard 68000 processor A600. Unfortunately this just can't cope with
Frontier. Anybody know what speed of Amiga processor I need to get Frontier
running well in very high detail mode?
Mark
Stuart Wilson
Well, my A1200 (68020) in low detail runs well with very little slow
down. I'd say for what YOU want then I reckon the best would be a
68060/66 with 32MB Fast RAM which you can get from Eyetech but it's not
exactly cheap. I reckon a basic 68040/25 with 8MB Fast RAM should do it
well but it does have a hefty drain on power because it has a fan: most
other Motorola chips don't. To be honest I doubt a 68030 could really
cut it. I'd be interested if anyone has any experience too as my Miggy
desperately needs a decent accelerator.
But you have an A600 so:
I honestly don't know whether the Apollo 630 (comes with a 68030 and up
to 8MB Fast RAM) would still be available: it goes directly over the
original 68000 CPU, but as it is stuck down it would be difficult to
remove. It does come with jumper settings to select either 68k or the
030 (if backward compatibility becomes an issue) and it may (or may
not ???) require a better PSU. I haven't played anything much on my old
A600 though, after I got the A1200 it changed my life (well, not quite
but you get the gist). I picked up my A1200 for £20. They are still
available (as new) for £100 if you shop around, I remember the A600
being slow on low detail but the A1200 is more or less OK. I don't know
whether FE2 can utilise a PPC chip (PPC 604e runs at something like
240MHz) either.
Stuart
--
'We had no use for the policy of the Gospels: if someone slaps you,
just turn the other cheek. We had shown that anyone who slapped us on
our cheek would get his head kicked off.'
-Nikita Khrushchev (1894 -1971)
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Angus Manwaring
>I've just discovered these games and am having a blast with Amiga Elite on a
>bog-standard 68000 processor A600. Unfortunately this just can't cope with
>Frontier. Anybody know what speed of Amiga processor I need to get Frontier
>running well in very high detail mode?
The thing is a lot of folk seem to think that the processor one stage down
from theirs makes Doom/Quake/Napalm/Frontier/whatever unplayable, while
infact that often isn't true for the person using the machine in question.
If it's any help, I thought an A1200 ran the game about twice the frame
rate of the 600, and the addition of fast ram to the 1200 doubled it
again, but that's obviously just my impression. The 030 would make flying
over terrain much smoother, but I've got an 060 and I can't say it made
much difference to my enjoyment of the game from when I played it on a
1200 + 2 megs of fast.
All the best,
Angus Manwaring. (for e-mail remove ANTISPEM)
I need your memories for the Amiga Games Database: A collection of Amiga
Game reviews by Amiga players http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/AGDB.html
Mark Robertson
got my other amigas. £20 sounds good to me. I can get an accelerator for
the A600 (a 6030/33 I think) new form Power Computing so that may be an
option.
Thanks folks
Mark
Stuart Wilson <stu9...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8rijil$j7d$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <8ri81d$9eu$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>,
> "Mark Robertson" <ma...@rhymerproductions.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I've just discovered these games and am having a blast with Amiga
> Elite on a
> > bog-standard 68000 processor A600. Unfortunately this just can't
> cope with
> > Frontier. Anybody know what speed of Amiga processor I need to get
> Frontier
> > running well in very high detail mode?
>
Timo K Suoranta
...
> over terrain much smoother, but I've got an 060 and I can't say it made
> much difference to my enjoyment of the game from when I played it on a
> 1200 + 2 megs of fast.
Indeed. AFAIK, Amiga Frontier uses blitter to draw graphics. It is fine
for lower end Amigas, but it really becomes bottleneck for 68030 and up.
So 68030 with fastram will do fine.
OTH, if you had a fast PC, you could run it on UAE, which can speed
up the blitter as well. Some people may prefer Amiga Frontier over
PC Frontier.
-- Timo Suoranta -- tksu...@cc.helsinki.fi --
martin krois
>
> I've just discovered these games and am having a blast with Amiga Elite on a
> bog-standard 68000 processor A600. Unfortunately this just can't cope with
> Frontier. Anybody know what speed of Amiga processor I need to get Frontier
> running well in very high detail mode?
I run it on a 68030 40 mHz accellerated 500.
If I tweak the detail settings to maximum, it still has a hard time,
especially on planets. It's considerably better than 68000 though :)
IMHO, Amiga Elite has a great feel to it, if it weren't for those
penguin brain AI's.
/martin
Mark Robertson
man who knows his stuf, Timo so thanks for the info. A 68030 with fast ram
it shall be (if I can get one).
Ta again folks
Mark
Timo K Suoranta <tksu...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
news:8rk5ag$qgi$1...@oravannahka.helsinki.fi...
Mark Robertson
Mark
martin krois <m...@cybercity.dk> wrote in message
news:39DDA87A...@cybercity.dk...
John Whitehouse
AI was the most disappointing on the Amigo, which was a pity because it had
some nice features. Glad to see it wasn't all in my head:-)
Mark Robertson wrote in message <8rkbqf$2cp$1...@newsg3.svr.pol.co.uk>...
John Whitehouse
the keyboard:-(, I'm have one of those days
John Whitehouse wrote in message <39ddc...@nnrp1.news.uk.psi.net>...
Simon Challands
martin krois <m...@cybercity.dk> wrote in message news:39DDA87A...@cybercity.dk...
> IMHO, Amiga Elite has a great feel to it, if it weren't for those
> penguin brain AI's.
Amiga Elite was bloody awful! Or are you talking about Amiga Frontier?
Possibly, from the rest of the thread.
--
Simon Challands, creator of:
The Acorn Elite Pages - http://elite.acornarcade.com/
Three Dimensional Encounters - http://www.3dfrontier.fsnet.co.uk/
The Stunt Racer 2000 League - http://www.3dfrontier.fsnet.co.uk/srleague/
John Whitehouse
never played frontier on the amiga. I wouldn't have called it bloody awful
though but that my opinion. Ah just the links at the bottom of the page
for stunt car racer, I was meaning to ask you about this before is there PC
version of the game we had a great deal of fun with this when we linked two
amigas. Could you network two PC's using an amiga emulators??
Simon Challands wrote in message <8rkm8a$n40$1...@news8.svr.pol.co.uk>...
ColinR
some stuu fon the screen. He probably developed the game on a high spec
Amiga and ported down to the lower spec 500s and 1200s of the time.
Is there much of a difference between the PC version and Amiga version? The
PC had superior graphics (with its texture maps) so how could playing the
Amiga version on UAE on a PC be better than playing the original PC version
on a PC?
"Mark Robertson" <ma...@rhymerproductions.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:8rkbl9$hko$1...@newsg2.svr.pol.co.uk...
Simon Challands
John Whitehouse <JohnWhi...@csllink.com> wrote in message
news:39dde...@nnrp1.news.uk.psi.net...
> Sorry for digressing from the original post but yes I did mean Amiga Elite,
> never played frontier on the amiga. I wouldn't have called it bloody awful
> though but that my opinion. Ah just the links at the bottom of the page
> for stunt car racer, I was meaning to ask you about this before is there PC
> version of the game we had a great deal of fun with this when we linked two
> amigas. Could you network two PC's using an amiga emulators??
It's not for Stunt Car Racer, it's for Stunt Racer 2000, which is an Arc
game based on the one you mention. Whether or not it's better or not I
don't know, since I've never even seen Stunt Car Racer.
Stuart Wilson
"Mark Robertson" <ma...@rhymerproductions.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Yep, I'm hoping to pick up an A1200 at a car-boot sometime - it's
where I
> got my other amigas. £20 sounds good to me. I can get an
accelerator for
> the A600 (a 6030/33 I think) new form Power Computing so that may be
an
> option.
Let me know how the A600 accelerator fares as I have an old A600 that's
in need of a boost. I hope to get an A1200 accelerator by next Easter
(finances permitting - I also to get a decent PC that'll run decent 3D
modelling software).
Stuart Wilson
"Mark Robertson" <ma...@rhymerproductions.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Yep, I'm hoping to pick up an A1200 at a car-boot sometime - it's
where I
> got my other amigas. £20 sounds good to me. I can get an
accelerator for
> the A600 (a 6030/33 I think) new form Power Computing so that may be
an
> option.
Let me know how the A600 accelerator fares as I have an old A600 that's
in need of a boost. I hope to get an A1200 accelerator by next Easter
(finances permitting - I also need to get a decent PC that'll run
David Harrison-Rand
David (originally from Manchester now in San Francisco)
"John Whitehouse" <JohnWhi...@csllink.com> wrote in message
news:39ddd...@nnrp1.news.uk.psi.net...
Scott Kurtz
magazine AMIGO TIMES (1988-1990 or so).
David Harrison-Rand <davi...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:4YqD5.77$Gs4....@news.pacbell.net...
Mark Robertson
Mark
ColinR
"Simon Challands" <si...@challands.freeserve.removethisandadddotcodotuk>
wrote in message news:8rl6a5$8mq$1...@news6.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
> John Whitehouse <JohnWhi...@csllink.com> wrote in message
Rhino
>
winner. Written by Geoff Crammond of F1 fame I believe. Used to link either
two ST's or and ST and an Amiga together - Literally months of fun. Possibly
even a year. In fact I bought an old 4meg STE for £25 yesterday - I think
I'll have to pick it up again.
In the meanwhile, I've just acquired X - Beyond the Frontier........question
is, is it any good?
Dave
Stuart Wilson
"Rhino" <wank...@NOSPAMTHANKYOUMAAMhotmail.com> wrote:
> In the meanwhile, I've just acquired X - Beyond the
Frontier........question
> is, is it any good?
Scored about 30% or so in PC Gamer, but they try to copy much of the
humour of Amiga Power with none of the talent that made AP just such a
damn good read. It LOOKS good, and will appeal to those who prefer
raytraced graphics above actual depth of gameplay, apparently it is
difficult to get into and has a few bugs. I'd rather wait for another 2
years...
Rhino
> humour of Amiga Power with none of the talent that made AP just such a
> damn good read. It LOOKS good, and will appeal to those who prefer
> raytraced graphics above actual depth of gameplay, apparently it is
> difficult to get into and has a few bugs. I'd rather wait for another 2
> years...
Well I had about 10 minutes to get into X before a mate came around to go
shopping (I subsequently bought Midtown Madness 2 - very dissapointing). And
it DOES look good; visually that is.
Thing is, according to PC Zone it ranks along with Terminus as the best
space sim in the vein of Elite. I'm more likely to trust their opinion than
PC Gamer in light of the fact that PC Gamer nearly always over-rate games.
e.g. recently Diablo II (which I thought was linear pants) got 90odd% in
Gamer and in PC Zone it got a more deserving 70%. Anyway, I'll be back with
more once I've played it properly.
Dave
Holger Picker
> Indeed. AFAIK, Amiga Frontier uses blitter to draw graphics. It is fine
> for lower end Amigas, but it really becomes bottleneck for 68030 and up.
> So 68030 with fastram will do fine.
I'm afraid, Amiga Frontier doesn't use the blitter except for cleaning the
screen. Its graphic engine is based on the engine used in Virus, which uses the
processor for drawing the polygons. To speed up the drawing Mr Braben has
invented special routines for drawing triangles, rectangles etc with different
colours. My old Amiga 1200 ran Frontier with a MC68030 at 50 Mhz. It did
benefit a lot from the (both fast and compact) programming. Actually the
blitter wasn't used much on the Amiga, as it was too slow. You would need
far too many MOVE-instructions to fill the blitter registers (for drawing the
surrounding lines, filling the plane and then copying it to the screen
planes) compared to a simple direct processor write to the screen. Most
games I've come across (Starglider, Damocles, No Second Prize, Zeewolf etc)
therefore did not use the blitter.
> OTH, if you had a fast PC, you could run it on UAE, which can speed
> up the blitter as well. Some people may prefer Amiga Frontier over
> PC Frontier.
Yes, because the sound is better. But PC Frontier has texture mapping and
more than 16 colours at the same time. It's probably a question of taste.
BTW: Don't run Amiga Frontier on Fellow, the other Amiga emulator for the
PC. It seems to have a serious bug in the DIVS/DIVU emulation, as it doesn't
set the overflow bit right (at least not on my PC). I've written a little
test program, and it revealed this mistake quite clearly. Frontier depends
largely on this. If the overflow flag is not set (if the result of a 32:16
division is larger than 16 bits) calculation will fail definitely giving very
strange effects.
Cheers
Holger
ColinR
decided I can wait another 2 weeks.
"Rhino" <wank...@NOSPAMTHANKYOUMAAMhotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8rnv86$bhj$1...@news7.svr.pol.co.uk...
Martin Krois
> martin krois <m...@cybercity.dk> wrote in message news:39DDA87A...@cybercity.dk...
>
> > IMHO, Amiga Elite has a great feel to it, if it weren't for those
> > penguin brain AI's.
>
> Amiga Elite was bloody awful! Or are you talking about Amiga Frontier?
> Possibly, from the rest of the thread.
I'm referring to Elite. I don't think it was awful... I think the solid vector graphics was
really great, and with the sounds it was an atmospheric and fun game. A big minus was the
AI though, or at least the ships always appear in the same place making them sitting ducks
if you had a large laser.
I didn't like Frontier that much, the retro controls and physics is much more appealing to
me.
/martin
Angus Manwaring
>Blitter stood for Block Large Image Transfer or something. A way of dumping
>some stuu fon the screen. He probably developed the game on a high spec
>Amiga and ported down to the lower spec 500s and 1200s of the time.
>Is there much of a difference between the PC version and Amiga version? The
>PC had superior graphics (with its texture maps) so how could playing the
>Amiga version on UAE on a PC be better than playing the original PC version
>on a PC?
I don't know. I think, if the blitter was used at all in Frontier, that
because the UAE "blitter" was software, it probably wouldn't be
constrained to run at it's less than impressive rate on a fast Miggy. I
don't know anything about this stuff, but given David Braben's skill, and
the time at which Frontier appeared I'd have though he made very little
(if any) use of the Blitter, but as the code had to run on the 16-bit
Amigas it wasn't optimised for the 32-bit machines. As a small website
plug, I'd add that on the AGDB, Scott Johnston (author of Hired Guns
etc) contributed a review of the game Bloodwych. He talks about a lot of
his games including the adaptive code he used in UFO:Enemy Unknown, which
cleverly (I thought) shared the blitter appropriate tasks between the
blitter and the CPU, with the more powerful machines doing the majority of
the task with the CPU while the slower machines made greater use of the
blitter.
ColinR
"Angus Manwaring" <angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1695.316T773T10134344angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk...
of
> his games including the adaptive code he used in UFO:Enemy Unknown, which
> cleverly (I thought) shared the blitter appropriate tasks between the
> blitter and the CPU, with the more powerful machines doing the majority of
> the task with the CPU while the slower machines made greater use of the
> blitter.
Graham Thurlwell
deja.com> says...
<snip>
> Let me know how the A600 accelerator fares as I have an old A600 that's
> in need of a boost. I hope to get an A1200 accelerator by next Easter
> (finances permitting - I also need to get a decent PC that'll run
> decent 3D modelling software).
Unfortunatly for me, the 3.5" HDD I managed to shoehorn into my A600 took
up all the available space. I used to have an evil idea to convert the
A600 into a tower system, but never got round to it.
--
Graham 'Jades' Thurlwell
Jades' FFE Site: http://www.jades.org/ffe.htm
The best Frontier First Encounters site on the net
Angus Manwaring
Have you tried playing it on an Amiga with less than an 030? :)
Stuart Wilson
Graham Thurlwell <ja...@jades.org> wrote:
> Unfortunatly for me, the 3.5" HDD I managed to shoehorn into my A600
took
> up all the available space. I used to have an evil idea to convert
the
> A600 into a tower system, but never got round to it.
I had a 210MB 2.5" HD in mine. Plenty of space but the PSU couldn't
pull the skin off a rice pudding. As such, the whole thing just screwed
up big style: the HD refuses to work on ANYTHING, and the A600 (2MB
version) was a wreck (buggered up chips and keyboard). I got another
A600 but then I discovered the joys of AGA and have never really looked
back. Except to play ECS Heimdall 2.
Did you see a feature (in CU Amiga I think) about turning the A600 into
a laptop? It worked surprisingly well.
ColinR
Graham Thurlwell
<colinr@DON'TSPAMMEntlworld.com> says...
> I saw X Gold in the shops for £25 the other day. Almost bought it, but
> decided I can wait another 2 weeks.
If you haven't already got X:BTF, get X Gold. It contains the original
X:BTF and the X-Tension add on. Gameplaywise, X-Tension is much better
than X:BTF, although I prefered the station animations in X:BTF.
Graham Thurlwell
deja.com> says...
> In article <MPG.1448662e9...@news.btinternet.com>,
> Graham Thurlwell <ja...@jades.org> wrote:
> > Unfortunatly for me, the 3.5" HDD I managed to shoehorn into my A600
> > took up all the available space. I used to have an evil idea to convert
> > the A600 into a tower system, but never got round to it.
>
> I had a 210MB 2.5" HD in mine. Plenty of space but the PSU couldn't
> pull the skin off a rice pudding. As such, the whole thing just screwed
> up big style: the HD refuses to work on ANYTHING, and the A600 (2MB
> version) was a wreck (buggered up chips and keyboard).
My original A600 PSU blew up, but fortunatly didn't take out the machine.
The current power supply is pretty evil - it's basically a standard PC
PSU with an Amiga power connector.
As for my HDD, Eyetech used to do a combo bundle, which had an an
improved IDE controller (plugged into the IDE header on the mainboard), a
2 Gig (IIRC) 3.5" HDD and an external ATAPI CD-ROM kit. The ribbon cable
for the CD-ROM drive actually leaves the back of the A600 case. With all
the bits inside, the top _just_ goes back on.
The whole lot worked rather well, but after the original CD-ROM drive in
my PC failed, I dismantled the Amiga's external CD-ROM and put the drive
in my PC, where it is still working.
> Did you see a feature (in CU Amiga I think) about turning the A600 into
> a laptop? It worked surprisingly well.
I remember that. I've probably still got the article in my big stack of
mags in my cupboard (I _never_ bin computer mags, but recently started
cutting out the good articles from my Loaded collection and binning the
rest).
David Braben
Angus Manwaring wrote in message
<1695.316T773T10134344angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk>...
>On 06-Oct-00 16:23:11, ColinR said
>because the UAE "blitter" was software, it probably wouldn't be
>constrained to run at it's less than impressive rate on a fast Miggy. I
From memory, I tried using the blitter for filling polys. It was slower than
using the processor, because of the set-up time, even on an original 7.1Mhz
A500. Frontier did use the blitter for screen clear, as this could be done
while the gameloop stuff was running. However if the game loop and render
preparation completed before the blitter had cleared the screen (as on an
040 Amiga) the processor would finish the job.
David Braben
www.frontier.co.uk
Timo K Suoranta
> From memory, I tried using the blitter for filling polys. It was slower than
> using the processor, because of the set-up time, even on an original 7.1Mhz
Did you try HAM fill? Setting up HAM screen mode, you would only
have to plot edges of polygons, clearing the screen with 'modify
previous color with nothing' pixels.
David Braben
>David Braben <dbrabe...@frontier.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> From memory, I tried using the blitter for filling polys. It was slower
than
>> using the processor, because of the set-up time, even on an original
7.1Mhz
>
>Did you try HAM fill? Setting up HAM screen mode, you would only
>have to plot edges of polygons, clearing the screen with 'modify
>previous color with nothing' pixels.
Yes - I wasted a lot of time on it!
David Braben
www.frontier.co.uk
Mr.WC
Timo K Suoranta <tksu...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
> Did you try HAM fill? Setting up HAM screen mode, you would only
> have to plot edges of polygons, clearing the screen with 'modify
> previous color with nothing' pixels.
This is not completely true. There are no "nothing pixels" in HAM mode,
instead you can choose for each pixel if you want to take one colour
from the 16 colours palette (64 colours in HAM8) or modify one of the R,
G or B components. That is, you always have to "modify" at least one of
the 3 components, no matter if it's going to change or not (of course,
if it isn't going to change, you have to "modify" it to its previous
value). So you always end up with blits into at least 4 out of 6
bitplanes for the whole polygon and not only for its left/right edges
(or 6 out of 8 planes in case of HAM8).
Well, there is a possible approximation towards blitting only the edges,
indeed. You can achieve this, when you ensure that one of the 3 colour
components (in most cases blue, as this is the one with the lowest
luminance) is the same in all polygons and on the background in each
frame (you may vary the selected component and component value across
frames, of course).
Regards,
Niels Böhm alias Mr.WC