pouët.net

Hi guys,

I'm not criticising, I'm just curious. Could you please let me know why OCS is praised by Amiga demosceners while pure AGA machines are not so popular at the moment while thinking about making demos/intros for Amiga?

If I browse for an AGA prods they're generally made for 060 machines. What about pure A1200 (AGA+020)? Is there really no magic about it? No challenge for utilising AGA comparing to OCS? Or is it about something else?

Thanks for the discussion!
Kokos

One of the reasons might be that the vanilla-A1200 didn't really get that many productions back in the days either, as people quickly got (and made demos for) memory-expansions and accelerators. Whereas the (unexpanded) A500 had a strong scene for several years.

I guess a lot of that was about compatibility. There's always a decision you have to make when making a demo (at least on platforms that variable): make it so everyone can watch it, or go for the bleeding edge only a few will get to watch realtime.

When AGA came in, most people still had A500s, usually with a memory upgrade. Fewer people had A1200s, and some of those had accelerators. So the decision comes down to A500 or "high end", more or less.

I really liked the early 'vanilla' 1200 prods back in the day, so more of that would be cool to see :)

Britelite nailed it. Except that we tend to forget that, generally, people got A500 with memory expansion (because vanilla A500 got just 512K).

Before the models with 1Mb of chip memory, even unexpanded A500 were rare. Most people got A500 with 512Kb + 512Kb expanded ("fakefast") memory.

When A1200 appeared, many people got some 4Mb fastmem expansion as minimum. And soon accelerators with 68030 were very popular. That's why most AGA demos from 1994-1996 runs well on a 030/50Mhz.

Also, unexpanded A1200 has no fast mem, so the 68020 is nerfed by sharing memory cycles with the custom chips. Except for more colours, there's not THAT much gain over the A500.

I don't get it, neither: AGA is obviously better and can compete with PC's SVGA, but then I heard about the flaws in the AGA chipset, like it wasn't as good as it could've been, like neither the Copper nor the Blitter were fully upgraded. Then again, other platforms have had poor choices made in their designs, so I guess that's par for the course.

OCS allez!

make a demo about it!

Yeah, gonna agree with Bonefish here. If you want to see more vanilla-A1200 demos, then go make more vanilla-A1200 demos!

But it's so much easier to just rant about how OTHER people are not making them!!!

In Kokos defence it didn't come off as ranting at all.

Other than that - why do I prefer coffee over tea? :)

In the case of A500 vs. vanilla A1200 I simply like the fact that there are more limitations to play with on the former.
And there's also more people out there who (at least think they) have some idea about what's possible on the A500, so there are more faces to rub my brilliance all over.

Ever considered shaving your brilliances, as they're quite hairy at the moment

Also the fact that coding for aga is a royal pain in the ass!

AGA = more colors and higher res and more3d power?

More colors? = a lot of ocs-prods show more than 32 colors by hacking and using the copper

higher-res= who needs higher res (except for slideshows) the machine has not enough power for higher-res effects. most aga-demos still have 320x200.

more3d power= if you want cool 3d-stuff the go for a pc, not an amiga

But when you've done a twister and a tunnel you can reuse them forever!

that's right, nobody uses hi res.

There is that Cocoon demo from Revision which runs on a vanilla 1200.

My take is a lot of amiga sceners left just as the AGA scene took over. ('92-'93) There's been a surge of people from that era returning to the scene and wanting to do more OCS stuff.

I'm somewhat torn. I like when people produce stuff for the Amiga. I'm an AGA-fanboy myself but do appreciate a500 demos. However, I'm having a difficult time enjoying yet another scrolling starfield or yet another sinusscroller. I saw thousands of such in the beginning of the nineties and don't appreciate them anymore. The c64 peepz have shown that oldskool hardware isn't necessarily equal to oldskool effects. It strikes me that the same does not count for the newly returned a500 coders. Slummy & Britelite have a fresher view of a500 development, but honestly most new a500 demos bore the hell out of me. I'm an AGA fanboy. I like doing c2p effects and enjoy that convenience. Unlike Hoffman I think that a1200 is great fun, but again...it probably also depends on what you have worked with the most.

Chiming in from the perspective of a person who'd only ever done PC demos, and only recently tried his hand at Amiga stuff:

If nowadays, you want to start doing things on the Amiga for the first time, you typically start from the basics, and want to understand what you are doing first. So A500 first it is, and once you feel comfortable with that, maybe look at the newer, fancier stuff.

Which means that: You'll spend a lot of time dabbling around with the relatively bizarre architecture of the a500, being both amazed and appalled. Then, doing c2p effects doesn't seem that interesting anymore, since you might as well do those on a PC with less pain. So you stay on OCS, and that's it.

The plain 1200 never got all that many prods, even though it got some absolute classics right at the start (Nexus 7 for example), the AGA scene quickly moved to more RAM/faster CPU expansions.
I think it's a bit sad that today the term "AGA demo" almost always means that it targets the 060 expansions which are so prohibitively expensive and rare.

Well... it's not like there's a shortage of 64 demos with some (distorted) big sprite, some bars and scrollers either.

And yeah, it's inherently boring to watch. Especially since it seems that greetings is an extremely important part of that part of the scene.
And if you've been doing demos since the 80s, you've probably met a lot of people between then and now. And they must all be greeted. All of them.

(coughWinUAE(cough)

It has already been explained by Britelite and Absence , but to highlight the reasons the OP was asking for, the reason why A1200 users so quickly expanded their machines is the lack of fast memory. I guess you won't realize how big a difference fast memory makes, until you do some Amiga coding. Without fast memory, the A1200 is almost as slow as A500. If you run code from chip memory, it is s-l-o-w. I think the reason behind limiting AGA chip memory to OCS speeds was OCS compatibility, but not having fast memory in stock A1200 was just idiotic, because it effectively took away the 020's added speed.

I think some Amiga 1200s even came without a hard drive. So if you want to go 100 % pure stock A1200 without options, your demo has to run from a floppy! ;)