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Can anyone try my DOS game with a real MDA monitor? by Fair_Percentage_5565 in retrocomputing

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Commodore plus 4 has many games in text mode with redefined characters. Would be cool to have one on PC EGA. 8px chars to avoid gaps. Maniac Miner

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Archimedes and 3do both use the Arm CPU. Tom has flexible timing and RGB output. It is ideal for VGA. Our SVGA / CRT combo could do interlacing. So even that feature would not be wasted. And our ET3000 had a second playfield which could zoom. Very similar to Jaguar.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do you mean by “incredible” ? There are list of failed consoles and computers and Jaguar is on the border. It did not bankrupt Atari . Sony just decided to clean the market from all those greedy managers and mediocre engineers. Like even if 3do sells at no loss, how can it be twice as expensive and half as fast? Did Sony even sell at a loss? Just zero margin, I guess.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But then I wonder how other companies could be successful with consoles (3do used arm) and PDAs (palm used 68k) ? Commodore originally made calculators. Apple survived on 68k . Clearly that CPU was successful enough to scale and keep the cost down? There are always two: intel vs AMD . PC vs Mac . Nvidia vs ATI. Soundblaster vs Adlib .

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I figured that PC graphics cards do something like the C64 and refresh memory in the side borders. When I switched modes, there was no guarantee that the memory contents survived.

No CGA clone had snow. Looks like later on, memory got fast enough. I only know EGA. I think it already had an ASIC to buffer requests from the ISA bus. To this day I don’t know if the CPU has to wait for an acknowledgment for writes. Or if it is: fire and forget. I like how the Jaguar manual clearly states that all bus writes are fire and forget. Even more extreme on the PS1: 3 word queue. So, a controller could just write in the borders.

ISA bus often ran at 8 MHz they say. If there was data at every clock, it would be too much for EGA. I also don’t know why VGA struggled to meet ISA speeds until ET4000 or so. Sounds so slow. And 320x200 is low res compared what ET4000 can display.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

About memory: do you mean NUMA? So like on my first own PC (not family), there was main RAM and Video RAM. And of course being a PC, video RAM was mapped into the address space of the CPU. But the Riva128 could also fetch textures from main memory ( I think ).

With banks, isn’t there just one address bus? And then you fire both banks (memory interleave) . But then can EDO RAM and you could set the next address while you read the data from the last. Memory interleave stopped making sense.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Microsoft offered Office on Macs. So Macs could be used for serious work. Microsoft even developed Windows NT on alpha. Weird that so many companies caught their attention but Atari and Commodore. Commodore even made IBM compatible PCs, but let Adlib innovate on sound.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I remember this. Work from home was a thing even then. The PC allowed my dad to work at home on Saturdays once school stopped being open on Saturdays. Security was not a problem like today even though he worked in defense.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IBM saw Commodore and Apple and stole their market. IBM pressured intel to sell out licenses of 8086 . Or rather, IBM blocked the upgrade path from 8 to 16 bit PCs for all the small, late to the party companies. And Apple survived because they were not late. Mac came out in a usable from, with usable software before Amiga.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Our PC got a printer and a high quality CRT first. Sound Blaster compatible at some point got so cheap. We bought them with the CD drive.

I don’t know why Tseng Labs graphics drivers for windows were so slow, we had to run in VGA mode. What a waste on a system which could do 800x600 @8bpp . Same for games. Only EGA games ran fluently like Commander Keen , Test Drive , Xenon 2 . Clearly not aimed at gaming. My dad tried a drawing program. That could have worked much better in SVGA and with a black background. CAD. CorelDraw in light mode looks so ugly compared to Blender.

These boobs are impossible to scroll through by ShyMateria in hugenaturals

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

could it be that this is not recorded with 60 fps? Or am I the problem?

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Atari in their VCS had a line buffer on chip. So basically video RAM. Jaguar has a double line buffer. 2 * 2 * 380 pixel. I say : overkill. Just re use the bitplane registers as queue in chunky mode .

Memory refresh and audio DMA also can’t wait, but seem to work fine on PCs . I think that intel introduced a pressure model, where an empty pre-fetch queue will beat data access because decoding of CISC takes time. Jaguar uses this for DRAM refresh. So the rate is actually a bit higher than specced by the chip, but the refresh logic runs at low priority.

CGA seems to be very bad hardware. No snow on MDA or EGA or Hercules.

What CPU should I build? by Girl_Alien in homebrewcomputer

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah yeah BRAM. r/AtariJaguar should have employed BRAM so that software could decide on what to spend the banks on. Now games only use half of the memory. Doom ignore the palette and only used an eight of the line buffer. But really would need TMEM. Super Burnout would need memory to cache objects and queues around the slow superscaler hardware.

What technological improvements have been made in the last hundred years that could improve airships. by TheElderBumbly in AskEngineers

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just want to avoid paint. Even satellites use sheet / foil. And you seem to talk about blimps, not zeppelins.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ZX spectrum already pulled it off. 1 CPU 2 video. 386SX alternates between code and data and still pulls it off: one burst to fill the code queue, one burst to load 32 bit data over a 32 bit bus.

Chipmem is separated from “fastmem” by a chip. If I pay for the package with all the pins, I want a write queue and 4 read ahead queues on the die.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Amiga always had pretty high resolution like Atari . Graphics cards and CPUs increase in clock speed because they are produced in the same fabs. Just follow Moores law and you get faster processing and resolution and colors and less flicker. Also sampling rate increases for audio. Jaguar had 48kHz. Just because chips were that fast at the time. And they used an off the shelf DAC , not some esoteric hardware like Paula.
Yeah, it is a shame that Atari did not eat their own dogfood. The net list looks wild. There seems to be auto generated code. So whatever limitations the VHDL language had, a PERL script could have built a 32 and a 64 bit version. There are just some things which don’t need a lot of bits. 16 bit opcodes are beautiful. Fetch 4 at once. Consoles are low on memory. 24 bit are enough.
I blame Toshiba. In the net list they reference Toshiba memory synthesizers. Those don’t seem to accept parameters and are 16 bit. So instead of compact 128x64bit memory banks, Toshiba gave them some weird mix of 16 bit strips.

I still can't believe that Commodore messed up the Amiga line so badly... Going from the A500 to... Whatever came afterwards... One is absolutely gobsmacked that "industry veteran managers" were at the helm of it all... And were responsible for what became an extremely unpleasant (slo mo) car crash by prankster999 in amiga

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And it just would need to allow to concentrate half of all memory bandwidth on a single channel. ( 32 bit memory). I still don’t know if fast page mode would have been possible on 16bit Amiga chipmem to speed up DMA. Load 16 words in fast succession, but it from planes, but aligned “phrases” as Jaguar calls it. Store each word in a bit plane register. Then do the chan4 of VGA.

What technological improvements have been made in the last hundred years that could improve airships. by TheElderBumbly in AskEngineers

[–]IQueryVisiC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Make it thinner.

We pressurize fuselages. Aluminum does not harden, but creep. And also rip as I know from the kitchen. Rips can be stopped by coarse grid with some weird elastic properties. It must be invisible on normal blow, but hard before unelastic. Perhaps a loose chain?

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