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^ that they did!

i remember a friend getting a 128mb pcmcia internal cf card drive

I think quite many of them came without a hard drive. I bought my first HD few years later for my A1200 (which I bought in '93), when some swedish guy sold his 40Mb(!) 2,5" HD at Assembly 1995. Later I discovered that HD had belonged previously to Offa/TBL ;)

Yeah. To try and say it even clearer, an unexpanded stock Amiga 1200 was basically a piece of shit machine nobody wanted to have even back then. You wanted to have at least a hard drive and some fast memory to make it not suuuuuuuuuck. Think about what "PC lamers" already had when the A1200 came out, let alone 1995 or something.

The question "why is there so few demos for this piece of shit machine nobody wanted even back in the day" only arises now, much later, when sceners started to get interested in all sorts of retro stuff, and this particular piece of shit is just a technical challenge and curiosity among many others. Today, nobody takes it personally, if a retro machine is slow or quirky, because they all are, and nobody really uses them as their actual personal computer in daily use.

So who's setting up that service where you can upload some test code to run on an 060 and get a capture back? :)

Methinks that Yzi is a blasphemous TROLL.

I'm up for doing an base A1200 production at some point :)

Don't be offended if you used a stock A1200 with only a floppy drive. It did have something extra compared to A500! More room for ProTracker samples. 8 bitplanes mode! Must have felt like good value for money?

I think it's a combination of many factors, some of which were already mentioned...

The Amiga platform was already in trouble anyway, and AGA didn't really take off in general. There are very few games released for AGA, because very few people owned an A1200 or better.
They either couldn't afford the upgrade from Amiga 500 to an AGA machine, or they moved to PC instead.

Also, a stock A1200 isn't all that interesting as a demo machine. The audio chip is the same as an OCS machine, and the CPU isn't powerful enough to do any kind of fancy soft synth or whatever, so you're still stuck with ProTracker-ish stuff.
The graphics are somewhat better, but again you don't have that much more CPU grunt (partly because you only have chipmem as already mentioned), so you can't really do totally different things like chunky effects. You could mainly do the same stuff as you did on OCS, with a few more colours and a few more polys.
Compare that to the 486 VLB systems that were available on the PC side at the time, and I guess it's no coincidence that the 'PC demo boom' started at around the same time, with classics like Second Reality being released.

I suppose the AGA+030/040/060 platform became popular because it was very similar in capabilities. So for the few people who stuck to the Amiga, this opened the door to a new level of Amiga demos.

Perhaps if someone had released a very influential demo like 'Desert Dream' or 'Second Reality' on a stock A1200, things would be way different.
Such epic demos inspired tons of people to make similar demos, and they may have used the same hardware to do it on.

As said, today it's different, and we have a 'retro-scene' where people make demos for old systems, regardless of their specs. Back then, AGA was not 'retro', it was a 'new' platform, used by people who wanted to make state-of-the-art demos. They wanted to push the limits of realtime rendering and such.
Creating ever more realistic and complex 3d scenes was a big part of what made a 'good demo' back in the day. And the A1200 didn't fit that requirement very well.

Just imagine if the A1200 had got even 2 megs fast memory, a chunky video mode, and the graphics side having fast-mem-speed access. Without even going to something like a 68030.

I think the A1200 would've needed the unreleased AAA chipset in order to be somewhat impressive. AGA was quite bad even on release, and should have been included in the A600 instead.

Would an A1200 with say 4mb fastmem and AGA chipset but with the addition of a 256 color chunky mode have been enough for it to run the games that took off on the PC at that time? Wolfenstein would have worked fine I guess, but it probably would have struggled with Doom?

The point really being is vanilla out of the box systems (stock A500 or A1200) and, in the case of the 500, equipped with a sort of historically accepted expansion (the extra 512k public RAM) instead of a variety of accelerated AGA machines (030 - 060 and PPC).


Dealing with AGA colour palettes ... you bet yer posh arse :D


That's why I'm surely not the only one aiming for modern style on the old lady.

The CD32 game console is basically an A1200 with CD ROM and a dedicated chip for chunky conversion. Someone on a forum tried to run a port of Doom on a CD32 expanded with 8 MB fast mem and an FPU. I'm not sure how much benefit the FPU is, but he got 5.8 FPS with the hardware chunky conversion (3.9 FPS without). So yes, it would struggle with Doom. :)

Blueberry has got a great idea! :) I'm currently using the Frequent cloud which runs demos on 060 and returns a WhatsApp video, but it is offline for hut painting and sleeping sometimes.

I'm hoping the amiga demo scene can start using a mix of chipset features and c2p/cpu type effects where appropriate. Much like the c64 scene has been good at doing. Many people end up using c2p for everything (including myself until recently). Even for scrolling, overlays and other effects where it is the wrong hammer.

AGA have some cool features which extend the A500 world a little:
- 2MB custom chip accessible RAM as opposed to 512KB
- 8 bitplanes instead of ... 5 or 6 (EHB is ECS no? not OCS)
- 8 bits per channel colors instead of 4
- HAM8 mode for 262144 colors
- 1280x512 resolution
- Sub pixel scrolling allowing you to scroll 0.25 pixels at a time on a 320x256 screen
- Sub pixel horizontal placement of sprites (very smooth animation of overlays)
- Sprites can use different color banks, not limited to colors 16-31
- New fetch modes 64-bit, 32-bit
-- Allows 64-pixel wide scrolling with sub pixel precision.. and probably save some memory access times?
-- Allows 64 pixel wide sprites
- Independent resolution sprites. Can have hires sprites on lores background.
- You can do "double buffering" in the copper using these xor plane registers. While changing colors, showing one row of color registers while changing the next.
- dual play field can have more colors per plane and the colors can be selected from multiple 16 color sets?
... anything else? larger blits?

These just supercharge some parts of the A500 world. It doesn't get you any new class of HW effects like for example adding a 3d chip would have done.

The new effect possibilities mostly arise from using c2p as the CPUs available became powerful enough. So you could do blur, texture mapping, 2d bump, tunnel tables etc. ad nauseam in stead of star fields, copper bars, biplane modulo effects, blitter powered effects (shade bobs?) ad nauseam.

More memory and better tools provide new opportunities for higher quality Amiga demos after the hardware stopped updating:
- Do your precalc on a monster PC to save time
- 64/128 MB RAM is Cheap
-- Use streaming music converted to .. for example Ephidrena's new noiseless 8-bit format. Stream that shit from fast ram to chip 512 bytes per frame.
- Or add your Muffler/Dune inspired soundtrack with 64KB sized drum loops and stuff now that there is 2MB chip RAM available.
- Use high end 3d software and bake that sweet lighting that would take a year to calculate on an amiga into the textures. Spin those low poly spike balls slowly on axises of your choosing!
- Use UAE to avoid your development environment crashing each time the exe crashes
- Cross compile from PC to Amiga using for example VBCC (1 second, 1 demo finished compiled)
- Use photoshop and downconvert graphics to 8-bit to save time.

OCS has EHB. Only early NTSC A1000 models lack EHB.

MORE BLASPHEMY!!

AGA was great, considering that's all you were going to get from the CMM (Commodore Management Morons).

AGA wasn't THAT bad but selling the A1200 without any fast memory was plain stupid. Also, the A600 was a complete waste of time and money and does not deserve to be called Amiga and hence no AAA chipset either in my (not so) humble opinion.

Probably, but when DOOM came out, you still needed a pretty high-end and expensive 486 to play it properly. So it would not be a shame if a non-accelerated A1200 couldn't do it, given the massive price difference.
Perhaps if the A4000 had a decent chunky mode (and they didn't sell it without fastmem), it would have been a decent match for a PC game system.

Then again, I suppose you'd also need to upgrade the sound chip, because at that time you were competing with GUS and AWE32 cards.

This, this!

Back in early 2000s things didn't look well for A500, but it all started to change thanks to Slummy and Britelite. These two crazy guys proved that OCS potential was not fully exploited yet and they made people realize that an A500 demo could be something way more interesting than glenz vector and dot tunnel. I believe it was Hideous Mutant Freaks and Superoriginal that inspired many people to do OCS stuff again (me included).

Might want to throw in an accelerator board as well. A4000 shipped with 25 MHz 68040 (or 68030 for the "cheap" version).

Yea, I loved Superoriginal. The first thing I thought was: "It's an AGA demo, without the AGA".
And I would sooner make an OCS demo than AGA now.
I suppose that brings us back to the current 'retro' state though: we pick our own arbitrary limits, and we think it's just cooler to do these effects on the more limited A500 platform than on an A1200.
That, and the fact that it's the 'original' Amiga may also give it extra charm. These capabilities were present since the first A1000 was launched in 1985.

I guess it's somewhat equivalent to the PC scene, where we find more and more people doing 64k or 4k intros now. Sure, you *could* do a regular demo, but it seems that a lot of people prefer the extra challenge of fitting the effects into a small binary.

Anyone can make a demo for any platform. But there is some flavor of self-imposed limits to the demoscene. These limits set the minimum specs, and the minimum specs is what makes a demo impressive to a (knowledgeable) viewer.

All the limits are arbitrary, but there is sense to them. I've often advocated stock A1200 as the third sensible standard platform.

OCS 1MB, A1200 w/o fastram, and AGA/060 have come about for historical reasons. The first two because it's what most people had; you could do most things with that, and very few bought f.ex. accelerators or real fastram for their machines. We were young. It was expensive. So the setups that have been for sale that sceners have bought last 10-20 years have been setups like this.

But as people got older, they could afford accelerators so on AGA there was a bit of a standard platform in AGA/030 for a while. This then turned into AGA/040 and AGA/060 when they came out, and AGA/060 is the highest limit of original Amigas.

As for the praise for OCS 1MB, well, I think it's praiseworthy but mostly I think it's just the same home computer love as others have for "their" platform. ;)

I guess the OCS 1 MB platform also hits a certain sweet-spot for demos, making good quality audio, graphics, tons of effects and overall design, flow and coherency possible.

I mean, most oldskool platforms are quite primitive, and only people familiar with the hardware will appreciate the demos. But I can show something like 9 Fingers or Everyway to anyone, and they'll like the music and the visuals, even if they don't know what an Amiga is.

Another theory I have is that doing demos for AGA often requires more effort (more complex architecture; more resources and options; higher expectations to have sophisticated frameworks like a nice 3D engine etc.) while for OCS you can achieve good results (relative to the platform) already with smaller chunks of work and fewer people. Looking at the demographics of today's scene (compared to 20 years or so ago) and the real life situation many sceners are in, OCS might be more attractive to get something released successfully.

I definitely disagree with this and would say that doing something worthwhile on an A500 requires a lot more effort than on AGA/060. With the latter you have enough resources that you can quickly throw together a half-shoddy implementation of a decent idea and still get away with it, thus making it a lot more suited for last-minute party prods. :)