15 Feb
1999
15 Feb
'99
12:24 p.m.
I fired up a couple of my Amiga games, one of which I wish to "clone" using
modern hardware called StarGlider. This game was pretty revolutionary in
its time as it provided lots of smoothly animated 3D things on the screen
at once.
In looking at this and browsing my amiga archives I came across a regular
Amiga flame war which was held between the Game programmers and the Amiga
users. The Game programmers were adamant that you had to "take over the
machine" in order to get the necessary performance and there was no way you
would ever have something like StarGlider running in real time with some OS
back there stealing your cycles.
I contrasted that with running Descent FreeSpace on my Win95 machine. It
brings into focus the huge changes that have undergone this space in only
the last 10 years. Amazing, simply amazing.
--Chuck
15 Feb
15 Feb
12:22 p.m.
In looking at this and browsing my amiga archives I
came across a regular
Amiga flame war which was held between the Game programmers and the Amiga
users. The Game programmers were adamant that you had to "take over the
machine" in order to get the necessary performance and there was no way you
would ever have something like StarGlider running in real time with some OS
back there stealing your cycles.
I contrasted that with running Descent FreeSpace on my Win95 machine. It
brings into focus the huge changes that have undergone this space in only
the last 10 years. Amazing, simply amazing.
Are you saying that Descent doesn't take over the machine? (I'm not being
sarcastic -- I don't know either way, mainly because I use a Mac most of the
time.) I've seen some vey badly-behaved Windows programs, and tons of DOS
ones. I don't think Windows 95 or NT are very efficient, so I'd say that
when performance counts, the truth is sometimes closer to the
game-programmers' side than the users'.
-- Derek
12:48 p.m.
At 06:22 PM 2/15/99 -0800, Derek Peschel wrote:
Are you saying that Descent doesn't take over the
machine? (I'm not being
sarcastic -- I don't know either way, mainly because I use a Mac most of the
time.) I've seen some vey badly-behaved Windows programs, and tons of DOS
ones. I don't think Windows 95 or NT are very efficient, so I'd say that
when performance counts, the truth is sometimes closer to the
game-programmers' side than the users'.
What I'm saying is that Descent asks the OS for the machine and the OS
gives it to the game in a controlled way that does not disturb other
applications that are running. (I had an explorer up and a web browser).
During the game I can "alt-tab" to a different application and then click
on the program bar to resume it. While the game is running I can download
software from the network, while the game is running other machines can
print on the printer attached to this machine and shared over the network.
Its not a "DOS" mode game, it uses DirectX and Win32 calls.
It is pretty interesting.
--Chuck
16 Feb
16 Feb
12:58 a.m.
At 06:24 PM 2/15/99 -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
I fired up a couple of my Amiga games, one of which I
wish to "clone" using
modern hardware called StarGlider. This game was pretty revolutionary in
its time as it provided lots of smoothly animated 3D things on the screen
at once.
I imagine you met Jez San at the Amiga dev cons. I still keep in touch.
He's still running Argonaut at <http://www.argonaut.com/>, makers of
StarGlider, StarFox, and Croc. Why, it was only four years ago or so
that he moved out of his parent's house. :-)
The Game programmers were adamant that you had to
"take over the
machine" in order to get the necessary performance and there was no way you
would ever have something like StarGlider running in real time with some OS
back there stealing your cycles.
Take over the machine, indeed. Back in 1986, there was no choice but
to do that for many intensive applications. A decade and a few doublings
of CPU power, and suddenly 3D on the cheap is easy and fast in C++,
even though the .EXE is larger than the amount of RAM in the old computer.
There's also Argonaut RISC Cores at <http://www.arccores.com/>, where you
can buy "the world's first user-customizable microprocessor".
Some folks still use assembler on today's Windows machines. See
Steve Gibson's site at <http://www.spinrite.com/smgassembly.htm>.
- John
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cmcmanis＠mcmanis.com -
dpeschel＠u.washington.edu -
jfoust＠threedee.com