OK, so last night my dad set up his old Amiga 1200 (which has been 
somewhat modified), and we played some games.

Unfortunately, attempting to play Zyconix resulted in an immediate Guru 
Meditation Number. (Who the hell came up with THAT name??)

I spent some time playing a game known only as "Putty". This is actually 
the first Amiga game I ever saw, running on my dad's Amiga 600. Try to 
imagine my reaction: It's the early 1990s, and I've spent most of my 
life playing games on a Commodore 64. And then I come home one day and 
find everybody sat round the TV, playing this thing.



For those who don't memorise such details, let me throw in some 
technical specifications.

- C64: 16 colours available, up to 16 on-screen at once. (Like old VGA.)

- A600: 4,096 colours available (!!), up to 32 on-screen at once.

- C64: monophonic subtractive synthesis, 3 notes polyphonic.

- A600: stereophonic digital playback, 8 bits/sample, arbitrary sampling 
rate (i.e., not just a choice of a few preset rates) up to over 50,000 
samples/second. 4 independent channels. Hardware sample looping.

The A600 also boasts lots of tricks and gizmos that can be used to work 
around these limitations to give even more impressive results.

In other words, in principle the A600 can produce almost photographic 
images, and nearly CD-quality sound. These levels are seldom reached in 
a *game* though - it has to fit on a reasonable number of double-density 
floppy disks.

(Double-density being the 800 KB disks that came *before* the 
high-density "1.44 MB" disks we use today - so it's actually more 
limiting than it sounds. And JPEG wouldn't be invented for another 
decade or so yet - even if there were a machine powerful enough to 
handle it!)

In practice, on a cheap CRT TV with blurry picture and weak sound... it 
looked damned-near photographic and sounded very impressive. Certainly 
obliterating anything the C64 could muster, by a significant margin.



As some kind of comparison, take a look at the C64 classic "Uridium":

http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/uridium/screenshots/gameShotId,169121/

Now compare to "Putty":

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/putty/screenshots/gameShotId,33172/

You can see why I was so damned impressed! The hike in graphical quality 
is very significant. Check out the Putty logo screen:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/putty/screenshots/gameShotId,33168/

With a tiny amount of blur the dithering and aliasing isn't really 
apparent, and it *appears* to be a hyper-snooth image.



Putty is a platform game. Once you get over the fact that it's a 
platform game, and how old-fashioned and boring that seems and just PLAY 
the game for what it is... it's actually quite interesting. Even today. 
Obviously the graphics are rather blurry, and the sound is mildly grainy 
in places - but it's not nearly half as bad as you'd expect. It's 
actually quite *good* in fact.

The game involves controlling a small sphere of blue putty. It has two 
eyes, and when it moves, the underside develops two small lumps like 
"feet". It's quite comical to watch. It can also jump, and stretch short 
distances. This little guy manages to be surprisingly expressive; he's 
only got eyes, but with just his eyes and eyelids he manages to convey a 
seemingly wide range of emotions.

Controlling this lump, you must do battle against various foes. There 
are small red and white mushrooms with eyes that jump around 
rythmically. There are little snails who's shells jiggle up and down as 
they saunter along. And so forth. There's an organce carrot with a green 
spikey hairdoo who yells "uzi ninty millimeter" in a chipmonk-style 
voice and fires bullets at you. And various kinds of birds and bird 
chicks flying or waddling around.

Most of these can be killed by "absorbing" them. Press down and the 
putty ball plattens itself over the floor. Anything that steps on the 
sheet of putty gets absorbed, causing the putty to return to its normal 
ball shape.

Certain enemies can also be "punched", which turns them into little pink 
babies (together with a rythemic "wah! wah! wah!" sound). If you absorb 
these, you get additional points. If you're not quick enough, they 
eventually vanish. If you don't quite get there in time, a cat's head 
bursts through the platfield (as if it were paper), and a grainy sample 
plays: "Too bad, juuuuuust missed em... HAHAHAHAHA!"

[It appears to be a sample of Screwy Squirrel. I saw the cartoon 
broadcast about 10 years later while casually watching TV, and he said 
that exact line.]

The spatial resolution isn't so hot, but even today the colouring looks 
pretty smooth. My dad's composit video lead seems to introduce a lot of 
ghosting - maybe it's not shielded right or something. But I'm playing 
this game on a *vast* 40-inch LCD panel, and the colours look smooth and 
seemless, even if the edges look rather grainy. The putty is a deep 
blue. The mushrooms are red and white. The snails are bright green, with 
golden brown shells. And so forth.

It all looks very smooth and slick. More to the point, every single 
individual character is just *packed* with character. They all have 
their own characteristic movement. The whole screen is so full of life, 
it's really quite entertaining just to watch.

The sound is pretty neat too. If the putty touches another creature, it 
makes a strange "squawking" sound, and it's eyes bulge. However, when 
the putty absorbs a creature, you get a combination of a high-pitched 
"plink" and a burp. When you complete a level, you hear a bubbling sound 
followed by a coocoo clock. It's all quite zaney and strange, but it's 
once again full of character. (And a far cry from the bleeps and buzzes 
the C64 can manage.)



Eventually I got frustrated with Putty. (Although I did play it for a 
rather long time.) My dad's joystick seems to be slightly worn out. 
(Hey, when was the last time you heard the word "joystick"? Much less 
*used* one...)

I spent some time playing "Cool Spot". But that was just annoyingly 
difficult to control.

Another neat game is "Push Over". This involves domino puzzles. You 
start a level with a given configuration of dominoes, and you have to 
rearrange them in such a way that by pushing a single domino, all the 
dominoes fall. Once every last one has toppled, the level exit door 
opens. But you've got a time limit, and various dominoes have "special" 
features - they're impossible to knock over, they have a delay before 
they fall, they continue to roll over and over forever, etc. It's great 
fun, and the later levels are *definitely not* a push-over!

But then I cound an old CU Amiga coverdisk, containing the full-version 
of the very excellent shareware game "Cybernetix". This is your standard 
"you fly around in a space rocket shooting asteriods" type thing - but 
done *well*. Watch out for the enemy ships trying to attack you!

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/cybernetix/screenshots/gameShotId,254396/

I most especially like the music too. I think I'm going to have to wheel 
my CD recorder round to my dad's house to make some serious recording! I 
used to have a tape somewhere, but I've long since lost it, and most 
games won't run on my heavily modified Amiga any more. (In particular, 
I've got the updated Kickstart ROM.)



While we're on the subject, the Amiga 600 features the Enhanced Chip Set 
(ECS), which is a slightly improved version of the Original Chip Set 
(OCS) as found in, say, the Amiga 500. However, the Amiga 1200 features 
the formidible Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). Let's compare specs:

- ECS: 4,096 colours available (i.e., 4 bits per RGB channel), up to 32 
colours on-screen at once using normal indexed bitmaps. (Various special 
tricks allow far more, but with restrictions.)

- AGA: 16,777,216 colours available (i.e., 24-bit colour like on all 
modern video systems). Up to 256 colours on-screen at once using normal 
indexed bitmaps. (Again, lots of special tricks available to exceed this 
limit, some of them unsuitable for games programming.)

With enough preprocessing, an AGA Amiga can basically display 24-bit 
graphics. It just has to be encoded cleaverly. Recall that at this point 
in history, PCs were still lumbering around with EGA or maybe, if you're 
lucky, VGA. Ooo, 16 colours. Wow. :-P

Oh how we laughed at those silly little PCs with their lame-ass Windows 
3.11 that struggled to open and close windows when we had a true 
premptive multitasking OS with a lightning-fast GUI and hardware with 
high-quality digital audio and video.



Unfortunately, then the Amiga's hardware stood still for 20 years. While 
it was once a shining example of hardware far ahead of its time, it has 
long since been left in the dust. I don't really understand how it 
happened, but Commodore ended up in all sorts of financial trouble. 
Commodore was good it making great hardware, but hopeless at marketing it.

(Having said that, there was one cheeky thing they did. They put a 
30-foot poster showing an Amiga CD32 - directly outside Sega's UK 
headquarters. The caption read "To be this good will take Sega ages". 
The Amiga CD32 is basically an Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM drive.)

There were persistent rumours of a new chipset dupped "the AAA chipset". 
(I forget what that's meant to stand for.) If the rumours are to be 
believed, they had "running silicon" for a true 24-bit graphics 
subsystem. That is, it could display 16,777,216 colours at once without 
trickery. It also had hardware to copy and combine graphics blocks 
without CPU intervention, and various other sophistications.

Reputedly the sound hardware got a tweak too. (The sound capabilities of 
the OCS, ECS and AGA were all identical.) Details of this were scant though.

Month after month, Amiga magazines [of which there used to be many] 
phophesied new hardware hitting the shelves "soon". Ultimately, this 
never occurred. It was a very upsetting time for us all.

Then, one by one, all the Amiga magazines shut down. I still remember 
the day CU Amiga shut down, and Amiga Format promised that "Future 
Publishing is in a different position to CU Amiga, and we can promise 
that AF wil never shut down". A year or so later, when AF had become 
little more than a thin pamphlet, they finally announced their decision 
to shut down.



Looking back through the pages of old issues of AF, it's amazing what 

for a device called a "digitiser" which transforms analogue sound into 
the digital form that the Amiga can then play back. (Modern sound cards 
throw this in for free!)


sound editing package. TechnoSound Turbo even came with a minimal 
sequencer! These packages would load and save multiple file formats, 
edit sound down to the sample level, program in sample loops, apply very 
basic filtering and so forth.

Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D, 
Expert 4D Jr, Cinema 4D, et al. Most of these just render polygons with 
texturing and light sourcing, but Imagine offers configurable procedural 
textures, and Real3D offered sophisticated *ray tracing* and CSG. The 
more expensive machines (the ones that *didn't* appear as cover disks) 
offered particle systems and inverse kinetics, and so on and so forth.

It sounds old-hat now, but seeing for the very first time a home 
computer produce a realistic 3D image out of nothing was a truly 
astonishing thing. Sure, Hollywood had been doing it for a while. But a 
home computer? A *home* computer?? Wow.

(Bearing in mind, my first ray-traced scene - a mesh torus with a 
procedural wood texture and one light source - took well over 2 *hours* 
to render at 320x200 pixels. What can I say? No FPU...)

Then there were coverdisks and commercial programs for drawing fractals. 
Fractuality was famed. I actually got to own this one. I played with it 
on my dad's Amiga the other day. It took 30 minutes to laboriously draw 
a Mandelbrot image - you could actually watch the individual pixels 
appear near the edge of the set, while further out it was quite fast.

The program comes with a complement of demo parameters. Some of them I 
couldn't actually see, because the rendering was just so ridiculously 
slow. Watching my dad's Amiga struggle to produce this image yesterday, 
I realised that it's not even a particularly deep region. Xaos zooms 
past it IN REALTIME on my 2.4 GHz Athlon64 X2 at home! How far we have 
come...



Then there was Amiga Format's landmark inclusion of several versions of 
OctaMED over the years. Originally some Finnish guy (why was it always 
Finnish guys?) write the Music EDitor, MED. Then, alone amounst the 
"tracker" genre of programs, he added *8 channel mode*, thus creating 
OctaMED.

This breakthrough feature essentially uses software upsampling and 
mixing to play 8 independent channels of sound even though the Amiga 
actually possesses a mere 4 hardware channels. The result brings an 7 
MHz Amiga 600 to its knees. (It's quite tame on a 12 MHz Amiga 1200 though.)

The software gradually become a commercial enterprise, and feature after 
feature was added. A very early and unique feature was a simple 
software/hardware "synthesizer" engine. No other tracker had it. Also 
MIDI support, unique amount trackers.

But then, the astonishing OctaMED Sound Studio came out. This completely 
tore up the rulebook. Unusuable on anything less than an Amiga 1200, 
this allows an *unlimited* number of channels! And each with *arbitrary* 
stereo location! And many of the tight restrictions from OctaMED's 
8-channel mode were removed. And Amiga Format put this legend of sonic 
power on a coverdisk!

In the blink of an eye, suddenly if you had the CPU and the storage 
space, you could record chunks of digital sound, edit it, and produce 
complex, layered symphonies of sound. And in another astonishing move, 
OctaMED Sound Studio allows rendering *to disk*. So if you happened to 

real CD* out of your music! Previously this was an unthinkable achievement.

Using more than about 20 channels started to slow the system down quite 
a bit (especially if you were really *using* all those channels), but 
the possibilities seemed vast. If nothing else, now you could load up 
all your old songs and edit the stereo staging to sound less irritating. 
Suddenly you felt like a "real" musician!



It all sounds a bit silly today. We tak such things for granted. Look:



- The cheapest, nastiest motherboard you can buy is virtually guaranteed 
to have 52-channel super-hyper-mega-ultra surround sound, and will have 
analogue and maybe even digital audio *inputs* as well.

- *All* graphics cards can trivially display 24-bit graphics. 
Specialised high-speed bitmap copying hardware is unecessary due to the 
speed of the other components.

- Sophisticated image processing software such as The GIMP can be 
obtained *for free*!

- 3D graphics rendering requires nothing more than a copy of POV-Ray. 


- Complex sound editing software such as Audacity is *free*.

In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video tools 
actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase, Cakewalk, 
Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)

Today, anybody with sufficient technical bent can easily sit down with a 
computer and cut CDs of their music, or burn DVDs of their graphics and 
animations. It's not even expensive any more.

We are truly living in the future, my friends...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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