#A1200: First Impressions
19 messages in this thread
manual and Install disk with all 1200s.
All I need to do now is put together a PARNET cable, pick up a 15-to-23
pin monitor cable adaptor for my Mitsubishi DiamondScan, and get an
expansion RAM board for the 1200. Computing nirvana awaits! <g>
-Dave (via AutoPilot)
"…pick up a 15-to-23 pin monitor cable adaptor for my Mitsubishi
Diamondscan.."
David..
If you find that you need one of those fancy RGB adaptor widgets that
come with the 1950 and 1960 monitor, let me know. I think there is a BIT of
circuitry (maybe a resistor, capacitor or two as well) in it. I have a few
spare ones.
Jim
Does the A1200 have color composite output? If so how do the hi-color
modes look? Very Curious…..
Yes, the A1200 does have color composite output. HAM8 and 8-bit
images look ok in composite, I guess. Mind you, I'm viewing them on
an old 1080 with a rapidly declining picture tube <g>…when I get my
DiamondScan hooked up (it has a composite input) I'll be able to
judge more fairly.
Congrats! on your new A1200. Have you had a chance to do any animations
with the new AGA resolutions/colors? I am wondering how that feature
compares with the A4000 with its faster cpu. Let me know what it's like!!!
Bye-
Shane
– via Whap!
Shane,
Nope, haven't done any animation work with the A1200 yet. That'll have to
wait until I expand the machine's RAM. I have converted a lot of IFF24
images to HAM8 and viewed them on the 1200; they look terrific!
From what I understand, the 1200 should be able to animate at high frame
rates just as well as the A4000. The AGA chips, which provide the
horsepower, are the same in both machines.
-Dave (via AutoPilot)
"From what I understand, the 1200 should be able to animate at high frame
rates just as well as the A4000."
Not exactly. It depends on how the scene is being animated, blitter vs.
cpu. If it's the blitter then there should be no difference, but if it's
the CPU (as in ANIMs), then there will be a difference. I notice a
slowdown in ANIM speed on my A4000 when I turn off the CPU caches.
I have alot more comparisons to make, but already it seems that an
8bitplane(256/256K colors) 640×400 de-interlaced ANIM moves as quickly on
the A4000 as a 4bitplane(16 colors) 640×400 interlaced ANIM on the A3000.
I was able to get a 16 color hires interlace ANIM with over 1/4-screensize
delta to do 60fps on the A4000. Next I will experiment with 8 bitplane
ANIMs.
-Chris
Christopher, please continue to post these results of ANIM speeds on the
A4000 (and maybe David can compare the same ANIMs on his A1200). I think
this is what most people are looking for – how much faster will these new
machines do animations. We probably could use a benchmark ANIM for
comparisons of different machines (and different CPUs if they become
available). Thank you Christopher and David for sharing this with us.
John
Nice to see you are making these tests and I hope you post further
results.
One question:
How are you playing back your anims? With what player? Does using
`uncompressed' mode in D-Paint play-back at a resonable speed (20+ fps)?
I had seen Scala's player playback HAM-8 anims at VERY fast speeds (50+
fps) but `I' wasn't impressed with the quality.
<<< Tony D. Tracer >>>
Anthony, how were you not impressed with a HAM-8 anim played at 50+ fps?
Was it the HAM-8 quality or the anim itself? What machine did you see this
Scala demo on? 50+ fps sounds rather neat. Thanks.
John
anim played at 50+fps?
You make me sound like a jerk! or did I do that myself? :^)
HAM-8 still look great but these particular anims had too much
artifacting
everywhere. The anims were the ones with the spacefighters of
LightWave
going past towards the planet. This was done on a A4000, frames
were
rendered on a A2000/Toaster and transfered to the A4000. The frames
were
then converted to HAM8 with ADPRO, I think, and compiled with
Scala. I am
not sure of the resolution.
There might be a way to produce better looking anims but since I
don't
have Scala I wouldn't know how to do it.
<<< Tony D. Tracer >>>
Thank you for that info on the Scala demo Anthony. I certaintly would not
try to make you look foolish <g>. If you weren't impressed, you weren't
impressed. I was just amazed at that frame rate. I would say that Scala
has the early lead in the AGA anim race. The fact that there was
artifacting makes the anim rate more impressive because that usually slows
down an animation. Has anyone heard of the rumor that Commodore is
rethinking the design of the A4000 because the theoretical anim rate is not
attainable and they can't produce software (AmigaVision?) that will get the
advertised frame rate? This info on Scala would seem to disspell that
gossip.
John
If they were rendered on a 2000, I would guess those were really HAM6
ANIMs you were seeing.. especially for artifacts to be noticable in an
animation.
I have made some more concise ANIM tests and will be posting a set of
benchmark ANIM files for others to compare. Here is what I have so far:
2color 16color 256color
A3000 : 49 25 N/A
A4000 : 53 49 26
Explanation: Results are in frames per second. Source ANIMs are 59 frames
(looping) of identical scenes rendered in Imagine, differing in color
depth only; Image dimensions are 640×400. Test times included 10 loops
with 0 milliseconds between frames _and_ loading time from hard disk; Fps
was calculated as : 590 frames / elapsed seconds. ANIM player was Viewtek
1.03, available here on CIS, used strictly in video interlace (15KHz).
Times for deinterlaced (31KHz) video were the same for 2 & 16 colors and
17 fps for 256 colors.
Notes: Two factors on the A4000 that can severely affect ANIM playback
are the CPU caches and scan rate (deinterlacing). I suspect that the
supplied RAM in the A4000 is not as fast as it could be (just what _is_
the recommended DRAM speed for top performance on a 25MHz 68040?); I have
not opened up my machine but a support tech says the RAM is probably 80ns
(yech!). From the CPU benchmarks I have, I seem to be missing about 5
MIPS.
-Chris
Chris, that's some interesting info on amim speed- and RAM speed. We
apparently will all have to work together to figure out how to get the
fastest anim speeds. Looking forward to more of your time trials.
John
Chris,
Thanks for the anim info. If you were using Viewtek then you playing a
compressed anim. From what I understand the OP5 anim format is very poor
for AGA use for technical reasons so time is lost in the delta
calculations etc. What we need is a lean mean doublebuffering screen
flipping machine! I've heard that there is a devcon soon. Maybe once a few
good programmers really understand 3.0's animation support we'll see some
good PD or shareware stuff.
BTW I've also read a posting on Genie that Dpaint IV AGA will NOT support
the OS double buffering :(, but Brilliance will :).
…AutoPilot Engaged…
-Paul-
Paul,
I was under the impression that programs that really needed screen
flipping had already implemented it in some way (Director gives you this
ability). It's true that it takes time to uncompress ANIM data, but if the
68000 could do it the 68040 can do it quicker (even though you may have as
much as twice the ANIM data or more). I would be interested in learning
just what the technical reason is that makes ANIM not as good of a choice
with AGA as ECS.
Screen flipping doesn't have much appeal for me as a techniquie.. even
for 16 color screens & 2MB Chip RAM it seems very limited. Otherwise you
have to resort to pumping whole frames from Fast RAM into Chip RAM, so now
instead of straining the CPU, you're straining the Amiga's data busses (as
if it weren't bad enough with ANIMs already).
Or perhaps you mean something akin to ANIM's frame-by-frame delta changes
but without any additional compression? Such an idea popped into my head
years ago, where deltas could be stored blitter-ready bundled in hunks by
frame or set of frames.. The blitter could assemble the current frame(s)
while the CPU was preparing to do a burst move of the next hunk of frames
into Chip RAM. Perhaps the hardware isn't capable of this, but it seems to
be consistent with what I've learned about Amiga architecture; Or maybe
this would simply comsume more bandwidth than is practical.. or maybe
not?
-Chris
Chris,
You are really bumping up against the limits of my knowledge here, but
I'll try to share what I've learned from reading other posts. Maybe it
will make sense and maybe others will fill in the details.
First, yes my 4000 IS faster than our 3000 playing anims, but it still
slows down to the point where the animation is no longer "smooth" (< 30
fps) when more than about 75% of the screen changes from frame to frame
(camera pans, large spacecraft cruising past the camera, etc.).
From what I've read some of the algorythms used in playing OP5 anims
are 8bits wide and not optimized for the AGA 32bit architecture. <- I may
be way off here and hopefully others will fill in the details.
The 3.0 OS is supposed to have built in calls that support hi speed
double buffering pageflipping. Nothing I've seen supports this yet.
Last fall I was looking into getting some hardware to lay down
animation on video tape like single frame controllers, single frame
accurate VCR, etc. I almost went for the laser disk recorder Lou
advertised here. Then out came the 4000. It was HEAVILY advertised and
lauded as being able pump out 60fps anims in ANY resolution and ANY color
depth! If figured if it could pump out 60fps HAM8 super72 anims full speed
DCTV anims should be NO SWEAT! I ran to my dealer and got one of the first
4000s in the state. Even beat Denny Atkins by a week! 😉
So far the 4000's full speed anim capability is still an unkept
promise. 🙁
…AutoPilot Engaged…
-Paul-
For you folks interested in seeing a gorgeous HAM8 anim – check out the
forthcoming A4000 DEMO package CBM is putting on A4000's HD for dealers.
It has a FractalPro Julia Set cascade animation which I'm told is getting
some raves – CBM even used it at Comdex (I still haven't even seen which
part of it they're using – I made it pretty long and they had to cut it
down to fit into the DEMO HD – which I'm told is about 75megs of DEMO
material!). They're supposed to send me a copy on HD and I'll try it out
on my A1200.
Daniel, I'm looking forward to seeing your FractalPro HAM8 anim. May I ask
what was the anim player, anim resolution and any idea of frame rate? Does
FractalPro have AGA output? Thanks.
John