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[Web] GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2ANN.lu
Posted on 14-May-2003 05:12 GMT by GetBoinged65 comments
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GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 51 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 15-May-2003 08:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (Emeric SH):
>5 out of 5 means it cannot be better,

Really? Even the Xbox magazine stuff said the wished they had given Halo 100% instead of 92% and that knowing that Halo2 is much better. There are so many things to consider, first of all that there can be more than a 5/5 review.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 52 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 15-May-2003 08:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Emeric SH):
There is nothing to be surprised about. I would have given the same rating (yes, I got those cards too). You get 4 games for just $29.99 on an SD card, slip it in and it works. I take my PDA everywhere and play those games whenever I have to wait for something. Entertainment value is very high, you don't get bored.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 53 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Got an Amiga Game Pack on 15-May-2003 08:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (Janne Sirén):
>You can see such simple games being offered for free,

On a SD card in a national chain store? Wow!
What about those people that don't want to bother installing from the net? Do they have the right to purchase from the store or do they must download the content? So all those people who have broadband should not be allowed to purchase Photoshop on the stores either?
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 54 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by AH4EVER on 15-May-2003 09:30 GMT
Doesn't really matter, it won't help us, we're doomed, we're doomed, don't you get it, it's all dead, they've been telling it to us from the 80's! :)
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 55 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by corpse on 15-May-2003 14:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (Lando):
"People seem to forget PSX had only 2MB RAM and a 33Mhz CPU, and managed plenty games a LOT more polished and technically advanced that what we've so far seen on AmigaDE. Sure the PSX had some decent (for the time) graphics hardware too, but then the average entry-level PDA has 200Mhz CPU to play with."

The PSX has 650(700)meg of media to play with, with games like those on the PSX it means we can be very sloppy about compressing our data and leave it as raw data. This raw data is ready for use and requires no extra CPU time to get it into a workable form so all we need to do is keep the DMA controller grabbing 2mb chunks as they're needed and everythings sweet.

Now pitch that against a PDA with media of around the 16mb range(unless you're prepared to pay insane prices), we're tight on space here so we can either compress raw data and use extra cpu time and memory(which we don't really have) decompressing it or make smaller, less flashy but addictive games suitable for a pda, after all the input and graphics hardware aren't going to be up to thousands of input signals and 30->60 frames of graphics very second anyways.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 56 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Lando on 15-May-2003 15:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 55 (corpse):
>The PSX has 650(700)meg of media to play with

No, it has 650 Megs of STORAGE. Suppose I stuck a 80GB hard drive in a vanilla A1200, would it be more powerful than a 2.4Ghz p4 with a 1gig drive? Really the size of storage is irrelevant in this discussion. What we're talking about is the ability of a PDA to play host to a decent quality game, not reams of FMV and CDDA music.

>, with games like those on the
>PSX it means we can be very sloppy about compressing our data and leave it as
>raw data.

This is really irrelevant. Think about it. The Playstation has 2MB of RAM* At any given time, in any given scene, the Playstation only has access to the 512k or so textures in VRAM. It can only draw what it has in VRAM. A PSX game is usually running in 2 frames, is it really going to access the CD mid-render, load more textures and carry on rendering?

If you have MGS for PS1, load in the first level, take out the CD. Does the game stop? No. Was it streaming in data? No. Everything in each scene of MGS is held in memory, until the next load. You go to the lift and, hey, it loads in some more data.

Now try ridge racer. Start a game, and start racing. Take the CD out. The music stops, that's all. Same with Rage Racer, same with pretty much any PSC game I can thing of actually.

*(plus a meg of VRAM, half or more of which (depending on resolution) is used as front/back buffers leaving you around 512k for textures and CLUTS (PS1 games usually use 64x64 pixel 4-bit textures and store the CLUT in VRAM along with the texture itself).)

>This raw data is ready for use and requires no extra CPU time to get
>it into a workable form so all we need to do is keep the DMA controller
>grabbing 2mb chunks as they're needed and everythings sweet.

Where are you going to put this 2MB you just streamed from CD? You overwrite what's already there? So you overwrite data already in RAM and leave the screen black for 5 or six seconds until you loaded your next set of data? And remember that this 2MB main RAM also contains your executable which is usually around the 1MB mark.

>Now pitch that against a PDA with media of around the 16mb range(unless you're
>prepared to pay insane prices), we're tight on space

Compared to PSOne we're positively overflowing with space. Really, just stick to small textures if you're that tight on space. PS1 games use 64*64 4-bit textures for the most part, as it happens to fit exactly in the texture cache and it is only 2k (uncompressed, which is how it's stored in VRAM). You know how many 2k textures you could fit in a 16MB machine, assuming you reserve yourself 8MB or so for game code, meshes and so on? Over 4 million.

>here so we can either compress raw data and use extra cpu time and memory
>(which we don't really have) decompressing it or make smaller, less flashy but
>addictive games suitable for a pda,

Fine. I'm all for making simple, addictive games, I just don't like listening to people moaning about hardware limitations when much more has been accomplished on much less. If a developer wanted to take the time and invest the money into producing a triple-A product for PDA's along the lines of Metal Gear Solid then there is absolutely no reason why this could not be done.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 57 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by ArcWave on 15-May-2003 16:54 GMT
Hi,

Yes, quality titles can be made to fit on disk/media in less than 1mb (megabyte).

For an example, I am writing an arcade game in Intent (AmigaDE) and it takes the following requirements:

Target - PocketPC 2002 build
On disk/media - <1mb (note, it can fit on an Amiga 880kb disk)
Memory requirements: 2mb (due to game data)
Graphic level - 16bit (65,000 colors)
Sound - 8/16 bit
Language used - C/C++

This includes animation, graphics, sounds, program(s) (main binary, independant processes - 2 of them), configuration files. The same program targeted at cell phones takes <400kb (kilobytes) on disk and <1mb of ram to run. Could I make it smaller? Yes, but it's not worth the time to do so.

In both cases the main game binary takes 90kb (kilobytes). The other processes take 2kb each.

As you can see, content can be made to fit on these devices. I can't reveal the game as yet, due to NDAs and I can't talk about other titles that I am working on.

Of course creating in-depth games like First Person Shooters, RPGs and the like can take even more disk/media space. It depends what you are making and the content needed to create a rich entertaining game experience.

There are lots of things to consider when creating a game.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 58 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by corpse on 15-May-2003 17:13 GMT
"No, it has 650 Megs of STORAGE. Suppose I stuck a 80GB hard drive in a vanilla A1200, would it be more powerful than a 2.4Ghz p4 with a 1gig drive? Really the size of storage is irrelevant in this discussion. What we're talking about is the ability of a PDA to play host to a decent quality game, not reams of FMV and CDDA music."

A vanilla A1200 has no hardware 3D or high speed buses so you're point is null... Look at the N64 vs the PSX, the N64's hardware wipes the floor with the psx but the storage space isn't there to provide for rich graphics.

"This is really irrelevant. Think about it. The Playstation has 2MB of RAM* At any given time, in any given scene, the Playstation only has access to the 512k or so textures in VRAM. It can only draw what it has in VRAM. A PSX game is usually running in 2 frames, is it really going to access the CD mid-render, load more textures and carry on rendering?"

Scratch up a psx disc and see what happens : the game either crashes or fills the scene with junk.

"If you have MGS for PS1, load in the first level, take out the CD. Does the game stop? No. Was it streaming in data? No. Everything in each scene of MGS is held in memory, until the next load. You go to the lift and, hey, it loads in some more data.

Now try ridge racer. Start a game, and start racing. Take the CD out. The music stops, that's all. Same with Rage Racer, same with pretty much any PSC game I can thing of actually."

You're talking about games that really aren't the cream of PSX games, I can take the disc out in GTA but try it in a newer game e.g. GTA2 which is streaming data from cd and the result is a crashed game.

Many games now work in JIT, a good example although not PSX1 is GTA3 on the PC or PS2, if you happen to have a buffer under run the engine starts to fill the scene with blue textures, you can test this by disconnecting your harddrive or kicking your ps2 ;)

Try playing newer games on a 1000 series ps thats had some beating, you probably won't complete Resident Evil 3 without it giving up on a cd read 4 or 5 times(the explosion scene at the start makes my 1000's laser scream for mercy;)).

N.B. Quake 1 ( maybe even 2) exist on the PocketPC so its not like fast paced 3D games can't be done on a PDA, but its hard to control and the screen can't usually keep up.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 59 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Kolbjørn Barmen on 15-May-2003 18:58 GMT
In reply to Comment 50 (Thomas Würgler/Pagan):
> As far as I can recall (it's been some time since the Zaurus days), the reason for the small size was that they should be downloadable and be possible to store in the on-board ram - that is the 16 megs that hold both applications, data (and as far as I can recall runtime ram).

The developer version of the Zaurus had 16MB of flash and 32MB of RAM, of which 16 was used for ramdisk and 16 for system ram. This is the SL5000/SL5000D

The retail version of the Zaurus has twice as much RAM, and again halfed up so that 32MB is used ass ramdisk and 32MB as system ram.

Amiga ship their games on SD cards, internal storage on the Zaurus is irrelevant, the games can run right off the media they are shipped on.

Downloadable? Rather optimistic, anyone could tell that by the time any of the games would be avaible for downlaod somehow, those old Zaurusen would be long out-dated. :)

Anyways, Amiga are too slow, the world has already surpassed them... we are already doing what BillMQ said we would be doing, but we're not doing it with AmigaAnywhere :)
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 60 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Thomas Würgler/Pagan on 15-May-2003 19:21 GMT
In reply to Comment 59 (Kolbjørn Barmen):
>The retail version of the Zaurus has twice as much RAM, and again halfed up so that 32MB is used ass ramdisk and 32MB as system ram.

Yes. Like I said, but back then the retail version hadn't been announced, so we were aiming for storage on a 16 MB device - which meant that we wanted to stay around ~500KB including music, code and 16 bit graphics. The music took up the largest part actually.


>Amiga ship their games on SD cards, internal storage on the Zaurus is irrelevant, the games can run right off the media they are shipped on.

No. Back then Sharp were planning a shop in the vein of the Amiga Anywhere shop. It just didn't materialize (as far as I know), and anyway the deal fell through due to Sharp's sudden change of ideas as we know. Back then our game had been finished for a long time though.

>Downloadable? Rather optimistic, anyone could tell that by the time any of the games would be avaible for downlaod somehow, those old Zaurusen would be long out-dated. :)

If the Sharp deal hadn't fallen through, the games would have been ready. IIRC we finished the game in approximately 1-1,5 month's time. Since then only minor adjustments have been made to accomodate different input schemes.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 61 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Henrik Münther on 15-May-2003 19:45 GMT
In reply to Comment 60 (Thomas Würgler/Pagan):
Yeah.. just checked the old mails... The max working mem size for the zaurus games at that time was 800k, and about 500k on disk. That's not a lot for 16 bit graphics..
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 62 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Kolbjørn Barmen on 15-May-2003 20:45 GMT
In reply to Comment 61 (Henrik Münther):
Good thing for Sharp they changed plans then :)
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 63 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Bodie on 15-May-2003 23:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 62 (Kolbjørn Barmen):
why
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 64 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by BCD on 16-May-2003 06:05 GMT
In reply to Comment 50 (Thomas Würgler/Pagan):
> As far as I can recall (it's been some time since the Zaurus days), the
> reason for the small size was that they should be downloadable and be
> possible to store in the on-board ram - that is the 16 megs that hold both
> applications, data (and as far as I can recall runtime ram).
No, the first Zaurus, the SL 5000 D developer unit, have 32 MB RAM. 16 MB for storage and 16 MB for runtime RAM. It also have 16 MB Flash for the System ROM. Newer modells have more, see http://www.zaurus.com/dev . The SL 5000D also have a Cf and a SD slot. The Zaurus hardware is similar to actual Pcoket PCs. And many games on Zaurus and PocketPC shows that more is possible than the games in the Amiga Game Pack offer.

But, I think you are right. If I remember right, Sharp / Amiga only wants small games/programs. Maybe the first plan was to run this games on the old Zaurus systems without Linux which are sold in Japan and also on the new ones.
GetBoinged reviews Amiga Games Pocket Pak #2 : Comment 65 of 65ANN.lu
Posted by Kolbjørn Barmen on 16-May-2003 09:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 63 (Bodie):
Why? Because it would have been a crap product? :)
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