Image quality: Amiga vs. PC

[villerk]

My amigist friend Tuomas showed me some Amiga demos last weekend, and I almost dropped my eyes! So smooth 2D and 3D even without a graphics card, only with the basic AGA. I couldn't believe when he told me that the resolution was 160x100 (and in 3D scenes 320x200) !! Why the heck it looked so smooth?!? Then it stroke me: he had a TV, not a monitor. TV has round pixels, while PC's monitor has square pixels, so what would look like shit on PC, looks like antialiased 800x600 on Amiga! I want to plug my TV in! I want to have a great image quality!

Any comments, suggestions?

[rugger]

While the Amigas abilities are somewhat limited, especailly compared to todays computers, people seem to have been able to extract impressive feats out of them.

Most of the really graphicly good demos and games for the amiga have been written in assembly code. 68000 assembly code is actually quite simple, and there are lots more registers than i386 to play with. The amiga also had massive amounts of graphics power, often more than the pokey 68000 was able to handle.

It is a pity that those days of utterly hardcore optimization are long gone. Now it is directx and opengl and other high level APIs that are often implemented badly by hardware manufacturers and games that only work on (insert favourate graphics manufacturers) cards only.

[villerk]

I've noticed the same. Think this: when C64 was first introduced, the games weren't that great (no matter what they say), but at the end of the 80's the games were from a different planet! Coders learned about C64's abilities (and disabilities) and optimized the games to the MAX.

I really don't think that an adventure game like Monkey Island 4 consumes so much CPU power than it seems to do. IF people would optimize their games and software, everyone could still use P120 with 32 MB ram. It's just that it isn't worth optimizing as it's much easier to do simple code fast and push it to the market.

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