Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!exodus!stpeter.Eng.Sun.COM!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis@stpeter.Eng.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: Re: FAUG demo of Powermonger by E.A. -- long review Keywords: simply incredible Message-ID: <5014@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 25 Dec 90 00:28:52 GMT References: <1950@unlisys.in-berlin.de> <1990Dec5.110344.6364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <1787@seti.inria.fr> <1990Dec10.133123@avahi.inria.fr> <22110@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Dec12.114250@avahi.inria.fr> Sender: news@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca. Lines: 48 Whew! A lot of noise on the net about multitasking and games. Listen up guys this ones for you... There seems to be the misunderstanding that if a game is OS friendly then I'll be running Dpaint at the same time I'm running Killer Tomatoes and the guy who wrote Killer Tomatoes will get blamed for lousy performance. This is bullshit and you should know it right now. The Amiga has many unique features that are not available on any other PC and multitasking is one of them. However, the Amiga gives the programmer the option to correctly shut down ANY of those options that they don't want. Now it isn't as easy as it is on the Commodore-64 but hey thats life. In particular, multitasking on the Amiga is PRIORITY based. That means that _only_ the tasks with the highest priority run. So if Killer Tomatoes runs and gives itself a priority of 127 it is the _only_ thing that runs, nobody else gets a single cycle. "But wait Chuck, every 60th of a second the scheduler runs to figure out what task to run next." Correct, but two things make this irrelevent a) A single high priority task can take a quantum interrupt and be running again in about 30 instructions, and b) Display graphics ought to be based on interrupts anyway and they don't have to go through the scheduler. Mssr. Buffa posed the challenge to name one decent game that allowed multitasking. No doubt he feels that the lack of evidence is a form of evidence. I believe it is only the absence of committment on the various games developers. The Lucas Film people are making great strides toward killer games and haven't shut down the OS yet. I understand the motivation for getting the OS out of one's collective face and getting down to the metal. Unfortunately a lot of people use their A500es as disk loading Nintendo machines and this doesn't penalize people for their poorly thought out strategies. The only incentive I can offer is that eventually, maybe not today and maybe not tommorrow, but eventually, the difference between the games that sell on the Amiga and the ones that don't is going to be the attitude of programmers who write them. In particular the attitude toward using what is in ROM versus rewriting it yourself. Couldn't you use an extra 512K for game data for "free" ? Dumping your own functions and using the real ones will give you this. -- --Chuck McManis Sun Microsystems uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: Internet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you. "I tell you this parrot is bleeding deceased!"