Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!jesup From: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: Mike Farren Tutorial. Message-ID: <20115@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 26 Mar 91 02:23:12 GMT References: <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp> Reply-To: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) Distribution: comp Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 121 In article <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp> sschaem@starnet.uucp (Stephan Schaem) writes: [ In a message formatted to make it darn near impossible to read... ] > I really hope you have time to read the following.You might find that > game > programer are not all ignorant people like Mike Farren want us to > beleive! Mike may be many things, but I wouldn't call him ignorant. > >(Mike Farren): > >even more, I hope that game programmers will take a > >hint or two - leave us our Amigas, please! > > Dont I feel a little pretention here.I dont like that, especially > when you attack other people! especially my profesion. Game programming is his profession also, and he's been at it longer (unless you're older than I think you are). > -DISPLAY: Some game actually need steady frame rate. Fine, take over the system then. You can still return gracefully on exit (or when paused). Also, by no means do all games need a perfectly steady frame - Lemmings doesn't have one now, for example. > -MULTITASKING: Have you EVER monitored the system! > Move your mouse around, moving the mouse take more than > 20% of the > CPU time! 1%? Why do you want to multitask if you use the > CPU 1% on > the other side! And puting the OS to sleep and waiking > it UP is the closest > you can get to it with this kind of game. Fine, so put it to sleep if you can't live with it. Restore it on pause or exit if possible. If there isn't enough memory to keep from killing it, let the user know, and if he wants to continue then take over completely. > -DISK FORMAT: 980K? not 1035K? (why have they step > down?) > Right now you can get over 1.1 meg, but > not with the system. And 1.7 meg with data > crunching included in the > driver ... So 880K VS 1.7 MEG! > You can have 2.4 meg disk messing around with MFM > clocks, not safe... > Also Game like SW-IV or OVERDRIVE use the drive > has virtual memory. > So 512K user can have 1MEG quality games! "Data crunching" (compression) has nothing to do with it, you can use that regardless of the disk format. I have not seen 1035K, and I don't believe it unless you violate the timing specs for the system and drive (as I published in an AmigaMail article and devcon article (low-level drive access). The basic spec is there are (with MFM) 6250 nominal bytes of data per track. Combine that with the amiga nominal timing (2.3% fast), disk speed slop (1.5%), and amiga timing slop (5%), and you can store 5999 to 6812 bytes per track, depending. So if you remove ALL sector headers, etc, you can get 959840 bytes on a disk safely (though you still need some sync marks and you really need a checksum - some recent programs haven't bothered with that and crash on disk errors). Perhaps with GCR (which the hardware manual says shouldn't be used with 2us mode, though people are using it that way) you might get a bit more, though you're still subject to those timing figures above. Things like this are why some games (particularily European) don't work on all machines: some have drives that are slightly faster spinning, or their clock rate is slightly different (crystal variation, NTSC/PAL, genlock hooked to the system, temperature, etc, etc). Some drives can handle certain uses of the interface beyond the speced performance, some barely handle our spec. Some can read past track 79, some can't. > -MEMORY: Dont you think some people apreciate > to be able to buy software > for their 512K machine!!! I hope so. Then again, in the US a LARGE proportion of people have 1M or more. Perhaps 30-50% of people who actively buy software nowadays have HD's in the US. (Numbers pulled out of a hat.) > -HD INSTALABLE: There is absolutly no > barrier for that for any floppy games. > Well only piracy. Then they should do it. > Well not everybody do simple games like > you! > People could ONLY take your advice > seriously if you actually done serious > coding and know whats involve.From what > you write in your 4 letters > I seen a LARGE lack of knowledge. > Yes, Like the Bitmap Brother, the people > at Rainbow Art, Inerprise etc etc.. > dont know all about the stuff you are > saying! Often they don't (or aren't allowed to make use of it). Many Euro-games are written so the same code (with some conditional assembling) runs on the ST and the Amiga. Needless to say, this encourages them to ignore anything on the Amiga that isn't on the ST. ALso, a number of the programmers are more used to the ST, and may not know (or care) about such things (I've gotten personal letters (snail-mail, no less) from people like this. The company wouldn't even pay for RKMs, let alone joining the developer program.) Mike can defend himself, but you should remember he's a LONG-time game programmer. [ After this, the message ends up with such a distorted margin it's essentially unreadable... ] -- Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering. {uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com BIX: rjesup Thus spake the Master Ninjei: "To program a million-line operating system is easy, to change a man's temperament is more difficult." (From "The Zen of Programming") ;-)