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Sep Roland
Sep Roland
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A lot of games on the Amiga killed the OS and accessed hardware directly, a practice discouraged by Commodore to the point that AGA hardware was afaikAFAIK undocumented unless one used the proper OS functionality (OpenLibrary on graphics.library and the like).

I’m curious though how much of a performance penalty theythere really is? I know this is subjective, but assuming a system like a stock Amiga 1200 or CD32, would it have been feasible to make a “Triple A” game (for 1994) just using the official APIs? If not, what would be the biggest blockers? AFAIK stuff like DMA and Copper Lists were supported already, but I’m not sure what else direct hardware access offered? (If the state of “optimizing C compilers” was an issue, I wonder if Assembly programming made it more feasible?)

A lot of games on the Amiga killed the OS and accessed hardware directly, a practice discouraged by Commodore to the point that AGA hardware was afaik undocumented unless one used the proper OS functionality (OpenLibrary on graphics.library and the like).

I’m curious though how much of a performance penalty they really is? I know this is subjective, but assuming a system like a stock Amiga 1200 or CD32, would it have been feasible to make a “Triple A” game (for 1994) just using the official APIs? If not, what would be the biggest blockers? AFAIK stuff like DMA and Copper Lists were supported already, but I’m not sure what else direct hardware access offered? (If the state of “optimizing C compilers” was an issue, I wonder if Assembly programming made it more feasible?)

A lot of games on the Amiga killed the OS and accessed hardware directly, a practice discouraged by Commodore to the point that AGA hardware was AFAIK undocumented unless one used the proper OS functionality (OpenLibrary on graphics.library and the like).

I’m curious though how much of a performance penalty there really is? I know this is subjective, but assuming a system like a stock Amiga 1200 or CD32, would it have been feasible to make a “Triple A” game (for 1994) just using the official APIs? If not, what would be the biggest blockers? AFAIK stuff like DMA and Copper Lists were supported already, but I’m not sure what else direct hardware access offered? (If the state of “optimizing C compilers” was an issue, I wonder if Assembly programming made it more feasible?)

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Michael Stum
Michael Stum
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How much of a performance loss is there when using Amiga OS functions to make a game?

A lot of games on the Amiga killed the OS and accessed hardware directly, a practice discouraged by Commodore to the point that AGA hardware was afaik undocumented unless one used the proper OS functionality (OpenLibrary on graphics.library and the like).

I’m curious though how much of a performance penalty they really is? I know this is subjective, but assuming a system like a stock Amiga 1200 or CD32, would it have been feasible to make a “Triple A” game (for 1994) just using the official APIs? If not, what would be the biggest blockers? AFAIK stuff like DMA and Copper Lists were supported already, but I’m not sure what else direct hardware access offered? (If the state of “optimizing C compilers” was an issue, I wonder if Assembly programming made it more feasible?)