Talk:Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture

message: Hi, guys.
I'm wrong, you're right. I did some further research. The Amiga Format magazines were using the terms interchangeably and I got confused. Someone give me a 'moron' barnstar. Someone else please undo all the separation of AA/AGA that I've been up to. (But keep the technical details of AA, that's all correct). - Richardcavell 02:39, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I'm wrong 

message: It's a fact that the Amiga lost its technical leadership (obviously this happened at some point, since clearly no Amiga compares to today's computers, for example). I was saying it's POV/speculation to say that this happened when AGA was released, or due to its release (even if AGA was revolutionary for its time, the Amiga would still have ultimately lost its technical leadership due to Commodore going bust and the end of Amiga development).
Also on this note, I think it would be worthwhile to say how AGA compared to PC graphics of its time, rather than just saying it was or wasn't as good? (Was SVGA out in 1992? If so was it standard in all PCs or was VGA still common? Did even VGA have advantages over AGA?) Mdwh 00:21, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Technical leadership 

message: I removed several sentences which tried to explain why commodore did not implement chunky modes or 32bit blitter in the aga chipset, because it looked very much like a POV.
Just to be clear: Adding 32 bit blitter/copper operations could have been done in a purely transparent fashion just as it was done with the graphic fetches. There is no argument not to do this due to ECS compatibility. It would have have added two additional weeks of development time. Same goes to the chunky modes.
--Qdr 08:32, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why didn't commodore implements feature XX? 

message: I have the vague impression that the AGA chipset meant that some Amiga 500 games did not work on the Amiga 1200. (Is this why some games are "AGA fixed"?) I came looking for information about that in this article, but found none -- could someone add a word about that backwards compatibility? -- Mecandes (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: AGA is backwards compatible with whatever's in the A500, but that does not necessarily mean a game will run on a A1200. The A1200 has a different OS/firmware/CPU than a A500. Using utilities like the "Degrader" one can hide some of these differences, so most A500 games should run. --Anss123 (talk) 15:10, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: And more significantly, this was during an era when 'hitting the hardware' and making use of tricks and undocumented features was standard practice for games programmers. If a game was programmed that made certain assumptions about the hardware it was running on, which were no longer true when running on an AGA machine, then it would fail due to those assumptions. The AGA chipset is one of differences between the A500 KS1.3 (the most popular model before AGA), the others being RAM size (and chip ram size), RAM type (chip vs fast vs slow), kickstart and CPU. Anyone of those factors can cause software to fail. Take for example the RAM. It was not uncommon for the assumption that if there was 1Mb RAM, then it would be 512Kb slow and 512kb chip (the most common arrangement in the A500), this assumption failed even with the small change in some models to 1Mb Chip, so some software would not run. 'AGA fixed' is often used loosely to encompass all the differences between the A500 KS 1.3 and the A1200. However, I agree it would be interesting to have some discussion of the particular differences between the chipsets which might cause problems (clock and timing issues, register sizes, maybe?). 60.240.207.146 (talk) 12:58, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Backwards compatibility with Amiga 500?