pouët.net

Better late than never, huh ?
This is my unpublished demo from 1992.
I was 19 at the time, with less than a year of experiencing ARM programming (1st real interest for assembly language started on my Archimedes A410/1, bought second-hand in 1991).

My alias in the French Archimedes scene was ZARCHOS (remember RTEL on the French Minitel ?)

Running on an 8 Mhz Archimedes with 2 MB RAM, its goal was to check 2 routines used here :
- 1st the vertical hardware scrolling routine using the MEMC (it's the Archie's MEMory Controler), and then
- my superfast plotting / unplotting routines.
These are 'generated code' routines.
Of course they don't need masks, and prioritize LDMIA / STMIA instructions over LDRB / STRB.

The demo is in 256 colours (1 byte defines 1 pixel), overscan 384x240, and IN THE FRAME (ie 50 FRAMES PER SECOND), demonstrating how fast the routines are.

The 4 channel MOD is from the Amiga, and is (badly) played by The Serial Port modplayer (not the fastest available for the Archimedes, today I'd choose QueueTheMusic, as it's the fastest available on the Archie, and it reproduces 100% of all known Protracker effects.
I've uploaded some videos where I play Chocks Away with a Shadow Of The Beast tune played by QTM , at the same time, on the same machine).

I think this demo was something unknown at the time, with such big sprites, on a scrolling background made of tiles.(And running at 50 frames per second, not 25 ! And there's still 15% CPU load left per frame, with an awfully slow MOD playroutine, more than twice slower than the one offered by QTM).

If you wonder why the background is so ugly, well it's simply because the tiles were drawn by me using !Paint. Simple graphics showing the numbers refering to the tiles number I plot ...
REMEMBER : it's a technical demo, and a preview, nothing more.
I don't give a damn about esthetics.
This (preview of a) demo was a programming exercise, intended to demonstrate what the Archimedes can do in 2D : more than the Amiga, of course !
Remember it's in 256 colours, and the Archie has no dedicated chips to plot sprites as the Amiga has and thus can see the sluggish 68 000 CPU be discharged of this burden.(The 68000 at 7,14 Mhz in the Amiga delivers a ridiculous weak 0.8 MIPS).

The ARM chip, thanks to its very fast load multiple registers and store multiple registers instructions, more than compensate the lack of dedicated blitter-like chips.

Any pixel on screen can be any colour among 256 (including colour whose byte value is zero, as, again, I don't need mask).

This is the magic of the Archimedes, with the raw power of its brilliant ARM chip, delivering 4,5 MIPS at 8 Mhz, and providing an orgasmic instructions set for the assembly programmer.

I'm still working on a game in my spare time (mainly when I'm bored in the train, to kill time), with revisited routines : this time sprite plotting is done line by line, which will allow to add some 'twisting' effects to the sprites.
Furthermore, they are even faster, especially the unplotting side, and they better handle superfast plotting identical sprites on screen (not the case in this present demo : there is no trick to plot faster the second rendered sphere).

youtube link :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8Xgjlqcdw

Very boring and ugly indeed, certainly far away from the Amiga standards.

Also I don' t like your attitude ... "Sorry, Amiga trolls !" from the text of your YouTube video.

Nice! Thanks for releasing this into the wild @Archiforever

Hope to see more on this great platform from you

Nice Amiga bashing with only good thing ripped from Amiga :D

Looks totally horrible from YT vid at least.

More acorn stuff please!

Bashing Amiga is OK if you come up with something that is at least somewhat better than a mediocre Amiga demo. What we have here is a boring and ugly demo which is not entertaining at all. FAIL! :D

Yeah, pretty much what StingRay said. Drop the attitude, it's 2015 and you're not a teenager anymore.

And the demo is pretty weak too, I've seen more impressive stuff on the ST, which also has the "sluggish 68 000 CPU" without any custom chips.

Pathetic shit.

I have also a filling routine which put amiga blitter to shame ..

After testing with Arculator, here it is on a real BBC A3000.(A standard Archimedes running at 8 Mhz if you didn't know that ;-) ).
It took 75 seconds on Arculator, and it takes 85 seconds on a real ARM2 8 Mhz Archie.

This shape represents 200x200/2 pixels, that's 20 000 pixels or 20 000 bytes since the screen mode is MODE 13 (ie 256 colour screen mode).
It's plotted 50 000 times, it represents 1 000 000 000 bytes.
It took 1 minute and 25 seconds to plot all this, or 85 seconds.
Bandwith of the routines with this shape is 1 000 000 000 / 85 = 11 764 705 bytes per second or 11,219 Mbytes per second.

I love the archimedes, but the whole attitude was unnecessary. And the titles. The titles man.

dude, go make an actual demo about it. I'm sure this machine rocks but you're doing it and yourself a disservice by using it to slag off other platforms.

up for uncommon platform

The only shame here is your attitude.

I love how the objects don't scroll nicely on pixel boundaries, but randomly jump around. What's the point of 50 Hz screen updates if you're not doing actual smooth scrolling?
I bet it's because it's compiled sprites that can't be placed with pixel-accurate precision.
The flicker adds some more of that 'not quite Amiga'-vibe.
Not the platform's fault btw.

Outch i forgot the youtube link :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCovPU8DJbY

Have fun ..

thumb up for the platform.
undoubtedly Acorn Archimedes was the most powerful computer in 80's

glöp

glöp glöp

.
lol

thumb down for shitting on Amiga and the global attitude here and an other Archimede prods.

it's a very bold stance to try to roast other people when you are yourself a big lamer.