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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

I had Battletech on the Amiga (showcased in the video) and it ran much faster even though the Amiga only has a 7Mhz CPU...

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That was probably down to having a Blitter, rather than mathematical performance. This was a memory copy function in one of the support chips (Agnes), that massiveky speeded up things like sprite and window movement and line drawing.

Did the a1000 have hard floating point? I know it had a great f18 flight sim that seems like it would have been difficult with integer math, but people do amazing things with integer math.

No, it didn’t. My first Amiga with an FPU was a 2000 with an A2630 accelerator card.

The early VGA chipsets were very slow. They also didn't have any of the sprite & tile features that Amigas had.

On a generic 286 you could swap out the stock ISA VGA video card for a Diamond SpeedStar and the improvement was crazy.

That was still true with VLB(VESA Local Bus) and later revisions of the Tseng ET4000 chipset. Which was what made the SpeedStars fly. (At 50Mhz! Harr!)

carmack and friends getting sprites to work on DOS machines was a technical feat. I think they used it for commander keen.

I’m sure it’d beat a 386 running it in v86 mode emulating a CGA display on an VGA window. Something an Amiga cannot do.

Rest assured it’s significantly faster full screen under OS/2. And faster again on native MS-DOS.

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