:) Looking forward to that one getting finished so much... :)

What so special about NeoGeo anyways? -_-

All it is a console that plays fighting game, shoot up games and arcade. Not much.

You make it sound like NeoGeo have better hardware spec over A1200 or A4000.

But Gunnar...with Vampire been able to emulate the NeoGeo HW which is much stronger than Amiga for gaming...and mimic it with perfection and speed and graphics.....

haven't we now made Amiga much stronger in HW over NeoGeo for gaming and everything else?

If the Amiga's blitter had n/16 scaling and chaining, then I would say it would have easily best it. Otherwise, I would say there are pro's and con's on both, with no clear winner.

I've actually never understood why HAM wasn't used more -- was the idea of using a fixed RGBG pattern such a radical idea? I mean, then all you need is four shifted copies of each sprite in memory (RGBG, GBGR, BGRG and GRGB) and then you can blit any sprite to any location on screen, enjoying near 12-bits per pixel graphics with the blitter demands of an 8-bit lores screen.

I mean, compare hires HAM (left) to lores NEO GEO (right):
EXTERNAL LINK

Hehe...I like the left more.

Compare that to AGA Amigas, with 8 x 64 pix wide sprites with 3 colors, or 4x64 pix with 15 colors. So in 320 pix resolution you can cover almost 5 times screen with sprites in Neo geo, while not even once with AGA in comparable amount of colors. AGA also does not allow for horizontal multiplexing in 32/64 pixel wide sprite modes. The blitter is also very slow, it can maybe make up for same performance as with AGA sprites without vertical multiplexing. Or around 15-20 16x16 pixel sized sprites with 16 colors at 50 fps and not much DMA slowdown.

Neo Geo does have to use sprites for a scrolling background though, so two independent layers of sprites cost 40 sprites. While Amiga uses HW support for horizontal scrolling, but some sprites may still be used up due to HW limitations, and some some blitter/CPU time for incoming tile layers.

The 68020 14 MHz is slow for graphics, and the 68000 10 MHz used in Neo Geo does not perform any graphic actions, it does just do game logic and such. Mixing together sound samples in real time takes also up a lot of CPU power, you'd need at least a fast 68030 for that and to handle game logic at same time. A fast 68030 operating in fast ram is much faster than blitter for drawing sprites though, not to mention a 68040/68060, so you'd need these to come close to Neo Geo in performance, and even then i suspect the Amiga can't produce as many colors in objects and background as Neo Geo.

But Vojin, all this does not matter at all ones SAGA is out!!

Uuuh ambermoon is one example of where you are wrong. Uh duuuh!

LINE0: RGBGRGBG...
LINE1: BGRGBGRG...

This is done by fixing the 5th and 6th bitplanes with a constant value. We NEVER change these and do not ever attempt to use the base palette -- this is what causes problems and over-complicates the mode.

Now, lets say you have a BOB of a ship, and pre-convert it to our HAM format, so that it's RGBG. The problem now is that this
BOB will only align with the RGBG pattern on every 4th X-coordinate. So you need four rotated images to allow the BOB to be places at any arbitrary X-coordinate. With the Y-interleaving, you then just xor the image model with ((y & 1) << 1). This allows your 12-bit RGB BOB to be placed anywhere on-screen.

It's worth mentioning that MOST raster effects would still work in this mode except for the scroll-based scalars. Aside from than, having smooth scrolling, etc, should be fine. And like I said, this is no harder on the DMA than an 8-bit lowres screen while giving us **ALMOST** 12-bpp colour.

The NEOGEO was more specialized at handling sprites, making writing games a bit easier. Amiga's sprite engine was rather lacking and better suited as a fast-scrolling background layer than as player sprites, but I digress. The AGA hardware could absolutely produce higher resolutions with higher colours than the NEOGEO.

Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

HAM6 and HAM8 were never used so much - because they cannot be used for fast anim and action, just for background pictures and pic displays.

This is a huge misconception. Making a HAM6 scroller would not have been any harder than a 256-colour one and would have looked mind-blowing-ly superior. The problem was the palette-selector red herring. If you omit that and use a simple RGBG pattern, you make HAM every bit as easy to manage as any other screen mode.

You don't even have to use C2P at this point. Your BOBs are pre-C2P'd in memory and you just blit like normal. And if the blitter is "too slow", then the 14MHz 68EC020 can easily make up the difference and still have more CPU power left over than the NEOGEO has.

Just because no one did at the time doesn't mean that it couldn't have.