Amiga games : AGA vs ECS OCS

Castlevania
Chaos Engine, the
Exile
Fire & Ice
Great Sisters
PGA Tour Golf
Shadow Fighter
Skidmarks
Second Samurai
Soccer Kid
Speedball 2
Syndicate
SuperCars 2
Theme Park
TUrrican 2
Wing Commander
Zool2
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Amiga games : AGA vs ECS OCS

[@jamyskis]

Nice job. The problem with a lot of these AGA ports was the attempt to shoehorn in a colourful palette just for the sake of having it. The ECS versions of Chaos Engine and Speedball 2 were visually perfect. The AGA versions made them unnecessarily garish. In other games, the difference was barely noticeable. The AGA version of Theme Park was an absolute masterpiece though.

[@valenrn8657]

Amiga's Speedball 2 OCS player artwork was ported from the Atari ST.

[@s_t_s4846]

@@valenrn8657 Same happened with mose Bitmap Brother games if I remember correctly and that showed that our poor ATARI ST could handle good gfx. Soundwise this was another story. :/

[@valenrn8657]

@@s_t_s4846 Bitmap Brother games such as Xenon Mega Blast and Gods have 16 colors and near monochrome color shades.

[@TheTurnipKing]

It was less an attempt to shoehorn it in than to do feature parity with PC VGA. The amount of time required to redo 32 colour versions of all the art for one platform would have been prohibitive. There's also another difference here you can see in terms of speed. But it was possible to have OCS/ECS graphics with the same CPU as the 1200, or faster.

[@rafaellima83]

I've never played Theme Park on Amiga, but I remember reading more than one review stating the OCS version ran faster on a vanilla A500/600 setup than the AGA version ran on a vanilla A1200 setup.

[@OLIV3R_YT]

To my surprise I always liked the look of Chaos Engine's ECS version better than the AGA version because of the color palette.

[@Harkonnen75]

I agree with you...

[@user-bw1vm7mk7u]

​@@Harkonnen75 Absolutely. Chaos Engine would have been far better served with transparency tricks and the like. Take the original desaturated graphics. Now add two copies of that palette, one more desaturated and whitened, the other maybe illuminated. Hey presto, you can now add translucent fog and/or torchlight, and all you'll need is an additional blit. I mean, there's a reason Banshee went this route: it looks bloody epic and you rarely need more than 32 colors anyway, not when the copper can do its magic when required. You certainly don't need it for the Chaos Engine, those graphics were stellar as it was.

[@pilouuuu]

Man, I feel bad for the people that had to work on the ECS version of Wing Commander. They had to work so hard to make the game look decent, using dithering and other tricks, and then the AGA version easily surpasses it. The Chao Engine original version is easily better though. Its limited pallette give it a lot of style and special mood which the AGA lacks with its more colorful graphics.

[@lorenzodigaetano3591]

Basically, the most important difference between OCS and AGA games, besides the 24-bit palette, was the dual playfield which could have 16 colors per playfield instead of 8, in fact a lot of AGA versions have the background parallax playfield instead of a simple copper rainbow. Otherwise, the 256-color mode was used very little due to the fact that the blitter had remained that of 1985.

[@valenrn8657]

FYI, Wing Commander AGA and Turrican AGA are from PC's 256-color VGA version. AGA Blitter was modified to move 8-bit planes instead of OCS/ECS's 6-bit planes i.e. 2MB ECS Agnus can't be used as a substitute for Alice. For 320x200/256 resolution AGA can do four 64-pixel sprites background for parallax. For any Amigas, CPU's and AGA's potential are reduced by half without Fast RAM.

[@lorenzodigaetano3591]

@@valenrn8657 Yes, but blitter speed is the same of 1985, while 8 bitplanes mode required to move more data. After 7 years this was a huge limitation for games that required fast moving objects at the usual 50 fps Amiga tradition.

[@valenrn8657]

Refer to Aladdin AGA in the Amiga vs PC video. A 68020 with AGA is moving around some sizable and colorful objects on screen just as well as the PC's fast VGA clone. I have a 1987 IBM VGA from IBM PS/2 Model 55SX and it was very slow. Athlon XP 2200+ @ 1800 Mhz with IBM VGA yielded 8.6 fps with Quake's 320x200. kzbin.info/www/bejne/pZTXcqWtfdWUn7s Amiga AGA with (Pentium 75 Mhz class) 68060 CPU@ 80 Mhz playing Quake at a higher frame rate when compared to IBM VGA kzbin.info/www/bejne/qHilhq2cgryJqa8

[@valenrn8657]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZaXpqqwg9CIjKc Aladdin AGA in the Amiga vs PC video, a 68020 with AGA is moving around some sizable and colorful objects on screen just as well as the PC's fast VGA clone.

[@valenrn8657]

A1200's higher memory bandwidth Chip RAM allows additional clock cycle slots for many of Amiga's custom chips' functions.

[@fernandocollazo8705]

There are games that differences are significative as Brian the Lion, Bubble 'n Squeak, Stardust and Super Stardust

[@thoresittly2634]

Fire and Ice is a false screen mode. ECS also has water ripple at the bottom. Also Theme Park ECS is quite different, this is the AGA version shown here ;)

[@Harkonnen75]

Thanks for your comment. Some versions, I perfectly remember their differences, but others not... I searched for the game roms on public sites... and I downloaded 2 times for each game and version, that is, 4 roms to be sure... There is another comment about Theme Park, about the fact that the 2 versions of the video are AGA... Well, then it's my mistake, without a doubt... Although I tried several versions to be sure. It is clear that you have to be careful with the versions of the roms that you download because they are not the ones indicated...

[@timrichter1980]

That's how I remember it! Nonetheless nice comparison!

[@desiv1170]

I think a lot of the issues too were around the fact that AGA was released as the Amiga was winding down... If the Amiga has lasted longer, I'm sure we would have started seeing some more games/programs taking advantage of AGA... When something is new like that, the initial support is always more of a "Hey, look at all the colors" rather than a real use of the advantages... ;-)

[@heroicnonsense]

AGA was supposed to be a stopgap until AA (Advanced Amiga) appeared. That never came to fruition because of Commodore's demise. AA would have done for the Amiga what the PowerPC architecture did for the Mac: breath in new life. The PA-RISC CPU they intended to use was very powerful and would repeat what Commodore did in the 80's: launch a relatively cheap machine that was really powerful for its price point. Not much is known about the graphical side of AA, but it was supposed to be able to do 3D. Audio was to be 16-bit stereo. AGA was more-or-less bolted onto ECS to extend the classic Amiga's life until AA was ready. Pretty much everything remained the same: audio, IO and basic graphics are identical to ECS. The only real new thing was the 24-bit graphic modes, but as stated above, those were actually used very little in games. Most devs simple added a new parallax layer to the existing planes, doubled the amount of colours (not even to the full 256) and called it a day. The real reason why the A1200 was a succes wasn't so much AGA, but the fact they managed to shoehorn an EC020 and 2MB of RAM into a £400 machine. This was a steal. Competing 32-bit systems (like 386 PC's, Atari's TT and Falcon or Apple's Macintosh II) were more expensive. And the A1200 was the only real option for folks getting into the Amiga or upgrading, as the A600 was a dissapointment (and this is coming from someone who owned an A600). Both the EC020 and AGA didn’t do much for games, but were a welcome addition for productivity software.

[@kanalarhis5847]

Your videos are extremely interesting. I like watching it very much.Very good job, thank you

[@DanElgaard9]

I second that - looking forward to each Sunday, just for this channel 🙂

[@christianjohansson8694]

Interesting video, but I think you could have skipped the ports made recently by "homebrew" coders (like Turrican 2, Giana and Castlevania) and just shown commerial OCS/AGA games.

[@sanjyuu2298]

Giana Sisters VS Giana Sisters S.E. is a bad example of comparision (a manipulatory one may say), the first is original version for Amiga, the second one is a mod with revamped graphics that came from Giana sisters DS, which also works on OCS and looks the same except intro.

[@danyoutube7491]

Of these, I think only the Wing Commander and Exile AGA versions were notable improvements. Some other games looked marginally better (Soccer Kid) but the more washed out look of OCS/ECS actually looks nicer for Chaos Engine and Speedball 2.

[@amigadude6409]

Very good video.....love the way you do this

[@nyisziati]

It's really interesting, that on PC the difference between EGA and VGA is MUCH more spectacular.

[@higochrana6424]

There is missing UFO OCS vs AGA, big difference as well

[@Harkonnen75]

I'll keep it in mind for a second part. :-)

[@mattx5499]

I had A1200 and I can confirm that most of AGA games were barely improved over ECS versions. Some games looked better with less colours. There were some games that were made especially and only for AGA Amigas and these were a different story. Still I think that AGA wasn't huge improvement over OCS/ECS and to use full capabilities of newer chipset 2MB RAM wasn't enough and that really limited A1200 as an improvement over A500.

[@paul1979uk2000]

True, I found the game that were made for AGA or ports of games from the PC that used 256 colours, did a much better job of using the hardware, most of the other games ended up throwing in more colours for the hell of it and in many cases, it looked worse as it messed up the original art style.

[@Kavlor1]

Yeah I remember getting the AGA version of Ishar and being really dissappointed.

[@Corsa15DT]

We never saw a worthy AGA game. Too little too late, the programmers didn't care, moved on.

[@valenrn8657]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZaXpqqwg9CIjKc Aladdin AGA in the Amiga vs PC video, a 68020 with AGA is moving around some sizable and colorful objects on screen just as well as the PC's fast VGA clone.

[@Corsa15DT]

@@valenrn8657 Aladdin is one of the best but if I am Not mistaken the 500 could play is just ad good?

[@valenrn8657]

@@Corsa15DT Aladdin is not available for Amiga 500/600.

[@valenrn8657]

AGA can use faster graphics fetches from memory (4x the speed of OCS). Aladdin uses this feature, which gives it much more DMA cycles to actually use the Blitter than an OCS/ECS game would have. nonarkitten's Agnus AGA chip drop-in replacement for the A500 project has onboard memory to improve Chip RAM bandwidth.

[@Corsa15DT]

@@valenrn8657 the internet says Aladdin is available for the 500 ...

[@stevesether]

After watching this, I realize how much my early 20s self would have been disappointed if I'd ever magically been able to afford an upgrade from a A500 to a 1200 in the early 90s. Until now, I'd never really seen AGA graphics, as nobody I knew had one, and it's not like there were stores at the time that had them on display. Some of the graphics are marginally better.... but nothing like the equivalent of costing over $1000 in 2023 dollars you'd pay for an A1200. Even half that wouldn't have been worth it.

[@Harkonnen75]

The Amiga 1200 came late, it was a little version of the original design to cut costs and they priced it very very expensive... Yes. It had a more powerful CPU, more RAM, the option to put a hard drive and accelerator... But the AGA chip was totally wasted by developers. And it came very very late...

[@AmigaOmega]

Theme Park AGA vs Theme Park AGA, an odd choice. The ocs/ecs version is quite different. Wing Commander on a stock A500/600. now that was an experience ;)

[@balorduomo]

Remember that the asteroid sections on WC were so hard on a standard A500 due to the extreme choppiness (asteroids moved from background to right on your face in 3-4 frames) . Playing on a CD32 made things much easier

[@wimwiddershins]

This video pretty much covers the new A1200/CD32 owner experience. I had one, Boohoo!😂 Well done to the few Dev's who didn't just do lazy ports.

[@willrobinson7599]

These showed why the aga was a bit of a let down. Alot of enhanced games really had very little done to them. Very few pushed the new capabilities as it was to easy and saved money to do lazy port I'm afraid

[@paul1979uk2000]

True, the A1200 should have had some fast ram which would allow the cpu to run faster, it also should have had a better bitter chip. I also felt it was crazy that the A1200 had the same sound chip as the A500, it should have been better with 8 channel sounds at a higher frequency and maybe the floppy drive should have had double the capacity like the PC drives of the time. Heck, whiles we are at it, that chunky chip on the CD32 should have been thrown in. I like the A1200 but it was a massive let-down on the technical front, the A1200 should have blown away the likes of the SNES in every way but it didn't, it was better in some areas but worse in others. To make things worse, the A1200 machine were not really taken advantage off by games, it came out too little too late when the demise of Commodore was kicking in, if it was released around 1990 and fixed the flaws above, then it would have been a worthwhile upgrade, and I would have been willing to spend a bit more to buy it.

[@ananasstudio6221]

Everyone dreamed at that moment of reliving what the Amiga 500 meant, with the arrival of the Amiga 1200. It wasn't complicated: it had to improve all aspects of hardware presented seven years earlier: better CPU, better coprocessors, better audio, better storage capacity. The Amiga 500 still had enough momentum in some multimedia and multitasking aspects for an Amiga 1200 to have achieved greater success (and yet it sold well). The reality is that it was a disappointing hardware, and perhaps the closest thing to what the 1200 should have been was done by Atari with the Falcon: minimum Motorola 6030, 4MB of RAM, DSP...

[@marmeladenfreund]

As many here have already correctly noted, there are often only very small and insignificant differences in many games. Sometimes only the 2nd scrolling level is more complex or a few additional colors have been squeezed in. In the case of Speedball and Chaos Engine, the AGA version looks rather awful and forcedly garish. That wouldn't have been necessary, because the OCS versions were already perfect, as the Bitmap Brothers always used very sophisticated color schemes. Really better and 32-bit worthy are the AGA versions of Wing Commander and Turrican II (although this is a recent conversion based on the improved PC version). Exile does indeed look different, but I don't see anything in the AGA version that wouldn't have been possible in 16-bit OCS with good programming. In general, I would say that most game developers under AGA have unfortunately not really arrived in the 32-bit world. The games are therefore more comparable to those of 16-bit consoles. While the OCS/ECS-Amiga always suffered greatly from the simple game conversions from the Atari ST (at most with improved sound), the same can be said for the AGA-Amiga with the conversions of OCS/ECS games (only minimally improved graphics). As a result, AGA was unfortunately never able to realize its full potential during its commercial lifetime...

[@DanElgaard9]

Still on ECS on my A500+

[@AmigaFanatic1980]

Its a shame that AGA versions never got a resolution bump as well as the pallet bump, but I suppose that's because it wasn't really their in the hardware(??)

[@bryansillman3240]

AGA was an "incremental" upgrade, but they held it back expecting AAA. AGA should have been released in '90 starting with the Amiga 3K. I also believe that the 2K should have been released with Ranger. If this happened, then you could have a 2K with Ranger, a 3K with AGA, and then a 4K with AAA.

[@marcianzero_yt]

@@bryansillman3240 Wouldn‘t that have been interesting? But I think Ranger was planned to be built by some of the original Designers that could really impact the circuit, while AA seems to be a bodge job into ECS. So even if AA was in the 3K, after Ranger it would have been a different beast.

[@armorgeddon]

Which resolution do AGA games actually run at and at which framerates? Still limited to the PAL and NTSC standards?

[@AmigaFanatic1980]

@@armorgeddon 640x200 @ 60Hz (NTSC) and 640x256 @ 50Hz (Pal). It would have been nice if AGA "standard" was 640x400/512 at 60/50Hz giving much more play for games

[@danyoutube7491]

AGA can go up to considerably higher resolutions than ECS, but I think doing so uses up a lot of RAM, and the A1200 was chronically under served as it was with 2MB.

[@Midwinter2]

Very interesting. A couple of observations: OCS Wing Commander just ports the horrible 16-colour graphics of the EGA version. No attempt was made to rework it to use the Amiga's colour palette. Compare these presentation graphics to the similar - but far superior - 32-colour presentation graphics in Epic. It's night and day. OCS Castlevania is shockingly bad. Poor graphics and jerky scrolling - there is just no excuse for this. It does not represent the capability of the OCS Amiga at all. Compare to Second Samurai further on in the video, just to cite one example. OCS Chaos Engine and Speedball 2 look better than the AGA versions due to some unnecessary recolouring. AGA Super Cars 2 retains the slow, jerky scrolling of the OCS version. In fact, it looks even slower. Why? This should have been fixed. Shadow Fighter: the very worst level graphically was chosen for this video - so it's very hard to compare. The waterfall level would have given a great opportunity to see the differences. Syndicate: no visible difference in gameplay. Theme Park: no visible difference, graphically - but the AGA version appears faster.

[@valenrn8657]

OCS's gray scale usage doesn't exist on EGA.

[@Qba86]

Some "AGA games" only took advantage of the new chipset in things like the intro and title screen. Others simply required a faster CPU and 2MB ChipRAM, and could easily run on an upgraded ECS Amiga.

[@paul1979uk2000]

Got to agree on all your points. Most of these games could have been done better on OCS Amiga's and a lot better on AGA Amiga's

[@Zsolt_Peter_Kodner]

There is no AGA version of the 'Syndicate' game.

[@aaronmicalowe]

Also the music played for Syndicate is not the music on the Amiga version, or at least not on Syndicate that I played on the Amiga. The version in the video is using synths, whereas the version I played used samples. Plugged into midi? Taken from PC version?

[@Zsolt_Peter_Kodner]

@@aaronmicalowe The Syndicate has no ingame music on AMIGA, and this music in the video is from PC.

[@zeffster2]

post mortem technology the way I see it. Commodore failed at this stage unfortunately and we were all migrated to where the good stuff was happening - the PC

[@playnochat]

I think 95-99 were wasted years with endless doom clones. I spent those years playing turn based strategy games and point & click adventures. Thief, System shock 2 and Deus ex were first good 3D games and worth playing even today. Of course this is only my opinion and I enjoyed the original Doom and Duke Nukem 3d as brainless entertainment.

[@sonicboove4865]

The AGA was hyped so much back in the day, a bit of a let down.

[@adzi6164]

as a person who only recently started being interested in the Amiga, a question would Amiga 1200 with those better chips run OCS/ECS games better than the A500? It *seems* logical to assume so, but I guess there might be some compatibility issues.

[@wimwiddershins]

Some do, most just run the same. Worse, many A500 targeted titles don't work "out the box" because of differences in the Kickstart ROM.

[@Justforvisit]

Holy demons of Hell, the difference between the OCS / ESC version of Castlevania and the AGA version that seemingly only Japan got...... ....a difference like Dracula and Alucard! DAMN! We got ROBBED!

[@danyoutube7491]

The AGA version is one of a number of Amiga games being made in very recent years, it's not a contemporary game to the OCS one. I don't think the Amiga made it to Japan, though I can see why you would think that because it is clearly styled on the Japanese console versions rather than the original Amiga port.

[@adzi6164]

the latter Castlevania game seems to be a fanmade port, made by someone with passion and deep understanding of Amiga's capabilities and limitations, compared to the old, official Amiga port, which seemed to be about as well made as Amiga's Street Fighter 2 version...

[@Asphodellife]

It's actually (simply) being made with the Scorpion Engine!@@adzi6164

[@StefanEdek]

Are you sure there is an AGA version of Syndicate?

[@Harkonnen75]

Even though I tried the Sindycate AGA game with two different sources, it gave me the same result. I have to say that I was surprised, since I remembered that there were more differences than just some colors in the intro...

[@StefanEdek]

@@Harkonnen75 i was looking for Syndicate AGA for some time, but all dowloaded version were standard OCS/ECS. Even the Syndicate for CD32 is old A500 version copied to CD. I don’t think Syndicate AGA exist.

[@blumcole]

I don’t think there ever was one. I never saw one in the stores or magazines att so I was surprised.

[@hunter141072]

There are some mistakes in the video, AGA Wing Commander never existed back in the days, the only version that was created by Mindscape was the ECS version, that's the only thing that we got. Those screen I presume are from the PC version not the AGA one. Also the ECS version of Theme Park is not the real version, the 500 version of theme park had way less colors and details most notable on the floor, on the ECS version it was just a grey square without those white edges. And all the objects had more noticeable less colors, plus the sale stands were not tematic, it was just a square like store which was the same no matter what you sold and it only had a tiny symbol of hamburgers, drinks or coffee on the top.

[@Harkonnen75]

There was a Wing Commander CD32 AGA version, which is the image in the video. Yes, it existed, and I have played. More info: www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=4727 Regarding the Theme Park game, despite my efforts to find the correct roms of the two versions, it is possible that the comparison is not correct and you are right.

[@hunter141072]

​@@Harkonnen75 I never saw that AGA version but it looks like you are right, looks like it was a very limited edition released on two compilations only, what a big mistake why they didn´t released it on the 1200 at the same time than the a500 is a completely stupid decision.

[@Harkonnen75]

totally agree...

[@matieucastel835]

There is a problem with your AGA version of PGA Euro. The AGA version is much better visually than the one showed here. The grass is textured for example, not plain 3D. Also Syndicate doesn't use the AGA chipset. It is just the OCS version put on a CD for the CD32.

[@PeowPeowPeowLasers]

4:40 is just wrong without "ICE CREAM......ICE CREAM"

[@nexusvi4373]

W większości gier nie ma dużej różnicy.

[@luomotigre2803]

There was no AGA ver. of Syndicate.

[@guest21984]

Castlevania AGA looks much better and makes the game better due to other effects. Turrican is worse on AGA, poor Turrican just looks fat :D I had an A500 as a child and always some of the AGA & CD32 games. It was just the marketing and box art though. Comparing now, they look worse in some cases

[@2K8Si]

Why does PGA European Tour have the music from Supercars???

[@Harkonnen75]

When I started the KZbin channel, I used to put music that I like from games in other games that they generally don't have. Curious. But this weekend I will show the third part of a trilogy of games after Commodore and of course there is PGA and this time yes... with its original music :-)

[@ecernosoft3096]

Castlevania on ECS/OCS looks so terrible compared to The AGA one that looked like the X68000.....

[@zenbyo]

Castlevania on the A1200 looks insane

[@Justforvisit]

Like a completely different game!

[@EricBarbman]

It's a 2022 homebrew, apparently.

[@spieleschreiber5093]

That's because it's a totally different thing. It's a modern homebrew demo of how Castlevania could potentially look like on AGA-chipset. Should have been mentioned in the description. Same with Turrican, Giana Sisters.

[@zenbyo]

@@spieleschreiber5093 Thanks for the update. It still looks great. :)

[@spieleschreiber5093]

@@zenbyo It definitely does. I find it especially impressive as it's being created with Scorpion engine, meaning it does not test the hardware to the limit.

[@gelzamangitzaman1482]

THey look identical to me.

[@DrJ3RK8]

That Castlevania comparison is a little... ...unfair... :D A modern remake of the X68000 version, against a really crappy original port. :D

[@Harkonnen75]

Ehhh... mmm... You're right...

[@DrJ3RK8]

@@Harkonnen75 Hehehe, wasn't nitpicking. I just find it funny. :) That new version is amazing!

[@marcellvalle7255]

AGA? OCS?

[@TheSudsy]

Advanced Graphic Architecture and Original Chip Set(OCS) Enhanced Chip Set (ECS)

[@youuuuuuuuuuutube]

Half the games look better on ECS than AGA ...

[@Harkonnen75]

Indeed. Many games didn't take advantage of AGA technology and that was a shame...

[@Asphodellife]

Comparing CastleVania is just mean.. 😆

[@joeegg124]

Castlevania OCS was just piss poor, or inept programming, like 70% of Amiga games

[@kinaceman]

the AGA version of turrican 2 ruined the turrican suit it looks like a clown with big ears!

[@Foebane72]

If you want to see AGA at its absolute BEST, LOOK TO THE DEMOSCENE! FUCK AMIGA GAMES, they mostly suck anyway!

[@valenrn8657]

Refer to AGA's Reshoot Proxima 3

[@xxxfreshman]

Hmmm were was a speedball II AGA ???

[@fernandocollazo8705]

There are games that differences are significative as Brian the Lion, Bubble 'n Squeak, Stardust and Super Stardust

[@Harkonnen75]

Thanks for the comment. It is possible that one day (later) I will make a second part... Then these games will be included. :-)

[@Justforvisit]

And Castlevania