Talk:Amstrad GX4000/Archive 1

Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad wildstreets.gif
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Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad protennistour.gif
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Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad pang.png
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Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad klax.gif
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Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad crazycars2.gif
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Fair use rationale for Image:Amstrad burninrubber.gif
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just an observation
That guy is seriously reaching with "technically on a par with the SNES". Yes... it has a CPU running at a higher Mhz, and can do a comparable top-end resolution (640x200 vs 512x224), and has about the same RAM. But everything else gets wiped by the Nintendo with its custom coprocessors, highcolour-ish graphics (somewhere between 12 and 16 bit, depending how you sliced it), sprite engine, mode 7 pseudo-3D effects, awesome soundsystem, massive cartridge capacity, etc...

It would, however, have been fairly competitive with the Mega Drive, but for the anemic CPU (the same as in the Master System... the Sinclair Spectrum of >7 years earlier... and the Game Boy!). I have a feeling that although it may have had a 4096 colour pallete, it wouldn't have been able to show all of them at once without coding tricks, or at least poor resolution. Probably something more like 64, on a similar level to the Game Gear and roughly equivalent to the apparent quality of the Genesis/MD. (64 colours/6 bit at 320x200, full 12-bit 4096 at a chunky 160x200, and a mere 8 colours/3bit at 640x200? Making it vaguely equivalent to an Amiga but without the dedicated accelerator chip). And it still only has that - admittedly, a darling of a - 3 channel yamaha 2192 square wave chip, as found in a range of computers notable for slightly underperforming in the audio area (master system, atari st, pc jr, spectrum +2...).

Good games and good marketing - and a sensible approach to market position and pricing - could have saved it, as Amstrad have an otherwise decent history of making solid, low-to-mid budget equipment (I have a stereo of theirs from '92 that's modest (sold for £120 including a CD player at the time), and showing its age, but still hanging on...). Pity. 193.63.174.10 (talk) 12:38, 30 January 2009 (UTC)
 * EDIT ... after re-reading the specs... OK, 32 colours onscreen. No mention of whether you have to be in 160 (or 160/320) resolution to achieve that, though, but with only 16k VRAM I'm not confident unless it's using clever tricks to stretch that memory (Atari ST needed 32k to show 320x200 at 16 colours... so *something* must be going on for the Amstrad to even manage >16 at 160x200). Does have a sprite pusher, but a fairly limited 16 item one (and i bet only for 16x16 sprites, with a 32x32 monster needing 4 entries) so probably a bit of flicker on complex games. And not much else - though the IBM analogue joystick input is interesting. I wonder if any of the consoles and computers (Atari STE included) that incorporated analogue controller options ever actually used them, apart from the PC itself where it was analogue or nothing? 193.63.174.10 (talk) 12:46, 30 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, the comparison is pretty funny to be honest, in fact, now that I have access to the actual source, I would say it was probably just a simple mistake on his part, as he mentions that the GX4000 had trouble competing technically with the Atari ST, which is a pretty backwards statement to make after saying it was better than SNES.


 * In regards to the tech comparison, I'm not the best person to comment, but from what I can gather, for all intents and purposes the SNES usually runs at 256x224 resolution at 2.68 MHz, as the higher resolution and CPU speeds have drawbacks. However the SNES CPU is more efficient than the GX4000 one for most actions anyway, so that 2.68 Mhz should be comparable to a 5-6Mhz Z80, still faster than GX4000 (though the few actions which the Z80 is better for should be far faster on GX4000). GX4000 has a higher resolution available, but when using that Mode it has a 4-colour background limitation, pitifully low in comparison to SNES (though possibly not quite as bad as it first seems, as its possible that using the Asic's interrupts you could reload the screen multiple times, with 4 colours at the top, a palette reload to give another 4 colours for the mid background and another palette change to give 4 colours for the ground, on top of that you have 15 colours available for sprites, some of which could just be statically placed over the background to give the illusion of more background colour, still, even with that huge amount of work and optimisation, you're still probably going to have well under half the on-screen colours of the SNES, and the colours will be limited to certain areas of the screen). Outside of that the sprites are much worse on GX4000 (just to note though, when you talk about multiple sprites for large monsters you're selling the system a little short, as it can magnify the size of the sprites by up to 4x both in height and width anyway, so the sprites can be 32x64 sized, but at low resolution). The sound chip is waay better on SNES too, but the extra DMA feature provided by the Asic may at least help the system to have superior sound capability to earlier systems which used the same sound chip. On top of that the SNES has the advanced features for rotating and scaling the background of course Jesus.arnold (talk) 02:11, 5 February 2012 (UTC)