ECS - What is it good for?

[AndyLandy]

OK, time to AndyLandy the forums again.

So, AGA is pretty cool, there's a bunch of games and demos out there that take advantage of it, so it's pretty desirable. But I don't believe the same is true of ECS. I don't think I've ever seen anything that requires an ECS chipset, it's all either "Works with OCS" or "Needs AGA" -- So, what is ECS good for? Is it worth making a fuss over? Are A500+ or A2000 r6.5 much more-desirable than their OCS counterparts? Particularly since you can put a Kickstart 2 or higher in an OCS Amiga.

:thanks:

 

[Justin]

Re: ECS - What is it good for?

all your questions answered

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Enhanced_Chip_Set

 

[Harrison]

Re: ECS - What is it good for?

The biggest advantage of the ECS chipset is 2MB chip ram support and some higher display modes. However you can upgrade the OCS chipset to ECS chips by replacing Agnus and Denise with the Super versions, so you can turn an OCS machine into an ECS machine fairly easily, although finding the chips these days isn't that easy.

And the later 1990+ A500's and A2000's started to see a mix of OCS and ECS chips, so some late A500's might actually be nearly identical to an A500Plus (obviously the motherboard will still be slightly different).

It was however more the advances in Kickstart 2 that really upgraded the Amiga, rather than the ECS chipset at the time, because even with the OCS chipset, fitting a KS2 rom allowed Workbench 2 to work, and that was the biger upgrade from the OCS and KS1.3 days than the chipset.

The ECS chipset added a lot of improvements over the OCS chipset, but it's not really talked about much these days. It added the Super Agnus and Super Denise chips, allowing support for 2MB Chip Ram, support for Productivity and SuperHires display modes, ability of the blitter to copy regions larger than 1024x1024 in one operation, and the ability to display sprites in border regions outside of the display window where bitplanes are shown.

Most of this was more important to more serious software, rather than games. There are quite a few productivity applications that required Kickstart 2 and the ECS chipset to run, and would not work on the OCS chipset. However since KS3 and Workbench 3 these same programs also run on that. If you look on Aminet you will see a lot of utilities and applications that require ECS or higher to run.

There are some Amiga games that require the ECS chipset. The games I can think of at the moment are Exile ECS, Wing Commander ECS and Super Skidmarks, which I think all required at least ECS. Please correct me if I'm wrong? I think it was mostly later released games that were originally designed for AGA first and then an ECS version was later released.