Why did 1mb RAM make such a big difference on Amiga games and not on x86 games?

[Atheist]

KingTutt wrote:
Anyway I think bloated coding is not going to do much for x86 machines in the long run. Sooner or later there is going to be a point were all this bloatware will bite x86 computers in the ass. I think it may be sooner than later, as 64bit machines are just around the corner. As for whether m$ will try to make backwards compatibility native or emulated is another question altogether.

One thing is certain, all that sloppy coding will haunt bgates the day x86 users move forward to 64bit machines.

In Amiga OS Development
I posted
CPU Instructions Q.

in which I share the same sentiments.

AmigaOne! Irrisistable!

[olegil]

@PhatBoiCollier:

You missed the point :-)

The first half meg was CHIP mem, the second half was SLOW mem (neither chip nor fast) accessed through the same timing on the motherboard, but outside the rather low address window the graphics and sound chips could DMA to. Cutting a trace in a jumper near the CPU and soldering in a small wire, so that two address lines from the CPU to Agnus swapped places, moved the SLOW mem into the CHIP mem range (late A500 motherboards with proper Agnus version only). I had 1M chip and 2M fast in my A500. Wasn't half bad then.

[Hammer]

Still I see it a real shame that we couldn't continue with Amiga's legacy of efficient coding.

What about X86 QNX? (it has games such as Unreal Tournament  and QuakeIII) OR AROS?

But is it really good practise to be resource wasteful with sloppy code?!?!

Ultimately it promotes hardware sales…

There are some parts of Windows that are optimized for maximum speed e.g. 3D drivers..  

There are some X86 applications (most related to encoding and decoding video/audio streams) that are optimized for maximum speed (e.g. MMX, 3DNow, 3DNow Pro, SSE, SSE2).

The bloated part is for the support for application services (too many to list down).

I personally think it should be a crime punishable by death if that same approach is adopted for the Amiga OS4 platform. hehe.

What happens if Quake III/Unreal Tournament/MS Office XP/Star Office 6.0/Netscape 7 gets ported over to AmigaOS 4.0?

BTW can't AOS4 boost say an A1@G4 800Mhz to feel like a A1@1600Mhz. I mean an Athlon 1800+ is really just running at 1533Mhz yet is comparable to a P4 1800Mhz.

Athlon XP’s rating is based on Athlon Model 4 (a.k.a Thunderbird core). It’s rating was obtained mostly from MS Windows applications and benchmarks(refer to AMD’s web site for disclosure).  

IF the PowerPC has MS Windows 2K/XP a rating could be created. The closest desktop application set to MS Windows is the MacOS X platform.

It’s just too bad that PPC MacOS platform is not an alternative clone market.

[Hammer]

 

I remember doing a small HW hack with cutting and soldering a few lines on the motherboard which then converted the 512k expansion into an extra 512k of Chip (giving you a total of 1meg Chip) which was great if you had a HD attached to the side of the machine.

I still remember that hack (modifying A500 6A motherboard to the level of A500 Plus (also plugged in new ECS chips and ROMs) .

The best hack I did was the 50Mhz clock source hack on the A3000’s 68882 FPU (getting something for nothing (well almost i.e. one has to install a small heat sink) ).

[KingTutt]

Hammer wrote:
What happens if Quake III/Unreal Tournament/MS Office XP/Star Office 6.0/Netscape 7 gets ported over to AmigaOS 4.0?

I'm sure Hyperion or whichever Amiga software company that does the port will be wary of the strong code efficient ethics of amiga programming. I trust they will not follow in the same path as m$. Most of these apps have redundant code anyway, since we don't use MMX/SSE/3Dnow code, nor do we have a few dozen different mainboards to support.

I think we are still safe from bloatware whichever way you look at it. The only hitch is, how many programmers nowadays have gotten to complacent to care... i sure hope not any who are serious about Amiga coding.

[Hammer]

I trust they will not follow in the same path as m$.

In a desktop business environment, legacy software support is important. MS couldn’t afford to alienate its (cashed up) business customers.   One of the main strength of MS Window’s marketing ideology is its legacy software support.

IF required, MS can deliver a cut down MS Windows 2K with little legacy software support (i.e. refer to X-BOX's OS package).  

since we don't use MMX/SSE/3Dnow code, nor do

PPC G4 (and soon to be released(H2 2003) PPC 970) does have it’s own streaming instructions btw…

==========================================
Some minimal configurations:
LynxOS: 150kb
BlueCat Linux: 260kb
Windows XP Embedded: 5Mb

Some typical configurations:
LynxOS: 250kb
Linux: 500kb
Windows XP Embedded: 15Mb
==========================================
Reference

[KingTutt]

Hammer wrote:

I trust they will not follow in the same path as m$.

In a desktop business environment, legacy software support is important. MS couldn’t afford to alienate its (cashed up) business customers.   One of the main strength of MS Window’s marketing ideology is its legacy software support.

IF required, MS can deliver a cut down MS Windows 2K with little legacy software support (i.e. refer to X-BOX's OS package).  

since we don't use MMX/SSE/3Dnow code, nor do

PPC G4 (and soon to be released(H2 2003) PPC 970) does have it’s own streaming instructions btw…

==========================================
Some minimal configurations:
LynxOS: 150kb
BlueCat Linux: 260kb
Windows XP Embedded: 5Mb

Some typical configurations:
LynxOS: 250kb
Linux: 500kb
Windows XP Embedded: 15Mb
==========================================
Reference

Agreed. But with only 3 mainboards to support, the bloatware is potentially less. Not the hundreds of motherboards and CPUs spanning almost 3 decades for the x86 series.

Anyway my greatest concern for OS4 is that the methodologies of good efficient coding of the once great classic systems, may be lost with this newer generation of windozzze programmers. Think about it for a second. A whole generation has grown up with windows 95/98/2000/XP, probably never of having heard of the amiga or any commodore machines for that matter. None of them will have the slightest clue on what assembly language is, and probably scoff at the mention of it anyways.

Hopefully us true amigans are plentiful enough to show them young 'uns the way to true programming enlightenment, lol!

Sloppy coding and bloatware could become the greatest travesty to the amiga platform. Jay Miner would certainly roll in his grave on that one.

[Ohno]

Most of it comes down to sloppy code, usually caused by strict deadlines. These days simple things like vertical text-scrollers are put into animations, since rendering such an animation is easier and quicker then actually coding such a thing (which looks better and uses much less resources).

Companies want to push out products and make money on them as quickly as possible and they don't care if that means you need a couple of megabytes of extra memory/harddisk space.

I also dislike the fact that each game on the PC needs installing to the harddisk, which takes hundreds of megabytes of harddisk space and then the game still needs the CD's to start up. Most games can easily be run straight from CD... I hope that'll happen on Amiga.... it would be great if they even make the CD's bootable, so you can start up your Amiga, insert the CD and it will run the game without having to install it... or boot from harddisk first.

Regards,

Onno

[olegil]

Well, considering a harddrive might be able to sustain 20MB/s, and a CDROM might be able to sustain 5MB/s, I know which medium I would like to play a full CD texture-rich 3D game off of. Even worse is the difference in seek time (7ms vs 150ms...)

[Atheist]

Any game I can, I load into a Ram: disk, on my Amiga.

Man, "King's Quest: Perils of Rosella" was a nightmare, loading from disk. Many others, as well.

AmigaOne! 2 Gigs of ram, you can actully USE it!!!!

[Hammer]

@Atheist

AmigaOne! 2 Gigs of ram, you can actully USE it!!!!

In a RAM disk context, ~2.0 GB may not be enough for UT2003 or Unreal2 level games.

1. "Unreal 2" has installed size of 2.10 Gb (2,257,989,274bytes). It was shiped with 2 CDs.

2. "Unreal Tournament 2003" has installed size of 2.88Gb (3,101,392,896bytes). It was shiped with 3 CDs.

This tread will continue at foreseeable future.

"Unreal 2" has practically killed the “Geforce 2” as a gaming 3D card.  

[PPC]

@ KapitanKlystron

Quote: No matter what OS4 does or don't do, There willnot be a huge performance gap between the A1 and a Wintel box. And thats the real shame.

So why is my old&slow A1200T 040/25+603e 240 Mhz ppc+bvision,128 MB fast&lot's more still outprefroming a vast majority of th pc's ?

Amiga OS is very efficient!

I am playing an mp3,running Q2 in window mode, typing this message,mailing,online on icq and irc and downloading files with 85 Kb/sec (my ADSL connection is pretty slow only 768 k/bit bandwidth)

My WB has a very graphical config (1152*900*16) i use visual pref's,MUI,Magic menu,birdie,Caboom,reqattack and whatever i installed to let my wb look and work great.
I skinned every part i could with jpeg's,gif's etc.. and everything is still running smooth, even better i hardly notice all these app's&progs running :-D And still more then enough free mem (about 50 MB) with all this stuff running at the same time.

PC using Friends are always totally stunned when they see my miggy in action.
And then i give em a load of my CSPPC A4000 and then they are silent and totally confused how such an old machine can be so fast with so little hardware (it boots in 5.5 sec's on pfs 3 :-D )

The only time my Amiga's has to give in to modern pc's is when it comes down to raw cpu power.

So if hyperion does a real good job i think an Next gen Amiga will blow a pc out of the water only due to the fact that Amiga OS extremely efficient also coz multiprocessing is very sucky on the x86 platform.

What i also notice is that lot's of Amiga users never seen/used a well configured PPC Amiga.
 

[KingTutt]

I agree, PPC.

The myth that AmigaOne will be some horribly under-resourced, underpowered and unenviable platform is just pure and unadulterated crap. Its small footprint OS will show the world AGAIN, that alot can be achieved with so little. Amigas legacy of efficient coding should and WILL be resurrected by OS4. We can only pray that others will follow suite with their own OS4 programs and say no, to overbloated s/w.

We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the Amiga platform... Hell! we OWE it to Jay Miner and his dream of fun computing. Competition be damned, we don't care how big and unmoving M$ is. And we sure as hell don't care about the standards of today, the promotion of sloppy coding by big companies, to drive the development of h/w further. What we do care about is a solid platform which works and is enjoyable and not lifeless or uninspiring like certain cumbersome and overbloated OSes of today. We care about a certain joy in computing that was lost a while ago, and we care enough to resurrect it by whichever means possible. We care enough to stick by it after 10yrs of no development and no Commodore. And if it takes another 10 years I will still be here, because as long as I remain unsatisfied with the alternatives I will remain Amigan.

My resolve is unchanged since '87 and my resolve will likely remain so till 2087 (that is if I'm still around and tucked away in a flask with electrodes running from my brain. lol!)

[jeffimix]

The Xbox has a many bit processor, I though it was 128 like other consoles out there...  you'd have to do a lot of really heavy work to port windows. Or are the processors stil 64 bti like the N64? Which doesn't seem right to me...

[Atheist]

Hello jeffimix,

X-BUX=
733 MHz Intel Custom Pentium III
250 MHz Custom-Designed NV2X

rest of their huffing and puffing

(not)OS takes less then 3 MB in RAM
Doesn't brag about boot-up time, though. Anybody know that?

Here's an interesting stat: Total Internal Components 800

800? Seems high to me? Are they including screws and dust-bunnies? Read elsewhere, 300 people worked on it about 2 to 3 years.

Here's another bogus semi-fact. THEY wrote IE, so how come it took about a YEAR to get the networking, working?? Loouuuuggggeeerrrrrssss!!!!

NO DIRECT PORTS PLEEASE!!! Look at the features of mozilla, opera, netscape, and (gasp) IE, and Amigafy(TM) it. (Just try not to take as long as AOS4.0 to release it.)

AmigaOne! I ADORE my CD (970-)64!!!!! :-D  :-D

[Revener]

@ Kin Tutt
Yeah gogogogo I'm totally with you on this.

Will be in Amiga til the end of time
even though I'm mostly a gamer and only uses my Amiga sporadicly these days (mainly coz I never upgraded it past a 030 and been waiting for my friend to find his broken A4000 so I can have his PPC card for free ;-) ).