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Author Topic: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!  (Read 4485 times)

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Offline MAD

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #14 on: March 27, 2003, 08:38:05 AM »
Hoya!

@KingTutt

I DO agree with you dude!
Those were the time when micro-computing WAS fun AND efficient!
And sorry, but I do not think raw power means efficiency...

/me is looking for a good time machine to go back in time...

Be funky

M A D
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Offline olegil

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #15 on: March 27, 2003, 09:14:29 AM »
@Desmon:

To be fair, I have actually seen one motherboard which had drivers where you could format a floppy in the background under Windows. If it's implemented right, with interrupts and whatnots, it shouldn't be that damn hard. The problem with Windows (IMHO) is that it has 1: a fairness scheduler (tries to give more CPU to low priority processes that hasn't had cpu for a while) and 2: makes the assumption that hardware banging needs higher priority.

These two tends to make multitasking freak out from time to time. For instance, a high-pri task might have to wait for seconds while a low-pri task is fetched from swap, all because the swap-daemon has a high priority and only takes into account free CPU time, not whether there's actually time to fetch something before the CPU isn't free again (medium high pri task idles out for half a millisecond, but isn't rescheduled until low pri task has been fetched from disk). Result == complete loss of multitasking for seconds at a time. Of course, this won't happen if you install more memory, but then you'll most likely just run more programs, won't you? Also, there's no really sure way of stopping Windows from swapping to disk, afaik...
 

Offline ottomobiehl

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #16 on: March 27, 2003, 09:49:21 AM »
Quote
One should also blame Motorola's part in dumping 68k as their leading edge CPU.


I never did find out why they dropped the 68k.  Seemed like a good and popular CPU to me? :-?
 

Offline whabang

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #17 on: March 27, 2003, 09:57:34 AM »
Quote

ottomobiehl wrote:
I never did find out why they dropped the 68k.  Seemed like a good and popular CPU to me? :-?

I think it was too hard to push the clock frequency higher. Besides, RISC was a very popular word at the time...
Beating the dead horse since 2002.
 

Offline Siggy

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #18 on: March 27, 2003, 11:35:41 AM »
@Desmon

Quote

What's more, formatting a floppy under Win2kPro these days still kills everything else.


There are a lot of things that do this.. it's amazing. One of the edit systems I use at work (when I can't get on the Avid) runs on WinNT (one day they will fess up and reveal that this in fact stands for 'nearly there').
When I digitize video the clock stops.

I work in News - which is time critical.. everytime I use that machine I'm getting burned thinking I have '5 more minutes' to get a story done.

I think the strength of the Amiga is not just pre-emptive multi tasking at the OS level -- it was doing it at the hardware level, and the OS was designed to take advantage of this.

The proof is there for anyone that used a WAITBLIT macro in assembly - where you stop your program and wait for the blitter to finish it's work.

I also believe things like this made the code smaller - a handfull of registered passed to blitter and it's happily processing your graphics while your program continues.
Same goes for copperlists - set and forget.

Note on the copper - I've yet to use any system that was so flexible in it's video formatting or the ability to smoothscroll so effortlessly (and with such a tiny impact on the hardware).

If they're out there - I've not programmed one. It was things like that where with but a tiny fraction of knowledge you could throw up something that was (compared to the competition of the day) incredible.

oh, and 68k assem was a thing of beauty and joy..

Ok - enough reminiscing - I'm firing up Devpac :-P

Siggy
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 It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the Journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs,
 

Offline Atheist

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #19 on: March 27, 2003, 12:28:09 PM »
Unfortunately I'll be repeating myself, but here goes;

Siggy, you beat me to it, FLEXIBLE, that's the key. AOS is so damn flexible. I could be wrong, but I heard game guys could easily not use ANY of the OS if it suited their needs. The machine wouldn't cry bloody murder! It makes me say, never mind "amiga anywhere", I say "ANYTHING to ANYONE"!

But wait, that's only a part of it, with everything else that was said by others here.

In fact, everyone saw something different. For me, and few people seem to have lived my vision, I freaked after desperately saving and finally buying an 8 meg ram board for my A2000, I loaded the ENTIRE OS into ram: or usually a rad: ALMOST every  session. I remember playing "Black Crypt" (five disks) in ram. I still remember playing one of the Ultimas on a SNES, with LOAD TIME DELAY!

Atari and Mac aren't flexible enough, and windows, FORGET IT!!!!

Notepad on w98se is 43,000 bytes, and it's USELESS!!! IT HAS NO FEATURES!!!! It's limit is 64K files!! then you have to use wordpad, which I didn't install.

Multiple screens, at different resolutions; once you SEE that, YOU'RE ADDICTED!

I HAD a program called x-ray??, that could cycle through the screens below it, over the section you were on, or pan and scroll around it, HOW COOL IS THAT??? 1990!!!!! and you SAW the program underneath RUNNING!

AmigaOne! "Anything to anyone".

P.S. Isn't that why you bought a computer?
\\"Which would you buy? The Crappy A1200, 15 years out of date... or the Mobile Phone that I have?\\" -- bloodline
So I guess that A500, 600, 1000, 2000, CDTV, CD32, are pure garbage then? Thanks for posting here.
 

Offline Vincent

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #20 on: March 27, 2003, 02:06:23 PM »
PC gamers are a funny bunch - I used to be one.

My parents decided to get a PC to help with their home-run business.  That was in 1994.  (Before this we had an Amstrad PCW)

When they weren't using it, I would play games like Settlers, Doom, Cannon Fodder, Tomb Raider and a few others.  A while later I got Quake for my birthday.  Then we needed to upgrade to play it.  Thankfully it was only the ram we needed to upgrade.  Everything was great after that.  I could play Quake and There was a slight increase in the general speed of Windows (95).

I kept playing games on the PC and enjoying them.  Then I had to start a Training Scheme or get my unemployment money cut off.  I made a few friends there (one of which is now living with me :-D).  Some of them lived on a not-too-far-out-of-the-way-home place, so I decided I would stop by there before going home.  That was one of the greatest choices I made.

This was the first time I had seen an expanded A1200 (I had seen Amigas years before - I wanted an A500 when they came out, but I could never afford one).  I was amazed at what it could do.  A few weeks later, I decided I was going to get one.  The local Tandy shop had one (the last one to be sold in a shop in Dundee).  I promptly went to the bank, got my £200 and bought it.  I then spent money upgrading it (accel, ram, HD, CD-ROM and just a month or two ago a tower and SD/FF - we had a spare monitor)

Playing the games on an Amiga (Skidmarks, Hired Guns, Breathless, Alien Breed (all of them), Gloom, Cannon Fodder, Dune II, Syndicate, the list goes on...) is far better than on the PCs.  I remember playing Cannon Fodder on the PC and thinking it was great.  I then saw it on an Amiga and saw how smoothly it scrolled.  I was surprised at how graphically different these two games were.

I still play the occasional games on my PC, but I get so much more fun playing them on my Amiga.  And the specs of my Amiga haven't changed in 6 years.  Since getting my Amiga, my parents have upgraded twice just to run things more smoothly.

I'm glad I'm an ex-PC gamer :-D
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Offline cycloid

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #21 on: March 27, 2003, 02:25:42 PM »
It's all true, sorry to hear you lost some friends there power! you should havemade them follow the monitor cable or something!

What i can say is that i AM a PC gamer (and CS-rival coder) but only since the days of wolfenstein, so i suppose i crossed over when the gauntlet did :-) And it is true that in real life i try to pronounce things like LOL, w00t and the most diffucult to say: rotfl .... oh dear.

at any rate i'm happy now that i can play DOOM on my miggy, it's all that matters to me!

interesting a firend of mine who owns EVERY gaming console recently got a PC (this means he loves goldeneye but thinks Half life sucks and, of course, thinks HAlo rocks)(which it does) ... i introduced him to Quake ... and it blew him away! the speed of the gameplay especially.
 

Offline Calen

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #22 on: March 27, 2003, 03:53:53 PM »
Great thread guys and oh so true...

I was quite late getting a PC in life, i would never touch one in the past as i never had the urge/need to get one , to them my friends it was all tweaking this, teaking that, mine is faster than yours, windows is so coool, we can multitask, yada yada yada.
Back then in the mid to late 90s they really didnt believe me i could go online with my Amiga, play Doom on an old 030, play quake on a 60mhz Amiga computer and be able to have dual CPU's and 24 bit gfx cards, there of course like nah you cant do that, same old crap as they live in the PC world that if you didnt have something way above 400mhz (this was a few years ago) and 3d card then its gonna be crap and not do anything, i gladly show them the demo scene that was and is Amiga and point out that these our running on a 7mhz original Amiga 500 that was released around '85, had stereo sound, and could multitask better than your machine could ever dream of.
 When they did eventually see my PPC setup they didnt believe me either it was an Amiga, all i got was no no way and eventually, wow!
Also worth a note was when i brought up how bloated Windows really is and showing them, fine examples our the memory requirements compared to Amiga and showing the size of alot of my Amiga internet programs for an example, stricq/amirc//IB/Yam etc etc that most of which fall below 1MB !

The sad fact is, they didnt know what is was like to enjoy a computer experience, something noone ever seem to have with a Windows machine, i guess for me the Amiga has soul and its a very enjoyable experience, and its not all down to mhz as is clearly showing in the PC world.
When i got my first PC which was a 450 mhz P3 running windows 98, it felt slow, cumbersome, the feel that you don't know whats really going on under the bonnet, and is this CPU really faster than my old 200mhz 603e or my 040/25mhz for that matter?  It for sure didnt respond as quickly and after time i could really start to see why i enjoyed my Amiga so much.

Anyway im sure for some you may start to see the trend all over again, you have a G4 @ 800mhz?   but i have an Athlon running over 2 ghz, you machine must suck!  the windows rules of computing comes back again, but when that comes around, show them what it can do :-)

Anyway enough ranting...but before i go, i dunno about you guys but when i first seen my friend shutting down windows and windows replying "It's now safe to turn of your computer"  i buckled with laughter.  does it also tell you when  your allowed to switch it back on again? ;-)
 

Offline Venkman

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #23 on: March 27, 2003, 04:14:54 PM »
I'm currently a PeeCee gamer, but I haven't always been so. I had an Amiga 500 from 1992 - 1997 and it was only the fact that I didn't know whether the Amiga was going to still be around as a gaming platform that made me switch to other formats.

I've owned several machines since my Amiga, including Atari Jaguar, Panasonic 3DO, Playstation, Playstation 2 (crap) and numerous PC's.

My Amiga was most definately the best computer I ever owned though...
Video game developer, former ZX81, C64 and Amiga bedroom coder, amateur astronomer, musician, graphic designer, Linux user and geek!
 

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #24 on: March 27, 2003, 08:58:51 PM »
Bottom line, PC's are only good for 1st person games (which all seem to be the same to me) and those over complicated flight sims that need a load of buttons.

I used to spend hours playing games on my Amiga and now I hardly touch any of the PC games I have. I leave that to my PS2.

Which makes me wonder why I bother trying to have a decent graphics card in my PC. :-?
 

Offline Hammer

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #25 on: March 27, 2003, 09:31:26 PM »
Quote

What's more, formatting a floppy under Win2kPro these days still kills everything else.


Formatting a floppy disk doesn’t seem to be a burden on my Athlon XP/nForce 2/WinXP-Pro-SP1 box…
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Offline Hammer

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #26 on: March 27, 2003, 09:51:48 PM »
Quote
Bottom line, PC's are only good for 1st person games (which all seem to be the same to me) and those over complicated flight sims that need a load of buttons.


What about RTS (e.g. Command Conquer - Generals)? I don’t think those consoles can effectively pump at +1600x1200 resolution with a TV.
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Offline Seehund

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #27 on: March 27, 2003, 10:09:25 PM »
Quote

Hammer wrote:
Quote

What's more, formatting a floppy under Win2kPro these days still kills everything else.


Formatting a floppy disk doesn’t seem to be a burden on my Athlon XP/nForce 2/WinXP-Pro-SP1 box…


Hush now! Don't go spoiling classic mythology. :)


Just as those "PeeCee gamers" aren't very clued in on the capabilities of Amigas, neither do a whole bunch of Amiga users seem to have ever used an even moderately modern PC with a recent Windows version.

"ISA and IRQs, waah, waah! Can't do anything else while formatting floppies, waah waah! Hardware being fast and cheap is not ELEGANT, it's SUPPOSED to be slow and expensive, waah waah!" ;)
[color=0000FF]Maybe it\\\'s still possible to [/color]save AmigaOS [color=0000FF][/size][/color]  :rtfm:......
 

Offline Hammer

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #28 on: March 27, 2003, 10:24:22 PM »
Quote
I was quite late getting a PC in life, i would never touch one in the past as i never had the urge/need to get one , to them my friends it was all tweaking this, teaking that, mine is faster than yours,

I don’t find tweaking a problem, i.e. the Amiga does have its share of hardware and OS tweaking e.g. over-clocking my A3000’s 68882 FPU, 68010 drop in replacement/512kb bogo ram to chip ram hack for A500, direct FPU math library replacements and ‘etc’.

Quote

Back then in the mid to late 90s they really didnt believe me i could go online with my Amiga, play Doom on an old 030, play quake on a 60mhz Amiga computer and be able to have dual CPU's and 24 bit gfx cards, there of course like nah you cant do that, same old crap as they live in the PC world that if you didnt have something way above 400mhz (this was a few years ago) and 3d card then its gonna be crap and not do anything,


With sufficient ram (e.g. 20MB ram), the right core logic chipsets (e.g. OPTi),  the right UART chip and Cirrus 542x SVGA addon-card; one could surf the net, play DOOM @33Mhz 386DX.

Quote
i gladly show them the demo scene that was and is Amiga and point out that these our running on a 7mhz original Amiga 500 that was released around '85, had stereo sound, and could multitask better than your machine could ever dream of.

Largely thanks to Amiga’s custom co-processors chips which reduces the CPU burden, thus the 7Mhz 68000 machines can-do most of the mentioned task.

Quote

play quake on a 60mhz Amiga computer

But how large is the resolution?

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Offline Calen

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Re: PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!
« Reply #29 from previous page: March 27, 2003, 10:45:51 PM »
Quote
But how large is the resolution?

Not very big, it couldnt handle it at decent frames rates, but it was running on a 68k Amiga under AGA, something that was touted as impossible not long before and a great achievement since the Amiga was not designed to handle these types of games, but hey..that was what programmers done best on Amiga, pushing every single last drop of power out of it. Nows it all mhz mhz mhz, yes i know, i've heard why bother since x86 h/w is so cheap etc etc.

I dare say if they optimized half of todays games, the h/w requirements for the games would be much lower..so in that respert i wouldnt be suprised to see some fine Games running at fantastic speeds on the new Amiga OS with alot less system requirements than the windows versions.

We may be getting well below 1 GHZ CPU'S and not the very top of the range gfx card 3d support straight of the bat but this will be under Amiga OS, not the overhead that is windows, in that respect we could run anything that is out there today and Faast!. if only it can get the support.