Amiga vs PC

[B00tDisk]

Sigh.  This again.

Computers don't have souls.  You do.  Whether that's a transcendent immortal part of you that continues on after death or simply your personal drive and spark and creativity.  You get out of computers what you put in to them in terms of creativity.  There's no magic fairy dust sprinkled inside a CIA chip, there's no ancient hexagram carved on the surface of a Fat Agnus.  Amigas are like Macs and PCs - they're ABS plastic and/or steel housings containing PCBs made from toxic materials, leaking ELF into you and shortening your existence every time you get near one.  Commodore wasn't a church, Jay Miner wasn't Jesus Christ.  If C= had managed to continue on you'd be using a standard PC with a boing ball or rainbow check mark sticker on the outside, period.  You can debate whether or not Amiga OS would still be running on it, but if you don't believe me about the hardware, go ask Dave Haynie.  AAA would've been outdated had it been released after AGA and AGA was outdated when it was released.

Yes it was a neat computer.  So's an Imsai 8080.  And in spite of what others have said in this thread, old x86 systems are (or can be) fun, too.

[B00tDisk]

I think there's DOSBOX, but it doesn't run Windows 3.1 and it has its limits unlike running it in native mode.  Hey, if they can run Windows 3.1 in Windows XP and 98, they should be able to do it in 64-bit OSes.

Wrong.

[B00tDisk]

No, you misunderstood the post.  I admitted even 64-bit processors can run older 16-bit stuff but the OS doesn't allow.  Similarly, DOSBOX runs DOS stuff fine but it won't run Windows 3.x stuff.  I.e., it doesn't have the required windows files.

YES.

YES IT CAN.

[B00tDisk]

Out of curiosity,what do you consider "computing" ?
 
Ive been meaning to open some sort of thread about this, but I guess this is as good as any.

Apparently "computing" meant fucking around with your computer to make it do things.

[B00tDisk]

Saying "YES IT CAN" doesn't change reality nor refute my point.  See my previous reply (post #215).

DOSBOX doesn't run Windows 3.x stuff.   Now that I think about it, it may not even run all DOS software properly-- haven't really extensively tested it.

jesus christ man yes it does, I've run Fleet Defender and Pirates! Gold in 3.1 under DOSBox.

[B00tDisk]

No, the person who is really stupid is the one that thinks a 64-bit OS is incapable of running 32-bit applications and offers no benefit over a 32-bit OS.

You obviously know very little about how x86_64 is implemented. My system runs both 64-bit linux and 64-bit windows, both of which have ran every 32-bit application I've tested without complaint (although the only 32-bit applications I  run under linux just now are actually windows ones in WINE). The machine has 4GB of RAM and 896MB of video RAM, which just isn't possible in a 32-bit OS 4GB address space (unless the OS supports PAE). Plenty of the applications (read games) I run in Windows are 32-bit, though drivers and codecs are 64-bit.

Generally, the benefits are that 64-bit optimised code runs faster on the CPU than legacy x86 code does (there are a few rare exceptions, even in some of my own code), since 64-bit code can make use of 16 64-bit general purpose registers for integer code and at least SSE2 for floating point/vector ops.
Furthermore, 32-bit applications in the 64-bit environment can allocate more physical RAM than they could in a 32-bit one, since on 32-bit, only around 2GB was addressable in total (1GB of address space reserved for OS/hardware space, another 1GB used to map in the video memory. Again, PAE can mitigate this slightly). Now in a 64-bit OS, the 1GB address space used for hardware doesn't get in the way and if the process doesn't need direct access to the video memory, it doesn't have to be mapped into it's address space either. You might think that no 32-bit application should ever need 3GB of RAM, but then you probably haven't played Fallout 3 (after patching for large address awareness on 64-bit) with half a dozen resource hungry add-ons and HD texture packs. It certainly helped in this instance.

In short, if you have 64-bit hardware, which let's face it, every new desktop/server PC in the last 5 years (at least) has, using a 32-bit OS is pretty pointless. Even without more than 4GB total memory installed, 64-bit optimised code is usually a better fit for the hardware.

(psst, Karlos, all my 32 bit games work under Win7 x64, please don't tell amigaski that his head will explode)

[B00tDisk]

You know what's sad?  When the Amiga was top of the heap, and I was running rings around PCs with my souped up A500, all I heard from PC luddites stuck with DOS, crappy semi-graphical file managers or Windows 2.x was "You don't need this, you don't need that, why multi-task you can only do one thing at a time anyway lol".  I was as smug as a bug because I had an (at the time) world beater of a computer that was high tech.  Left the competition in the dirt.  It was really the next big thing.  C= dropped the ball, but that's a whole different issue, this was 1989 and I was on top of the heap technically speaking.

Now?

Now I see the same counterarguments being offered by the remaining Amiga users.  "You don't need this, that or the other".  Sheesh.  Sad, really.

[B00tDisk]

Windows 98SE was the LAST good OS by Microsoft.  It allowed direct port I/O and APi access just like Amiga OS.

you understand zero about OS design if that's what you think.

Compatibility is NOT achieved for Win 3.x through selecting compatibility mode.  And even for many Win98 stuff, it doesn't work.  Windows 3.x will beat Windows 98SE given the same hardware setup since you can do 32-bit stuff in Windows 3.x.  So editing an image of 30MB using 16MB machine and a more bloated OS will degrade performance.

So what?  Who uses 3.1 stuff aside from you?

Besides you've been told time and again: DOSBOX + 3.1 works.  Run it in that environment; it won't break into your house and kill you and your family, you know.