Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: ElPolloDiabl on May 28, 2009, 04:34:37 PM
-
Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5
The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.
It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...
-
Your title is a little misleading. PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame. The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed. And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
-
And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
Amen brother.
-
Of course technology has grown by leaps and bounds, far beyond the technology of the past 25 years. What I would admit is the amazement of the timeless viability Amiga still possesses today and its global following.
-
Yet there is still the sad fact that the latest PCs slow to a crawl when trying to multitask.
-
Yet there is still the sad fact that the latest PCs slow to a crawl when trying to multitask.
You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.
There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.
The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.
Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga ;)
-
@Gibbersan
Sorry, I don't agree that the latest PCs slow to a crawl. I heavily multitask with mine and it still runs fast; but then again, I've built mine to be really fast.
The great thing about Amiga is that it worked so well, straight out of the box, with such small amount of resources. At the time of the 68K Amigas, they by far blew away any PCs in terms of overall functionability. Now, PCs are way ahead. I'd love to see Amiga make a strong comeback - Widely available software/hardware, comparible prices and most of all, fun to use computers again! Just my 2 cents.
Ed
-
Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5
The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.
It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...
Yes, the computing world might be very different if the Amiga had dominated instead of MSDOS/Windows, but we will never know how it would have been different, and how much it would have been the same.
Speculating about what the differences might have been can be entertaining, but probably as useful as me wondering what my life would have been if dear old Dad was a Pirate instead of a Deputy Sheriff. :roflmao:
-
Yes, the computing world might be very different if the Amiga had dominated instead of MSDOS/Windows, but we will never know how it would have been different, and how much it would have been the same.
If that'd be the case there'd be a site called IBM.org where nutcases complaining about nowadays rigid systems, hard to upgrade and if there'd be any competion on the hardware market, technology would've been much more advanced. Don Estridge will be honoured as a god.
Plus there'd be someone who states you should NOT use any other computer than a mil. spec. AT 5170.
-
If that'd be the case there'd be a site called IBM.org where nutcases complaining about nowadays rigid systems, hard to upgrade and if there'd be any competion on the hardware market, technology would've been much more advanced. Don Estridge will be honoured as a god.
Plus there'd be someone who states you should NOT use any other computer than a mil. spec. AT 5170.
Probably. I dare say it's all happening in a parallel existence right now.
-
The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.
What the heck are you talking about?! The Amiga can stream 3 channels of 1080p data on one cable... I did not know that...
-
@ Karlos
Just going from work experience. Maybe "slow to a crawl" is a bad analogy. If I'm scanning in anywhere from a few to several hundred pages, I can't do anything else on my system as its sending its data to the SQL server and processing the images. You try and do anything, and the program crashes. Probably just written poorly by the company who does our data system. While it's working on processing, I just have to sit there and wait. It's really aggravating.
-
@ Karlos
Just going from work experience. Maybe "slow to a crawl" is a bad analogy. If I'm scanning in anywhere from a few to several hundred pages, I can't do anything else on my system as its sending its data to the SQL server and processing the images. You try and do anything, and the program crashes. Probably just written poorly by the company who does our data system. While it's working on processing, I just have to sit there and wait. It's really aggravating.
There could be any number of reasons for this. Bad application, dodgy drivers etc. However, if the machine is new, unless it's dirt cheap, it's unlikely to be down the the hardware.
-
Originally Posted by ferrellsl
And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
Originally Posted by McVenco
Amen brother.
Well as they say, who knows entirely?
Say if you convinced like Sir Richard Branson that Amiga is cool, then you would't laugh that loud. If you consider Amiga as a completely-dead-alas-i-liked-her-while-we-was-together, that's your feelings. Let mine remain mine but please don't send people to an institution just for having uncommon views or ideas, call it.
Young brats laughed ad Steve and Bill, sure, and look what happened. There's much things I can stand but I cannot overlook offencing people just because they believe in something, no matter how pointless this is...
-
@DiskDoctor
Well said, could not have said it better myself.
-
The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.
There are literally dozens of operating systems out there, many of which will run on commodity PC hardware (which is the biggest hardware platform to target), are free and often a lot more mature than AmigaOS that are equally dead in the water as there's no real niche left for them. Between Windows, MacOS and Linux/U**x the OS market is totally sewn up.
-
I think it is still pretty amazing that the Amiga of 25 years ago is still a viable machine for doing modern day tasks, it may not have the quad core processing power that allows machines to multitask the way they do but for a 7 or 14 mhz chip to do what the Amiga still does today is just awesome. The Amiga is still for me the little computer that could and still can. I think it is great that people can still believe in an alternative, the Amiga may or may not arise again but there is nothing wrong in believing in what you think is the right way. I use my Amiga as much as I can because at the end of the day I don`t need all the extra power offered by Quad Core processing, my graphics are simple, I like listening to .mods and to be brutally honest but when I word process Word is the most convoluted piece of sh*te I have ever used, I am still using Final Writer to this day as it helps me be creative. Of course I should perhaps I should be sent to the doctors for having a such a "radical view". The way I see it, a lot of the technology most people don`t really need - if software is programmed more efficiently and thought gone into design we would not need such power guzzling computers. So for me the Amiga still represents an ideal platform because it offers real world usage without the power drain.
-
Yet there is still the sad fact that the latest PCs slow to a crawl when trying to multitask.
Perhaps too many memory-intensive apps open at the same time in combination with too little memory in your system to run them all? HDD swap space starts getting used very heavily and makes you want to tear all your hair out or do something violent?
-
As mentioned, all it takes is one investor with capital and techy people to make Amiga work. If there's anything in the past 30 years of computer technology that one can learn is that nothing is for certain, nothing is written in stone and change is a constant and only thing. Amiga can be part of change if it so chooses. Even a private company can be bought. Everyone has their price.
In the late 90s certain company by name of Apple were having difficulties and were almost extinct. And certain person returned to make MacOS viable alternative again. To say that CBM saw this "end of Amiga" in early 90s is plain wrong - if thats the case then why release A4000/1200, CD32/A4000T and why work on Pandora? CBM could have abandoned Amiga/8bit line and concentrated solely on their PC business (which I think was profitable for them - don't make me takeout the financial statements ;-)). And what is MacOS or Linux if not a niche market? (majority of users are still Windows and although thats changing, this is still predominant OS at work / home environment. Try to sell it to them instead of Windows XP hehe.)
And Amiga isn't just the family of 680x0 processors. It's reemerging in OS4.1/4.0, MorphOS, AROS, Minimig, perhaps as NatAmi - surely still very much behind (in quantity of software), but not standing still.
Anyway, I'm just stating my opinion and everyone is entitled to one, I'm not try to convince you/anyone or win an argument over anything (especially over the net ).
-
The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.
If you mean that Amiga is obsolete, I disagree. While not state-of-the-art by any means, even the classic Amiga is still useful in many areas (beyond just vintage gaming). What constitutes a "serious platform" anyway?
-
You can make a pig fly given enough power..
And even if the hardware is good enough. The software may not be.
As for Amiga revival. The hw/sw is dead-on-arrival in the current market.
The only viable niche is a netbook that makes the competition look like lead
weights. Esp if memory protection and premptive multitasking is on the table.
The core of the Amiga concept seems to be to make the most of hardware and
software for a price that many people can afford. Keep in mind what
Jack Tramiel said: "Computers for the masses, not the classes"
There were some pretty impressive computer way before Amiga.. if your house
were made of solid gold :-)
So again max the hardware and software within a price mark that many can
afford. This will create a lot of developers. Which will attract more people..
Many Amigans also went with x86 + unix when Commodore did go p0ff.
So is there any improvement that would be groundbreaking for current breed of PCs ..?, that the big drone companies will miss even if you put in their face? ;)
Anyone seen this?:
http://alpha-400-mips-elonex-razorbook-coby.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
In essence Intel, Microsoft, HP, etc., are kept alive as long as they could the old truism, "The computer you need is always US$ 5000." appearently Intel made Asus drop any cheap and small Intel Atom based computers.
-
Your title is a little misleading. PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame. The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed. And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
Anything can happen in the future. I don't see how you can leave the option out that Amiga can become a marketable computer. Didn't Apple Mac rise from the dead basically. I am sure if someone invented a souped up processor running at 1 Terahertz (better than Intel's) and used custom chips backward compatible to Amiga OCS/ECS/AGA, it would take over the market eventually.
PCs haven't had split-screens like Amigas with different resolutions and color depths. VGA standard only supported split-screens with same resolution and color depth. Now, the video cards don't have any standard so any split-screens would have to be accessed via an API and software would be emulating the function if it doesn't exist on your video card.
-
You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.
There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.
The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.
Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga ;)
I doubt you have hundreds of processes running your PC. Many things you see when you pop up the processes dialog box are just terminate and stay resident (TSR) type drivers and applications. And even if you did have hundreds of processes running, your statement "The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening" is false. It violates the law of conservation (law of physics). I doubt even more that you can have EUAE running on top with PCI bus busy as it is. Why only look at the processor speed-- there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds. Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things? Why not time things to cycle accuracy while your running your PCI transfers? I can't even time a 500Khz event on the latest PC without synchronization going off if I have a WIFI card plugged in (not even surfing the web). Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered.
You are basically stating PCs have faster processor speeds and faster buses. But that was true even when Amiga 4000 was being marketed and people were still buying it (for other reasons). So you have said nothing new.
-
You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.
There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.
The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.
Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga ;)
No he's not joking. So you can run dozens of processes and some large apps: well dammit you have 1000x the RAM that works at lightening speeds, you have 4 or more CPU's with HUGE caches each running at clock speed that are 1000x faster, you have lightening fast data and display busses So why does my start menu stutter to open when a simple web page is loading, why don't application menus open instantaneously but there is a short pause because some irrelevant background task is getting priority over a users command to open the menu? And i can go and on: Windows and PC's do not have user responsiveness as a high priority. As a test I switched on my A1200 with 40 mhz 68060 ( yes it only runs at 40 mhz not 50) with 32 meg ram and executive: 5 sec boot up, ran Dpaint, Opus, Aweb Miami YAM, Image FX and Cinema 4d, final writer, magic menu, tools menu, oxypatcher, fblit, ftext and a few other things in the background, and it was far far more responsive to user commands ie opening a menu, opening new apps, closing apps, painting in dapint, typing in final writer, rotating a scene in Cinema 4d (whilst rendering in the background) than Vista. Why?
Having said thatWindows 7 RC is actually significantly more responsive than Vista, at least as fast as XP ( which itself is an 8 year old OS) running on modern hardware, so clearly the problem is the OS not the hardware.
-
rofl,:madashell: with all these flames there will be a Phoenix appearing in no time.
-
@AmigaDave
I venture to think that since business seems to be the driving force behind just about all things comuter. That almighty Dollar always telling them what we need next seems to me that Amiga would have fallen in to the same trap and ended up selling out just the same. Imagine this if Bill would have lost out a company named Microsoft would have still existed and with the same investment capitol. They would have just gone to visit the people over at commodor insted and fwalaw. Windows on an Amiga. hahah
:D
-
Your title is a little misleading. PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame. The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed. And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
Hi,
I am attempting to build a new Amiga type computer right now. It has a halograpic display that can display a walk around image as large as you have the room. It also has traveling 3D sound so if you are watching a band, and the band players are moving around your room with the halographic display the sound of the guitar moves with the guitar player, also as you walk around the room the sound will also be 3 dimensional along with the images. You have to watch when your playing games, because you can hit the pain switch, so if your main player gets hit you feel the pain where he got hit. Right now I am working on the smell sense so if you are watching a cooking show you can smell the food cooking, I hope to be bringing this out next week or soon as I can clear up my court case with Amiga Inc. on the trademark of the name.
smerf
and if you believe this, I got some swamp land up in Canada that I can sell ya
-
You aren't going to drive a daisy chain of half a dozen hi-res monitors with 2 MB of video ram...
-
...
And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.
Hmmmmmm - if someone had told me in early 1989 that about half a year later the wall would fall without a single drop of blood being spilled I'd have given him the very same advice.
You know - all my life I was hoping that the wall would fall one day - but noone (including me) really believed it...
(Just to say: Never say never!)
-
The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.
Hmmmm - how do you define "a serious platform"?
Unix workstations?
Wintel PCs?
Playstations or Wiis?
My POV in this regard is that Unix workstations and Wintel PCs (basically) are professional systems that companies need to get their work done. That's what I'd call "a serious platform".
But since more and more people bought Wintel PCs for their homes (fully understandable, as they needed compatible systems where they could continue to work on their job-related projects at home), they laid the foundation stone for todays quasi monopoly position of the WIntel platform by helping to pay the development costs of that platform that initially aimed at companies.
Playstations and Wiis exist to attract all the gaming kids to pull the money out of their pockets - I see them as "gaming platforms".
For me personally the Amiga platform represents the long forgotten "home computer".
I can't estimate if there is a chance today to "revive" the concept of "home computers".
It would require a powerful, cheap hardware (in the C64/Atari/Amiga-tradition) and a smart OS like AmigaOS 4.x - and most importantly it would have to provide full compatibility to the predominant office apps from the professional camp - be it that it just supports their formats, or that it offers a way to run that professional soft.
On the other hand - who wants to enhance a "home computing" platform today in that way that it's capable to do all the office stuff PLUS what people like to do at home - who has the money for it, given that the "professional systems" of today already underprice the "home computers" from back in the eighties by far and have long surpassed even the capabilities of the most promising of those "home computer" platforms - the Amiga?
Yes - the AmigaOS is by far better understandable and more clearly arranged than Windows from a users POV - but does this weigh out the enormous effort it would require to "revive" the concept of "home computers"?
I don't know...
-
Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5
The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.
It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...
Dude, even an Atari can do split screen, and all of that has been available to PCs since forever. Even the ET4k chipset supported hardware scrolling, the Mach 64 had a sophisticated blitter (think the ET4k had one too, albeit not as capable), and this was like - what - 15-20 years ago.
Take a look at modern PC architecture. Separate busses, accellerated graphics subsystems, bus master controllers, nifty DMA solutions. It's not like all sane hardware concepts died with the Amiga.
Having said that, of course the Amiga is a wonderful machine and is still useful to date. It should however be viewed in it's rightful context.
-
I doubt you have hundreds of processes running your PC.
No, you are quite right, there were only four at any given instant in time, one for each core*. However, a quick ps aux wwwf | less showed over 150 launched processes at the time I wrote that post.
*not including the 24576 GPU threads that were also active:
(http://extropia.co.uk/nbody2.png)
-
Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered.
Right. Do you even understand the difference between a PC and PC running Windows?
-
What is a BIP?
-
karlos: that would never happen though, as it would require them to open their eyes, remove the fingers from their ears and stop humming.
-
What is a BIP?
In the context of that display, "Billions of Interactions per Second", an "interaction" being the calculation of the change in velocity of a particle as a result of the gravitational force exerted on it and another particle.
The simulation is an all pairs n-body simulation. Each particle is simulated by a thread, all threads running concurrently (24576 being the maximum number of threads that can run on my GPU before it has to start switching between them).
-
So, it's really a GIP...
-
So, it's really a GIP...
Well, not really. I am reworking said example code into a charged particle simulation where each particle has a charge and mass. The force calculation then will be the Coulomb attraction between them. Unlike gravity, this force can be repulsive.
Also, the calculation is a bit more complex as I need one which has a maximum force potential at a distance equal to the sum of the radii of a pair of particles that becomes strongly repulsive at any distance less than that, regardless of the force potential (repulsive or attractive) at a distance greater than that.
I'm interested to see if such simulated charged particles of a given sets of mass, size and charge auto arrange in the way that ionic lattices do.
-
The presence of GFLOP/s argues that BIP should be GIP (for consistency).
Is this one of your own coding projects?
-
The presence of GFLOP/s argues that BIP should be GIP (for consistency).
Is this one of your own coding projects?
The example image isn't, it's a code example provided with the CUDA devkit. The simulation I just described is, however. I'm using the n-body gravity simulation as a starting point.
-
Cool.
-
Cool.
GPU Gems article here (http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cse.iitb.ac.in%2F~prekshu%2Fmyddp%2FDDP%2Fpapers%2FGPUGems3FastN-BodySimulationwithCUDA.pdf&ei=oSEgSuyJFIKRjAfOt-jOBg&usg=AFQjCNHEXM3cOTv6ORuqn1ZHqPAimxrrsg&sig2=vEKWO8pGPEDug1U5MRs11w) (pdf)
-
GPU Gems article here (http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cse.iitb.ac.in%2F~prekshu%2Fmyddp%2FDDP%2Fpapers%2FGPUGems3FastN-BodySimulationwithCUDA.pdf&ei=oSEgSuyJFIKRjAfOt-jOBg&usg=AFQjCNHEXM3cOTv6ORuqn1ZHqPAimxrrsg&sig2=vEKWO8pGPEDug1U5MRs11w) (pdf)
Well, as a user of AROS, Windows XP/Vista, OSX, I have to wonder sometimes what Windows and OSX are doing sometimes.
You guys can laugh at that guy and make jokes all you want, but I think most everybody has the same experience on Windows/MacOS sometimes. The experience where by you don't really have any of 'your' apps open, other than standard stuff running in the background, and you go to launch an app and while it's loading 'for whatever reason' the computer slows down. Or you are just browsing the web and you go to launch another app and in Windows you go to the Start button, but it won't click, screens "freeze" i.e. where the shape of the windows is there, but the image is a partial of the last window that was behind/infront of it.
I use Maya on OSX and while Maya is a fairly large program I often have to wait a "while" for firefox to start when I'm not even doing anything in Maya.
There's no argument, I mean I've been around computers a few days. Everyone experiences, certainly in Windows case, the randomness of the computer slowing/freezing for a few seconds when you are seemingly doing nothing.
It obviously not that hardware. I kind doubt it just sort of bottle necks it self for 10 seconds every now and then. ;-)
But I've never seen any explanation for it.
Sort of off topic, it's funny how we have delay built into things and we don't even realize it. For example I got a new stereo for my car a month or so ago. A Sony, nothing fancy, just a CD unit, plays MP3 discs, etc. The tuner has 6 buttons for Radio presets, pretty standard. But what is strange is when you hit the button, the next station plays instantly. No 1/2 second silence then the next station. It's just, push the button and there the next channel. Kind of interesting, I never really thought about it. Car stereo in our other car, home receiver, etc, all have a slight delay.
-
In the context of that display, "Billions of Interactions per Second"
It means buttocks in Dutch, though....
-
It means buttocks in Dutch, though....
That's good to know :)
-
Right. Do you even understand the difference between a PC and PC running Windows?
Linux isn't as real-time as AmigaOS, though...
But LynxOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LynxOS) actually is.
I sure do want to try that baby B-)
-
That's good to know :)
You're never too old to learn :D
-
It obviously not that hardware. I kind doubt it just sort of bottle necks it self for 10 seconds every now and then. ;-)
The only time I've had total freezes on this machine is when I've done something really stupid, like attempting to launch 1,000,000 GPU threads simultaneously, just to see what happens. It completely maxed out the hardware.
X has locked up twice, both times due to a conflict between CUDA and Compiz. Easy to fix, ssh into the box and kill the X server.
The point is, the assertion in this thread that the "PC", as a platform is playing catch up to the amiga is only true in the vivid imagination of a few Amiga fans that can't comprehend the difference between the PC and the OS that runs on it.
I have an A1, with an 800MHz G4, AGP Radeon 7000 gfx etc. It totally outclasses my classic A1200T in every way imaginable (except that the A1200 currently has more RAM installed ;)). However, aside from the CPU, it's made entirely out of standard "PC" hardware. And bloody old PC hardware at that.
My "PC", is about 1 year old and was fairly bleeding edge when I built it. In terms of hardware, it outclasses my A1 by an equally obscene amount. It's a hardware box. Windows doesn't come into it, since I run a 64-bit native linux as my main OS anyway.
However, Vista is installed on the machine and, as much as you'll all want to disagree, it flies like sh!t of a shovel. Which is just as well, since I only have it for gaming. You simply cannot play Crysis or Fallout 3 at 1680x1050 with all details turned up to maximum, having it run liquid smooth for several hours of solid gaming and then conclude "its slow and stops responding every now and then".
-
Linux isn't as real-time as AmigaOS, though...
But LynxOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LynxOS) actually is.
I sure do want to try that baby B-)
Neither Linux or AmigaOS are realtime OS's and damn well you know it. Claiming one is more "realtime" than another is a bit misleading. A realtime kernel guarantees that an event requiring service will receive it within a specified time limit. No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee.
Clock for clock, interprocess communication under AmigaOS is faster than Linux, but considering that procersses run in completely separate memory spaces under linux, a zero copy messaging system isn't really feasible (shared memory segments aside), nor desirable from a memory protection perspective.
You can easily demonstrate where the argument falls over. Simply run a busy process on the AmigaOS at normal priority and see how responsive it isn't. Unless you install a better task scheduler (eg Executive), everything starts to crawl. You can even lock yourself out entirely if your busy process runs higher than priorirty 19 (input.device).
Under linux, I've been able to use machines where the load average was over 100.
-
Hi,
@Karlos
I don't get it.
All I know is real time, and in real time my Amiga 4000 seems to get the job done faster than a Linux machine or a Windows machine. By the time they get done booting up, my Amiga has usually completed the job and is ready for turning off. As for running processes, the Amiga usually starts to slow down after about several large processes. Still think it is a pretty good machine if you don't mind obsolete games with poor graphics. Come to think of it don't you find Amiga games run on a A4000 harder to play than a new PC with it's modern day graphics and while we are on this subject why don't Electronic Farts, Sierra or any other game company produce games for Linux. Why do they only produce for Micro Soft?
Why aren't they bringing out games for the Amiga?
By the way I like Linux to, I use Ubuntu for all my important stuff, I trust it more than crash and burn windows including XP.
smerf
-
...why don't Electronic Farts, Sierra or any other game company produce games for Linux. Why do they only produce for Micro Soft?
Why aren't they bringing out games for the Amiga?
'cos the amount of remaining Amiga owners who would pay for new games can be counted in single digits - there's no money in it!
And there are some games around for Linux, and at least a few games companies take some steps to get their games running under Wine.
- Ali
-
Hi,
@Karlos
I don't get it.
All I know is real time, and in real time my Amiga 4000 seems to get the job done faster than a Linux machine or a Windows machine.
That all depends on what the job is. My A1, for example would be dozens of times slower than my current linux box for the stuff I'm experimenting with at the moment and my classic machine many times slower again. My 040 manages say, what, 3.5 MFLOPS peak? Assuming I could write the necessary code in assembler to maintain that throughput (totally overlooking the complete lack of memory speed) that's about 101,000 times slower than my current PC manages. In reality it would be even slower given how slow the fsqrt instruction is (ie you'd never get the 3.5MFLOPS for these calculations).
By the time they get done booting up, my Amiga has usually completed the job and is ready for turning off. As for running processes, the Amiga usually starts to slow down after about several large processes. Still think it is a pretty good machine if you don't mind obsolete games with poor graphics.
Don't get me wrong, I love using my old miggies, but when it comes to work, it's all horses for courses.
Why aren't they bringing out games for the Amiga?
Not enough of a market, sadly.
By the way I like Linux to, I use Ubuntu for all my important stuff, I trust it more than crash and burn windows including XP.
smerf
Can't argue with that. I use ubuntu on my home PC, though work requires that I use fedora.
-
No, you are quite right, there were only four at any given instant in time, one for each core*. However, a quick ps aux wwwf | less showed over 150 launched processes at the time I wrote that post.
*not including the 24576 GPU threads that were also active:
(http://extropia.co.uk/nbody2.png)
Thanks for clarifying. You are just using some souped up graphics card. Nothing to do with PC running 100s of processes. And you forgot to answer the rest of the message.
And you still violate the law of conservation even with quad core since there's still some overhead involved.
-
Right. Do you even understand the difference between a PC and PC running Windows?
You don't understand what a PC is. PC cannot be some souped up hardware that only a few people are running. Does it run on my PC? No. So if I include all hardware add-ons that I have made to my Amiga, it still should be comparable to any arbitrary PC right? Let's be more consistent. If you PC is not backward compatible with most of old software, it's NOT a PC. It's just a NEW computer.
-
karlos: that would never happen though, as it would require them to open their eyes, remove the fingers from their ears and stop humming.
Here's an example of a blind side-kick. Just following someone blindly does not help you-- only misleads people.
-
Well, not really. I am reworking said example code into a charged particle simulation where each particle has a charge and mass. The force calculation then will be the Coulomb attraction between them. Unlike gravity, this force can be repulsive.
Also, the calculation is a bit more complex as I need one which has a maximum force potential at a distance equal to the sum of the radii of a pair of particles that becomes strongly repulsive at any distance less than that, regardless of the force potential (repulsive or attractive) at a distance greater than that.
I'm interested to see if such simulated charged particles of a given sets of mass, size and charge auto arrange in the way that ionic lattices do.
Why not try it out on a REAL PC with standard hardware rather than specialized graphics cards.
-
Well, as a user of AROS, Windows XP/Vista, OSX, I have to wonder sometimes what Windows and OSX are doing sometimes.
You guys can laugh at that guy and make jokes all you want, but I think most everybody has the same experience on Windows/MacOS sometimes. The experience where by you don't really have any of 'your' apps open, other than standard stuff running in the background, and you go to launch an app and while it's loading 'for whatever reason' the computer slows down. Or you are just browsing the web and you go to launch another app and in Windows you go to the Start button, but it won't click, screens "freeze" i.e. where the shape of the windows is there, but the image is a partial of the last window that was behind/infront of it.
I use Maya on OSX and while Maya is a fairly large program I often have to wait a "while" for firefox to start when I'm not even doing anything in Maya.
There's no argument, I mean I've been around computers a few days. Everyone experiences, certainly in Windows case, the randomness of the computer slowing/freezing for a few seconds when you are seemingly doing nothing.
It obviously not that hardware. I kind doubt it just sort of bottle necks it self for 10 seconds every now and then. ;-)
They are only laughing at themselves once they realize they didn't even understand the point nor reply to the entire message. It's the hardware and the OS-- both. The hardware has its limitations maintaining backward compatibility so slow-downs occur. The OS obviously has it's limitations as far as real-time events go.
-
The only time I've had total freezes on this machine is when I've done something really stupid, like attempting to launch 1,000,000 GPU threads simultaneously, just to see what happens. It completely maxed out the hardware.
X has locked up twice, both times due to a conflict between CUDA and Compiz. Easy to fix, ssh into the box and kill the X server.
The point is, the assertion in this thread that the "PC", as a platform is playing catch up to the amiga is only true in the vivid imagination of a few Amiga fans that can't comprehend the difference between the PC and the OS that runs on it.
I have an A1, with an 800MHz G4, AGP Radeon 7000 gfx etc. It totally outclasses my classic A1200T in every way imaginable (except that the A1200 currently has more RAM installed ;)). However, aside from the CPU, it's made entirely out of standard "PC" hardware. And bloody old PC hardware at that.
My "PC", is about 1 year old and was fairly bleeding edge when I built it. In terms of hardware, it outclasses my A1 by an equally obscene amount. It's a hardware box. Windows doesn't come into it, since I run a 64-bit native linux as my main OS anyway.
However, Vista is installed on the machine and, as much as you'll all want to disagree, it flies like sh!t of a shovel. Which is just as well, since I only have it for gaming. You simply cannot play Crysis or Fallout 3 at 1680x1050 with all details turned up to maximum, having it run liquid smooth for several hours of solid gaming and then conclude "its slow and stops responding every now and then".
Talk about Chewbacca defense. I gave you a much simpler example-- 1Khz reading of joystick port (that works on all PCs). You are replying with your own example unrelated to what was asked. All I have to do is show one example, where Amiga wins out and your claims above are FALSE and the topic of this thread is valid-- PC still playing catchup. So please answer the post else don't pretend that you did.
-
Neither Linux or AmigaOS are realtime OS's and damn well you know it. Claiming one is more "realtime" than another is a bit misleading. A realtime kernel guarantees that an event requiring service will receive it within a specified time limit. No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee.
...
Under linux, I've been able to use machines where the load average was over 100.
Depends on the task. If your real-time task only involves modifying some registers, you can use the Copper and it's guaranteed with accuracy of 558ns (no +/- latency bullcrap).
And we can talk Amiga vs. PC w/o dealing with OSes although with PCs you'll have a hard time finding modern PCs that even maintain compatibility at hardware level.
-
You're right. Joystick polling is a much better test of computational power than a particle physics simulation.
-
You're right. Joystick polling is a much better test of computational power than a particle physics simulation.
First read everything written before you blurt out something against someone. Joystick reading at 1Khz is also a real-time event. Amigas were built with better gaming interface than PCs so that's a strength of the Amiga. PCs already had more computational power even while Amiga was being marketed. The claim that PCs have already surpassed Amiga in every aspect or by obscene amount is FALSE and I only need to state one example. There are other examples, but people are having a hard time grasping that even because they are blinded by the aura of modern PCs and can't see anything beyond Gigahertz processor speed.
His physics simulation is NO example of general PC power either. It's specific to his set-up. The examples I gave work on ALL amigas. I can read joystick at 15Khz easily on any Amiga. I wanted to see what the answer was for 1Khz. I can do copper list real-time events on ALL amigas. Perhaps, you should buy some souped up PCI graphics video card and put it in an Amiga and do the physics simulation and add in a few more hardware add-ons while you are at it and then do the comparison.
-
Why not try it out on a REAL PC with standard hardware rather than specialized graphics cards.
First of all, it is a "real PC". The graphics card is no more out of place in this machine than any of the custom chips in my "real Amigas". This simulation runs on any PC that has a G80 or above based graphics card.
Secondly, there's nothing "specialised" whatsoever about the card. All current generation graphics cards tend to have fully programmable parallel arithmetic units.
Thirdly, I have run the same simulation entirely on the CPU. A naive single threaded implementation in the same "real PC" is about 250x slower than the GPU version on this machine. I can boost it significantly by optimizing it for four core execution and even further by using specific SSE3 vector operations. However, that naive version would still be 400x faster than my humble 040 could manage in a perfect world where memory bandwidth was infinite and all operations took one cycle. In the actual real world, it couldn't run it at all, there's not enough memory available to even hold the state information for this simulation.
Criticising the use of the GPU is also shooting your own argument for the Amiga in the foot. So far, you've extolled the virtue of using the custom chips for "realtime" performance, such as polling the joyport. If our experiment were simply filling flatshaded polygons on a 68000 amiga, would you be advocating the use of the CPU and not some "specialised graphics processor" ? Of course not.
Incidentally, do you really think a 2.6GHz CPU with 12MB of cache, even running the least optimized code in existence, isn't capable of polling a piece of hardware at 1kHz without missing a single iteration?
-
Depends on the task. If your real-time task only involves modifying some registers, you can use the Copper and it's guaranteed with accuracy of 558ns (no +/- latency bullcrap).
Also, the argument was about "real-time OS", not what constitutes a real-time task in general. AmigaOS and Linux are in no way, shape or form "real-time" OS. You should probably look up the definition of what constitutes a real-time OS if you think differently.
A real-time OS guarantees that an event (an interrupt ot whatever) shall be dealt within a specified minimum time limit. A failure to do so is considered a complete failure of the OS.
No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee. You'll only see it in embedded hardware and mission critical systems.
-
All I have to do is show one example, where Amiga wins out and your claims above are FALSE and the topic of this thread is valid-- PC still playing catchup.
Then please do. I'm genuinely intrigued as to what this one example could be. And once you deliver it, I suppose you could look at it the other way around. I would suggest the amiga has been playing catchup to the PC for some time now. Or at least it would be, if it was even in the race still. Which it isn't and it hasn't been since the last hardware amiga rolled off the production line.
There's no greater demonstration of how far behind the amiga is in hardware terms than a quick glance at the hardware upgrades that are available for it. Most of the heavily expanded classic amigas out there are using some form of (now totally obsolete) commodity PC hardware to upgrade their native kit. I have two A1200 towers, one has a BVision, the other has a voodoo 3000. Both have nice displays that are significantly better than AGA could manage for productivity work, yet both are using utterly ancient PC hardware to deliver them. Apart from retrogaming and demos, I can't use AGA at all. Which is fine, because I don't ask anything more from it.
You are probably sitting there, p!ssed at me, thinking I'm some PC fanboy and that I hate the Amiga etc. The fact is, you couldn't be more wrong. I still own two towered 1200's, both pretty heavily expanded, two desktop 1200s, modestly expanded, a presently dead (but hoping to revive) A600 and a "next generation" Amiga, namely the A1XE. I get plenty of enjoyment out of them but I had to accept reality. Aside from some of the really cool FPGA stuff, the classic line is never coming back. The "next gen" line is interesting but I don't think there's any niche it can fulfil, outside of entertaining we few enthusiasts. And at the end of the day, that's what the Amiga is today. An enthusiasts platform. It's yestyear's classic car; beautifully designed and engineered, a joy to see still out on the road, but easily outclassed at a raw technical level by modern machines.
-
I think the two opposing camps are arguing about 2 separate things: one side is arguing about how many calculations per second a PC can do, about how fast its display is and how much higher res it has, or how much more bandwith and speed the newer busses have. The other side is arguing about what really matters: the user experience. This includes boot up time and the system putting you in control to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Personally I expected so much more than I'm getting from my current PC hardware running Vista. The hardware specs of even a 5 year old PC are insane, the average Joe's PC is more powerful than computers used in physics labs only a few years ago, yet it takes time to open a start menu, it takes time to draw the contents of a window, i have to wait for no apparant reason to pull down a menu even though an app has loaded.
When I went from my A500 with 3 meg ram to my A1200 40 mhz 68030 with 16 meg ram i thought WOW, now this progress!! And then I got an A4000 with 68060 and CV64 and I thought I was in Cray supecomputer territory. Just imagine i thought if I owned one of the piping hot 200 mhz pentiums...purely judging on mhz and necer used a PC before. What a joke things have turned out to be: my 3000 mhz C2duo runs general operating system tasks no faster than that 200 mhz pentium running Win95, and yet we still communicate with the hardware in the same way: by a mouse menu and icons. And yes Xp and vista are more complex beasts than Win 95, but this is NO EXCUSE because the hardware more than makes-up for the increased complexity of the OS. Sure we can crunch numbers faster, but the user experience is just as stop-start as it ever was.
My 13 year old son switches on his A1200 with a 68060, it boots in under 5 seconds, dpaint loads in 4 seconds and he's spray painting in real time in under 20 seconds from switching on. He asks me "Why don't they make computers like this anymore". He "gets" Amiga. And those of you who are happy with your PC, quite simply, don't.
-
Then please do. I'm genuinely intrigued as to what this one example could be.
I'll give you THREE:
1. Boot up time
2. Shut down time
3. Application launch time (and don't give me the spiel about how much bigger modern apps are because they do so much more so ofcourse they' take longer to load, thats all negated by the fact that you're running those apps on hardware specs that are many many factors faster clock speed and higher capacity ram and bussess, than the hardware used to launch Amiga apps.)
-
I'll give you THREE:
1. Boot up time
2. Shut down time
3. Application launch time (and don't give me the spiel about how much bigger modern apps are because they do so much more so ofcourse they' take longer to load, thats all negated by the fact that you're running those apps on hardware specs that are many many factors faster clock speed and higher capacity ram and bussess, than the hardware used to launch Amiga apps.)
In what sense is (1) and (2) remotely relevant unless you spend all your time rebooting? Bootup times on most machines are limited by having to wait for things. Network connections, hardware initialisation etc. All systems wait at the same speed. My current PC boots into linux in about 25 seconds, during which time it starts several server processes. It's true that my A1 can A1200 can boot faster from a warm reset, but then, I never have to reboot the linux box unless I consciously turn it off or intend to upgrade the kernel. My A1200 waits for 10 seconds just to see if anything is attached to the BPPC SCSI. It never boots in less than 20 seconds, even warm. There are additional delays whilst AmiTCP fires up and talks to the router.
3) Complete and utter rubbish, I am afraid. I can launch applications that take up more memory on this PC than I have fitted in all my amigas put together and they open faster than most applications on my actual amiga. For example, Firefox 3 is reportedly using 350MB of memory at the moment. It took about 2 seconds to start.
What's more, like 1 and 2, it's a contrived measure of user experience. I don't know about you but I tend to start applications once and then carry on using them for as long as needed. I don't sit there opening and closing them repeatedly and marvelling at the speed.
My ZXSpectrum boots from cold in about 1 second. It's obviously the best of the lot, by your reckoning.
-
Application (game) launch times generally weren't very good on the ZX series though... (cassette tapes).
-
Application (game) launch times generally weren't very good on the ZX series though... (cassette tapes).
I had the expansion interface that had the rom cartridge slot. They launched pretty damn quick.
To this day I have no idea what happened to that expansion.
-
In what sense is (1) and (2) remotely relevant unless you spend all your time rebooting? Bootup times on most machines are limited by having to wait for things. Network connections, hardware initialisation etc. All systems wait at the same speed. My current PC boots into linux in about 25 seconds, during which time it starts several server processes. It's true that my A1 can A1200 can boot faster from a warm reset, but then, I never have to reboot the linux box unless I consciously turn it off or intend to upgrade the kernel. My A1200 waits for 10 seconds just to see if anything is attached to the BPPC SCSI. It never boots in less than 20 seconds, even warm. There are additional delays whilst AmiTCP fires up and talks to the router.
3) Complete and utter rubbish, I am afraid. I can launch applications that take up more memory on this PC than I have fitted in all my amigas put together and they open faster than most applications on my actual amiga. For example, Firefox 3 is reportedly using 350MB of memory at the moment. It took about 2 seconds to start.
What's more, like 1 and 2, it's a contrived measure of user experience. I don't know about you but I tend to start applications once and then carry on using them for as long as needed. I don't sit there opening and closing them repeatedly and marvelling at the speed.
My ZXSpectrum boots from cold in about 1 second. It's obviously the best of the lot, by your reckoning.
well you must be the only person on the planet that sees no value in fast booting and shut down. Go to any Win 7 forum and you'll see boot up and shut down time is a MAJOR concern of many many PC users, so much so that MS has gone out of its way to reduce both of these in Win 7, making sure that people know about this as well. Unlike you, most people do turn their computers on and off numerous times in a day, maybe to surf a bit, send an email, do some banking, and then live the rest of their lives, only to do boot up a few hours later to do the same, or something completely different.
Regarding shut down, I don't like to remeber the times I've had to leave the house quickly but have to wait for the PC to shut down, or I leave after shut down, and coming home to find some stupid process has stopped the shut down and the PC's been on for 8 hours. Never happened with Amiga..
Application start up time is a real measure of the user experience. I get on the net on my A1200 68060 far more quickly than my PC. I have the google home page up faster on ibrowse than i do with Firefox; from the time I launch both browsers Its a joke that ancient hardware can do this. Try loading Word 2003 on a PC from 2003 see how fast it loads..and tell me if you enjoy your experience with loading Fireox3 on that as well.
BTW you only needed ONE, you've got three..
-
well you must be the only person on the planet that sees no value in fast booting and shut down
Wow, really? Sh!tfire, I must be a total freak if I think waiting 20 odd seconds either way is fast enough for something I do at most once a day. My work machine takes a whopping minute to start on a slightly less powerful PC. However, it's only been rebooted about 6 times in 3 years, 3 of those times were due to office moves.
I get on the net on my A1200 68060 far more quickly than my PC. I have the google home page up faster on ibrowse than i do with Firefox
No way! Rock on. Guess what? I don't actually have to connect. I just start a browser (this is also true on my A1200 and A1, both of which are connected to the same router). I just opened firefox and it was at my homepage instantly. I really can't shave any time off.
I think maybe lynx is slightly faster.
BTW you only needed ONE, you've got three..
Three what? Totally limp wristed non-arguments I've heard dozens of times that have never gotten any more meaningful no matter how many times repeated? If you ask any sane person if they have to choose between slightly faster boot times or the actual need to reboot in the first place, I wonder which they'd choose?
-
Wow, really? Sh!tfire, I must be a total freak if I think waiting 20 odd seconds either way is fast enough for something I do at most once a day. My work machine takes a whopping minute to start on a slightly less powerful PC. However, it's only been rebooted about 6 times in 3 years, 3 of those times were due to office moves.
i can assure you its not 20 seconds, its no less than 2 minutes, often 2 and half. Well you ARE a freak if you boot up once per year, excluding office moves. Seriously, thats not representative of the average PC users experience, not even in the same universe..
No way! Rock on. Guess what? I don't actually have to connect. I just start a browser (this is also true on my A1200 and A1, both of which are connected to the same router). I just opened firefox and it was at my homepage instantly. I really can't shave any time off.
I think maybe lynx is slightly faster.
BS. it takes time to start Firefox, and that time is longer than Ibrowse. you're not at you home page "instantly"
Three what? Totally limp wristed non-arguments I've heard dozens of times that have never gotten any more meaningful no matter how many times repeated? If you ask any sane person if they have to choose between slightly faster boot times or the actual need to reboot in the first place, I wonder which they'd choose?
You only wanted ONE thing that the PC is playing catch-up at, I gave you boot-up time shutdown time and application load times. You only hear what you want to hear and dismiss what doesn't sit well with your argument.
-
i can assure you its not 20 seconds, its no less than 2 minutes, often 2 and half. Well you ARE a freak if you boot up once per year, excluding office moves.
Assure me? It's my system. Would you like me to time it for you? It isn't as if I don't have any better use for a computer than rebooting it.
-
BS. it takes time to start Firefox, and that time is longer than Ibrowse. you're not at you home page "instantly".
Yes, I am a dirty liar:
karlos@Megaburken-II:~/Desktop$ time firefox
real 0m0.138s
user 0m0.032s
sys 0m0.012s
That's very nearly 0.14 seconds OMGZ!
-
@stefcep
I understand your need to feel like the 1985 Amiga is still as capable as a modern day PC or Mac. I really do. Everyone feels the need to justify why they're still running what they do, especially in light of overwhelming evidence to support the contrary.
Using an Amiga today is a hobby for everyone, and I mean 99.999% of everyone on the planet. Aside from the strange car wash or local public television station, there are literally no more legitimate uses for an Amiga in a professional setting.
Take away professional settings, and you're left with personal use, which -- when you consider there are better and faster alternatives out there -- means "a hobby".
There's nothing wrong with that.
For the record, I loathe Windows to my very core and even moreso when I have to use it at work.
That being said, there simply isn't any single way on the planet that you can compare a 2 GIGAhertz machine to a 7 (or even 14) MEGAhertz computer and have the latter come out ahead in ANY category on the planet. Sorry. You just can't do it.
I often laugh when some people trot out reboot times and "I don't have to shut my machine down".
What you, and every other stalwart defender of the faith always forget is that yes, Windows and Macs take longer to boot, but when they boot, they're loading up easily 100 times more active features than the antiquated Amiga.
If you want a fair test on boot times, take your 14mhz machine, load it down with network stacks, font handling stacks, printer handlers, and everything else that a stock Windows box does by default. Have it then automatically connect to everything from your printer to the network to.. well, everything that Windows does automatically, then time it from the moment you hit the power button until the time the hard drive quits gronking.
You *will* find that your precious little Amiga will take -- at a minimum -- more time to boot than even a mid-level Windows box. That is, *if* you could get the Amiga to even load 1/10th the features that Windows has, and you can't do it because frankly, the features Windows has by base install don't even exist for the Amiga.
I don't say this to tear you down. I really don't. Like I said, I'm a Mac guy and I hate Windows as much as you do, but... You can't sit here defending the Amiga as being better because it boots faster and come out sounding the least bit credible. It just makes you sound like a fanboy, which I'm sure is not your intent.
Also for the record, prior to the demise of my last Windows box, which I worked on 10 hours a day, 6 days a week professionally for an Internet Registrar doing everything from programming to tech support. During that time, my average "up time" (between reboots) was well over 6 months between reboots for a matter of 8 YEARS.
Most of those reboots caused by extended power outages which drained the UPS system I have in place.
Live well, Learn much, Love often,
Wayne
-
i can assure you its not 20 seconds, its no less than 2 minutes, often 2 and half.
That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...
... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.
Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.
Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.
-
Neither Linux or AmigaOS are realtime OS's and damn well you know it.
No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.
A nice read:rtos (http://www.ncaug.org/news/rtos.html)
-
No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.
No, tasks and interrupts can be preempted in unpredictable ways.
-
No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.
A nice read:rtos (http://www.ncaug.org/news/rtos.html)
Well, AmigaOS generally tasks run for at least an exec quantum of time before being preemptively switched out. However, as Trev says, all kinds of other things can happen in unpredictable ways.
AmigaOS is most assuredly not a RTOS, however it is so damned efficient that for the most part it behaves as if it were one. Right up until it hits heavy CPU load.
-
I'll give you THREE:
1. Boot up time
2. Shut down time
3. Application launch time (and don't give me the spiel about how much bigger modern apps are because they do so much more so ofcourse they' take longer to load, thats all negated by the fact that you're running those apps on hardware specs that are many many factors faster clock speed and higher capacity ram and bussess, than the hardware used to launch Amiga apps.)
Last I heard, MS-DOS whips AmigaOS in boot time, shutdown time, application launch time.
-
@stefcep
Using an Amiga today is a hobby for everyone, and I mean 99.999% of everyone on the planet. Aside from the strange car wash or local public television station, there are literally no more legitimate uses for an Amiga in a professional setting.
No, no. I just yesterday sold a monitor to a gentleman in Canada in urgent need of it because they use an Amiga 4000/30 to run their business. I've asked for the details, but he has not responded. Fact is that many professional uses from the 80s and 90s are still relevant today. PCs have surpassed Amiga in this regard, but that does not make Amiga obsolete unless you make the personal choice to declare it as such
-
In a similar vein, let me say that it may be good to ponder the thought that many of the greatest creative works of the past were produced with technology that is today considered "obsolete."
-
In a similar vein, let me say that it may be good to ponder the thought that many of the greatest creative works of the past were produced with technology that is today considered "obsolete."
I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius.
I'm not an advocate of upgrading for upgrading's sake, so if a process designed for the Amiga still does the job it was meant to do, good for the process and the Amiga. There comes a time, however, when that system's total cost of ownership (or the risks associated with a possible failure of that system) will outweigh its return. Anyone that doesn't upgrade at that point in time (or really, slightly before) is putting their livelihood at risk.
EDIT: Let's also not forget Amiga.org's own recent history re: PHP obsolescence.
-
Last I heard, MS-DOS whips AmigaOS in boot time, shutdown time, application launch time.
I think you'll find that MS-DOS only equals AmigaOS in shut down time ;) i.e., instant. While I do think anyone saying their classic machine beats any modern PC at anything other than reading Amiga floppies is nuts, I will say that the "average" PC experience of myself and everyone I have contact with in the real world is one of waiting - waiting for the list of apps to appear in the Start menu, waiting for a window to minimise so they can access the window open behind it. This is an everyday thing that everyone I work with just accepts, but does my head in because I know it doesn't have to be like that. True, they're not cutting edge machines, but they're all only running XP OTOH which is now 7-ish years old. This is most definitely a Windows thing rather than a hardware thing, and maybe with some better programming of the Windows task and memory handling it could be much better. But as it stands, the average Windows machine that people use every day can't hold a candle to a top-end machine running Linux, or even AmigaOS4 in terms of responsiveness. Responsiveness is really where it ends with AmigaOS though; a well configured, high powered PC can do it, but the average machines that most office workers in the world have to use simply can't, and that is actually the average experience.
-
@Daedalus
You know most of the "delays" in Windows, e.g. Start Menu pop-ups, are artificial, right? They're based on user interface studies, psychological studies, etc. Some things, though, like waiting for a window to minimize, have more to do with the application itself than Windows, i.e. the application has to respond to your minimize request and maybe it's still busy doing something else, like waiting on a synchronization object that's invisible to the user. The real problem with Windows is the differentiation among applications. Every developer thinks they know better than Microsoft (some actually do, and they're probably not running Windows) and instead of doing something the standard way, they do it their own way. The same problem happens on the Amiga when developers ignore the RKMs.
@Karlos
http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html
-
You wrote:
"I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius. [...]"
---------
Then let me use an apples compared with apples argument versus your apples (electronic) compared with oranges (extremely well-crafted acoustic) argument. Take much of the early electronic music work of the late 70s and early 80s. Much of it far surpasses what is put out with today's modern synthesizers. Sure, it did generally take more thought, technical understanding, and ingenuity to produce great electronic music 3 decades ago than it does today. However, it should not be considered ludicrous that perhaps some of that older technology had *some* advantages over the current high tech equipment of 2009. I don't believe that progress in every last subcategory of every category is linear (or even monatonic). Market/corporate forces, which are what usually pushes new technology, simply are not 100% efficient/intelligent.
-
@Karlos
http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html
Holy crap :laughing:
I'm waiting to see what the G300 series does, though. Let's face it, fast as they are, there are lots of improvements that could be made to the arithmetic units. Double precision performance is still dire (compared to single, still faster than your CPU).
-
Thanks for clarifying. You are just using some souped up graphics card. Nothing to do with PC running 100s of processes. And you forgot to answer the rest of the message.
And you still violate the law of conservation even with quad core since there's still some overhead involved.
Wrong. There were > 100 CPU processes, not GPU processes. There was precisely one CPU process for that simulation. "ps aux wwwf | less" is hardly going to report on GPU processes, now is it? :roflmao:
Four of those CPU processes are capable of being in the run state concurrently provided they aren't making atomic operations on the same area of memory. Which is highly unlikely because this is a virtual memory system. Most of the processes have no idea the others exist, let alone have the opportunity to lock something they own.
Just for you, I've dumped the current process list. Too big to post here, so here it is: process.txt (http://extropia.co.uk/_temp/process.txt)
I make that 171 processes at the moment. You should see it when it is actually busy.
-edit-
Oh, and as for the rest of your objection:
I doubt even more that you can have EUAE running on top with PCI bus busy as it is. Why only look at the processor speed-- there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds. Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things? Why not time things to cycle accuracy while your running your PCI transfers? I can't even time a 500Khz event on the latest PC without synchronization going off if I have a WIFI card plugged in (not even surfing the web).
My god, you are living so far in the past it's hilarious. EUAE runs just fine, even on top of that CUDA simulation.
If you can't time a 500khz event properly on your PC without sync going off it's probably because you are either
1) Using a crap OS (which given the rest of your assertion I'm assuming is windows)
2) Using a crap PC. Harder to verify, but not impossible.
As for your claim the machine is somehow too maxed out with the simulation to run EUAE. try reading the specifications for PCI Express 2.0 16-lane and then come back when you've understood it. Total bandwidth for a single 16 lane device is ~8000MB/s. The simulation was only shifting around 400MB/s. Plenty of room left to shove EUAE's framebuffer into the primary X display.
I'm using a decent OS on good hardware. It may have escaped your attention back there in the 1980's, but present day POSIX compliant systems now require nanosecond accuracy for timing. The Linux kernel uses a busy loop to calibrate the maximum execution speed of your CPU at boot time. With this, you can, if you need it, have a busy wait that is accurate to a few machine cycles, though it will cost you load.
Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered
Well, again, you are failing to differentiate the OS from the machine. For the nth time, Windows != PC. Use a decent OS, you don't get these problems.
-
@Trev
Yup I do know :) I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about things like the border being drawn, but instead of the list of applications, for about a second you get the "searching" flashlight until the icons appear. Same with the task switching, I'd guess it's VM-related seeing as it'll only happen if the inactive window hasn't been touched for a while, but it does seem to be common to most average-spec machines that are a year or two old, and for most users, most of which don't do anything more extravagant than send mail and run Excel.
-
I think you'll find that MS-DOS only equals AmigaOS in shut down time ;) i.e., instant. While I do think anyone saying their classic machine beats any modern PC at anything other than reading Amiga floppies is nuts, I will say that the "average" PC experience of myself and everyone I have contact with in the real world is one of waiting - waiting for the list of apps to appear in the Start menu, waiting for a window to minimise so they can access the window open behind it. This is an everyday thing that everyone I work with just accepts, but does my head in because I know it doesn't have to be like that. True, they're not cutting edge machines, but they're all only running XP OTOH which is now 7-ish years old. This is most definitely a Windows thing rather than a hardware thing, and maybe with some better programming of the Windows task and memory handling it could be much better. But as it stands, the average Windows machine that people use every day can't hold a candle to a top-end machine running Linux, or even AmigaOS4 in terms of responsiveness. Responsiveness is really where it ends with AmigaOS though; a well configured, high powered PC can do it, but the average machines that most office workers in the world have to use simply can't, and that is actually the average experience.
My god man...you must be running XP on a 486. Every machine I've had from my AMD 2200+ CPU based system to my Quad core system runnning XP to Vista, I've never had any issues like that ever.
My "everyday office computer" at work is very responsive also. Its a Dell core2duo laptop w/a 17" display, 4 gigs ram running XP.
The people I've run into that have slow systems are the same people who do not maintain it. You throw garbage into Windows you'll get garbage out. You take care of Windows, it'll take care of you. Its not the most reliable OS but it works.
-
Four of those CPU processes are capable of being in the run state concurrently provided they aren't making atomic operations on the same area of memory. Which is highly unlikely because this is a virtual memory system. Most of the processes have no idea the others exist, let alone have the opportunity to lock something they own.
Let's not forget two threads in the same process attempting to access data in the same cache line, which one core will implicitly lock. Pad those data structures. NUMA systems, e.g. multi-socket AMD hosts, could see implicit locks on the memory bus as well.
-
Let's not forget two threads in the same process attempting to access data in the same cache line, which one core will implicitly lock. Pad those data structures. NUMA systems, e.g. multi-socket AMD hosts, could see implicit locks on the memory bus as well.
Of course, you can't totally avoid situations where you are going cause cores to wait on each other for access to some exclusive resource. Still, I wouldn't trade my Q9450 for a single core processor ;)
-
True. But you can greatly minimize contention with creative use of pointers and padding. EDIT: (Unless you're using Java, in which case you're at the mercy of the VM's garbage collector to keep your data in order.)
-
Probably. I dare say it's all happening in a parallel existence right now.
Where do you think Red gets all his stuff from....... :laughing:
-
Well, AmigaOS generally tasks run for at least an exec quantum of time before being preemptively switched out. However, as Trev says, all kinds of other things can happen in unpredictable ways.
AmigaOS is most assuredly not a RTOS, however it is so damned efficient that for the most part it behaves as if it were one. Right up until it hits heavy CPU load.
But Amiga hardware supports real-time systems better than modern PCs. Who cares about OS when OS easily allows you to take over the machine and use cycle-exact coding unlike modern OSes which are bloated and hardly anyone knows what's happening internally.
-
Also, the argument was about "real-time OS", not what constitutes a real-time task in general. AmigaOS and Linux are in no way, shape or form "real-time" OS. You should probably look up the definition of what constitutes a real-time OS if you think differently.
A real-time OS guarantees that an event (an interrupt ot whatever) shall be dealt within a specified minimum time limit. A failure to do so is considered a complete failure of the OS.
No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee. You'll only see it in embedded hardware and mission critical systems.
Read what I wrote-- it depends on what you are doing. Each real-time system has it's time constraints-- if you know the worse case time the OS takes (which is easier to figure out on Amiga than modern OSes), you can design a real-time system with OS. Other option you have on the Amiga is that you can bypass the Amiga OS. The fact that you have hardware support guaranteeing that you can trigger off IRQ or do regster modifications with accuracy of 558ns helps with real-time tasks regardless of whether OS supports it or not.
-
Then please do. I'm genuinely intrigued as to what this one example could be. And once you deliver it, I suppose you could look at it the other way around. I would suggest the amiga has been playing catchup to the PC for some time now. Or at least it would be, if it was even in the race still. Which it isn't and it hasn't been since the last hardware amiga rolled off the production line.
...
I already did-- you have a very shallow understanding of PC architecture so you did not even see it. Reading joysticks on PC vs. reading joysticks on Amiga is a clear cut example where Amiga wins hands down. Do you need exact numbers? I have done the timing tests on PCs going from 90Mhz up to 2.8Ghz. I have many more examples where Amiga wins over PCs, but if you don't understand this example others will be very difficult for you.
>There's no greater demonstration of how far behind the amiga is in hardware terms than a quick glance at the hardware upgrades that are available for it...
I have a PC hooked up to my Amiga so I guess my Amiga is better than your PC since I can consider the PC as a new hardware add-on.
>You are probably sitting there, p!ssed at me, thinking I'm some PC fanboy and that I hate the Amiga etc. The fact is, you couldn't be more wrong...
No, I'm not pissed off at anyone. You are just wrong in stating that PC has surpassed Amiga in all respects and that's all I'm pointing out since some blind followers seem to be taking your views. In fact, Amiga just surpassed PC in another catagory without even doing further research/development. Parallel ports are no longer put on new PCs so Amiga has another thing that PCs don't have. The ability to do parallel port based software projects.
-
First of all, it is a "real PC". The graphics card is no more out of place in this machine than any of the custom chips in my "real Amigas". This simulation runs on any PC that has a G80 or above based graphics card.
Secondly, there's nothing "specialised" whatsoever about the card. All current generation graphics cards tend to have fully programmable parallel arithmetic units.
Thirdly, I have run the same simulation entirely on the CPU. A naive single threaded implementation in the same "real PC" is about 250x slower than the GPU version on this machine. I can boost it significantly by optimizing it for four core execution and even further by using specific SSE3 vector operations. However, that naive version would still be 400x faster than my humble 040 could manage in a perfect world where memory bandwidth was infinite and all operations took one cycle. In the actual real world, it couldn't run it at all, there's not enough memory available to even hold the state information for this simulation.
Criticising the use of the GPU is also shooting your own argument for the Amiga in the foot. So far, you've extolled the virtue of using the custom chips for "realtime" performance, such as polling the joyport. If our experiment were simply filling flatshaded polygons on a 68000 amiga, would you be advocating the use of the CPU and not some "specialised graphics processor" ? Of course not.
...
My point is not that current graphics cards are NOT superior to Amiga graphics overall, but one of standards. Unless your application runs on all the other graphics cards, it's of no use to me since I can build a custom PC w/souped up hardware that excels all other PCs but any software taking advantage of such hardware would only run on my PC. Amigas custom chips are in every Amiga. I have dealt with many different graphics cards installed in various people's homes and they range from doing 15MB/second to 200MB/second data transfers so if I wrote some application I can't just assume they have 200MB/second.
>Incidentally, do you really think a 2.6GHz CPU with 12MB of cache, even running the least optimized code in existence, isn't capable of polling a piece of hardware at 1kHz without missing a single iteration?
This is your shallow understanding of PC architecture. I/O is not caches. I/O has it's own clock way slower than processor clock. In fact, even the memory doesn't even run at the processor clock and I/O to hardware is much slower than memory. Only specialized AGP type buses can access memory mapped areas faster than I/O transfers but even in those cases their control ports for I/O are still slower than regular memory access.
-
I already did-- you have a very shallow understanding of PC architecture so you did not even see it. Reading joysticks on PC vs. reading joysticks on Amiga is a clear cut example where Amiga wins hands down. Do you need exact numbers? I have done the timing tests on PCs going from 90Mhz up to 2.8Ghz. I have many more examples where Amiga wins over PCs, but if you don't understand this example others will be very difficult for you.
You still didn't clarify how you were doing this timing, or on which OS. Therefore your assertion cannot at this stage be solely blamed on the hardware. For example, if you disable speedstep in your application and wrote your delay loop in assembler, you can pretty much get it down to bus cycle level of accuracy.
If you were relying on OS level sleep()/usleep() type functions you aren't going to get accuracy any more than you get from a DoIO() on the timer.device, probably worse, in fact.
>There's no greater demonstration of how far behind the amiga is in hardware terms than a quick glance at the hardware upgrades that are available for it...
I have a PC hooked up to my Amiga so I guess my Amiga is better than your PC since I can consider the PC as a new hardware add-on.
If it makes you happy to believe that, carry on.
>You are probably sitting there, p!ssed at me, thinking I'm some PC fanboy and that I hate the Amiga etc. The fact is, you couldn't be more wrong...
No, I'm not pissed off at anyone. You are just wrong in stating that PC has surpassed Amiga in all respects and that's all I'm pointing out since some blind followers seem to be taking your views. In fact, Amiga just surpassed PC in another catagory without even doing further research/development. Parallel ports are no longer put on new PCs so Amiga has another thing that PCs don't have. The ability to do parallel port based software projects.
Well, you got me there. I don't have a parallel port. I'm really up the creek without a paddle now. I wonder whether or not USB would make a reasonable alternative for control applications? I have about 12 of those to play with.
FWIW, I don't have a joystick port either. Tragic, really.
-
This is your shallow understanding of PC architecture. I/O is not caches. I/O has it's own clock way slower than processor clock. In fact, even the memory doesn't even run at the processor clock and I/O to hardware is much slower than memory.
You don't say...
Only specialized AGP type buses can access memory mapped areas faster than I/O transfers but even in those cases their control ports for I/O are still slower than regular memory access.
Good grief. AGP is obsolete, PCI Express 2 is the standard now and has been for some time. Devices talk to each other via high speed point to point serial communication, multiple devices can be using the bus at the same time. It's all a far cry from PCI and AGP.
-
@stefcep
I understand your need to feel like the 1985 Amiga is still as capable as a modern day PC or Mac. I really do. Everyone feels the need to justify why they're still running what they do, especially in light of overwhelming evidence to support the contrary.
Using an Amiga today is a hobby for everyone, and I mean 99.999% of everyone on the planet. Aside from the strange car wash or local public television station, there are literally no more legitimate uses for an Amiga in a professional setting.
Take away professional settings, and you're left with personal use, which -- when you consider there are better and faster alternatives out there -- means "a hobby".
There's nothing wrong with that.
For the record, I loathe Windows to my very core and even moreso when I have to use it at work.
That being said, there simply isn't any single way on the planet that you can compare a 2 GIGAhertz machine to a 7 (or even 14) MEGAhertz computer and have the latter come out ahead in ANY category on the planet. Sorry. You just can't do it.
I often laugh when some people trot out reboot times and "I don't have to shut my machine down".
What you, and every other stalwart defender of the faith always forget is that yes, Windows and Macs take longer to boot, but when they boot, they're loading up easily 100 times more active features than the antiquated Amiga.
If you want a fair test on boot times, take your 14mhz machine, load it down with network stacks, font handling stacks, printer handlers, and everything else that a stock Windows box does by default. Have it then automatically connect to everything from your printer to the network to.. well, everything that Windows does automatically, then time it from the moment you hit the power button until the time the hard drive quits gronking.
You *will* find that your precious little Amiga will take -- at a minimum -- more time to boot than even a mid-level Windows box. That is, *if* you could get the Amiga to even load 1/10th the features that Windows has, and you can't do it because frankly, the features Windows has by base install don't even exist for the Amiga.
I don't say this to tear you down. I really don't. Like I said, I'm a Mac guy and I hate Windows as much as you do, but... You can't sit here defending the Amiga as being better because it boots faster and come out sounding the least bit credible. It just makes you sound like a fanboy, which I'm sure is not your intent.
Also for the record, prior to the demise of my last Windows box, which I worked on 10 hours a day, 6 days a week professionally for an Internet Registrar doing everything from programming to tech support. During that time, my average "up time" (between reboots) was well over 6 months between reboots for a matter of 8 YEARS.
Most of those reboots caused by extended power outages which drained the UPS system I have in place.
Live well, Learn much, Love often,
Wayne
Sorry Wayne but you've got all me wrong.
I' not a fanboy, I use an Amiga for fun and I know what year it is, but your post makes you sound like someone who doesn't really understand the core of the argument.
Of course PC's load 100 more processes, but they have 1000 times the memory. (We'll ignore the other advancements in RAM design and clock spec modern PC's have.). Ofcourse the latest PC CPU can process numbers much, much faster than a 14 mhz 68020, thats because the PC's has several CPU's with clock speeds that are a factor of 200 times faster. (We'll ignore the other advancements in cache design, hyperthreading blah blah etc. We'll also ignore the blazingly fast graphics chips/gpu's, PCIE busses, SATA , USB2. So 1000 times more RAM, 200 x 2,3,4 CPU speed increase, super fast GPU superfast SATA but I've gotta wait 2 and half minutes to boot. I gotta put up with a start menu that stutters to open, because a web page loads, I've gotta search for the mouse pointer on screen beacsue its mysteriously teleported itself from one side of the screen to the other beacsue the OS doesn't have enough resources( !!!) to animate it smoothly because another app is loading in the background.
So you can't load vista on an 8 meg 68020 A1200? No kidding. That shows you just
'don't get it". Let me put it this way; Your PC has 1000 times the hardware specs to load and process 100 times the data, EVERYTHING ought to be 10 times faster. Ask yourself : IS it? Why not?
-
That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...
... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.
Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.
Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.
I use MSDOS still and I can state that Amiga boots up faster since it needs to load a 1024 byte boot block to be ready to accept commands. It's main functions in ROM. MSDOS on the other hand reads a boot block followed by the OS functions (MSDOS.SYS/IO.SYS/COMMAND.COM/etc.) before you can actually use the OS functions. Actually Atari/C64 with cartridge based software boot up with software faster than both. Boot-up time is useful in some cases where you just want to try testing some stuff. I still use Atari 800 for testing external devices connected to joystick ports with simple PEEK/POKE 54016.
Also useful for doing some simple math. Don't we still use calculators because they boot up faster than booting up a PC although you can get the functionality of the calculator in a laptop/desktop. I find Atari/Amigas retro-machines easy to analyze for video/real-time stuff and fun for games since their code is highly efficient and optimized and perfectly synched up to video rates. And you know you are the only thing running and there won't be any viruses or any Wifi doing background bullcrap.
-
My god man...you must be running XP on a 486. Every machine I've had from my AMD 2200+ CPU based system to my Quad core system runnning XP to Vista, I've never had any issues like that ever.
My "everyday office computer" at work is very responsive also. Its a Dell core2duo laptop w/a 17" display, 4 gigs ram running XP.
that my friend is the elephant in the room that you can't see: you are running a 7 year old OS on hardware specs that are more or less 12 months old. try running XP on a p3 600 with 256 meg ram, hey that was the average PC when XP came out. And run Word 2003, a web browser an email client and see how much you enjoy it. you might not even be able to open the start menu for all the hard drive groaning you'll get..
your system runs ok because you are using the "if its slow, then throw more hardware at it' philosphy.
-
And of course a Vax has a punch card reader attached to it, which is arguably more useful that a parallel port, so Vax still rules!
That all depends on what the job is. My A1, for example would be dozens of times slower than my current linux box for the stuff I'm experimenting with at the moment and my classic machine many times slower again. My 040 manages say, what, 3.5 MFLOPS peak? Assuming I could write the necessary code in assembler to maintain that throughput (totally overlooking the complete lack of memory speed) that's about 101,000 times slower than my current PC manages. In reality it would be even slower given how slow the fsqrt instruction is (ie you'd never get the 3.5MFLOPS for these calculations).
Don't get me wrong, I love using my old miggies, but when it comes to work, it's all horses for courses.
Not enough of a market, sadly.
Can't argue with that. I use ubuntu on my home PC, though work requires that I use fedora.
I already did-- you have a very shallow understanding of PC architecture so you did not even see it. Reading joysticks on PC vs. reading joysticks on Amiga is a clear cut example where Amiga wins hands down. Do you need exact numbers? I have done the timing tests on PCs going from 90Mhz up to 2.8Ghz. I have many more examples where Amiga wins over PCs, but if you don't understand this example others will be very difficult for you.
>There's no greater demonstration of how far behind the amiga is in hardware terms than a quick glance at the hardware upgrades that are available for it...
I have a PC hooked up to my Amiga so I guess my Amiga is better than your PC since I can consider the PC as a new hardware add-on.
>You are probably sitting there, p!ssed at me, thinking I'm some PC fanboy and that I hate the Amiga etc. The fact is, you couldn't be more wrong...
No, I'm not pissed off at anyone. You are just wrong in stating that PC has surpassed Amiga in all respects and that's all I'm pointing out since some blind followers seem to be taking your views. In fact, Amiga just surpassed PC in another catagory without even doing further research/development. Parallel ports are no longer put on new PCs so Amiga has another thing that PCs don't have. The ability to do parallel port based software projects.
-
that my friend is the elephant in the room that you can't see: you are running a 7 year old OS on hardware specs that are more or less 12 months old. try running XP on a p3 600 with 256 meg ram, hey that was the average PC when XP came out. And run Word 2003, a web browser an email client and see how much you enjoy it. you might not even be able to open the start menu for all the hard drive groaning you'll get..
p3 600? LOL. get with the times. Yea its great going on a long trip in a 1974 VW Beetle but its not as fun and comfortable as my wife's 2008 Chevy Tahoe.
your system runs ok because you are using the "if its slow, then throw more hardware at it' philosphy.
Actually, that never crossed my mind. Systems nowadays, if you build your own, are VERY affordable. If you're using a p3 600, then its your own fault, go wallow in your own sorrow. I have no sympathy for you.
Its not my fault XP is 7 years old. I upgrade my systems to keep up with the times. I'm glad XP runs well on my systems at work. At home, I'm ballin' with a HP laptop runnin openSuSE 11.
Too many people bash XP when its their dinosaur hardware causing the bottleneck.
-
My wife has throw away technology, a single core P4 @3 GHz. It runs Vista Ultimate just fine. You have to either image the 90% of people who buy PCs are either thick or sheep (or maybe thick sheep) to explain why the PC dominates the market. People aren't stupid, there are reasons why people buy PCs and not Amigas. The Amiga was phenomenal a decade and a half ago, it failed to capitalise on that superiority and was left an orphan. They Amiga is a couple orders of magnitude out of date as far as price versus performace goes. I can buy a gig of Ram for a PC for less money than I can buy a meg of Ram for my Amiga.
Yeah, I love my Amiga but it just feels old, the graphics are poor, the choice of software extremely limited, and a rogue program will bring the whole system to a guru because there's no memory protection.
I can't play the game and pretend it's 1992 again...
that my friend is the elephant in the room that you can't see: you are running a 7 year old OS on hardware specs that are more or less 12 months old. try running XP on a p3 600 with 256 meg ram, hey that was the average PC when XP came out. And run Word 2003, a web browser an email client and see how much you enjoy it. you might not even be able to open the start menu for all the hard drive groaning you'll get..
your system runs ok because you are using the "if its slow, then throw more hardware at it' philosphy.
-
Hi,
WOW!!!
What a discussion on which computer is better, this is an Amiga site of course and so by that I declare the Amiga the winner, all you Linux and Windose users are LOSERS just by the fact that you are on an Amiga site.
Lets face it a computer is only as fast as a user can use it. There is no way any of you can type faster than your machine, therefore almost 100% of you are using too much horse power for what you are using it for. Even when you play the most awesome games like fallout 3, crysis, far cry, doom 3, the computers today move much faster than what your senses can see. The only thing you are trying to do is get faster frame rates even though your eyes cannot see them, that is why most TV sets use the 22 fps rate anything above that is quite useless as far as the eye can see.
BUT
When you talk about computers you must deal with real time, stability, and the process of securing your data (the most expensive component) and I say the Amiga wins hands down, my Amiga has secured my data since 1993, its OS has been stable since OS 3.1 and has remained stable through OS 3.9, this is how I rate a computer, in real time it boots faster, loads the programs I use faster, which allows me to complete my projects faster and get done with my work faster in real time, it then retains my data, and can back up my data faster then a winblows machine, for what I do on my Amiga I don't care about color, or games because it just don't matter.
Now the only other OS that I am beginning to trust is Linux, it has shown me no problems for 3 years, and has the same fun as the original Amiga but has all the modern conveniences, it has a super update feature, simple backup (like the Amiga) and seems to have a loyal following like the Amiga did, the only thing is that the Linux fan boys seem like a bunch of snobs that don't understand how you can't see how to solve your own problems when you have one, they are the typical computer nerds that are so smart that they just don't understand why you can't solve that problem when it is so simple to them.
So based on data retention, non fatal crashes, little to no virus, spyware, and malware, and no registry I claim the Amiga the winner, it may be a tortoise but I think it still wins the race.
AMIGA FOREVER
smerf
-
p3 600? LOL. get with the times. Yea its great going on a long trip in a 1974 VW Beetle but its not as fun and comfortable as my wife's 2008 Chevy Tahoe.
Actually, that never crossed my mind. Systems nowadays, if you build your own, are VERY affordable. If you're using a p3 600, then its your own fault, go wallow in your own sorrow. I have no sympathy for you.
Its not my fault XP is 7 years old. I upgrade my systems to keep up with the times. I'm glad XP runs well on my systems at work. At home, I'm ballin' with a HP laptop runnin openSuSE 11.
Too many people bash XP when its their dinosaur hardware causing the bottleneck.
Ok someone ELSE who "just doesn't get it".
I don't use a P3 anymore, silly. I know that to get a current MS OS running as opposed to walking you need hardware 5 years ahead of the OS. BUT THE P3 WAS HARDWARE THAT WAS COMMONLY AROUND WHEN XP WAS RELEASED. THATS WHAT XP WAS MADE TO RUN ON. Its the hardware advancement 7 years later not the OS that improves the user experience. You just basically poved you still can't see the elephant in the room..
-
Ok someone ELSE who "just doesn't get it".
I don't use a P3 anymore, silly. I know that to get a current MS OS running as opposed to walking you need hardware 5 years ahead of the OS. BUT THE P3 WAS HARDWARE THAT WAS COMMONLY AROUND WHEN XP WAS RELEASED. THATS WHAT XP WAS MADE TO RUN ON. Its the hardware advancement 7 years later not the OS that improves the user experience. You just basically poved you still can't see the elephant in the room..
Hi,
@Stef
How can he see the elephant in the room when he has his head stuck up the elephants a**?
smerf
-
My wife has throw away technology, a single core P4 @3 GHz. It runs Vista Ultimate just fine. You have to either image the 90% of people who buy PCs are either thick or sheep (or maybe thick sheep) to explain why the PC dominates the market. People aren't stupid, there are reasons why people buy PCs and not Amigas. The Amiga was phenomenal a decade and a half ago, it failed to capitalise on that superiority and was left an orphan. They Amiga is a couple orders of magnitude out of date as far as price versus performace goes. I can buy a gig of Ram for a PC for less money than I can buy a meg of Ram for my Amiga.
Yeah, I love my Amiga but it just feels old, the graphics are poor, the choice of software extremely limited, and a rogue program will bring the whole system to a guru because there's no memory protection.
I can't play the game and pretend it's 1992 again...
Hi,
@persia my old friend
I can't believe you said that about the Amiga, I put memory in my Amiga 4000 from all the old PC's that I threw out in the trash, my 4 gig hard drive came from an old HP, my cd drive came from an old no name computer that I built back in 1987.
Now I do find the software quite limited because no new software is being made, but I am finding the old software and getting it at real cheap prices or free, I just picked up a whole box of software from a friend at work, he was just going to throw it out along with his A500 and he had some good software that cost about $199 when it first came out. Sure the Amiga is feeling old because it is, this doesn't take the fun out of using one, as a matter of fact I am having more fun with it now than before because I can get the software that I always wanted cheap or free, and yes I do own quite a new modern PC, that plays all the modern games quite nicely. Do I use my winblows machine for important work, not really, I don't trust it to hold my important data therefore it is only used for games, I use Ubuntu Linux for my music, photo's and movies but I use my Amiga with Pen Pal to keep track of all my software, my insurance data base, and other important stuff like my check book and since the Amiga is not hooked up to the internet it is bascially free from prying eyes. Yes the Amiga is old but I will bet you that you still can't out type it.
smerf
-
I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius.
I'm not an advocate of upgrading for upgrading's sake, so if a process designed for the Amiga still does the job it was meant to do, good for the process and the Amiga. There comes a time, however, when that system's total cost of ownership (or the risks associated with a possible failure of that system) will outweigh its return. Anyone that doesn't upgrade at that point in time (or really, slightly before) is putting their livelihood at risk.
EDIT: Let's also not forget Amiga.org's own recent history re: PHP obsolescence.
Good point-- not upgrading for upgrading's sake. If it serves the purpose, why bother with a new machine. Actually, my Toshiba 366Mhz laptop outperformed the HP 1.4Ghz laptop in watching DVDs since it had hardware decoding vs. software decoding. That should tell you the basic picture that clock speed isn't everything.
And from the standards point of view, small subset of hardware features among PCs worldwide are being used in software out there in order to support the most customer base.
-
Wrong. There were > 100 CPU processes, not GPU processes. There was precisely one CPU process for that simulation. "ps aux wwwf | less" is hardly going to report on GPU processes, now is it? :roflmao:
Four of those CPU processes are capable of being in the run state concurrently provided they aren't making atomic operations on the same area of memory. Which is highly unlikely because this is a virtual memory system. Most of the processes have no idea the others exist, let alone have the opportunity to lock something they own.
Just for you, I've dumped the current process list. Too big to post here, so here it is: process.txt (http://extropia.co.uk/_temp/process.txt)
I make that 171 processes at the moment. You should see it when it is actually busy.
...
So you maintain that running 1 process or 171 processes does not affect the response time at all? That's where your blunder was. It was a simple point not really that significant compared to the point of you not understanding I/O transfers of joystick ports.
>-edit-
I got lucky and I noticed this edit while looking for something else in the thread.
>Oh, and as for the rest of your objection:
>My god, you are living so far in the past it's hilarious. EUAE runs just fine, even on top of that CUDA simulation.
You keep missing the point. Your point is running all those processes DID NOT affect the user responsiveness at all. That is violation of law of conservation.
>If you can't time a 500khz event properly on your PC without sync going off it's probably because you are either
>1) Using a crap OS (which given the rest of your assertion I'm assuming is windows)
>2) Using a crap PC. Harder to verify, but not impossible.
It's easier to do in Windows 98SE or older OSes where you can take over the system. And it's easier to do with older systems than newer ones since newer systems have problems installing Windows 98SE because they have too much nonstandard hardware requiring whole slew of new driver database that are more bloated than previous versions.
>As for your claim the machine is somehow too maxed out with the simulation to run EUAE. try reading the specifications for PCI Express 2.0 16-lane and then come back when you've ...
Never made that claim. Straw-man argument.
>I'm using a decent OS on good hardware. It may have escaped your attention back there in the 1980's, but present day POSIX compliant systems now require nanosecond accuracy for timing. The Linux kernel uses a busy loop to calibrate the maximum execution speed of your CPU at boot time. With this, you can, if you need it, have a busy wait that is accurate to a few machine cycles, though it will cost you load.
I was wondering when you would ever get around to replying to my point of timing accuracy. Demanding some nanosecond and people having it NOW in their PCs are two different things. Current timers (up to Windows XP era) relied on PIT (8253) using 1.19318Mhz which comes to 840ns. And even that is unuseable given other things happening in the system. And once again you fail to understand I/O bottlenecks interfering with your so-called nanosecond accuracy. Amiga does the 558ns accurate register modifications with little effect on anything else running in the system since it's done via the Copper. For Amiga it's a breeze; for PC, you need to get one of the latest PCs that has implemented the "nanosecond" accuracy which inexorably will have problems given the support for backward compatibility.
>Well, again, you are failing to differentiate the OS from the machine. For the nth time, Windows != PC. Use a decent OS, you don't get these problems.
You replied to the same message twice; but anyway, my answer is the same as well-- you need to understand what a PC is. I am a low-level programmer; I hardly use the OS for anything. Whatever software I write is what is potentially possible with the PC.
-
You still didn't clarify how you were doing this timing, or on which OS. Therefore your assertion cannot at this stage be solely blamed on the hardware. For example, if you disable speedstep in your application and wrote your delay loop in assembler, you can pretty much get it down to bus cycle level of accuracy.
If you were relying on OS level sleep()/usleep() type functions you aren't going to get accuracy any more than you get from a DoIO() on the timer.device, probably worse, in fact.
...
It works on all Windows platforms unmodified since it's using inline ASM-- IN AL,DX with DX set to port of joystick. Dynamic frequency is disabled which by the way you should know affects the RDTSC timer as well.
>If it makes you happy to believe that, carry on.
You miss that point again. You can't talk about some video cards' capabilities unless it's standard among majority of PCs out there. Otherwise, I'll hook up some custom hardware to my Amiga like a laptop motherboard and use it for slave processing.
>Well, you got me there. I don't have a parallel port. I'm really up the creek without a paddle now. I wonder whether or not USB would make a reasonable alternative for control applications? I have about 12 of those to play with.
That's a lame excuse and selfish one. So you don't see any use for a parallel port-- try searching the web-- you'll see thousands of people who have done parallel port based projects. USB requires hardware to do parallel signal processing. With a parallel port, you have the digital lines to use for control lines.
>FWIW, I don't have a joystick port either. Tragic, really.
It is. Joystick ports are also very useful for Amiga users so dismissing one of it's strengths by thinking it's not that useful is a lame excuse. Look at your absurd style of arguing-- first you claim there's nothing superior on Amiga; now that it's staring you in the face that there are things still superior on Amiga, you want to downplay them or make them seem that they are useless.
-
You don't say...
Good grief. AGP is obsolete, PCI Express 2 is the standard now and has been for some time. Devices talk to each other via high speed point to point serial communication, multiple devices can be using the bus at the same time. It's all a far cry from PCI and AGP.
Your reply is irrelevant to the point. Standard joystick gameport still uses slow I/O regardless of whether you have PCI/AGP/PCI Express. Just because you put a new bus in doesn't make all the devices in the system automatically run at that rate.
And no, AGP is not obsolete as far as people out there having AGP. It may no longer be put into motherboards, but it's present in millions of homes. Just because A4000 introduced AGA that didn't mean that people stopped writing for OCS/ECS.
-
p3 600? LOL. get with the times. Yea its great going on a long trip in a 1974 VW Beetle but its not as fun and comfortable as my wife's 2008 Chevy Tahoe.
Actually, that never crossed my mind. Systems nowadays, if you build your own, are VERY affordable. If you're using a p3 600, then its your own fault, go wallow in your own sorrow. I have no sympathy for you.
Its not my fault XP is 7 years old. I upgrade my systems to keep up with the times. I'm glad XP runs well on my systems at work. At home, I'm ballin' with a HP laptop runnin openSuSE 11.
Too many people bash XP when its their dinosaur hardware causing the bottleneck.
Most non-technical fields use PCs for word processing, Database, and communications and going from 600Mhz to 1Ghz hardly makes any difference. I know these hospitals that still are using DOS-based software on the ancient PCs. They don't see any reason to upgrade if everything is working well especially if they have to BUY new PCs, BUY new versions of software, LEARN new interfaces, etc. Some areas don't upgrade unless they get FORCED into it. And I don't see any reason why they should either.
-
And of course a Vax has a punch card reader attached to it, which is arguably more useful that a parallel port, so Vax still rules!
As some people have stated in this thread, if it serves the purpose why bother with the upgrade. I hope you know many printing places still use parallel-port based printers. It's usefull and especially for testing custom circuits and stuff. I know the Willem EPROM programmer I use works perfectly with parallel port on my old laptop. And my argument isn't that that makes the Amiga superior, but that's another useful thing.
-
You wrote:
Take much of the early electronic music work of the late 70s and early 80s. Much of it far surpasses what is put out with today's modern synthesizers.
Kraftwerk, one of the pioneers of the electronic music, now just uses Windows machine to produce and play their music and the visual effects.
I think some psychology is involved here: people find certain music better because they know it is made with this old equipment, not that they actually can hear the difference.
greets,
Staf.
-
Just because A4000 introduced AGA that didn't mean that people stopped writing for OCS/ECS.
Yeah, true... And this refusal to see and embrace evolution is what helped to kill the Amiga... People always refused to accept newer technologies. AGA sucks, GfxCard sucks, AHI sucks, paula can do better,... and in the software side: memory protection is performance killing,...
And that's why people using an OS and a computer outdated in almost every aspect keep thinking it's better than monsters of technology created today...
Yeah, OS of today are heavier than Exec written 24 years ago... But there's no way Amiga could be used for anything productive. You do not reboot because a program crashed anymore. And guess what ? even Apple is doing multitasking nowadays...
If you ask me, the lack of memory protection is an heavier handicap than having extra processes doing nothing (especially when seeing the power/memory we have today).
-
Your reply is irrelevant to the point. Standard joystick gameport still uses slow I/O regardless of whether you have PCI/AGP/PCI Express. Just because you put a new bus in doesn't make all the devices in the system automatically run at that rate.
There is no fscking "standard joystick gameport" on current PC hardware. Along with the parallel port, it has vanished into the hazy world of yesteryear. Where you live :p In case you didn't notice, it has all moved to USB in recent years. Now, USB is very slow compared to any internal bus, yes. However that makes absolutely no difference on a system where the communication with the USB device is arbitrated by hardware. My USB device sends a packet, the controller handles it, puts it into memory somewhere and issues an interrupt. Magic. It might not be ideal for your specific polling needs but I think you'll find its ideal for most peripherals.
And no, AGP is not obsolete as far as people out there having AGP.
There are people out there with 8-bit home computers still. It doesn't mean they aren't obsolete. A given technology essentially becomes obsolete when it ceases to be manufactured or improved upon.AGP was better than PCI for graphics specific applications, PCIe is better than both, is fully generic and has subsequently rendered them obsolete.
I'm fully understanding your argument that the Amiga's native hardware is ideal for your purpose of polling the joystick port at a precise interval and that you couldn't, for whatever reason, duplicate this on a PC. It's quite amusing that you assert this as your premier example of the Amiga is still in some way streets ahead of the PC, yet complained that my particle simulation was "too specific" a metric.
-
Hi,
WOW!!!
What a discussion on which computer is better, this is an Amiga site of course and so by that I declare the Amiga the winner, all you Linux and Windose users are LOSERS just by the fact that you are on an Amiga site.
Greetings to you too! You have to explain your argument a bit closer, because maybe I'm too much of a loser to see how it makes sense logically. I'm not here because I think Amiga is the superior platform, but because I like old computer systems and think the Amiga is particularly interesting. The Amiga sure is an impressive innovation but in a typical home/work environment today it just doesn't cut it for the tasks a user would normally expect a computer to perform.
Lets face it a computer is only as fast as a user can use it. There is no way any of you can type faster than your machine, therefore almost 100% of you are using too much horse power for what you are using it for.
Are you serious? Then why don't you sit down and decode real time video on paper and just draw it yourself on the screen? Do you decompress zip files by reading the compressed data yourself? Do your drivers print you a message that you have to type in again to pass it to the system? Hell, why not move the laser around over a CD manually if you can do it just as responsively?
A computer is faster at what it does than every potential user, but it doesn't matter because most tasks it performs are tedious and complicated enough for it to be perceived as slow anyway.
Even when you play the most awesome games like fallout 3, crysis, far cry, doom 3, the computers today move much faster than what your senses can see. The only thing you are trying to do is get faster frame rates even though your eyes cannot see them, that is why most TV sets use the 22 fps rate anything above that is quite useless as far as the eye can see.
Judging from your totally misinformed point I take it that you have no knowledge at all about real-time graphics, and if you don't notice the difference between running a game at 60 fps and 22 fps you should probably see a doctor too, because it should be clear to anyone under 80. The reason 22 fps works for movies is because cameras don't really capture discrete moments of time on each frame, but rather pretty much everything between the frame before and the frame after, which introduces a lot of motion blur that conceals the slow frame rate.
Now, doing a similar effect on a computer costs a lot of time, because in the end it means rendering or extrapolating all the significant frames "in-between" too. I guess you could do it by hand pretty fast, though.
And no, TV sets aren't usually locked to 22 fps.
So please tone down the arrogance until you actually know what you're ranting about.
-
@Linde
I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.
Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help :)
-
@Linde
I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.
Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help :)
I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism :P
-
I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism :P
Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.
Back in the day, I used to hate PC's, Ataris, Macs and pretty much anything that wasn't an Amiga.
Nowadays, I just hate Macs ;)
Seriously though, current generation machines are tools that I use for serious work, high definition gaming and media. I use my Amigas for fun, doing all kinds of ultimately pointless things with them simply because they can be done. I'm not under any illusion that they are suddenly going to make a triumphant comeback into the world. This means I enjoy them all the more as I don't constantly brood over the lack of progress the platform is making. Finally, even though I would sooner spit on one at the time, I'd even have an Atari :D
-
Interesting discussion guys.
It reminds me of the good old days. The only difference is that those days are well and truly over.
Amiga is no longer mainstream and that is for some reasons.
PCs are mainstream and that's for some reasons.
Want to know those reasons.
It's all here:
:lol:
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=19&pictureid=105)
Seriously though, the Amiga is a nice, fun, niche, retro, hobby/home computing platform. Trying to claim it is something other than that is just plain denial.
-
Hi,
@Stef
How can he see the elephant in the room when he has his head stuck up the elephants a**?
smerf
Its pregant, so I'm helping extract you. You're somewhere up in there. LOL!!!
Ok someone ELSE who "just doesn't get it".
I don't use a P3 anymore, silly. I know that to get a current MS OS running as opposed to walking you need hardware 5 years ahead of the OS. BUT THE P3 WAS HARDWARE THAT WAS COMMONLY AROUND WHEN XP WAS RELEASED. THATS WHAT XP WAS MADE TO RUN ON. Its the hardware advancement 7 years later not the OS that improves the user experience. You just basically poved you still can't see the elephant in the room..
Call it what you want. All I know is my system(s) run great. Enjoy your Windows XPerience!
-
@amigaski
You replied to the same message twice; but anyway, my answer is the same as well-- you need to understand what a PC is. I am a low-level programmer; I hardly use the OS for anything. Whatever software I write is what is potentially possible with the PC
As I said in the same post you have just failed to comprehend before replying to, if you don't use the OS and bang the hardware, then WTF is stopping you using the CPU for precision timing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter)
Turn off clockspeed altering power saving modes or use the constant TSC if present. Create an asm function for timing. Lock your code to one core (on multicore) and write a busy loop with a suitable instruction to prevent OOO execution and count the bloody ticks until you hit the magic number you've determined based on the reported frequency of your TSC.
Quit your moaning about 850ns resolution hardware clocks. If you are a low level coder then the above tick timer should prove no problem. It should work on pretty much anything since the pentium.
Or, if all that is too much of a PITA, you could, assuming you have a reasonably recent PC, just use HPET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPET)
-
Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.
Of course! I'm not saying anything about the user base overall (which I think is very nice and unpretentious), but my experience tells me that the occasional nutter who still argues that the amiga is a more capable system than PC:s honestly holds that misinformed opinion in most cases.
Though, I must say, my experience should also tell me that reasoning rarely changes their mind, hehe.
-
Yeah, true... And this refusal to see and embrace evolution is what helped to kill the Amiga... People always refused to accept newer technologies. AGA sucks, GfxCard sucks, AHI sucks, paula can do better,... and in the software side: memory protection is performance killing,...
...
It's NOT refusal to see newer technologies, but looking at REALITY as it is. Just because a few big companies got together and made some superior graphics card and declared the previous standard "obsolete" does not make it obsolete in the REAL WORLD. Millions of people that still do not have that graphics card still have to be supported. Not everyone follows (nor should they follow) this vicious cycle of computer technology having to be upgraded every year or so. So the original point that when AGA came out, people still wrote for OCS/ECS is good and valid.
>And that's why people using an OS and a computer outdated in almost every aspect keep thinking it's better than monsters of technology created today...
It depends on what you want to do with it. If all I want to do is make some video titles on a video and I have the software on Amiga, there's no reason for me to go buy a PC because they just introduced a new graphics card that does 256MB/second over a new PCI Federal Express overnight delivery.
>Yeah, OS of today are heavier than Exec written 24 years ago... But there's no way Amiga could be used for anything productive. You do not reboot because a program crashed anymore. And guess what ? even Apple is doing multitasking nowadays...
That's your opinion. You have to maintain PCs as well as Amigas. In some cases, you better reboot when a program crashes in XP. But program crashing has nothing to do with hardware; well-behaved applications don't crash on Amiga nor on Windows XP.
>If you ask me, the lack of memory protection is an heavier handicap than having extra processes doing nothing (especially when seeing the power/memory we have today).
Even with memory protection, you still get spyware/viruses/etc. Misbehaved programs still exist and can be written.
-
There is no fscking "standard joystick gameport" on current PC hardware. Along with the parallel port, it has vanished into the hazy world of yesteryear. Where you live :p In case you didn't notice, it has all moved to USB in recent years. Now, USB is very slow compared to any internal bus, yes. However that makes absolutely no difference on a system where the communication with the USB device is arbitrated by hardware. My USB device sends a packet, the controller handles it, puts it into memory somewhere and issues an interrupt. Magic. It might not be ideal for your specific polling needs but I think you'll find its ideal for most peripherals.
...
Take it as USB or port I/O, they are both inferior to Amiga reading the joystick I/O port. Don't get pssed off now by cursing; you underestimated the Amiga; but it's okay, people make mistakes. You have to live with it. USB is better for block transfers. If you do single byte read of the status of a joystick, there's more overhead involved than reading an I/O port location (as is case with Amiga).
>There are people out there with 8-bit home computers still. It doesn't mean they aren't obsolete. A given technology essentially becomes obsolete when it ceases to be manufactured or improved upon.AGP was better than PCI for graphics specific applications, PCIe is better than both, is fully generic and has subsequently rendered them obsolete.
I defined what I meant by obsolete in previous message and in msg #113 which you are replying to. There are millions of users using AGP so it's not obsolete. Ideally, you want to support all machines being used, but companies make mistakes-- they can't get it right the first time so they have to keep improving their designs (or perhaps it's a marketing set-up in some cases).
>I'm fully understanding your argument that the Amiga's native hardware is ideal for your purpose of polling the joystick port at a precise interval and that you couldn't, for whatever reason, duplicate this on a PC. It's quite amusing that you assert this as your premier example of the Amiga is still in some way streets ahead of the PC, yet complained that my particle simulation was "too specific" a metric.
It wasn't my prime example; it's just one example that I thought would be easier to understand given Amiga users are familiar with joysticks. I stated that your particle simulation didn't address the point of joystick I/O (it was unrelated).
-
...
And no, TV sets aren't usually locked to 22 fps.
...
One thing interesting to note is that Amiga did do 30fps/60fps full screen (overscanned) and ran animations loaded from a floppy disk (880K). Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).
-
...
Nowadays, I just hate Macs ;)
...
Hey we have something in common. Macs should never have gone to intel processors because now it just boils down to which OS is better. They gave up that their hardware can compete with PCs.
>Finally, even though I would sooner spit on one at the time, I'd even have an Atari
Getting an Atari 800 may be an upgrade for you if you want to play games that are cycle exact and easier to control. By the way, Atari 800 joysticks read two joystick ports with one LDA instruction (LDA 54016) and takes 4 cycles at 1.78979Mhz. It beats any USB/Game Port joystick out there.
-
It's NOT refusal to see newer technologies, but looking at REALITY as it is. Just because a few big companies got together and made some superior graphics card and declared the previous standard "obsolete" does not make it obsolete in the REAL WORLD. Millions of people that still do not have that graphics card still have to be supported. Not everyone follows (nor should they follow) this vicious cycle of computer technology having to be upgraded every year or so. So the original point that when AGA came out, people still wrote for OCS/ECS is good and valid.
Well, reality is that Commodore may not have been dead if people had bought and developped for (new) AGA machines in mass... But I guess this is also Commodore's fault... They had to convince people, they failed to do so...
Of course it's not valid. When people still wrote 32 colours games, anything concurrent was displaying more colourful pics (be it the PC, SNES,...), and way more powerfull... How could the Amiga be compettitive this way ? Well, it couldn't. And that's what reality is about. This is just market/business. Of course people still used it. And of course people still bought ECS games (for a limited amount of time though). But a market that isn't dynamic is a dead market... Guess that's what happened.
-
By the way, Atari 800 joysticks read two joystick ports with one LDA instruction (LDA 54016) and takes 4 cycles at 1.78979Mhz. It beats any USB/Game Port joystick out there.
My question here is, who other than yourself actually cares about how fast they can read the joyport? This is one thing about your argument I really don't quite understand.
What is it you are doing that requires you to poll the joyport on a precision interval? Are you using some sort of homebrew measuring device on it?
-
Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps
At full HD 1080p ;)
, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).
Strange, hello world compiles to <5 K here, and that's with all the debugging crap left in.
-
@Linde
This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.
:)
Thats not my angle. I simply believe that relative to the hardware resources modern PC's are inferior to Amiga in responding to user coomands. Things that should not be slow on a PC are slow. There's far too much waiting to do simple things than there should be.
Heres another example: I'm on a c2d 2.4 ghz with 4 gig ram 512 gpu laptop. Vista. I go to Firefox menu bar and left click and move across the menu bar: there is a delay in the menu being drawn, I can FEEL the pointer sticking as the mneu is drawn, and as I drag the pointer along i can see the new menu being drawn top-down and bits of the previous menu being erased. This doesn't even happen on a 14 mhz 68020. Why? I read an Australian Commodore and Amiga review article circa 1995: Alta Vista ran on 10 CPU DEC alpha machine with total 6 gig ram. The same DEC alpha takes ten times longer to render a scene in Real 4D than an Athlon X2 2400, which is slower than my C2D. So I have a PC with hardware that was faster than that used by a THE major web search engine of a decade ago-but I still have to put up with delays in an app menu being drawn..
The lack of progress is just diappointing.
To the guys using 7 year old XP on current hardware: in 5 years time when you have a 16 core CPU running each at 3 ghz and 32 GIG RAM, 10 terrabytes of solid state hard drive space on a GPU with 8 gig video ram, I'm sure you'll think Vista is a speed demon too, except you'll still be seeing the start menu stutter, still have your 2 minute boots, still have your menus open slowly ON THE CURRENT MS OF THE TIME..
-
@stefcep2
The thing is, I stop reading when I get to "Vista", "XP" or anything else on your list of "it's so slow compared to the resources available." Windows is a heavyweight OS that basically tries to start everything and the kitchen sink at boot time. You can tune it if you want and it improves.
However, the catch is, I don't use Windows. I don't use PC's and Windows interchangably like some on the thread have done when they want to highlight what they consider as deficiencies on the PC. They aren't. They are defiencies in Windows and/or it's configuration. Take Windows out of the equation, shove a better OS - of which there are many to choose from - and you can see the raw speed of the machine.
Somebody earlier all but called me a liar for saying firefox 3 starts "instantly" on this machine. I actually took 0.14 seconds, so yeah, I guess I exaggerated. Under Vista, on the same physical box it took about 5 seconds to launch. Clearly the OS performance is a huge factor when it comes to the end user experience.
Seems to me like most "PC" critics here only have experience of one or more flavours of Windows.
Try a different operating system
-
Well, reality is that Commodore may not have been dead if people had bought and developped for (new) AGA machines in mass... But I guess this is also Commodore's fault... They had to convince people, they failed to do so...
Of course it's not valid. When people still wrote 32 colours games, anything concurrent was displaying more colourful pics (be it the PC, SNES,...), and way more powerfull... How could the Amiga be compettitive this way ? Well, it couldn't. And that's what reality is about. This is just market/business. Of course people still used it. And of course people still bought ECS games (for a limited amount of time though). But a market that isn't dynamic is a dead market... Guess that's what happened.
It's always going to be hard for smaller companies to keep up with bigger companies in dynamic situations. Amiga didn't become obsolete-- it's just the company went bankrupt so further development/research stopped. People can do their research, but the current innovations aren't making that big of an impact on the average user like going from 16-bit to 32-bit processors or ISA to VESA/PCI or EGA -> VGA. I have a 2.8Ghz system, 32-bit system. I don't see much point in going for a 64-bit system if it has problems with backward compatibility and isn't going to have much impact on what I currently use the system for.
-
My question here is, who other than yourself actually cares about how fast they can read the joyport? This is one thing about your argument I really don't quite understand.
What is it you are doing that requires you to poll the joyport on a precision interval? Are you using some sort of homebrew measuring device on it?
That's one example where it's a breeze to not only read the joystick on Amiga but also read it with high precision timing. Gaming with joysticks was an afterthought on PCs as even gameport was usually on an add-on board. Gaming was a central concept on Amiga/Atari machines so more relevant. It all adds up-- joystick I/O, timer IRQs, etc. not just for me, for everyone. Don't worry, "I have not yet begun to fight." Just going to finish up this point before addressing other points. A gameport uses analog joysticks and requires 1ms+ worse case read-time to get status of joystick directions. This at 1 Khz would use up all the CPU time whereas on Amiga, it would hardly effect system performance even if performed with high precision timing. Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion. Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.
-
Heres another example: I'm on a c2d 2.4 ghz with 4 gig ram 512 gpu laptop. Vista. I go to Firefox menu bar and left click and move across the menu bar: there is a delay in the menu being drawn, I can FEEL the pointer sticking as the mneu is drawn, and as I drag the pointer along i can see the new menu being drawn top-down and bits of the previous menu being erased. This doesn't even happen on a 14 mhz 68020. Why? ...
To the guys using 7 year old XP on current hardware: in 5 years time...
Yet here, on my 7 year old PC with PentiumIV 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, 32MB graphics (no gpu), XP Pro SP3, Firefox 3 -- there is no such faffing, the menus are fine, they just appear in full form, no appreciable delays, no funny drawing, it's all good. So it doesn't sound like it's either the hardware OR the older OS that is to blame. Maybe you've got yours configured badly?
-
One thing interesting to note is that Amiga did do 30fps/60fps full screen (overscanned) and ran animations loaded from a floppy disk (880K). Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).
Sorry, but what does size optimization have to do with speed? That misconception takes away any relevance your argument might have had. Mind you, though, most of the games I play update the screen well faster than the monitor is able to. The reason that there might be some slowdown is that there is generally a lot more going on behind Far Cry 2 than Lotus III. And why would anyone link MFC to a "simple" Hello World?
Regarding "running animations from a floppy disk"... The PC too has a demo scene, and some of the best programmers cram down pretty damn impressive (real-time) animations with sound and music in less than 1k. Pretty hard to imagine happening on the Amiga, no?
Amiga didn't become obsolete-- it's just the company went bankrupt so further development/research stopped.
The A1200 was pretty weak compared to contemporary PC's which had already done fluid 256 color graphics and 16 bit multi-channel sound for some time (even an 8 channel 16-bit stereo consumer sound card had popped up a few months before).
Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion.
Really? And no, doing it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance on a multi GHz multi-core processor either way, but it would certainly be a waste of cycles to sample it that often.
Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.
If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port (and yes, I've done that (http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/4981/interfacew.jpg) too (http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/6053/joyport.jpg).) why not compare it to USB 3.0? Let's just say that it's in a different league when it comes to high precision timing.
-
@stefcep2
The thing is, I stop reading when I get to "Vista", "XP" or anything else on your list of "it's so slow compared to the resources available." Windows is a heavyweight OS that basically tries to start everything and the kitchen sink at boot time. You can tune it if you want and it improves.
However, the catch is, I don't use Windows. I don't use PC's and Windows interchangably like some on the thread have done when they want to highlight what they consider as deficiencies on the PC. They aren't. They are defiencies in Windows and/or it's configuration. Take Windows out of the equation, shove a better OS - of which there are many to choose from - and you can see the raw speed of the machine.
Somebody earlier all but called me a liar for saying firefox 3 starts "instantly" on this machine. I actually took 0.14 seconds, so yeah, I guess I exaggerated. Under Vista, on the same physical box it took about 5 seconds to launch. Clearly the OS performance is a huge factor when it comes to the end user experience.
Try a different operating system
Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS. That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC". No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as). And yes I made the point about the mismatch between the user-experience and the hardware specs on modern PC's, and ofcourse this has to be down to the OS ie Windows. Afterall its the OS that lets you make the hardware do things. You therefore can't isolate the hardware and "say yes i have a responsive computer because I have fast hardware". Amiga was never just about the hardware, and never just about the OS, but rather it was about the sum of these: thats what determines the user experience. Microsoft and Apple(less so) are still yet to learn this.
-
I think everyone has made good arguments.
I didn't mean to start a flame war. I meant for people to suggest what would be different if Amiga was the benchmark OS/Hardware of the 21st century. Seeing how Mr Miner is no longer with us, we will never truly know.
Mr Haynie had his way of doing things we could further argue whether or not that was how Amiga should have progressed (Multi-cpu, home theatre etc.)
I thinks its important that we accomodate a 'headless chicken' approach of doing things. That way everyone gets their 2 cents in.
-
Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS. That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC". No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).
Not where I come from, no. A PC running Linux is a PC running Linux ("PC running Linux" and "Linux box" aren't mutually exclusive, you see). As I know it, PC usually refers to the IBM PC compatibles and their current "descendants".
So the whole thing boils down to you grasping for some flawed definition to back your point up. And no, I don't think that Wintel PCs are playing catchup either.
Amiga was never just about the hardware, and never just about the OS, but rather it was about the sum of these: thats what determines the user experience. Microsoft and Apple(less so) are still yet to learn this.
Yes, monolithic system design is the way of the future. Sigh.
-
Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS. That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC". No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).
I totally disagree.
A "Linux Box" where I come from means a box running linux. That can mean anything from a ARM powered Gumstix to a PS3 console, let alone commodity PC's and laptops. People say "Macs", because they've always said it. PowerPC based Macs were called "PowerMacs" for a while to differentiate them from their 68K predecessors. When Apple moved to intel lots of people started using the phrase "intel Mac", though it hasn't really caught on.
If the term PC can be nailed to any one thing it's a hardware x86/AMD64 CPU based computer. PC's have always been able to run more than one operating system.
If anything, I tend to call a PC running WIndows a "windows box". The days when windows ran on non x86/AMD64 cpus are long gone.
-
I have stayed out of this topic, but I agree with Karlos quite a bit on what he's been saying. There are a lot of modern pitfalls in both PCs and Mac that don't exist with Amigas, but honestly if I had to say it my PC today lets me do 1000 times more (and when you boot up actually doing 1000 more things in the background that you don't know about) and working faster in realtime than I could ever do on Classic Amiga hardware and still quite a bit on newer A1 technology.
The problem befalling the newer Amiga hardware is that it's based on older hardware bus standards and the support for things like GPUs and shaders and 3D is still not quite where it needs to be.
Part of the issue is access to the technologies. Most newer Amiga development for GPU has been dependent on information that is available via the "open source" community and firms who don't like to work with them providing information so things like drivers and APIs could be written..
For instance, I haven't used a Radeon 7000 series card in a number of years on a PC. Today everything has went PCI Express.. There are two types of PCI Express cards one with a smaller connector for most major peripherals with all the speed of current USB standards for internal cards. When people think PCI-E here they mainly think new graphics card with one of the smaller connectors and a larger connector attached.
Regular PCI bus is dead and considered legacy in current PCs just like ISA was on AT bus machines..
USB standards are a changing too. Wireless USB is on the horizon which means no more cords for everyone.. By the end of the year a 256 core PC that will be affordable to home/business users is SLATED for release..
My current laptop has 6 gigabytes of RAM , a 500GB internal hard drive and a dual core CPU with 64-bit instruction set and hardware virtualization built-in..
I run Windows 7 with Virtual XP in the background it takes up 256MB to 512MBs and I don't even know it's running. The old 32 bit apps can be run in a virtual screen or integrated along with the Windows 7 apps. I usually install things in Windows 7 versus Virtual XP because the apps run better and faster, whereas Virtual XP is there just for older apps that misbehave or are 16bit applications (I still have two old animation programs from that time period that I love. One is from Jim Kent, who wrote many Amiga animation programs).
Along side that, I run Linux (ubuntu) in a virtual machine on it's own full screen right along side the XP virtual machine, and I have AROS x86 and WinUAE running as well. It's the best of both worlds for me..
For a living I do WPF, and Silverlight applications (yes silverlight apps now run in and out of the web browser and work on PCs, Intel Macs, and soon should run on Linux) and web applications..
The reality of all of this is on this one machine I can run everything and it doesn't matter the cpu, the OS whatever. It just all runs. The machine is a 2.4 GHz CPU so it plays blu-ray DVDs as well.
Do I have viruses and issues, I really haven't, nor have I had viruses since I installed the Vista OS.. Of course I went completely 64-bit and I don't surf to porn site and filesharing sites to download software that I don't own or try to pirate things. There is a lesson to be learned here. I used an alternative virus checker not Norton/Symantec or McAffee. I use something called Avast that is made in Europe. Why these guys are ontop of their game, and they see most of the malware that is written. Most people writing viruses and malware immediately attempt to disable the top two programs that are sold out there. I have no worries with Avast (avast.com)..
My first virus ever was a boot block one and it happened on an Amiga. I have also found viruses on Mac OSX. Why don't we see them on linux, well that's the favored OS of most of the virus/malware writers..
Everytime my PC boots I am running background services (called deamons by some other OSes), like a web server and a SQL server. I honestly don't even notice they are there..
The people who complain the loudest about the PC are usually fanboys of other platforms who are "religious" about their OS experience, and people who have gaps in knowledge about their OS and how to get help not to have issues.. There are user groups and places they could go to learn. Most of them don't because they don't have time and just want to get things done. The only computer I was ever religious about was the classic Amiga, but PCs improved and I was part of the folks who marched that platform forward.
I still have a soft spot for the Amiga, but could never find a newer AmigaOne in stock anywhere to buy one or find the hardware to upgrade my four classic Amigas to run the Power PC version of the OS here where I live..
I think Hyperion has done a great job with AmigaOS, but they only have so much access to info and technology that has stayed proprietary to them. The Amiga OS needs to undergo fundamental change to get further along..
Things needed:
Better full gpu support and drivers and hardware support for PCI-E and USB standards. I think Displayport will have a difficult time catching on because HDMI is so popular with TVs..
full multi-user support..
More sound support
Support for multiple cores
the Move to 64-bit CPUs running as a 64 bit OS
Better WIFI support..
Who's CPU it is really doesn't matter anymore, they are fast enough to do anything now.. Intel would keep them riding the curve as new things come out, but in the abscence of that support for newer bus standards and virtualization technologies.
I wish AmigaOS and the platform would move forward but no one seems to think the R&D investment is worth it..
-Don
-
Yet here, on my 7 year old PC with PentiumIV 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, 32MB graphics (no gpu), XP Pro SP3, Firefox 3 -- there is no such faffing, the menus are fine, they just appear in full form, no appreciable delays, no funny drawing, it's all good. So it doesn't sound like it's either the hardware OR the older OS that is to blame. Maybe you've got yours configured badly?
No its Vista, the current OS running on current hardware( 2 months old). But I'm sure in 5 years time Vista will fly on that hardware.
-
But a computer runnings Windows is a PC right? So...
Or maybe it's an "iPC", imPersonal Computer?
-
No its Vista, the current OS running on current hardware( 2 months old). But I'm sure in 5 years time Vista will fly on that hardware.
Something has to be wrong there.
My machine is nearly a year old now. Admittedly it was pretty high-spec when I built it but I wanted something that was going to last a while.
intel Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz
intel X48 chipset
4GB DDR3 1600 (running at 1333 but with 7-7-7 latency)
500GB Seagate HDD
XFX GTX260 640MHz version
As I said earlier, I do use Vista (64-bit home premium ed) whenever I want to indulge in a spot of gaming. Admittedly, it's not as responsive as Linux, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, not by any stretch of the imagination.
-
Not where I come from, no. A PC running Linux is a PC running Linux ("PC running Linux" and "Linux box" aren't mutually exclusive, you see). As I know it, PC usually refers to the IBM PC compatibles and their current "descendants".
So the whole thing boils down to you grasping for some flawed definition to back your point up. And no, I don't think that Wintel PCs are playing catchup either.
Yes, monolithic system design is the way of the future. Sigh.
I always referred to Windows. Yes I can get Puppy Linux to fly on an x86 PC. Thsfact is 95% of PC user have no idea what Linux even is. Witness the Ubuntu netbooks that got sent back when people realised its not what they were used to ie Windows. You're a computer hobbyist, Karlos is an advanced computer user, neither of you are representative of the average computer user. Most people would have no idea what x86 means. To most people "PC" means a computer with Windows on it. And no I've done Linux, its multitasking is worse than Windows and definatley worse than Amiga.
-
And no I've done Linux, its multitasking is worse than Windows and definatley worse than Amiga.
Now I know you are having a giraffe. What was it, a version 1 kernel on a 486?
-
Something has to be wrong there.
My machine is nearly a year old now. Admittedly it was pretty high-spec when I built it but I wanted something that was going to last a while.
intel Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz
intel X48 chipset
4GB DDR3 1600 (running at 1333 but with 7-7-7 latency)
500GB Seagate HDD
XFX GTX260 640MHz version
As I said earlier, I do use Vista (64-bit home premium ed) whenever I want to indulge in a spot of gaming. Admittedly, it's not as responsive as Linux, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, not by any stretch of the imagination.
FFS Karlos!!!! Look at your specs. You don't have a garden variety PC there. It runs Vista ok? No kidding!! Keep throwing a gazillion CPU's and gigabytes of super fast RAM, ANYTHING will fly. Thats the point.
-
FFS Karlos!!!! Look at your specs. You don't have a garden variety PC there. It runs Vista ok? No kidding!! Keep throwing a gazillion CPU's and gigabytes of super fast RAM, ANYTHING will fly. Thats the point.
I didn't suggest it was a garden variety, merely recent. Less recent than yours, too. Ironically it cost about the same to build as the A1. Less if you factor in inflation :-o
What do you regard as a "garden variety" specification PC anyway?
I've used also Vista 32-bit with no problem on a 1.86 GHz core 2 duo, 2GB with 128MB Radeon X300. It was still perfectly snappy.
-
......running at 1333 but with 7-7-7 latency)
I think the memory standard guys missed a trick here. They could have made it 1337.:lol:
-
I think the memory standard guys missed a trick here. They could have made it 1337.:lol:
I have been itching to try it at 6-6-6, just to see what happens...
-
I have been itching to try it at 6-6-6, just to see what happens...
I set my memory timing to something stupidly low (especially given the cheapness of my RAM modules).. the machine just got stuck into a reset cycle... I had to reset the BIOS to restore.
-
FFS Karlos!!!! Look at your specs. You don't have a garden variety PC there. It runs Vista ok? No kidding!! Keep throwing a gazillion CPU's and gigabytes of super fast RAM, ANYTHING will fly. Thats the point.
What about running Vista in VirtualPC on a single core 2200mhz AMD with a gig of RAM, already running XP as the host?
I do that on a pretty regular basis, and Vista works fine.
-
I set my memory timing to something stupidly low (especially given the cheapness of my RAM modules).. the machine just got stuck into a reset cycle... I had to reset the BIOS to restore.
My motherboard has "dual bios", so that shouldn't be a problem. You can roll back any destructive change.
-
I have been itching to try it at 6-6-6, just to see what happens...
I don't think it will even break a sweat TBH. But why the DEVIL would you want to do that?:hammer:
-
My motherboard has "dual bios", so that shouldn't be a problem. You can roll back any destructive change.
Oh... So we are gonna have a "My BIOS is bigger than your's" argument eh? Fine... most of my machines use EFI... hmmm that's probably not something I want to brag about :roflmao:
-
I don't think it will even break a sweat TBH. But why the DEVIL would you want to do that?:hammer:
Well, Diablo III is coming out soon...
-
Well, Diablo III is coming out soon...
I know someone who incorporated his company on the 6th June 2006.
...But I digress further off topiic
-
@Karlos
Set your RAM:FSB ratio to 1:1 and then you'll be able to get some uber low latencies :cool:
-
That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...
... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.
Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.
Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.
Hi,
@trev
Sorry but my real time is real time not user perception, I mean time with stop watches doing real tasks like printing out a database, or printing out a letter. So far in three tests with both users turning on their computers at the same time, the Amiga has managed to send its preassigned letter to the printer faster than my Q6600 windows box gaming pc or my Q6600 Penquin machine. These were also timed with a stopwatch during the time of these tests (real time) no gigaflops, megaflops, bips, sips, or sh*ts just true man hour working time from time of turn on to process complete. Of course the Amiga cannot do trillions of math calcs a second, it wasn't made for that, it was made for a home computer fanatic to print a letter or make a database. now lets talk keeping your data safe, the Amiga 4000 has had my data on it since 1993, can you say the same about your then modern 286 or 386, oh you don't have that machine yet, it is obsolete, already in the trash, well even if you did I doubt that windows 3.1 still has your data since it was well known for crashing, but lets face it PC's keep a lot of people employed for solving problems when their machines do crash. These people are called IT experts, they come to your machine and solve your problem, usually with an re-install of winblows. Now Linux is different I have not had a crash on Linux during the last 3 years, and therefore have lost no data. Even through numerous upgrades, as a matter of fact I am using Ubuntu for this post on an old Toshiba laptop running at 1.1 gighertz with a 20 gig hard drive and 384 meg of memory. Windows 7 turned it down today because it needs 512 meg just to run.
I am not an Amiga Fan Boy, I just like the machine for what it does and it still amazes me today for what it does and what it can still do with upgrades, at least it is not in the trash like most of your 286 / 386 machines, that alone should tell you something, by the way have you found a 286.org site yet.
smerf
-
Sorry, but what does size optimization have to do with speed? That misconception takes away any relevance your argument might have had. Mind you, though, most of the games I play update the screen well faster than the monitor is able to. The reason that there might be some slowdown is that there is generally a lot more going on behind Far Cry 2 than Lotus III. And why would anyone link MFC to a "simple" Hello World?
...
Do you bother to read the posts that you reply to? Looks like not in this case. I stated not many people optimize programs (which is a fact): "Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC)."
I just compiled a hello world program and it was 1 MB; doesn't mean all compilers do that or you can't change the settings and eliminate the MFC. As far as your blunder that size has no relation to speed, ever check MPEG videos. If they were uncompressed, it would affect the speed. I am surprised to hear this argument from a PC enthusiast since PC memory speed is slower than processor speed so dealing with compressed animations and decompressing them with a fast algorithm would be preferred over uncompressed animations.
>Regarding "running animations from a floppy disk"... The PC too has a demo scene, and some of the best programmers cram down pretty damn impressive (real-time) animations with sound and music in less than 1k. Pretty hard to imagine happening on the Amiga, no?
I'll guarantee that it won't work with nonstandard hardware on everyone's PCs.
>The A1200 was pretty weak compared to contemporary PC's which had already done fluid 256 color graphics and 16 bit multi-channel sound for some time (even an 8 channel 16-bit stereo consumer sound card had popped up a few months before).
You seemed to missed some posts in this thread (or ignored them). Just because some 8-channel 16-bit card is available does NOT mean that everyone has it or that you can utilize it in comparing Amiga with PC. With new hardware add-ons, any computer can do anything. Talk about hardware that's available to most homes and compare with that-- then you can write some application and know that it will work on 99% of PCs out there.
>Really? And no, doing it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance on a multi GHz multi-core processor either way, but it would certainly be a waste of cycles to sample it that often.
Bullcrap. You have NO understanding of the gameport nor I/O timing on PCs. I/O is much much slower than even memory. I suggest you try to time the gameport yourself. And no, gameport is NOT obsolete because Vista doesn't have a driver for it. It exists out there in millions of homes. It was on the PCI surround sound Mag Dog Audio board I purchased a couple of years ago. It's NOT a waste of cycles to sample at 1Khz or above. I wrote a joystick recorder program and the time between changes of direction/firing goes to less than 1 ms in some cases for games like River-raid and others. I can say sampling audio at 44Khz is a WASTE of space, but it's required to capture all possible audible frequencies. Similarly, sampling joystick at 60Hz is NOT good enough.
>If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port (and yes, I've done that (http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/4981/interfacew.jpg) too (http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/6053/joyport.jpg).) why not compare it to USB 3.0? Let's just say that it's in a different league when it comes to high precision timing.
Are you like confused? USB 3.0 has NOTHING to do with high precision timing. USB 3.0 is a specification; it's not out there in any joysticks. Show me a joystick that uses USB 2.0! Once again comparing Amiga with nonexistent products or products that hardly anyone has. Get real.
-
I have stayed out of this topic, but I agree with Karlos quite a bit on what he's been saying. There are a lot of modern pitfalls in both PCs and Mac that don't exist with Amigas, but honestly if I had to say it my PC today lets me do 1000 times more (and when you boot up actually doing 1000 more things in the background that you don't know about) and working faster in realtime than I could ever do on Classic Amiga hardware and still quite a bit on newer A1 technology.
...
Nice story (with some speculations), but the point was is PC playing catch-up in some areas when compared to Amiga. For example, what has been mentioned so far is in split-screens VGA standard only supports two split screens. Amiga joystick ports are superior to PCs. Amiga boots up faster. And a few more things will be mentioned...
>The people who complain the loudest about the PC are usually fanboys of other platforms who are "religious" about their OS experience, and people who have gaps in knowledge about their OS and how to get help not to have issues..
Usually. And in other cases its people who know more about both platforms.
>There are user groups and places they could go to learn.
Or teach.
-
@Karlos
Set your RAM:FSB ratio to 1:1 and then you'll be able to get some uber low latencies :cool:
It is. The FSB is 1333. If I ever overclock, I have some headroom in the RAM.
-
It is. The FSB is 1333. If I ever overclock, I have some headroom in the RAM.
Think base frequency, not QDR or DDR, your FSB has a base frequency of 333 (4 x 333 = ~1333) and your RAM has a base frequency of 667 (2 x 667 = ~1333), at the moment you are running 1:2, try underclocking the RAM to a base frequency of 333 and then drop your latencies.
-
Amiga joystick ports are superior to PCs. Amiga boots up faster. And a few more things will be mentioned...
Re: Joyport / Parallel port. Current PC's don't have either port to compare against. Your inability to use your "low level" coding skills to write an accurate timer for x86/HPET is no reflection on the hardware..
Re: bootup times:
From cold, timed this morning:
My A1200T (25MHz 68040, 240MHz 603e, 256MB 60ns RAM, BVisionPPC)
SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Initial startup, 3.9 ROM loading: 4 sec
Reboot pause: 3 sec
SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Startup: 26 sec
End of WBStartup activity: 5 sec
Grand total: 62 sec
PC:
POST Test: 5sec
DPMI Verification: 3 sec
GRUB wait for user select: 10 sec
Linux Kernel decompression&initialisation: 1 sec
Startup to login screen: 22 sec
End of post login window manager activity: 3 sec
Grand total: 44 sec
Waiting for stuff occupies the lion's share of both. Suffice to say, no matter how fast a CPU is, they all wait at the same speed...
Or teach.
Or talk bollox.
-
I'll post the A1 boot time when I have a moment, right now I need to get ready for work. I suspect it'll be the fastest of all of them.
-
Think base frequency, not QDR or DDR, your FSB has a base frequency of 333 (4 x 333 = ~1333) and your RAM has a base frequency of 667 (2 x 667 = ~1333), at the moment you are running 1:2, try underclocking the RAM to a base frequency of 333 and then drop your latencies.
-edit-
Scratch that, it's already running at 333x8 (dual channel interleaved). DDR3 latencies, eh?
-
I didn't suggest it was a garden variety, merely recent. Less recent than yours, too. Ironically it cost about the same to build as the A1. Less if you factor in inflation :-o
When your PC was made is not relevant IF you go out and buy the top of the range (or near) hardware you can get at the time. When XP came many new PC's were being sold with 128 meg ram ,then 256 meg and 18 months ago a mate of mine bought a Dell PC with XP and 512 meg. Its pitifully slow and unresponsive.
I think you have neatly summarised your argument: Basically what you are saying is: " You have this PC with high-end CPU ram, MB, graphics card, all of which which you have tweaked/overclocked, you are running an OS that is not mainstream, probably hacked and slashed for performance, all probably at an increased risk of stability, and now you are happy that you can match the responsiveness of a stock standard A1200 running at 14 mhz with 4 meg ram". If you see nothing wrong with this, then good luck to you.
-
Re: Joyport / Parallel port. Current PC's don't have either port to compare against. Your inability to use your "low level" coding skills to write an accurate timer for x86/HPET is no reflection on the hardware..
Re: bootup times:
From cold, timed this morning:
My A1200T (25MHz 68040, 240MHz 603e, 256MB 60ns RAM, BVisionPPC)
SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Initial startup, 3.9 ROM loading: 4 sec
Reboot pause: 3 sec
SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Startup: 26 sec
End of WBStartup activity: 5 sec
Grand total: 62 sec
PC:
POST Test: 5sec
DPMI Verification: 3 sec
GRUB wait for user select: 10 sec
Linux Kernel decompression&initialisation: 1 sec
Startup to login screen: 22 sec
End of post login window manager activity: 3 sec
Grand total: 44 sec
Waiting for stuff occupies the lion's share of both. Suffice to say, no matter how fast a CPU is, they all wait at the same speed...
Or talk bollox.
You have a Frankenstein A1200.
My system: A1200, 68060, 32 meg ram, OS 3.1 (Magic menu, tools menu, magicwb, toolmanager docks, 1 gig flash card):
Boot up time when hard drive light stops and i can use the OS without delays, stutters :4.0 seconds.
Shut down: flick of a switch ( how fast can you do that)
Good luck beating that.
-
You have a Frankenstein A1200.
No, I have an expanded A1200. Nothing frankenstein about it. The PPC card is a standard trapdoor expansion. I'm using the basic IDE port.
My system: A1200, 68060, 32 meg ram, OS 3.1 (Magic menu, tools menu, magicwb, toolmanager docks, 1 gig flash card):
Boot up time when hard drive light stops and i can use the OS without delays, stutters :4.0 seconds.
You are using OS3.1. Try upgrading to OS3.9. Frankly I'm shocked you haven't. Call yourself an Amiga user?
Besides, my boot times were from switching the machine on from cold. Any sucker can quote their boot time from the moment the OS starts booting. If I do that after a fresh reboot from RAD I can get it down to about 6 seconds, on the 040 which is ~1/3 the speed of the 060.
Shut down: flick of a switch ( how fast can you do that)
Good luck beating that.
The 1200 and A1 can be switched off like that. So can the PC, as long as you don't mind corrupting your data, which is equally possible on the Amiga if disk writes are happening :rolleyes:
-
No, I have an expanded A1200. Nothing frankenstein about it. The PPC card is a standard trapdoor expansion. I'm using the basic IDE port.
The PPC card is NOT standard anything. It is a rare add-on, that was intended to act as bridge in the Amiga's move away from 68K to PPC. The owner of Amiga had no input or control over it.There are major performance bottlenecks that occur in that card due to to context switches, especially when you run 68 k software, the PPC has no caches etc, the memory busses are designed to work with a 68K CPU in mind. Stick to Classic Amiga ie 68K for a valid comparison.
You are using OS3.1. Try upgrading to OS3.9. Frankly I'm shocked you haven't. Call yourself an Amiga user?
I upgraded when OS 3.5 and later OS 3.9 came out. I have it installed on my A4000 68060. It boots in 7 seconds because it loads cybergrpahx. There is no functional advantage for me to use OS 3.9 on my A1200.
Besides, my boot times were from switching the machine on from cold.
So are mine.
The 1200 and A1 can be switched off like that. So can the PC, as long as you don't mind corrupting your data, which is equally possible on the Amiga if disk writes are happening :rolleyes:
Not EQUALLY POSSIBLE especially if you use PFS 3 or SFS or, if you use FFS, you wait, lets see, 1 second to make sure your hard drive light isn't on (oh yeah there's no swap file read/write nonsense going so hard drive writing occurs when you are saving something, which the user would know about. As an side you of course know your PC is slowly but surely killing your hard drive: my 40 MB 2.5" seagate on my A1200 is still OK as is my 120 MB Seaget from the A4000..I have several 20 Gig dead drives courtesy of Win 98..)
-
-edit-
Scratch that, it's already running at 333x8 (dual channel interleaved). DDR3 latencies, eh?
Eh? :lol:
Try running the CPU at 7 x 400 (QDR1600), that'll put you at 2.8GHz, you shouldn't need any voltage adjustments, then drop your RAM to 400MHz (DDR800) and theoretically you shouldn't have any troubles running your RAM latencies at 4-4-4-12. Or then again, you could just leave it all stock ;)
-
I'd like to see how long it takes an 060 (or even a 240MHz 603e) to open a 78MP (446MB) TIFF image, just for comparison, it took me 4 seconds ;)
-
Try running your PC without the level 1 cache, it is like applying the handbrake while you've got the pedal to the floor.
Do that with your 030/040/060 on Amiga and the OS speed penalty is marginal. Due to the on board co-processors. It's unique to Amiga.
I also have a Power Mac with OS8 it's slow down is caused by turning on pop-up help.
There are some arguments against the PC design. The availability of an 'OS co-processor' card could settle that.
-
The PPC card is NOT standard anything. It is a rare add-on, that was intended to act as bridge in the Amiga's move away from 68K to PPC. The owner of Amiga had no input or control over it.There are major performance bottlenecks that occur in that card due to to context switches, especially when you run 68 k software, the PPC has no caches etc, the memory busses are designed to work with a 68K CPU in mind. Stick to Classic Amiga ie 68K for a valid comparison.
In case you hadn't noticed, the PPC board has a 68K processor that runs pretty much everything in OS3.x. The PPC itself is totally irrelevant as regards the boot time.
So are mine.
You said "from the moment the hard disk light goes out".
Not EQUALLY POSSIBLE especially if you use PFS 3 or SFS or, if you use FFS, ... *snip*
There's no swap file because you don't get any virtual memory support in 3.x. One other basic feature taken for granted on pretty much every other modern OS.
-
Eh? :lol:
Try running the CPU at 7 x 400 (QDR1600), that'll put you at 2.8GHz, you shouldn't need any voltage adjustments, then drop your RAM to 400MHz (DDR800) and theoretically you shouldn't have any troubles running your RAM latencies at 4-4-4-12. Or then again, you could just leave it all stock ;)
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM)
Latencies
While the typical latencies for a JEDEC DDR2 device were 5-5-5-15, the standard latencies for the JEDEC DDR3 devices are 7-7-7-20 for DDR3-1066 and 7-7-7-24 for DDR3-1333.
DDR3 latencies are numerically higher because the clock cycles by which they are measured are shorter; the actual time interval is similar to DDR2 latencies (around 10 ns). There is some improvement because DDR3 generally uses more recent manufacturing processes, but this is not directly caused by the change to DDR3.
As with earlier memory generations, faster DDR3 memory became available after the release of the initial versions. DDR3-2000 memory with 9-9-9-28 latency (9 ns) was available in time to coincide with the Intel Core i7 release.[7] CAS latency of 9 at 1000 MHz (DDR3-2000) is 9 ns, while CAS latency of 7 at 667 MHz (DDR3-1333) is 10.5 ns.
That makes 6-6-6-21 (the current settings) look pretty good from here...
-
In case you hadn't noticed, the PPC board has a 68K processor that runs pretty much everything in OS3.x. The PPC itself is totally irrelevant as regards the boot time.
Is it? I seem to recall that the 68040 on a ppc card was slower at the same clock speed than a non-ppc 68040.
You said "from the moment the hard disk light goes out".
To mark the end of the boot process on the Amiga, and to distinguish it from PC's which are still loading stuff off hard drive and people say the PC has stopped booting coz they can bring up a stuttering start menu
There's no swap file because you don't get any virtual memory support in 3.x. One other basic feature taken for granted on pretty much every other modern OS.
you don't need virtual memory when you have a very efficient OS and lean apps. And if you really want it you can still do it. *I* have NEVER run out of RAM, but I concede someone somewhere out there might need more than 128 meg. In which case virtual memory can be done.
Tell me Karlos, with 4 GB of ram running at 1333 mhz and 4 CPU cores with caches that are big enough to hold the entire AmigaOS 3.1, why does your PC need a swap file even when you have nothing but a clock utility loaded? Surely there's enough RAM there, and its faster just to load stuff in and out of your superfast, huge capacity RAM and CPU Caches rather than reading and writing to an albeit superfast Hard drive?
-
I'd like to see how long it takes an 060 (or even a 240MHz 603e) to open a 78MP (446MB) TIFF image, just for comparison, it took me 4 seconds ;)
That settles it then...
-
That makes 6-6-6-21 (the current settings) look pretty good from here...
Yah, 6-6-6-21 is nothing to be sneezed at, now overclock that sucker!!! :D
-
Is it? I seem to recall that the 68040 on a ppc card was slower at the same clock speed than a non-ppc 68040.
Only when the PPC is accessing memory and the 68K wants to. Otherwise not really. The PPC cache is ample enough that the critical bits of the warpos kernel can fit in there whilst it's doing nothing.
-
Yah, 6-6-6-21 is nothing to be sneezed at, now overclock that sucker!!! :D
When the CPU is cheaper to replace, I'll do it :lol:
-
When the CPU is cheaper to replace, I'll do it :lol:
Chicken...buck-buck-buckaw! :lol:
-
That settles it then...
No, just offering a real life example, not much point in only comparing boot times is there?
edit...Wonder how many negative points this thread will earn me :lol: :lol: :lol:
-
My Atari ST has build-in midi-ports, the whole OS is on ROM and 68000 runs at 8mhz. It is better than amiga and pc combined!!111!!!1!!11!!
-
Chicken...buck-buck-buckaw! :lol:
Stock intel CPU cooler, you see. Having said that, it isn't bad. I haven't seen it go over 45C yet.
-
@amigaski
As I said in the same post you have just failed to comprehend before replying to, if you don't use the OS and bang the hardware, then WTF is stopping you using the CPU for precision timing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter)
Turn off clockspeed altering power saving modes or use the constant TSC if present. Create an asm function for timing. Lock your code to one core (on multicore) and write a busy loop with a suitable instruction to prevent OOO execution and count the bloody ticks until you hit the magic number you've determined based on the reported frequency of your TSC.
...
You forget the other problems associated with RDTSC. I am familiar with RDTSC as I mentioned it in the very post you are replying to (post #113). You claimed it's accurate to a few machine cycles but that's complete rubbish. In order to use in a generic way, you have to calibrate the RDTSC to the processor you are running on. The calibration requires another timer; thus dropping your accuracy down to the accuracy of the 2ndary timer. RDTSC is not always running at CPU frequency; some have tied to bus clock. Power management affects it and there's no way to shut that down on some systems and on a Toshiba Tecra where I did shut down the power management the system became hot as the fan did not turn on and the system shut-down. There are also SMIs implemented in some systems which cannot be disabled via applications and they cause frequency shifts and also halt tick counts during some C-states of the processor. What constant TSC are you talking about? So far on all the processors I have tried, RDTSC varies according to processor speed and the frequency of processor speed isn't some exact 90.00000Mhz.
>Quit your moaning about 850ns resolution hardware clocks. If you are a low level coder then the above tick timer should prove no problem. It should work on pretty much anything since the pentium.
Sorry, even if I use RDTSC and somehow avoid the above-mentioned problems, it's accuracy is the accuracy of the timer used to calibrate it-- 840ns for PIT. So problem remains.
>Or, if all that is too much of a PITA, you could, assuming you have a reasonably recent PC, just use HPET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPET)[/QUOTE]
The fact that they introduced the HPET which runs at lower frequency than RDTSC should tell you that RDTSC proved to be not that reliable. HPET is not present on my latest 2.8Ghz machine so not worth using it since that means it won't be present on majority of PCs. There are other issues that affect it's accuracy as well.
-
Re: Joyport / Parallel port. Current PC's don't have either port to compare against. Your inability to use your "low level" coding skills to write an accurate timer for x86/HPET is no reflection on the hardware..
...
A few people here in this thread have referred to items that are NEW or nonexistent (exist in spec only). Those are useless for a common application. I have written accurate timer using 8253 under Windows XP, but it's accuracy is 840ns (less than an Amiga). Amiga's accuracy is 558ns and HPET cannot be used to compare with it and RDTSC has problems as already mentioned. I just remembered another problem with RDTSC-- it's nonserializing; so I also have to make sure I write some special instructions after and/or before it to prevent it from executing in parallel. So much for your speculation that it's accurate to a few machine cycles.
>Re: bootup times:
>From cold, timed this morning:
I think one good test for boot-up time is is how long it takes to boot-up until you can run your specific program that uses OS functions. You can launch Amiga programs directly from command line via startup-sequence.
-
A few people here in this thread have referred to items that are NEW or nonexistent (exist in spec only). Those are useless for a common application. I have written accurate timer using 8253 under Windows XP, but it's accuracy is 840ns (less than an Amiga).
Joyports are nonexistent on PC's for some time now, but you are insisting on using it in your argument.
Amiga's accuracy is 558ns and HPET cannot be used to compare with it and RDTSC has problems as already mentioned. I just remembered another problem with RDTSC-- it's nonserializing; so I also have to make sure I write some special instructions after and/or before it to prevent it from executing in parallel. So much for your speculation that it's accurate to a few machine cycles
I think you'll find I already pointed out that as a requirement when writing the loop, along with locking it one core on multicore and preferring constant TSC where available, or preventing speed step from altering the core speed. Not my fault if you can't be arsed to read the CPU documentation properly.
Also, other than dismissing it outright, you haven't given any reason why HPET is unsuitable for your timing requirements.
>Re: bootup times:
>From cold, timed this morning:
I think one good test for boot-up time is is how long it takes to boot-up until you can run your specific program that uses OS functions. You can launch Amiga programs directly from command line via startup-sequence.
No, that's an entirely synthetic test invented by you. Under your stated circumstances, my chosen application is Workbench...
-
Joyports are nonexistent on PC's for some time now, but you are insisting on using it in your argument.
I think you'll find I already pointed out that as a requirement when writing the loop, along with locking it one core on multicore and preferring constant TSC where available, or preventing speed step from altering the core speed. Not my fault if you can't be arsed to read the CPU documentation properly.
...
Did you miss a post regarding RDTSC from me? I stated that I shut down power management to prevent RDTSC from misbehaving on a Toshiba and the system overheated. How do you prevent processor from going into SMIs and C-states and stopping tick counts? It's not in any Intel reference I have.
>Also, other than dismissing it outright, you haven't given any reason why HPET is unsuitable for your timing requirements.
The fact that it's not in any of my 10 PC systems is good reason to dismiss it for now. The fact that it won't work on majority of systems out there is another good reason. The fact that it's accuracy is affected by other IRQs in the system is another good reason. I can mention more but why waste time with it if I can't use it generically. By the way, Amiga timer is 558ns w/o +/- bullcrap (as I stated); HPET has a +/- latency as well attached to it.
>No, that's an entirely synthetic test invented by you. Under your stated circumstances, my chosen application is Workbench...
If you use Amiga for some specific application, it can launch faster before you load WB.
-
Joyports are nonexistent on PC's for some time now, but you are insisting on using it in your argument.
...
I wanted to keep the joystick argument separate from timer stuff since it was over. Joystick gameports are in millions of existing PCs and they suck; they are inferior to Amiga's joystick ports. If you can't live with this fact of REALITY, that's not my problem. You can still get gameports on audio cards and they were supported by Windows XP which is not obsolete for many.
-
Did you miss a post regarding RDTSC from me? I stated that I shut down power management to prevent RDTSC from misbehaving on a Toshiba and the system overheated.
LOL, excellent
How do you prevent processor from going into SMIs and C-states and stopping tick counts? It's not in any Intel reference I have.
Did the part not actually have a constant TSC register? Most current intel processors do.
>Also, other than dismissing it outright, you haven't given any reason why HPET is unsuitable for your timing requirements.
The fact that it's not in any of my 10 PC systems is good reason to dismiss it for now.
Are you sure? It could just be that whichever version of the OS you are using doesn't let you use it.
The fact that it won't work on majority of systems out there is another good reason. The fact that it's accuracy is affected by other IRQs in the system is another good reason. I can mention more but why waste time with it if I can't use it generically.
But this is true on the PC for most things. Very few applications that need to bash the hardware directly are going to be universally compatible
By the way, Amiga timer is 558ns w/o +/- bullcrap (as I stated); HPET has a +/- latency as well attached to it.
Maybe not, but you can't possibly be suggesting that whatever code you execute every 558ns isn't going to add latency.
>No, that's an entirely synthetic test invented by you. Under your stated circumstances, my chosen application is Workbench...
If you use Amiga for some specific application, it can launch faster before you load WB.
Well, by the same token, I could roll a linux kernel that gives me just what I need to run "nano" and edit a few files.
The point is, I haven't used custom OS boot disks on an amiga since the day I got my first hard disk. Which was a long, long time ago.
-
LOL, excellent
Did the part not actually have a constant TSC register? Most current intel processors do.
...
It only talks about fixed counter using bus clock as opposed to processor frequency, but even the bus clocks vary with systems.
>Are you sure? It could just be that whichever version of the OS you are using doesn't let you use it.
No, remember I'm a low-level programmer so I went through the BIOS RSDT/FACP tables to detect the HPET table in DOS32 and it does not exist.
>But this is true on the PC for most things. Very few applications that need to bash the hardware directly are going to be universally compatible
HPET/RDTSC/PIT/Keyboards/VGA/IRQs and some other things are amongst those that have standard means of detecting and using directly at hardware level.
>Maybe not, but you can't possibly be suggesting that whatever code you execute every 558ns isn't going to add latency.
Copper executes the instructions at the exact cycle you want it to (558ns accuracy). If I use processor frequency or CIA interrupts, I run into latency issues.
>Well, by the same token, I could roll a linux kernel that gives me just what I need to run "nano" and edit a few files.
Yeah, but I don't think it works in XP/Vista.
-
It only talks about fixed counter using bus clock as opposed to processor frequency, but even the bus clocks vary with systems.
Given that you can query this property, where is the problem?
-
Oh, my God! This flame made me laugh out loud at least twice. This joystick polling frequency argument frankly is the most silly I've ever heard in a computer architecture discussion, even more ridicolous than the old boot-time whining, and the only conclusion I can see for it, is that my Commodore 16 was the most powerful PC of all times, since it "booted" instantly, even faster than my later Commodore 128 (which took at least 1 second to initialize). My Amigas and then my PCs have always took more time to be ready for my input. So the C16 is the absolute winner here =)
PS: everywhere else, a "joystick polling frequency" argument would have been motivation for laughs, not for a 200 messages-long discussion. Please, let's do a reality check soon.
-
Don't forget about the mighty VIC-20! Clearly beats the lame C16!:whack:
Honestly, I've got no idea what such a joystick polling frequency is meant to accomplish. 1 kHz is far beyond ridiculous - who's supposed to move the stick that fast?? And don't forget the (formerly) common PC joystick is an analogue entity where it takes a bit for the ADC to work. Digital joysticks are a lot faster. Actually they were since the joyports have been gone for some time.
Actually it's more of a 'I want a 100% defined hardware base where I can bang bare metal as I see fit' against a hardware abstracted architecture, held together with drivers. Clearly the former is easier to code for, but the fate of the Amiga clearly shows what consequences are implied and which one is a more future oriented solution.
My .02
-
Do you bother to read the posts that you reply to? Looks like not in this case. I stated not many people optimize programs (which is a fact): "Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC)."
So how are these people who don't optimize their code a fault of the system design?
I just compiled a hello world program and it was 1 MB; doesn't mean all compilers do that or you can't change the settings and eliminate the MFC.
Congratulations. How did this ever pass off as a valid argument when you wrote it down? I can make you a 1 GB hello world example to compile, that's how much PC:s suck!
As far as your blunder that size has no relation to speed, ever check MPEG videos. If they were uncompressed, it would affect the speed.
That's totally besides the point. Weren't we discussing program size in relation to speed? Because MPEG files are not programs, and a smaller program doesn't mean a faster program.
I'll guarantee that it won't work with nonstandard hardware on everyone's PCs.
That's true for most 1k intros (which are often tightly tied to the features of a specific GPU), but I have some great looking 256 byte intros (that often use standard VGA software rendering) and 64k (which work on most graphics cards) that run on anything I throw them at. Now show me a demo that runs on any "standard" amiga without modification i e WHDLoad.
By the way, do you know there is no extreme "small coding" (i e < 256 bytes) scene for the Amiga? There is too much overhead to set the chip set up to do something interesting without using non-standard APIs.
You seemed to missed some posts in this thread (or ignored them). Just because some 8-channel 16-bit card is available does NOT mean that everyone has it or that you can utilize it in comparing Amiga with PC. With new hardware add-ons, any computer can do anything. Talk about hardware that's available to most homes and compare with that-- then you can write some application and know that it will work on 99% of PCs out there.
If you want to look at it that way, you can't even compare the two different systems. I would argue that this design difference (monolithic vs. modular) is one of the factors of the death of the Amiga. But I can tell you that pretty much every multimedia home PC had a SB16 compatible sound card for pretty much a decade after it was released.
Bullcrap. You have NO understanding of the gameport nor I/O timing on PCs. I/O is much much slower than even memory. I suggest you try to time the gameport yourself. And no, gameport is NOT obsolete because Vista doesn't have a driver for it. It exists out there in millions of homes.
Oh, the game port. I can't try it because I don't know anyone with a gameport joy-pad. I have a gameport on some of my sound cards though, which I sometimes use for MIDI which works fine and dandy with no noticable jitter or delay at 31.25 kbits/second (although I understand that these are two separate interfaces).
It was on the PCI surround sound Mag Dog Audio board I purchased a couple of years ago. It's NOT a waste of cycles to sample at 1Khz or above. I wrote a joystick recorder program and the time between changes of direction/firing goes to less than 1 ms in some cases for games like River-raid and others. I can say sampling audio at 44Khz is a WASTE of space, but it's required to capture all possible audible frequencies. Similarly, sampling joystick at 60Hz is NOT good enough.
Show me a game that samples the joystick at 1000Hz. I can imagine some bullet hell shoot'em'up would need pretty high sample rates, but I don't think you'll ever see anything going up that high. It is DEFINITELY not common to sample at more than 300Hz, so the test case is hardly a practical one. Your fingers and eyes are not as sensitive to high frequency information as your ears.
But yeah, go ahead, show me a game that uses and benefits from that high joystick sampling. Most Amiga games, I'm sure, don't sample more than a couple of times per redraw.
Are you like confused? USB 3.0 has NOTHING to do with high precision timing.
Confused? That makes two of us, then. Yes, you do need pretty tight timing to transfer data at 5 GB/s, and the latency is lower than ever with USB (not that latency was ever an inherent problem with USB pads and sticks).
USB 3.0 is a specification; it's not out there in any joysticks. Show me a joystick that uses USB 2.0!
Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O
If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port
general purpose I/O port
I/O port
...
Once again comparing Amiga with nonexistent products or products that hardly anyone has.
Say what you want (or you could compare to USB 2 instead), but I'll bet that in a couple of years there will be more users of USB 3.0 enabled PC:s than there were ever Amiga users.
Get real.
Haha.
-
USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 - these are standards that tell you nothing about which transfer rate to expect in any given situation. You should seriously consider using the terms Low-Speed, Full-Speed, Hi-Speed and SuperSpeed... Most (all?) HID devices including joysticks use Low-Speed.
-
Joystick gameports are in millions of existing PCs and they suck; they are inferior to Amiga's joystick ports. If you can't live with this fact of REALITY, that's not my problem.
You're right about game ports in general. As with most PC-compatible products, every vendor interpreted the specification differently, game port products from one manufacturer were often incompatible with products from another, and the game port itself performed rather poorly--hence USB.
The reality, though, is that game ports *were* in millions of existing PCs. They haven't been added to new PCs for years now, and mainstream electronics stores, e.g. Best Buy and Fry's Electronics in the Western United States, no longer carry game port-compatible products. This, among other things, is why operating systems provide hardware abstraction layers. (I know, it's obvious.) Performance is a trade-off, of course, but an input routine A will run on a system with API X, regardless of the underlying hardware. Smart programmers scale the features of their software to match the features reported by the API. That's the reality of today's consumer PC market.
-
Oh, my God! This flame made me laugh out loud at least twice.
Don't spoil it. Keep the humor coming !
greets,
Staf.
-
even more ridicolous than the old boot-time whining, .
"Boot-time whining"? You don't think boot times are significant? Why then at many Windows discussion forums do people regularly make posts about boot times being too long for Windows based PC's especially those that run Vista, why are there so many articles about how people can modify windows to improve boot times, why is Microsoft itself making a big deal that Win 7 boots faster on the same machines than Vista? The woman in charge of Vista has publically said that Win 7 & MS will attempt to address something they have failed to do in the past: make the PC responsive to the user, put the user in control, meaning that its an admission that its previous OS's weren't this, something the Amiga always has done. Boot time is one of the top two or three things that concern MS and PC users, it MATTERS.
-
"Boot-time whining"? You don't think boot times are significant? Why then at many Windows discussion forums do people regularly make posts about boot times being too long for Windows based PC's especially those that run Vista, why are there so many articles about how people can modify windows to improve boot times, why is Microsoft itself making a big deal that Win 7 boots faster on the same machines than Vista? The woman in charge of Vista has publically said that Win 7 & MS will attempt to address something they have failed to do in the past: make the PC responsive to the user, put the user in control, meaning that its an admission that its previous OS's weren't this, something the Amiga always has done. Boot time is one of the top two or three things that concern MS and PC users, it MATTERS.
I use a Mac, I rarely turn my machine off... I just put it to sleep... I don't care about boot times.
-
Give any sane person just the two choices below:
1) Fast boot time
or
2) Little need to (re)boot once up
Guess what they pick?
Being able to boot faster might be important to casual users, but for those of us that actually do real work on a PC, system stability once booted is absolutely paramount. Nothing else, whatsoever, is anywhere near as important.
My Amigas all crash, not too frequently but usually without any warning and at the most inopportune times. They can't stay up for extended periods. The (classic) OS suffers memory fragmentation, even with patches to help minimise it. AmigaOS might boot fast, but it isn't a safe working environment. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost work on it. Now I use KDevelop and edit source code for amiga projects (yep, I'm slowly getting into it again) in a directory on my linux machine that's shared over the network with the A1 and A1200. This way, I never lose anything. Why? Because Linux is far more stable. You don't get processes trashing each other's memory. You don't get large allocations splitting the available ram into two non conttiguous blocks, you don't get sudden deadlocks caused by magic menu and StormC's built in editor failing to get along. You don't get the results of your own accidental bugs in assembler code you didn't notice at 2am bringing down the whole machine in technicolour glory...
-
Hibernate works nicely here.
-
Hibernate works nicely here.
In the few times I've bothered to hibernate Vista (since I don't tend to use it often), it's woken back up again to normal operation in less than 30 seconds.
-
I use a Mac, I rarely turn my machine off... I just put it to sleep... I don't care about boot times.
@ Karlos
@meega.
I see. The solution to slow boot times is ........don't turn of fthe computer. May be OK for the minority-yes the majority of users power their machines down. My A1200 hasn't crashed in many months: but then I don't have a Frankenstein hack, I don't use software written by amateurs.
So you admit the PC is still playing catchup with the Amiga then. No amount of work around will change the fact that PC's take a factor of at least 10x longer to boot, despite having clock speeds in every hardware component that are factor of 100 faster.
-
@ Karlos
@meega.
I see. The solution to slow boot times is ........don't turn of fthe computer. May be OK for the minority-yes the majority of users power their machines down.
I do power down my computer - every time it hibernates it shuts down completely. That's what hibernating is all about.
-
@ Karlos
@meega.
I see. The solution to slow boot times is ........don't turn of fthe computer. May be OK for the minority-yes the majority of users power their machines down. My A1200 hasn't crashed in many months: but then I don't have a Frankenstein hack, I don't use software written by amateurs.
Try running your amiga for several weeks continuously and see how stable it isn't.
When you say slow, you are still talking about a minute at most. Which is only slow if you suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder. If your boot is taking longer than that, perhaps you have a totally clapped out unmaintained heap of scrap for a PC, because it really shouldn't.
So you admit the PC is still playing catchup with the Amiga then. No amount of work around will change the fact that PC's take a factor of at least 10x longer to boot, despite having clock speeds in every hardware component that are factor of 1000 faster.
Nope. See my earlier post. My PC boots faster than my A1200 running an otherwise base OS3.9. Whereas my A1200 loads a fairly minimal OS3.9 for my needs, my PC loads a full desktop OS and an entire suite of server services. It may be a factor 100x (not 1000) faster by CPU clockspeed, but it does more than 100x the amount of work, every second it is up.
-
I do power down my computer - every time it hibernates it shuts down completely. That's what hibernating is all about.
On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be. hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.
-
On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be. hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.
Hmmm, what you want there is a solid state drive :-)
-
Try running your amiga for several weeks continuously and see how stable it isn't.
My A4000 6-7 years ago was a used as a server for 6 months straight without rebooting.
When you say slow, you are still talking about a minute at most. Which is only slow if you suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder. If your boot is taking longer than that, perhaps you have a totally clapped out unmaintained heap of scrap for a PC, because it really shouldn't.
One minute? We've been down that path with your souped-up, hardware hacked/overclocked, custom_OS running PC that you run 24/7. You are in the infinitesimal minority of PC users. Your experience doesn't count. Further you've resorted to calling me and the millions of Windows users and MS itself, for whom boot times matter, "insane", and we are all "suffering from attention-deficit disorder". Name-calling is the last resort of those who simply can no longer defend their argument.
Nope. See my earlier post. My PC boots faster than my A1200 running an otherwise base OS3.9. Whereas my A1200 loads a fairly minimal OS3.9 for my needs, my PC loads a full desktop OS and an entire suite of server services. It may be a factor 100x (not 1000) faster by CPU clockspeed, but it does more than 100x the amount of work, every second it is up.
We've talked about your frankenstein A1200 before. It doesn't count.
You have 4 CPU's running at 2,400 mhz. 4x2400 about 10,000.
One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.' Nuff said.
-
On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be. hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.
Now who's having the tin bath?
You think restoring the system state by copying a single contiguous file off hard disk back into RAM will not be appreciably faster than starting all the processes one at a time off that same hard disk?
-
One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.' Nuff said.
And one 0.89MHz MOS 8501 boots faster than your 14MHz 020, 'nuff said
BTW...Still trying to load that 78MP TIFF image :lol:
-
Now who's having the tin bath?
You think restoring the system state by copying a single contiguous file off hard disk back into RAM will not be appreciably faster than starting all the processes one at a time off that same hard disk?
If hibernate powers down the system, then those processes would need to be started up again, no? Theoretically having everything as one contiguous file rather than having the hard drive seeking for individual files ought to be faster, but in my subjective experience-i haven't timed it yet-it is not signficantly different from just cold booting it up. Consequently the only time I hibernate is when the system forces me into it, due to my battery running out of power.
-
And one 0.89MHz MOS 8501 boots faster than your 14MHz 020, 'nuff said
BTW...Still trying to load that 78MP TIFF image :lol:
How much faster does the MOS 8501 boot?
What use would an average user have for a 78MP TIFF image? How long will your PC take to finish the calculations that are done by IBM's network of supercomputers in one second? Pointless argument..
-
Do you even know what hibernate does?
-
Do you even know what hibernate does?
i believe so: it copies whatever is in RAm to the hard drive as a file, and then powers down. Hardware resources still need to be re-initialise when resuming, and yep it generally ought to be faster than a cold boot, but 1. it may not always work at all on all hardware and 2. not all PC's are appreciably faster resuming from hibernate.
-
That's one example where it's a breeze to not only read the joystick on Amiga but also read it with high precision timing. Gaming with joysticks was an afterthought on PCs as even gameport was usually on an add-on board. Gaming was a central concept on Amiga/Atari machines so more relevant. It all adds up-- joystick I/O, timer IRQs, etc. not just for me, for everyone. Don't worry, "I have not yet begun to fight." Just going to finish up this point before addressing other points. A gameport uses analog joysticks and requires 1ms+ worse case read-time to get status of joystick directions. This at 1 Khz would use up all the CPU time whereas on Amiga, it would hardly effect system performance even if performed with high precision timing. Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion. Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.
I though I’d set the record straight on the PC joystick port:
(For some reason this seems to be a big issue in this thread)
The target audience of the IBM PC/AT was never the gaming market…
That being said, the 15pin analog joystick port standard was created:
Reading the button state of the joystick was simple and fast - it simply required one logic operation. This seems rational as the state of the button can only be in the ON or OFF position. The 3rd position is known as "broken".
They (the engineers) should have just expanded on that idea and created a digital joystick – like C=, Atari, etc.
BUT…
Instead, they created an Analog joystick and along the way somebody got a big bonus by saving $0.03 per machine by eliminating hardware. I believe he later went on to design the o-rings for the space shuttle Challenger.
Anyway, to read the joystick the programmer would write some value to port 0x201, run the CPU in a time wasting LOOP and then read back the contents of 0x201, and then work some magic with the values returned to determine the position of the X and Y axis.
If that’s not cheesy enough, you also had to disable the interrupts and poll several times to get an accurate reading.
Finally, as the PCs progressed from 4.7mhz to 33mhz to 66mhz, etc. the CPU cycles that were wasted looping to read the joystick were increasingly more significant.
Lets face it, constantly calibrating the trim on your flight stick just sucked. The part I really personally hated was that if you depressed turbo button (to slow the game play down) Chuck Yeager would typically do an uncontrollable barrel roll right into a barn.
Eventually, PC sound cards came along with MIDI interfaces. The MIDI interface connected to the outside world via the same 15-pin joystick port.
Again, someone probably got huge bonus – but this time they disserved it. The idea was to simply forget about the joystick port and to send the data over MIDI.
Genius!
By the time the Pentium came out, MIDI joystick was the standard until it was later replaced by USB.
Anyway, my main machine is a 2GHZ Mac mini with 9400n GFX, 4GB ram and an XBOX-360 wireless controller.
I have no idea about the technical aspects required to read the numerous axes and buttons on the 360 controllers, or how much CPU overhead is involved. I just know there are too many f’n buttons.
-
Hi,
@Linde
So what you are really telling me is that you can type faster than your computer can display on the screen, as for working/home environment, I use my Amiga for every day tasks I have even used it in a business environment and found it quite capable for my needs without the worry of picking up virus's or the loss of data, as a matter of fact I still have some of my old data from my business still left on my hard drive from 1996.
Now lets talk about about zipping and unzipping files, the Amiga 4000 backs up my whole hard drive of 2.2 gig in about 10 to 15 minutes using lharc through diskmaster, and while it is doing it I am usually in another window playing a game or listening to some mods or sometimes both.
As for TV's I have repaired them for years, and it has only been a couple of years where they have surpassed the 22 fps rate. yes hilary TV's have finally surpassed that rate because back in the old days they came up with a motion picture standard of 22 fps because the human eye and the brain sensors interpert motion at that speed unless your adrenalin is kicked in, then even at crash speed in a car under survival conditions will the brain kick into gear in order to survive. Also you should try talking to the motion picture society on the 22 fps, its been the standard since TV's first appeared on the market.
And now for the biggie, how do you expect your computer to perform, I expect mine to perform at high speed so that I can play modern day games, I expect excellent graphics performing at high speed (even though my brain can't really interpert it) but the computer at this point feeds me more visual information even though my brain can only pick up a small bit of it thats why I use a PC to play games with, and an Amiga to do my general bookwork, like data processing, word processing, and spreadsheets on. However at that being said I do enjoy using my PC for surfing the web and the instant display that I receive while using my Q6600, with 8 meg of sli ram, and two nvidia 8800 graphic cards, with 2 250 gig sata drives, and one 500 gig sata drive, and one old 40 gig ide drive, with a dual layer dvd burner, which sometime in the near future I hope to upgrade to blue ray. I use all this power to play todays modern games at very high resolutions. Now you are probably from a country probably in Europe where they were far advanced as far a TV are concerned because they use pal at a different freq and frame rate where you are probably correct, but the US who is restricted by US laws which are quite backward and archaic I am sorry to say where stuck at the 22 fps for TV.
Now for my final part, thank you for supporting Amiga, I know it is quite archaic by todays standards but to say a person can't use it today because of its age is quite nonsense, my challenge to you is pick up an old Amiga game like Rolling Thunder and try to beat it, I haven't heard of anyone getting through all its levels as of yet, I sure haven't I have only made it to level 7 and I play that game at least once a week, PC games are made to be beat because that brings more enjoyment to the lazy dopey kids who don't know what the outside is for today, they sit in the house and play stupid computer games, some of them even meet their husbands and wives over the stupid computer today, they look like zombies and act like draculas only up at night to play stupid games over the internet. I like football, baseball and basketball, did some hockey playing during my younger years, but today I rather be out fishing.
Sorry if I offended you by calling everyone who uses a PC on a Amiga site a Loser, but this is still an Amiga site and we all were losers when Amiga went bankrupt and we had to settle for todays sorry PC's.
smerf
-
Interesting discussion guys.
It reminds me of the good old days. The only difference is that those days are well and truly over.
Amiga is no longer mainstream and that is for some reasons.
PCs are mainstream and that's for some reasons.
Want to know those reasons.
It's all here:
:lol:
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=19&pictureid=105)
Seriously though, the Amiga is a nice, fun, niche, retro, hobby/home computing platform. Trying to claim it is something other than that is just plain denial.
Hi,
@Gadgetmaster,
What do you mean the Amiga isn't mainstream? Since when?
What do you mean my wife hasn't chucked my Amiga out?
She sure did she chucked out my Amiga 1000 along with my C64 and my 128 & 128D with my big box of over 1000 C64 & 128 programs,` straight in the trash I tell ya, lucy thing my Amiga software was to heavy to pick up or she would of chucked that out too!!!
smerf
-
Its pregant, so I'm helping extract you. You're somewhere up in there. LOL!!!
Call it what you want. All I know is my system(s) run great. Enjoy your Windows XPerience!
Hi,
@thetexasm
Oh, you texans are so clever and funny
good one
smerf
-
Just off the top of my head...
I think film based movies were 24FPS, NTSC is around 30FPS and PAL is like 29FPS.
If you don't believe your EYES can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS, just try and use 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with a 60hz refresh rate. Painful…
-
How much faster does the MOS 8501 boot?
What use would an average user have for a 78MP TIFF image? How long will your PC take to finish the calculations that are done by IBM's network of supercomputers in one second? Pointless argument..
As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."
The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.
-
A realistic photo for someone who is doing more than just shooting family shots would be 12 to 14 MP Raw. Not something you could edit on an Amiga. This whole discussion entered never-never land a while ago, with one side mentioning DVDs, MP3s, Flashing, photos etc and the other side countering with some incomprehensible joystick argument.
As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."
The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.
-
As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."
The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.
A PC has 100-1000 times CPU cycles of a 14 mhz Amiga but boots 150sec/5sec=30 times slower. The 14 mhz 68020 is has about 10 times the CPU clock cycles of the c16 but boots 5sec/1sec = 5 times slower..waiting for 4 seconds more is a lot more tolerable than waiting for an additional 150 seconds..
Ofcourse things that are CPU-intensive take longer on slower CPU's. BUT starting your PC, issuing commands and general responsiveness via the GUI is still slower on the PC than the Amiga.
-
Just off the top of my head...
I think film based movies were 24FPS, NTSC is around 30FPS and PAL is like 29FPS.
If you don't believe your EYES can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS, just try and use 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with a 60hz refresh rate. Painful…
Are we or are we not Amiga users? Broadcast video standards are the one thing we should all know, yeah? Film can be shot and projected at whatever mechanical rate the camera and projector are capable of using. 24 FPS is the de facto standard. NTSC is ~29.97 FPS and PAL is 25 FPS. (NTSC and PAL technically use fields and not frames, but we know that, too, right?)
Regarding what you can and can't see, it's subjective, just like the Amiga v. PC debate. ;-)
-
BUT starting your PC, issuing commands and general responsiveness via the GUI is still slower on the PC than the Amiga.
I haven't been using computers as long as some on this forum (I started in the early 80's), but I know this: I have never used a computer more responsive, subjectively speaking, than my current Windows system.
-
A realistic photo for someone who is doing more than just shooting family shots would be 12 to 14 MP Raw. Not something you could edit on an Amiga. This whole discussion entered never-never land a while ago, with one side mentioning DVDs, MP3s, Flashing, photos etc and the other side countering with some incomprehensible joystick argument.
It's called troll feeding and it's great fun :roflmao:
-
If only flames did as much damage to forum trolls as they did to "real" ones.
-
My A4000 6-7 years ago was a used as a server for 6 months straight without rebooting.
Running a basic OS3 or OS3.1 install on the base machine, possibly. Even then, you were lucky.
One minute? We've been down that path with your souped-up, hardware hacked/overclocked, custom_OS running PC that you run 24/7. You are in the infinitesimal minority of PC users. Your experience doesn't count.
:roflmao:
Put your toys back in your pram and think about what you just wrote. My experience doesn't count simply because it is contrary to yours? A PC made entirely of off-the-shelf components, only one of which is overclocked (the graphics card) and running the most popular open source OS in the world counts as a hacked/overclocked custom OS PC? Do you have any idea how ridiculously petulant you sound?
I can name two other users right here on this very board that have PC's in the same hardware class as mine. 2GHz multicore is not a minority, it is pretty much the norm for current generation machines.
Further you've resorted to calling me and the millions of Windows users and MS itself, for whom boot times matter, "insane", and we are all "suffering from attention-deficit disorder". Name-calling is the last resort of those who simply can no longer defend their argument.
No, I've suggested that if having to wait 1 minute is too stressful for you then you probably have it. Not the millions of others for whom it is a minor inconvenience at best.
We've talked about your frankenstein A1200 before. It doesn't count.
Bit hypocritical of you to slate my A1200 for having 2 CPU's and as much memory as I could throw into it. Why isn't it "souped up", like the PC instead? It's expanded with entirely legitimate expansions. There's nothing sat hanging upside down from one of the custom chips or dangling off the clockport. There aren't any low level hacks running in the OS.
By the sound of it, your definition of frankenstein is any amiga with a faster CPU fitted.
You have 4 CPU's running at 2,400 mhz. 4x2400 about 10,000.
One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.' Nuff said.
Of course, if you knew the first thing about multicore computing you'd know that performance is not a simple linear scale up of clockspeed x cores. Also you'd know that only threaded applications or multiple concurrent instances of single threaded applications benefit.
-
Oh, my God! This flame made me laugh out loud at least twice. This joystick polling frequency argument frankly is the most silly I've ever heard in a computer architecture discussion, even more ridicolous than the old boot-time whining, and the only conclusion I can see for it, is that my Commodore 16 was the most powerful PC of all times, since it "booted" instantly, even faster than my later Commodore 128 (which took at least 1 second to initialize). My Amigas and then my PCs have always took more time to be ready for my input. So the C16 is the absolute winner here =)
PS: everywhere else, a "joystick polling frequency" argument would have been motivation for laughs, not for a 200 messages-long discussion. Please, let's do a reality check soon.
You missed some posts and didn't read the title; nobody drew the conclusion that PC is inferior because it boots up slower. Nobody drew the conclusion that PC is inferior because it's gameport factually is inferior. Except for those like you who didn't read the topic and the posts. I recall that my 8-bit Commodore didn't even have a boot option unless you plugged in a cartridge. I think you had to type something like: Load "*",8,1.
Gaming is used on PCs, Gaming is used on Amigas. Amiga has the better interface. It's one aspect. And same joystick port also serves other needs like I/O...
-
Don't forget about the mighty VIC-20! Clearly beats the lame C16!:whack:
Honestly, I've got no idea what such a joystick polling frequency is meant to accomplish. 1 kHz is far beyond ridiculous - who's supposed to move the stick that fast?? And don't forget the (formerly) common PC joystick is an analogue entity where it takes a bit for the ADC to work. Digital joysticks are a lot faster. Actually they were since the joyports have been gone for some time.
Actually it's more of a 'I want a 100% defined hardware base where I can bang bare metal as I see fit' against a hardware abstracted architecture, held together with drivers. Clearly the former is easier to code for, but the fate of the Amiga clearly shows what consequences are implied and which one is a more future oriented solution.
My .02
"Clearly" is your subjective biased remark. It's better to have hardware level standards and OS API standards. That you get the best of both worlds. With modern OSes, you HAVE to go through APIs because ways to access hardware directly (which is much more efficient) cannot be done due to lack of standards for most hardware.
You're correct for many games you can get away with less than 1Khz, but in cases, you do need the 1Khz, gameport cannot accomplish that feat. As Karlos would put it, "Amiga joystick is OBSCENELY faster than PC joystick interface."
-
So how are these people who don't optimize their code a fault of the system design?
...
You are presuming in this topic that I declared the PC sucks because it has bloated code, but I never stated that.
>Congratulations. How did this ever pass off as a valid argument when you wrote it down? I can make you a 1 GB hello world example to compile, that's how much PC:s suck!
Again, just going by default compiler settings. Not purposely done. Many people don't bother figuring out what is dead code and how to eliminate it so you end up with EXEs that take up megabytes of memory. Never said PC sucks because it's full of applications that have tons of dead code or redundant code.
>That's totally besides the point. Weren't we discussing program size in relation to speed? Because MPEG files are not programs, and a smaller program doesn't mean a faster program.
The example I gave of animations running from floppy, the size of the data files and exes combined mattered. If they weren't compressed and code highly optimized, the frame rate speed would suffer.
>That's true for most 1k intros (which are often tightly tied to the features of a specific GPU), but I have some great looking 256 byte intros (that often use standard VGA software rendering) and 64k (which work on most graphics cards) that run on anything I throw them at. Now show me a demo that runs on any "standard" amiga without modification i e WHDLoad.
Many boot block intros I have seen don't rely on any WHDLoad. If you write OCS software, it works on all Amigas. You show me a demo that uses the audio card; they are all nonstandard. Here's I wrote my own boot block control code that allows me to control the Amiga from a PC:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320379502506
I answered the rest of your message already elsewhere.
>But yeah, go ahead, show me a game that uses and benefits from that high joystick sampling. Most Amiga games, I'm sure, don't sample more than a couple of times per redraw.
I wasn't going by "most". Just like the audio example I gave. One Khz is based on actual recorded joystick data from River-raid as I already mentioned.
>Confused? That makes two of us, then. Yes, you do need pretty tight timing to transfer data at 5 GB/s, and the latency is lower than ever with USB (not that latency was ever an inherent problem with USB pads and sticks).
You can't time a bit to appear to a device at an exact point in time unless you take over the hardware and have the exact spec of the controller. But then you mine as well plug the usb card into an Amiga and do the same. And this has nothing to do with joystick I/O.
>...of years there will be more users of USB 3.0 enabled PC:s than there were ever Amiga users.
Sorry, I don't argue about nonexistent products. If you don't have a joystick port, it's not my problem. Maybe the spec will get dropped and replaced with a different one.
Joystick I/O was a bonus to the joystick interface; first you need to pick the joystick port before talking about I/O. If you switch ports, I'll start talking about the expansion connector.
-
As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."
The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.
Boot up with what you want to do with the system is a better way to look at it. If I want to test a kernel mode driver on Windows XP which will cause many crashes during testing stage, the Amiga OS wins hands down in boot up time.
As far as the 78MP TIFF image goes, you could tile the image and use a format that fits for the system at hand. Just because PCs had ability to load into RAM (or virtual RAM), doesn't mean it can't be done on systems with less memory. I have written software that can edit 600MB images using 16 MB of RAM. It's nothing to do with the system. It depends on the software.
-
I have written software that can edit 600MB images using 16 MB of RAM. It's nothing to do with the system. It depends on the software.
This I'd be interested to see. Do you use a paging strategy for it, or do you limit it to the largest tile that can fit in 16MiB?
How do you give visual feedback on changes that affect the whole image, or do you allow modification only on a per tile basis?
I've written image processing code that operates on arbitrarily large images in a few kilobytes by basically streaming through it (for simple changes) or operating on tiny tiles (for image processing kernels). It worked but it certainly wasn't "visual". That didn't matter as it was for an automated process anyway.
This isn't a criticism, but I can't imagine such a system being a lot of use to people used to being able to operate at various levels of zoom as well as on the entire image at once. People buy big grunty PC boxes because they expect to be able to do stuff as quickly and readily as possible.
-
Erm... can someone condense this whole thread into a nutshell please. It's been all around the universe and back and I'm still confused. :crazy:
Is the PC still playing catchup? I mean really ??? :lol:
-
Erm... can someone condense this whole thread into a nutshell please. It's been all around the universe and back and I'm still confused. :crazy:
Is the PC still playing catchup? I mean really ??? :lol:
I don't think so. Even if we accept the joyport example, external HID for PC's have all migrated pretty much to USB these days. Honestly, you can even get bloody USB graphics cards nowadays. Therefore the PC isn't actually in the race to have a high speed joyport, so it can't really be playing catch up. The same is true with other legacy expansion ports like good old centronic's parallel ports etc.Who uses a parallel port printer in a typical PC dominated office environment now? LAN printers have been standard for donkeys years.
I know I've contributed (as much as a flame fest can have contributions) to this thread but the reality is, we're all comparing oranges and apples here. 15-20 year old computers of any description, Amiga, Atari, PC, Mac, Sun are all in a completely different league to present day computers.
Hell, present day computers will be equally outclassed in raw processing power in a lot less than 15-20 years from now.
We all know the best computer platform from it's era was the Amiga, that's why we are here on this forum. However, like it or not, the platform is an extreme minority in the present day. There's no hardware to bridge the gap between then now. Cool as the A1, Sam and Pegasos are, they too are sliding further behind the relentless march in computer evolution. Unless AmigaOS and MorphOS take a leaf out of apple's book and jump the CPU architecture fence over to the x86/x64 side, they'll never really be able to take full advantage of that progress. However, as cool as that would be, it would also be quite sad IMO since variety is the spice of life. I actually like having systems with different CPU's and ways of working. It's fun. And since AROS at least is free to explore the x86/x64 avenue, well, you can have it all, really.
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
Ok, enough, it takes you 30 seconds to reinit your computer from leaving it on, well guess what I left my Amiga on all night, all I did was turn off the LCD, turned back on my LCD and the Amiga was there ready and waiting, but darn I had to wait for my 24 inch LCD to turn on it took a total of 3 seconds, next time I won't turn if off hate waiting for this new stuff to work.
Now, lets talk about loading in a new fresh copy of your OS,
How long does it take windblows?
How long does it take Linux?
How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1?
How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1 with OS 3.9?
AMIGA WINS!!!
Windows SUCKS
Linux comes in 2nd
The PC is still trying to catch up to Amiga
smerf
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
Ok, enough, it takes you 30 seconds to reinit your computer from leaving it on, well guess what I left my Amiga on all night, all I did was turn off the LCD, turned back on my LCD and the Amiga was there ready and waiting, but darn I had to wait for my 24 inch LCD to turn on it took a total of 3 seconds, next time I won't turn if off hate waiting for this new stuff to work.
Now, lets talk about loading in a new fresh copy of your OS,
How long does it take windblows?
How long does it take Linux?
How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1?
How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1 with OS 3.9?
AMIGA WINS!!!
Windows SUCKS
Linux comes in 2nd
The PC is still trying to catch up to Amiga
smerf
My dear fellow, do try to keep up :)
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=508702&postcount=168 (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=508702&postcount=168)
I actually posted the boot times of my machines, completely from cold, earlier in the thread. Sadly, the A1200 lost the race between the two of them. Live with it.
However, I'll happily agree with you all that Vista isn't quick to start, despite whittling away all the unwanted gubbins.
PS:
OS4 on the G4 800 was fastest of all of them ;)
-
My dear fellow, do try to keep up :)
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=508702&postcount=168
I actually posted the boot times of my machines, completely from cold, earlier in the thread. Sadly, the A1200 lost the race between the two of them. Live with it.
However, I'll happily agree with you all that Vista isn't quick to start, despite whittling away all the unwanted gubbins.
PS:
OS4 on the G4 800 was fastest of all of them ;)
I detect some competition. I will beat all of you. Here is a boot loader I wrote the other day, to load my custom OS for my pc:
; Description: dVMOS boot loader
; Author: Brian Craig Miller
; Date: 2009-MAY-26
; Version: 4
; assembler: fasm
#make_boot#
org 7c00h
secnum equ 5 ; number of sectors after sector one to load
sector1:
cli ; disable interrupts
;setup temporary stack out of te way
mov dx, 08000h
mov ss,dx
mov sp, 0ffffh
; make es point to paragraph 0
push 0
pop es
sti ; enable interrupts
; setup registers for the copy routine
mov bx, 07e00h ; address of free memory
mov cl, 2
loadkernel:
call copysector
add cl, 1 ; move to next sector
add bx, 512 ; area to move next sector into
cmp cl, secnum + 1
jne loadkernel
runkernel:
; jump to our kernel
push 07e0h ; cs
push 00000 ; ip
retf
copysector:
pusha
mov ah, 02h ; read sector
mov al, 1 ; read one sector
mov ch, 0 ; cylinder 0
;mov cl, 3 ; second sector
mov dh, 0 ; head 0
mov dl, 0 ; drive 0
int 13h ; bios disk routines
popa
ret
db 510-($-sector1) dup (090h) ;fill out restof sector with zeroes
dw 0AA55h ; sector signature bios needs to identify bootable sec
On my 1.6GHz p4, I can go from cold start to ganking 6 sectors of the floppy and running my "kernel" in 2 seconds flat. I could cut some time off by stuffing the whole thing in a boot rom on a network card. Hell, I could get a 1second boot if I just ditched the sparse bios routines and stuff my crap in the bios flash rom it's self.
Oh, and Amiga OS is bloated compared to my OS. Every *byte* accounted for. I have you all beat. :roflmao:
-
Hi,
@Karlos
NO, NO,NO
I don't mean boot times, I mean loading in a new copy of your OS on the computer, like starting with a new hard drive.
Amiga wins
smerf
-
Hi,
No not really. I don't think the PC is playing ketchup, but I do think that it is in a pickle, or is it that the Amiga is in a pickle, not actually Amiga Inc. is the Company that made hamburg out of the Amiga putting it in a pickle, see that Amiga Inc. can't do anything right, they put the hamburg in a pickle instead of the pickle on the hamburg, but where is the ketchup?
smerf
-
Hi,
@koaftder
Hey has anyone tried the boot time on CPM?
Bet is beats everyone hands down
smerf
-
Hah my notebook beat the Amiga, I just flip the page and put my pencil done and I'm off.
Noterbook: ready instantly
Amiga: has to boot up
Notebook: start writing instantly
Amiga: have to load a word processing program
Notebook: can use anywhere, any time
Amiga: needs electricity
-
Hi,
@koaftder
Hey has anyone tried the boot time on CPM?
Bet is beats everyone hands down
smerf
My Abacus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus) didn't even need to be booted.
Beat that! :laughing:
-
Hi,
@Karlos
NO, NO,NO
I don't mean boot times, I mean loading in a new copy of your OS on the computer, like starting with a new hard drive.
Amiga wins
smerf
That depends. You might have to replace your ROM chips before you begin. You know, small things like that :D
-
My Abacus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus) didn't even need to be booted.
Beat that! :laughing:
Sure it does, you have to push all the beads into their correct initial places before you use it, right?
-
Hah my notebook beat the Amiga, I just flip the page and put my pencil done and I'm off.
Noterbook: ready instantly
Amiga: has to boot up
Notebook: start writing instantly
Amiga: have to load a word processing program
Notebook: can use anywhere, any time
Amiga: needs electricity
Ah but did your pencil and notebook take longer to construct than my abacus?
Lets see, pencil needs lead adding to it and sharpening.
notebook is made by pulping wood first to make paper and then is processed into a book.
Abacus is just lumps of wood rounded and strung in a row.
See
Abacus wins
Notebook and pencil lose. :lol:
-
Hi,
No not really. I don't think the PC is playing ketchup, but I do think that it is in a pickle, or is it that the Amiga is in a pickle, not actually Amiga Inc. is the Company that made hamburg out of the Amiga putting it in a pickle, see that Amiga Inc. can't do anything right, they put the hamburg in a pickle instead of the pickle on the hamburg, but where is the ketchup?
smerf
:roflmao:
-
Sure it does, you have to push all the beads into their correct initial places before you use it, right?
Unless you have them all aligned to the left to start with all the time. So shutdown might tike a tad longer but at least the Abacus can reawaken from its sleep mode instantly.
No more waiting for the monitor to warm up or the pencil to be sharpened.
:juggler:
:bitch:
:mickeymouse:
-
Boot up with what you want to do with the system is a better way to look at it. If I want to test a kernel mode driver on Windows XP which will cause many crashes during testing stage, the Amiga OS wins hands down in boot up time.
As far as the 78MP TIFF image goes, you could tile the image and use a format that fits for the system at hand. Just because PCs had ability to load into RAM (or virtual RAM), doesn't mean it can't be done on systems with less memory. I have written software that can edit 600MB images using 16 MB of RAM. It's nothing to do with the system. It depends on the software.
What part of the word example don't you understand? Besides which, I never doubted that you could actually open a large image, my point was how long it would take to open said image.
-
That depends. You might have to replace your ROM chips before you begin. You know, small things like that :D
Hi,
@Karlos,
Well!!!
You might have to flash your bios on your new system in order to get things to run correctly on XP, VISTA or the New Windows 7.
You see that Amigians are ROM CHANGERS
While you PC users are flashers, you can get arrested for that don't you know.
smerf
-
My Abacus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus) didn't even need to be booted.
Beat that! :laughing:
Hi,
@GadgetMaster,
I just use my fingers and toes, my fingers go up to ten, then my toes calculate the tens this gives me a calculation up to a buck 10, and the best part they have automatic reset requiring no boot time at all, but some times my toes crash while being booted.
Beat that! :laughing:[/QUOTE]
smerf
-
Hi,
@ADZ
What does example mean.
and then
What does that have to do with the price of kangaroos down under?
smerf
-
I detect some competition. I will beat all of you. Here is a boot loader I wrote the other day, to load my custom OS for my pc:
; Description: dVMOS boot loader
; Author: Brian Craig Miller
; Date: 2009-MAY-26
; Version: 4
; assembler: fasm
#make_boot#
org 7c00h
secnum equ 5 ; number of sectors after sector one to load
sector1:
cli ; disable interrupts
;setup temporary stack out of te way
mov dx, 08000h
mov ss,dx
mov sp, 0ffffh
; make es point to paragraph 0
push 0
pop es
sti ; enable interrupts
; setup registers for the copy routine
mov bx, 07e00h ; address of free memory
mov cl, 2
loadkernel:
call copysector
add cl, 1 ; move to next sector
add bx, 512 ; area to move next sector into
cmp cl, secnum + 1
jne loadkernel
runkernel:
; jump to our kernel
push 07e0h ; cs
push 00000 ; ip
retf
copysector:
pusha
mov ah, 02h ; read sector
mov al, 1 ; read one sector
mov ch, 0 ; cylinder 0
;mov cl, 3 ; second sector
mov dh, 0 ; head 0
mov dl, 0 ; drive 0
int 13h ; bios disk routines
popa
ret
db 510-($-sector1) dup (090h) ;fill out restof sector with zeroes
dw 0AA55h ; sector signature bios needs to identify bootable sec
On my 1.6GHz p4, I can go from cold start to ganking 6 sectors of the floppy and running my "kernel" in 2 seconds flat. I could cut some time off by stuffing the whole thing in a boot rom on a network card. Hell, I could get a 1second boot if I just ditched the sparse bios routines and stuff my crap in the bios flash rom it's self.
Oh, and Amiga OS is bloated compared to my OS. Every *byte* accounted for. I have you all beat. :roflmao:
Wrong. If I put my OS and application in ROM, then that would be the fastest boot up time.
-
This I'd be interested to see. Do you use a paging strategy for it, or do you limit it to the largest tile that can fit in 16MiB?
How do you give visual feedback on changes that affect the whole image, or do you allow modification only on a per tile basis?
I've written image processing code that operates on arbitrarily large images in a few kilobytes by basically streaming through it (for simple changes) or operating on tiny tiles (for image processing kernels). It worked but it certainly wasn't "visual". That didn't matter as it was for an automated process anyway.
This isn't a criticism, but I can't imagine such a system being a lot of use to people used to being able to operate at various levels of zoom as well as on the entire image at once. People buy big grunty PC boxes because they expect to be able to do stuff as quickly and readily as possible.
I did one with uncompressed tiles; that one is easier to do. You just keep at least 9 tiles on screen and then update as user wants to move. So you update 3 tiles going east/west or 3 tiles going north/south or 5 tiles going diagonally. You keep one average image either in a separate file or in the header. You can keep several images at various resolutions but for my application, it served the purpose. You can also do it with compressed tiles-- if you keep space for worst case compressed tile and keep directory in header of the size of each tile. There's some restrictions but it works okay.
-
What part of the word example don't you understand? Besides which, I never doubted that you could actually open a large image, my point was how long it would take to open said image.
It's faster to load 9 tiles of an image than the entire image. In fact, I froze Photoshop several times on a PC because I was editing an image 50+ Megabytes and saving also takes quite some time. In fact, I also wrote a Sound Editor for older Windows OSes that has instant load/play time because it only reads a few samples to display in the window and keeps track of everything in the file. So you can instantly play/load a file up to 2GB. Editing is also zero time unless you shorten or lengthen the waveform.
-
Wrong. If I put my OS and application in ROM, then that would be the fastest boot up time.
Doesn't that depend on the bus connected to the ROM and the ROM package itself? You've just made a very general statement regarding ROM-based boot times. ;-)
-
I don't think so. Even if we accept the joyport example, external HID for PC's have all migrated pretty much to USB these days. Honestly, you can even get bloody USB graphics cards nowadays. Therefore the PC isn't actually in the race to have a high speed joyport, so it can't really be playing catch up. The same is true with other legacy expansion ports like good old centronic's parallel ports etc.Who uses a parallel port printer in a typical PC dominated office environment now? LAN printers have been standard for donkeys years.
...
Sorry, but even with a USB joystick, you can't read the joystick port in a few cycles like you can on Amiga. Using API calls or serial packet protocols is the general trend for modern OSes but Amiga allows another method-- direct hardware access which is becoming lesser and lesser doable on PCs as more and more hardware becomes nonstandard. So the same API call takes 100 cycles on one machine and 20000 cycles on another machine and hardly anyone knows what actually the API call did.
Parallel ports are still useful in certain applications. They make better joystick interfaces than USB especially if they are PCI-based.
-
Doesn't that depend on the bus connected to the ROM and the ROM package itself? You've just made a very general statement regarding ROM-based boot times. ;-)
Go ahead, calculate the timing for 16-bit ROM interface on Amiga with the general PC's ROMs and see if it's that significant.
Realistically as it is now, many offices and homes I have gone to (I was just there today fixing someone's PC), the XP boot up time is in the minutes. I saw one person whose XP took 20 minutes to boot up before he could log in to the internet. I think all the antivirus software, internet drivers, etc. took longer to initialize than the rest of the system. So what he did was, he put Solitaire into the startup as the first task that started up. So he played solitaire as the system booted and he told me he can finish one game by the time he was able to log into the internet.
-
I saw one person whose XP took 20 minutes to boot up before he could log in to the internet. I think all the antivirus software, internet drivers, etc. took longer to initialize than the rest of the system. So what he did was, he put Solitaire into the startup as the first task that started up. So he played solitaire as the system booted and he told me he can finish one game by the time he was able to log into the internet.
That's not uncommon, unfortunately, and it's a product of many poorly written programs stepping all over each other. Vendors like HP and Dell sell services, so of course, they pre-install software-based advertisements geared at separating consumers from their money.
One very common slowdown is a product of I/O latency introduced by antivirus software during updates, at which time access to files is blocked or significantly delayed. I wish we lived in world where antivirus products were unnecessary, but unfortunately, the world is peopled with a**holes intent on making everyone else's life miserable. Like hardware vendors, antivirus vendors also sell services, so their consumer products are laden with yet more software-based advertisements.
-
That's not uncommon, unfortunately, and it's a product of many poorly written programs stepping all over each other. Vendors like HP and Dell sell services, so of course, they pre-install software-based advertisements geared at separating consumers from their money.
One very common slowdown is a product of I/O latency introduced by antivirus software during updates, at which time access to files is blocked or significantly delayed. I wish we lived in world where antivirus products were unnecessary, but unfortunately, the world is peopled with a**holes intent on making everyone else's life miserable. Like hardware vendors, antivirus vendors also sell services, so their consumer products are laden with yet more software-based advertisements.
Someone mentioned the security problems with Win PC's. i would go so far as to say that PC security software ought to be cosdiered as part of the PC operating environment, without security software installed all the arguments about up-time, data reliabilty etc go out the window ( no pun) in the REAL world. Then consider the responsiveness and boot time and the user experience..
-
Someone mentioned the security problems with Win PC's. i would go so far as to say that PC security software ought to be cosdiered as part of the PC operating environment, without security software installed all the arguments about up-time, data reliabilty etc go out the window ( no pun) in the REAL world. Then consider the responsiveness and boot time and the user experience..
In the business world, where we care about thinhs like I/Os per second, antivirus, open file managers, and other file system related tools are always part of the equation. The Windows kernel does start *very* quickly, but like Kickstart, it's not of much use without an operating environment.
-
Someone mentioned the security problems with Win PC's. i would go so far as to say that PC security software ought to be cosdiered as part of the PC operating environment, without security software installed all the arguments about up-time, data reliabilty etc go out the window ( no pun) in the REAL world. Then consider the responsiveness and boot time and the user experience..
Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?
Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?
I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.
Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.
-
Someone mentioned the security problems with Win PC's. i would go so far as to say that PC security software ought to be cosdiered as part of the PC operating environment, without security software installed all the arguments about up-time, data reliabilty etc go out the window ( no pun) in the REAL world. Then consider the responsiveness and boot time and the user experience..
Oh yeah, Windows XP is insecure.
1. It's besides the point. We're still discussing PC:s here. Stop making invalid arguments based on the assumption that PC:s = Windows.
2. If we compare to Amiga OS, Windows XP actually is pretty damn secure.
-
Guys, you need to stop perpetuating the "amiga boots faster" argument until you have any idea of what tasks the machines are performing while they're booting.
Again, just going by default compiler settings. Not purposely done. Many people don't bother figuring out what is dead code and how to eliminate it so you end up with EXEs that take up megabytes of memory. Never said PC sucks because it's full of applications that have tons of dead code or redundant code.
... which is why the argument was totally redundant and irrelevant to this discussion. I can make a bloated "Hello world" for Amiga, too, but I wouldn't hold it against the Amiga system.
The example I gave of animations running from floppy, the size of the data files and exes combined mattered. If they weren't compressed and code highly optimized, the frame rate speed would suffer.
Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available.
Where exactly is the "hard drive storage" on a floppy? This is exactly what you were saying, seemingly unrelated to the floppy example. Concerning the example you gave with the Amiga (play an animation LOADED from floppy), uncompressed images would be faster anyway.
All in all it's a pretty whimsical argument anyhow to say that PC code is usually too "unoptimized" to play full frame rate animation, since pretty much all common media formats used on the PC are compressed and optimized enough to be streamed with low band-width.
Many boot block intros I have seen don't rely on any WHDLoad.
Seeing them run perfectly on any "standard" Amiga is not common, though.
If you write OCS software, it works on all Amigas.
Hahaha, yeah, well in reality most OCS demos are pretty incompatible with anything other than the machine they were coded for (remember, we have to GET REAL). "Optimizing" in the early Amiga days usually meant bypassing standard system functions, controlling the hardware directly and taking full advantage of the exact specifications of the machine. Change the hardware? Stops working. That's how it was for all Amiga models, as is it for all PC models. Even if you used the proper kernel functions on the Amiga old software titles would stop working properly with new ROM revisions and clock speeds.
You show me a demo that uses the audio card; they are all nonstandard.
Since audio cards are all "non-standard" there is a standard API present in any modern PC OS to provide transparent access to the functionality (like AHI on the Amiga), so yes, most PC demos and small intros (both in Linux and Windows) use the sound card. Can't you bother to look that up yourself (http://www.pouet.net/)? And even in the DOS days before there were standard APIs some demos (and most serious software and games) supported multiple soundcards perfectly anyway.
Here's I wrote my own boot block control code that allows me to control the Amiga from a PC:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320379502506
Pretty damn cool, but hardly relevant to your argument.
I wasn't going by "most". Just like the audio example I gave. One Khz is based on actual recorded joystick data from River-raid as I already mentioned.
Oh, you could probably record ultrasound in the MHz range but that still doesn't mean that it's relevant information to our hearing, much like kHz recording of hand movement isn't relevant to joystick handling (and if this isn't getting obvious to you by now, I don't really know what to tell you).
How exactly were you recording anyhow? Were you just recording the joystick directly, or were you counting how often the game polls for the joystick? In the latter case I would be pretty surprised since River Raid is one of those games where once-per-frame sampling would probably be sufficient.
You can't time a bit to appear to a device at an exact point in time unless you take over the hardware and have the exact spec of the controller.
But you can still have them predictable enough, apparently. My PS2 to USB interface performs great in all games I've tried it with.
But then you mine as well plug the usb card into an Amiga and do the same.
Who's playing catchup again? I'm not saying that the Amiga can't do stuff, my point is that PC:s don't really have anything to catch up to.
And this has nothing to do with joystick I/O.
If USB is the primary interface of your joystick (which probably is the common case), it must have!
Sorry, I don't argue about nonexistent products. If you don't have a joystick port, it's not my problem. Maybe the spec will get dropped and replaced with a different one.
Modern PC:s playing catchup with the Amiga are also non-existent, but we've been arguing religiously about those for the last few pages.
Joystick I/O was a bonus to the joystick interface; first you need to pick the joystick port before talking about I/O. If you switch ports, I'll start talking about the expansion connector.
USB is not analogous to the expansion connector. USB is exactly what it is called - a universal serial bus. The closest thing you'l find in the "standard" Amiga hardware design? Don't know, maybe the clock port?
-
Oh yeah, Windows XP is insecure.
1. It's besides the point. We're still discussing PC:s here. Stop making invalid arguments based on the assumption that PC:s = Windows.
OK I'll say it again: more than 90% of PC's use Windows. Some figures say 95%. An assumption that is correct 95% of the time would be an acceptable one everywhere else except a few anal people on Amiga.org. Linux has its own special shortcomings from a user perspective which i'll get to in a later post, and Macs are NOT PC's in the context of the original post.
2. If we compare to Amiga OS, Windows XP actually is pretty damn secure.
2. You miss the point: if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly. This might result in your losing your life savings. Its a pretty big risk. So you HAVE to use your XP PC with your security software..your PC takes a huge performance hit and what does that do to the responsiveness of your PC and the quality of user experience? I actually have no qualms using my Amiga on the net without any security software. Could someone hack into it and install malware? Yep. Will it happen? Nope.
-
OK I'll say it again: more than 90% of PC's use Windows. Some figures say 95%. An assumption that is correct 95% of the time would be an acceptable one everywhere else except a few anal people on Amiga.org. Linux has its own special shortcomings from a user perspective which i'll get to in a later post, and Macs are NOT PC's in the context of the original post.
If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").
2. You miss the point: if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly. This might result in your losing your life savings. Its a pretty big risk. So you HAVE to use your XP PC with your security software..your PC takes a huge performance hit and what does that do to the responsiveness of your PC and the quality of user experience? I actually have no qualms using my Amiga on the net without any security software. Could someone hack into it and install malware? Yep. Will it happen? Nope.
Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.
Windows XP IS more secure, no matter how much more likely it is some external force will try to attack it. Amiga OS doesn't even have any basic protection from the programs it is running itself.
But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!
And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.
-
Guys, you need to stop perpetuating the "amiga boots faster" argument until you have any idea of what tasks the machines are performing while they're booting.
...
That example was also given. You can launch applications from AmigaDOS; you can't under Windows XP/Vista which is what most PCs have.
>... which is why the argument was totally redundant and irrelevant to this discussion. I can make a bloated "Hello world" for Amiga, too, but I wouldn't hold it against the Amiga system.
You missed the point again. The default compiler settings produced it; it's not on purpose. It's an observation-- not meant to say that PCs cannot produce optimized code.
>Where exactly is the "hard drive storage" on a floppy? This is exactly what you were saying, seemingly unrelated to the floppy example. Concerning the example you gave with the Amiga (play an animation LOADED from floppy), uncompressed images would be faster anyway.
You missed the point again. There's no hard drive involved. The animation boots from floppy and runs.
>All in all it's a pretty whimsical argument anyhow to say that PC code is usually too "unoptimized" to play full frame rate animation, since pretty much all common media formats used on the PC are compressed and optimized enough to be streamed with low band-width.
NEVER said that. PCs have enough horsepower to run the animation even with the bloat. Chewbacca defense.
>Seeing them run perfectly on any "standard" Amiga is not common, though.
That's what I stated-- that size matters to affect the speed ON THE AMIGA. Your blunder that size has no bearing on speed is your problem in understanding.
>Hahaha, yeah, well in reality most OCS demos are pretty incompatible with anything other than the machine they were coded for (remember, we have to GET REAL). "Optimizing" in the early Amiga days usually meant bypassing standard system functions, controlling the hardware directly and taking full advantage of the exact specifications of the machine. Change the hardware? Stops working. That's how it was for all Amiga models, as is it for all PC models. Even if you used the proper kernel functions on the Amiga old software titles would stop working properly with new ROM revisions and clock speeds.
Complete rubbish. My boot block stuff runs on all Amigas across the board. Don't argue against things you don't understand.
>Since audio cards are all "non-standard" there is a standard API present in any modern PC OS to provide transparent access to the functionality (like AHI on the Amiga), so yes, most PC demos and small intros (both in Linux and Windows) use the sound card...
Now is that after the OS loads or before. If your demo is 1K (as you say) but relies on the OS functions, then you have to wait for OS to load.
> Can't you bother to look that up yourself (http://www.pouet.net/)? And even in the DOS days before there were standard APIs some demos (and most serious software and games) supported multiple soundcards perfectly anyway.
In 1k? Bullcrap.
>Pretty damn cool, but hardly relevant to your argument.
Sure it is. You asked for small demo; I gave you a full application.
>Oh, you could probably record ultrasound in the MHz range but that still doesn't mean that it's relevant information to our hearing, much like kHz recording of hand movement isn't relevant to joystick handling (and if this isn't getting obvious to you by now, I don't really know what to tell you).
You should really think about it rather than repeating your mistake. If I move the joystick around while pressing/releasing fire button, the time in state change can be 1 ms or less.
>How exactly were you recording anyhow? Were you just recording the joystick directly, or were you counting how often the game polls for the joystick? In the latter case I would be pretty surprised since River Raid is one of those games where once-per-frame sampling would probably be sufficient.
I'm recording the state changes and timing the difference between the state change.
>But you can still have them predictable enough, apparently. My PS2 to USB interface performs great in all games I've tried it with.
Sorry, don't know of any joystick using PS2 port.
>Who's playing catchup again? I'm not saying that the Amiga can't do stuff, my point is that PC:s don't really have anything to catch up to.
They are still playing catchup to joystick interface. They are still playing catchup to real-time useage of hardware registers (those that you are forced to go through APIs); they are forced in playing catchup to timing things with zero latency. I'll sum up later...as this reply times out with Amiga.org for some reason.
>If USB is the primary interface of your joystick (which probably is the common case), it must have!
It's not the primary case; there are millions of gameports. USB joystick requires more cycles to read the joystick port than reading I/O port on Amiga as it is currently-- not the nonexisting ones you are speculating on.
>Modern PC:s playing catchup with the Amiga are also non-existent, but we've been arguing religiously about those for the last few pages.
First show a joystick that beats the amiga. Show me a timer that can do the 558ns accuracy on any PC. Etc.
>USB is not analogous to the expansion connector. USB is exactly what it is called - a universal serial bus. The closest thing you'l find in the "standard" Amiga hardware design? Don't know, maybe the clock port?
So don't compare apples and oranges then. Pick a joystick port.
-
2. You miss the point: if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly.
Well, since there is no antivirus in Amiga, no protection, no user level (yes, any program will run as root level), how time do you think it would take to just format your harddrive by some virus ?
This argument is void. If Amiga suffered maybe 1/100th of the attacks targeted to Windows, how secure would it be ?
-
If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").
Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.
...
You just like comparing nonexistent things. Compare with reality. Amiga OS is a minority so it wins since it doesn't need as much security as Windows XP.
>But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!
You missed some posts. C64 does not have BOOT option. You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.
>And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.
I have seen hundreds of users where there system slowed down by general use. Majority of people are NOT experts at eliminating whatever garbage has gotten into their system. It's the OS writers fault (who are constantly updating their OSes anyway) to realize this and fix it. Otherwise, it can be stated that in general Windows XP boots slower than Amiga OS.
-
I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.
Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.
Some preliminaries:
1. Who appointed you to judge whether "the responses from the PC side make perfect sense". Give examples of these perfectly-sensible arguments that do not centre around the raw processing power of modern hardware, but instead focus on the user-experience. In particular focus on the 90%+ of PC's in the real world that run on Windows, most of which are XP machines with single core CPU's with 1 gig or less ram running vital security software that strangles the hardware. Thats the experience of most users.
2. The question is not: "Can an Amiga do everything as fast as PC". Can the Amiga open 78 MP pictures, encode DVD/audio as fast as a PC blah blah. Can your PC do it as fast as IBM supercomputers? Thats simply new hardware crunching numbers faster than old hardware. Its a meaningless argument. Take raw processing power out of the equation, what do you have left? The user experience.
3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers. Its therefore reasonable to say "PC"= computer that runs Windows.
4. I only need to demonstrate ONE area where the PC is still playing catch-up.
Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?
An A1200 with 8 meg ram and OS 3.1 can be used to write letters, store customer accounts, issue mail shots, print receipts, analyse financial data using spreadsheets. The software is there, and the hardware is capable. The basics of business don't change, even if computer hardware and OS's do. Whether people choose to use it or not is a different question. Format your drive with PFS 3 or SFS and you won't lose data on your hard drive even if your switch the power off mid-write. You can back it up if you want to CD-RW like we still do at my job on a PC. You won't lose your data. If your Amiga hardware is flaky then don't blame the system, fix the hardware. Mission critical enough? Secure enough? Amiga will do the job.
Two current real world examples: My dentist uses Scala on an A1200 with a touch screen to display information in the waiting room. He scans images with a UMAX scsi scanner, and set it all up himself. My dentist is also my brother. An aged-care facility uses an A500 (!!) to display meal times, announcements etc 24/7 to all of the residents room TV's and to TV's throughout the facility, and this is set up by the receptionist!! It boots off a floppy in 10 second. A PC can do digital signage as its now called, but at a cost of many thousands of $ both in hardware, software, professional set up costs.
Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?
Oh the linux fan boys: i can get a responsive fast PC by compiling my own custom kernel, and with 4 cores at 2600 mhz and huge CPU caches and 4 gig RAM running at 1333 mhz and a 640 MB GPU overclocked it can boot a few seconds faster than a 15 year old computer with crippled CPU card.
And now the typical Linux user: "just bought a PC, booted with ubuntu/mandriva/fedora/PCLinuxOS 09 blah blah and i get a kernel panic/white screen/vesa only video/no sound/mobile modem not detected/no wireless/doesn't see hard drive. Search through gazillion forums to find: sorry your chipset/video card/sound/modem/wireless isn't supported, wait for the next kernel in 6 months. Or follow this obscure guide which doesn't work. oh yeah thats right it doesn't, its out of date, go to this guide..still no luck? wait 6 months..new kernel/distro, Ok i can boot and install but....refresh is funny on my screen/wireless doesn't work/sound is scratchy/ wait 6 months more..yep it works, except for the wireless. And my printer. Should have got a HP printer. But it IS a HP. Is it a supported model...erm no. Packages are great: but what i wan't isn't in the repo: tough. OK I installed something from the repo, it said it needed to download dependencies, so i said yes, and now I can't boot, something about KDE..what did you install? Oh yeah that installs a small library that KDE uses but was updated and KDE will need to be updated and you can do that by cutting and pasting CLI commands..BUT I can't boot. Sorry boot using your installation CD..blah blah blah.
Amiga: stick workbench floppy in, switch on, follow instructions, boot. Hardware detected, configured. Done. Soft reset. Boot off hard rive. Install app software: double click on install icon. Done.
Which user-experience would you prefer?
1. Boot times: Amiga's boot faster. No question. Even if you allow for the additional processes that the PC has to perform at boot times, PC hardware resources are many, many factors greater than that available to an Amiga. Put another way: the Amiga does less at boot time, but has less hardware resources to do it with. Waiting is waiting, no matter why it happens. And no hibernating isn't a solution because you can hibernate on PC but you may not awaken from it and its not a HUGELY faster than cold booting anyway.
2. greater malware prevalance on PC introduces higher risk of data loss, passwords being stolen, identity theft. Third party security software is mandatory, but that diminishes the responsiveness and therefore the quality of the user experience.
3. general responsiveness of the GUI fluctuates on Windows PC's far more than Amiga. AmigaOS prioritises user input eg mouse pointer, menu opening when background tasks are running more highly than Windows. I experience more wait cursors on a Win PC than i do on Amiga.
Thats enpough for tonight.
-
Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?
Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?
I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
...
The problem with writing all the reasons at once is that the thread goes in all different directions. So gradually different reasons are being mentioned starting with the simplest that the joystick interface on Amiga is much much superior to the PC's joystick interface. Now, we have got some PC fanatics having problems with this obvious fact so how can someone prepare a list of other things that are more difficult to understand.
>We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.
Sorry missed those posts that make perfect sense. Any reference?
>Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.
Too lazy to read the posts, but yet claim that PC side has made good arguments. That's kind of hard to do. Here's summary of what has been stated thus far:
(1) Amiga joystick interface kills PC gameport and even what's available on USB joysticks.
(2) Amiga (in general) boots up faster than PCs (in general). Barring customized 32/64-bit ROM interfaces/boot setups.
(3) Amiga has a Copper which can allow you to time things to 558ns accuracy without the +/- bullcrap (latency) of modern PCs. Amiga also has other timing mechanisms like audio timers, processor timing, etc. but those are like PC timers in that there's latency involved. (4) Amiga allows direct access to hardware registers as well as API function calls. PCs are stuck with mainly non-standard hardware I/O so you are forced to go through API calls which can take any amount of time (100 cycles to thousands of cycles). This allows you to write tighter code that guarantee response time in cycles rather than some hodge-podge value.
(5) The above (3) and (4) combine to give a system that's more predictable and thus suited for real-time projects. Amiga also has a parallel port as well which PCs unfortunately got rid of and thus doing parallel signal processing with exact timing also now favors Amiga more.
There's a few more like sprite engine, audio effects, video beam position reading, etc. that can also in some cases out do the PC.
-
If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").
Like i said anal people on Amiga.org, but I've dealt with the Linux fan boys as well.
Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.
yeah BUT ITS ISN"T AN THEY DON"T. Imagine if we could get OS 3.1 running natively on quadcore machine. We can't so we have to deal with reality, not what if fantasy..
QUOTE=Linde;509138]
And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.[/QUOTE]
No. ALL PC's get slower the more you use them; the registry gets clogged with shit, the hard drive gets badly fragmented and malware does god-knows what. the Amiga GUI deosn't slow down as it gets used more.
-
The point is that Amiga virus protection lay really in the miniscule amount of users. "New Amiga virus released, dozens panic worldwide" is not likely to make Headline News.
-
Well, since there is no antivirus in Amiga, no protection, no user level (yes, any program will run as root level), how time do you think it would take to just format your harddrive by some virus ?
This argument is void. If Amiga suffered maybe 1/100th of the attacks targeted to Windows, how secure would it be ?
But Amiga doesn't, and Windows does. Thats REALITY.
If as many people used Linux as they do windows, would Linux's argument that its more secure than windows still be valid?
-
This is so funny that PC people have to make hypothetical arguments like "In 2 years USB 3.0 will common place", "If Amiga had the majority..", etc. That just proves the point of this topic-- "PC still playing Amiga catchup."
-
You missed some posts. C64 does not have BOOT option. You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.
No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.
-
No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.
But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots). Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS. On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.
-
But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots). Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS. On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.
Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:
-
Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:
while (argumentFails()) {
mutateArgument();
}
-
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.
The application I choose is Firefox...
-
Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:
I said that criterion a few times already. You ever heard of autoboot ROMs vs. normal ROMs on SCSI cards on Amiga? Why the prefix "auto" in autoboot.
-
while (argumentFails()) {
mutateArgument();
}
Sounds like what you did with the joystick argument.
-
Sounds like what you did with the joystick argument.
Hardly. My argument was consistent all the way through. Modern computers have far exceeded 20 year old ones in performance and capability. You and a couple of other bitter diehards were the ones suggesting you need to use sampling rates of obsolete ports and boot times as significant metrics.
Frankly, I find your entire attempt to justify the premiership of long obsoleted hardware above hardware that what was once inferior but has since evolved beyond recognition hilarious.
Current machines have thousands of times the processing power, hundreds of times the memory and disk space available. You will find for the vast majority of all computer users, professional or otherwise, 20 year old hardware is of no practical use for their day to day needs nor live up to their expectations in terms of basic capability.
20 years is a long time. Simply playing an mp3 track or opening a large jpeg image from a digital camera will bring a classic amiga to its knees, unless a hardware or PPC decoder is used. A 68060 will manage either task more respectibly, but it uses a significant portion of the available CPU time to do so. Meanwhile, the rest of the world have grown used to the expectation that their mobile phone can do these things, let alone their computer.
I'm really sorry that you find yourself so opposed the notion that PC hardware has evolved far beyond the venerable miggy that you find things like emulation in UAE a total anathema. You are missing out on enjoying the using an amiga that has the raw horsepower of a modern machine for the sake of being true to hardware that even Jay Minor and Dave Haynie both expressed doubts about afterwards (As early as 1989, Jay mentioned in hindsight that he'd have opted for chunky rather than planar pixel formats and Dave wanted to use PCI instead of evolving the Zorro standard any further).
Still at the end of the day, your choice, your loss.
-
But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots). Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS. On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.
I want to write programs in COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2.
-
Several things about PC booting with Windows that you folks are probably not aware of:
If you want to see what's taking so long on your PC boot up all you have to do is go down to the RUN Menu and type:
MSCONFIG
Click on the startup tab, all the boxes that are checked on your list are things that run when you start up the pc, if you remove those (most of which Amiga doesn't have available) your PC will boot much much faster though you need to be careful with what you turn off..
There is also a services tab.. Everything there runs in the background and takes up memory unchecking the boxes there will remove these items from startup.
Also there is something called superfetch that runs on startup.. Windows SuperFetch enables programs and files to load much faster than they would on Windows XP–based PCs.
When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using. On Windows XP–based PCs, this can slow progress to a crawl when you attempt to resume work.
SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.
You can disable this also using Tweak VI from TotalIdea Software
http://www.totalidea.com/product.php
I have to say that most of the people who think Windows starts up slowly just aren't aware of just how much work and what the PC is doing for you that doesn't happen on the Amiga when you start up. Yes it starts up quickly, but the Amiga doesn't enhance your experience in the same way.. Though I know a lot of guys who put a LOT of things in their startup-sequences..
If you turned off everything cached and in startup, the PC would boot just as fast as an Amiga, but would you really want that experience considering what it's doing for you??
-
You missed the point again. The default compiler settings produced it; it's not on purpose. It's an observation-- not meant to say that PCs cannot produce optimized code.
So what IS the point? If you can't code or if you can't use a compiler you might make bloated programs? Surprise, surprise.
You missed the point again. There's no hard drive involved. The animation boots from floppy and runs.
"Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available."
NEVER said that. PCs have enough horsepower to run the animation even with the bloat. Chewbacca defense.
Oh, I'm sorry then. I misread your message.
That's what I stated-- that size matters to affect the speed ON THE AMIGA. Your blunder that size has no bearing on speed is your problem in understanding.
No, size doesn't necessarily have direct correlation with speed unless you count the loading time from the disk or stream the content.
Complete rubbish. My boot block stuff runs on all Amigas across the board. Don't argue against things you don't understand.
I never said your bootblock stuff doesn't, but you'll have a pretty frustrating experience watching OCS and ECS demos or games without soft kicking or using WHDLoad.
Now is that after the OS loads or before. If your demo is 1K (as you say) but relies on the OS functions, then you have to wait for OS to load.
That is after the OS loads. Yes, interfacing with "any" soundcard on a PC relies on standard APIs. That's definitely a difference from the "standard" Amiga, but in most regards it's not a short-coming, which is why abstraction layers like RTG and AHI exist.
In 1k? Bullcrap.
Probably not often in DOS demos, but it's definitely possible to support adlib compatible cards in 1k.
You should really think about it rather than repeating your mistake. If I move the joystick around while pressing/releasing fire button, the time in state change can be 1 ms or less.
Yes, and a change in sound can happen over an infinitesimal amount of time. It doesn't mean that it's particularily important for our hearing.
I'm recording the state changes and timing the difference between the state change.
How often do you think the game itself is checking the state? Show me a game that utilizes the superior Amiga joystick port to its full potential!
Sorry, don't know of any joystick using PS2 port.
PS2 as in Playstation 2, not PS/2. I have an adapter to connect two PS2 compatible controllers to one USB port.
They are still playing catchup to joystick interface.
No. There is nothing to catch up to. Having a joystick port on a computer is totally redundant when you have universal serial interfaces.
They are still playing catchup to real-time useage of hardware registers (those that you are forced to go through APIs);
No. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years you know that software developers are trying to move further AWAY from the hardware. Transparency, modularity, uniformity, and in the end, system stability, at the expense of exact control. A pretty small price to pay to open up a whole new world of fast hardware development, in my opinion, while a rigid system design like the Amiga won't ever see that.
they are forced in playing catchup to timing things with zero latency.
PC:s may very well be (and are) used in low latency/real-time applications.
It's not the primary case; there are millions of gameports. USB joystick requires more cycles to read the joystick port than reading I/O port on Amiga as it is currently-- not the nonexisting ones you are speculating on.
Given the average life length of a typical PC game pad I'm pretty sure that there are more USB sticks in use. "There are millions of game ports"... How many USB ports do you think there are?
First show a joystick that beats the amiga.
The joypads I use have two separate analog joysticks, a directional pad and ten buttons ergonomically laid out. They work as respond as instantly as necessary for fast shooters as well as old platform games, even if my computer might not be able to sample them at 1000Hz (which I don't know since there are no games that do).
There really isn't anything like it for Amiga.
Show me a timer that can do the 558ns accuracy on any PC. Etc.
On some OS:s I'm sure it's possible. If you need to have timing that tight (i e for timing some sort of serial communication) in any of the mainstream general purpose OS:s you can often outsource the time critical stuff to a $1 PIC.
So don't compare apples and oranges then. Pick a joystick port.
Dedicated interfaces for joysticks are a thing of the past, so there's really nothing else to compare to. Consoles too are moving to better solutions such as USB and Bluetooth.
-
Some preliminaries:
1. Who appointed you to judge whether "the responses from the PC side make perfect sense".
The same entity that appointed you the saviour of the Amiga.
Give examples of these perfectly-sensible arguments
Take off your rose tinted spectacles and read the thread again. Maybe you missed them.
....that do not centre around the raw processing power of modern hardware, but instead focus on the user-experience.
In particular focus on the 90%+ of PC's in the real world that run on Windows,
Why should I? Does it qualify your argument only when you specify the criteria? That's not what thetitle of this thread states.
You wan't to know about the real world. In the real world people use PCs and MAC. The Amiga need a hell of a lot of catching up to do before it can even be taken as a serious platform at all. How much more real do you want it? Learn to accept reality my friend. :)
2. The question is not: "Can an Amiga do everything as fast as PC". Can ...blah.
There was no question. Just an unqualified statement. Read the title again.
It's only zealotry that has led you to conflate this issue into an unrecognisable mess and introduce criteria and questions where there were none.
I ask for clarification and you decide to jump down my throat. You seem awfully twitchy. Step back and take a chill pill. This level of excitement might not do your health much good.
3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers. Its therefore reasonable to say "PC"= computer that runs Windows.
It seem you still can't make the simple deistinction between hardware and software. :roflmao:
4. I only need to demonstrate ONE area where the PC is still playing catch-up.
Aww. :( Why only one? Knock yourself out we're all listening intently. Don't say you are running out of steam already? Oh yes your health. OK step back then.
An A1200 with 8 meg ram and OS 3.1 can be used to write letters, store customer accounts, issue mail shots, print receipts, analyse financial data using spreadsheets. The software is there, and the hardware is capable. The basics of business don't change, even if computer hardware and OS's do.
Back to software are we? The company I work for needs to exchange MS Office ducuments and run a decent web browser as a bare minimum.
I'm sorry sttuffing a load of hobby home computers in our offices is not goung to make us more productive.
We run LAMP servers and can even use basic specced machines for that. Unfortunately a stock AMIGA 1200 just wont cut the mustard there. (You are the one that wants to stick to basics and not use "souped up machines" so you at least use your own criteria in this one.)
Whether people choose to use it or not is a different question. Format your drive with PFS 3 or SFS..... blah blah..
So you are writing a 10000 word proposal and you hit the off button you won't lose any data on an Amiga? Wow! That's amazing! The business world should really be told about this breakthrough. I don't think you are evangelising it enough. :eek:
Come on. You are clutching at straws here. Not having to shutdown safely is hardly a feature that is going to affect our servers which haven't been shut down for years. We don't miss it one bit.
If your Amiga hardware is flaky then don't blame the system, fix the hardware.
My A1200 Wedge is fine. Plays a nice game of Cannon Fodder once in a blue Moon. :D
Mission critical enough?
No! , I'm afraid not, to be honest.
Secure enough? Amiga will do the job.
Sure not being able to serve DHTML web pages at all is a bit too secure to be useful at all. I could replace the A1200 with a brick instead. That would be just as equally secure. Not a fat lot of use though.
Two current real world examples: ........................
Good luck to them. Those examples hardly put PCs to shame. I can do more than that on my mobile phone. It doesn't mean the whole world is going to scrap their PCs overnight upon hearing that news.
The Amiga needs billions of dollars of investment to be a serious contender and catch up with to the established platforms. Just face reality for goodness sake.
Oh the linux fan boys: i can get a responsive fast PC by compiling my own custom kernel, and with 4 cores at 2600 mhz and huge CPU caches and 4 gig RAM running at 1333 mhz and a 640 MB GPU overclocked it can boot a few seconds faster than a 15 year old computer with crippled CPU card.
:roflmao: I hate using linux.
But it runs the majority of the worlds website including all major Amiga websites. (This one included) so it has it's uses and is far more advanced as a platform than the limited Amiga.
Just because I don't like linux doesnt mean I will deny it's capabilities and usefulness.
Zealotry can turn you blind. It's a pernicious habit you know. You seriously sound like an old style MacLover :rofl:
And now the typical Linux user: "just bought a PC, booted with ubuntu/mandriva/fedora/PCLinuxOS 09 blah blah and i get a kernel panic/white screen/vesa only video/no sound/mobile modem not detected/no wireless/doesn't see hard drive. Search through gazillion forums to find: sorry your chipset/video card/sound/modem/wireless isn't supported, wait for the next kernel in 6 months. Or follow this obscure guide which doesn't work. oh yeah thats right it doesn't, its out of date, go to this guide..still no luck? wait 6 months..new kernel/distro, Ok i can boot and install but....refresh is funny on my screen/wireless ......blah blah blah.
Funny I had similar problems trying to get one of my A1200s up to scratch.
Amiga: stick workbench floppy in, switch on, follow instructions, boot. Hardware detected, configured. Done. Soft reset. Boot off hard rive. Install app software: double click on install icon. Done.
Send me a ticket please. Cloud cuckoo land sounds like quite an inviting place.
Which user-experience would you prefer?
My current user experience with PCs is fine. It's better and more productive for me than trying to force an ancient (but elegant) Amiga system to try and do it for me.
I don't need to catch up with anything. You might need to catch up with reality though.
1. Boot times: Amiga's boot faster. No question. Even if you allow for the additional processes that the PC has to perform at boot times, PC hardware resources are many, many factors greater than that available to an Amiga. Put another way: the Amiga does less at boot time, but has less hardware resources to do it with. Waiting is waiting, no matter why it happens. And no hibernating isn't a solution because you can hibernate on PC but you may not awaken from it and its not a HUGELY faster than cold booting anyway.
2. greater malware prevalance on PC introduces higher risk of data loss, passwords being stolen, identity theft. Third party security software is mandatory, but that diminishes the responsiveness and therefore the quality of the user experience.
3. general responsiveness of the GUI fluctuates on Windows PC's far more than Amiga. AmigaOS prioritises user input eg mouse pointer, menu opening when background tasks are running more highly than Windows. I experience more wait cursors on a Win PC than i do on Amiga.
Thats enpough for tonight.
Finally you decided to be polite enough and answer my question. All I wanted was a summary to clarify your position.
I didn't want or need sarcastic, acrimonious, patronising, sanctimonious claptrap. But that's what I got so I decided to give as good as I got. I doubt many will hold it against me. ;)
OK. So this is all it boils down to eh? Wow ! I must say.
After all these pages all you say is that the PC needs to catch up with a PC in terms of:
(1) Boot times
(2) Security
(3) Responsiveness
(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.
(2) Security through obscurity eh? Sh!t !!! I think we need to make all PCs obscure to CATCH UP with the Amiga. :eek:
Since when has obscurity been a sought after feature? :crazy:
(3) I'm sorry to say that the PCs I use daily are a heck of a lot more responsive and useful to me than my A1200 could ever be. I could use an Amiga to do some of my tasks but I'd probably get fired for taking hours too long on tasks that should really be completed in minutes.
If anyone insisted on using Amigas for the work we do here they would be fired just for being anally retentive masochist anyway.
Look! a tool is a tool alright. Amigas are fun hobby retro machines. I like them I really do. What I don't do is lie to myself that they are the worlds answer to poverty as well as the kitchen sink.
The platform is a RETRO platform to everyone in the world bar a few BAFs. There are website that cater specifically for these types of people. You might want to pay a visit and see if you don't fit right in.
Standards matter in the real world. The PC has compatibility and standards which the Amiga needs to catch up to. It's sad but true.
Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.
-
But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots). Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS. On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.
Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?
-
yeah BUT ITS ISN"T AN THEY DON"T. Imagine if we could get OS 3.1 running natively on quadcore machine. We can't so we have to deal with reality, not what if fantasy..
By that logic cardboard boxes are also more secure than prisons. No one ever tried breaking out of cardboard boxes! Let's slowly begin putting criminals in boxes instead.
-
Hardly. My argument was consistent all the way through. Modern computers have far exceeded 20 year old ones in performance and capability. You and a couple of other bitter diehards were the ones suggesting you need to use sampling rates of obsolete ports and boot times as significant metrics.
Frankly, I find your entire attempt to justify the premiership of long obsoleted hardware above hardware that what was once inferior but has since evolved beyond recognition hilarious.
...
That's your blind obsession. You already think it's obsolete if it's old without refuting the legitimate argument. But that's not how the modern world works. Some companies produce better machines than others. It doesn't always go with later machines have better technology. Even during when Gameport was being produced (XP era and prior), it was obsolete compared to Atari/Amiga joysticks. They just never choose the superior interface.
>Current machines have thousands of times the processing power, hundreds of times the memory and disk space available. You will find for the vast majority of all computer users, professional or otherwise, 20 year old hardware is of no practical use for their day to day needs nor live up to their expectations in terms of basic capability.
That's not relevant to the arguments presented. Some people HAVE to use the PC becasuse of job/work requirements since that's the PC that happens to be marketed everywhere.
>I'm really sorry that you find yourself so opposed the notion that PC hardware has evolved far beyond the venerable miggy...
I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.
I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do. Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.
-
Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?
I didn't mutate my stand. I stated my criterion many times. This was already refuted when I stated "barring Atari 2600 cartridge type boots". BASIC is a ROM like cartridges. It's true, if he only wants to use BASIC, he's fine-- for him it does boot faster. But in the general case, I know the C64 are loading huge files of the disk drive and there's no boot option for that.
-
well you must be the only person on the planet that sees no value in fast booting and shut down. Go to any Win 7 forum and you'll see boot up and shut down time is a MAJOR concern of many many PC users, so much so that MS has gone out of its way to reduce both of these in Win 7, making sure that people know about this as well. Unlike you, most people do turn their computers on and off numerous times in a day, maybe to surf a bit, send an email, do some banking, and then live the rest of their lives, only to do boot up a few hours later to do the same, or something completely different.
quantify most. all you see on forums are a vocal few and not everyone. i for one am betatesting win 7 and have never posted anything. furthermore i don't shut my computer down as a pc really is really not designed to be started and shut down repeatedly.
Regarding shut down, I don't like to remeber the times I've had to leave the house quickly but have to wait for the PC to shut down, or I leave after shut down, and coming home to find some stupid process has stopped the shut down and the PC's been on for 8 hours. Never happened with Amiga..
no the amiga refused to shut down. on my amigas i could never use the menu to shut down workbench. there was always a process running in the background that had to be killed first(usually several.) on my setup i could not find a program to automatically kill those processes. so i just hit the power swich to shut it down. since amigas didn't cache anything this was harmless as long as the hd drive light was not on. but guess what a pc does cache files on the harddrive so trying to hit the power switch can hurt it. this is the only reason you can shut down an amiga faster. Application start up time is a real measure of the user experience. I get on the net on my A1200 68060 far more quickly than my PC. I have the google home page up faster on ibrowse than i do with Firefox; from the time I launch both browsers Its a joke that ancient hardware can do this. Try loading Word 2003 on a PC from 2003 see how fast it loads..and tell me if you enjoy your experience with loading Fireox3 on that as well.
lol you funny. yes ibrowse would load faster since it is optimized for the basic hardware for amigas. so it stands to reason that an 060 would blow it up quick. now for a something to blow your idea out of the water. i have used windows xp on a 380mhz pc and had the same experience as my 3ghz athlon ----why you ask? because microsoft has built timers into the os so the feel won't change with succesive hw upgrades. this is an asthetic decision and the delays actually help with compatibility. go and load up a pc version gold box game on a modern computer and you will see what i mean.
-
...
I don't need to catch up with anything. You might need to catch up with reality though.
...
That's subjective. If you take the objective approach, PCs do in fact need catching up in some areas that make the Amiga unique in those cases. And this topic was not to fulfill your needs but hope for an objective discussion.
>(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
>It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.
See, now if I make this subjective like you did, I would it makes a HUGE difference in boot-up time because I test low-level drivers which cause frequent crashes in XP. You decrease your life span by the amount of time you wait for your system to boot. It all adds up if you have to do it often.
>Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.
Nobody stated PC is inferior. It's inferior in some aspects; that's a fact. Even if you use it for hobbies/games, why not use a PC?
You didn't reply to my message.
-
I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.
I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do. Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.
Yeah, using Windows for totally elementary stuff like reading the joystick state at 1 kHz without jitter is something we have to look far into the future for. And for me, as a professional switch flipper having computer rebooting as my primary field of interest, light-switch booting speed is a very important factor.
-
You didn't reply to my message.
Come on! I was about to reply to you, I just about finished replying to Stefcep2. Phew! :crazy:
I'll probably do it in a bit as I need go somewhere in a few minutes.
Don't worry I won't be too harsh, as your tone was not sarcastic like his/hers? was. ;)
-
You can ask the windows kernel for the value of the game port and it'll return you that value before a stock amiga can stuff a number in one of it's cpu registers.
-
So what IS the point? If you can't code or if you can't use a compiler you might make bloated programs? Surprise, surprise.
..
It happens by default with famous PC compilers. Looks like you replied to this message without reading the entire posting since what you argued against initially was answered later.
>No, size doesn't necessarily have direct correlation with speed unless you count the loading time from the disk or stream the content.
The anim files decompress on the fly-- no streaming or disk reads.
>I never said your bootblock stuff doesn't, but you'll have a pretty frustrating experience watching OCS and ECS demos or games without soft kicking or using WHDLoad.
But Amiga has the edge since if you use OCS standard hardware, it works across the board on all Amigas and you don't have to use APIs.
>That is after the OS loads. Yes, interfacing with "any" soundcard on a PC relies on standard APIs. That's definitely a difference from the "standard" Amiga, but in most regards it's not a short-coming, which is why abstraction layers like RTG and AHI exist.
I'm glad you agree on something.
>Probably not often in DOS demos, but it's definitely possible to support adlib compatible cards in 1k.
Adlib is not supported by all audio cards and even those it's supported on don't use the same I/O port.
>Yes, and a change in sound can happen over an infinitesimal amount of time. It doesn't mean that it's particularily important for our hearing.
In sound, 44Khz..48Khz is enough but in the case of joysticks, IT CAN make a difference. It all depends on how fast the software is sampling the joystick and WHEN it samples. Anyway, your point that humans can't react that fast is false since you can produce millisecond accurate state changes in the joystick that are not NOISE.
>How often do you think the game itself is checking the state? Show me a game that utilizes the superior Amiga joystick port to its full potential!
I can say the same for Audio.
>PS2 as in Playstation 2, not PS/2. I have an adapter to connect two PS2 compatible controllers to one USB port.
So, how does that make it faster than Amigas I/O port access like MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.
>No. There is nothing to catch up to. Having a joystick port on a computer is totally redundant when you have universal serial interfaces.
It has catching up to do until you prove that you have faster joystick interface that people are using out there right now.
>No. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years you know that software developers are trying to move further AWAY from the hardware. Transparency, modularity, uniformity, and in the end, system stability, at the expense of exact control...
Believe it or not, people still access hardware I/O ports on PCs in kernel drivers. I write some of these so I know.
>PC:s may very well be (and are) used in low latency/real-time applications.
But PC has catching up to do in regards to Amiga's real-time set-up.
>Given the average life length of a typical PC game pad I'm pretty sure that there are more USB sticks in use. "There are millions of game ports"... How many USB ports do you think there are?
Not ports, USB joysticks that are faster than Amiga's joystick interface.
>The joypads I use have two separate analog joysticks, a directional pad and ten buttons ergonomically laid out.
Analog sticks suck and 10+ button joysticks suck as well. I rather have a one or two button joystick rather than complicate things for kids playing games with 10+ joysticks. "Sorry you pressed Select instead of A". "Sorry you pressed Start although it's labeled as Select." "Sorry you pressed the right white button instead of left black one." Now take this into context of a fast shoot-em up game.
>They work as respond as instantly as necessary for fast shooters as well as old platform games, even if my computer might not be able to sample them at 1000Hz (which I don't know since there are no games that do).
They can all seem instantaneous, but there's factually some time they take.
>There really isn't anything like it for Amiga.
Complete bullcrap.
>On some OS:s I'm sure it's possible. If you need to have timing that tight (i e for timing some sort of serial communication) in any of the mainstream general purpose OS:s you can often outsource the time critical stuff to a $1 PIC.
That's your worst argument so far. Use a piece of hardware. As I stated before, if I use hardware, anything can be done on any computer.
-
Yeah, using Windows for totally elementary stuff like reading the joystick state at 1 kHz without jitter is something we have to look far into the future for. And for me, as a professional switch flipper having computer rebooting as my primary field of interest, light-switch booting speed is a very important factor.
Read post #275.
-
I didn't mutate my stand. I stated my criterion many times. This was already refuted when I stated "barring Atari 2600 cartridge type boots". BASIC is a ROM like cartridges. It's true, if he only wants to use BASIC, he's fine-- for him it does boot faster. But in the general case, I know the C64 are loading huge files of the disk drive and there's no boot option for that.
It still boots faster into its operating system than the Amiga. Should I add all activity on my PC to the start-up time? Because I open thousands of web browser tabs everyday, and sometimes open hundreds of folders and compressed archives, play a few games, sometimes three pretty complex IDE:s, many instances of Paint.net and Foxit Reader and more...
Let's pick another case to clarify why I think the C64 is SUPERIOR to the Amiga: I can boot "The Final Cartridge III" faster than you will ever be able to boot into Amiga OS or even the insert disk screen. TFC III contains functionality for basic usability - there is a mouse driven GUI, a calculator, some disk and tape utilities, a clock with a timer, a game data editor, a note pad where you can print, save and load text, and if you want you can very immediately exit into BASIC or a machine code monitor.
All in all, it's handled more responsively than possible with the inferior Amiga OS, and much much faster than the comparably primitive PC.
-
It happens by default with famous PC compilers. ck and 10+ button joysticks suck as well. I rather have a one or two button joystick rather than complicate things for kids playing games with 10+ joysticks. "Sorry you pressed Select instead of A". "Sorry you pressed Start although it's labeled as Select." "Sorry you pressed the right white button instead of left black one." Now take this into context of a fast shoot-em up game.
So, basically sub ms joystick polling is mad important to you, but more than two buttons drives you up the wall. LOL, this gets better and better. Please continue.
-
Out of curiosity, does anybody know enough about hid game controllers to comment on if it's possible to get events from it with less than 1 ms between events? I know USB latency *round* trip is like 5 ms.
-
Here (http://mouse-reviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/razer-offers-up-mamba-wireless-gaming.html) is a 1ms mouse.
-
It still boots faster into its operating system than the Amiga. Should I add all activity on my PC to the start-up time? Because I open thousands of web browser tabs everyday, and sometimes open hundreds of folders and compressed archives, play a few games, sometimes three pretty complex IDE:s, many instances of Paint.net and Foxit Reader and more...
Let's pick another case to clarify why I think the C64 is SUPERIOR to the Amiga: I can boot "The Final Cartridge III" faster than you will ever be able to boot into Amiga OS or even the insert disk screen. TFC III contains functionality for basic usability - there is a mouse driven GUI, a calculator, some disk and tape utilities, a clock with a timer, a game data editor, a note pad where you can print, save and load text, and if you want you can very immediately exit into BASIC or a machine code monitor.
All in all, it's handled more responsively than possible with the inferior Amiga OS, and much much faster than the comparably primitive PC.
If you like staring a OS booting and NOT doing anything, then you stick to that criterion. I won't. I also know how to burn files (applications) into ROMs and boot up Amiga. Moot point given C64 userbase relies on disk drives.
-
So, basically sub ms joystick polling is mad important to you, but more than two buttons drives you up the wall. LOL, this gets better and better. Please continue.
It's a separate point regarding the buttons. I never stated that sub ms is of prime importance but is required in some cases and that it's UNDOABLE on Gameport. Even if you sample at 60Hz, Amiga wins but it is doable on PC gameports. MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is faster than an entire algorithm using IN from 201h or serial protocol.
-
Just saw this joystick. Looks like it would be neat to use with UAE.
http://www.thumbsupuk.com/products/USB-Classic-Joystick.htm?id=3&subid=&prodid=562&cc=
-
It's a separate point regarding the buttons. I never stated that sub ms is of prime importance but is required in some cases and that it's UNDOABLE on Gameport. Even if you sample at 60Hz, Amiga wins but it is doable on PC gameports. MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is faster than an entire algorithm using IN from 201h or serial protocol.
Under which specific cases is it required?
-
It happens by default with famous PC compilers. Looks like you replied to this message without reading the entire posting since what you argued against initially was answered later.
Sigh. Please repeat it for me then. What exactly IS your point? Is it that not knowing what you're doing may result in bad code and less-than-optimal file sizes and execution times? Because yes, I very much agree with that, but I still don't see how it's relevant. You can produce horrible code on any system.
The anim files decompress on the fly-- no streaming or disk reads.
Then some form of lesser compression with bigger files and shorter extraction time would be faster.
But Amiga has the edge since if you use OCS standard hardware, it works across the board on all Amigas and you don't have to use APIs.
No, if you write an app that uses standard OCS hardware (let's say an old A500) or even uses the kernel functions that's in no way a guarantee in itself that it will work on other Amiga systems.
I'm glad you agree on something.
Great. So what are you trying to say?
Adlib is not supported by all audio cards and even those it's supported on don't use the same I/O port.
No, but Adlib sound was definitely supported in the majority of sound cards, and telling the program what port to use can be as simple as passing a parameter when launching it or reading an environment variable. Perhaps not common, but as I said, definitely possible.
In sound, 44Khz..48Khz is enough but in the case of joysticks, IT CAN make a difference. It all depends on how fast the software is sampling the joystick and WHEN it samples. Anyway, your point that humans can't react that fast is false since you can produce millisecond accurate state changes in the joystick that are not NOISE.
How come normal Amiga and C64 games feel so responsive when they read the joystick only once or twice per frame anyway?
I can say the same for Audio.
Hahaha, let's see... Audio apps that make full and non-redundant use of 44.1 kHz audio... Well, to be honest I'd rather do multi-track destructive sound editing and recording at a higher frequency (and as high bit depth as possible) to get some frequency head room. If you've ever done any audio editing you know what I mean. A higher sampling frequency can also be used to account for a low bit depth (and yeah, in terms of recording and mixing, 16 bits often aren't quite enough). Some KORG recorders for example sample 1-bit sound at a 20-something MHz rate. The sound can then be filtered digitally for very high fidelity audio.
But yeah, you still didn't show me a game that utilizes 1 KHz joystick polling.
So, how does that make it faster than Amigas I/O port access like MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.
I never said it was faster, just superior in every other regard, and definitely SUFFICIENTLY fast.
It has catching up to do until you prove that you have faster joystick interface that people are using out there right now.
Amiga has some catching up to do with Burger King, because they are serving good hamburgers that people are eating right now.
Believe it or not, people still access hardware I/O ports on PCs in kernel drivers. I write some of these so I know.
If you are writing kernel drivers you should know what a devastating effect unrestricted access to hardware registers could have in a complex system like Windows XP. I certainly don't want my Windows install to bluescreen as often and unexpectedly as my Amiga comes to a Guru meditation.
But PC has catching up to do in regards to Amiga's real-time set-up.
Windows XP isn't an optimal system for real-time applications, no, but what on earth made you believe that they were trying to be?
Not ports, USB joysticks that are faster than Amiga's joystick interface.
Well, there are none. Reading ADCs and multiple buttons and passing it serially to the application in a system-friendly way might never be as fast as reading five mechanical switches. Boo-hoo.
Analog sticks suck and 10+ button joysticks suck as well. I rather have a one or two button joystick rather than complicate things for kids playing games with 10+ joysticks. "Sorry you pressed Select instead of A". "Sorry you pressed Start although it's labeled as Select." "Sorry you pressed the right white button instead of left black one." Now take this into context of a fast shoot-em up game.
LOL, you can make up would-be scenarios too, I see, but in real life kids are very fast to learn (often much faster than we are). Well, I guess not liking more than two buttons is a matter of taste, really, but most gamers and kids seem to agree with me.
They can all seem instantaneous, but there's factually some time they take.
If it SEEMS instantaneous (being a HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE), what the is the point of pushing it further?
Complete bullcrap.
Yeah, that's the next thing for you to show then (after you've shown me a 1 kHz joystick game): An ergonomic four axis analog controller with vibration and 10 buttons. In my opinion we're already in deep water at "ergonomic", because none of the Amiga controllers I've used have been ergonomically sound at all (well, maybe the joyboard ;)). Closest to beef is using a SEGA Mega Drive controller, I guess.
That's your worst argument so far. Use a piece of hardware. As I stated before, if I use hardware, anything can be done on any computer.
I'm sorry then, but that's the PC philosophy. External processors, controllers and hardware devices are used for everything. In the end it just means a huge amount of available (and compatible at API level) peripherals, expansions and gadgets at competitive prices, and a higher economic pressure for further development.
-
When the Amiga catches up to multi-touch PCs and THIS on the XBOX-360, then I'll know it has a future..
Introducing Project Natal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_txF7iETX0&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxU_T7C4Ils&feature=player_embedded
This is no joke, I saw this functional over a year ago..
-
When the Amiga catches up to multi-touch PCs and THIS on the XBOX-360, then I'll know it has a future..
Introducing Project Natal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_txF7iETX0&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxU_T7C4Ils&feature=player_embedded
This is no joke, I saw this functional over a year ago..
I bet the execs at Nintendo aren't too happy with this, eh?
-
Out of curiosity, does anybody know enough about hid game controllers to comment on if it's possible to get events from it with less than 1 ms between events? I know USB latency *round* trip is like 5 ms.
You could create a device that samples at an arbitrary frequency and buffers the data to the host system. You wouldn't get the data in "real-time," but it wouldn't matter. As long you process the data appropriately prior to the next screen update, you have the appearance of submillisecond sampling. This is where the psychology of user interaction and a cost-benefit analysis of your input scheme comes into play.
-
Just saw the tags and I think they sum up this thread better than anyone else has managed to do: :hammer:
amiga (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=amiga) , catchup (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=catchup) , complete bollocks (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=complete+bollocks) , denial (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=denial) , fantasy (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=fantasy) , flamefest (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=flamefest) , ibm pc (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=ibm+pc) , loljoystick (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=loljoystick) , playing (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=playing) , troll (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=troll) , uninformed (http://www.amiga.org/forums/tags.php?tag=uninformed) :roflmao:
-
Under which specific cases is it required?
If you want to be a purist, it can make a difference at any time. If you sample at 60Hz, you could just miss that case of state change which could make a difference in the game. As I stated, the recording I did was from a River-Raid game.
-
If you want to be a purist, it can make a difference at any time. If you sample at 60Hz, you could just miss that case of state change which could make a difference in the game. As I stated, the recording I did was from a River-Raid game.
That hasn't quite answered the question. Does River Raid sample at 1kHz?
-
Sigh. Please repeat it for me then. What exactly IS your point? Is it that not knowing what you're doing may result in bad code and less-than-optimal file sizes and execution times? Because yes, I very much agree with that, but I still don't see how it's relevant. You can produce horrible code on any system.
...
You don't see the relevance that when applications install under Windows they fill up hundreds of DLLs and other bloated files.
>Then some form of lesser compression with bigger files and shorter extraction time would be faster.
My point still stands. Amiga sped up the animation by shorter files and short data files.
>No, if you write an app that uses standard OCS hardware (let's say an old A500) or even uses the kernel functions that's in no way a guarantee in itself that it will work on other Amiga systems.
Bullcrap. AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.
>No, but Adlib sound was definitely supported in the majority of sound cards, and telling the program what port to use can be as simple as passing a parameter when launching it or reading an environment variable. Perhaps not common, but as I said, definitely possible.
You forgot this is a boot block; no parameters to pass. And how would you know the port even if you could pass the parameters.
>How come normal Amiga and C64 games feel so responsive when they read the joystick only once or twice per frame anyway?
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference. You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.
>Hahaha, let's see... Audio apps that make full and non-redundant use of 44.1 kHz audio... Well, to be honest I'd rather do multi-track destructive sound editing and recording at a higher frequency (and as high bit depth as possible) to get some frequency head room. If you've ever done any audio editing you know what I mean. A higher sampling frequency can also be used to account for a low bit depth (and yeah, in terms of recording and mixing, 16 bits often aren't quite enough). Some KORG recorders for example sample 1-bit sound at a 20-something MHz rate. The sound can then be filtered digitally for very high fidelity audio.
That's a good point. I am not arguing against that-- higher sampling rates make up for lower bit depths.
>But yeah, you still didn't show me a game that utilizes 1 KHz joystick polling.
I told you any game like River-raid that has fast action and shooting can benefit from it. You may get away with less rates, but that's just like audio-- you can get away with 22Khz in most cases.
>I never said it was faster, just superior in every other regard, and definitely SUFFICIENTLY fast.
What other regard? Digital joysticks are better than analog even at slower speeds of sampling. There's no ambiguity regarding the direction.
>Amiga has some catching up to do with Burger King, because they are serving good hamburgers that people are eating right now.
Take you bullcrap elsewhere if you can't refute the points.
>If you are writing kernel drivers you should know what a devastating effect unrestricted access to hardware registers could have in a complex system like Windows XP. I certainly don't want my Windows install to bluescreen as often and unexpectedly as my Amiga comes to a Guru meditation.
People can access hardware even in protected mode. I have done it myself in my application.
>Windows XP isn't an optimal system for real-time applications, no, but what on earth made you believe that they were trying to be?
So they are playing catch-up. PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.
>Well, there are none. Reading ADCs and multiple buttons and passing it serially to the application in a system-friendly way might never be as fast as reading five mechanical switches. Boo-hoo.
Lame way to shove the point under the rug.
>LOL, you can make up would-be scenarios too, I see, but in real life kids are very fast to learn (often much faster than we are). Well, I guess not liking more than two buttons is a matter of taste, really, but most gamers and kids seem to agree with me.
It's real experiment.
>If it SEEMS instantaneous (being a HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE), what the is the point of pushing it further?
Because MP3 also seems instantaneous. I see your lame reasons. To you fake diamonds are just as good as real ones as long as they seem real.
>I'm sorry then, but that's the PC philosophy. External processors, controllers and hardware devices are used for everything...
I'm sorry than that it has to play catch-up to Amiga.
-
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference. You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.
MP3 sounds like crap, but not everyone can hear the distortion, and in fact, younger folks prefer MP3 to state of the art lossless codecs. Odd.
So they are playing catch-up. PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.
We really need to stop mixing terms. If Windows XP guaranteed that all operations completed within one year, it would be a real-time system, albeit a "slow" one. Neither Windows nor Amiga OS are real-time operating systems; however, both Amiga systems and modern PCs are capable of running real-time operating systems. Yes?
-
You don't see the relevance that when applications install under Windows they fill up hundreds of DLLs and other bloated files.
Do you see the relevance that you need to install dozens of custom classes with MUI, some applications refusing to work because you don't have version xx, etc...
Amiga needs to improve here.
Bullcrap. AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.
Still, there is no garanty it will work. Why do you think you needed to degrade your Amiga 1200 to play some older games ? Why do you think a lot of demos/games made for ECS are crashing or have garbage instead of sprites unless you patch them with WHDLoad ?
Seems like it's not 100% compatible... What's bulcrap is you saying the contrary when the proof is there with the hundred (thousands ?) of OCS software that needs to be patch to work with AGA.
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference. You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.
Amiga can't play 16bit sound anyway. Unless you add a soundcard, and use AHI which is far far far less prcecise than anything you could expect... Still it sounds a lot better than 14bit Paula audio, be it mp3 or linear uncompressed audio...
I told you any game like River-raid that has fast action and shooting can benefit from it. You may get away with less rates, but that's just like audio-- you can get away with 22Khz in most cases.
You're arguing that you need to be able to poll joystick 1000 times a second, but you can live with 22khz... Come on ! :)
So they are playing catch-up. PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.
The point is that neither is a real-time OS. Amiga can be as responsive as you want, just use some apps that uses some CPU, and everything crawls...
I'm sorry than that it has to play catch-up to Amiga.
What for ? And what is there to catch up ?
What I see is the Amiga is trying to catch up... thousand colours 5 years after it's mainstream everywhere... 3D after everyone... Games ported 3-4 years after they are released... CPU raw power behind...
Who's trying to catch who ?
-
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio?
It doesn't.
-
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference. You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.
MP3 sounds like crap, but not everyone can hear the distortion, and in fact, younger folks prefer MP3 to state of the art lossless codecs. Odd.
We really need to stop mixing terms. If Windows XP guaranteed that all operations completed within one year, it would be a real-time system, albeit a "slow" one. Neither Windows nor Amiga OS are real-time operating systems; however, both Amiga systems and modern PCs are capable of running real-time operating systems. Yes?
Re-read the post. They are not real-time systems like the Amiga. Any system can be declared to be real-time. But PC is not as good as Amiga so don't equate them in regards to real-time operations.
-
Do you see the relevance that you need to install dozens of custom classes with MUI, some applications refusing to work because you don't have version xx, etc...
Amiga needs to improve here.
...
No comparison between XP and AmigaDOS here.
>Still, there is no garanty it will work. Why do you think you needed to degrade your Amiga 1200 to play some older games ? Why do you think a lot of demos/games made for ECS are crashing or have garbage instead of sprites unless you patch them with WHDLoad ?
Because you don't understand OCS/ECS/AGA.
>Seems like it's not 100% compatible... What's bulcrap is you saying the contrary when the proof is there with the hundred (thousands ?) of OCS software that needs to be patch to work with AGA.
Go find the actual reasons and then reply; stop blurting out whatever comes on the top of your head.
>Amiga can't play 16bit sound anyway. Unless you add a soundcard, and use AHI which is far far far less prcecise than anything you could expect... Still it sounds a lot better than 14bit Paula audio, be it mp3 or linear uncompressed audio...
That's not the argument.
>You're arguing that you need to be able to poll joystick 1000 times a second, but you can live with 22khz... Come on ! :)
That's not the argument. Do you read English?
>The point is that neither is a real-time OS. Amiga can be as responsive as you want, just use some apps that uses some CPU, and everything crawls...
Bullcrap. Another PC fan just contradicted you in a previous post; only one can be right.
>What for ? And what is there to catch up ?
Post #275. Sorry, I'm pointing this to you; they way you replied to this post, I hope you think before you reply.
>What I see is the Amiga is trying to catch up... thousand colours 5 years after it's mainstream everywhere... 3D after everyone... Games ported 3-4 years after they are released... CPU raw power behind...
You didn't even read the arguments.
-
You don't see the relevance that when applications install under Windows they fill up hundreds of DLLs and other bloated files.
Oh, and every other Amiga program will do the same with libraries... Except that mostly I have to put them there manually. and they are oh-so-bloated! If anything, dynamically linked libraries retract from the "bloatedness".
My point still stands. Amiga sped up the animation by shorter files and short data files.
Shorter maybe, but in that case, not by compression but by information reduction.
Bullcrap. AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.
Oh, I am not speaking from any particular technical know-how, but as I said, using old ECS and OCS demos/games on an A1200 without WHDLoad or soft kicking will be a pain. Probably not so much the incompatibilities in the custom chips as because of incompatibilities in the different ROM revisions, RAM size and changes in clock speed.
You forgot this is a boot block; no parameters to pass. And how would you know the port even if you could pass the parameters.
No, not boot block. If someone made a boot block demo for a particular PC model, they could make it work on every other machine of the same model, though, just as well as Amiga boot intros work for every computer of the same model.
I am surprised we are talking about boot block demos now though, since PC = Windows, apparently.
How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference. You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.
It can indeed make a difference, but the question is whether this difference is important enough for our perception to take into account.
I told you any game like River-raid that has fast action and shooting can benefit from it. You may get away with less rates, but that's just like audio-- you can get away with 22Khz in most cases.
Implementing that frequent polling in River Raid was probably beyond scope of the programmers or the machines it was made for. In the end, it means implementing sub-pixel movement and collision detection for every joystick "read cycle", and either way you will only see the changes when the screen redraws.
Also, you won't get away with 22 kHz if you want to be able to faithfully reproduce audible sound without loss of loads of audible information - that's only half the human hearing range, and a clearly perceptible difference, as opposed to the difference between reading the joystick 4 or 17 times per redraw.
And no, you still haven't shown me a game that benefits and uses 1 kHz joystick sampling, so the use case is still VERY artificial.
What other regard? Digital joysticks are better than analog even at slower speeds of sampling. There's no ambiguity regarding the direction.
You sort of missed the point of analog joysticks then. They are not there to send unambiguous up/down/left/right information. They give you full and precise control over the axes, for example to control a crosshair or fine movement controls of a player. Did I mention that my joypads have a digital directional pad too, by the way?
Take you bullcrap elsewhere if you can't refute the points.
I'm just reducing your argument to the absurd to show how little sense it makes. Amiga OS might provide a 1 kHz joystick orgy that the PC doesn't need (and no, not the Amiga either) and Burger King is providing hamburgers, which certainly isn't a feature the Amiga needs (though I would appreciate it dispensing hamburgers). Your argument makes the faulty assumption that when something doesn't have a particular vaguely attractive feature that something else does have, it needs or tries to "catch up".
People can access hardware even in protected mode. I have done it myself in my application.
Congratulations. What are you complaining about then? Is it particularly hard?
So they are playing catch-up. PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.
As I said, Windows isn't exactly aspiring to be real-time either, and I don't think Amiga OS was either. If the Amiga is more predictable in timing it's more likely a result of the simple system design than a thought-out feature.
Lame way to shove the point under the rug.
How so? It is true, isn't it?
It's real experiment.
And ten minutes later the kid gave up and never touched the controller again? Doesn't sound real at all. How old was the kid?
Because MP3 also seems instantaneous. I see your lame reasons. To you fake diamonds are just as good as real ones as long as they seem real.
MP3 is instantaneous? What are you talking about?
I'm sorry than that it has to play catch-up to Amiga.
I'm starting to think that I am feeding some popular fairy-tale creature by even bothering to argue with you.
-
Re-read the post. They are not real-time systems like the Amiga. Any system can be declared to be real-time. But PC is not as good as Amiga so don't equate them in regards to real-time operations.
Listen, one could write a simple real-time operating system that is source compatible (with a small HAL, of course) with both Amiga and IBM PC-compatible hardware. Both systems would perform identically within the domain of the real-time operating system because that's what the real-time operating system guarantees.
No one disagrees that the joystick ports on the Amiga provide lower latency access to traditional digital joysticks; however, that doesn't make the Amiga "better."
No human being can trigger a joystick at an input frequency of 1 kHz. (Something other than a human being might, but we're talking about human beings.) The problem then is one of message passing and message processing. Any software system that guarantees that 100% of the messages sent from the joystick to the host system will be received and processed within a certain period of time is making a real-time guarantee. This you know. However, it doesn't necessarily need to sample the joystick at a frequency of 1 kHz unless that's the only way to guarantee that no messages are missed. Under most circumstances, a real-time system running on IBM PC-compatible hardware can make the same guarantees as a similar system running on an Amiga. I'm not talking about 500ns response windows. I'm talking about simple message processing.
Of course, none of this explains why Photoshop CS4 64-bit has such a hard time moving the cursor when GPU acceleration is enabled. WTF? ;-) Something silly on my end, I'm sure.
EDIT: Just to be clear: "real-time" does not mean instantaneous.
-
Hi,
@DonnyEMU,
Thank god for the PC enhancing my computer experience with Windows VISTA, 10 reactivations due to hardware upgrades, 3 hard crashes, not loading games, at least 3 crashes a night while playing Fallout 3, and 4 freezes where I had to stop everything from running with Task Manager, Windows VISTA has been a real ehancing computer experience, and just think all this cost me $159.oo. Somewhat good for modern day games.
Ubuntu Linux, put on my machine in 2005, no crashes, free programs, free office suite, plays about 65% windows games with WINE or CEDEGA, provides penguin games, run e-uae, and the cost $0.00 (excuse me 5 bucks a month for cedega). Good for data, games, databases, word processing, spreadsheets, and home financial programs.
Amiga 4000, no crashes, no reloads, don't have to call Commodore for reactivation, have OS3.1 on 5 of there computers, plays old but challenging games, plays music, has great demos, no internet, no virus's or loss of data for the past 10 years, no support, but a fun computer to play around with.
smerf
-
Hi,
@everyone,
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for microsoft?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Linux?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Amiga?
Amiga has the least techs working for them, this means they have the most stable system that just works.
Amiga wins
PC and Linux users lose because they need professional help to keep their systems going.
Sounds Logical to me
smerf
-
Hi,
@everyone,
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for microsoft?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Linux?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Amiga?
Amiga has the least techs working for them, this means they have the most stable system that just works.
Amiga wins
PC and Linux users lose because they need professional help to keep their systems going.
Sounds Logical to me
smerf
Aren't you forgetting the ones that use PCs and Amigas? :lol:
-
Hi,
@everyone,
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for microsoft?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Linux?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Amiga?
Amiga has the least techs working for them, this means they have the most stable system that just works.
Amiga wins
smerf
Sinclair Reasearch Limited doesn't have any at all. Spectrum wins!
-
>No, if you write an app that uses standard OCS hardware (let's say an old A500) or even uses the kernel functions that's in no way a guarantee in itself that it will work on other Amiga systems.
Bullcrap. AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.
You have never programmed an Amiga then... AGA was not that compatible with OCS/ECS... the chipset even contained a compatibility mode that could be switched on during the early boot sequence to degrade the chipset features to the older spec.
I have tried to follow your weird Joystick argument... I can't think of a single game that I or anyone else has ever written on the Amiga that checked the Joystick status more than once a frame... if it did then any related animation would be jumpy, since there would missing frames...
You can read any register on any system as fast as the busses will allow... but if you can read the port faster than you need to, and you do read it faster than you need to, you are just wasting bandwidth.... with the Amiga there is precious little bandwidth, wasting it all trying to read the joystick one thousand times a second would just steal the bus time away from the audio and gfx circuits that do need to read memory and registers that quickly.
If you want to sample something at a stupidly high rate there are plenty of available options on the PC... I use an FA-101 Firewire box to sample 10 channels of 32bits at 192Khz... that can be processed in realtime... that sort of pisses on your weird little 1khz joystick port...
-
Denise chip handles digital joystick. 3.57MHz 290ns time period. Documentation shows 16bit value for each joy port state. Is there an internal latch? Documentation i've read says something to the effect of data shifted into this 16bit register one bit at a time on leading edge of clock. Then wouldn't it mean that it takes 2.3us to update the status of a joyports state? Paula handling analog joystick reads ADC once per video frame. Any hardware gurus out there know if i got this right?
-
Hi,
@everyone,
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for microsoft?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Linux?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Amiga?
Amiga has the least techs working for them, this means they have the most stable system that just works.
Amiga wins
PC and Linux users lose because they need professional help to keep their systems going.
Sounds Logical to me
smerf
lol
-
You have never programmed an Amiga then... AGA was not that compatible with OCS/ECS... the chipset even contained a compatibility mode that could be switched on during the early boot sequence to degrade the chipset features to the older spec.
I have tried to follow your weird Joystick argument... I can't think of a single game that I or anyone else has ever written on the Amiga that checked the Joystick status more than once a frame... if it did then any related animation would be jumpy, since there would missing frames...
You can read any register on any system as fast as the busses will allow... but if you can read the port faster than you need to, and you do read it faster than you need to, you are just wasting bandwidth.... with the Amiga there is precious little bandwidth, wasting it all trying to read the joystick one thousand times a second would just steal the bus time away from the audio and gfx circuits that do need to read memory and registers that quickly.
If you want to sample something at a stupidly high rate there are plenty of available options on the PC... I use an FA-101 Firewire box to sample 10 channels of 32bits at 192Khz... that can be processed in realtime... that sort of pisses on your weird little 1khz joystick port...
spec sheet says 6 24bit channels in at 192KHz.
-
spec sheet says 6 24bit channels in at 192KHz.
you're quite right, it's only 96khz with 10 channels :lol:
-
you're quite right, it's only 96khz with 10 channels :lol:
I'm afraid our friend is going to have to conclude that because of this, the Amiga blows your pc and it's fancy firewire bus out of the water.
-
I throw my opine in here I guess....
Amiga is light years behind the PC. We don't need to go into all the crazy awesome hardware you can get on a PC.
There are something that Windows hasn't caught up to though. (feel free to compare these to Mac/Linux on the same hardware)
-Single directory App installations. i.e. no Registry. Windows needs to find a better way to do things. Windows is a pain the ass to deal with a lot of times when an 'app goes bad' and needs to be repaired. Now, you can lay some blame on the app developers, but Windows default model is messy.
-OS Windows/System32 file structure is a mess. Most all virus/spyware you find out there just puts files in /Windows/ or Windows/System32. You'd think viruses would be easy to remove, but there is so much crap everywhere that literally people make a living just by telling what is suppose to be in System32 and what isn't.
-There still some Amiga GUI type things Windows lacks. Such as window focus. In Windows as soon as you click a Window it is forced to the front. Would like to at least have more control or things like that, ala double 'click to front'.
-Boot times. Yeah, sore subject these days I guess. But seriously it a sad joke. I leave my computer on 24/7 because it's a SO slow to startup. Sometimes if the OS becomes a little flaky I just leave until a point I am doing something else so I can restart it as shut down & boot up is even more of a joke.
SATA2 is rated a 6gb/sec- computers have tons ram - multi cores and multi GHZ, there is no excuse for it. The "well" Windows has your ethernet are ready to go by the time the Start button appears at least, that argument just doesn't cut it anymore.
My computer is an appliance to me. I don't leave my TV on 24/7 because it's a pain in the ass to wait for it to turn on. If my light bulbs took so long to turn on I'd leave my lights on all the time too.
Anyway, it's hard to just say, blanket statement, that todays OSes are flawed, but there is room today for a "fast" single user OS, where I can copy a program by moving a folder, or delete a program for that matter by dragging the folder to the trash.
Anyway....
-
The same entity that appointed you the saviour of the Amiga.
PFFFT.
You wan't to know about the real world. In the real world people use PCs and MAC. The Amiga need a hell of a lot of catching up to do before it can even be taken as a serious platform at all. How much more real do you want it? Learn to accept reality my friend. :)
No shit Sherlock. Can you READ? What does: "3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers." mean to you?
There was no question. Just an unqualified statement. Read the title again.
I see, so its now a question of grammar. Maybe we could add a full stop at the end followed by the word "Discuss."
It's only zealotry that has led you to conflate this issue into an unrecognisable mess and introduce criteria and questions where there were none.
translation: " couldn't be arsed reading and understanding all of the posts in the thread nor think beyond the obvious"
It seem you still can't make the simple distinction between hardware and software. :roflmao:
PC hardware without software does nothing. Its pointless separating the two.
Aww. :( Why only one? Knock yourself out we're all listening intently. Don't say you are running out of steam already? Oh yes your health. OK step back then.
Because it only takes ONE to show the PC is still playing catchup. But WAIT. There was MORE..
Back to software are we? The company I work for needs to exchange MS Office ducuments and run a decent web browser as a bare minimum.
YOU might. The user examples I gave don't, some people who need to quickly sample a music riff in the middle of the night just need a fast booting A1200.
I'm sorry sttuffing a load of hobby home computers in our offices is not goung to make us more productive.
We run LAMP servers and can even use basic specced machines for that. Unfortunately a stock AMIGA 1200 just wont cut the mustard there. (You are the one that wants to stick to basics and not use "souped up machines" so you at least use your own criteria in this one.)
And I bet you can't do gene sequencing/process nuclear physics data/analyse climate models as fast as Big Blue with your XP network either. Whats your point?
So you are writing a 10000 word proposal and you hit the off button you won't lose any data on an Amiga? Wow! That's amazing! The business world should really be told about this breakthrough. I don't think you are evangelising it enough. :eek:
1. Never had to write 10,000 words of anything. 2. Even a cardigan-wearing gronk would know to SAVE his file before he switches off his computer. 3. how would the same data not be lost on the PC if you don't save it first?
Come on. You are clutching at straws here. Not having to shutdown safely is hardly a feature that is going to affect our servers which haven't been shut down for years. We don't miss it one bit.
Never said anything about not having shutdown safely being anything to YOUR f'en servers. The point about safely switching off was to counter a previous argument that Amiga can corrupt your drive if you shut down mid-write, but if you could be arsed reading the thread, you'd know this. Being able to flick a switch and shutdown instantly means people can leave their PC straight away, instead of coming home to find their PC has been in shutdown mode for 8 hours due to some silly process that has blocked the shut down, but they couldn't wait to be around the PC to see it shutdown.
You're work in a server-client environment. Many people at home don't, many people shut down their PC's daily, to them it matters..Its a feature that many PC user would be glad to have, but no YOU might not care, but so what, it DOESN"T CHANGE THE FACT THAT PC's STILL CAN"T DO IT.
Sure not being able to serve DHTML web pages at all is a bit too secure to be useful at all.
I'm sure i couldn't give a toss about serving DHTML on an A1200
Good luck to them. Those examples hardly put PCs to shame.
VERY good luck to them: it cost them a few hundred dollars and no tech support costs. An equivalent PC set up would cost many $1000's for the dentist, and tens of thousands for the aged-care facility to achieve the same.
I can do more than that on my mobile phone.
Really? you can run a public touch screen /multi screen display from your phone? Which phone? which software? which screens?
The Amiga needs billions of dollars of investment to be a serious contender and catch up with to the established platforms.
And this is relevant because......?
But it runs the majority of the worlds website including all major Amiga websites. (This one included) so it has it's uses and is far more advanced as a platform than the limited Amiga.
Just because I don't like linux doesnt mean I will deny it's capabilities and usefulness.
i highlighted linux's hardware recognition/configuration issues which simply don't exist to anywhere near the same degree with classic Amiga. That's all thats is needed in the context fo the discussion.
Funny I had similar problems trying to get one of my A1200s up to scratch.
provided you installed from original operating system disks then you had defective ie broken hardware.
Send me a ticket please. Cloud cuckoo land sounds like quite an inviting place.
i think you boarded the plane a long time ago..
My current user experience with PCs is fine. It's better and more productive for me than trying to force an ancient (but elegant) Amiga system to try and do it for me.
I don't need to catch up with anything.
good for you.
(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane peopl
It matters to Microsoft who are highlighting Win 7's improved boot and shut down times, it matters to the many reviewers of Win 7 who highlight this as well. Ask a PC user: would you like to boot in 5 seconds and shutdown with the flick of a switch?
So your argument is: yeah Amiga's boot faster, but i run from a server, I never shut down, i can do more than an Amiga so i don't care. Good for you. But none of that makes your PC boot any faster. And admit it you'd really like a PC that boots in 5 seconds and shuts down instantly, wouldn't you? And admit it your pC can't do this.
(2) Security through obscurity eh? Sh!t !!! I think we need to make all PCs obscure to CATCH UP with the Amiga. :eek:
Since when has obscurity been a sought after feature? :crazy:
CRAZY but thats REALITY: I can get on the net, open all sorts of malicous email with ZERO anti-malware software and it has NO EFFECT on my Amiga. Your PC can't. How, why- is irrelevant. ITS THE REALITY.
(3) I'm sorry to say that the PCs I use daily are a heck of a lot more responsive and useful to me than my A1200 could ever be. I could use an Amiga to do some of my tasks but I'd probably get fired for taking hours too long on tasks that should really be completed in minutes.
On my A1200, i get far less wait-cursers, and when i click on a mouse button i always get an instant response, and when i move my mouse the pointer always moves with it. That doesn't always happen with my PC.
Look! a tool is a tool alright.
Agreed. And sometimes my Amiga is still the better tool for some jobs that I-and others- want to do.
What I don't do is lie to myself that they are the worlds answer to poverty as well as the kitchen sink.
Well NOW your plane to LaLaLand has landed on the tarmac..
-
I throw my opine in here I guess....
Amiga is light years behind the PC. We don't need to go into all the crazy awesome hardware you can get on a PC.
There are something that Windows hasn't caught up to though. (feel free to compare these to Mac/Linux on the same hardware)
-Single directory App installations. i.e. no Registry. Windows needs to find a better way to do things. Windows is a pain the ass to deal with a lot of times when an 'app goes bad' and needs to be repaired. Now, you can lay some blame on the app developers, but Windows default model is messy.
-OS Windows/System32 file structure is a mess. Most all virus/spyware you find out there just puts files in /Windows/ or Windows/System32. You'd think viruses would be easy to remove, but there is so much crap everywhere that literally people make a living just by telling what is suppose to be in System32 and what isn't.
-There still some Amiga GUI type things Windows lacks. Such as window focus. In Windows as soon as you click a Window it is forced to the front. Would like to at least have more control or things like that, ala double 'click to front'.
-Boot times. Yeah, sore subject these days I guess. But seriously it a sad joke. I leave my computer on 24/7 because it's a SO slow to startup. Sometimes if the OS becomes a little flaky I just leave until a point I am doing something else so I can restart it as shut down & boot up is even more of a joke.
SATA2 is rated a 6gb/sec- computers have tons ram - multi cores and multi GHZ, there is no excuse for it. The "well" Windows has your ethernet are ready to go by the time the Start button appears at least, that argument just doesn't cut it anymore.
My computer is an appliance to me. I don't leave my TV on 24/7 because it's a pain in the ass to wait for it to turn on. If my light bulbs took so long to turn on I'd leave my lights on all the time too.
Anyway, it's hard to just say, blanket statement, that todays OSes are flawed, but there is room today for a "fast" single user OS, where I can copy a program by moving a folder, or delete a program for that matter by dragging the folder to the trash.
Anyway....
Well said. Especially the boot times: it IS a joke on the PC, any PC.
-
Well said. Especially the boot times: it IS a joke on the PC, any PC.
My 800MHz G4 A1XE takes around half the time of my A1200T to boot. It has 32x the CPU speed, 5x the bus speed, 10x the sustainable hard disk transfer rate, yada etc.
It's running AmigaOS so on that hardware, surely it should boot in a flat second. Dear me, whatever could be wrong with it?
Boot times are not a metric for computer performance. Boot times are dominated by waiting, be it waiting for initialisation of hardware, software, synchronisation between processes or a myriad of other things. The more processes that are started, the more conflated this becomes.
All computers wait at exactly the same speed. Even a factor of a million CPU clockspeed difference cannot make a half second device initialisation go any faster. a 4GHz CPU cannot negotiate an IP address with your router any quicker than the router wants to talk to it.
The only valid indication of performance of a system is once it has booted up, not how long it takes to get there. My A1200* has a longish from cold boot time for an Amiga classic, but once up, it's pretty quick and capable, much moreso than a 7 second boot-from-cold bare OS3.1 install.
*FYI an accelerator card and graphics card as the sole internal expansion cards in a system do not make it a Frankenstein machine.
-
(about instant shutdown tuening off the machine)
You're work in a server-client environment. Many people at home don't, many people shut down their PC's daily, to them it matters..Its a feature that many PC user would be glad to have, but no YOU might not care, but so what, it DOESN"T CHANGE THE FACT THAT PC's STILL CAN"T DO IT.
Oh, really? That's exactly what I do to turn off my Icaros Destkop machine: i press the button and the PC is off. Immediately.
But don't think it's the safest feature on earth: if you turn off your computer while it's writing to disk, it doesn't matter if you're using AmigaOS, Windows, AROS or MacOS X, you'll kill the accessed file and you can also ruin the whole filesystem, with a random degree of pain. A shutdown procedure is not simply a bloated pointless loose of time, but a safer way to close operations and leave everything in a good shape.
-
I can't wait until Project Natal hits the PC environment not just the x-box. Things like minority report's interface will be available with your built in laptop webcam.. Not that I heard it's happening but it makes sense that it would be..
As far as turning PCs off I never do it. Most hardware folks tell you not to, as it shocks the power supplies. It's better to hibernate or SLEEP. And I haven't lost a file to this or any context or blue screeen since Windows XP which I stopped using around 2004-2005.. I like UBUNTU it's low memory and hardware requirements make it a nice second virtual machine to have around too..
-
Oh, really? That's exactly what I do to turn off my Icaros Destkop machine: i press the button and the PC is off. Immediately.
Ok i stand corrected. Approximately 1 in 1 billion PC's in operation can do this...
But don't think it's the safest feature on earth: if you turn off your computer while it's writing to disk, it doesn't matter if you're using AmigaOS, Windows, AROS or MacOS X, you'll kill the accessed file and you can also ruin the whole filesystem, with a random degree of pain. A shutdown procedure is not simply a bloated pointless loose of time, but a safer way to close operations and leave everything in a good shape.
I know why PC's shutdown, but thats why on Amiga I said you SHOULD wait that second or so for the hard drive light to go off after you have saved. But with Windows and Linux PC's are very frequently reading and writing to the hard drive eg swap file-even with 4 gig ram, so you can't really wait for the hard drive light to go off, well because its going on and off all the time, whether you're saving or not.
BTW does anyone know WHY Windows and linux need a swapfile even if they use so little available RAM? I know you can force the swap file size to zero in Windows, but I suspect it still uses a swap file. And AFAIK Linux won't install without a swap file partition.
-
Probably what they are calling GPU acceleration is PIXEL SHADER technology that's actually being done through software emulation thru the CPU not the real GPU.. I'd call Adobe about this and ask them exactly what it means..
"Of course, none of this explains why Photoshop CS4 64-bit has such a hard time moving the cursor when GPU acceleration is enabled. WTF? ;-) Something silly on my end, I'm sure.
EDIT: Just to be clear: "real-time" does not mean instantaneous.[/QUOTE]"
-
*FYI an accelerator card and graphics card as the sole internal expansion cards in a system do not make it a Frankenstein machine.
Duly noted. Even though you have transplanted an additional foreign brain from a totally different species and likewise a foreign display system, all communicating with the original carcass over transplanted foreign busses.
Having both a PPC and 68k, would describing at as having a multiple-personality disorder be more appropriate? That might explain why it slows down every now and then: the two CPU's are fighting over who will be the dominant personality.
-
@DonnyEMU
Well, I've no delusions about the many weaknesses of the Amiga, but to be honest, I do like the fact that I can boot it up, do a quick Google and shut it down again before my Windows system has become responsive. That's a positive asset for me, in a real situation. Don't get me wrong, the PC is probably used more than the Amiga in my world, but it takes so long for the PC to boot that I don't really use it for looking up something quickly. Hell, fiddling about on my phone's browser is usually faster, and I don't have to go upstairs ;)
I don't like having computers turned on all the time; they generate heat and use electricity. And those hardware guys should have been able to tell you, that hibernating a computer is pretty much the same as a full shut down/start up as far as the PSU and hard drives are concerned. Sleeping might be a little less harsh on the PSU, but I'd be far more worried about the starting/stopping of the mechanical hard drives. And that's the same whether you sleep or shut down a system.
-
t?
Boot times are not a metric for computer performance. Boot times are dominated by waiting, be it waiting for initialisation of hardware, software, synchronisation between processes or a myriad of other things. The more processes that are started, the more conflated this becomes.
All computers wait at exactly the same speed. Even a factor of a million CPU clockspeed difference cannot make a half second device initialisation go any faster. a 4GHz CPU cannot negotiate an IP address with your router any quicker than the router wants to talk to it.
Lets ignore my A1200 that you label a "toy". And ignore yours that I label a "frankenstein".
A big box Amiga with third party hardware in its standardised Zorro slots is a good comparison machine as PC's often have lots of third party hardware in their slots. My A4000 has an 68060 CPU card that needs to be initialised, with RAM on it that needs to be initialised, a scsi adaptor, a CV64, an elbox fast serial/fast parallel port card, and a Tocatta, CDRW, and Octagon SCSI, plus keyboard, mouse. It boots OS 3.1 in under 10 seconds, and that includes several OS software enhancements, CGX, sound drivers, fast port drivers, and whatever is in the ROMS of the cards. (OS 3.9 is slower because of the reset, but to be fair if Escom didn't go broke i think we would have had 1 meg ROMS that would've avoided the reset. Anyway OS 3.1 is functionally equivalent to OS 3.9 on *this* system). The PC also has to initialise its CPU, RAM, Video card, DVD, Sound system, USB ports, keyboard, mouse, hard drive. All of these components have functional equivalents on the A4000.
FWIW Karlos I AGREE that much of the delay in booting on the PC is due to the hardware initialiasation that occurs when the PC is booted. And yes no number of CPU, ghz, RAM, hard drive speed will change that part of the boot-up process, because it happens before software processes begin. Integral to the PC architecture is waiting for hardware to initialise. Its part and parcel of the PC hardware design. It seems that the *way* the Amiga initialises and then configures its hardware during the boot process is more efficient. That would seem to be an architectural issue.
-
Duly noted. Even though you have transplanted an additional foreign brain from a totally different species and likewise a foreign display system, all communicating with the original carcass over transplanted foreign busses.
They share the same bus into memory. Logic on the board handles any differences between m68K and PPC's local buses.
Having both a PPC and 68k, would describing at as having a multiple-personality disorder be more appropriate? That might explain why it slows down every now and then: the two CPU's are fighting over who will be the dominant personality.
This is what caches are for. When you read from memory and you get a cache hit, no actual bus activity need occur. When you write to memory and you have copyback enabled, no actual bus activity need occur at that instant either. It'll get done some time later when the CPU decides it's the right time. When that happens, each CPU will spend most of it's time performing whole cache line transfers.
The worst performance hit in these systems are forced cache flushes on context switches. That is painfully slow. However, when you are performing a complex operation, such as decoding a datatype, one or two of those is totally hidden in the speedup you get from doing the work on a 3-digit clockspeed CPU compared to a 2-digit one.
Now, talking about actual bus contention, you have to look no further than a 68K machine without fast ram.
The original 68000 can only access memory once in every two cycles. The custom chips get it every other cycle ideally. However, bump up the screen size, number of sprites etc and before long the DMA starts to eat into the bandwidth available for the CPU. And the custom chips will always win, slowing the CPU down. In fact, the CPU is forbidden alltogether from performing certain atomic operations on Chip RAM by the architecture.
On a 68020+, the situation is significantly worse since these CPU's can access memory every cycle. This is why a bare A1200 dies on it's arse compared to one with (pref zero wait state) fast ram fitted.
-
That's subjective. If you take the objective approach, PCs do in fact need catching up in some areas that make the Amiga unique in those cases. And this topic was not to fulfill your needs but hope for an objective discussion.
Let's, just for arguments sake, accept that there are some unique features left in the architecture that have not yet been surpassed it still does not mean that the PC is still playing catchup. I meant slight differences in the way hardware is initialised ir how a joystick is polled is quite irrellevant and hardly a showstopper in the PC world.
The more significant aspects of compatibility, convenience, accessibility and usability, that the Amiga needs mad invesment for before it even comes close to touching the current PC platform, is much more significant. I doubt such investment will ever materialise so unfortunately the Amiga cannot catchup with PC. It lost the race quite a while back and no amount of denial is ever going to change that.
>(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
>It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.
See, now if I make this subjective like you did, I would it makes a HUGE difference in boot-up time because I test low-level drivers which cause frequent crashes in XP. You decrease your life span by the amount of time you wait for your system to boot. It all adds up if you have to do it often.
So I'll die quicker by using PC's instead of using Amigas daily. Hmm.. Now that is a killer feature. Why didn't anyone tell me about it sooner. :confused:
>Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.
Nobody stated PC is inferior. It's inferior in some aspects; that's a fact. Even if you use it for hobbies/games, why not use a PC?
You may be able to speak for yourself but I don't think you should be confident enough to speak for others. Some peple arguing on this thread do seem to think the modern day PC is inferior to a retro computer and that the Amiga is perfect beyond criticism and has no catching up to do with the PC at all. Try telling them that.
You didn't reply to my message.
Happy now? :D
-
They share the same bus into memory. Logic on the board handles any differences between m68K and PPC's local buses.
.
I thought the ppc has no cache?
-
Let's, just for arguments sake, accept that there are some unique features left in the architecture that have not yet been surpassed it still does not mean that the PC is still playing catchup.
surely thats a contradiction isn't it? If the PC can't yet do it then it still hasn't caught up to the Amiga?
Some peple arguing on this thread do seem to think the modern day PC is inferior to a retro computer and that the Amiga is perfect beyond criticism and has no catching up to do with the PC at all. Try telling them that.
Actually from another POV its been the reverse: my impression is that some pro-PC people believe the *PC* is perfect and any flaws regarding its hardware eg joystick polling, hardware initialisation and boot times and shut downs, user-interface slow downs, propensity for malware, registry clogging, hard drive fragmentation, hardware incompatibility (Linux), etc have not been accepted as the flaws that they are but rather have been excused for various reasons (the PC does more, it can crunch number faster, the PC has industry standard software compatibility, more people use a PC), despite the Amiga being superior at many of these things.
-
This is what caches are for.
I thought the PPC has no caches.
-
I thought the PPC has no caches.
Nope, the 603e, for example has 16KiB instruction and 16KiB data. IIRC, the 604e doubles this.
What you are probably thinking of is L2 cache. There isn't any of that on the Blizzard/Cyberstorm. Then again, as far as I know, no amiga accelerator has L2 cache.
-
BTW does anyone know WHY Windows and linux need a swapfile even if they use so little available RAM? I know you can force the swap file size to zero in Windows, but I suspect it still uses a swap file. And AFAIK Linux won't install without a swap file partition.
Maybe you should try finding out.
-
PFFFT.
I'm glad you agree. :lol:
Can you READ?
The fact that I am responding to your post might be an indication, even to a half wit, that it is quite obvious that I can read. ;)
What does:"3. PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers." mean to you?
It means you are comparing apples to oranges. A hardware platform is a hardware platform. The IBM PC and compatibles are not an OS and are capable of running the Amiga OS as well as any other OS you decide to compile for them.
The sooner you can seperate the difference between hardware and software in your mind the sooner things will suddenly start becoming clearer to you.
Go on humour me, try it. It won't use too much of your brain power up. honestly, trust me.
I see, so its now a question of grammar. Maybe we could ..blah"
Maybe we could. Maybe it would be better to put a question mark at the end instead. It's a statement and judging by the original thread starter it's exactly what he meant it to be.
If you decide to twist the statement into something else than you have to be delusional as well as approaching the whole argument in a manipulative and dishonest way as can only be acheived by those blinded by irrational zealotry.
Surely you are not one of those?
translation:"couldn't be arsed.. blah"
I think that's called projection in some circles. You are trying to project your inadequacies onto others. I almost feel pity for you. :(
PC hardware without software does nothing. It's pointless separating the two.
And Amiga hardware is different exactly how? You still need to grasp the difference between a hardware platform and an OS. Come back and argue when you have that one figured out.
Because it only takes ONE to show the PC is still playing catchup
Oooh! Is that so. I bet all the engineers that work on PC architecture are have sleepless night about it all around the world. I mean It's really something on all their minds isn't it. "OMG how the heck do I catch up with the Amiga. My life depends on it. We really need to catchup.dammit. Catch up.":nervous:
Do you even have an inkling how pathetic your argument sounds?
YOU might. The user examples I gave don't, some people who need to quickly sample a music riff in the middle of the night.. blah
So you admit that the Amiga is a nice hobby home computer? Glad to see some sense creep into your arguments. Just don't wander off into those delusional pastures again. You know the ones wher you think it is a serious contender to the established platforms in every conceivable computing avenue.
And I bet you can't do gene sequencing/process nuclear physics data/analyse climate models as fast as Big Blue with your XP network either. Whats your point?
Oh I can you know. Ever heard of cloud computing running (PC architecture based) blade servers? Who said anything about an XP network?
Distributed computing is the future. I've seen it. ;)
Besides the Amiga can't do that either so your point is moot.
1. Never had to write 10,000 words
Good for you. So you accept you have limited experience of the business world.
2. Even a cardigan-wearing gronk would know to SAVE his file before he switches off his computer..blah
So you are now calling all Amiga users cardigan-wearing gronks? That wasn't nice of you at all. :rolleyes:
What is interesting is that you admit data loss is almost always down to user error and gronks or not, Amiga users are no different to PC users in that regard so being able to shut your Amiga down from a switch is hardly a useful feature that the P world are screaming out to catch up with.
Never said anything about not having shutdown safely being anything to YOUR f'en servers. ...blah
Again it depends on what OS you are running. that's no shortcoming of the PC hardware architecture. If Icaros etc. is running on it you can do the same thing.
See it still boils down to your mis-comprehensions about the difference between hardware and software. Try researching the concepts a little. It might suddenly dawn upon you, but you won't catch me holding my breath over it.
You're work in a server-client environment. Many people at home don't, many people shut down their PC's daily, to them it matters..Its a feature that many PC user would be glad to have..
Again, I'm really glad you are beginning to see where the Amiga really fits in. A nice comfy fun home computer. It's when you start to have megalomaniacal fantacies for it of conquering the whole computing world is when I start worrying about your health.
I'm sure i couldn't give a toss about serving DHTML on an A1200
Sure! That's what we've been trying to tell you all along. You can give your pernicious tosses to more relevant things like viewing Pr0n on Ibrowse on your unexpanded A1200. Go knock yourself out. Just don't start thinking your A1200 currently has many practical uses outside of that home retro computing sphere.
If you disagree then if you convince even one blue chip company to abandon all it's PCs in favour of Amigas and I will gladly eat my hat, live on webcam if you prefer. :hat:
VERY good luck to them: it cost them a few hundred dollars and no tech support costs. An equivalent PC set up would cost many $1000's for the dentist, and tens of thousands for the aged-care facility to achieve the same.
Niche installations in small local businesses , so yes good luck to them. Just don't tell me that is what the PC has to catch up with. If you do I'll just laugh publicly. :lol:
Really? you can run a public touch screen /multi screen display from your phone? Which phone? which software? which screens?
Oh dear oh dear! You really need to catch up on mobile phone technology as well. It gets better and better. :laughing:
Try engadget.com (http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/05/iphone-owners-get-control-of-digital-signage/) for a look at what amazing technologies exist outside of your closed sphere. You might be qite surprised you know.
The Amiga needs billions of dollars of investment to be a serious contender and catch up with to the established platforms.
And this is relevant because......?
because the Amig platform just doesn't have these resources so it can't catch up. Clearer now?
i highlighted linux's hardware recognition/configuration issues which simply don't exist to anywhere near the same degree with classic Amiga. That's all thats is needed in the context..
Is it? What context is your discussion? You don't really make yourself clear at all. One minute you claim the Amiga is a super, untouchable, all singing, all dancing super computer that the world needs to catch up with and when challenged you restrict its capabilities to nice home computing or Small business niche. Do you even comprehend the concept of contextualisation?
provided you installed from original operating system disks then you had defective ie broken hardware.
I don't even kno what you are talking about here so I can't comment. You don't make much sense tbh.
I think you boarded the plane a long time ago..
good for you.
On second thougt I don't really want to go and wallow on your clouds of denial. I'm qute happy in the real world.
It matters to Microsoft who are highlighting Win 7's improved boot and shut down times, ..blah
Software : Hardware :rtfm:
So your argument is: yeah Amiga's boot faster, but i run from a server, I never shut down, i can do more than an Amiga so i don't care. Good for you.
Yeah good for me. Thank you for understanding.
But none of that makes your PC boot any faster. And admit it you'd really like a PC that boots in 5 seconds and shuts down instantly, wouldn't you? And admit it your pC can't do this.
but.. but. I thought we already established I don't care and you already said it was good for me. why would I all of a sudden really like that? Don't contradict yourself man. You are providing too much entertainment. I don't think the crowds are going to be able to keep their internal organs confined to their torso due to their sides splitting so heavily. Have some Mercy ! :rofl:
Anyway, my PC can do this if I want it to. You are trying to creep the OS argument in here again. Already covered umpteen times. Move along now. nothing to see here.
CRAZY but thats REALITY: I can get on the net, open all sorts of malicous email.. blah.
The PC can. Live with it.
On my A1200, i get far less wait-cursers, ..blah
That won't help me in my day to day work at all I'm sorry you can't sway me to use a hobby home computer in a professional environment for my daily work. Cursors or no cursors, I get my work done without any hassle because the machines are capable of performing the tasks at hand and an Amiga can't. Live with because none of your blathering on is going to make the slightest bit of difference. My Amiga is sitting nicely at home where it belongs as a nice retro hobby machine.
Agreed. And sometimes my Amiga is still the better tool for some jobs that I-and others- want to do.
Good for you. I'm afraid the rest of the world is still not convinced. Maybe you are not evangelising it enough. Hmm.. Yeah.. Maybe thats it. You are really letting your side down you know.
Well NOW your plane to LaLaLand has landed on the tarmac.
I didn't see a friendly welcoming party so I jetted off back to the real world. Pity really, I would have had a great laugh at your expense. I'm sure. :lol:
-
Originally Posted by stefcep2 View Post
BTW does anyone know WHY Windows and linux need a swapfile even if they use so little available RAM? I know you can force the swap file size to zero in Windows, but I suspect it still uses a swap file. And AFAIK Linux won't install without a swap file partition.
First of all, they don't use a little amount of ram. They use as much of it as possible at any given instant since the paradigm they follow is that unused RAM is needlessly wasteful. Instead it's used for caches, buffers and so on:
The memory utilisation of my machine at work here a moment ago was as follows:
Mem: 1032208k total, 956012k used, 76196k free, 103616k buffers
Swap: 4610612k total, 31520k used, 4579092k free, 299596k cached
As you can see, most of the physical memory is in use. What you will also note is that most of the swap is not in use. It is possible to run without a swap file, but why would you want to? It's only used when you are trying to do more than can be reasonably accomplished within the confines of your physical memory. Think of it as a safety net. Better to run a bit slower when paging kicks in than simply stop running and fail in some fashion.
Furthermore, modern memory allocation strategies don't actually have to allocate the memory all at once. Physical allocation need only occur when a page within that allocation space is accessed for the first time. It's not uncommon for large allocations at compile time to turn out to be oversized at runtime. This way, only the amount of memory actually required at runtime (as opposed to what the program thinks it required) gets allocated.
-edit-
My machine at home isn't using any swap:
Mem: 4053804k total, 3404668k used, 649136k free, 900776k buffers
Swap: 20000884k total, 0k used, 20000884k free, 1871376k cached
-
My 800MHz G4 A1XE takes around half the time of my A1200T to boot. It has 32x the CPU speed, 5x the bus speed, 10x the sustainable hard disk transfer rate, yada etc.
It's running AmigaOS so on that hardware, surely it should boot in a flat second. Dear me, whatever could be wrong with it?
Boot times are not a metric for computer performance. Boot times are dominated by waiting, be it waiting for initialisation of hardware, software, synchronisation between processes or a myriad of other things. The more processes that are started, the more conflated this becomes.
All computers wait at exactly the same speed. Even a factor of a million CPU clockspeed difference cannot make a half second device initialisation go any faster. a 4GHz CPU cannot negotiate an IP address with your router any quicker than the router wants to talk to it.
The only valid indication of performance of a system is once it has booted up, not how long it takes to get there. My A1200* has a longish from cold boot time for an Amiga classic, but once up, it's pretty quick and capable, much moreso than a 7 second boot-from-cold bare OS3.1 install.
*FYI an accelerator card and graphics card as the sole internal expansion cards in a system do not make it a Frankenstein machine.
I don't really think it has anything to do with driver initalization though. There are plenty of examples of OSes that can boot in a few seconds, have sound, ethernet ready, etc etc. People in this very thread claim to have boot times in the "seconds" range, so I really don't think it is an issue of hardware/hardware initialization... That is unless it the slow way Windows does it guess.
Boot times aren't a metric of CPU performance, but it is a metric of "performance". If I had two identical computers boxes next to me and the 'only' difference was one booted in 10 seconds and one booted in a minute, then you'd obviously buy the 10 second box. (Assuming all other things equal). So yes, the performance of how fast a system boots is a metric. Now it's not the main metric I would ever look at when buying a computer, but it's almost 2010, I dare say it seems odd.
-
I don't really think it has anything to do with driver initalization though.
Have you seen typical driver sets for things like graphics cards these days?
Thanks to direct support for CUDA, PhysX, OpenGL1.0 - 3.0, Direct X (up to v10), Pure Video etc, the drivers for my card alone weigh in at around 100 MB, not including tweaking tools.
The linux drivers aren't much smaller.
-
Have you seen typical driver sets for things like graphics cards these days?
Thanks to direct support for CUDA, PhysX, OpenGL1.0 - 3.0, Direct X (up to v10), Pure Video etc, the drivers for my card alone weigh in at around 100 MB, not including tweaking tools.
The linux drivers aren't much smaller.
And thats mostly down to not having so many user definable options to adjust and things like real time previews of setting alterations. Either relying on the distro's own configuration menus or simply not allowing the options.
In a lot of cases it is litterally only a few megs either way.
-
And thats mostly down to not having so many user definable options to adjust and things like real time previews of setting alterations. Either relying on the distro's own configuration menus or simply not allowing the options.
In a lot of cases it is litterally only a few megs either way.
True, though quite oddly, the linux driver does have an X Server Settings GUI that grants access to various options I don't see in the Windows version. :)
-
That hasn't quite answered the question. Does River Raid sample at 1kHz?
Don't have the source code to tell, but if I record the joystick data as fast as possible and do a "replay", the fact that the lower the recording rate the more off the replay is shows that sampling rate of joystick should be really high. Take into account the fact that the actual joystick motion requires millisecond sampling since data reflects those times. Here's data from River Raid (similar results for Vyper Amiga game). I used river raid since it uses fixed patterns for intial levels so I can test Reply mode. The following data will automatically finish Bridge 1 without dieing (first byte is joystick data where bit 0 = forward, bit 1 = back, bit 2 = left, bit 3 = right, bit 4 = trigger):
255 492.011992 ms
239 193.551497 ms
255 102.613160 ms
239 169.355474 ms
255 212.145701 ms
247 577.819620 ms
231 82.070541 ms
239 63.292001 ms
235 17.194553 ms
251 742.122450 ms
235 45.433999 ms
239 0.011948 ms
235 0.428292 ms
239 0.023143 ms
235 0.237284 ms
239 99.513307 ms
255 49.932682 ms
247 11.206606 ms
255 0.011948 ms
247 380.715926 ms
255 1.470111 ms
247 1.934836 ms
255 5.022607 ms
239 249.192435 ms
255 138.805327 ms
251 505.806763 ms
235 75.794901 ms
239 66.561437 ms
231 19.253496 ms
247 374.931845 ms
255 2.567959 ms
247 1.448165 ms
255 11.873767 ms
239 170.120274 ms
255 84.725221 ms
247 305.335075 ms
255 32.394828 ms
251 566.892716 ms
235 41.297094 ms
239 44.859821 ms
231 8.054205 ms
230 12.307901 ms
231 0.012093 ms
230 15.734817 ms
231 27.877147 ms
247 862.149214 ms
231 82.911276 ms
239 0.011960 ms
231 0.677802 ms
239 0.011827 ms
231 6.334053 ms
239 0.011827 ms
231 0.012192 ms
239 0.011827 ms
231 0.023066 ms
239 56.721352 ms
235 350.176663 ms
251 421.029415 ms
255 38.664893 ms
239 5.328367 ms
231 0.045222 ms
230 0.836479 ms
238 0.012093 ms
230 5.734592 ms
231 25.773636 ms
239 0.011960 ms
231 116.353143 ms
239 0.011960 ms
231 0.012237 ms
239 0.450360 ms
231 0.045355 ms
239 0.033917 ms
231 0.158012 ms
239 0.034183 ms
231 0.011827 ms
239 0.011782 ms
231 0.034382 ms
239 0.745502 ms
231 0.565145 ms
239 0.012093 ms
231 0.881712 ms
239 6.550044 ms
255 0.011827 ms
239 1.774851 ms
255 38.831827 ms
247 365.889257 ms
231 158.959145 ms
247 0.011948 ms
231 0.226255 ms
247 247.729640 ms
255 0.599051 ms
247 8.032414 ms
255 73.691257 ms
239 102.764111 ms
235 49.886784 ms
251 64.230773 ms
255 38.148894 ms
239 104.014240 ms
255 31.979304 ms
247 2.499194 ms
255 4.027175 ms
247 13.166736 ms
255 0.012093 ms
247 13.437925 ms
255 0.111925 ms
247 92.455577 ms
255 0.034039 ms
247 8.121784 ms
255 0.226377 ms
247 0.474435 ms
255 46.157965 ms
251 471.010511 ms
235 150.837494 ms
251 0.011948 ms
235 0.100697 ms
251 9.163358 ms
255 130.177054 ms
251 327.273709 ms
235 119.984878 ms
234 2.579386 ms
238 10.422133 ms
254 46.738007 ms
246 45.275178 ms
247 677.737134 ms
231 29.894558 ms
229 16.877754 ms
237 0.011948 ms
229 13.506435 ms
237 0.012181 ms
229 9.991790 ms
237 0.802673 ms
239 37.390446 ms
235 137.930531 ms
239 70.181079 ms
255 0.011948 ms
239 2.147802 ms
255 0.045488 ms
239 3.110892 ms
255 73.307278 ms
251 847.801656 ms
235 12.624313 ms
239 127.058847 ms
255 38.491718 ms
247 613.906313 ms
231 137.009327 ms
239 0.090433 ms
231 0.067434 ms
239 0.057459 ms
231 1.254785 ms
239 0.023143 ms
231 0.271600 ms
239 0.055996 ms
231 0.023143 ms
239 0.045355 ms
231 0.011827 ms
239 8.286867 ms
255 0.012359 ms
239 0.271334 ms
255 0.011827 ms
239 0.417386 ms
255 386.192064 ms
247 19.196558 ms
231 200.935127 ms
239 0.011960 ms
231 4.377115 ms
239 0.350871 ms
231 0.033917 ms
239 0.044956 ms
231 0.045355 ms
239 0.090045 ms
231 0.147637 ms
239 0.452489 ms
231 0.023143 ms
239 0.949401 ms
231 0.611165 ms
239 36.892857 ms
255 0.012170 ms
239 1.503163 ms
255 0.011827 ms
239 0.949545 ms
255 223.152276 ms
251 628.032148 ms
255 27.326333 ms
239 152.454201 ms
255 116.829695 ms
247 16.594029 ms
255 0.012093 ms
247 0.169063 ms
255 0.391705 ms
247 316.154100 ms
231 2.488676 ms
239 0.350871 ms
231 0.113854 ms
239 0.349674 ms
231 0.034183 ms
239 122.315963 ms
255 0.012303 ms
239 1.649737 ms
255 933.725144 ms
239 302.371610 ms
255 912.454647 ms
247 102.990222 ms
231 19.616083 ms
239 0.022866 ms
231 0.565278 ms
239 0.033917 ms
231 0.237550 ms
239 154.648544 ms
255 572.020930 ms
251 797.851018 ms
235 15.316622 ms
239 174.151571 ms
255 253.714007 ms
247 63.774948 ms
231 109.837404 ms
239 0.011948 ms
231 0.012192 ms
239 0.023054 ms
231 0.011838 ms
239 0.125436 ms
231 0.045222 ms
239 0.215205 ms
231 0.758404 ms
239 124.109425 ms
255 27.082000 ms
239 101.504284 ms
231 138.721920 ms
239 435.550413 ms
235 27.367443 ms
239 26.851511 ms
238 10.871141 ms
239 0.068110 ms
238 12.545063 ms
230 0.995411 ms
231 0.011827 ms
230 3.800010 ms
231 0.090711 ms
230 2.760153 ms
231 0.204032 ms
230 3.585859 ms
231 51.779756 ms
239 0.101606 ms
231 2.353009 ms
239 0.011982 ms
231 1.085057 ms
239 0.237960 ms
231 0.848172 ms
239 0.622349 ms
231 0.012314 ms
239 0.011971 ms
231 0.168298 ms
239 14.822790 ms
237 8.054360 ms
233 16.138769 ms
235 0.011960 ms
233 0.949257 ms
235 0.023420 ms
233 57.981589 ms
235 0.226233 ms
233 0.215072 ms
235 338.698723 ms
239 0.012226 ms
235 0.745901 ms
239 159.747752 ms
255 0.012824 ms
239 0.291750 ms
255 209.284208 ms
247 709.275521 ms
255 0.012303 ms
247 0.643275 ms
255 0.068498 ms
247 0.022877 ms
-
Oh, and every other Amiga program will do the same with libraries... Except that mostly I have to put them there manually. and they are oh-so-bloated! If anything, dynamically linked libraries retract from the "bloatedness".
...
If everyone shared them. But they don't, there are several versions of each DLL and I have seen when they do use a common directory, they cause conflicts.
>Shorter maybe, but in that case, not by compression but by information reduction.
LOSSLESS compression means no loss in information. That's what it uses unlike MPEG4.
>Oh, I am not speaking from any particular technical know-how, but as I said, using old ECS and OCS demos/games on an A1200 without WHDLoad or soft kicking will be a pain. Probably not so much the incompatibilities in the custom chips as because of incompatibilities in the different ROM revisions, RAM size and changes in clock speed.
Good, so we agree AGA/ECS/OCS are backward compatible and directly accessing OCS hardware registers works on all amigas.
>No, not boot block. If someone made a boot block demo for a particular PC model, they could make it work on every other machine of the same model, though, just as well as Amiga boot intros work for every computer of the same model.
You can't do a 1K demo on PC that uses audio card or the advanced features of VGA cards, etc. etc. since OS first has to be loaded. Amiga wins here in tight coding due to hardware level compatibility.
>I am surprised we are talking about boot block demos now though, since PC = Windows, apparently.
Not for me. For me all OSes are the same since I just write kernel mode drivers.
>It can indeed make a difference, but the question is whether this difference is important enough for our perception to take into account.
I dumped the actual data of River Raid in another post.
>Also, you won't get away with 22 kHz if you want to be able to faithfully reproduce audible sound without loss of loads of audible information - that's only half the human hearing range, and a clearly perceptible difference, as opposed to the difference between reading the joystick 4 or 17 times per redraw.
When a human moves and when you redraw are unrelated.
>And no, you still haven't shown me a game that benefits and uses 1 kHz joystick sampling, so the use case is still VERY artificial.
Bullcrap. The more you sample the joystick, the more accurate the results.
>You sort of missed the point of analog joysticks then. They are not there to send unambiguous up/down/left/right information. They give you full and precise control over the axes, for example to control a crosshair or fine movement controls of a player. Did I mention that my joypads have a digital directional pad too, by the way?
If you read the same analog stick a few times, you will see that it returns different values (testing with gameport). Thus, it's not as precise as you think and people usually people use range of values to do a particular thing so you already not using full range.
>I'm just reducing your argument to the absurd to show how little sense it makes...
You didn't even refute a SINGLE point. Just claiming it's "absurd" doesn't make it that.
>Congratulations. What are you complaining about then? Is it particularly hard?
Your claim that people no longer use hardware directly. They have less standard hardware, but they still use what little of it there is.
>How so? It is true, isn't it?
Amiga can do it in software whereas you want to use additional hardware. That's not a good comparison.
>And ten minutes later the kid gave up and never touched the controller again? Doesn't sound real at all. How old was the kid?
No, I wanted some kids to play games-- and they preferred Amiga/Atari games over PC games since controls were simple. They didn't have to think "which of the 10+ buttons do I press." Given they are kids, I didn't want to teach them:
Eenie meenie minie moe
pick a button to shoot the foe
if it's wrong then let it go
next time try another to blow
>MP3 is instantaneous? What are you talking about?
Sorry, MP3 also appears same as uncompressed audio to most people as analog joystick appears instantaneous like digital joystick. Yet one is better than the other.
-
Listen, one could write a simple real-time operating system that is source compatible (with a small HAL, of course) with both Amiga and IBM PC-compatible hardware. Both systems would perform identically within the domain of the real-time operating system because that's what the real-time operating system guarantees.
...
They are not identical. Each real-time task has its own constraints. With Amiga, given hardware level compatibility and exact timing using Copper, I can make real-time tasks with more precise timing constraints and right tighter code. I am speaking in general that works for majority of PCs. Yeah, you can make your specific PC do equivalent by adding customized hardware...
>No one disagrees that the joystick ports on the Amiga provide lower latency access to traditional digital joysticks; however, that doesn't make the Amiga "better."
It doesn't make the Amiga better, it makes it's joystick interface better.
>No human being can trigger a joystick at an input frequency of 1 kHz. (Something other than a human being might, but we're talking about human beings.) ...
Sorry, but joystick states can change-- I just dumped the data file from river raid in another message.
>EDIT: Just to be clear: "real-time" does not mean instantaneous.
I know what it is. I made the floppy simulator which has a constraint of 2 micrseoconds (to get 500kbits/second).
-
spec sheet says 6 24bit channels in at 192KHz.
You use your audio card as a joystick?
-
They are not identical. Each real-time task has its own constraints. With Amiga, given hardware level compatibility and exact timing using Copper, I can make real-time tasks with more precise timing constraints and right tighter code. I am speaking in general that works for majority of PCs. Yeah, you can make your specific PC do equivalent by adding customized hardware...
>No one disagrees that the joystick ports on the Amiga provide lower latency access to traditional digital joysticks; however, that doesn't make the Amiga "better."
It doesn't make the Amiga better, it makes it's joystick interface better.
>No human being can trigger a joystick at an input frequency of 1 kHz. (Something other than a human being might, but we're talking about human beings.) ...
Sorry, but joystick states can change-- I just dumped the data file from river raid in another message.
"Better" is subjective. If a human being cannot access anywhere near the full potential of this port, and the PC offers more then enough overhead that it is still far quicker then a human beings maximum potential reaction time, then seriously... so what?
I can't run a hard drive or a printer or any other of the miriad of periferals available today off of an amiga's joystick port, but I can run one off of any modern PC's USB port.
And you still haven't shown a single game that actually uses more then a tiny fraction of this supposed superior ports capability.
Untill you can show something that actually benefits by having this lower latency your whole argument is dead in the water.
-
Actually from another POV its been the reverse: my impression is that some pro-PC people believe the *PC* is perfect and any flaws regarding its hardware eg joystick polling, hardware initialisation and boot times and shut downs, user-interface slow downs, propensity for malware, registry clogging, hard drive fragmentation, hardware incompatibility (Linux), etc have not been accepted as the flaws that they are but rather have been excused for various reasons (the PC does more, it can crunch number faster, the PC has industry standard software compatibility, more people use a PC), despite the Amiga being superior at many of these things.
PCs aren't perfect but allow a wider range of options and a unmatched degree of customization. Most of the 'defects' you mentioned either depend on software, or are plain silly (there's NO "joystick port" on PCs you can compare the Amiga's ones to. And well, I'd suspect any EHCI controlled USB 2.0 port is quite more reliable and fast than ANY "1 KHz"-polling 9 pin joystick port, and in newest PCs there are a dozen available on the motherboard), while considering the Amiga "still superior" for these really marginal aspects cries for an urgent reality check.
The irony of life, is that in its glorious days, Amiga meant innovation. Now "innovation" is what is keeping the PC platform alive, even if there are cheaper and more reliable solutions for games - like nextgen consoles and so on - and sales are growing only for notebooks and netbooks. And people who once brought the flag of innovation, now prefer to close their eyes and appear as dumb with silly arguments like this 1-KHz fool and the evergreen faster boot-time. If you prefer, I can give you another: the Amiga keyboard had the left Ctrl button where mother IBM decided it should stay. Modern PCs placed it somewhere else: odd. :roflmao:
-
@amigaski
If you are going to pivot the crux of your argument around precision timing with this degree of anality, then I am forced point out that the argument that all amigas have exactly the same timing, expressed in units of time (as opposed to cycles), is not true. You have not factored manufacturing tolerances of the clock crystals, nor have you factored in nonlinear effects caused by slight differences in temperature and voltage.
No two clock crystals give exactly the same timing, they just aren't that good.
-
@amigaski
If you are going to pivot the crux of your argument around precision timing with this degree of anality, then I am forced point out that the argument that all amigas have exactly the same timing, expressed in units of time (as opposed to cycles), is not true. You have not factored manufacturing tolerances of the clock crystals, nor have you factored in nonlinear effects caused by slight differences in temperature and voltage.
No two clock crystals give exactly the same timing, they just aren't that good.
And certainly when the Amiga was being manufactured (not to mention the cheapness of Commodore) the tolerance of the crystals were very very poor... fortunately the quality of the display and audio equipment of the time were so poor the timing could be quite imprecise.
-
These differences are actually quite easy to demonstrate, too.
All you need to do is to play a test sound (something like a drum beat is good), looped indefinitely on a pair of amiga models of your choice (even the same model) and set them off. Naturally you won't be able to get them perfectly aligned at the start, but no matter. The important thing is how they sound an hour later compared to the start.
-
Of course the clock crystal difference gets considerably bigger when you compare PAL and NTSC amigas ;)
-
You use your audio card as a joystick?
I can use my sound card as a joystick port. Does that count?
-
Thought experiment:
Suppose you took an analogue joystick and used the X/Y potentiometers to control an independent left/right output volume from a oscillator (generating a note at let say several kHz) then fed that into your basic sound card and sampled this signal at 44.1kHz. You could then calculate the RMS intensity of each channel in frames of 441 sample chunks and use that (suitably calibrated) to represent the original X and Y potentials. 441 samples at 16-bit precision would be ample data to get a decent value for the RMS intensity of a simple tone in the kHz range.
That should be pretty damn close to 1kHz sampling of your joystick position ;)
(note, simply sampling a DC potential across the potentiometers with a soundcard isn't likely to work well, or possibly even at all due to the frequency response of the sampling hardware. Not many record 0Hz too well)
-
Dude, you've recorded contact bounce (which means that you actually need to sample multiple values, which in turn means you get much longer readings than the ones you discussed earlier).
-
Dude, you've recorded contact bounce (which means that you actually need to sample multiple values, which in turn means you get much longer readings than the ones you discussed earlier).
:lol: amigaski has forgotten that physical switches have a maximum switch frequency... any amiga joystick will use cheap switches that will switch far bellow 1khz :)
-
:lol: amigaski has forgotten that physical switches have a maximum switch frequency... any amiga joystick will use cheap switches that will switch far bellow 1khz :)
The funny part is that it's fairly common to poll the joysticks only once per VBL, which generally means every 20ms on the Amiga...
And polling at the frequency he mentions gives erroneous values - that actually means it's inferior to modern counterparts - which is even more funny considering the argument used in this discussion.
-
Thought experiment:
Suppose you took an analogue joystick and used the X/Y potentiometers to control an independent left/right output volume from a oscillator (generating a note at let say several kHz) then fed that into your basic sound card and sampled this signal at 44.1kHz. You could then calculate the RMS intensity of each channel in frames of 441 sample chunks and use that (suitably calibrated) to represent the original X and Y potentials. 441 samples at 16-bit precision would be ample data to get a decent value for the RMS intensity of a simple tone in the kHz range.
That should be pretty damn close to 1kHz sampling of your joystick position ;)
Make sure to use single copper crystal wires, coated in platinum.
I wonder if amigaksi (http://www.amiga.org/forums/member.php?u=4508) has ever seen what a button press looks like with an oscilloscope, or has ever had to deal with debouching. Years ago, when I first started playing around with microcontrollers, I had a simple little project I threw together, one of my first. Toggle an LED based on the state change from a pin. I'd press the button and it would randomally decide whether or not it was gonna stay lit. That drove me up the wall but I learned something. Contact switches are full of noise and ring like hell. Polling the crap out of a contact switch or tying one to an interrupt line is a waste of time. You take a sample and you move on. Even if a person could press a button 1,000 times a second, the noise floor would make it impossible to ascertain what really happened. This is one of the many reasons why people typically sample the joystick once per frame. You're not likely to have a legitimate state change in under 50ms. Sampling at higher rates just means you're picking up noise.
*edit* lol, you guys beat me to it!
-
:lol: amigaski has forgotten that physical switches have a maximum switch frequency... any amiga joystick will use cheap switches that will switch far bellow 1khz :)
Perhaps his joystick is built by the folks that made these (http://www.directindustry.com/prod/honeywell-sensing-and-control/military-grade-switch-12365-307307.html) ;)
-
The funny part is that it's fairly common to poll the joysticks only once per VBL, which generally means every 20ms on the Amiga...
And polling at the frequency he mentions gives erroneous values - that actually means it's inferior to modern counterparts - which is even more funny considering the argument used in this discussion.
So in fact the Amiga hardware is inferior to the PC since it doesn't debounce the input signal hahaha :D
-
So in fact the Amiga hardware is inferior to the PC since it doesn't debounce the input signal hahaha :D
Human reaction time is also worth taking into the equation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time
Reaction time from visual stimulus is actially in the 200ms range, which means polling the joystick every 20ms is more than adequate.
-
Perhaps his joystick is built by the folks that made these (http://www.directindustry.com/prod/honeywell-sensing-and-control/military-grade-switch-12365-307307.html) ;)
Be careful what you search for on the net these days. :nervous:
[EDIT]
I just realised this is my 2000th post no wonder I gained a rep power point. :D
-
"Reaction time from visual stimulus is actially in the 200ms range"
I wouldn't use wiki as an authorative source on everything.
Look at Tennis, Cricket and Baseball or Clay pigeons even. Or how about snipers?
-
Yeah... I did some reaction-time tests on a BBC micro when I was about 15 years old. These days they "red-flag" sprinters who respond to the gun in less than 0.1s, because it's counted as jumping the gun - but I was able to *average* about 0.08s, with lots of 0.04-0.06s, and that included making a decision as to which hand to use to press a key in response to a square appearing on either the left or right side of the screen. If you were less than 95% accurate on 100 tests then the whole caboodle was discarded - it assumed you were guessing.
-
Not everyone can play tennis, cricket, and basebell or shoot targets. The world's fastest tennis serve crossed the court in 326ms. Nice. Regardless, ~200ms is the magic number, and it's what you need to shoot for to make something appear instanenous.
-
"Reaction time from visual stimulus is actially in the 200ms range"
I wouldn't use wiki as an authorative source on everything.
Look at Tennis, Cricket and Baseball or Clay pigeons even. Or how about snipers?
They're describing a specific thing here. Mainly, waiting for a visual cue and making some kind of movement, and 200ms is about right, according to everything I've read over the years. People can move faster, of course, but within limits, but not hanging on a stimulus event. Typing or walking up a flight of stairs for example. In games, it's easy to get trained to the point where you just automatically hit the right sequence of interface buttons to go through a level without even thinking. But how fast can you click a button or move a stick?
Try this: http://www.urban75.com/Mag/java7.html
Best I can do is 6 clicks a second. 166ms per click.
-
Have you seen typical driver sets for things like graphics cards these days?
Thanks to direct support for CUDA, PhysX, OpenGL1.0 - 3.0, Direct X (up to v10), Pure Video etc, the drivers for my card alone weigh in at around 100 MB, not including tweaking tools.
The linux drivers aren't much smaller.
I don't really think that has anything to do with initalisation though. With drivers your really are getting back to HD speed and CPU speed. Besides even it took a full second to initalize the card, with the Quad core beast, blazing fast bus speeds, and HD speeds you should be able to initialize just about everything at the same time. Aside from the fact that many people, as some have pointed our here, this is possible. Something QNX or Amithlon, take seconds to boot and you can access the internet, hear sound, see the desktop.
For Windows, there's also the speed that "some" apps install. Or some Windows updates. Windows update can take minutes just to figure out what needs to be updated. I can render huge 3D scenes in Maya in less time. What in the world could Windows be doing in all that time?
-
Churning your hard disk, that's what. Rendering is usually a CPU/memory IO bound task. The bottlenecks there are small and a fast CPU/memory system will plough through such work.
Dependency resolution and all the nonsense that goes with it is generally a disk IO bound task. Modern hard disks have great transfer speeds but they don't seek much more quickly than they did years ago. If you are processing thousands of small files, the time is totally dominated by seeks and the like. The CPU will be twiddling it's virtual thumbs for a lot of it.
Having said that, yum and apt-get (to name just two) are significantly quicker. I think we just live in a world where windows is expected to be slow for these things.
-
@DonnyEMU
Well, I've no delusions about the many weaknesses of the Amiga, but to be honest, I do like the fact that I can boot it up, do a quick Google and shut it down again before my Windows system has become responsive. That's a positive asset for me, in a real situation. Don't get me wrong, the PC is probably used more than the Amiga in my world, but it takes so long for the PC to boot that I don't really use it for looking up something quickly. Hell, fiddling about on my phone's browser is usually faster, and I don't have to go upstairs ;)
I don't like having computers turned on all the time; they generate heat and use electricity. And those hardware guys should have been able to tell you, that hibernating a computer is pretty much the same as a full shut down/start up as far as the PSU and hard drives are concerned. Sleeping might be a little less harsh on the PSU, but I'd be far more worried about the starting/stopping of the mechanical hard drives. And that's the same whether you sleep or shut down a system.
Hi,
Not only that but while your computer is sleeping the power supply keeps running and a fan in the power supply stays on pulling through air, this draw through pulls in dust, but that just brings another market to the PC world, compressed air to blow the dust out of their many heat sink fans, and air ducts.
smerf
-
Hi,
Not only that but while your computer is sleeping the power supply keeps running and a fan in the power supply stays on pulling through air, this draw through pulls in dust, but that just brings another market to the PC world, compressed air to blow the dust out of their many heat sink fans, and air ducts.
smerf
Ummm, time to wake up, it's 2009! My computer's power supply and fans power down to something like 5% or so when it sleeps. Even the pretty lights go out...
-
Ummm, time to wake up, it's 2009! My computer's power supply and fans power down to something like 5% or so when it sleeps. Even the pretty lights go out...
Hi,
@juan_fine,
Don't really know about that but my modern day computer keeps the fan in the power supply running when it sleeps, it may slow down some but still produces enough noise to bother my wife when she is trying to sleep, so I have gotten used to turning my computer off. By the way this is a totally year old machine built to play the most modern day games at very fast frame rates, equal to maximum pc test point computer. And by the way pretty blue lights still stay on after shutdown, the only way to get rid of them is to hit the main power switch off on the power supply, and yes juan_fine, my computer does have an off switch. Don't have to wait for winblows or linux to shut it down, but this is not advised with these two OS's
smerf
-
Be careful what you search for on the net these days. :nervous:
[EDIT]
I just realised this is my 2000th post no wonder I gained a rep power point. :D
Gratz!
I guess this means I'm going to have to really put my back in to posting more regularly again!
:laughing:
-
Hi,
Not only that but while your computer is sleeping the power supply keeps running and a fan in the power supply stays on pulling through air, this draw through pulls in dust, but that just brings another market to the PC world, compressed air to blow the dust out of their many heat sink fans, and air ducts.
smerf
My laptop's sleep mode shuts down the fan.
-
So you are now calling all Amiga users cardigan-wearing gronks? That wasn't nice of you at all. :rolleyes:
No. ONLY YOU. And an anal one at that.
ONLY an anal cardigan wearing gronk would:
1. Embark on a grammatical argument about whether the original post is a question or a statement, as if THAT would make one iota of a difference to what replies are posted.
2. Be incapable of understanding that a statement such as "PC=x86 running on 90-95% of the worlds computers run Windows", would also mean most of the world doesn't use an Amiga computer.
3. Want limit the meaning of "PC" to a discussion about x86 hardware, without admitting that without software, hardware is useless.
4. Want to ignore that 95% of PC hardware runs Windows, and ignore the user-experience of THOSE machines but instead focus his argument solely on the few per cent that don't run Windows.
Only a deluded, anal cardigan-wearing gronk would:
5. Even contemplate the notion that a PC could run AmigaOS natively because not only is there no PC that can run AmigaOS natively, it has virtually zero probability of eventuating in this universe, or at any time in this universe's existence.
Only a stupid, deluded, anal, cardigan wearing gronk would:
6. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up", and then dismiss those reasons because they don't matter to HIM and HIS computer needs, no matter that, for many people, its because of the unique qualities of the Amiga over a PC that they still use Amiga.
7. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up". and then re-state the reply into a statement of belief that not only will Amiga be popular again, that it will be more popular than the PC and even put a dollar value on how much that would cost.
8. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up" and then re-state the reply into a statement that, not only can Amiga do EVERYTHING that a modern PC can currently do, but that the Amiga can do it ALL better than the PC.
9. Use emerging technologies (CLOUD COMPUTING FFS), which may or may not gain wider acceptance , as an argument against the capabilities of Amiga compared to PC.
-
I don't really think that has anything to do with initalisation though. With drivers your really are getting back to HD speed and CPU speed. Besides even it took a full second to initalize the card, with the Quad core beast, blazing fast bus speeds, and HD speeds you should be able to initialize just about everything at the same time.
So why might that not happen? karlos?
-
So why might that not happen? karlos?
It does happen on 'some' OSes. ;-) Why not others? ???
-
Dude, you've recorded contact bounce (which means that you actually need to sample multiple values, which in turn means you get much longer readings than the ones you discussed earlier).
Wrong. When you move the joystick, left to right you go into a state of no-press for extremely small amount of time (sub millisecond); that's what you see there. I only mentioned 1Khz; if you took that into account as relevant you would need much higher than 1Khz. Your speculation that it's contact bounce is just that -- speculation.
-
Human reaction time is also worth taking into the equation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time
Reaction time from visual stimulus is actially in the 200ms range, which means polling the joystick every 20ms is more than adequate.
You are wrong. Joystick goes through a lot more states than most games actually use. It's like audio example I gave. Your not proving anything by just make a blind assertion that it's switch bounce. And the blind follow the blind...
-
"Better" is subjective. If a human being cannot access anywhere near the full potential of this port, and the PC offers more then enough overhead that it is still far quicker then a human beings maximum potential reaction time, then seriously... so what?
...
You have missed the point completely. Amiga joystick is superior REGARDLESS how fast you sample it. I was stating an example where you need 1Khz sampling.
>I can't run a hard drive or a printer or any other of the miriad of periferals available today off of an amiga's joystick port, but I can run one off of any modern PC's USB port.
We're not comparing which port is faster. We're comparing which joystick interface is better.
>And you still haven't shown a single game that actually uses more then a tiny fraction of this supposed superior ports capability.
If you sample at higher rates, you will capture more of the human reaction on the joystick than if you sample at lower rates.
>Untill you can show something that actually benefits by having this lower latency your whole argument is dead in the water.
You need to think about the joystick recorder dump file I posted. It's not noise as someone as speculated. But he's mislead others as well-- it's normal for him.
-
PCs aren't perfect but allow a wider range of options and a unmatched degree of customization. Most of the 'defects' you mentioned either depend on software, or are plain silly (there's NO "joystick port" on PCs you can compare the Amiga's ones to. And well, I'd suspect any EHCI controlled USB 2.0 port is quite more reliable and fast than ANY "1 KHz"-polling 9 pin joystick port, and in newest PCs there are a dozen available on the motherboard), while considering the Amiga "still superior" for these really marginal aspects cries for an urgent reality check.
The irony of life, is that in its glorious days, Amiga meant innovation. Now "innovation" is what is keeping the PC platform alive, even if there are cheaper and more reliable solutions for games - like nextgen consoles and so on - and sales are growing only for notebooks and netbooks. And people who once brought the flag of innovation, now prefer to close their eyes and appear as dumb with silly arguments like this 1-KHz fool and the evergreen faster boot-time. If you prefer, I can give you another: the Amiga keyboard had the left Ctrl button where mother IBM decided it should stay. Modern PCs placed it somewhere else: odd. :roflmao:
Go read post #275. You are doing Chewbacca Defense. You are trying to confuse people by misrepresenting the actual argument. You don't have to do 1Khz sampling and still Amiga joystick interface is superior.
-
Gratz!
I guess this means I'm going to have to really put my back in to posting more regularly again!
:laughing:
I think you should first figure out that "better" is NOT subjective before you post. If it was subjective, you have nothing to argue against except to express your opinion. Amiga is better than PC in all respects. Now tell me it's subjective.
-
Make sure to use single copper crystal wires, coated in platinum.
I wonder if amigaksi (http://www.amiga.org/forums/member.php?u=4508) has ever seen what a button press looks like with an oscilloscope, or has ever had to deal with debouching. Years ago, when I first started playing around with microcontrollers, I had a simple little project I threw together, one of my first. Toggle an LED based on the state change from a pin. I'd press the button and it would randomally decide whether or not it was gonna stay lit. That drove me up the wall but I learned something. Contact switches are full of noise and ring like hell. Polling the crap out of a contact switch or tying one to an interrupt line is a waste of time. You take a sample and you move on. Even if a person could press a button 1,000 times a second, the noise floor would make it impossible to ascertain what really happened. This is one of the many reasons why people typically sample the joystick once per frame. You're not likely to have a legitimate state change in under 50ms. Sampling at higher rates just means you're picking up noise.
*edit* lol, you guys beat me to it!
He was lying (concocting things to confuse people) and you were biased enough to fall for it without any evidence.
-
@amigaski
If you are going to pivot the crux of your argument around precision timing with this degree of anality, then I am forced point out that the argument that all amigas have exactly the same timing, expressed in units of time (as opposed to cycles), is not true. You have not factored manufacturing tolerances of the clock crystals, nor have you factored in nonlinear effects caused by slight differences in temperature and voltage.
No two clock crystals give exactly the same timing, they just aren't that good.
So sorry, you still can't grasp the simple file I wrote and rather opted to be mislead by some speculator who is already known to have mislead people. When you press the fire button and let go and move the joystick, you can go through a few states of a joystick that require millisecond accuracy. In fact, it can be less. Now your bullcrap about two clock crystals not giving exactly the same timing is just that-- a separate argument and just bullcrap since the crystals only need to be as accurate as to produce the timing needed for the system and there are ways to insure they all have consistent timing. Perhaps, you want to read up on how they actually get Coppers, CIAs, Audio Interrupts, etc. to get the same timing rather than blurting out some blind assertion to mislead people.
-
Yeah... I did some reaction-time tests on a BBC micro when I was about 15 years old. These days they "red-flag" sprinters who respond to the gun in less than 0.1s, because it's counted as jumping the gun - but I was able to *average* about 0.08s, with lots of 0.04-0.06s, and that included making a decision as to which hand to use to press a key in response to a square appearing on either the left or right side of the screen. If you were less than 95% accurate on 100 tests then the whole caboodle was discarded - it assumed you were guessing.
We're talking about states of a joystick not just human reaction time. As I explained already, joystick can go through multiple states when person hits it and presses/releases fire button. When you sample at 60Hz or less, you are approximating.
-
Is this thread still going on?
While it's true that the method of polling the old DB15 joystick port is suboptimal, and that USB is also a bit convoluted and known to introduce lag, luckily PCs have (had?) a perfectly adequate port for this purpose: the parallel port. A wide variety of devices are supported by this win driver http://www.geocities.com/deonvdw/Docs/PPJoyMain.htm and I remember some DOS-based emulators also including support (for instance ZSNES could use parallel port SNES pads)
-
Go read post #275. You are doing Chewbacca Defense. You are trying to confuse people by misrepresenting the actual argument. You don't have to do 1Khz sampling and still Amiga joystick interface is superior.
Yes, but the issue here is: "who cares?".
Maybe you're the only one all over the world. Doesn't this suggest anything to you?
-
I don't really think that has anything to do with initalisation though. With drivers your really are getting back to HD speed and CPU speed. Besides even it took a full second to initalize the card, with the Quad core beast, blazing fast bus speeds, and HD speeds you should be able to initialize just about everything at the same time. Aside from the fact that many people, as some have pointed our here, this is possible. Something QNX or Amithlon, take seconds to boot and you can access the internet, hear sound, see the desktop.
Compare the size of your ultra fast boot time OS and the functionality they give to those that boot more slowly on the same hardware.
Neither Amithlon or QNX support anything beyond the basic framebuffer of my card (and probably not even that). So, whilst they can boot in a fraction of the time, they don't offer the same functionality. No 3D, no physics acceleration, no GPGPU support, no video decoding.
If I only use the most basic supported drivers for all my hardware I can reduce the boot time quite considerably. However, I didn't pay good money to buy hardware I can't use properly. A card with ~960GFLOPS number crunching capability is no better than an old Cirrus Logic if all your OS/divers grant you is a few MB of framebuffer.
The argument about the quad core being able to initialise everything is neither here nor there. Aside from starting services, booting up is pretty much a single threaded operation, one that is dominated by waiting for hardware and disk IO. Disk intensive (many seeks and small transfers) operations are slow on any OS, AmigaOS included.
If you are going to assert that slow boot times must be down to something else, then you need to explain why my A1XE doesn't boot dozens of times faster than my least classic machines do. It has much faster hardware and is pretty much doing the same jobs in the same way as OS3.9 did them during boot time.
-
So sorry, you still can't grasp the simple file I wrote and rather opted to be mislead by some speculator who is already known to have mislead people. When you press the fire button and let go and move the joystick, you can go through a few states of a joystick that require millisecond accuracy. In fact, it can be less. Now your bullcrap about two clock crystals not giving exactly the same timing is just that-- a separate argument and just bullcrap since the crystals only need to be as accurate as to produce the timing needed for the system and there are ways to insure they all have consistent timing. Perhaps, you want to read up on how they actually get Coppers, CIAs, Audio Interrupts, etc. to get the same timing rather than blurting out some blind assertion to mislead people.
Temper, temper. Just mirroring your pedantry. Struck a nerve, did it?
-
He was lying (concocting things to confuse people) and you were biased enough to fall for it without any evidence.
No, he's not lying. He took at look at the data and came to the same conclusion that I did, he just managed to drop his post a few minutes before I got done with mine. I actually dumped your table into excel and did some analysis.
To begin with, you didn't disclose how you got this information. You didn't tell us what the other bits are for either. The first issue alone makes your data worthless. Another, more important issue is that you have no idea how often the software polls the port and you stated as such.
Your data shows state changes on the joy port with a time interval of 0.01 milliseconds. This is physically impossible for a human and mechanical switches are unable to guarantee a clean state at this frequency. It's classic undebounced garbage signal noise. I see that you've slammed folks about one thing or another about the chipset, yet you seem to know nothing about basic hardware issues. For all your hemming and hawing about cycle count this and sync that on ancient hardware, you fail to unserstand how a contact switch works.
(http://koft.net/pix/debounce.png)
-
0.01 millisecond? Or 0.01 second?
-
0.01 millisecond? Or 0.01 second?
The data the guy posted and is defending has sub millisecond entries. He's arguing that 10 microsecond state changes on the joy port are important for playing games.
-
Wrong. When you move the joystick, left to right you go into a state of no-press for extremely small amount of time (sub millisecond); that's what you see there. I only mentioned 1Khz; if you took that into account as relevant you would need much higher than 1Khz. Your speculation that it's contact bounce is just that -- speculation.
No, it's fairly obvious that it's contact bounce:
239 0.034183 ms
231 0.011827 ms
239 0.011782 ms
231 0.034382 ms
1/(0.01ms / 1000) = 100000Hz. This is not joystick input from the user, this is contact bounce/noise. This is not speculation, it's an obvious conclusion based on your own readings. You on the other hand have interpreted this as "holy cow, this is accurate" - while it's actually not accurate at all.
-
If you sample at higher rates, you will capture more of the human reaction on the joystick than if you sample at lower rates.
That's true until you sample faster than the switch time of the joystick switches. Then you're recording contact bounce. Which you did.
-
Thought experiment:
Suppose you took an analogue joystick and used the X/Y potentiometers to control an independent left/right output volume from a oscillator (generating a note at let say several kHz) then fed that into your basic sound card and sampled this signal at 44.1kHz. You could then calculate the RMS intensity of each channel in frames of 441 sample chunks and use that (suitably calibrated) to represent the original X and Y potentials. 441 samples at 16-bit precision would be ample data to get a decent value for the RMS intensity of a simple tone in the kHz range.
That should be pretty damn close to 1kHz sampling of your joystick position ;)
(note, simply sampling a DC potential across the potentiometers with a soundcard isn't likely to work well, or possibly even at all due to the frequency response of the sampling hardware. Not many record 0Hz too well)
I'm actually really tempted to try this for real now :lol:
-
That's funny :)
Once upon a time, Amiga was a superior machine (in terms of hardware) as anything else... So Amiga fans were using this as an argument for the Amiga's superiority.
But then, PC catched up, and even went beyond, with faster gfx, more colors, even smooth scrollings, etc... Sure, it took time. But meanwhile, Amiga only went from OCS/ECS to weak AGA.
And AGA was inferior to anything else, be it consoles of the time or even PC. So Amiga fans had to use another argument... So they switched to the OS, and the fact it was small, when compared with bloated Windows (or Linux,...). And could do preemptive multitasking while OS of the time couldn't (well, MacOS couldn't, but Windows had preemptive multitasking starting from Win95, although the full OS wasn't yet 32BIT).
Today, well... OS are still bloated, but processors are so fast and you have so much memory that's it's not really a problem, especially when compared to the services it gives you: 3D, Games, Video encoding/decoding, webcam, huge frameworks,... And all OS can do preemptive multitasking, even MacOS, yes! ;)
And well, AmigaOS became bloated too: while original AmigaOS could run with as little as 256kb RAM, I doubt you could run the latest with less that 40Mb RAM... And that's without running the bloated browsers that can easily eat as much as 32Mb RAM for a single webpage ! So well... not only the OS isn't that light anymore, but it's also lagging in term of services, functionnalities, security, etc.. no memory protection, no resource tracking, no advanced 3D support (T&L ?), weak USB support (especially for OS4, since Poseidon is quite advanced I have to admit).. So you can't really use the OS anymore as an advantage, or you can use stupid things like "it boots fast"... but since you can reboot every hour or so because program x brought down the whole OS, I really don't see it as an advantage. The last time I rebooted my WinXP machine must have been 3 months ago... and it's no even long compared to today standards.. It's just normal.
As for the hardware, well, Amiga is still trying to catch up... lagging behind, because there's no development made in desktop powerpc. Cause there is no market..
So well, what's staying ?
Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...
So really, who cares ?
Now, if people could simply accept the fact that the Amiga has been catched up in every aspect, we could move on.. and work on something great, nice... a true NG Amiga... it surely wouldn't catch PC development. That can't happen anymore. But could be fun, interessting, *fresh*,... like the original Amiga actually.
Running ScummVM+SDL ports on lagging hardware, crashy, old, ugly (yes, grey 2-colours GUI was certainly ok on a TV, but on a 20 inch 16/10th monitor and such powerfull gfx boards you can certainly o better) OS isn't really fun...
Playing with a nice true NG frehs OS on powerfull common/cheap PC hardware could be interesting though... Look at Apple: seems like fun is possible with PC hardware as well... and I ask you to show me the difference between a PPC-Mac and an Intel one without opening it... except that the Intel one would be faster of course.
That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...
-
Yes, but the issue here is: "who cares?".
Maybe you're the only one all over the world. Doesn't this suggest anything to you?
If you don't care about things where Amiga has an advantage, then what are you arguing about in this topic.
-
Temper, temper. Just mirroring your pedantry. Struck a nerve, did it?
No, you didn't answer the point. What makes the timing consistent throughout ECS/AGA/OCS if crystals are so different as you claim?
-
The data the guy posted and is defending has sub millisecond entries. He's arguing that 10 microsecond state changes on the joy port are important for playing games.
You are drawing that conclusion by distorting the truth. I only stated 1Khz but if you think about it you can see that someone releasing a fire button and moving joystick can have sub-millisecond intervals as well.
-
No, you didn't answer the point. What makes the timing consistent throughout ECS/AGA/OCS if crystals are so different as you claim?
Erm, as was pointed to in Karlos's drumbeat example:
There is no consistant timing
Now watch and learn as the rest of your argument is slowly chewed up and spat out.
-
No, he's not lying. He took at look at the data and came to the same conclusion that I did, he just managed to drop his post a few minutes before I got done with mine. I actually dumped your table into excel and did some analysis.
To begin with, you didn't disclose how you got this information. You didn't tell us what the other bits are for either. The first issue alone makes your data worthless. Another, more important issue is that you have no idea how often the software polls the port and you stated as such.
Your data shows state changes on the joy port with a time interval of 0.01 milliseconds. This is physically impossible for a human and mechanical switches are unable to guarantee a clean state at this frequency. It's classic undebounced garbage signal noise. I see that you've slammed folks about one thing or another about the chipset, yet you seem to know nothing about basic hardware issues. For all your hemming and hawing about cycle count this and sync that on ancient hardware, you fail to unserstand how a contact switch works.
(http://koft.net/pix/debounce.png)
You didn't plot the data where the switching does occur without the submilliseconds intervals:
239 154.648544 ms
255 572.020930 ms
251 797.851018 ms
235 15.316622 ms
239 174.151571 ms
255 253.714007 ms
247 63.774948 ms
231 109.837404 ms
You're only showing part of the data. And your distorted conclusion that I'm talking about UAE is your speculation. I never mentioned anything about UAE in this topic nor EVER used it in my life. Stick to reality and drop the bias. I don't see why an emulator could not handle 1Khz joystick input.
-
We're yet to be convinced that:
1) Any amiga game, other than your code, samples the joyport at this rate.
The one example I can think of where high joystic sampling rates may be used would be the ZXAM tape interface.
2) That the ability to sample the joystick represents a genuine advantage. Your sample data suggests that you are able to observe the electrical properties of the micro switches as they close and open. I'm certainly not convinced that this resolution is useful unless you intend to produce time a averaged sample of the observed state at a lower resolution. For example, averaging the entire set of samples at 1kHz every frame into a value that you assume is "on" for the frame if more of the samples were in the on state than the off state. I'm not convinced any game does this. It more likely reads a sample once a frame and moves on.
3) You can't really infer what the sample rate of an application is just by attempting to sample the signal yourself and reproduce it the behaviour of the original application from it.
What you should try is sending simulated pulses at different rates to the joyport from another device from which you can control the pulse of and see wether or not the game is capable of responding to it in a predictable fashion.
-
Erm, as was pointed to in Karlos's drumbeat example:
There is no consistant timing
Now watch and learn as the rest of your argument is slowly chewed up and spat out.
He hasn't proven anything about the timing of audio interrupts, CIA interrupts, Copper timing being different or varying over time.
You don't need to reference him; I read his posts.
-
He hasn't proven anything about the timing of audio interrupts, CIA interrupts, Copper timing being different or varying over time.
You don't need to reference him; I read his posts.
If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.
You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.
-
If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.
You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.
That's why I pointed out timing specifically "in units of time", rather than "in cycles" However, our friend here has been throwing around statements like "558ns with no +/- bullcrap", which is why I felt the need to clarify.
eg:
Depends on the task. If your real-time task only involves modifying some registers, you can use the Copper and it's guaranteed with accuracy of 558ns (no +/- latency bullcrap).
And we can talk Amiga vs. PC w/o dealing with OSes although with PCs you'll have a hard time finding modern PCs that even maintain compatibility at hardware level.
Absolutely no way can you say you can claim "558ns accuracy" when the clock signal itself is subject to variance. Furthermore, the clock speed is slightly different between NTSC and PAL Amigas. For example, in a base A1200, the CPU is driven from the same clock as the rest of the native hardware and the stated clock speeds are 14.32 MHz for NTSC and 14.18 MHz for PAL.
-
No, it's fairly obvious that it's contact bounce:
1/(0.01ms / 1000) = 100000Hz. This is not joystick input from the user, this is contact bounce/noise. This is not speculation, it's an obvious conclusion based on your own readings. You on the other hand have interpreted this as "holy cow, this is accurate" - while it's actually not accurate at all.
Bullcrap. You are taking only a small part of the data where fire button and joystick directions are changing. It's not obvious if you take the data as a whole and see that the sub-millisecond timing only occurs sometimes. If I stated microsecond changes as "accurate user input", I wouldn't be stating 1Khz.
-
No. ONLY YOU. And an anal one at that.
ONLY an anal cardigan wearing gronk would:
1. Embark on a grammatical argument about whether the original post is a question or a statement, as if THAT would make one iota of a difference to what replies are posted.
2. Be incapable of understanding that a statement such as "PC=x86 running on 90-95% of the worlds computers run Windows", would also mean most of the world doesn't use an Amiga computer.
3. Want limit the meaning of "PC" to a discussion about x86 hardware, without admitting that without software, hardware is useless.
4. Want to ignore that 95% of PC hardware runs Windows, and ignore the user-experience of THOSE machines but instead focus his argument solely on the few per cent that don't run Windows.
Only a deluded, anal cardigan-wearing gronk would:
5. Even contemplate the notion that a PC could run AmigaOS natively because not only is there no PC that can run AmigaOS natively, it has virtually zero probability of eventuating in this universe, or at any time in this universe's existence.
Only a stupid, deluded, anal, cardigan wearing gronk would:
6. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up", and then dismiss those reasons because they don't matter to HIM and HIS computer needs, no matter that, for many people, its because of the unique qualities of the Amiga over a PC that they still use Amiga.
7. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up". and then re-state the reply into a statement of belief that not only will Amiga be popular again, that it will be more popular than the PC and even put a dollar value on how much that would cost.
8. Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up" and then re-state the reply into a statement that, not only can Amiga do EVERYTHING that a modern PC can currently do, but that the Amiga can do it ALL better than the PC.
9. Use emerging technologies (CLOUD COMPUTING FFS), which may or may not gain wider acceptance , as an argument against the capabilities of Amiga compared to PC.
Ooh! I think I touched a raw nerve there. :lol:
You just can't step back and see how ridiculous your whole argument looks can you? Every one of your arguments has been ripped to shreds yet you persevere like an obsessed and possessed fool.
Btw, you also keep repeating the word anal a lot, is there something you want to tell us? Don't be shy. :rofl:
I seriously thought you were just trying to wind us up and by trolling like some others on this thread but by your reaction I can see that this is really quite important to you and you take it quite personally. I think that this puts you right up there in the category of the Bus-Arch Troll and Mil-spec guy if you are not just a sockpuppet of one of them already.
You seriously are quite deluded if you think that the PC needs to catch up to the Amiga nowadays, but I think you are happy in your own little comfort zone of belief so I'll not challenge your faith if it upsets you. Quite pitiful really.
Enjoy yourself in your own little world whilst the rest of us live in the real one.
Peace
Gadget. :D
-
That's funny :)
...
But then, PC catched up, and even went beyond, with faster gfx, more colors, even smooth scrollings, etc... Sure, it took time. But meanwhile, Amiga only went from OCS/ECS to weak AGA.
...
I asked you to reply to post #275; you did not but are now expressing your opinion again.
>Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...
The people who don't understand the argument are stupid. Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB. Then I gave an example of River raid where 1Khz sampling can be used (and I did use it in a "Replay" mode) and this sampling is UNDOABLE on a gameport.
>That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...
You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.
-
That's true until you sample faster than the switch time of the joystick switches. Then you're recording contact bounce. Which you did.
You should take into account the FACT that pressing fire button or releasing it is INDEPENDENT of joystick direction motion. You can in fact get an extremely low time reading so just declaring it all noise is your speculation.
-
You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.
You should disassemble the game and find its input handling code before claiming it is using 1kHz sampling. As I've pointed out, you can't base this assumption on attempting to see what minimum sampling rate you need to use to replicate it. I can produce a signal on a machine that I need to sample at 44kHz to get it sounding "just right", but this by no way suggests the signal source is operating at a comparable resolution.
-
I asked you to reply to post #275; you did not but are now expressing your opinion again.
>Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...
The people who don't understand the argument are stupid. Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB. Then I gave an example of River raid where 1Khz sampling can be used (and I did use it in a "Replay" mode) and this sampling is UNDOABLE on a gameport.
>That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...
You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.
You haven't shown that your own code is accurate yet either. But regardless, even if by some miracle it is I do have a question:
How is it in any way an advantage when both the Amigas and PC-USB based control systems are far quicker then human reaction times?
-
We're yet to be convinced that:
1) Any amiga game, other than your code, samples the joyport at this rate.
The one example I can think of where high joystic sampling rates may be used would be the ZXAM tape interface.
...
Given the fact that you can get a millisecond state-change reading from a joystick, it should be clear that sampling at 1Khz is useful. Just like sampling audio at higher rates is useful although most frequencies are accounted for even if you sample at 30Khz.
>2) That the ability to sample the joystick represents a genuine advantage. Your sample data suggests that you are able to observe the electrical properties of the micro switches as they close and open. I'm certainly not convinced that this resolution is useful unless you intend to produce time a averaged sample of the observed state at a lower resolution. For example, averaging the entire set of samples at 1kHz every frame into a value that you assume is "on" for the frame if more of the samples were in the on state than the off state. I'm not convinced any game does this. It more likely reads a sample once a frame and moves on.
Getting millisecond responses is not necessarily electrical property of micro switches.
>3) You can't really infer what the sample rate of an application is just by attempting to sample the signal yourself and reproduce it the behaviour of the original application from it.
But you know it can be theoretically anything so the higher the sampling rate the better. Heck, even if you consider it noise, it is actually happening and should be taken into account.
>What you should try is sending simulated pulses at different rates to the joyport from another device from which you can control the pulse of and see wether or not the game is capable of responding to it in a predictable fashion.
It is being sent from a PC to an Amiga/Atari via a PCI parallel port.
-
Hi,
@juan_fine,
Don't really know about that but my modern day computer keeps the fan in the power supply running when it sleeps, it may slow down some but still produces enough noise to bother my wife when she is trying to sleep, so I have gotten used to turning my computer off. By the way this is a totally year old machine built to play the most modern day games at very fast frame rates, equal to maximum pc test point computer. And by the way pretty blue lights still stay on after shutdown, the only way to get rid of them is to hit the main power switch off on the power supply, and yes juan_fine, my computer does have an off switch. Don't have to wait for winblows or linux to shut it down, but this is not advised with these two OS's
smerf
Hey, Smurf;
Really, my desktop is just like my laptop, I put it to sleep and it goes into an almost 0 power sleep. It takes about 5 seconds to shut down, and it's at the log in prompt around 5 seconds after I hit the spacebar. This is with the Windows 7 x64 RC, by the way. Now if I only had a fast joystick port I'd be a happy camper!
-
Given the fact that you can get a millisecond state-change reading from a joystick, it should be clear that sampling at 1Khz is useful. Just like sampling audio at higher rates is useful although most frequencies are accounted for even if you sample at 30Khz.
Sure, I'm not dismissing basic sampling theory here. What I am suggesting is that even if the joystick is capable of producing millisecond changes, are any amiga games applications actually sampling at that resolution? I really dont think it is likely. Most games have a lot more to do than read the joyport a thousand times a second.
Getting millisecond responses is not necessarily electrical property of micro switches.
Not necessarily no, but still more than likely. You then have the problem of figuring out which was a genuine pulse and which was a switch bounce. I don't really see how you can tell the difference, no matter how high a rate you sample at.
>3) You can't really infer what the sample rate of an application is just by attempting to sample the signal yourself and reproduce it the behaviour of the original application from it.
But you know it can be theoretically anything so the higher the sampling rate the better. Heck, even if you consider it noise, it is actually happening and should be taken into account.
Well, you know it's not likely to be faster than the main loop of the application. Given common programming practises, it's also unlikely to be more than once per frame for most old amiga titles, though there may be examples to the contrary. I'd expect code that reads from the joyport register address once per frame and whatever value was there at that particular instant is taken at face value by the application.
>What you should try is sending simulated pulses at different rates to the joyport from another device from which you can control the pulse of and see wether or not the game is capable of responding to it in a predictable fashion.
It is being sent from a PC to an Amiga/Atari via a PCI parallel port.
Can you elaborate on that?
Look, here's a real experiment that can be attempted and repeated:
Why not try sending completely synthetic 1ms wide pulses once a second for the fire button and seeing how the game responds. If it fires every second then you know the sampling must be high enough (or at least has some clever latching). If, OTOH, it fires only very sporadically, it isn't likely to be sampling at a high rate.
By widening the pulse until you get your 1 fire event per second being registered systematically in your application you will get a better appraisal of what the sampling period is likely to be. It will at least be in the right order of magnitude.
-
If everyone shared them. But they don't, there are several versions of each DLL and I have seen when they do use a common directory, they cause conflicts.
And that's a problem totally non-existent on the Amiga...
LOSSLESS compression means no loss in information. That's what it uses unlike MPEG4.
So you're trying to tell me that decompressing an image and writing it to the frame buffer is faster than directly writing an uncompressed image directly to the buffer. That might be true if you are typing the data down by hand from paper.
Good, so we agree AGA/ECS/OCS are backward compatible and directly accessing OCS hardware registers works on all amigas.
Yes, I can agree with that. But that doesn't mean that all "ocs software" is compatible with any Amiga. There is more to it than the chip set, as I pointed out. I think you understand this as well as I do, but you are playing a fool to be able to dismiss my argument.
You can't do a 1K demo on PC that uses audio card or the advanced features of VGA cards, etc. etc. since OS first has to be loaded. Amiga wins here in tight coding due to hardware level compatibility.
Yes you can, if you know the exact hardware configuration.
Not for me. For me all OSes are the same since I just write kernel mode drivers.
Yes, because the concept of kernel mode drivers exists in every operating system available for the PC...
I dumped the actual data of River Raid in another post.
Data existing is not in itself an indicator that it is important to the end user. As pointed out, the sub-ms state changes are results of switch bouncing. Just because there are millions of magazines in the world doesn't mean that I am missing out stuff that is important to me by not reading them all.
When a human moves and when you redraw are unrelated.
Not in a computer game, when the screen redraw is sometimes the only feedback you get.
Bullcrap. The more you sample the joystick, the more accurate the results.
No, it's not bullcrap. YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ME A GAME THAT USES AND BENEFITS FROM 1 kHz JOYSTICK SAMPLING. That's still true, as it has been since I first pointed it out. As far as I know, there are VERY few games in the River Raid era where even the game logic (all the moving, AI decisions, counting of score etc) operates faster than the screen update.
If you read the same analog stick a few times, you will see that it returns different values (testing with gameport). Thus, it's not as precise as you think and people usually people use range of values to do a particular thing so you already not using full range.
If you'd ever used joysticks for other things than measuring the time between state changes, you'd know that the values that the joysticks are precise enough, and no, while they are not usually exact they give you more precise control over direction than four on/off switches. You'd also know that in most games that utilize the analog sticks, the walking/turning speed/direction correlates exactly enough to the input.
If digital sticks with one button were superior for controllability, their market wouldn't have died out in the early 90s.
You didn't even refute a SINGLE point. Just claiming it's "absurd" doesn't make it that.
I'm not saying that your argument was absurd. I was saying that it made no sense, and to prove my point I used your logic but applied it to something else. It's a common rhetorical device.
Your claim that people no longer use hardware directly. They have less standard hardware, but they still use what little of it there is.
No, that was not what I was claiming. I said that developers are trying to move further away from hardware, which is why there are abstractions like drivers and APIs. If you think that the average software developer has as much use of accessing the hardware as before you are wrong.
Amiga can do it in software whereas you want to use additional hardware. That's not a good comparison.
The Amiga can read four analog values at the same time and digitally convert them without hardware modification? The PC doesn't need any additional hardware besides what's in the joystick.
No, I wanted some kids to play games-- and they preferred Amiga/Atari games over PC games since controls were simple. They didn't have to think "which of the 10+ buttons do I press." Given they are kids, I didn't want to teach them:
Eenie meenie minie moe
pick a button to shoot the foe
if it's wrong then let it go
next time try another to blow
No of course, why would you want to teach them anything? Your kids are none like the kids I know. Either way your story is very anecdotal and not enough to support your argument. The truth is that most kids these days handle and enjoy far more advanced games and joy pads.
Sorry, MP3 also appears same as uncompressed audio to most people as analog joystick appears instantaneous like digital joystick. Yet one is better than the other.
And you think that mp3 vs uncompressed audio is completely analogous to 100 Hz vs 1000 Hz?
-
@GadgetMaster
You really live in alternate reality don't you? Ignorance is bliss, so they say, and your life must be perfectly blissful. You make such lengthy posts, and yet have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY. However there is no point having a discussion with retarded clam, so I'll spare you the intellectual challenge of stringing two coherent words together and leave you blissfully ignorant.
-
Ignorant bliss is the world in which the sun is always shining, the Amiga is still the most popular home computer in Europe, PC's still have CGA displays, 286 processors, no sound beyond the beeper and nobody minds having to reset their computer, regardless of type, when it has a critical brainfart.
In some ways, I guess I'd really like the world to be like that still, but reality is pretty different. My amiga still brings me the joy of the days when things were that much simpler, however, the days of sneering at PC's is long gone for me. In the end, open hardware specifications and modular design won the day out there in the greater world of computing.
-
You should disassemble the game and find its input handling code before claiming it is using 1kHz sampling. As I've pointed out, you can't base this assumption on attempting to see what minimum sampling rate you need to use to replicate it. I can produce a signal on a machine that I need to sample at 44kHz to get it sounding "just right", but this by no way suggests the signal source is operating at a comparable resolution.
There are plenty of games which do NOT use VBI to read joystick port on Atari and Amiga. Only when you read the potentiometers, you need to wait for VBI since they are sampled synched up to the video scanlines. Even in many basic games which I have source code for, they just read joystick and do the appropriate action in main loop. This can be as fast as machine allows them to do the main loop. It's more significant to understand that millisecond sampling gives a better state of the joystick reading than 100 ms than to try to play by what SEEMS like good enough. You don't need examples, but I'll dig up some if you really don't see how it's relevant data at 1 ms sampling.
-
I'd prefer to see a controlled experiment of the type I suggested earlier. I'm even thinking to try it myself :)
-
Hi,
@Juan_fine,
Yes I am very disappointed with the PC joystick port, (by the way where is it located on the PC's I have spun my computer around several times and I can't locate it, but also I can't ever remember using a joystick on the PC and I play all the latest games, like far cry, far cry II, Doom3, fallout 3, Quake IV, crysis, and a lot of the old ones like half life the original, half life 2, Castle Wolfenstein, call of duty/2/3/4/??? or what ever ones I buy my son it is on here I just haven't got around to playing them, interesting.
Well anyhow seeing that having a joystick on your computer is very important by this forum, I have decided to take one of my old Amiga 500's that died, and remove the joystick port and circuitry for my PC, after all I put a lot of time and money in my new game rig and I want the best joystick port made.
I suggest that you do the same, remove the port from an old fried Amiga that you have been carrying for parts, and put it in your PC, I know it can be made to work somehow.
As far as the PC playing catchup to the Amiga, hey the PC can out do the Amiga in just about all major areas, like graphics, sound, games, media, and multi tasking. The things I still find irratating, are OS install time and reboots during installation, BOOT UP TIME, and untimely updates by microsucks, ever been in the middle of a game and you are finally beating the on slaught of the N. Korean troops in crysis, and you are saying yeah I got those &%$#%%$#@# beat and then your screen goes blank, a blue screen comes up with the sentence on it that reads your computer will reboot in 6 seconds to install updates and then you think back and say so thats why the game seemed slower today and then it hits you NO, NO, NO, I have to do that part all over again.
On the sleep mode, hey there are so many types of PC's and laptops, everyone is different, I may have disabled that mode in my computer when I first built it, etc. etc. etc. I mean I could dabble for hours one end in my BIOS, I have a motherboard book that is about an inch and a half thick on the things you could do with it, but there is one thing I am sure I can depent on with a PC:
1. They crash at least 3 times a night while playing fallout 3.
2. They do updates a the most inconvenient time, I turned auto off.
3. Every time I call that American company called microsucks, I get some person in India and you know they talk funny and probably say the same thing about me but you know I have them beat in being rude, yeah the old smerf still has it when he needs it.
4. You basically have to run micro soft if you want to play the newest games, it seems that the software compainies are just atuned to micro shaft. Hey software companies you ever hear of LINUX, if you started making games for LINUX I bet micro shaft would fall flat on its face, BECAUSE WE ALL HATE MICRO SHAFT and the only reason we use it is to play your stupid games, maybe we should all endorse micro shark an quit buying your stupid games for micro $$jerk.
smerf
-
And that's a problem totally non-existent on the Amiga...
...
Yes.
>So you're trying to tell me that decompressing an image and writing it to the frame buffer is faster than directly writing an uncompressed image directly to the buffer. That might be true if you are typing the data down by hand from paper.
You can time it yourself. If you move uncompressed frame to video area vs. decompress one to video area (as in anim format), the uncompressed frames can't achieve the speed of the decompression.
>Yes, I can agree with that. But that doesn't mean that all "ocs software" is compatible with any Amiga. There is more to it than the chip set, as I pointed out. I think you understand this as well as I do, but you are playing a fool to be able to dismiss my argument.
Hold it right there. The argument is ability to access hardware registers directly to produce tighter code and for better response time (as in real-time events). OCS software being incompatible has NOTHING to do with the hardware registers so those hardware registers can be used. Processor speeds changing and ROM versions changing don't involve hardware registers.
>Yes you can, if you know the exact hardware configuration.
No, we're talking about making the software work in general on PCs across the board-- that's why we're even talking about OCS/ECS/AGA compatibility.
>Yes, because the concept of kernel mode drivers exists in every operating system available for the PC...
At hardware level programming, the PCs are the same but nowadays you HAVE to go through APIs for much of the hardware.
>Data existing is not in itself an indicator that it is important to the end user. As pointed out, the sub-ms state changes are results of switch bouncing. Just because there are millions of magazines in the world doesn't mean that I am missing out stuff that is important to me by not reading them all.
You fell for that speculation that it's a result of switch-bouncing; nonetheless, I wasn't talking about sub-ms. I answered this in another message.
>Not in a computer game, when the screen redraw is sometimes the only feedback you get.
User can cause motion via joystick that is faster than refresh rate; he does not have to depend on feedback from display to make moves on the joystick.
>No, it's not bullcrap. YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ME A GAME THAT USES AND BENEFITS FROM 1 kHz JOYSTICK SAMPLING. That's still true, as it has been since I first pointed it out. As far as I know, there are VERY few games in the River Raid era where even the game logic (all the moving, AI decisions, counting of score etc) operates faster than the screen update.
It's better to understand the LOGIC that millisecond state changes are there and not result of noise. Also, try to understand that noise is also considered input to machine.
>If you'd ever used joysticks for other things than measuring the time between state changes, you'd know that the values that the joysticks are precise enough, and no, while they are not usually exact they give you more precise control over direction than four on/off switches. You'd also know that in most games that utilize the analog sticks, the walking/turning speed/direction correlates exactly enough to the input.
I know that most games don't need analog sticks and it's a waste of time in reading such sticks for PCs since they end up using some threshold to make them act like digital joysticks do.
>If digital sticks with one button were superior for controllability, their market wouldn't have died out in the early 90s.
That's speculation. They still exist and are being marketed. You can market "garbage" and sell more of it than something valuable and more useful. Marketing has NOTHING to do with the product being superior/inferior.
>No, that was not what I was claiming. I said that developers are trying to move further away from hardware, which is why there are abstractions like drivers and APIs. If you think that the average software developer has as much use of accessing the hardware as before you are wrong.
I am saying it's more optimal to have both available. APIs and hardware access, but PCs are now getting more and more restricted to APIs so Amiga wins in this catagory.
>The Amiga can read four analog values at the same time and digitally convert them without hardware modification? The PC doesn't need any additional hardware besides what's in the joystick.
That wasn't the point. We were talking about timing things exactly not joysticks here.
>No of course, why would you want to teach them anything? Your kids are none like the kids I know. Either way your story is very anecdotal and not enough to support your argument. The truth is that most kids these days handle and enjoy far more advanced games and joy pads.
It doesn't have to be kids. I tried out some of the XBOX/playstation crap (sticks and games). You try a few of them and you quickly find out, you can't tell which button is used for what. And even worse, some of the games play by themselves as if they were demos. I played this baseball game-- very good graphics but couldn't figure out what I had to do in the game-- it just kept playing itself. So it's not just eenie meenie minie moe for the buttons.
>And you think that mp3 vs uncompressed audio is completely analogous to 100 Hz vs 1000 Hz?
Actual that's an example where a person can't tell the different although there is a difference. A better example is 44Khz sampling vs. 32Khz sampling of audio. A few frequencies may get added in the higher rate which hardly anyone notices.
-
@GadgetMaster
You really live in alternate reality don't you? Ignorance is bliss, so they say, and your life must be perfectly blissful. You make such lengthy posts, and yet have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY. However there is no point having a discussion with retarded clam, so I'll spare you the intellectual challenge of stringing two coherent words together and leave you blissfully ignorant.
Bless you ! :)
-
Karlos,
Yep, you've got it, the Amiga reminds me of a much simpler time, I can just fire up a game and suddenly it's 1989 again and I'm in the wild old days, it's nostalgia, and in a way I get the same feeling from my iPhone. But as far as dong serious video, image or music editing, well, I wouldn't dream of using my iPhone or Amiga, all though the iPhone, no, scratch that thought...
I live in the present, I don't have time for the Amigas frequent trips to the guru, lack of software, and seriously low powered hardware when I have work to do.
-
You haven't shown that your own code is accurate yet either. But regardless, even if by some miracle it is I do have a question:
How is it in any way an advantage when both the Amigas and PC-USB based control systems are far quicker then human reaction times?
If it's a miracle, it has already happened. If you look at it logically:
(1) move a joystick from one diagonal to another and you can expect quite a few states it goes through; (2) move a joystick quickly up to down or left to right and it has to go through a state where nothing is pressed for extremely short time; (3) as already mentioned, pressing fire and moving joystick are independent so those states can have any small time amount in between. (4) Even if you consider some noise in the data, it can ALSO get sampled in by the game and it would take it just as good as real data. Human reaction times may be slower, but the game should play exactly according to joystick movement so taking into account more of the state changes means a more accurate reading.
I don't know which code you are referring to being accurate. That dump of the data was using this code:
/* DUMPREC.C: Dumps joystick .REC file (c) 2009 KSI */
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include "types.h"
int main(int argc,char *argv[])
{
FILE *f, *df;
unsigned currstate,newstate,i,j;
unsigned long dtL,dtH;
char scratch[128];
double ProcessorSpeed,cnvrt;
if (argc<2)
{
Syntax:
printf("Syntax: DUMPJOY infile.REC outfile.txt\n");
printf("Dumps joystick recordings done with MPDOS SuperPro.\n");
printf("If you don't specify outfile, infile.txt will be outputted.\n");
return 0;
}
f = fopen(argv[1],"rb");
if (!f) goto Syntax;
i = strlen(argv[1]);
if ((argv[1][i-4]=='.')&&(argv[1][i-3]=='r')&&(argv[1][i-2]=='e')&&
(argv[1][i-1]=='c'))
{
argv[1][i-3]='t';
argv[1][i-2]='x';
argv[1][i-1]='t';
}
if (argc==3) df = fopen(argv[2],"wb");
else df = fopen(argv[1],"wb"); //default output file
fread(&dtH,4,1,f);
currstate = dtH&0xFF; //current joystick state
fread(&dtL,4,1,f);
ProcessorSpeed = (double)dtL/32768.0; //accurate to 838ns (max)
printf("Recorded on processor running at %lf MHz\r\n",ProcessorSpeed);
for (i=0; i<65535; i++)
{
j=fread(&dtH,4,1,f);
if (j==0) goto ItsEOF;
fread(&dtL,4,1,f);
newstate = dtH&0xFF;
cnvrt = (double)dtL/(ProcessorSpeed*1000.0);
sprintf(scratch,"%d %lf ms\r\n",currstate,cnvrt);
currstate = newstate;
printf("%s",scratch);
j = strlen(scratch);
fwrite (scratch, j, 1, df);
}
ItsEOF:
fclose(df);
fclose(f);
return 0;
}
-
If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.
You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.
The NTSC/PAL crystals are by spec given a fixed frequency. Now even if they deviate by one billionth or something, it's within the tolerance of the TVs and they are still considered to be at the same frequency. You don't say my TV runs faster than yours. Amigas use the same timing as NTSC/PAL crystals. So I can say that CIA interrupts, Audio Interrupts, Copper lists, etc. all run at the same frequency across the board for OCS/ECS/AGA.
-
That's why I pointed out timing specifically "in units of time", rather than "in cycles" However, our friend here has been throwing around statements like "558ns with no +/- bullcrap", which is why I felt the need to clarify.
eg:
Absolutely no way can you say you can claim "558ns accuracy" when the clock signal itself is subject to variance.
...
You are making an absurd claim. PC timers also claim a certain accuracy and their crystals are subject to same conditions as Amiga timers. And that has NOTHING to do with latency. Latency is the hardware deviating by a few cycles from the exact point when the event was supposed to occur.
>Furthermore, the clock speed is slightly different between NTSC and PAL Amigas. For example, in a base A1200, the CPU is driven from the same clock as the rest of the native hardware and the stated clock speeds are 14.32 MHz for NTSC and 14.18 MHz for PAL.
Just answered that for someone else:
The NTSC/PAL crystals are by spec given a fixed frequency. Now even if they deviate by one billionth or something, it's within the tolerance of the TVs and they are still considered to be at the same frequency. You don't say my TV runs faster than yours. Amigas use the same timing as NTSC/PAL crystals. So I can say that CIA interrupts, Audio Interrupts, Copper lists, etc. all run at the same frequency across the board for OCS/ECS/AGA.
T = 1/F that's how you get 558ns.
-
I know how to convert period to frequency, thanks. The point is that you are being very loose with your terminology.
No crystal timer is guaranteed to allow you to time something to exactly 556ns, no two amigas run at exactly the same speed, which is what your earleir posts were claming. No two PC's do either. They all operate within a certain tolerance
If you had stated your case in bus cycles, rather than nanoseconds, I wouldn't have pointed this out. As it goes, I was being deliberately pedantic in this regard so that you could appreciate how some of the pedantry in your argument sounded to the rest of us.
-
I know how to convert period to frequency, thanks. The point is that you are being very loose with your terminology.
No crystal timer is guaranteed to allow you to time something to exactly 556ns, no two amigas run at exactly the same speed, which is what your earleir posts were claming. No two PC's do either. They all operate within a certain tolerance
If you had stated your case in bus cycles, rather than nanoseconds, I wouldn't have pointed this out. As it goes, I was being deliberately pedantic in this regard so that you could appreciate how some of the pedantry in your argument sounded to the rest of us.
They also say the meter always isn't the same size. I consider all these rubbish arguments. They also claim PIT (8253) original timer runs at 1.19318Mhz which comes out to 838ns and has been used to update time in a PC. So take your rubbish elsewhere. You have to go by the spec. There's also ways to make sure frequency is fixed using PLLs or other such mechanisms. I still claim it's 558ns accurate. I have no reason to claim it isn't. All Amiga audio interrupts, cia interrupts, copper lists run at the same speed (NTSC).
-
You are making an absurd claim. PC timers also claim a certain accuracy and their crystals are subject to same conditions as Amiga timers. And that has NOTHING to do with latency. Latency is the hardware deviating by a few cycles from the exact point when the event was supposed to occur.
Are you sure?
-
... I'd expect code that reads from the joyport register address once per frame and whatever value was there at that particular instant is taken at face value by the application.
Can you elaborate on that?
Look, here's a real experiment that can be attempted and repeated:
Why not try sending completely synthetic 1ms wide pulses once a second for the fire button and seeing how the game responds. If it fires every second then you know the sampling must be high enough (or at least has some clever latching). If, OTOH, it fires only very sporadically, it isn't likely to be sampling at a high rate.
By widening the pulse until you get your 1 fire event per second being registered systematically in your application you will get a better appraisal of what the sampling period is likely to be. It will at least be in the right order of magnitude.
I would only be able to test that with games that allow you to fire more than once before the previous missile reaches its target or goes out of bounds. But anyone can easily right an application that reads the joystick port and moves a sprite around within a few machine cycles and he doesn't have to wait for any VBI. Joystick port is digital and can be read anytime unlike the potentiometers.
-
Are you sure?
Yep, just read the HPET spec which deviates by 2 clocks + or - from where actual tick count finishes. Just run some copper color change in the middle of the screen (horizontally and vertically) and reply back when it changes position.
-
I still claim it's 558ns accurate.
You can claim it all you like, but that doesn't make it true. It's approximately 558ns. An accurate figure, determined by a high precision scope might record 555, 559. I totally agree with you that it doesn't matter in system since the circuitry will all be running at whatever speed the clock gives, but the claim it is accurate to 558ns is not true at all. You have to quote a margin of error for any real measurement.
All Amiga audio interrupts, cia interrupts, copper lists run at the same speed (NTSC).
They run in the same number of hardware cycles. As the hardware cycle durations are subject to the timing variances of the oscillator, from system to system they do not run at the same frequency and therefore not a the same speed.
Again, this is deliberate pedantry, but it is true that amiga chipset hardware does not run at exactly the same speed everywhere. It only runs with the same cycle pattern everywhere.
For example, some years ago, Redrumloa was experimenting with underclocking the main oscillator on the motherboard as he observied it was giving a speed up as based on common amiga benchmarking programs where the native chipset wasn't being used for video etc.
I was intrigued by his suggestion and a bit sceptical too, so I wrote some software to try and verify his observation. It turned out that all of the original benchmark programs were using EClock to time operations. So, as the system was downclocked, the benchmarks went up entirely as a result. The benchmark code was still running at the same speed but the clock timing it was simply running slower. I was able to test this assertion by using the PowerPC to measure a delay generated using the timer.device and observe that the actual delay generated was getting longer in tandem with the lowering clock speed.
Cycle for cycle, Reds underclocked system was still running the same pattern as any other, but it certainly would not have been accurate to 556 ns.
-
I would only be able to test that with games that allow you to fire more than once before the previous missile reaches its target or goes out of bounds. But anyone can easily right an application that reads the joystick port and moves a sprite around within a few machine cycles and he doesn't have to wait for any VBI.
The 1 second periodicity was only an example. You could trigger it every 10 seconds. What matters is whether the game responds to the 1ms wide pulse whenever it is issued. If it doesn't then the game simply isn't sampling at a rate that guarantees a sample is read within a 1ms window - ie it isn't sampling at 1kHz. By gradually increasing your pulse width to the point where you get a consistent response (eg 9 in 10 pulses trigger the action) then you know you are in the right approximate resolution of the application's sample rate.
As for the rest, they could but that still does not demonstrate that any particular game title samples this quickly. You need to actually test with real applications that were written, not software you write purely to demonstrate that it is possible.
Joystick port is digital and can be read anytime unlike the potentiometers.
PS, see my other crazy idea to allow 1kHz sampling an analogue joystick. In case you can't find it, a quick recap:
Use the X/Y potentiometers to adjust the left/right volume of a simple hardware oscillator running at several kHz that is sampled by the soundcard at 44.1 kHz. Calculate the RMS power for frames of 441 samples (one frame for left and one frame for right) and look up the RMS value in a suitable calibration table to determine X and Y position.
Et voila, 1kHz sampling of analogue joystick and done using the soundcard just like the good old days :lol:
-
The people who don't understand the argument are stupid. Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB.
It certainly is. The point is: who cares ?
If this was a real problem I'm sure someone would have adressed this issue on PC hardware. But it seems everyone is living with it. Not to mention no one ever used it or mentionned it on the Amiga either.
So what's the point ?
-
If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.
You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.
I have an A500 here, with an ActionReplay Mk3... I can show the system clock speed down (to assist with difficult parts of games), despite changing the clock speed, the A500 remains cycle accurate.
By Amigaski's definition, my A500 is no longer cycle accurate... weird thought... also by slowing the machine's clock speed down I can test if any game really does use a sampling frequency higher than the frame rate.
-
Bullcrap. You are taking only a small part of the data where fire button and joystick directions are changing. It's not obvious if you take the data as a whole and see that the sub-millisecond timing only occurs sometimes. If I stated microsecond changes as "accurate user input", I wouldn't be stating 1Khz.
Even if that was right, you still honestly believe that sampling the transition stages from e.g. left to right would have any impact on gameplay? Which planet are you from? What matters to the application is the intended directional input from the player, which renders the transition stages to be A: inaccurate and B: useless.
-
@Smurf,
I need Windows for my work, so I have one of those Frankenstein Machines, as they are called here. It has all sorts of nifty ports; 2xDVI, 1xSVHS, 1xHDMI, 1xVGA, 2xFirewire...but not a single game port - what WAS I thinking?
I have to admit that there are annoyances with Windows, but I don't do that much gaming on this maching, mainly just Recoil, and I just turn off the network when I do - you're right about the updates, but Avast! is the one that always gets me, it doesn't need a reboot, but I end up with an ugly blue box at the bottom of my right monitor.
I had a dream last night that someone in this thread claimed to have SoftAGA working...
Hi,
@Juan_fine,
Yes I am very disappointed with the PC joystick port, (by the way where is it located on the PC's I have spun my computer around several times and I can't locate it, but also I can't ever remember using a joystick on the PC and I play all the latest games, like far cry, far cry II, Doom3, fallout 3, Quake IV, crysis, and a lot of the old ones like half life the original, half life 2, Castle Wolfenstein, call of duty/2/3/4/??? or what ever ones I buy my son it is on here I just haven't got around to playing them, interesting.
Well anyhow seeing that having a joystick on your computer is very important by this forum, I have decided to take one of my old Amiga 500's that died, and remove the joystick port and circuitry for my PC, after all I put a lot of time and money in my new game rig and I want the best joystick port made.
I suggest that you do the same, remove the port from an old fried Amiga that you have been carrying for parts, and put it in your PC, I know it can be made to work somehow.
As far as the PC playing catchup to the Amiga, hey the PC can out do the Amiga in just about all major areas, like graphics, sound, games, media, and multi tasking. The things I still find irratating, are OS install time and reboots during installation, BOOT UP TIME, and untimely updates by microsucks, ever been in the middle of a game and you are finally beating the on slaught of the N. Korean troops in crysis, and you are saying yeah I got those &%$#%%$#@# beat and then your screen goes blank, a blue screen comes up with the sentence on it that reads your computer will reboot in 6 seconds to install updates and then you think back and say so thats why the game seemed slower today and then it hits you NO, NO, NO, I have to do that part all over again.
On the sleep mode, hey there are so many types of PC's and laptops, everyone is different, I may have disabled that mode in my computer when I first built it, etc. etc. etc. I mean I could dabble for hours one end in my BIOS, I have a motherboard book that is about an inch and a half thick on the things you could do with it, but there is one thing I am sure I can depent on with a PC:
1. They crash at least 3 times a night while playing fallout 3.
2. They do updates a the most inconvenient time, I turned auto off.
3. Every time I call that American company called microsucks, I get some person in India and you know they talk funny and probably say the same thing about me but you know I have them beat in being rude, yeah the old smerf still has it when he needs it.
4. You basically have to run micro soft if you want to play the newest games, it seems that the software compainies are just atuned to micro shaft. Hey software companies you ever hear of LINUX, if you started making games for LINUX I bet micro shaft would fall flat on its face, BECAUSE WE ALL HATE MICRO SHAFT and the only reason we use it is to play your stupid games, maybe we should all endorse micro shark an quit buying your stupid games for micro $$jerk.
smerf
-
Karlos,
Yep, you've got it, the Amiga reminds me of a much simpler time, I can just fire up a game and suddenly it's 1989 again and I'm in the wild old days, it's nostalgia, and in a way I get the same feeling from my iPhone. But as far as dong serious video, image or music editing, well, I wouldn't dream of using my iPhone or Amiga, all though the iPhone, no, scratch that thought...
I live in the present, I don't have time for the Amigas frequent trips to the guru, lack of software, and seriously low powered hardware when I have work to do.
Hi,
@persia,
I hear that work for you is having to turn on your computer, is that true?
Dong serious video? This sounds kinky
I still use the Amiga for some video, like when I am redoing a VHS tape, yes VHS still exists.
but
I can also do VHS onmy PC, I bought a little box for that by ADS called DVD express, rather old now about 10 years but it works great with my sync box for copying my old VHS protected tapes to DVD either on the Amiga or PC. I use the Amiga 4000 just about every day as a matter of fact is sits on the same desk as my PC and makes a great monitor stand, speaking of monitors, I can switch mine on the fly to either the Amiga or the PC so it works out really great. The PC use the DVI and the Amiga uses the VGA ports.
smerf
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
Huh!
I can tell how outdated your machines are, I upgraded my computers to an Atomic frequecy timing standard about 5 years ago. My machines are very stable and very accurate. My computer clocks are right on the money, they vary by maybe pico pico second every 20 years.
smerf
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
Will you take your darn joystick and sit on it?
That should give you the greatest pleasure
smerf
-
You are making an absurd claim. PC timers also claim a certain accuracy and their crystals are subject to same conditions as Amiga timers. And that has NOTHING to do with latency. Latency is the hardware deviating by a few cycles from the exact point when the event was supposed to occur.
>Furthermore, the clock speed is slightly different between NTSC and PAL Amigas. For example, in a base A1200, the CPU is driven from the same clock as the rest of the native hardware and the stated clock speeds are 14.32 MHz for NTSC and 14.18 MHz for PAL.
Just answered that for someone else:
The NTSC/PAL crystals are by spec given a fixed frequency. Now even if they deviate by one billionth or something, it's within the tolerance of the TVs and they are still considered to be at the same frequency. You don't say my TV runs faster than yours. Amigas use the same timing as NTSC/PAL crystals. So I can say that CIA interrupts, Audio Interrupts, Copper lists, etc. all run at the same frequency across the board for OCS/ECS/AGA.
T = 1/F that's how you get 558ns.
Hi,
The true def for latency is:
Definition:
[noun] (computer science) the time it takes for a specific block of data on a data track to rotate around to the read/write head
Synonyms: rotational
[noun] the time that elapses between a stimulus and the response to it
Synonyms: reaction time, response time, latent period
Just thought you would like to know
smerf
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
Huh!
I can tell how outdated your machines are, I upgraded my computers to an Atomic frequecy timing standard about 5 years ago. My machines are very stable and very accurate. My computer clocks are right on the money, they vary by maybe pico pico second every 20 years.
smerf
That's the sort of thing you'd expect in the Fallout universe, eh? :lol:
-
There could be any number of reasons for this. Bad application, dodgy drivers etc. However, if the machine is new, unless it's dirt cheap, it's unlikely to be down the the hardware.
Hi,
@Karlos,
I know I am a little late on this one, but this is very noticeable in Windows, on somethings it multi tasks really great on, on some things you might as well walk away from the PC until it gets done, like when I am playing fallout 3, the machine sometimes slows to a crawl, then I go to my main screen and usually Winblows is updating, very aggrevating, especially when your at a really good part in the game and then it reboots to install updates, had this problem for 2 or 3 times before this idiot got smart and shut off auto updates, don't know what is going on with this board but all I did was fire up the Amiga.org site, and my virus stopper went off like a stealth bomber being shot at by a sam missle in Iraq. Had 3 virus warnings in about 3 seconds, don't know if it was the site or somebody trying to invade through the internet. I use Avira virus checker, this was recommended by maximum pc as being one of the best for catching virus's.
smerf
by the way I have never noticed this on Linux, or the virus's either, Linux just keeps on ticking.
-
That's the sort of thing you'd expect in the Fallout universe, eh? :lol:
Hi,
@Karlos,
you bet ya!
Hey don't knock out fallout 3 man, this is one of the best games I played in years, they just came out with a new episode that i bought for my son, now he is up in Alaska. Have to wait for him to get done playing so I can.
You really need a good machine because it pounds the hardware don't you know.
Trying to finish Doom3 now while my son plays fallout, can't wait, he should be done in another day. My old slow fingers just don't move on the keypad and mouse like they used to, don't you know.
If you notice I said keypad and mouse, not joystick, the new PC's don't have a joystick port, I am working on removing it from the Amiga to put in the PC so I will have the best joystick port made to man and throw Amigaski's claim right out the windows.
smerf
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
you bet ya!
Hey don't knock out fallout 3 man, this is one of the best games I played in years, they just came out with a new episode that i bought for my son, now he is up in Alaska. Have to wait for him to get done playing so I can.
Moi, knock Fallout 3? Why my dear fellow, I have completed it twice and clocked over 250 hours in there in total :)
I have the first two DLC packs but I don't have Broken Steel yet. Needed to wean myself off the addiction a bit :)
You really need a good machine because it pounds the hardware don't you know.
It's not that bad. The lack of real time shadows means it runs a lot faster than some titles. If you want something that really pounds your hardware, run Crysis with all the detail jacked up. I dread to think how intensive it's lighting engine is alone.
-
I did Broken Steel first, then the Pitt... Just started the Alaska thing last night...
went back to Fallout3 to get away from The Last Remnant... lol
Waiting for Mass Effect 2! or god forbid, KoToR III? heh
and err, to stay OT here... The Amiga is timeless... hmmm... Ma just txted me an hour ago and said my new Flex had arrived via UPS... off home tonight to swap out my 667 for 800 heh...
Alaska will have to wait ;-)
-
It certainly is. The point is: who cares ?
If this was a real problem I'm sure someone would have adressed this issue on PC hardware. But it seems everyone is living with it. Not to mention no one ever used it or mentionned it on the Amiga either.
So what's the point ?
People participating in this topic should care.
Because PCs were originally business machines so they failed to address or did not both addressing issues related to gaming (which relates to multimedia as well)-- sprites, multiple audio channels, joystick types (digital vs. analog), joystick ports, timing, etc. These things were not needed to do word processing, communications, running excel, or doing mathematical computations. Gradually, they started addressing these things-- adding in audio cards, faster local bus graphics cards, better ways to time video-related stuff, etc.
So the points so far are as stated in msg #275.
-
Even if that was right, you still honestly believe that sampling the transition stages from e.g. left to right would have any impact on gameplay? Which planet are you from? What matters to the application is the intended directional input from the player, which renders the transition stages to be A: inaccurate and B: useless.
You are still speculating. First of all, those transitional stages aren't just going left to right and even that is accurate and useful. Even if you sample at lower rate, you may get that transitional state in your sample. Secondly, the fire button(s) are indepependent of the joystick directions so you can get minute values for timing of the states. It's not a matter of opinion whether you THINK it has impact on gameplay. It's more accurate to take into account all the various states of the joystick just like it's more accurate to sample sound at 44Khz although it may make little difference to many people if they sampled at 32Khz. Or another example was the MP3 which distorts some samples compared to lossless audio.
As far as which planet I am from. Well, that's a tough one-- if I take into account reincarnation, it could be many.
-
The 1 second periodicity was only an example. You could trigger it every 10 seconds. What matters is whether the game responds to the 1ms wide pulse whenever it is issued. If it doesn't then the game simply isn't sampling at a rate that guarantees a sample is read within a 1ms window - ie it isn't sampling at 1kHz. By gradually increasing your pulse width to the point where you get a consistent response (eg 9 in 10 pulses trigger the action) then you know you are in the right approximate resolution of the application's sample rate.
...
I do have some source code for games that just poll the joystick without waiting for VBI. In the case of River-raid, it does not let you fire again until the missile hits its target or is off the screen.
>As for the rest, they could but that still does not demonstrate that any particular game title samples this quickly. You need to actually test with real applications that were written, not software you write purely to demonstrate that it is possible.
They are both useful. See if they exist in existing applications and to show that it's more accurate to sample at higher rates.
>PS, see my other crazy idea to allow 1kHz sampling an analogue joystick. In case you can't find it, a quick recap:
>Use the X/Y potentiometers to adjust the left/right volume of a simple hardware oscillator running at several kHz that is sampled by the soundcard at 44.1 kHz. Calculate the RMS power for frames of 441 samples (one frame for left and one frame for right) and look up the RMS value in a suitable calibration table to determine X and Y position.
Computing an on-going RMS may slow things down though. How about, just looking for a max/min value every millisecond or so and using up 4 channels to get a digital joystick out of it.
-
You can claim it all you like, but that doesn't make it true. It's approximately 558ns. An accurate figure, determined by a high precision scope might record 555, 559. I totally agree with you that it doesn't matter in system since the circuitry will all be running at whatever speed the clock gives, but the claim it is accurate to 558ns is not true at all. You have to quote a margin of error for any real measurement.
...
There's some ppm rating on the crystals but in the general case it's more accurate than even the rating. I know the NTSC/PAL crystals are pretty solid when it comes to timing since they have an exact formula to work with: 227.5*262.5*60/1.001 = NTSC color burst signal (3579545.4545Hz) and timing based on that should give 558.73ns for Copper. Are you claiming that TV's are skipping frames once in a while?
>For example, some years ago, Redrumloa was experimenting with underclocking the main oscillator on the motherboard as he observied it was giving a speed up as based on common amiga benchmarking programs where the native chipset wasn't being used for video etc.
There are cases where there's manufacturer defect. They do use the T=1/f even on PCs when they use the timer to update system time every 55ms or so.
-
>PS, see my other crazy idea to allow 1kHz sampling an analogue joystick. In case you can't find it, a quick recap:
>Use the X/Y potentiometers to adjust the left/right volume of a simple hardware oscillator running at several kHz that is sampled by the soundcard at 44.1 kHz. Calculate the RMS power for frames of 441 samples (one frame for left and one frame for right) and look up the RMS value in a suitable calibration table to determine X and Y position.
Computing an on-going RMS may slow things down though. How about, just looking for a max/min value every millisecond or so and using up 4 channels to get a digital joystick out of it.
For a single pot value, doing 441 multiplications, 440 additions (most of which could be optimised using multiply add style instructions) and a square root might take at most a few hundred cycles. You can even get rid of the square root all together and just have the values in your calibration table squared and look up the nearest match. However, even with the square root, on a GHz class machine that's peanuts, you are looking at microseconds. Given that searching through the 441 samples will require as many memory accesses, which are by far the slowest operation in the task for a modern CPU it probably wouldn't be faster.
-
For a single pot value, doing 441 multiplications, 440 additions (most of which could be optimised using multiply add style instructions) and a square root might take at most a few hundred cycles. You can even get rid of the square root all together and just have the values in your calibration table squared and look up the nearest match. However, even with the square root, on a GHz class machine that's peanuts, you are looking at microseconds. Given that searching through the 441 samples will require as many memory accesses, which are by far the slowest operation in the task for a modern CPU it probably wouldn't be faster.
I think encoding the x/y signals in a single channel, while efficient and the "right way" to do it, is overly complex for this application... just have two square wave oscillators, and alter the amplitude depending upon position... the Audio interface I referred to has 10 channels, but even the simplest audio input has two channels... x on left, y on right.. simples ;)
-
I wasn't encoding them into a single channel, I was suggesting the attenuation of the output of one mono oscillator separately into left and right (the volume levels for left and right representing representing X and Y respectively) and then analysing the RMS values of each 441 sample frame for left and right independently to infer the X/Y pot values.
The reason for RMS is to calculate a representative value since you'll never get an exact number of oscillator cycles (regardless of waveform shape) in a single frame.
If you are going to go to the trouble of 1kHz sampling of your analogue joystick, there's no point in doing it half arsed, eh?
-
I wasn't encoding them into a single channel, I was suggesting the attenuation of the output of one mono oscillator separately into left and right (the volume levels for left and right representing representing X and Y respectively) and then analysing the RMS values of each 441 sample frame for left and right independently to infer the X/Y pot values.
The reason for RMS is to calculate a representative value since you'll never get an exact number of oscillator cycles (regardless of waveform shape) in a single frame.
If you are going to go to the trouble of 1kHz sampling of your analogue joystick, there's no point in doing it half arsed, eh?
Well... I can't really see the point of a joystick sampling at 1Khz... so it wouldn't make much difference, in reality... :)
-
Well... I can't really see the point of a joystick sampling at 1Khz... so it wouldn't make much difference, in reality... :)
What? Are you insane? :p
-
What? Are you insane? :p
:lol:
-
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=22&pictureid=138)
-
That was a fine looking machine, to be fair :)
Pity Commodore never thought to market the Amiga comparatively. Idiots.
-
(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/63/218241608_7ab7d1bacc_m.jpg)
Amiga; "cats up"
-
Hi,
@Karlos & Amigaski,
I am probably an idiot, but everything I found on joystick polling on the Amiga says that it operates at 1mhz. I looked at schematics, at building boards, etc. etc.etc. even checked my CD32 Schematics, I see 1mhz. Please correct me if I am wrong, also while looking at the schematics I see a diode and cap in circuit with joystick plug, could this possibly be for joystick contact bounce. I could be entirely wrong, but just wanted to see what you would say.
Sitting on a joystick so much fun, just move the sprite by wiggleing your bun
smerf
-
The world is moving towards more distance between the programs and hardware. You have several cores each running at 3 GHz, a bus running in the GHz range, USB 2 running in the 100 MHz range, the hardware has evolved to a point it responds faster than a human can react with it.
The speed of the equipment has also eliminated the need for ports that do only one thing, nowadays your USB port can do everything, so you can plug anything from a monitor or printer to a joystick or mouse into them, no more worrying about not having the right port or the right number of ports. I would never dream of going back to the old days.
Living in 2009 and loving it!
-
Because PCs were originally business machines
Originally, they weren't. The first IBM PC shipped with 16KB RAM, a cassette tape interface, and BASIC in ROM. They accidentally failed in the home computer market, and succeeded in the business microcomputer market. They then tried again for the home market, with the PC jr. but failed. The PC jr. didn't really sell until they introduced a proper keyboard and an upgrade module that enabled it to be used for the same stuff that PCs were being used for.
-
Originally, they weren't. The first IBM PC shipped with 16KB RAM, a cassette tape interface, and BASIC in ROM. They accidentally failed in the home computer market, and succeeded in the business microcomputer market. They then tried again for the home market, with the PC jr. but failed. The PC jr. didn't really sell until they introduced a proper keyboard and an upgrade module that enabled it to be used for the same stuff that PCs were being used for.
Yeah, PC jr failed but IBM PC didn't have the colors, sprites, blitter, sound DACs, etc. and it's price was way too expensive for gaming or for home use.
-
Yeah, PC jr failed but IBM PC didn't have the colors, sprites, blitter, sound DACs, etc. and it's price was way too expensive for gaming or for home use.
Then they tried again with the PC/AT and blew everything away. Welcome to 2009 ;)
-
Look here!!! Amiga still in use!
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/06/09/verjee.uk.hacker.extradition.cnn
er lol?
-
20 Years from now, when terabytes of non volatile memory are standard and video displays beam 3d images directly into your eyeballs, we're still gonna be arguing about joystick ports and boot up times.
(http://koft.net/pix/amiga_smoke_dont_breathe_this.jpg)
I like PCs, I like Macs, got some SGI hardware, som DEC hardware, I use Windows, Linux, NetBSD, OS X, AROS, and Amgia OS 1.3. I love it all but smoking the dust from a ground up Denise chip is just bad for your health.
-
Then they tried again with the PC/AT and blew everything away. Welcome to 2009 ;)
FYI, PC/AT was at 6/8Mhz.
-
@koafter
The boing balls... nice touch :lol:
-
FYI, PC/AT was at 6/8Mhz.
...and the AT was released the year before the Amiga came out, what's your point?
-
...and the AT was released the year before the Amiga came out, what's your point?
Go ask the guy who stated that PC/AT blew everything away.
-
20 Years from now, when terabytes of non volatile memory are standard and video displays beam 3d images directly into your eyeballs, we're still gonna be arguing about joystick ports and boot up times.
I haven't heard anybody complain about 3d imagery.
But come on! Every OS nowadays is shoddy bloatware. Not that Amiga is nowadays the answer to that, but back in the heydays it was.
We just need a new OS, a new system, everything, and which is instantly on, before we can be the slightest bit excited.
I mean, Vista. hurray for eyecandy :roll:
-
20 Years from now, when terabytes of non volatile memory are standard and video displays beam 3d images directly into your eyeballs, we're still gonna be arguing about joystick ports and boot up times.
...
People decided to argue about these two points because they are capable of arguing them. They didn't bother arguing about the other points stated.
-
...and the AT was released the year before the Amiga came out, what's your point?
actually what hurt the amiga and ALL other computers was the pc/at was closely related to business computing. when people wanted to have a computer at home the first choice was a computer compatible with their work pc. however the aos didn't have any competition(os function wise) till win 95. at this point the amiga STARTED to show it's age. and by coincidence 1995 was 1 year after commodore went belly up. if commodore had survived i believe aos would have kept up with the pc but this was not to be.
granted aos stillhad advantages but in an os you look at the whole package not just bits and pieces. i could have the best revolver in the world but without bullets it is nothing more than a keepsake. maybe in a few years amiga can make a comback but with all the bickering between companies and backstabbing i have my doubts about that.
-
I asked you to reply to post #275; you did not but are now expressing your opinion again.
>Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...
The people who don't understand the argument are stupid. Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB. Then I gave an example of River raid where 1Khz sampling can be used (and I did use it in a "Replay" mode) and this sampling is UNDOABLE on a gameport.
>That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...
You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.
I prefer my Xbox 360 controller (for Windows) over standard classic Amiga digital joysticks i.e. four standard analogue controls (e.g. LT, LT, RS, LS) and vibration feedback.
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
I know I am a little late on this one, but this is very noticeable in Windows, on somethings it multi tasks really great on, on some things you might as well walk away from the PC until it gets done, like when I am playing fallout 3, the machine sometimes slows to a crawl, then I go to my main screen and usually Winblows is updating, very aggrevating, especially when your at a really good part in the game and then it reboots to install updates,
Which Windows?
MS Window offers options in regards to Windows updates. I haven't encountered a slow down, while playing Fallout3 on Vista SP2.
Spec
ASUS G1SN 15.4" laptop.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz, 4 MB L2 Cache, 800 FSB.
MEM: 4 GB PC5300 with dual channel mode.
GPU: NVIDIA Geforce 9500M GS with 512MB VRAM and Forceware 185.70 driver.
HD: 2.5" 500GB with NCQ.
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 32bit.
Playing Fallout3 at 1280x720p/800p and high details.
-
(SNIP)
>Yes, because the concept of kernel mode drivers exists in every operating system available for the PC...
At hardware level programming, the PCs are the same but nowadays you HAVE to go through APIs for much of the hardware.
Software abstraction layer enables the PC to adapt and not being stuck with a boat anchor.
>Data existing is not in itself an indicator that it is important to the end user. As pointed out, the sub-ms state changes are results of switch bouncing. Just because there are millions of magazines in the world doesn't mean that I am missing out stuff that is important to me by not reading them all.
You fell for that speculation that it's a result of switch-bouncing; nonetheless, I wasn't talking about sub-ms. I answered this in another message.
>Not in a computer game, when the screen redraw is sometimes the only feedback you get.
User can cause motion via joystick that is faster than refresh rate; he does not have to depend on feedback from display to make moves on the joystick.
>No, it's not bullcrap. YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ME A GAME THAT USES AND BENEFITS FROM 1 kHz JOYSTICK SAMPLING. That's still true, as it has been since I first pointed it out. As far as I know, there are VERY few games in the River Raid era where even the game logic (all the moving, AI decisions, counting of score etc) operates faster than the screen update.
It's better to understand the LOGIC that millisecond state changes are there and not result of noise. Also, try to understand that noise is also considered input to machine.
>If you'd ever used joysticks for other things than measuring the time between state changes, you'd know that the values that the joysticks are precise enough, and no, while they are not usually exact they give you more precise control over direction than four on/off switches. You'd also know that in most games that utilize the analog sticks, the walking/turning speed/direction correlates exactly enough to the input.
I know that most games don't need analog sticks and it's a waste of time in reading such sticks for PCs since they end up using some threshold to make them act like digital joysticks do.
Besides the analogue LS/RS/RT/LT, the Xbox 360 controller includes a digital PAD/LB/RB/X/Y/A/B. In most PC FPS and RTS, a mouse and keyboard combo is the preferred method.
Most console-to-PC game ports(e.g. Games For Windows) includes support for the Xbox 360 controller.
>If digital sticks with one button were superior for controllability, their market wouldn't have died out in the early 90s.
That's speculation. They still exist and are being marketed. You can market "garbage" and sell more of it than something valuable and more useful. Marketing has NOTHING to do with the product being superior/inferior.
I recall Street Fighter II Amiga port didn't capture the arcade feeling i.e. the 1 button joystick standard is one of these issues.
PS; waiting for Street Fighter IV PC edition.
>No, that was not what I was claiming. I said that developers are trying to move further away from hardware, which is why there are abstractions like drivers and APIs. If you think that the average software developer has as much use of accessing the hardware as before you are wrong.
I am saying it's more optimal to have both available. APIs and hardware access, but PCs are now getting more and more restricted to APIs so Amiga wins in this catagory.
IF there's a direct hardware access, what happens to the security objects?
-
Moi, knock Fallout 3? Why my dear fellow, I have completed it twice and clocked over 250 hours in there in total :)
I have the first two DLC packs but I don't have Broken Steel yet. Needed to wean myself off the addiction a bit :)
It's not that bad. The lack of real time shadows means it runs a lot faster than some titles. If you want something that really pounds your hardware, run Crysis with all the detail jacked up. I dread to think how intensive it's lighting engine is alone.
In CryEngine3 switched to deferred rendering for lights i.e. followed Killzone2.
-
I prefer my Xbox 360 controller (for Windows) over standard classic Amiga digital joysticks i.e. four standard analogue controls (e.g. LT, LT, RS, LS) and vibration feedback.
Someone just gave me an XBOX for $4. I guess it's not 360, but probably same controllers. Controllers are fancy looking, but they are still analog and confusing due to so many buttons. Perhaps, they were trying to replace the keyboard with the joystick. Tried a few games and still ended up doing eenie, meenie, minie moe...I guess they forgot to put in a help button.
Vibration feedback-- is that the propellors that come out of the joystick when player does something wrong and attack the user like Maximillian in the movie Black Hole?
Given all those buttons and killer propellers, I revised my poem regarding which button to press:
Eenie meenie minie moe
pick a button to shoot the foe
if it's wrong then let it go
next time it occurs you better know
-
Have you seen typical driver sets for things like graphics cards these days?
Thanks to direct support for CUDA, PhysX, OpenGL1.0 - 3.0, Direct X (up to v10), Pure Video etc, the drivers for my card alone weigh in at around 100 MB, not including tweaking tools.
The linux drivers aren't much smaller.
NVIDIA drivers includes NVAPI i.e. it enables some of Direct3D 10.1 *like* features on current CUDA processors e.g. FarCry2 PC.
-
Someone just gave me an XBOX for $4. I guess it's not 360, but probably same controllers.
They are not the same controllers.
Controllers are fancy looking, but they are still analog and confusing due to so many buttons. Perhaps, they were trying to replace the keyboard with the joystick. Tried a few games and still ended up doing eenie, meenie, minie moe...I guess they forgot to put in a help button.
If you can handle a PC keyboard, you should be able to handle a well known gaming controller.
Vibration feedback-- is that the propellors that come out of the joystick when player does something wrong and attack the user like Maximillian in the movie Black Hole?
Refer to steering feedback on real life car.
-
Software abstraction layer enables the PC to adapt and not being stuck with a boat anchor.
...
As I said, you can have both APIs and hardware level compatibility. For PCs, that's a big problem nowadays.
>Most console-to-PC game ports(e.g. Games For Windows) includes support for the Xbox 360 controller.
Which port are you referring to as the "console-to-PC" game port?
>I recall Street Fighter II Amiga port didn't capture the arcade feeling i.e. the 1 button joystick standard is one of these issues.
Majority of games don't require the analogicity (can be done with digital joysticks) and don't require 10+ buttons. They just have to be programmed to use one or two buttons. Amiga joystick port can handle up to 3 buttons if you use the POTs as buttons as well, but it's easier to use a game with lesser buttons.
>IF there's a direct hardware access, what happens to the security objects?
First you need the hardware compatibility so you have a choice for hardware access. Then there's obviously the IOPM in intel's processors to implement protection for ports for security purposes.
-
As I said, you can have both APIs and hardware level compatibility. For PCs, that's a big problem nowadays.
actually that is not an issue. if you allow direct hardware access then when the hardware changes you have to emulate the old chips. after a few generations that will be unwieldy as heck. this is why commodore was moving away from this idea of direct access before they died. they were trying to force everyone to create os friendly games and apps. this is so they could phase out hardware compatibility for older software. that was the first phase to allow retargetable graphics and sound.
-
If you can handle a PC keyboard, you should be able to handle a well known gaming controller.
Hmno, with some games, digital control is just better, and those well known gaming controllers don't handle that very well, and mostly ends up as a secondary 'analog' controller, or for the use to change weapons, or browsing through inventory.
And with arcade games, use a digital arcade controller (IIRC there's one available, with connectors for quite some gameconsoles and computers). It's just better.
-
Come on, you need more than one button for some games, no amount of programming can make that easier. I don't like the other extreme - the PS1/2/3 controller still annoys me due to the number of buttons. Best controller I've used so far? The Gamecube. Just the right number of buttons, a nice big "Go" button under your thumb, and analogue shoulder buttons that can also be used digitally. But come on, 3 buttons is probably a bare minimum for a lot of games these days to avoid reaching for the keyboard from time to time. I remember hating the Amiga version of Street Fighter compared to the SNES because of the lack of buttons. Less than three might make it easier to play, but imposes tough limits on the flexibility of the game. Hell, I remember Spy Hunter on the Atari 800 had support for a special 2-button joystick (was actually wired as a second joystick's fire button), so you could use 2 different weapons and drive at the same time. It was great!!
-
I was referring to this controller: http://www.xgaming.com/two-player.shtml
-
It's obvious that people who are responding here about "Games for Windows" here have never done any real DirectX, Managed DirectX, Or XNA Game Studio programming at all and they are just talking out of their proverbial hats.. If you want to talk about support for more than just game controllers and want to add Windows Live and Xbox live including multiplayer over network (IP), and voice and instant messaging and headset communication, not to mention the upcoming facial recognition and other technologies..
I suggest you visit the following URLs:
http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Pages/DirectX10.aspx
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
I don't think about programming a pots unit anymore, please that's done all for me in a standardized kind of way.. I think more about creating a game for the PC and deploying it on the X-box 360 and Zune (all of which cross port via the free XNA game studio 3.0).. And if you look at creators.xna.com there are all sorts of nice 3d and 2d multi-scroller games with (some are free), or I can program my own and sell it directly on X-box live and they are as good as any Amiga game I had back in the day..
Check out catalog.xna.com and get back with me about this discussion..
-
It's obvious that people who are responding here about "Games for Windows" here have never done any real DirectX, Managed DirectX, Or XNA Game Studio programming at all and they are just talking out of their proverbial hats.. If you want to talk about support for more than just game controllers and want to add Windows Live and Xbox live including multiplayer over network (IP), and voice and instant messaging and headset communication, not to mention the upcoming facial recognition and other technologies..
I suggest you visit the following URLs:
http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Pages/DirectX10.aspx
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
I don't think about programming a pots unit anymore, please that's done all for me in a standardized kind of way.. I think more about creating a game for the PC and deploying it on the X-box 360 and Zune (all of which cross port via the free XNA game studio 3.0).. And if you look at creators.xna.com there are all sorts of nice 3d and 2d multi-scroller games with (some are free), or I can program my own and sell it directly on X-box live and they are as good as any Amiga game I had back in the day..
Check out catalog.xna.com and get back with me about this discussion..
How often do you read from the controller class in XNA (; I bet it's once per render loop.
Done a little bit XNA stuff on the 360 myself. It's a pretty nice environment.
-
actually that is not an issue. if you allow direct hardware access then when the hardware changes you have to emulate the old chips. after a few generations that will be unwieldy as heck. this is why commodore was moving away from this idea of direct access before they died. they were trying to force everyone to create os friendly games and apps. this is so they could phase out hardware compatibility for older software. that was the first phase to allow retargetable graphics and sound.
Hardware is not supposed to suddenly change-- it's suppose to retain backward compatibility like for example 8253 is still in modern PCs although they added other means for timing things. It's more efficient to do ASM instructions that directly read/write I/O ports than go through API calls.
-
Hardware is not supposed to suddenly change-- it's suppose to retain backward compatibility like for example 8253 is still in modern PCs although they added other means for timing things. It's more efficient to do ASM instructions that directly read/write I/O ports than go through API calls.
Have you ever read the errata page of a modern chip?
-
Hardware is not supposed to suddenly change-- it's suppose to retain backward compatibility like for example 8253 is still in modern PCs although they added other means for timing things. It's more efficient to do ASM instructions that directly read/write I/O ports than go through API calls.
let me come at this from a different perspective.
how many chipsets are there currently?
vid cards?
sound cards?
lan cards?
each brand has their own way of addressing the hardware. there is no one generic hw codeset to directly address all brands of control chips. there is always some functions that will be manufacturer dependant.
now would you really want to program for each one individually or program for 1 api built into the os that does the translating for you?
now to compound this each generation of each manufacturer the direct means of addressing the chipset will change. are you willing to rewrite your program with each new piece of hardware release or would you rather program to a non-changing api that the manufacturer creates interface drivers for.
you see the original amiga and aga amiga had the advantage of being the same hardware regardless of machine so people were able to get away with banging the hardware while programming. this also stiffled what commodore could have done with their chipsets since they had to maintain hardware backwards compatibility. this is why commodore was trying to move people away from doing that.
-
As I said, you can have both APIs and hardware level compatibility.
In Windows NT, there are only two I/O privilege levels used i.e. level 0 & level 3. Usermode programs runs in privilege level 3. All usermode programs should talk to a device driver that arbitrates access i.e. to minimise conflicts.
For PCs, that's a big problem nowadays.
Define this "big problem nowadays." in terms of numbers. One could write a kernel mode driver for I/O level 0 access. Most PC games talks to DirectInput or xInput APIs i.e. userland programmers do not have worry about specific implementations i.e. makes development easier.
Refer to ease of development with Xbox 360 vs PS3's "design to be hard development".
IF STI(CELL) has been proper GPU vendor, they would have abstracted SPEs and RSX in similar ways to Direct3D9’s split vertex (a type of stream processor) and pixel shader (a type of stream processor).
IF you notice with PC GPU(a type of stream co-processor array) market, they annually change their micro-architecture i.e. they went from SIMD(Geforce 4 TI), VLIW (Geforce FX), SIMD (Geforce 6/7), SIMT(Geforce 8), MIMT**(Geforce GT300). “Hitting the metal” requires userland software rewrites.
**Rumoured to be MIMT.
>Most console-to-PC game ports(e.g. Games For Windows) includes support for the Xbox 360 controller.
Which port are you referring to as the "console-to-PC" game port?
Mostly from Xbox 360 targets (i.e. games installed on my laptop) for example, Fallout3, Devil May Cry, Dynasty Warriors 6, Burnout Paradise IUB, Far Cry2, GRID Race Driver, Gears Of War, Mirror's Edge, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., The Last Remnant, Two Worlds (V1.5), Assassin's Creed, Dead Space, Lost Planet, Turning Point (Fall Of Liberty). Any console/PC games that supports XInput API (i.e. Games For Windows and Xbox 360).
>I recall Street Fighter II Amiga port didn't capture the arcade feeling i.e. the 1 button joystick standard is one of these issues.
Majority of games don't require the analogicity (can be done with digital joysticks) and don't require 10+ buttons. They just have to be programmed to use one or two buttons. Amiga joystick port can handle up to 3 buttons if you use the POTs as buttons as well, but it's easier to use a game with lesser buttons.
The Xbox 360 controller assumes lack of PC keyboard access. Note that, the mouse is one form of analogue control.
On Xbox 360 controller
LS = analogue direction e.g. I use it in Grid, Burnout Paradise, H.A.W.X.
RS = analogue POV (changes user's view) e.g. I use it in Grid, Burnout Paradise, H.A.W.K. digital PAD = digital direction
LT = analogue trigger e.g. deceleration.
RT = analogue trigger e.g. acceleration.
LB = digital trigger e.g. E-Brake.
RB = digital trigger.
Y,X,B,A = digital buttons.
Start = start game button.
Back = back button.
In real world controls, analogue controls reigns supreme.
Anyway, AmigaOne, SAM and Peg supports USB type devices.
-
Hmno, with some games, digital control is just better, and those well known gaming controllers don't handle that very well, and mostly ends up as a secondary 'analog' controller, or for the use to change weapons, or browsing through inventory.
And with arcade games, use a digital arcade controller (IIRC there's one available, with connectors for quite some gameconsoles and computers). It's just better.
Both PS3 and Xbox 360 controllers must support all type of games at minimal cost.
-
It's obvious that people who are responding here about "Games for Windows" here have never done any real DirectX, Managed DirectX, Or XNA Game Studio programming at all and they are just talking out of their proverbial hats.. If you want to talk about support for more than just game controllers and want to add Windows Live and Xbox live including multiplayer over network (IP), and voice and instant messaging and headset communication, not to mention the upcoming facial recognition and other technologies..
I suggest you visit the following URLs:
http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Pages/DirectX10.aspx
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
I don't think about programming a pots unit anymore, please that's done all for me in a standardized kind of way.. I think more about creating a game for the PC and deploying it on the X-box 360 and Zune (all of which cross port via the free XNA game studio 3.0).. And if you look at creators.xna.com there are all sorts of nice 3d and 2d multi-scroller games with (some are free), or I can program my own and sell it directly on X-box live and they are as good as any Amiga game I had back in the day..
Check out catalog.xna.com and get back with me about this discussion..
Thats what im sayin. Theres alot of *classic console*-esque games on the 360, Wii and PS3!
XNA is pretty fun. We got a game that finally went live recently (a puzzle game), and are looking into what to do next.
-
I think the whole idea of speed is completely relative, to the user...
In my opinion drawing a simple picture is as fast on Dpaint as it is on any modern graphics package, in fact maybe faster on an Amiga because there were less complicated options and less pixels to push around!
The 'feel' of Amiga was definately faster because the programmes were smaller and much more 'economical' and out of the box, ready to use. There are a lot of labour saving devices on the PC but the more complicated and convoluted it gets the less attractive it is to work with. The modern PC is great at processing vast amounts of information but does that make it more enjoyable? hmmm Amiga wins for simplicity and user friendliness :))
-
I think the whole idea of speed is completely relative, to the user...
In my opinion drawing a simple picture is as fast on Dpaint as it is on any modern graphics package, in fact maybe faster on an Amiga because there were less complicated options and less pixels to push around!
The 'feel' of Amiga was definately faster because the programmes were smaller and much more 'economical' and out of the box, ready to use. There are a lot of labour saving devices on the PC but the more complicated and convoluted it gets the less attractive it is to work with. The modern PC is great at processing vast amounts of information but does that make it more enjoyable? hmmm Amiga wins for simplicity and user friendliness :))
-
I think the whole idea of speed is completely relative, to the user...
In my opinion drawing a simple picture is as fast on Dpaint as it is on any modern graphics package, in fact maybe faster on an Amiga because there were less complicated options and less pixels to push around!
The 'feel' of Amiga was definately faster because the programmes were smaller and much more 'economical' and out of the box, ready to use. There are a lot of labour saving devices on the PC but the more complicated and convoluted it gets the less attractive it is to work with. The modern PC is great at processing vast amounts of information but does that make it more enjoyable? hmmm Amiga wins for simplicity and user friendliness :))
I agree with that. I can't do photoshop. I feel like im drowning in all the crap on screen. I use Neo-Paint which is some kind of derivative of PC Paintbrush era DOS paint programs. It has a streamlined feel like all the old DOS/Amiga paint programs.
i still blow at art, but thats a different story :laughing:
-
In Windows NT, there are only two I/O privilege levels used i.e. level 0 & level 3. Usermode programs runs in privilege level 3. All usermode programs should talk to a device driver that arbitrates access i.e. to minimise conflicts.
...
Yeah, that's the rule. But if the at ring0 you had standardized hardware, you can write more efficient code.
>Define this "big problem nowadays." in terms of numbers. One could write a kernel mode driver for I/O level 0 access. Most PC games talks to DirectInput or xInput APIs i.e. userland programmers do not have worry about specific implementations i.e. makes development easier.
If those implementations were standardized like 8253 example I gave or even VGA standard modes, you can have more efficient code. On Amiga, writing to OCS registers works for all OCS/ECS/AGA amigas.
>...IF you notice with PC GPU(a type of stream co-processor array) market, they annually change their micro-architecture i.e. they went from SIMD(Geforce 4 TI), VLIW (Geforce FX), SIMD (Geforce 6/7), SIMT(Geforce 8), MIMT**(Geforce GT300). “Hitting the metal” requires userland software rewrites.
Hitting the metal can be done and product enhanced. I still use same I/O ports and memory address of A000:0000 for VGA access on ISA-based VGA cards, VESA-based VGA cards, PCI-based VGA cards, and AGA-based VGA cards. So they improved the video cards and yet maintained backward compatibility at hardware level.
>The Xbox 360 controller assumes lack of PC keyboard access. Note that, the mouse is one form of analogue control.
But mouse is usually read as digital data so it's more exact than reading an analog value which tends to fluctuate between various values.
>In real world controls, analogue controls reigns supreme.
I wasn't speaking from marketing point of view-- but one of ease of use and learning in a majority of games.
-
Come on, you need more than one button for some games, no amount of programming can make that easier. I don't like the other extreme - the PS1/2/3 controller still annoys me due to the number of buttons. Best controller I've used so far? The Gamecube. Just the right number of buttons, a nice big "Go" button under your thumb, and analogue shoulder buttons that can also be used digitally. But come on, 3 buttons is probably a bare minimum for a lot of games these days to avoid reaching for the keyboard from time to time. I remember hating the Amiga version of Street Fighter compared to the SNES because of the lack of buttons. Less than three might make it easier to play, but imposes tough limits on the flexibility of the game. Hell, I remember Spy Hunter on the Atari 800 had support for a special 2-button joystick (was actually wired as a second joystick's fire button), so you could use 2 different weapons and drive at the same time. It was great!!
You can get away with a couple of buttons by separating the game selection/starting to be separate from the joystick. Atari 800 had the console keys separate from the joystick button. Atari 7800 had the two button joysticks. They would also work on Amiga.
-
let me come at this from a different perspective.
how many chipsets are there currently?
...
I know current video/audio boards are NOT backward compatible on hardware level (except basic VGA graphics). But that trend is with modern systems. Older PCs did have hardware level compatibility like Amigas.
>you see the original amiga and aga amiga had the advantage of being the same hardware regardless of machine so people were able to get away with banging the hardware while programming. this also stiffled what commodore could have done with their chipsets since they had to maintain hardware backwards compatibility. this is why commodore was trying to move people away from doing that.
Don't see why it would "stifle" things. Hardware compatibility is a good thing; API-level compatibility is not as good-- slower and harder to compute response time overall.
-
You can get away with a couple of buttons by separating the game selection/starting to be separate from the joystick. Atari 800 had the console keys separate from the joystick button. Atari 7800 had the two button joysticks. They would also work on Amiga.
Yeah, I understand that, but what about using 3 different weapons for example? Or a driving game with more than just accelerate/brake? Or even Street Fighter? High punch, middle punch, low punch. An awful pain if you have to combine a button with a joystick movement to choose a different attack. And it rules out attacks while jumping, crouching etc. Yes, 10 buttons is making things overly complicated, but so is limiting yourself to 3 or less. Of course start/pause/reset can be moved away, but sure you don't need more than that anyway - game select screens shouldn't need more than direction and one button.
-
Yeah, that's the rule. But if the at ring0 you had standardized hardware, you can write more efficient code.
No, what you would have is a problem for 2 or three years down the road building up. The thing that killed the amiga was the fact that it could not keep up.
Anyone writing software tied to specific hardware in this day and age would be fired on the spot in any large software firm. And with good reason.
If those implementations were standardized like 8253 example I gave or even VGA standard modes, you can have more efficient code. On Amiga, writing to OCS registers works for all OCS/ECS/AGA amigas.
Do you have even the slightest concept of how much things have advanced in the last twenty years in terms of audio and video? You have API's there to abstract these changes and to be fair, DirectX is a pretty damn efficient way of doing things. It's unlikely that you could learn the hardware of a modern GPU these days well enough to improve over what is already available in a reasonable timeframe. To be clear, even mid range GPUs are more complex then every chip on any Amiga ever created in their totality.
Hitting the metal can be done and product enhanced. I still use same I/O ports and memory address of A000:0000 for VGA access on ISA-based VGA cards, VESA-based VGA cards, PCI-based VGA cards, and AGA-based VGA cards. So they improved the video cards and yet maintained backward compatibility at hardware level.
LULWUT?! You're comparing 2d VESA to a modern capable 3D GPU? ROTFLMAO!!!
Hitting the metal, given the complexity of modern systems isn't just retarded, it is a complete waste of resources.
Come back when you get a clue.
I wasn't speaking from marketing point of view-- but one of ease of use and learning in a majority of games.
Err, Microsofts tools are among the best on any platform bar none. You want to learn how to produce modern games, you use their tools. It's actually one of the few things they really did get right.
-
Yeah, I understand that, but what about using 3 different weapons for example? Or a driving game with more than just accelerate/brake? Or even Street Fighter? High punch, middle punch, low punch. An awful pain if you have to combine a button with a joystick movement to choose a different attack. And it rules out attacks while jumping, crouching etc. Yes, 10 buttons is making things overly complicated, but so is limiting yourself to 3 or less. Of course start/pause/reset can be moved away, but sure you don't need more than that anyway - game select screens shouldn't need more than direction and one button.
I guess example of data compression is appropriate here. If you take majority of games, and take down how many buttons are a must to play, you will end up with a series of number with some maximum and minimum (0 for pacman, 2 for defender, 176 for Flight simulator, etc.). Now rather than carry lg(MaxButtons-1) bits, you simply use the lg(majority of cases for buttons-1) and have special codes/cases for those exceptions. So for example, Atari 800 games generally only need one button so in case of Defender they used the Space bar for Smart Bomb and some other key for hyperspace. That makes it simple for the user to figure out and not need a manual everytime he puts some game in. Nowadays, you switch games and you have to remember which button did what in addition to making learning curve bigger for each game and less responsive due to bigger choice of options for buttons.
-
It entirely depends on the game.
For example, I can pick up and play almost all racing games without having to learn the buttons.
The games I have a real problem with are RPGs like Fable 2, Oblivion and Fallout 3. That said, those games would totally suck without all those buttons as you would spend too much time navigating the menu system. Plus, those games are very much designed for you to play frequently and obsessively, so that you wont forget the controls. If you can't get into those games due to the controls, then you have far more serious issues and those games are not for you.
Its true, I forgot what on earth I was doing on Oblivion because I left it too long since I last played. Its also true however, that the controls are the least of my problems there, its the actual missions and what I did last that are bigger problems. Even a complex control scheme you should be able to pickup after a few minutes.
Basically, you can't say modern gaming sucks simply because the games have more depth/detail and so require more controls. I have more Xbox 360 games on my shelf that I love than I ever did on Amiga. Granted partly because I was so young and had no money back then, but also partly because games are so much more fun.
I, unlike some people, hate games which are so hard you only do a few levels then die and have to start again. I used to get very bored with those games and while it means games are easier, I get a lot more enjoyment out of them which is the most important thing at the end of the day.
-
I'm not a fan of console controls either. A keyboard has the right blend of complexity/familiarity/simplicity.
With a console I feel like a mage trying to meld a wild magic surge... It doesn't feel right, not for me.
I grew up with a keyboard/joystick interface.
A mouse interface is very intuitive like the steering wheel in a car.
-
Don't see why it would "stifle" things. Hardware compatibility is a good thing; API-level compatibility is not as good-- slower and harder to compute response time overall.
if you find one method inefficient in the current system you can change the system to be more efficient then create a driver to interface with the api. if we maintained hardware compatibility you would have to either create both chips on one die or use the existing inefficient method. both are bad since putting both on one chip would be expensive. and using the inefficient method will prevent optimization to improve performance.
-
No, what you would have is a problem for 2 or three years down the road building up. The thing that killed the amiga was the fact that it could not keep up.
...
I already answered this. VGA went through an evolution where it kept backward compatibility at the hardware level.
>Anyone writing software tied to specific hardware in this day and age would be fired on the spot in any large software firm. And with good reason.
Might does not make right. So big companies are following some API standard that does not mean it's the most efficient method.
>Do you have even the slightest concept of how much things have advanced in the last twenty years in terms of audio and video? You have API's there to abstract these changes and to be fair, DirectX is a pretty damn efficient way of doing things. It's unlikely that you could learn the hardware of a modern GPU these days well enough to improve over what is already available in a reasonable timeframe. To be clear, even mid range GPUs are more complex then every chip on any Amiga ever created in their totality.
Take any software using those APIs, and I can write a more efficient software going directly to the hardware.
>LULWUT?! You're comparing 2d VESA to a modern capable 3D GPU? ROTFLMAO!!!
You just don't understand the point.
>Hitting the metal, given the complexity of modern systems isn't just retarded, it is a complete waste of resources.
It's the same resources you use as with API.
>Come back when you get a clue.
You have no clue that it's better to have hardware level compatibility as well as APIs.
>Err, Microsofts tools are among the best on any platform bar none. You want to learn how to produce modern games, you use their tools. It's actually one of the few things they really did get right.
I prefer the simpler digital joysticks over analog joysticks w/various interfaces and 10+ buttons. As I have experienced and seen many others, people have a harder time dealing with the complexities of extra buttons and analogicity for every game. Wasn't it Microsoft that implemented a GUI and mouse to make things SIMPLER. How about a mouse with 10+ buttons. Actually, I saw one of these and it's terrible trying to even move the mouse around without pressing some button accidently and having something weird happen.
-
if you find one method inefficient in the current system you can change the system to be more efficient then create a driver to interface with the api. if we maintained hardware compatibility you would have to either create both chips on one die or use the existing inefficient method. both are bad since putting both on one chip would be expensive. and using the inefficient method will prevent optimization to improve performance.
They speed up processors and functionality while maintaining compatibility; they sped up VGA and functionality while maintaining compatibility; Creative Labs made all those Sound Blaster cards while maintaining backward compatibility.
-
They speed up processors and functionality while maintaining compatibility; they sped up VGA and functionality while maintaining compatibility; Creative Labs made all those Sound Blaster cards while maintaining backward compatibility.
the only reason this is there now is for a generic driver in the bios to display bootup messages. and windows to load a generic driver on initial bootup. this is not backwards compatibility just a basic commandset.
nearly all soundcards use the soundblaster 16(compatible) commands also for a generic driver. however to get the most out of it you need the driver for the card you are using. all they did was create a subset on the chip for the most basic functionality. so no there is no backward compatibility just SB16 compatibility.
simply you are mistaking backward compatibility to a basic codeset for initial bootup.
in cpu chips the basic x86 codeset is maintained as is the extensions added to improve the performance. the hardware does change tho they have to make allowances for all those commands. they become more complicated and problematic because of this.
see errata(pentium4) (http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/specupdt/249199.htm)
-
the only reason this is there now is for a generic driver in the bios to display bootup messages. and windows to load a generic driver on initial bootup. this is not backwards compatibility just a basic commandset.
as for processors the same thing goes as vid cards. there is just enough functionality for bootup processes. this coding has to be standardized to get the system going due to the small size of the bios.
nearly all soundcards use the soundblaster 16(compatible) commands also for a generic driver. however to get the most out of it you need the driver for the card you are using. all they did was create a subset on the chip for the most basic functionality. so no there is no backward compatibility just SB16 compatibility.
simply you are mistaking backward compatibility to a basic codeset for initial bootup.
More often than not, this backward compatibly that the hardware offers, is actually just an emulation... which links nicely to amigaski's other "ignorance thread"...
-
More often than not, this backward compatibly that the hardware offers, is actually just an emulation... which links nicely to amigaski's other "ignorance thread"...
true true
-
I guess example of data compression is appropriate here. If you take majority of games, and take down how many buttons are a must to play, you will end up with a series of number with some maximum and minimum (0 for pacman, 2 for defender, 176 for Flight simulator, etc.). Now rather than carry lg(MaxButtons-1) bits, you simply use the lg(majority of cases for buttons-1) and have special codes/cases for those exceptions. So for example, Atari 800 games generally only need one button so in case of Defender they used the Space bar for Smart Bomb and some other key for hyperspace. That makes it simple for the user to figure out and not need a manual everytime he puts some game in. Nowadays, you switch games and you have to remember which button did what in addition to making learning curve bigger for each game and less responsive due to bigger choice of options for buttons.
I agree that too many buttons are unnecessary and make things too difficult to remember (PlayStation controllers are my example here), but I stand by too few also being an issue. Why would you not need a manual to look up which keys on the keyboard are for the hyperspace and smart bomb? There are something like 60 possibilities there instead of the 6 you'd have with e.g. a CD32 controller. It's something I never liked as I tended to play games holding the joystick base with one hand - look at the ZipStik and tell me how you use a keyboard without losing either the fire button or directional control...
-
Yeah, that's the rule. But if the at ring0 you had standardized hardware, you can write more efficient code.
Userland programmers should not worry about the implementation i.e. plumbing work.
If those implementations were standardized like 8253 example I gave or even VGA standard modes, you can have more efficient code. On Amiga, writing to OCS registers works for all OCS/ECS/AGA amigas.
A boat anchor.
Hitting the metal can be done and product enhanced. I still use same I/O ports and memory address of A000:0000 for VGA access on ISA-based VGA cards, VESA-based VGA cards, PCI-based VGA cards, and AGA-based VGA cards. So they improved the video cards and yet maintained backward compatibility at hardware level.
These legacy modes have no bearing on vendor specfic NVIDIA CUDA’s (Geforce 8 and above) and AMD CAL’s (Radeon HD) capabilities.
Notice X86's performance improvements while keeping legacy compatibility vs GPU's performance improvements. To maximise performance, GPUs usually take a clean design approach i.e. applying the latest micro-architecture paradigm on a given transistor count.
Note that modern X86 translates(amounts to hardware accelerated emulator) CISC instructions to RISCy instruction and hides their expanded micro-architecture registers(i.e. register renaming hardware).
Let's use Geforce 8 micro-architecture as an example.
G80's processing elements has the following specs
[MT IU]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[SP][SP]
[Share memory]
8 scalar threads processors(SP)
32 GFLOPS peak at 1.35Ghz
8192 32bit registers (32K).
- 512KByte total register file space.
768 thread active threads in total.
16KByte on-chip memory
- shared amongst threads of a block
- supports thread communication
1. Geforce 8600 GT/8700M GT/9500M GS/9600M/9650M GT has four of these processing elements i.e. 32 SPs with 32768 32bit registers.
2. Geforce 9600 GSO has eight of these processing elements i.e. 96 SPs with 98304 registers i.e. these values are stored next to actual execution cores.
Notice the register count differences between examples 1 and 2.
>The Xbox 360 controller assumes lack of PC keyboard access. Note that, the mouse is one form of analogue control.
But mouse is usually read as digital data so it's more exact than reading an analog value which tends to fluctuate between various values.
I was referring to variable of movement compared to on-off nature of a digital joystick. Anyway, my mouse has an optical scanner i.e. it has a DPI resolution and it doesn't have a mouse ball. It has A-to-D conversion.
>In real world controls, analogue controls reigns supreme.
I wasn't speaking from marketing point of view-- but one of ease of use and learning in a majority of games.
I wasn't referring to marketing point of view i.e. refer to real world cars. Xbox 360's RS's replicates (player's POV)'s head movement changes.
-
They speed up processors and functionality while maintaining compatibility;
Intel and AMD didn't give you(and anyone else) access to X86’s RISCy micro-architecture instruction set.
they sped up VGA and functionality while maintaining compatibility; Creative Labs made all those Sound Blaster cards while maintaining backward compatibility.
Standards breaks when vendors can't copy/clone another vendor’s specific features e.g. NVIDIA CUDA vs AMD CAL. DirectX11's compute shader and OpenCL attempts to standardise GpGPU.
-
They speed up processors and functionality while maintaining compatibility; they sped up VGA and functionality while maintaining compatibility; Creative Labs made all those Sound Blaster cards while maintaining backward compatibility.
I though I'd find a nice little article for you that details the problem Apple have faced:
"
Managing the platform
Another aspect to keeping technical specifications out of the limelight is that Apple is careful to expose access to hardware components in a manageable, sustainable manner. If developers are allowed to write "to the hardware," the result is a broken platform where the vendor can't move forward without breaking the apps.
Apple experienced this problem in the clever hacks to the classic Mac OS which resulted in destabilizing the system, a problem that got progressively worse after the company sanctioned the system patches in System 7 under the name Extensions. In Mac OS X, reference releases have been plagued by Input Manager hacks that similarly caused some serious compatibility problems.
That has led Apple down the road of a tightly managed iPhone platform where the execution of third party software requires code signatures and sandboxing, and where access to hardware has been roped off until the company could perfect abstracted public access to features in a way that can accommodate new underlying changes as future models are released.
Users shouldn't need to know how much RAM is available to the operating system of a mobile device, or how fast its primary CPU core is clocked at; what they should care about is how usable the device is and what it allows them to do. That's the message Apple is working to control."
-
I already answered this. VGA went through an evolution where it kept backward compatibility at the hardware level.
>Anyone writing software tied to specific hardware in this day and age would be fired on the spot in any large software firm. And with good reason.
Might does not make right. So big companies are following some API standard that does not mean it's the most efficient method.
From GPU's POV, maintaining a CPU style legacy may not be efficient for the transistor budget. For example, GPU's allocates their transistor budgets to math units.
Also, I don't think NVIDIA would share thier GPU ISAs with anyone else.
>Do you have even the slightest concept of how much things have advanced in the last twenty years in terms of audio and video? You have API's there to abstract these changes and to be fair, DirectX is a pretty damn efficient way of doing things. It's unlikely that you could learn the hardware of a modern GPU these days well enough to improve over what is already available in a reasonable timeframe. To be clear, even mid range GPUs are more complex then every chip on any Amiga ever created in their totality.
Take any software using those APIs, and I can write a more efficient software going directly to the hardware.
Close sourced NVIDIA and ATI driver packages include JIT re-complier engine. You are welcome to write Radeon drivers that would beat the offical Radeon drivers.
AMD and NVIDIA offers "close-to-metal" with thier GPUs, but they are vendor specfic. With PS3, NVIDIA provides LibCGM thin-layer.
>Come back when you get a clue.
You have no clue that it's better to have hardware level compatibility as well as APIs.
>Err, Microsofts tools are among the best on any platform bar none. You want to learn how to produce modern games, you use their tools. It's actually one of the few things they really did get right.
I prefer the simpler digital joysticks over analog joysticks w/various interfaces and 10+ buttons. As I have experienced and seen many others, people have a harder time dealing with the complexities of extra buttons and analogicity for every game. Wasn't it Microsoft that implemented a GUI and mouse to make things SIMPLER. How about a mouse with 10+ buttons. Actually, I saw one of these and it's terrible trying to even move the mouse around without pressing some button accidently and having something weird happen.
Pre-programmed macros on MS gaming mouse while playing with Xbox 360 players in Gears Of War(via Xbox Live) is an advantage.
I use an 8 button gaming mouse e.g. able to change sensitivity on-the-fly (two buttons), change weapons, use alternate weapons fire, use health packs and 'etc'.
-
More often than not, this backward compatibly that the hardware offers, is actually just an emulation... which links nicely to amigaski's other "ignorance thread"...
Sorry to disagree, but I can boot up in REAL mode in DOS using a floppy disk and write to same I/O registers directly for many sound blaster cards, read/write DMA data, read/write memory mapped areas for VGA, etc. There's no OS running that is trapping the I/O locations or memory areas and emulating the features. Some may be doing it in software, but those examples I gave I know aren't just software running in the background.
-
...
simply you are mistaking backward compatibility to a basic codeset for initial bootup.
...
Take an easy example of trying to use more than 256K of VGA memory. Each VGA card implemented its own I/O Window register like $3D4 or $3CE. There are hundreds of different I/O Window registers some using 4K banks some 64K banks and then there are various methods of using the linear memory mode at various memory mapped locations. Now all this could be a single Window register and single linear memory area if things were standard like they were for the basic VGA card (A000:0000, $3C0..$3DF, etc.).
-
Sorry to disagree, but I can boot up in REAL mode in DOS using a floppy disk and write to same I/O registers directly for many sound blaster cards, read/write DMA data, read/write memory mapped areas for VGA, etc. There's no OS running that is trapping the I/O locations or memory areas and emulating the features. Some may be doing it in software, but those examples I gave I know aren't just software running in the background.
For simple stuff like VGA, yes.
For more modern hardware this doesn't fly. Meaning that you can't actually access the 3D portions of your Nvidia GFX card the same way as your ATI GFX card or your onboard one.
Heck, from what I understand the implementations might not even be the same for different cards from the same company. Meaning a Nvidia 9600 and a Nvidia G260 might need altogether different ways of being accessed.
They don't do this to stop backwards compatibility, they do this because it's the best way to get high performance out of your chips. For a well documented example of why you sometimes need to break with the past to move on, look no further than Amiga AGA. That could have been so much more if Commodore had not tried so hard to keep compatibility and instead had designed a new chipset around more modern technology.
-
Sorry to disagree, but I can boot up in REAL mode in DOS using a floppy disk and write to same I/O registers directly for many sound blaster cards, read/write DMA data, read/write memory mapped areas for VGA, etc. There's no OS running that is trapping the I/O locations or memory areas and emulating the features. Some may be doing it in software, but those examples I gave I know aren't just software running in the background.
You have no idea what the BIOS, either on the mainboard or the PCI cards is actually doing. For example, the VESA/VGA support on many modern GFX cards is provided by emulation... The EFI firmware on a very modern Computer, uses emulation to support older technologies...
-
I though I'd find a nice little article for you that details the problem Apple have faced:
"
Managing the platform
Another aspect to keeping technical specifications out of the limelight is that Apple is careful to expose access to hardware components in a manageable, sustainable manner. If developers are allowed to write "to the hardware," the result is a broken platform where the vendor can't move forward without breaking the apps.
Apple experienced this problem in the clever hacks to the classic Mac OS which resulted in destabilizing the system, a problem that got progressively worse after the company sanctioned the system patches in System 7 under the name Extensions. In Mac OS X, reference releases have been plagued by Input Manager hacks that similarly caused some serious compatibility problems.
That has led Apple down the road of a tightly managed iPhone platform where the execution of third party software requires code signatures and sandboxing, and where access to hardware has been roped off until the company could perfect abstracted public access to features in a way that can accommodate new underlying changes as future models are released.
Users shouldn't need to know how much RAM is available to the operating system of a mobile device, or how fast its primary CPU core is clocked at; what they should care about is how usable the device is and what it allows them to do. That's the message Apple is working to control."
That's why PCs may have suffered recently-- they were following Apple's policy of ineffiiciency. I am not speaking of maintaining some undocumented hacks relying on processor timing to be backward compatible especially since it's now a given that processor speeds will change. However, those examples should not be reason to remove direct hardware access completely and not to consider it significant that hardware be standardized at port level (not API level).
-
Userland programmers should not worry about the implementation i.e. plumbing work.
...
As I said, there's nothing wrong with having APIs for user mode and still having standardized hardware on I/O port/memory-map level so at least kernel mode software can be written to take advantage in best possible way.
>A boat anchor.
It doesn't have to be just the basic VGA-- entire SVGA/XGA/SXGA could have been standardized at hardware level; but it wasn't so you have to live with the method of accessing them through APIs.
>...To maximise performance, GPUs usually take a clean design approach i.e. applying the latest micro-architecture paradigm on a given transistor count.
Because they are already assuming now that they only have to write for APIs. Also, it's cheaper for them to start fresh. But it's better to have both. If some video card company had maintained hardware standards at I/O level throughout their history, it would be pretty popular and useful since it would work with all OSes (DOS, Windows 3.x, XP, Vista, Linux, etc.) and would allow for direct programming. I know ATI even has like 10 different I/O port locations on various cards that do the same thing.
>1. Geforce 8600 GT/8700M GT/9500M GS/9600M/9650M GT has four of these processing elements i.e. 32 SPs with 32768 32bit registers.
>2. Geforce 9600 GSO has eight of these processing elements i.e. 96 SPs with 98304 registers i.e. these values are stored next to actual execution cores.
>Notice the register count differences between examples 1 and 2.
Yeah, but given they are only accessed via APIs, they could change the GPU and register sets. However, if they had known that many applications are writing directly to the hardware, they would have to maintain APIs and be backward compatible from hardware perspective.
>I was referring to variable of movement compared to on-off nature of a digital joystick. >Anyway, my mouse has an optical scanner i.e. it has a DPI resolution and it doesn't have a mouse ball. It has A-to-D conversion.
Most games on PCs use analog joysticks but they could just as well have been written with digital joysticks. Yeah, a few games need the analogicity, but why should most of the games suffer because of it.
>I wasn't referring to marketing point of view i.e. refer to real world cars. Xbox 360's RS's replicates (player's POV)'s head movement changes.
I have played Pole Position on Atari 800 and Atari 5200 and it works great with digital joysticks and analog sticks although latter has centering issues/calibration issues.
-
Did I start this? Or were they already at each other throats? :griping:
Interesting read anyway.
-
Intel and AMD didn't give you(and anyone else) access to X86’s RISCy micro-architecture instruction set.
Standards breaks when vendors can't copy/clone another vendor’s specific features e.g. NVIDIA CUDA vs AMD CAL. DirectX11's compute shader and OpenCL attempts to standardise GpGPU.
Never heard of OpenCL-- but OpenGL is also an API standard. I think the problem with VGA cards occurred when no hardware standard was set for going past it's basic 640*480*16/320*200*256. People started writing their own methods of doing 640*480*65536, 1024*768*16777216, etc. Even at that point, it wasn't that bad since you could set the mode via VESA BIOS and still go directly to A000:0000 and use the I/O ports for palettes. But then it got worse and worse as more and more features got added by various vendors.
-
Never heard of OpenCL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
-
From GPU's POV, maintaining a CPU style legacy may not be efficient for the transistor budget. For example, GPU's allocates their transistor budgets to math units.
Also, I don't think NVIDIA would share thier GPU ISAs with anyone else.
...
Actually, even VGA standard bandwidth and chipsets varied but they used the same I/O ports and memory map areas. I have timed various VGA graphics cards using standard graphics modes (these are older PCI cards) and the Matrox had one of the highest bandwidths (> 2X over ATI), but they were accessed the same way.
>Close sourced NVIDIA and ATI driver packages include JIT re-complier engine. You are welcome to write Radeon drivers that would beat the offical Radeon drivers.
Even amongst Radeon cards, they don't use the same I/O ports.
>AMD and NVIDIA offers "close-to-metal" with thier GPUs, but they are vendor specfic. With PS3, NVIDIA provides LibCGM thin-layer.
It's "thin-layer" may be worth it if it's not vendor specific.
>Pre-programmed macros on MS gaming mouse while playing with Xbox 360 players in Gears Of War(via Xbox Live) is an advantage.
>I use an 8 button gaming mouse e.g. able to change sensitivity on-the-fly (two buttons), change weapons, use alternate weapons fire, use health packs and 'etc'.
I still find the simple one/two button-based games fun and easy. I played this 3D game on playstation where you had to pick up objects but the interface is highly complicated and you miss the object many times and when you are under attack, you have to first set position then move or press one of the buttons to attack back. By the time you figure it all out, game's over.
-
Did I start this? Or were they already at each other throats? :griping:
Interesting read anyway.
lol no this has been going on on a couple threads.
-
Never heard of OpenCL-- but OpenGL is also an API standard. I think the problem with VGA cards occurred when no hardware standard was set for going past it's basic 640*480*16/320*200*256. People started writing their own methods of doing 640*480*65536, 1024*768*16777216, etc.
Some important points here:
Even at that point, it wasn't that bad since you could set the mode via VESA BIOS and still go directly to A000:0000 and use the I/O ports for palettes.
The BIOS is a software API... the very thing you are arguing against... in fact it was the fact that the BIOS abstracted the hardware that lead to the popularity of CP/M (the forerunner of MSDOS).
But then it got worse and worse as more and more features got added by various vendors.
And this is why we use APIs!!! Ok, so you have now successfully argued against yourself, maybe you understand :)
-
Take an easy example of trying to use more than 256K of VGA memory. Each VGA card implemented its own I/O Window register like $3D4 or $3CE. There are hundreds of different I/O Window registers some using 4K banks some 64K banks and then there are various methods of using the linear memory mode at various memory mapped locations. Now all this could be a single Window register and single linear memory area if things were standard like they were for the basic VGA card (A000:0000, $3C0..$3DF, etc.).
they are standard. standard through the api. this way you create a program and the os retains control over the hardware. after all it is an Operating System. not window dressing for direct hardware access.
i am not going to say that the api system couldn't be implemented better. what i am saying is this method is fine and is not a problem.
-
On the contrary, when Creative had to go from ISA sound cards to PCI ones they had a HELLOVA time making them backwards compatible. There is also an endless list of "soundblaster emulation" cards which never worked right as because they were "hardware compatible" they couldnt fix it. However if you use a higher level API and software drivers you can easily patch any compatibility problems later.
My god, I was upgrading in that era when they went from ISA to PCI for sound cards, half the time games wouldn't work properly. Oh and lets not forget, soundblaster emulation on PCI sound cards is done in SOFTWARE, at least partially. I believe its something to do with having to emulate the ISA chipset timings which is also why it did not work properly.
The switch to Direct X brilliant as you very very rarely get this sort of problem anymore, it just works. Kinda breaks your whole argument that backwards compatibility is easy.
Now when talking graphics cards things get even worse as they are so much more complicated. Do you REALLY think its cost effective to include legacy modes in every single new card you release?
As for VESA, as I understand it that is still an API but it was mostly supported via the graphics card BIOS which is the only real difference between hardware and software support anyway. That said, DOS games would always come with software VESA as many graphics cards lacked support, or supported the wrong specification. So the whole VESA introduction could just have easily been done with software drivers anyway except as people were using DOS (Win95 was not yet a large enough install base to support exclusively) it was easier to keep it in the graphics card BIOS. The instant enough people were using Win95 over pure DOS though they made the jump, as it was so much easier to support. If keeping things in hardware was as good as you say, why was it so hard to get DOS games working properly compared to once they made the jump to Windows?
The overhead can't be that bad either as games still improved when we jumped to Windows instead of DOS, despite the fact by your argument the extra power in the PC should have been stolen in API inefficiencies.
And blimey, how large do you think the graphics card BIOS would need to be in order to have backwards compatibility for ALL GPU functions? How often would it need to be patched to fix bugs? Quite frankly, its just not practical and you damn well know it. Using VESA as an argument just seems plain silly, given the above that early VESA was supported via software drivers - very much like how modern drivers support Direct3D today.
Nobody is saying that 100% accurate backwards compatibility would be a bad thing. I'm sure there are a few benefits from a developers point of view (for a few very rare unusual applications), but you have to live in reality. There is no PC standard which says your sound/graphics card must talk in this language (apart from VESA and old VGA standards), with these memory addresses, etc. There is also the little thing of evolution to think of. If you write a strict standard you are stuck with it, forever. However with an API if you find more efficient ways of doing stuff at the hardware level, the only restriction is rewriting the software driver. This is not a whole lot different to how it works at the hardware level except the risk/cost of doing it hardware level is insane (hard to fix once in production, huge BIOS to handle the translation). And no, directly pushing bits around the GPU directly is simply insanity. It was fine for Amiga because the chipset was relatively simple, but a modern graphics card GPU is going to be many times more complex than a whole Amiga so claiming that you should have the same hardware access is just plain silly.
Likewise when two competing companies make a graphics card with new functions, how on earth do you propose they would make them compatible with each other without an API? You can't develop the standard that far in advance of the actual hardware development because you are keeping your cards close to your chest to beat the competition to market with the latest features.
Again, of course a hardware level API like VESA is handy if you want to bang the hardware more directly and save yourself some CPU cycles. However nobody outside of an insane asylum is going to want that level of control. Nobody actually NEEDS that level of control.
-
they are standard. standard through the api. this way you create a program and the os retains control over the hardware. after all it is an Operating System. not window dressing for direct hardware access.
i am not going to say that the api system couldn't be implemented better. what i am saying is this method is fine and is not a problem.
OS does retain control of the hardware but it application can also use it directly-- the way it's set up in Amiga. APIs will always be worse than direct control from efficiency point of view and knowing exactly what is happening in the system.
-
I agree that too many buttons are unnecessary and make things too difficult to remember (PlayStation controllers are my example here), but I stand by too few also being an issue. Why would you not need a manual to look up which keys on the keyboard are for the hyperspace and smart bomb? There are something like 60 possibilities there instead of the 6 you'd have with e.g. a CD32 controller. It's something I never liked as I tended to play games holding the joystick base with one hand - look at the ZipStik and tell me how you use a keyboard without losing either the fire button or directional control...
It's any key to hyperspace and spacebar for smart bomb. You may need the manual, but the most useful function is the one button to fire and it's to figure out what it does without any manual. Hyperspace is hardly used to begin with so no sense in confusing things by putting 10+ buttons on the controller when only one or two matter most of the time.
-
For simple stuff like VGA, yes.
For more modern hardware this doesn't fly. Meaning that you can't actually access the 3D portions of your Nvidia GFX card the same way as your ATI GFX card or your onboard one.
Heck, from what I understand the implementations might not even be the same for different cards from the same company. Meaning a Nvidia 9600 and a Nvidia G260 might need altogether different ways of being accessed.
They don't do this to stop backwards compatibility, they do this because it's the best way to get high performance out of your chips. For a well documented example of why you sometimes need to break with the past to move on, look no further than Amiga AGA. That could have been so much more if Commodore had not tried so hard to keep compatibility and instead had designed a new chipset around more modern technology.
I don't agree with you at all. I gave you the example of VGA-- it could have been implemented just as efficiently while maintaining hardware level compatibility.
-
Some important points here:
The BIOS is a software API... the very thing you are arguing against... in fact it was the fact that the BIOS abstracted the hardware that lead to the popularity of CP/M (the forerunner of MSDOS).
...
I said "it's not as bad" since you can still take over the hardware; mode switching is not used that often as say changing palettes, modifying a pixel, split-screening (to go back on topic for a moment), etc. and you wouldn't have to be playing guessing games as to what the API is doing. Just set the VESA mode once and then use the I/O ports and directly write to VGA. If you don't need low-level accesses then use the API.
>And this is why we use APIs!!! Ok, so you have now successfully argued against yourself, maybe you understand :)
My argument has been the same-- it's better to have both.
-
On the contrary, when Creative had to go from ISA sound cards to PCI ones they had a HELLOVA time making them backwards compatible. There is also an endless list of "soundblaster emulation" cards which never worked right as because they were "hardware compatible" they couldnt fix it. However if you use a higher level API and software drivers you can easily patch any compatibility problems later.
...
"On the contrary" to what? Did you like misread or skip some posts? Sound cards are NOT backward compatible. I stated an example where some Sound Blaster cards are backward compatible at the hardware level and they can be accessed directly with more efficiency. I was stating that if they were all like that, that is better. API restricts your access to hardware for what the function performs and it's inefficient.
>My god, I was upgrading in that era when they went from ISA to PCI for sound cards, half the time games wouldn't work properly. Oh and lets not forget, soundblaster emulation on PCI sound cards is done in SOFTWARE, at least partially. I believe its something to do with having to emulate the ISA chipset timings which is also why it did not work properly.
That's your speculation. Some Soundblaster audio cards ISA and PCI versions of them are hardware compatible. I can set use I/O locations 220h..22Fh and DMA/IRQs directly. It's not being done in software as I explained before.
>The switch to Direct X brilliant as you very very rarely get this sort of problem anymore, it just works. Kinda breaks your whole argument that backwards compatibility is easy.
No it doesn't break the argument, since you never understood the argument according to what you wrote. APIs restricts your access to the hardware and is less efficient than directly writing to hardware registers if there is backward hardware compatibility.
>Now when talking graphics cards things get even worse as they are so much more complicated. Do you REALLY think its cost effective to include legacy modes in every single new card you release?
We're not talking about cost. We're talking about what's better for using/programming-- is it better to modify a pixel color by doing a XOR [nnnn],EAX or by doing a call to an API? Legacy mode should be a standard mode. Some applications are undoable via API but can be done if direct hardware access is allowed.
>As for VESA, as I understand it that is still an API but it was mostly supported via the graphics card BIOS which is the only real difference between hardware and software support anyway.
I said, "it's not as bad" meaning you can use it along with direct hardware access. Since setting a mode is nonstandard, you can call it to set a graphics mode and then use direct I/O. More later if needed.
-
We're not talking about cost. We're talking about what's better for using/programming-- is it better to modify a pixel color by doing a XOR [nnnn],EAX or by doing a call to an API? Legacy mode should be a standard mode.
That scream you can hear in the distance was the cries of every professional developer of every game and desktop apps studio in th industry crying out in horror at the concept of what you've just written.
Things move too fast and are now so complex that to support even a major subset of capabilities on modern hardware without an overall API to build upon as to make the suggestion completely no go. At best, you would end up with a situation where each software developer would effectively have to write and maintain their own (likely) incompatable layer which would then have to fight other softwares API in order to function.
At which point, you have just effectively rendered the whole point of having an OS completely meaningless.
Even Comodore saw the writing on the wall, with the A500 you had a copy of the schematics of the custom chips (or at least parts of) in order to allow for easier hardware banging. When systems are as simple as the Amiga, that's great. But you upgrade to a newer, better system and all of a sudden you're having to write off huge sections of your software base each time you do so. Which is why even by 2.0 there was a major shift in emphasis to OS friendly applications. The OS deals with the hardware and keeps everything ticking along and the software sits on top. The way things should be.
Some applications are undoable via API but can be done if direct hardware access is allowed.
Name three often used desktop applications that cannot by virtue of their function be made in an OS friendly fashion.
I said, "it's not as bad" meaning you can use it along with direct hardware access. Since setting a mode is nonstandard, you can call it to set a graphics mode and then use direct I/O. More later if needed.
I'd bet good money that there was a way within DirectX to call a non standard screensize.
The question would be though, why would you want to? Any monitor you use, be it CRT or LCD will only allow for a certain amount of resolutions. Seems to me you're doing things in a very cackhanded way.
-
And this is where I am confused.
The whole argument here seems to be, isn't it better to be able to address the hardware directly for maximum efficiency as an API will always run code that "is not necessarily efficient for what you want to do" and "you do not know EXACTLY what it is doing".
Well guess what, you CAN address hardware directly - but you would effectively to writing your own OS. The sheer nature of using an off-the-shelf OS makes it impractical to allow banging the hardware directly. Why? So that one application does not prevent another application from working correctly.
Bang the hardware the wrong way or at the wrong time and you take the whole OS down. This is why Vista changed the driver model to split it into kernel/user code instead of all being kernel code. Low-level driver code is the cause of 99% of Windows crashes. Now instead of a lockup its able to reinitialise your graphics card so you do not lose your work. Even Linux developers are trying to move as much as possible into userland for stability reasons.
APIs are brilliant for 99.9% of development. If they weren't, they wouldn't exist.
The other 0.1% that you NEED to bang the hardware directly on, well quite frankly its unlikely to be a mass market application so why would it even matter that you might need to build PCs with EXACT specifications so your application/OS will run? In fact, surely some sort of embedded board is more suitable where you can choose EXACTLY what hardware you use. A multi purpose PC will never be efficient (or necessarily usable at all) for 100% of the things you might want to use a computer for, at least not without additional hardware (it was already mentioned there are plenty of nice PIC boards for precise timing applications, etc).
And here lies the whole point. Why would manufacturers bother to put a HUGE extra workload onto themselves in order to make their hardware compatible for that 0.1% of the development community who needs low-level access?
I find it hard to see that having low-level access to the GPU would be helpful in any way. The whole reason APIs are good is because the time it would take to code low-level is completely nullified by the increase in computing power in the meantime. By the time you optimise your code for current hardware, you could easily do the same thing using an API with the THEN current hardware.
I have Windows 7 running on a PC below its minimum specifications and its stuck using the Standard VGA driver (VESA presumably) and its almost as fast as using the stock driver on XP. Sure with a standard advanced 2D/3D API for all cards it would be even faster, but again that is impractical and it wouldn't cover every eventuality.
Often there are more efficient ways to operate different make/model cards for specific applications (games). With a software driver it can detect the game running and use optimisations for that game - done by the card manufacturer who knows the most efficient way to code for their card. Using your standards-based 3D this would be impossible, it would be down to the developers to put more effort into detecting different cards and tweaking the settings accordingly and altering how the API translates to low-level code would be harder, as its on the BIOS instead of a software driver.
-
Banging the hardware was a cheat, it allowed you to do things on the underpowered machines of the '80s that simply wouldn't be possible if you had to wait for the OS to do them. The trade off was stability, you have code going around the already unstable OS to bang at hardware that may or may not have changed. Amiga graphics were simple, a single chip and a few meg of RAM. Today's graphics are much more complex, a half gig of RAM, a GPU and other hardware. It's like comparing a sundial with an atomic clock, there is no comparison.
You have power, you have speed, you have an OS with memory protection and now you have drivers in user space. Trying to bang the hardware in a dual quad core processor with GPU environment is just stupid. Especially to try to read the bounce of a joystick...
You got a FSB in the GHz range, on a 4000 you've got a bus speed of max 25 MHz. Your talking to the GPU over an order of magnitude faster than the Amiga talked to Fast RAM.
-
You got a FSB in the GHz range, on a 4000 you've got a bus speed of max 25 MHz
:hammer: Just to be a nitpicker if you look inside the case the Oscillator has 28.xxx Mhz on it. Agnus ran at 28.xxx Mhz the other chips, the chip bus the chip RAM and the Zorro slot bus ran at 7.xx Mhz. The CPU and FAST was free do it's own thing.
You are now de-loused.
-
Banging the hardware was a cheat, it allowed you to do things on the underpowered machines of the '80s
Reality check: software is worthless without hardware to run it on. Rather than slamming what was once state of the art (I don't suppose you could have done better?) saying it was "underpowered" because it wasn't convenient for what you personally imagined was the One True Way of doing things, consider that people who wrote the naughty code ("cheat") actually created successful products.
The trade off was stability
The trade off was that you had to take the hardware specs into account before creating software to run on it. Stability has nothing to do with it. Flawed code continues to be flawed no matter whether it manipulates hardware or APIs.
-
I don't agree with you at all. I gave you the example of VGA-- it could have been implemented just as efficiently while maintaining hardware level compatibility.
No, it couldn't. Keeping hardware backwards compatible leads to bad stuff - like AGA palette changes needing a gross hack, or a PC architecture that struggled for years with limits based on old AT hardware. The PC only recently started recovering from the legacy hardware mess. And this was not a bad thing at all.
-
The trade off was that you had to take the hardware specs into account before creating software to run on it. Stability has nothing to do with it. Flawed code continues to be flawed no matter whether it manipulates hardware or APIs.
True, but even if your code isn't in of itself flawed, it might interfere with other code (that again might not be flawed) in ways that are undesirable. I would have thought one of the major benefits (outside of the time requirements, especially of modern hardware) of running via APIs was that it set out rules and systems to stop that sort of collision from occuring.
But all of this is moving away from the central point of Amigaski's claims of the Amiga's superiority based wholy and solely on an (as yet) unproven hypothesis.
-
It's like comparing a sundial with an atomic clock, there is no comparison.
Amen. Essentially that's what this thread is doing, comparing two very different pieces of technology which were developed for their time.
Similarly we could argue that the horse and cart is superior to today's motor vehicle eg. Horses were enviromentally friendly, there were fewer crashes, they were self repairing and could multitask ( poo and walk at the same time :))
-
Reality check: software is worthless without hardware to run it on. Rather than slamming what was once state of the art (I don't suppose you could have done better?) saying it was "underpowered" because it wasn't convenient for what you personally imagined was the One True Way of doing things, consider that people who wrote the naughty code ("cheat") actually created successful products.
I've just 'bolded' two words and you've got your answer. Times change, habits change, ways to do things change. A long ago moving balls over lines was a fast way to do computation, today any mobile phone can do the job of a pocket calculator, many magnitude orders faster, simplier and more accurate (in a word: better). Everything that once was a good thing, today is a hack. It happens for TV sets (no more banging on the tv-tuner frequency with a potentiometer, but choosing fixed frequencies pressing keys on remote command), it happens for computers (no more banging the hardware, but calling APIs), and every time progress has its advantages (many) and drawbacks (very few). Yes, flawed code is always flawed code, but how many chances there are, now, that it can mess up the whole operating system if it crashes? On AmigaOS, the same. On any other CURRENT architecture with protected memory, almost zero. I agree with you when you say that old 'hacks' were sometimes state of the art and masterpieces (who can forget Amiga demos?), but I absolutely can't think banging the hardware would be feasible TODAY. The price is a fraction of my 2.6+ GHz processor power, or the inability (:roflmao:) to poll my joystick port (:roflmao:) 1000 times per second? I can live with it.
regards,
-
Actually, even VGA standard bandwidth and chipsets varied but they used the same I/O ports and memory map areas. I have timed various VGA graphics cards using standard graphics modes (these are older PCI cards) and the Matrox had one of the highest bandwidths (> 2X over ATI), but they were accessed the same way.
PC graphics card comes with a BIOS(firmware).
>Close sourced NVIDIA and ATI driver packages include JIT re-complier engine. You are welcome to write Radeon drivers that would beat the offical Radeon drivers.
Even amongst Radeon cards, they don't use the same I/O ports.
Which makes “hitting the metal” unfeasible for userland programs. Also, refer to AMD/ATI Radeon's AtomBIOS.
>AMD and NVIDIA offers "close-to-metal" with thier GPUs, but they are vendor specfic. With PS3, NVIDIA provides LibCGM thin-layer.
It's "thin-layer" may be worth it if it's not vendor specific.
In the real world, they are vendor specfic.
>Pre-programmed macros on MS gaming mouse while playing with Xbox 360 players in Gears Of War(via Xbox Live) is an advantage.
>I use an 8 button gaming mouse e.g. able to change sensitivity on-the-fly (two buttons), change weapons, use alternate weapons fire, use health packs and 'etc'.
I still find the simple one/two button-based games fun and easy. I played this 3D game on playstation where you had to pick up objects but the interface is highly complicated and you miss the object many times and when you are under attack, you have to first set position then move or press one of the buttons to attack back. By the time you figure it all out, game's over.
There’s a move towards motion controls.
-
On the contrary, when Creative had to go from ISA sound cards to PCI ones they had a HELLOVA time making them backwards compatible. There is also an endless list of "soundblaster emulation" cards which never worked right as because they were "hardware compatible" they couldnt fix it. However if you use a higher level API and software drivers you can easily patch any compatibility problems later.
My god, I was upgrading in that era when they went from ISA to PCI for sound cards, half the time games wouldn't work properly. Oh and lets not forget, soundblaster emulation on PCI sound cards is done in SOFTWARE, at least partially. I believe its something to do with having to emulate the ISA chipset timings which is also why it did not work properly.
The switch to Direct X brilliant as you very very rarely get this sort of problem anymore, it just works. Kinda breaks your whole argument that backwards compatibility is easy.
Now when talking graphics cards things get even worse as they are so much more complicated. Do you REALLY think its cost effective to include legacy modes in every single new card you release?
As for VESA, as I understand it that is still an API but it was mostly supported via the graphics card BIOS which is the only real difference between hardware and software support anyway. That said, DOS games would always come with software VESA as many graphics cards lacked support, or supported the wrong specification. So the whole VESA introduction could just have easily been done with software drivers anyway except as people were using DOS (Win95 was not yet a large enough install base to support exclusively) it was easier to keep it in the graphics card BIOS. The instant enough people were using Win95 over pure DOS though they made the jump, as it was so much easier to support. If keeping things in hardware was as good as you say, why was it so hard to get DOS games working properly compared to once they made the jump to Windows?
The overhead can't be that bad either as games still improved when we jumped to Windows instead of DOS, despite the fact by your argument the extra power in the PC should have been stolen in API inefficiencies.
And blimey, how large do you think the graphics card BIOS would need to be in order to have backwards compatibility for ALL GPU functions? How often would it need to be patched to fix bugs? Quite frankly, its just not practical and you damn well know it. Using VESA as an argument just seems plain silly, given the above that early VESA was supported via software drivers - very much like how modern drivers support Direct3D today.
Nobody is saying that 100% accurate backwards compatibility would be a bad thing. I'm sure there are a few benefits from a developers point of view (for a few very rare unusual applications), but you have to live in reality. There is no PC standard which says your sound/graphics card must talk in this language (apart from VESA and old VGA standards), with these memory addresses, etc. There is also the little thing of evolution to think of. If you write a strict standard you are stuck with it, forever. However with an API if you find more efficient ways of doing stuff at the hardware level, the only restriction is rewriting the software driver. This is not a whole lot different to how it works at the hardware level except the risk/cost of doing it hardware level is insane (hard to fix once in production, huge BIOS to handle the translation). And no, directly pushing bits around the GPU directly is simply insanity. It was fine for Amiga because the chipset was relatively simple, but a modern graphics card GPU is going to be many times more complex than a whole Amiga so claiming that you should have the same hardware access is just plain silly.
Likewise when two competing companies make a graphics card with new functions, how on earth do you propose they would make them compatible with each other without an API? You can't develop the standard that far in advance of the actual hardware development because you are keeping your cards close to your chest to beat the competition to market with the latest features.
Again, of course a hardware level API like VESA is handy if you want to bang the hardware more directly and save yourself some CPU cycles. However nobody outside of an insane asylum is going to want that level of control. Nobody actually NEEDS that level of control.
I still remember TSR SoundBlaster emulators.
-
I still remember TSR SoundBlaster emulators.
And how they never worked quite right ;)
-
"On the contrary" to what? Did you like misread or skip some posts? Sound cards are NOT backward compatible. I stated an example where some Sound Blaster cards are backward compatible at the hardware level and they can be accessed directly with more efficiency. I was stating that if they were all like that, that is better. API restricts your access to hardware for what the function performs and it's inefficient.
Refer to http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvapi.html
"NVAPI is NVIDIA's core software development kit that allows direct access to NVIDIA GPUs and drivers on all windows platforms. NVAPI provides support for categories of operations that range beyond the scope of those found in familiar graphics APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL."
NVAPI = NVIDIA API. A vendor specfic APIs.
NVAPI was use to enable the current CUDA's Direct3D 10.1 supported features with FarCry2.
(http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:NiMqBCMzUOhu_M:http://pcarena.pl/uploads/files/markus_newsy/NV_The_Way_Primary_H_3D.jpg)
FarCry2 is an example of "The way its meant to be played" game.
LibCGM doesn't solve HDR FP + hardware AA problem with NVIDIA's RSX, nor it will solve pixel shader's stalls during texture operations.
>My god, I was upgrading in that era when they went from ISA to PCI for sound cards, half the time games wouldn't work properly. Oh and lets not forget, soundblaster emulation on PCI sound cards is done in SOFTWARE, at least partially. I believe its something to do with having to emulate the ISA chipset timings which is also why it did not work properly.
That's your speculation. Some Soundblaster audio cards ISA and PCI versions of them are hardware compatible. I can set use I/O locations 220h..22Fh and DMA/IRQs directly. It's not being done in software as I explained before.
Refer to TSR Soundblaster emulation.
>The switch to Direct X brilliant as you very very rarely get this sort of problem anymore, it just works. Kinda breaks your whole argument that backwards compatibility is easy.
No it doesn't break the argument, since you never understood the argument according to what you wrote. APIs restricts your access to the hardware and is less efficient than directly writing to hardware registers if there is backward hardware compatibility.
There's nothing stopping you making a RING 0 program.
I said, "it's not as bad" meaning you can use it along with direct hardware access. Since setting a mode is nonstandard, you can call it to set a graphics mode and then use direct I/O. More later if needed.
For custom display modes, you either modify the INF(with NVIDIA's case) or
(http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l327/encia/customres.jpg)
Part of NVIDIA's control panel (I use 185.70 beta)
or play with NVAPI.
-
I said "it's not as bad" since you can still take over the hardware; mode switching is not used that often as say changing palettes, modifying a pixel,
Erm Pixel shader.
split-screening (to go back on topic for a moment), etc.
3D surface.
and you wouldn't have to be playing guessing games as to what the API is doing. Just set the VESA mode once and then use the I/O ports and directly write to VGA. If you don't need low-level accesses then use the API.
On CUDA processors, you have CUDA (ver 2.2), PhysX CUDA, NVAPI, D3D (upto ver 10), OpenGL(upto ver 3), soon OpenCL (ver 1.0, currently in beta).
My argument has been the same-- it's better to have both.
On the PC, you can have programs in "kernel space" i.e. usefull for OS vendors, IHVs, hypervisor/virtual machine vendors, copyright protection/spyware/malware and virus writers.
-
As I said, there's nothing wrong with having APIs for user mode and still having standardized hardware on I/O port/memory-map level so at least kernel mode software can be written to take advantage in best possible way.
>A boat anchor.
It doesn't have to be just the basic VGA-- entire SVGA/XGA/SXGA could have been standardized at hardware level; but it wasn't so you have to live with the method of accessing them through APIs.
>...To maximise performance, GPUs usually take a clean design approach i.e. applying the latest micro-architecture paradigm on a given transistor count.
Because they are already assuming now that they only have to write for APIs. Also, it's cheaper for them to start fresh. But it's better to have both. If some video card company had maintained hardware standards at I/O level throughout their history, it would be pretty popular and useful since it would work with all OSes (DOS, Windows 3.x, XP, Vista, Linux, etc.) and would allow for direct programming. I know ATI even has like 10 different I/O port locations on various cards that do the same thing.
Did you forget ATI's AtomBIOS?
>1. Geforce 8600 GT/8700M GT/9500M GS/9600M/9650M GT has four of these processing elements i.e. 32 SPs with 32768 32bit registers.
>2. Geforce 9600 GSO has eight of these processing elements i.e. 96 SPs with 98304 registers i.e. these values are stored next to actual execution cores.
>Notice the register count differences between examples 1 and 2.
Yeah, but given they are only accessed via APIs, they could change the GPU and register sets. However, if they had known that many applications are writing directly to the hardware, they would have to maintain APIs and be backward compatible from hardware perspective.
You missed the lesson on X86 legacy tax when it comes to maximising the number of math units? The GPU takes the clean design approach nearly to the maximum.
(http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l327/encia/2366192084_a8b19c5f9c.jpg)
>I was referring to variable of movement compared to on-off nature of a digital joystick. >Anyway, my mouse has an optical scanner i.e. it has a DPI resolution and it doesn't have a mouse ball. It has A-to-D conversion.
Most games on PCs use analog joysticks but they could just as well have been written with digital joysticks. Yeah, a few games need the analogicity, but why should most of the games suffer because of it.
Most modern 3D games needs variable controls.
>I wasn't referring to marketing point of view i.e. refer to real world cars. Xbox 360's RS's replicates (player's POV)'s head movement changes.
I have played Pole Position on Atari 800 and Atari 5200 and it works great with digital joysticks and analog sticks although latter has centering issues/calibration issues.
I don't recall "centering issues/calibration issues" with Xbox 360 controlers. When driving a car (real world or virtual), the on-off nature of digital joysticks $ucks.
-
Continuation of my reply from yesterday...
...That said, DOS games would always come with software VESA as many graphics cards lacked support, or supported the wrong specification. So the whole VESA introduction could just have easily been done with software drivers anyway except as people were using DOS (Win95 was not yet a large enough install base to support exclusively) it was easier to keep it in the graphics card BIOS. The instant enough people were using Win95 over pure DOS though they made the jump, as it was so much easier to support. If keeping things in hardware was as good as you say, why was it so hard to get DOS games working properly compared to once they made the jump to Windows?
...
I am treating VESA also as an API but at the time VESA BIOS was introduced, most of the other ports were standard so you can use VESA to set the video mode and then use direct I/O or write to video memory after that. And putting VESA into ROM is better since you don't have to load any drivers that hogged up valuable DOS memory (from 640K). In fact, I can call some VESA BIOS functions even from Windows 98SE (if they don't rely on selectors). Games did not run in some cases because NOT all video cards had VESA BIOS or supported the various modes the game was requesting. Those required a software (non-ROM) VESA Bios
>The overhead can't be that bad either as games still improved when we jumped to Windows instead of DOS, despite the fact by your argument the extra power in the PC should have been stolen in API inefficiencies.
That's not my argument-- the extra power was lost by API inefficiencies. In all cases, you have more power with direct access to hardware vs. API. Same for Amiga, if you go through API, your games will not make efficient use of hardware as if you go directly to hardware registers.
>And blimey, how large do you think the graphics card BIOS would need to be in order to have backwards compatibility for ALL GPU functions? How often would it need to be patched to fix bugs? Quite frankly, its just not practical and you damn well know it. Using VESA as an argument just seems plain silly, given the above that early VESA was supported via software drivers - very much like how modern drivers support Direct3D today.
You missed the point there. VESA is an API as well; it's not as good as directly being able to set a video mode through direct i/o.
>Nobody is saying that 100% accurate backwards compatibility would be a bad thing. I'm sure there are a few benefits from a developers point of view (for a few very rare unusual applications), but you have to live in reality.
Not "few". If I/O ports and video memory were standard in all video cards for all their functionality, you will have more efficient applications and less restricted games/applications.
>There is no PC standard which says your sound/graphics card must talk in this language (apart from VESA and old VGA standards), with these memory addresses, etc. There is also the little thing of evolution to think of. If you write a strict standard you are stuck with it, forever. However with an API if you find more efficient ways of doing stuff at the hardware level, the only restriction is rewriting the software driver. This is not a whole lot different to how it works at the hardware level except the risk/cost of doing it hardware level is insane (hard to fix once in production, huge BIOS to handle the translation). And no, directly pushing bits around the GPU directly is simply insanity. It was fine for Amiga because the chipset was relatively simple, but a modern graphics card GPU is going to be many times more complex than a whole Amiga so claiming that you should have the same hardware access is just plain silly.
I don't think complexity makes a difference. VGA standard is also pretty complex since it also incorporates EGA/CGA mode compatibility as well.
>Likewise when two competing companies make a graphics card with new functions, how on earth do you propose they would make them compatible with each other without an API? You can't develop the standard that far in advance of the actual hardware development because you are keeping your cards close to your chest to beat the competition to market with the latest features.
How did they make VGA standard cards with same I/O ports and video memory? The same way for newer functions. The act of settling for API compatibility is the problem.
>Again, of course a hardware level API like VESA is handy if you want to bang the hardware more directly and save yourself some CPU cycles. However nobody outside of an insane asylum is going to want that level of control. Nobody actually NEEDS that level of control.
That's your subjective opinion. Most Amiga OCS games go directly to hardware and would be worse if they did not. Most early PC games went directly to CGA/EGA/VGA.
-
Banging the hardware was a cheat, it allowed you to do things on the underpowered machines of the '80s that simply wouldn't be possible if you had to wait for the OS to do them....
I agree with this completely if you replace word "cheat" with "feat".
It's not a cheat. It's what hardware is capable of. Now in modern systems, some tasks require critical timing loops and can't rely on making API calls and making things vague. Or they want to do something API restricts them from but easily can be done with directly accessing the hardware.
>The trade off was stability, you have code going around the already unstable OS to bang at hardware that may or may not have changed.
If the hardware is backward compatible, there's no problem with stability. If OS is unstable for some API calls (bugged), then going directly to hardware makes OS more stable.
>Amiga graphics were simple, a single chip and a few meg of RAM. Today's graphics are much more complex, a half gig of RAM, a GPU and other hardware. It's like comparing a sundial with an atomic clock, there is no comparison.
Simplicity and complexity have nothing to do with making hardware backward compatible on I/O port level.
>You have power, you have speed, you have an OS with memory protection and now you have drivers in user space. Trying to bang the hardware in a dual quad core processor with GPU environment is just stupid. Especially to try to read the bounce of a joystick...
If you had some application where you wanted to control which part of the program executed by which core at exactly which time, you are better off with hardware level compatibility. You picking on my joystick recorder again? It wasn't bounce. But let's say you want to measure quality of joysticks in a PC application, then reading bounce is of utmost importance and that works better going directly to hardware as well.
>You got a FSB in the GHz range, on a 4000 you've got a bus speed of max 25 MHz. Your talking to the GPU over an order of magnitude faster than the Amiga talked to Fast RAM.
The principle is the same. Just because you have a faster system doesn't make APIs catch up with hardware level access.
-
No, it couldn't. Keeping hardware backwards compatible leads to bad stuff - like AGA palette changes needing a gross hack, or a PC architecture that struggled for years with limits based on old AT hardware. The PC only recently started recovering from the legacy hardware mess. And this was not a bad thing at all.
AGA palette changes being more complex that it was is because they wanted to save on register space not because of backward compatibility. Legacy hardware ports is what is currently making some tasks possible (especially real-time stuff) which would otherwise be impossible under modern systems.
-
That scream you can hear in the distance was the cries of every professional developer of every game and desktop apps studio in th industry crying out in horror at the concept of what you've just written.
Things move too fast and are now so complex that to support even a major subset of capabilities on modern hardware without an overall API to build upon as to make the suggestion completely no go. At best, you would end up with a situation where each software developer would effectively have to write and maintain their own (likely) incompatable layer which would then have to fight other softwares API in order to function.
At which point, you have just effectively rendered the whole point of having an OS completely meaningless.
...
OS is easier to write if all the hardware is backward compatible. No need to find drivers since all I/O ports are compatible. Even Windows OSes rely on VGA standard in order to initially boot up. Then they do a desperate search from a bloated database of 1000s of drivers to try to map to your particular hardware. That's one reason why AmigaOS (at least up to versions I have) is smaller and quicker to boot/install.
The screams you hear should be louder once you explain to them that API is actually HLI (hardware limiting interface).
>...emphasis to OS friendly applications. The OS deals with the hardware and keeps everything ticking along and the software sits on top. The way things should be.
You can still have that and have hardware level compatibility.
>Name three often used desktop applications that cannot by virtue of their function be made in an OS friendly fashion.
Why 3? Look at it generically-- any task that requires computations or timing and GUI interaction and wants to run as fast as possible is better off going directly to hardware. For example, in some tight loop it's better to do IN AL,201h and test the upper bits to see if a Gameport joystick button was pressed then to call an API function to retrive button status.
>I'd bet good money that there was a way within DirectX to call a non standard screensize.
Well, you can set various graphics modes with API or directly so that's not the argument here.
-
Amen. Essentially that's what this thread is doing, comparing two very different pieces of technology which were developed for their time.
Similarly we could argue that the horse and cart is superior to today's motor vehicle eg. Horses were enviromentally friendly, there were fewer crashes, they were self repairing and could multitask ( poo and walk at the same time :))
Bullcrap. Amiga is more efficient at certain real-time tasks than modern PCs. And one reason being discussed presently is because it had hardware level compatibility rather than just API level compatibility. The other reasons like having digital joysticks vs. analog joysticks, having ability to do cycle-exact timing, etc. were already mentioned.
-
True, but even if your code isn't in of itself flawed, it might interfere with other code (that again might not be flawed) in ways that are undesirable. I would have thought one of the major benefits (outside of the time requirements, especially of modern hardware) of running via APIs was that it set out rules and systems to stop that sort of collision from occuring.
But all of this is moving away from the central point of Amigaski's claims of the Amiga's superiority based wholy and solely on an (as yet) unproven hypothesis.
You can set rules for hardware level compatibility as well. So many people made Ps/2 type keyboards but they all worked with IN/OUT AL,60h..64h in DOS.
What unproven hypothesis? Amiga has both API and hardware level compatibility-- that's better than relying on some API which may be bugged, you have little information as to what it actually does, and is definitely slower.
-
Reality check: software is worthless without hardware to run it on. Rather than slamming what was once state of the art (I don't suppose you could have done better?) saying it was "underpowered" because it wasn't convenient for what you personally imagined was the One True Way of doing things, consider that people who wrote the naughty code ("cheat") actually created successful products.
...
I wouldn't label it "naughty" or "cheat". I used direct hardware VGA access or other direct hardware access in all my products (http://www.krishnasoft.com); I allowed for APi method as well in cases where it wasn't available (like Windows XP). Even under Windows 98SE, you can directly access VGA card (for standard functions), keyboard ports, parallel ports, etc. XP restricts you a bit more.
And the results are better when going direct to hardware.
-
I've just 'bolded' two words and you've got your answer. Times change, habits change, ways to do things change. A long ago moving balls over lines was a fast way to do computation, today any mobile phone can do the job of a pocket calculator, many magnitude orders faster, simplier and more accurate (in a word: better). Everything that once was a good thing, today is a hack. It happens for TV sets (no more banging on the tv-tuner frequency with a potentiometer, but choosing fixed frequencies pressing keys on remote command), it happens for computers (no more banging the hardware, but calling APIs), and every time progress has its advantages (many) and drawbacks (very few). Yes, flawed code is always flawed code, but how many chances there are, now, that it can mess up the whole operating system if it crashes? On AmigaOS, the same. On any other CURRENT architecture with protected memory, almost zero. I agree with you when you say that old 'hacks' were sometimes state of the art and masterpieces (who can forget Amiga demos?), but I absolutely can't think banging the hardware would be feasible TODAY. The price is a fraction of my 2.6+ GHz processor power, or the inability (:roflmao:) to poll my joystick port (:roflmao:) 1000 times per second? I can live with it.
regards,
You are speculating it's "progress" to use only APIs. It's FACTUALLY a big hit on creativity. Now people have to rely on the same dull APIs and live with inefficient code and not knowing exactly what is happening behind the API. It produces vague, bloated, dull code. Joystick gameport was an example where Amiga wins even at the hardware level. In other cases for real-time scenarios, Amiga hardware level compatibility makes it superior to API versions of the same program on PC. Your 100Mhz or 2.6+GHz processor does not affect your I/O speed. Banging hardware is not possible today (for most cases) because of the mess up of not having hardware level compatibility. I would rather use some check for I/O port to escape from a critical timing/computational loop than calling some GetMessage() API function which may call thousands of other functions and may not even return!
-
AGA palette changes being more complex that it was is because they wanted to save on register space not because of backward compatibility. Legacy hardware ports is what is currently making some tasks possible (especially real-time stuff) which would otherwise be impossible under modern systems.
That is not what available documentation from Commodore suggests.
-
I would rather use some check for I/O port to escape from a critical timing/computational loop than calling some GetMessage() API function which may call thousands of other functions and may not even return!
Sure, because the hardware equivalent bus error, context switch to supervisor mode, exception frame generation, processing, return from exception - all if you are lucky, is just the most efficient thing ever.
-
Take some solace:
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
:rofl:
-
What unproven hypothesis? Amiga has both API and hardware level compatibility
The Amiga had only two major iterations in its entire life - OCS and AGA. Comparing that to the evolution of the PC from 1988-2009 is ridiculous!
Your original claim was that the Amiga was superior due to an alledged ability to detect button presses faster then a PC. Your only "evidence" to that effect has been torn to shreds. So yes, as it stands, your hypothesis is as yet unproven. You have since then tried to move the argument to API vs hardware banging.
that's better than relying on some API which may be bugged,
You have not shown that DirectX/OpenGL/OpenCL/Cuda/X are flawed.
Nor have you shown proof that having API's reduce people's creativity either btw.
you have little information as to what it actually does, and is definitely slower.
No, it might be marginally slower in some ways, however, going the hardware banging route is slow as well - in terms of development for starters, not to mention the very real issue you have completely dodged with regard making sure that multiple programs interact in a friendly way without them.
And I see you dodged the question on what commonly used desktop program could not be made in an OS friendly fashion. I wonder why that was :rolleyes:
-
Continuation of my reply from yesterday...
I am treating VESA also as an API but at the time VESA BIOS was introduced, most of the other ports were standard so you can use VESA to set the video mode and then use direct I/O or write to video memory after that. And putting VESA into ROM is better since you don't have to load any drivers that hogged up valuable DOS memory (from 640K). In fact, I can call some VESA BIOS functions even from Windows 98SE (if they don't rely on selectors). Games did not run in some cases because NOT all video cards had VESA BIOS or supported the various modes the game was requesting. Those required a software (non-ROM) VESA Bios
>The overhead can't be that bad either as games still improved when we jumped to Windows instead of DOS, despite the fact by your argument the extra power in the PC should have been stolen in API inefficiencies.
That's not my argument-- the extra power was lost by API inefficiencies. In all cases, you have more power with direct access to hardware vs. API. Same for Amiga, if you go through API, your games will not make efficient use of hardware as if you go directly to hardware registers.
Define this lost of computation power. Large API inefficiencies is debunked by Fold@Home GPU2 CUDA example.
-
You are speculating it's "progress" to use only APIs. It's FACTUALLY a big hit on creativity. Now people have to rely on the same dull APIs and live with inefficient code
Game content providers are only interested in providing content. They are not interested in worrying about the plumbing work. What we have now is RAD i.e. rapid application development. With XNA, one could easily build Super-Stardust clone with 3D based effects.
and not knowing exactly what is happening behind the API.
This does not reflect the professional gaming development.
It produces vague, bloated, dull code. Joystick gameport was an example where Amiga wins even at the hardware level.
Sorry, Nintendo Wii’s control method is currently the leader in casual gaming. In E3 2009, both Sony and Microsoft announced motion based controls. With Microsoft's motion based controls, the handheld control device doesn’t actually exist i.e. optical based recognition.
In other cases for real-time scenarios, Amiga hardware level compatibility makes it superior to API versions of the same program on PC. Your 100Mhz or 2.6+GHz processor does not affect your I/O speed. (SNIP)
In terms effective bandwidth, my laptop's ExpressCard I/O port is magitude faster than the classic Amiga hardware.
-
I wouldn't label it "naughty" or "cheat". I used direct hardware VGA access or other direct hardware access in all my products (http://www.krishnasoft.com); I allowed for APi method as well in cases where it wasn't available (like Windows XP). Even under Windows 98SE, you can directly access VGA card (for standard functions), keyboard ports, parallel ports, etc. XP restricts you a bit more.
And the results are better when going direct to hardware.
A Natami supporter...That figures.
-
Bullcrap. Amiga is more efficient at certain real-time tasks than modern PCs. And one reason being discussed presently is because it had hardware level compatibility rather than just API level compatibility. The other reasons like having digital joysticks vs. analog joysticks, having ability to do cycle-exact timing, etc. were already mentioned.
Pure efficiency has limits in respect to brute performance+efficiency and overall design of the system.
If you notice with CUDA processors, the extremely large register set is superior to Natami’s SRAM memory and CELL's SPE local memory.
-
AGA palette changes being more complex that it was is because they wanted to save on register space not because of backward compatibility. Legacy hardware ports is what is currently making some tasks possible (especially real-time stuff) which would otherwise be impossible under modern systems.
Sorry, my laptop can play Blu-Ray 1080p movies in real time.
What target market are you targeting?
-
All this harping on about API's being slow and metal banging being faster:
1) Metal banging is fun but fails the moment the metal changes, even slightly
2) Any loss of processor cycles involved in going down the API route is more than made up for in the fact that systems employing API access to devices tend to be running on CPU's orders of magnitude faster than the 68K.
Cycle for cycle, direct hardware access wins, but when your API is running on a machine that can execute billions of instructions per second, worrying about a function call that might execute a few dozen instructions to get the job done is quite simply nothing short of laughable.
-
All this harping on about API's being slow and metal banging being faster:
1) Metal banging is fun but fails the moment the metal changes, even slightly
2) Any loss of processor cycles involved in going down the API route is more than made up for in the fact that systems employing API access to devices tend to be running on CPU's orders of magnitude faster than the 68K.
Cycle for cycle, direct hardware access wins, but when your API is running on a machine that can execute billions of instructions per second, worrying about a function call that might execute a few dozen instructions to get the job done is quite simply nothing short of laughable.
Not to mention that banging the metal with a multitasking OS is generally a bad idea.
-
Going on about how you could still bang the metal in Win98 is amusing, seeing as that was the single reason why it was such an unstable OS.
Personally, I do not want to go back to the days where I fire up a game, it crashes, and I have to hit the reboot button because said game had taken control from the OS so there was no way for the system to recover from that state. Or even if the game did not crash, often it would have corrupted the OS environment so I still had to reboot before I could do anything else.
Now compared to today, you can usually recover from any crashed state because games are using standard API OS calls so the OS knows what it needs to cleanup. You may still get some memory leaks, but at least you aren't forced to immediately reboot in order to continue using the computer.
Lets face it, even games consoles do not bang the hardware anymore for the most part. They have an OS all their own, they multi-task and have to play nice. Even then there are still stability issues because they run as close to the metal as possible on APIs.
Oh and they also still get to optimise and improve their gaming engines (yet another API). Imagine the love if their engine had to bang the hardware directly, not to mention the complexity of porting it to other systems.
As has already been said. The greatest thing about APIs is how you can write a game on the PC and easily port it to Xbox 360. Even then there are quite enough optimisations you can do for that specific hardware, even though you are still writing for APIs. There would be no use at all for banging the hardware as developers do not have the time/money to waste tweaking their code to that degree.
-
I was surprised to see how easy it was to move my OS X apps to iPhone, different processor, completely different hardware and just a bit of screen real estate redesign and it's done. I lived through the bang the hardware age once, thank Ahura Mazda it's gone!
-
That is not what available documentation from Commodore suggests.
I don't see any reason why hardware could not be extended with 256 palette registers using different locations rather than overloading the same 32 registers.
-
The Amiga had only two major iterations in its entire life - OCS and AGA. Comparing that to the evolution of the PC from 1988-2009 is ridiculous!
...
You have a problem understanding me. Your argument does not show that they cannot have hardware compatibility.
>Your original claim was that the Amiga was superior due to an alledged ability to detect button presses faster then a PC. Your only "evidence" to that effect has been torn to shreds. So yes, as it stands, your hypothesis is as yet unproven. You have since then tried to move the argument to API vs hardware banging.
No, the joystick argument is over-- Amiga won hands down; it can't be torn to shreds until people stop selling gameport based joysticks and 99% of the people adopt nonexistent USB 3.0. List of my points is given in post #275. Now we are talking which has better implementation of hardware for real-time tasks. Amiga has API and hardware level compatibility. PCs have moved away from that since early 90s are going toward the inferior solely API-based method.
>You have not shown that DirectX/OpenGL/OpenCL/Cuda/X are flawed.
That was not my argument, but there are bugs since they are up to version 10.0 DirectX or something around that number.
>Nor have you shown proof that having API's reduce people's creativity either btw.
Creativity is limited by the choices you have. If you have a C64 and want to use colors, your creativity to paint a picture is limited by 16 colors from palette of 16. If you have an Amiga and want to use colors, you can paint the C64 pictures as well as make pictures not doable on C64. Similarly, having just API is restrictive but having both API and hardware level compatibility opens up a lot more possibilities.
>No, it might be marginally slower in some ways, however, going the hardware banging route is slow as well - in terms of development for starters, not to mention the very real issue you have completely dodged with regard making sure that multiple programs interact in a friendly way without them.
I never said APIs should be removed and only hardware level programming should be done. But having that option gives you more possibilities with the machine.
>And I see you dodged the question on what commonly used desktop program could not be made in an OS friendly fashion. I wonder why that was :rolleyes:
I gave you a better answer than 3. If you just want three, my floppy simulation is IMPOSSIBLE to do with API calls; I have this DOS program that does echo effects on DMAd data going to audio card in real-time-- that would be affected using API calls. I have a joystick recorder which would have problems if it relied only API calls.
-
Not to mention that banging the metal with a multitasking OS is generally a bad idea.
Amiga seems tons of games that go directly to hardware and still have a multitasking OS. It's wonderful that some systems allow you to take over the hardware and use all of it for your application-- you really get to use what you paid for and it works in general not just for your Amiga.
-
All this harping on about API's being slow and metal banging being faster:
1) Metal banging is fun but fails the moment the metal changes, even slightly
...
But if the hardware compatibility is required for newer hardware, then metal won't change registers or affect previous software.
>2) Any loss of processor cycles involved in going down the API route is more than made up for in the fact that systems employing API access to devices tend to be running on CPU's orders of magnitude faster than the 68K.
>Cycle for cycle, direct hardware access wins, but when your API is running on a machine that can execute billions of instructions per second, worrying about a function call that might execute a few dozen instructions to get the job done is quite simply nothing short of laughable.
Thanks-- some people can't even accept that direct hardware access wins everytime. The point about processors being much faster is fine, but I/O instructions haven't sped up like processors have.
-
Define this lost of computation power. Large API inefficiencies is debunked by Fold@Home GPU2 CUDA example.
Suppose you want to use mode 640*480*16 paletted mode and read palette register #3 and swap with palette register #15. I can do that with a few IN/OUTs using standard VGA registers or doing MOVE.Ws to $DFF186/$DFF19E on Amiga or a few LDA/STA on 8-bit computers. Let's see your API calls to do that. Since you seem to be pretty up to date with all the latest video cards and hype of APIs and video cards are frequently updated and are using best possible technology-- let's see how efficient their APIs are.
-
I still remember TSR SoundBlaster emulators.
If you boot DOS in REAL mode and directly access sound blaster registers, there are no TSRs running nor anything else and your IOPL=0 so nothing is trapping your using the ports. If such an application works, you know it's hardware compatible with Soundblaster.
-
Going on about how you could still bang the metal in Win98 is amusing, seeing as that was the single reason why it was such an unstable OS.
Personally, I do not want to go back to the days where I fire up a game, it crashes, and I have to hit the reboot button because said game had taken control from the OS so there was no way for the system to recover from that state. Or even if the game did not crash, often it would have corrupted the OS environment so I still had to reboot before I could do anything else.
Now compared to today, you can usually recover from any crashed state because games are using standard API OS calls so the OS knows what it needs to cleanup. You may still get some memory leaks, but at least you aren't forced to immediately reboot in order to continue using the computer.
Lets face it, even games consoles do not bang the hardware anymore for the most part. They have an OS all their own, they multi-task and have to play nice. Even then there are still stability issues because they run as close to the metal as possible on APIs.
Oh and they also still get to optimise and improve their gaming engines (yet another API). Imagine the love if their engine had to bang the hardware directly, not to mention the complexity of porting it to other systems.
As has already been said. The greatest thing about APIs is how you can write a game on the PC and easily port it to Xbox 360. Even then there are quite enough optimisations you can do for that specific hardware, even though you are still writing for APIs. There would be no use at all for banging the hardware as developers do not have the time/money to waste tweaking their code to that degree.
I have games on Amiga which take over the system and also come back to OS without it crashing so it's doable. Also, I myself take over Windows 98SE OS and write directly to VGA memory and then restore the OS as if nothing happened. In fact, there's a built in function in Windows 98SE although undocumented that lets you take over video registers.
Tweaking is unrelated to using hardware registers.
-
Windows XP seems to relinquish resources on my 512MB (don't ask why it is so low, also notice I used the big B as in Byte) laptop, allowing me to play The Sims 2. No complaint there.
In fact Windows XP seems very well behaved at most things. The complaints usually come from 3rd party items,
a) Crapping files all over the place and 'not' cleaning them up at uninstall.
b) Accessing the hard drive at random times or not efficiently resulting in a 'slow down'.
I could also complain about Media Player and IE, but I'm not forced to use them.
-
You have a problem understanding me. Your argument does not show that they cannot have hardware compatibility.
By the very nature of evolution within computer hardware, at some point you have to let go of hardware compatability or you are forced to produce ever more drastic hacks in order to maintain it. At some point the value of creating these hacks for infinatesimal improvements, not to mention newer concepts within computing make this a no go. It is far easier to produce an API to bridge basic support (such as VESA) then to build it into hardware.
The hardware of today is so different to the hardware of the XT that to maintain "hardware compatability" would be utterly pointless, in many cases the hardware functions have been completely replaced by other technologies.
No, the joystick argument is over-- Amiga won hands down;
You cannot say that given that you made no effort to test that the data you were recieving wasn't infact signal noise, indeed your "proof" was and is as it stands utter garbage. You were given a solution that would test it one way or the other. I have yet to see you put your hypothesis to an actual test yet. Simply repeating "it's better" over and over does not make it so.
PCs have moved away from that since early 90s are going toward the inferior solely API-based method.
PC's are far too numerous in terms of variation to support anything else. Had the Amiga moved to more comodity type hardware in a similar vein to the Mac, the same would likely have had to have been done. C=, for all their faults saw the writing on the wall, which is why when you bought a shiny new A4000 or A1200, you didn't get a whole bunch of circuit diagrams to help the hardware bangers like you did with the A500, further, they improved APIs based on feedback from programmers. They pushed developers to develop for the OS, not the hardware.
>You have not shown that DirectX/OpenGL/OpenCL/Cuda/X are flawed.
That was not my argument, but there are bugs since they are up to version 10.0 DirectX or something around that number.
There is always likely to be bugs in software, but that is not the same as a flaw in an API and you should damn well know that! Also, DirectX now supports a great many things that it didn't in the past, the reason for version changes was to allow for the addition of newer capabilities, bug fixes have nothing to do with the DX version number.
>Nor have you shown proof that having API's reduce people's creativity either btw.
Creativity is limited by the choices you have.
Correct. But also wrong. You are also limited by your own abilities. Doing things your way means extra work and hassle for everyone else.
API and hardware level compatibility opens up a lot more possibilities.
Only if everything else is using the exact same setup as your own or you are working only for yourself!! To anyone else with different hardware, the only thing you've opened is likely to be a pack of headache tablets when the poor sap who has the misfortune of using your software finds out that it's been hardcoded for something he doesn't own instead of using the OS's APIs
>And I see you dodged the question on what commonly used desktop program could not be made in an OS friendly fashion. I wonder why that was :rolleyes:
I gave you a better answer than 3.
No, you really didn't. Making baseless claims does not constitute an answer.
Your claim (and that's all it is, as you provided no evidence to support your suposition) that it's better is meaningless. Untill you can provide real world data to show that APIs slow down feedback to such an extent that there is a noticeable lag between what you do and what happens on screen AND prove that it's not down to sloppy game engine coding, it will remain a baseless claim.
(and that's ignoring the whole issue of having to provide custom support for hundreds, if not thousands different controllers and many different interfaces etc etc)
If you just want three, my floppy simulation is IMPOSSIBLE to do with API calls; I have this DOS program that does echo effects on DMAd data going to audio card in real-time-- that would be affected using API calls. I have a joystick recorder which would have problems if it relied only API calls.
Which part of Commonly used desktop program was not clear? Joystick recorders and floppy drive simulators do not constitute anything like commonly used, I doubt even within development circles they're used all that often.
Secondly with regard to your alledged DOS program, prove that a modern day OS using an OS friendly program that allowed for realtime effects couldn't do as well if not better. I mean real proof.
-
But if the hardware compatibility is required for newer hardware, then metal won't change registers or affect previous software.
And as hardware evolves and things are simply dropped as they become obsolete, you end up right right where we are now in terms of hardware, only, you'll have to wait a lot longer to get here because of that added requirement, not to mention the veritable rats nest of kludges you'll have to add to the mix to get there.
Thanks-- some people can't even accept that direct hardware access wins everytime. The point about processors being much faster is fine, but I/O instructions haven't sped up like processors have.
You are failing (actually, I suspect wilfully ignoring) the fact that to access even a large subset of the full capability of for instance a modern GPU in a reasonable timeframe the only way to do it is with an API. Also, I/O has improved a great deal in computing. The only remaining bottleneck is optical and hard drives, with the latter being slowly overtaken by SSD's that are an order of magnitude faster.
-
:madashell:
Hi Wayne,
I think it is time to lock the thread. Them mushrooms will be sprouting anytime now. [Takes iodine pill]
-
Creativity is limited by the choices you have. If you have a C64 and want to use colors, your creativity to paint a picture is limited by 16 colors from palette of 16. If you have an Amiga and want to use colors, you can paint the C64 pictures as well as make pictures not doable on C64. Similarly, having just API is restrictive but having both API and hardware level compatibility opens up a lot more possibilities.
True... But on the Amiga the hardware, bandwitch, etc... directly limits your creativity
You want to do C64 like graphics (looking in the PAST), you can, sure. But what about 3D ? Yes, you can be creative and want to do some nice beautiful 3D...
You want to do real-time HD raytracing on the PC, fine. You want to render crysis like graphics, fine.
You want to do something like that on the Amiga. You cannot. No matter you use an API or hardware banging code,... You simply cannot. Because the PC took over the Amiga since years. And there's no way it will change.
The PC wins. Over. Next thread...
-
>You have not shown that DirectX/OpenGL/OpenCL/Cuda/X are flawed.
That was not my argument, but there are bugs since they are up to version 10.0 DirectX or something around that number.
Let me get this straight. Something must be buggy since it exists in a high version number?
It's true that there are bugs in all versions of DX, like there are in any software (and hardware), but this isn't the reason it's up to V10. It's up to V10 due to the inclusion of more and more features.
You only have to look at the featureset of a typical DX10 game compared to one that'll work on DX3 to know that :lol:
-
I have games on Amiga which take over the system and also come back to OS without it crashing so it's doable. Also, I myself take over Windows 98SE OS and write directly to VGA memory and then restore the OS as if nothing happened. In fact, there's a built in function in Windows 98SE although undocumented that lets you take over video registers.
Tweaking is unrelated to using hardware registers.
But you seem to be missing the obvious. Code is so complicated these days (and hardware banging would not reduce that) that bugs will remain and said bugs cause MUCH greater problems if you are hardware banging than if you are using OS calls and other APIs.
Also, the reason for different versions of Direct X is again partly related to a need to NOT be fully backwards compatible, as its too complicated and actually reduces efficiency in the API.
Often a newer version will remove older functions, because if you for example coding for Direct X 10 there are more efficient ways to do things and than calling some Direct X 9 function. Also, developers often need a push to encourage use of the newer versions as if they don't use it, theres no point in the card supporting it.
Microsoft made a particular point for example of saying Direct X 10 was written specifically to take advantage of Windows Vista, with Direct X 9 still being included for backwards compatibility. They are however, I believe, seperate libraries as a lot of changes in Direct X 10 involved more efficient ways of doing things that would not necessarily work well with some Direct X 9 API calls.
We can even use this example on HTML. Certain tags get deprecated on newer versions to encourage the use of more efficient/clean/powerful ways of rendering a page layout. If that did not happen, we would have an aweful mess of HTML 1 code with CSS. In fact, to some degree that does happen but it would be a whole lot worse if they had not mandated that you cannot do certain things if you are aiming for HTML 3 compliance for example.
So basically, backwards compatibility while being useful is not always a good thing if it means you mixing/matching different ways of doing something. Yes I know, HTML is not the same as banging registers but the reasons why its not a good idea are very similar. The more different ways you can achieve the same thing, the more complicated the code and more likely you cause bugs and/or tread on other software causing instability. You yourself pointed out that with an API you cannot be sure what calling a function is ACTUALLY doing. Therefore is it logical to allow you do hardware banging, when you might be interfering with the code the API is executing?
Doing hardware banging and API calls at the same time is just asking for trouble.
Doing just hardware banging is time comsuming to code, not useful for most people.
So here we are today, mandating ONLY API calls be used. Because its the safest more stable (and legible) way to code.
You also seemed to miss a point I made earlier. We are not arguing that the PC is as good at precise timing as the Amiga, we know it isn't. But the PC is intended to be an all purpose machine not for precise timing. If you want strict timing you would use a more suitable machine, an embedded board of some kind or, guess what, the Amiga. It does not mean the PC is "catching up", its the opposite, as the PC no longer NEEDS that functionality for what people use it for.
-
True... But on the Amiga the hardware, bandwitch, etc... directly limits your creativity
You want to do C64 like graphics (looking in the PAST), you can, sure. But what about 3D ? Yes, you can be creative and want to do some nice beautiful 3D...
You want to do real-time HD raytracing on the PC, fine. You want to render crysis like graphics, fine.
You want to do something like that on the Amiga. You cannot. No matter you use an API or hardware banging code,... You simply cannot. Because the PC took over the Amiga since years. And there's no way it will change.
The PC wins. Over. Next thread...
Hi,
>>True... But on the Amiga the hardware, bandwitch, etc... directly limits your creativity
What are you crazy, the Amiga was the original creative computer, and when I turn mine on today it is usually because I want the thrill of being creative again, not guided like some apple fanboy, or winblows fanboy.
>>But what about 3D ? Yes, you can be creative and want to do some nice beautiful 3D...
UHHH ever hear of the Video toaster with lightwave!!!! FNG's
>>You want to do real-time HD raytracing on the PC, fine. You want to render crysis like graphics, fine.
>>You want to do something like that on the Amiga. You cannot.
Do you really own an Amiga, are you for real, you ever hear of Picasso II, IV. How about GVP IV 24.
Oh well there are FNG's in every group, I still do 3D rendering, in 24 bit high mode, the only thing is that I run my frames through a ADS DVD express to the PC where I use the PC to put it all together for a movie, this takes the Place of my video recorder, and causes no loss in picture quality. Remember the Amiga was the machine back in the 80's and 90's to do this.
and
Amiga won, PC lost, again as usual. Maybe this is why Mr. Bill Gates had an Amiga 1000 on the shelf in his office, he wasn't going to quit until Winblows could do or outdo everything the Amiga could do.
Yes you can name a few areas that the PC wins, but, remember the Amiga was the first with stereo sound, the first with excellent graphics, and one of the first to do 3d rendering and do it well enough to display it in movies. The Amiga also had another advantage over PEE CEE's, when the power went out it could restart and continue the processing that it was programmed to do, can your PC do that, or do you have to turn on your PC to restart it after a power hit. I remember while going through Windows Server school the first thing they said was protect your data, backup, backup, backup. Always have 3 different backups or more that you can turn back to. Could this be because Winblows crashes so much? Could this also be why when you go into banks to make a deposit, or withdrawl they say were sorry we are unable to complete this transaction because our computers are down, could it be that all you young ones now playing with computer's know no better. I would rather retain my data then rely on a buggy, crash and bash program like winblows and in this area my Amiga does very well only one self induced major crash since 1993.
How many of you PC owners running winblows can say that?
Get Real!!!
Switch to a good OS, switch to Linux, it's easy it is free, the programs are free, and if we get enough people using it, we may even switch the support from winblows to linux. A more stable OS than winblows.
Oh I know why most of you are like Apple fanatics, we just want to turn on our computer and be guided by Mr. Jobs on what programs to use, and make it simple so any moron can use it. The only thing we want to know how to do is turn it on, use it and turn it off.
Right Wayne, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT
smerf
-
"could it be that all you young ones now playing with computer's know no better."
I also would like to see a return to wood-fired ovens. Nothing beats flame grilled.:madashell:
-
"could it be that all you young ones now playing with computer's know no better."
I also would like to see a return to wood-fired ovens. Nothing beats flame grilled.:madashell:
Hi,
With the world economy going the way it is you may soon have your wish. Just think roasting marshmellows over an open wood fire. Potatoes roasting in the hot embers, no more electricity, no more micro wave ovens, no more gas, no more electricity for stupid computers. The way the world economy is going we may all be cooking over wood fires,
GOD BLESS AMERICA
smerf
-
Hi,
Switch to a good OS, switch to Linux, it's easy it is free,
smerf
Well, I am trying to stay far away from this debate, but when I read that Linux is EASY, I just can't help but wondering what he has been smoking! Linux (to a newbee) IS far from easy and one of the most frustrating things in the world to get up and running (unless you have a "Live Boot" cd). I can walk through over the phone anyone through a Windows format and install because Microsoft has it down to a science. I have many times tried to "get into Linux" by trying to install it on various machines, and it has always failed for one reason or another. Linux is wayyy to advanced for the uneducated home user.
But this is way off topic, I have been hearing the same song and dance from Linux fans since 1996 and so far nothing has changed. ABSOLUTELY nothing except that some brand names have tried to bring linux out on their machines (ASUS) and even 90% of those sold with Linux, were sold with an XP license and upgraded to XP.
-
Well, I am trying to stay far away from this debate, but when I read that Linux is EASY, I just can't help but wondering what he has been smoking! Linux (to a newbee) IS far from easy and one of the most frustrating things in the world to get up and running (unless you have a "Live Boot" cd). I can walk through over the phone anyone through a Windows format and install because Microsoft has it down to a science. I have many times tried to "get into Linux" by trying to install it on various machines, and it has always failed for one reason or another. Linux is wayyy to advanced for the uneducated home user.
But this is way off topic, I have been hearing the same song and dance from Linux fans since 1996 and so far nothing has changed. ABSOLUTELY nothing except that some brand names have tried to bring linux out on their machines (ASUS) and even 90% of those sold with Linux, were sold with an XP license and upgraded to XP.
Hi,
@quarkx
OK, Have you tried Ubuntu, this Linux version is so good that even Maximum PC, has put articles on it, it is one of the easiest Linux versions on the PC to install. There are only a couple of interactions between the user and the computer, just RTFS (read the frappin screen), all updates to Ubuntu are easy to install and about 10 to 20 times faster than Winblows. Now here is one for the books, I just went to print out a picture on some glossy inkjet paper, in Linux no problem, it took it and ran and gave me an excellent print, then I tried the same picture on glossy paper with Windows Vista (your trouble free easy software for the masses) not only did it print the picture to dark, but it only printed half of it (sigh) and I thought I would get a better print from Winblows, but lets face it Winblows has not let me down yet, it loses data, it never does what I think it will do, I have to try it 2 or 3 times before I get it done the way I want it. You can keep your OS for the masses, I stay with the hard to set up Ubuntu Linux, keep my data, and have it do stuff the right way the first time I do it and you know what it cost me to get stuff done right, not $159.00 like Windows Home Version of Vista, but $.12 cents what it cost for me to put the ISO on a CD and install it. By the way don't try to burn an ISO in VISTA because they gave you burn programs but no ISO burn, but you can get ImgBurn off the internet to burn ISO's.
smerf
-
"could it be that all you young ones now playing with computer's know no better."
I also would like to see a return to wood-fired ovens. Nothing beats flame grilled.:madashell:
HI,
@Fanscale,
No, you don't know any better, Microsoft is trying to take over the compute world, they are trying to knock out all competition, they are doing underhanded stuff, like telling software companies that they will only support Microsoft based products, or they will lose there license rights for Windows, since Microsoft owns about 80% of the computing world, they can get away with this. Pretty soon Microsoft will be telling you what you can or cannot put on your computer, if they don't like what you are doing they can shut down your computer, ( I know mine has been shut down 10 times already for doing hardware upgrades during the past year that I have owned VISTA) I am getting to know the people in India better than I know my co-workers at work. So keep supporting Winblows, one day you will be screaming like I am, I just learned it faster, Microsoft is out to control your private computer.
smerf
-
Hi,
@quarkx
OK, Have you tried Ubuntu,
smerf
Yes, Infact Ubuntu sent me about 20 CD's a few years back to try to "Convert" me, but, to be honest, all I got to work was the "live CD" and I thought the brown gui was just plain Fugly.
Second, When I talk of Windows, I am only talking XP, NT4 Win 2000 etc, because, even Microsoft knows that VISTA is the worst piece of software since Windows ME. EVEN Microsoft BOB was better than VISTA Period. You can't compare anything the VISTA, because there is just no Argument. EVEN GW BASIC was a better Code than VISTA. Even Mr. Gates has eluded many times on his displeasure with VISTA. That is the reason for MS rushing out Windows 7, because the big Corporations will not put up with Vista. I guess it is easy to match the worst OS ever written to Linux, and Linux will shine every time, But the simple fact is over 10 years have past and linux has not made any more dent in the real world. It is sad, but like Amiga, Linux will never be accepted by the general public.
But enough, because I don't want to be looked at as trolling here.
-
@quarkx
Regarding the default gui on ubuntu, you do realise that you can change the entire look and feel of pretty much any linux distro as much or as little as you like, right? There are a dozen window managers, all of which are customisable to the hilt.
As for Vista, yeah it isn't great. But it does have DX10. Which is all I really use it for ;)
-
@quarkx
Regarding the default gui on ubuntu, you do realise that you can change the entire look and feel of pretty much any linux distro as much or as little as you like, right? There are a dozen window managers, all of which are customisable to the hilt.
As for Vista, yeah it isn't great. But it does have DX10. Which is all I really use it for ;)
The CD's they sent me, it wasn't all that apparent, it would not even use my second monitor at the time, but I only had used it of about 20 minutes and in that time nothing impressed me about it, so I had tossed it.
Also XP CAN use DX 10, it originally was coded on XP, but MS chose to disable it in XP for fear that it would absolutely KILL any chance of selling VISTA. There was some 3rd party trying to restore DX10 on XP about a year ago, but I admit, I have not kept up to date on it.
When I had my computer store 90% of my bench work was "Downgrading" VISTA to XP on new computers. 100% of the 500 or so ASUS EECPC's that I sold, the customers had requested to have XP installed before they got them out of the store. (This was the original batch of EEC's) So, I can honestly say after 20 years in the computer field, only about 10% of the tech's I have ever worked with were Linux fans. The public ALWAYS ignored linux., and the thousands of PC's I have built over the years, all (100%) were Windows boxes, because that is what the customer wanted.
-
1. You are speculating it's "progress" to use only APIs. It's FACTUALLY a big hit on creativity.
2. In other cases for real-time scenarios, Amiga hardware level compatibility makes it superior to API versions of the same program on PC.
3. Your 100Mhz or 2.6+GHz processor does not affect your I/O speed.
1. We must have two different ideas about what 'creativity' is, so I won't answer to this.
2. Perfect. So please write some assembly lines that poll @1KHz the damn 9-pin joystick port on my old Amiga 1200 and let's run it (natively) on my SAM too. I'm curious to see if the "Amiga hardware level compatibility" is still a working, good idea. A we're not talking about PCs, here.
3. Obvious. Peripherals are supposed to work under precise TIMINGS. A 2.6 GHz processor won't make my USB pen faster, but this isn't what a higher CPU frequency is supposed to do.
-
@quarkx
Regarding the default gui on ubuntu, you do realise that you can change the entire look and feel of pretty much any linux distro as much or as little as you like, right? There are a dozen window managers, all of which are customisable to the hilt.
As for Vista, yeah it isn't great. But it does have DX10. Which is all I really use it for ;)
Hi,
@Karlos
Yea we were all suckered into buying VISTA for DX10, then after it came out, they upgraded it to 10.1 which threw a lot of the new amazing cards out, causing bugs in their coding. Case in point nvidia 8800 cards. So really you are using DX10.1, I could look back in my Max PC mags to put down all the details but very few people know about that.
I like Ubuntu for the ease of use, fast loading, fast updates, and FREE SOFTWARE!!!
What more could you ask for. The Synaptec software manager is great, makes putting on new software in Linux a breeze and compiz is an amazing gui. Just Love It. Plus I can put it on as many computers as I want without breaking any EULA's. The Open Office Suite is fantastic, and GIMP is always good and improving. Now if we could only get the game Co.s to write games for Linux, they would put MS out of business.
smerf
-
If you boot DOS in REAL mode and directly access sound blaster registers, there are no TSRs running nor anything else and your IOPL=0 so nothing is trapping your using the ports. If such an application works, you know it's hardware compatible with Soundblaster.
As an example, Gravis Ultrasound Max uses TSR Soundblaster emulation. GF1 chip is missing the AdLib-compatible OPL2 circuitry.
-
Suppose you want to use mode 640*480*16 paletted mode and read palette register #3 and swap with palette register #15. I can do that with a few IN/OUTs using standard VGA registers or doing MOVE.Ws to $DFF186/$DFF19E on Amiga or a few LDA/STA on 8-bit computers. Let's see your API calls to do that.
Why 2D when you can have 3D+shaders on XNA framework?
Refer to development issues between PS3 vs Xbox 360.
Since you seem to be pretty up to date with all the latest video cards and hype of APIs and video cards are frequently updated and are using best possible technology-- let's see how efficient their APIs are.
How efficient would it be on time and money to recoding the same software on different platforms? Setting up screen resolution is not a large issue in professional gaming creation.
On Amiga, if CBM didn't go bust, would "hitting-the-metal" work on "clean break" Hombre based Amiga?
Amiga Hombre based PC (includes HP PA-7150 RISC microprocessor) runs legacy 68k AmigaOS software through emulation.
-
Amiga seems tons of games that go directly to hardware and still have a multitasking OS. It's wonderful that some systems allow you to take over the hardware and use all of it for your application-- you really get to use what you paid for and it works in general not just for your Amiga.
What happens to Deluxe Music if Protracker "hitting the metal" Paula’s audio hardware? Who will arbitrate the hardware access?
-
As an example, Gravis Ultrasound Max uses TSR Soundblaster emulation. GF1 chip is missing the AdLib-compatible OPL2 circuitry.
You lost track of the point. There are SB cards that are backward compatible on hardware level. I proved it by running in REAL DOS mode.
-
By the very nature of evolution within computer hardware, at some point you have to let go of hardware compatability or you are forced to produce ever more drastic hacks in order to maintain it. At some point the value of creating these hacks for infinatesimal improvements, not to mention newer concepts within computing make this a no go. It is far easier to produce an API to bridge basic support (such as VESA) then to build it into hardware.
...
Sorry you missed the point of how VGA is backward compatible on hardware level with EGA/CGA.
>You cannot say that given that you made no effort to test that the data you were recieving wasn't infact signal noise, indeed your "proof" was and is as it stands utter garbage. You were given a solution that would test it one way or the other. I have yet to see you put your hypothesis to an actual test yet. Simply repeating "it's better" over and over does not make it so.
You missed that point as well then. I gave you LOGICAL statements how you can have millisecond readings which you NEVER replied to. Just declaring it "garbage" does not change reality. You are as biased as they come. It's faster EVEN IF YOU DON'T SAMPLE AT 1KHZ.
>There is always likely to be bugs in software, but that is not the same as a flaw in an API and you should damn well know that! Also, DirectX now supports a great many things that it didn't in the past, the reason for version changes was to allow for the addition of newer capabilities, bug fixes have nothing to do with the DX version number.
I said it's not my argument but I know there are bugs in implementation of the API where certain video cards don't work the same for the same function.
>Correct. But also wrong. You are also limited by your own abilities. Doing things your way means extra work and hassle for everyone else.
Yes, you are limited by your abilities, but you are more restricted with just an API rather than both API and hardware level compatibilities.
>...software finds out that it's been hardcoded for something he doesn't own instead of using the OS's APIs
You are caught in a cyclical reasoning loop. We are claiming it's better to have hardware compatibility. Given that, you can do both-- API and hardware level programming. You are now claiming, suppose he doesn't own that piece of hardware. Well, that assumes it's not hardware compatible.
>No, you really didn't. Making baseless claims does not constitute an answer.
I gave a general answer-- any application employing time-critical loops.
>Which part of Commonly used desktop program was not clear? Joystick recorders and floppy drive simulators do not constitute anything like commonly used, I doubt even within development circles they're used all that often.
It's commonly used for me. That's subjective really to say "commonly used". And why does it matter-- it's an application that can be written only if you have hardware compatibility.
>Secondly with regard to your alledged DOS program, prove that a modern day OS using an OS friendly program that allowed for realtime effects couldn't do as well if not better. I mean real proof.
Only if the real-time effect you are trying to do is supported by an API call. But as I stated before, you can manipulate I/O ports in so many ways and not all of them will have APi equivalents.
-
...
You are failing (actually, I suspect wilfully ignoring) the fact that to access even a large subset of the full capability of for instance a modern GPU in a reasonable timeframe the only way to do it is with an API. Also, I/O has improved a great deal in computing. The only remaining bottleneck is optical and hard drives, with the latter being slowly overtaken by SSD's that are an order of magnitude faster.
I don't see the argument why you MUST have an API access only. And if hardware compatibility can help make things more efficient, why not spend the time. I/O has improved but not as much as processor speeds. And I gave the example of palette changes which (if you go time them) you will find they are not that much faster than amiga changing palette. This is just one example.
-
True... But on the Amiga the hardware, bandwitch, etc... directly limits your creativity
You want to do C64 like graphics (looking in the PAST), you can, sure. But what about 3D ? Yes, you can be creative and want to do some nice beautiful 3D...
You want to do real-time HD raytracing on the PC, fine. You want to render crysis like graphics, fine.
You want to do something like that on the Amiga. You cannot. No matter you use an API or hardware banging code,... You simply cannot. Because the PC took over the Amiga since years. And there's no way it will change.
The PC wins. Over. Next thread...
You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point. It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access. You have less options with just API access. Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.
-
What happens to Deluxe Music if Protracker "hitting the metal" Paula’s audio hardware? Who will arbitrate the hardware access?
I was making the point that certain applications go directly to hardware yet don't effect the multitasking OS. They return and OS is still stable as it was. Even the examples of audio playback in Compute! magazines are directly writing to hardware registers rather than making APi calls.
-
I don't see the argument why you MUST have an API access only. And if hardware compatibility can help make things more efficient, why not spend the time. I/O has improved but not as much as processor speeds.
And what sort of "hardware access" stanards do you propose for modern GPU's? You're thinking is so yesteryear with rgards this branch of hardware than you seemingly fail to note that modern graphics hardware has all but completely evolved away from fixed function pipelines into turing complete programmable devices.
Do you, in all honesty, even have the faintest notion how modern graphics hardware works?
And I gave the example of palette changes which (if you go time them) you will find they are not that much faster than amiga changing palette. This is just one example.
From the above statement, clearly not. I could program a "pallete change" for my GPU that simultaneously sets every colour register in parallel in a couple of shader clock cycles.
However, palette changes are a thing of the past for modern hardware. I haven't used a indexed colour mode for more than a few hours (usually when retgrogaming) in almost 10 years, even on the Amiga.
-
Sorry you missed the point of how VGA is backward compatible on hardware level with EGA/CGA.
>You cannot say that given that you made no effort to test that the data you were recieving wasn't infact signal noise, indeed your "proof" was and is as it stands utter garbage. You were given a solution that would test it one way or the other. I have yet to see you put your hypothesis to an actual test yet. Simply repeating "it's better" over and over does not make it so.
You missed that point as well then. I gave you LOGICAL statements how you can have millisecond readings which you NEVER replied to. Just declaring it "garbage" does not change reality. You are as biased as they come. It's faster EVEN IF YOU DON'T SAMPLE AT 1KHZ.
You have not yet proven that the Amigas joystick port is capable of actually being able to support anything like that rate.
>There is always likely to be bugs in software, but that is not the same as a flaw in an API and you should damn well know that! Also, DirectX now supports a great many things that it didn't in the past, the reason for version changes was to allow for the addition of newer capabilities, bug fixes have nothing to do with the DX version number.
I said it's not my argument but I know there are bugs in implementation of the API where certain video cards don't work the same for the same function.
That is not the same though as what you said originally, is it? In fact it's nothing like what you said originally.
>Correct. But also wrong. You are also limited by your own abilities. Doing things your way means extra work and hassle for everyone else.
Yes, you are limited by your abilities, but you are more restricted with just an API rather than both API and hardware level compatibilities.
You've said this time and time again. Prove it.
>...software finds out that it's been hardcoded for something he doesn't own instead of using the OS's APIs
You are caught in a cyclical reasoning loop. We are claiming it's better to have hardware compatibility. Given that, you can do both-- API and hardware level programming. You are now claiming, suppose he doesn't own that piece of hardware. Well, that assumes it's not hardware compatible.
Excuse me? I've said from the beginning that banging the hardware on the modern desktop PC is an exersise in stupidity for many of the reasons given here already. You have completely dismissed them, instead prefering to go on about a dream world where every componant on a PC, regardless of what it actually does, retains some form of hardware legacy compatability. Do not try to turn this around because you've been called on your BS.
>Which part of Commonly used desktop program was not clear? Joystick recorders and floppy drive simulators do not constitute anything like commonly used, I doubt even within development circles they're used all that often.
It's commonly used for me. That's subjective really to say "commonly used". And why does it matter-- it's an application that can be written only if you have hardware compatibility.
No it isn't. Unless you're trying to play some kind of pathetic game of semantics. "Commonly used desktop programs" is quite clear in of itself. But if you want to be a pedant, fine.
Show proof that there is not some commonly (by commonly, I mean greater than 50% of the computer using population use it on a regular basis) used desktop (by which I mean a desktop computer still within its design specifications lifetime IE within 6 years of this post) application.
Clear enough now?
Only if the real-time effect you are trying to do is supported by an API call.
That is a given. I note that you still managed to dodge the point again however.
But as I stated before, you can manipulate I/O ports in so many ways and not all of them will have APi equivalents.
Yes, and how many of those ways can be done without it having a detrimental effect on other processes. Further how can you maintain compatability across the huge differences between computers?
-
But if the hardware compatibility is required for newer hardware, then metal won't change registers or affect previous software.
Tell that to 68K vs ColdFire.
>2) Any loss of processor cycles involved in going down the API route is more than made up for in the fact that systems employing API access to devices tend to be running on CPU's orders of magnitude faster than the 68K.
>Cycle for cycle, direct hardware access wins, but when your API is running on a machine that can execute billions of instructions per second, worrying about a function call that might execute a few dozen instructions to get the job done is quite simply nothing short of laughable.
Thanks-- some people can't even accept that direct hardware access wins everytime. The point about processors being much faster is fine, but I/O instructions haven't sped up like processors have.
On GPUs and at a given transistor budget, maximising math unit count takes precedence i.e. maximising compute wavefront. The host CPU can handle driver JIT re-complier workload.
-
I was making the point that certain applications go directly to hardware yet don't effect the multitasking OS. They return and OS is still stable as it was. Even the examples of audio playback in Compute! magazines are directly writing to hardware registers rather than making APi calls.
They'll break if the application misbehaves i.e. results in guru-mediation.
-
You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point. It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access. You have less options with just API access. Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.
On the PC, there’s nothing stoping you using kernel space.
-
You lost track of the point. There are SB cards that are backward compatible on hardware level. I proved it by running in REAL DOS mode.
DOS TSRs and device drivers(e.g. CD-ROM) also run in real mode. Anyway, my SoundBlaster X-Fi USB2.0 is not SB16 backward compatible in REAL DOS mode.
-
Yeah, yeah, we all know about reading joystick bounce, but I can't think of a practical application for it.
It makes sense to hardware control a bi-plane, it does not make the same sense in an A380.
You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point. It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access. You have less options with just API access. Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.
-
Sorry you missed the point of how VGA is backward compatible on hardware level with EGA/CGA.
>You cannot say that given that you made no effort to test that the data you were recieving wasn't infact signal noise, indeed your "proof" was and is as it stands utter garbage. You were given a solution that would test it one way or the other. I have yet to see you put your hypothesis to an actual test yet. Simply repeating "it's better" over and over does not make it so.
You missed that point as well then. I gave you LOGICAL statements how you can have millisecond readings which you NEVER replied to. Just declaring it "garbage" does not change reality. You are as biased as they come. It's faster EVEN IF YOU DON'T SAMPLE AT 1KHZ.
>There is always likely to be bugs in software, but that is not the same as a flaw in an API and you should damn well know that! Also, DirectX now supports a great many things that it didn't in the past, the reason for version changes was to allow for the addition of newer capabilities, bug fixes have nothing to do with the DX version number.
I said it's not my argument but I know there are bugs in implementation of the API where certain video cards don't work the same for the same function.
That’s an implementation issue. The product should be following the reference renderer.
>Correct. But also wrong. You are also limited by your own abilities. Doing things your way means extra work and hassle for everyone else.
Yes, you are limited by your abilities, but you are more restricted with just an API rather than both API and hardware level compatibilities.
You made the same mistake as PS3 fanboys. OpenGL can be expanded via vendor specific extensions. You are welcome to implement your own OpenGL driver.
Make sure you target AmigaOS 4.x.
Using Oblivion (PC edition) game’s example, ATI’s chuck patch enables HDR FP+AA via driver level patch i.e. it overcomes Direct3D 9c's limitations.
"Hitting the metal" doesn't change NVIDIA RSX's hardware limitation e.g.
1. Limited vertex resource. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
2. Lack of HDR FP render targets + hardware AA. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
3. Lack of geometry shader instructions. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
4. Lack of Early-Z hardware features. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
5. Avoiding pixel shader stalls during texture fetch. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
6. Limited shader branch support. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
7. Lack of Giga-Thread hardware features. NVIDIA G80 fixes this feature.
NVIDIA's G7x and RSX hardware functionality basically follows Direct3D 9c limitations.
-
Hi,
@Karlos
Yea we were all suckered into buying VISTA for DX10, then after it came out, they upgraded it to 10.1 which threw a lot of the new amazing cards out, causing bugs in their coding. Case in point nvidia 8800 cards. So really you are using DX10.1, I could look back in my Max PC mags to put down all the details but very few people know about that.
Current CUDA GPUs can enable some DX10.1 features via NVAPI. Best example is FarCry2 PC.
"FarCry 2 reads from a multisampled depth buffer to speed up antialiasing performance. This feature is fully implemented on GeForce GPUs via NVAPI. Radeon GPUs implement an equivalent path via DirectX 10.1. There is no image quality or performance difference between the two implementations."
-
Let me get this straight. Something must be buggy since it exists in a high version number?
It's true that there are bugs in all versions of DX, like there are in any software (and hardware), but this isn't the reason it's up to V10. It's up to V10 due to the inclusion of more and more features.
You only have to look at the featureset of a typical DX10 game compared to one that'll work on DX3 to know that :lol:
In general they do fix bugs as versions keep going up and up, but in one sense you can consider adding more functions a type of flaw as well since that means original was missing things that are now present.
Some even divide up the number of the version into some major function change or bug fixes...
-
Current CUDA GPUs can enable some DX10.1 features via NVAPI. Best example is FarCry2 PC.
"FarCry 2 reads from a multisampled depth buffer to speed up antialiasing performance. This feature is fully implemented on GeForce GPUs via NVAPI. Radeon GPUs implement an equivalent path via DirectX 10.1. There is no image quality or performance difference between the two implementations."
Hi,
@Hammer,
Know what you mean, I was really ticked at MS when I read about the new 10.1. There was a big billiwac by both nvidia and MS on this. Both companies are still fighting about who was right or wrong on this. All i have to say is that a lot of people spent a lot of money (like I did) for nvidia 8800 graphic cards that were now not up to date because of MS changes in their coding. One of the major things I noticed was when playing fallout 3 in SLI mode, I had to disable SLI while playing fallout 3 because of 10.1 programming errors. SLI worked great using windows aero but tended to crash and cause screen distortions while playing this game. I usually crashed 3 times a night while playing until I learned to disable the SLI mode. I paid a lot of money to get SLI in order to have the faster frame rates, but MS frapped me up there. I HATE MS and their buggy bloated OS that you have to pay money for. By the way I had the same problem playing far cry in SLI, but when I played it on Linux using cedega, it played without any crashes or problems.
smerf
-
You have not yet proven that the Amigas joystick port is capable of actually being able to support anything like that rate.
...
You must have missed some posts. I can read the joystick on Amiga way faster than 1Khz. Try it out yourself if you don't accept.
>That is not the same though as what you said originally, is it? In fact it's nothing like what you said originally.
I know what I stated original which you have misconstrued: from post #570: "Amiga has both API and hardware level compatibility-- that's better than relying on some API which may be bugged, you have little information as to what it actually does, and is definitely slower."
>You've said this time and time again. Prove it.
I prove it for myself. You have to go repeat the experiment and prove it for yourself. Why haven't you replied to my posts where you were refuted rather than wait a while and restate the same argument again.
>Excuse me? I've said from the beginning that banging the hardware on the modern desktop PC is an exersise in stupidity for many of the reasons given here already.
Because the point is not banging the hardware on modern existing systems where one system's hardware differs from another. Point is, IF HARDWARE WAS BACKWARD COMPATIBLE, it's better to allow for API access as well as going direct to hardware.
>...hardware legacy compatability. Do not try to turn this around because you've been called on your BS.
Your misunderstanding is NOT my problem. The only part of modern hardware that you can do direct access via hardware is the legacy compatible ports and memory map areas. That's a good thing. Your the one who is trying to cheat by trying to misconstrue clear cut things.
>No it isn't. Unless you're trying to play some kind of pathetic game of semantics. "Commonly used desktop programs" is quite clear in of itself. But if you want to be a pedant, fine.
I don't care if you call them "common" or not. They are USEFUL programs that require going directly to the hardware. And there are thousands of such programs out there that require precise control of hardware and can't rely on vague, inexact API calls.
>That is a given. I note that you still managed to dodge the point again however.
You keep missing the simplest of points-- the joystick is faster to read on Amiga. How can you possible understand something like real-time events.
>Yes, and how many of those ways can be done without it having a detrimental effect on other processes. Further how can you maintain compatability across the huge differences between computers?
That's not the point. You only go directly to hardware if it's backward compatible and you know it will work the same on other systems.
-
To amigaksi:
Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?
-
In general they do fix bugs as versions keep going up and up,
Specifically addressing DirectX, you'll have DX8, for instance. then you'll have bugfixes so that when you run something like dxdiag, you'll end with DX8.000000005 or something. A change from 8 to 9 specifically means a jump in capabilities, for instance shader support.
but in one sense you can consider adding more functions a type of flaw as well since that means original was missing things that are now present.
Things being done now probably weren't even a hardware developers wet dream 20 or more years ago! Technology advances, capabilities improve. To try to write it off as flawed because the guy who helped design the XT didn't forsee oneday that graphics processors would become fully programable and that hard drives would be in the Terabyte range is beyond retarded!
You're seriously pulling at straws now. The wise thing to do would be either to retire or concede.
-
DOS TSRs and device drivers(e.g. CD-ROM) also run in real mode. Anyway, my SoundBlaster X-Fi USB2.0 is not SB16 backward compatible in REAL DOS mode.
First of all, my application that I used to test several SB cards does not require any drivers, TSRs, or even COMMAND.COM/BIOS/etc. It runs by directly going to the hardware I/O ports, DMA channels, IRQ vectors. I am not saying *ALL* sound blaster cards are backward compatible. I was giving an example, that it is possible for sound cards to maintain backward compatibility on the hardware level and the bullcrap about it's too complex nowadays is just that-- bullcrap.
-
Specifically addressing DirectX, you'll have DX8, for instance. then you'll have bugfixes so that when you run something like dxdiag, you'll end with DX8.000000005 or something. A change from 8 to 9 specifically means a jump in capabilities, for instance shader support.
Things being done now probably weren't even a hardware developers wet dream 20 or more years ago! Technology advances, capabilities improve. To try to write it off as flawed because the guy who helped design the XT didn't forsee oneday that graphics processors would become fully programable and that hard drives would be in the Terabyte range is beyond retarded!
You're seriously pulling at straws now. The wise thing to do would be either to retire or concede.
Your getting too emotionally and can't think straight anymore. Concede to a point that's irrelevant to my point is retarded for you to come up with.
-
And what sort of "hardware access" stanards do you propose for modern GPU's? You're thinking is so yesteryear with rgards this branch of hardware than you seemingly fail to note that modern graphics hardware has all but completely evolved away from fixed function pipelines into turing complete programmable devices.
Do you, in all honesty, even have the faintest notion how modern graphics hardware works?
...
All I am stating regarding hardware standards is that they base it on I/O ports and memory maps like VGA/EGA/CGA was rather than API calls. That way, you don't have to rely on any drivers and API calls although those can also be present in a system.
>From the above statement, clearly not. I could program a "pallete change" for my GPU that simultaneously sets every colour register in parallel in a couple of shader clock cycles.
Now you call an API to do that which works on majority of PCs and see how well it performs as compared to Amiga swapping two palette registers or to a standard VGA swapping color registers. You can't just target your machine since we are talking about making it work in general; that's why I am talking hardware compatibility to begin with.
>However, palette changes are a thing of the past for modern hardware. I haven't used a indexed colour mode for more than a few hours (usually when retgrogaming) in almost 10 years, even on the Amiga.
That's subjective. But regardless, I was giving example where I/O accesses are better than API calls and Amiga I/O accesses aren't that slow.
-
>You've said this time and time again. Prove it.
I prove it for myself. You have to go repeat the experiment and prove it for yourself. Why haven't you replied to my posts where you were refuted rather than wait a while and restate the same argument again.
The data was torn to shreds, all you've recorded is signal noise. You have yet to show that the computer can actually react to anything like the numbers you suggest.
>Excuse me? I've said from the beginning that banging the hardware on the modern desktop PC is an exersise in stupidity for many of the reasons given here already.
Because the point is not banging the hardware on modern existing systems where one system's hardware differs from another. Point is, IF HARDWARE WAS BACKWARD COMPATIBLE, it's better to allow for API access as well as going direct to hardware.
Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.
>...hardware legacy compatability. Do not try to turn this around because you've been called on your BS.
Your misunderstanding is NOT my problem. The only part of modern hardware that you can do direct access via hardware is the legacy compatible ports and memory map areas. That's a good thing. Your the one who is trying to cheat by trying to misconstrue clear cut things.
Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.
>No it isn't. Unless you're trying to play some kind of pathetic game of semantics. "Commonly used desktop programs" is quite clear in of itself. But if you want to be a pedant, fine.
I don't care if you call them "common" or not. They are USEFUL programs that require going directly to the hardware.
I C WUT U DID THAR!
Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.
And there are thousands of such programs out there that require precise control of hardware and can't rely on vague, inexact API calls.
Yup, and the vast, vast majority of them are found in embedded situations where the hardware would be considered limited even by Spectrum users of the 1980's. You have yet to show (outside of your fairy land) how this would be in any way beneficial to the common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.
>That is a given. I note that you still managed to dodge the point again however.
You keep missing the simplest of points-- the joystick is faster to read on Amiga. How can you possible understand something like real-time events.
You have not proved that the amiga will actually respond at anything like that sort of speed yet.
>Yes, and how many of those ways can be done without it having a detrimental effect on other processes. Further how can you maintain compatability across the huge differences between computers?
That's not the point.
That is precisely the point, it's the point that every other person on this board has been trying (and failing) to get through to you! Your response to the explanation of why your demands for full and complete hardware access has been to create a wonderful makebelief fairy land where hardware doesn't change even a fraction as radically as it has over the past 20 years!
You only go directly to hardware if it's backward compatible and you know it will work the same on other systems.
And since you can't do that, even between different models of the Amiga (which is again why C= stopped providing hardware diagrams of the chips in question and encouraged developers to use API's instead) the supposed performance increase in immediately offset by the fact that your code will have to be modified or at least take into account a great many variables in order to actually be useful to the rest of the world. The time it takes to do that as well as take advantage of the hardwares "full" capability is so great that in the mean time the hardware has moved on and you can do all that and more via an API in the same timeframe.
-
In general they do fix bugs as versions keep going up and up, but in one sense you can consider adding more functions a type of flaw as well since that means original was missing things that are now present.
Some even divide up the number of the version into some major function change or bug fixes...
Hi,
@amigaski,
Do you ever have any idea what you are talking about, well lets explain it to you in very easy terms
Once upon a time a great computer was developed, it was called an Amiga, it had great features like stereo sound, great graphics, and a new feature called muti tasking meaning that it could run several programs at once due to pre-emptive tasking. This great computer held this domain for about 10 years until the big bad microsoft company developed windows with much support from hardware developers to take over the Amiga kingdom. Now Amiga owned by Commodore didn't have this support because they squandered all the money on such things as the PC-10 and PC-20 instead of improving the King Amiga, when the coffers went dry due to overspending in other areas the Amiga finally succumbed to being bankrupt, a great savior called Gateway said they would help poor king Amiga, but they to gave up because it seemed that microsoft had their hands into everything, it was rumored that microsoft paid Gateway a huge sum to drop development of the new Amiga. Now no one really has proof of this and it is just rumor. Then a new savior emerged, another Mister Bill, but alas all he could do was rewrite games for iphones (not very good ones either). Now during this time the hardware was advancing and the speed of the hardware increased, the graphics cards displayed more colors, and then came up with such things as shaders and math calculations to do such things as display vapors, fogs and dust on the new graphics hardware, poor Amiga was still bragging about faster boot times, and joystick speed ( I threw joystick time in because I know how hard you fought for this Amigaski) so as you can see children the versions of DX weren't really flawed they just imporoved with time, and if the evil microsoft would of told about their improvement in the shaders from version 10.0 to 10.1 then the hardware developers would have used it to improve their hardware.
have a nice day Amigaski, as much as I hate to say this, the old saying that the Amiga can emulate a PC, but can the PC emulate the Amiga is over, done with and no longer valid. The PC can not only emulate a PC, but has actually improved the Amiga through emulation, for now today the Amiga emulator program can use USB, DVD's, and even usb digital camera's, sata drives and most modern day hardware.
Amiga wins by default, because I still like it.
and thats all that counts
smerf
-
Your getting too emotionally and can't think straight anymore. Concede to a point that's irrelevant to my point is retarded for you to come up with.
On the contrary, when you say something as retarded as you did I will respond in kind. You brought it up, you were shot down and tried to squirm out of it any way you could.
And now this... :laughing:
-
Hi,
@amigaski,
Do you ever have any idea what you are talking about, well lets explain it to you in very easy terms
Once upon a time a great computer was developed, it was called an Amiga, it had great features like stereo sound, great graphics, and a new feature called muti tasking meaning that it could run several programs at once due to pre-emptive tasking. This great computer held this domain for about 10 years until the big bad microsoft company developed windows with much support from hardware developers to take over the Amiga kingdom. Now Amiga owned by Commodore didn't have this support because they squandered all the money on such things as the PC-10 and PC-20 instead of improving the King Amiga, when the coffers went dry due to overspending in other areas the Amiga finally succumbed to being bankrupt, a great savior called Gateway said they would help poor king Amiga, but they to gave up because it seemed that microsoft had their hands into everything, it was rumored that microsoft paid Gateway a huge sum to drop development of the new Amiga. Now no one really has proof of this and it is just rumor. Then a new savior emerged, another Mister Bill, but alas all he could do was rewrite games for iphones (not very good ones either). Now during this time the hardware was advancing and the speed of the hardware increased, the graphics cards displayed more colors, and then came up with such things as shaders and math calculations to do such things as display vapors, fogs and dust on the new graphics hardware, poor Amiga was still bragging about faster boot times, and joystick speed ( I threw joystick time in because I know how hard you fought for this Amigaski) so as you can see children the versions of DX weren't really flawed they just imporoved with time, and if the evil microsoft would of told about their improvement in the shaders from version 10.0 to 10.1 then the hardware developers would have used it to improve their hardware.
have a nice day Amigaski, as much as I hate to say this, the old saying that the Amiga can emulate a PC, but can the PC emulate the Amiga is over, done with and no longer valid. The PC can not only emulate a PC, but has actually improved the Amiga through emulation, for now today the Amiga emulator program can use USB, DVD's, and even usb digital camera's, sata drives and most modern day hardware.
Amiga wins by default, because I still like it.
and thats all that counts
smerf
Smerf, I don't often agree with what you write, but every once in a while you'll produce a gem like this and I'm left with my jaw on the floor.
Bravo sir, and may your miggies continue to trundle on far into the future!
Thats actually brightened my day :afro:
-
On the contrary, when you say something as retarded as you did I will respond in kind. You brought it up, you were shot down and tried to squirm out of it any way you could.
And now this... :laughing:
Read post #570; that's where I brought up "bugged" APIs and now you have distorted it to the point as if that's required to support everything I have stated here. It's irrelevant to my point that APIs are inferior to direct hardware access. I see you can't address the relevant points and have to resort to stupidity of just saying things like "prove it" after it has already been proven.
-
Hi,
@amigaski,
Do you ever have any idea what you are talking about, well lets explain it to you in very easy terms
...
It sounds like you don't understand the main point either.
-
...Thats actually brightened my day :afro:
I already know you are in the group of "blind following the blind".
-
The data was torn to shreds, all you've recorded is signal noise. You have yet to show that the computer can actually react to anything like the numbers you suggest.
...
PROVE IT. I torn to shreds someone's speculation that it's noise. And NOISE is ALSO REQUIRED to be recorded for a joystick recorded in order to repeat the performance EXACTLY. Get a brain before you reply. And you have yet to reply to the LOGICAL facts already posted of why it's NOT noise.
>Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.
It's not make believe. Amiga has both hardware compatibility and API. VGA is also.
>Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.
That's you blurting out blindly whatever comes on the top of your head. Go prove it for yourself. I'm not your slave. I have evidence and can repeat the experiment anytime. All you have is your BLIND belief. You look like your too emotional biased to look at it rationally-- it shows when you start taking people's quotes and modifying them so you don't have to address the points.
>Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.
No, I only use PCs for internet and floppy simulations so that's COMMON application for me. You dodged the question-- WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE COMMON to be useful?
>...common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.
I am a common desktop user.
>You have not proved that the amiga will actually respond at anything like that sort of speed yet.
Huh. I guess I'll leave you to your ignorance on that.
[rest of the rubbish deleted since it was already addressed refurted several times]
-
To amigaksi:
Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?
With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code. Also depends on what the instructions are. One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.
-
Smerf, I don't often agree with what you write, but every once in a while you'll produce a gem like this and I'm left with my jaw on the floor.
Bravo sir, and may your miggies continue to trundle on far into the future!
Thats actually brightened my day :afro:
Hi,
@the leander,
I am glad I brought some joy into your day, a lot of times I just like to troll, and stir up the pot. Yes I still like the Amiga and still use it daily. but it is very limited in its features today and even though I hate to say this my Amiga is like an old Model T roadster, fun to play with. fun to soup it up and hot rod and fun to see how far I can take it to compete with modern day computers. Lately I have been gathering all my Amiga schematics to see what I can do to bring it up to modern day values, after a year of examining and looking at it, I have decided to take the original block diagram as developed by Mr. Jay Miner and build from there. I have decided to go with an Intel Q6600 processor, and try to develope from there, looks like a lot of work but it might be a challenge. I now have the original block diagram, Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and CD32 schematics. Now I am trying to match modern day tech to the block diagram and make decisions on the type of hardware and coding that I will have to use, my main problem is this house, every time I get started something breaks in the house that I have to fix (usuall a 6 month to a year project) and by the time I get back to the Amiga I forgot where I was at and have to spend another month calculating, and planning which way to go, by this time the technology has advanced and I try to start there. (never ending story)
Glad to see I brought you some joy, but I was getting tired of someone comparing old tech with new tech, sort of like saying a P51 could take on a F18 hornet because it can make the turns tighter.
smerf
-
PROVE IT. I torn to shreds someone's speculation that it's noise. And NOISE is ALSO REQUIRED to be recorded for a joystick recorded in order to repeat the performance EXACTLY. Get a brain before you reply. And you have yet to reply to the LOGICAL facts already posted of why it's NOT noise.
NO U.
I don't do fundie logic. You claim it is superior, it is your task to show evidence to back up your point.
You're right, I've not replied, because others, with greater skill and knowledge than myself have already explained it to you earlier in this thread.
You chose to ignore it and or fallback to fairyland.
>Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.
It's not make believe. Amiga has both hardware compatibility and API. VGA is also.
No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability. And to get even that level of compatability required the inclusion of some hidious kludges in AGA. VGA is a nice touch for the most primative things within PC's, but even it has been superceeded by XGA now.
>Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.
That's you blurting out blindly whatever comes on the top of your head. Go prove it for yourself.
It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.
All you have is your BLIND belief.
No see, only one of us is having to resort to going into a magical fairyland to gain even the slightest amount of traction in this discussion.
You look like your too emotional biased to look at it rationally-- it shows when you start taking people's quotes and modifying them so you don't have to address the points.
No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.
>Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.
No, I only use PCs for internet and floppy simulations so that's COMMON application for me. You dodged the question-- WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE COMMON to be useful?
Since the original point was made with respect to desktop computers (you later went so far as to include windows 98 as an example) I asked the question in the same context. I am not disputing your hard coded programs aren't useful to you, but one would think that you would even by your own admission concede you are not like >90% of computer users out there.
>...common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.
I am a common desktop user.
No, you're really not.
-
It sounds like you don't understand the main point either.
Hi,
@Amigaski,
What exactly is the main point, according to wikipedia API's sound like something brought about in programming. In todays programming environment, code is made up and kept in libraries that anybody can access and use. This cuts down the programming environment and yes if someone does write some bad code for hardware and it isn't caught can trickle into any program developed for it, but on a sad note this can also happen in the Amiga. Now most of the code written for the Amiga was developed 20 years ago and today all the buggy stuff has been found and trashed. So the Amiga has less buggy code than the PC, since new hardware is being developed every day for it. What was new yesterday is old today with the PC, the Amiga on the other hand has very little hardware developed for it, case in point was the buddha ide that I just bought for my Amiga 4000. The new hardware was shipped to me and I had to go to the company to get new software in order to make it work. The software that shipped with it was bad. OK case in point API's do have faults, but not only for PC's.
Buggy code is prevelent in all computers.
smerf
-
...
You're right, I've not replied, because others, with greater skill and knowledge than myself have already explained it to you earlier in this thread.
They haven't either.
>No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability.
Wrong. AGA is compatible with OCS. But again you miss the point that hardware compatibility is better than being forced to go through APIs. I wasn't talking about what it is now. Just another case of you twisting things around in an attempt to miss the main point of discussion.
>It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.
I already did. Logical deduction is superior to experimentation and I gave both.
>No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.
You can't understand is the problem. Where's the lies? Go time the joysticks yourself and go see the timing for yourself. It's not that hard to do.
-
Hi,
@the leander,
I am glad I brought some joy into your day, a lot of times I just like to troll, and stir up the pot.
:D
Yes I still like the Amiga and still use it daily. but it is very limited in its features today and even though I hate to say this my Amiga is like an old Model T roadster, fun to play with. fun to soup it up and hot rod and fun to see how far I can take it to compete with modern day computers.
Now that I can fully understand, tweeking and tuning an amiga to do the more then it should on paper be able to do was a source of a stupendous amounts of hours of fun for me. I think in a way my EeePC does the same (for me) in that regard - it's limited hardware but you can really do so much with it.
Lately I have been gathering all my Amiga schematics to see what I can do to bring it up to modern day values, after a year of examining and looking at it, I have decided to take the original block diagram as developed by Mr. Jay Miner and build from there. I have decided to go with an Intel Q6600 processor, and try to develope from there, looks like a lot of work but it might be a challenge. I now have the original block diagram, Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and CD32 schematics. Now I am trying to match modern day tech to the block diagram and make decisions on the type of hardware and coding that I will have to use,
Hey best of luck! Sounds like a cool project.
my main problem is this house, every time I get started something breaks in the house that I have to fix (usuall a 6 month to a year project) and by the time I get back to the Amiga I forgot where I was at and have to spend another month calculating, and planning which way to go, by this time the technology has advanced and I try to start there. (never ending story)
LOL ain't that the truth! :D
Glad to see I brought you some joy, but I was getting tired of someone comparing old tech with new tech, sort of like saying a P51 could take on a F18 hornet because it can make the turns tighter.
smerf
Hmm, with a bit of cleaning the above would make excellent sig fodder, would you mind? (attribution would be there, obviously)
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
...it work. The software that shipped with it was bad. OK case in point API's do have faults, but not only for PC's.
Buggy code is prevelent in all computers.
smerf
I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs. See post #570. My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly. Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."
-
They haven't either.
>No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability.
Wrong. AGA is compatible with OCS.
No, it isn't. If it were, a sizeable chunk of OCS games would still work on AGA systems without the need for hacks and patches. Again, this is well documented.
But again you miss the point that hardware compatibility is better than being forced to go through APIs. I wasn't talking about what it is now. Just another case of you twisting things around in an attempt to miss the main point of discussion.
The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland. When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now. Of PC's of that Vintage, maybe, but in all honesty in terms of capability even by the time the A1200 came out there were better options available, even to Amiga users (third party graphics cards, DSP based soundcards etc).
>It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.
I already did.
No, you supplied data that showed nothing. You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.
>No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.
You can't understand is the problem.
I think I understand the problem better then you do.
Where's the lies? Go time the joysticks yourself and go see the timing for yourself. It's not that hard to do.
You've been given a way of testing this one way or the other to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Now, if you do that and come back with the results, hell I'll be the first one to say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.
The lies come in when you've had it explained to you where you're going wrong, ignore that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.
-
No, it isn't. If it were, a sizeable chunk of OCS games would still work on AGA systems without the need for hacks and patches. Again, this is well documented.
...
As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines. Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.
>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.
No, it works right now. If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program. You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.
>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.
Straw-man argument. I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.
>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.
Bullcrap. Go re-read the data.
>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.
The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer. Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data. Your thinking is flawed. I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).
>I think I understand the problem better then you do.
You think you do.
>...say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.
That's not even the point. Joystick on Amiga is faster even if you do one sample every 1/60 second. And why are you narrowing to just USB; Gameport is also a valid joystick port for millions of PC owners.
>...that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.
You're in ignorance.
-
I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs. See post #570. My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly.
On a fixed platform be it one that's discontinued (Amiga) or an embedded or industrial controller, having those sorts of options is great and depending on the hardware again, hitting the hardware might be your only way of acomplishing something.
Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."
It's not circular reasoning. With a landscape as diverse as the modern PC desktop market it is the only way to be able to produce applications in a reasonable timeframe to reach a broad audience. Take a look at any medium to large PC venders and, just as a for instance here lets look at Scan (http://www.scan.co.uk/SelectCategory.aspx?NT=1-0-92-0-0).
There are, just for (m)ATX boards 23 different variations. That's even before we look at the offerings from AMD. 23. And it gets worse when you consider that within a year most of those models will be discontinued and replaced with something else. Now with an API, barring serious driver issues, if I write a program for windows/linux/whatever it'll run on all 23 of those motherboards. If I hit the hardware yes, I could potentially get it to run on those 23 motherboards, but by the time I'd worked out each motherboards kinks (actually, probably long before then) and gotten the full performance possible, you would no longer be able to get those motherboards and regardless it would still only constitute a drop in the ocean within the marketplace, probably less then 5% of all PC's currently in operation around the globe.
That is why it is considered that nobody in their right mind would do so.
-
As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines. Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.
I believe this was already responded to as to why you were wrong then too.
>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.
No, it works right now. If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program. You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.
Of course dear.
>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.
Straw-man argument.
Not so. A valid statement of fact.
I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.
In a tiny, nay, infinatesimal really seriously convoluted tasks, maybe.
>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.
Bullcrap. Go re-read the data.
Without being able to show that the Amiga can distinguish and react to your output, your data is meaningless.
>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.
The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer. Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data. Your thinking is flawed. I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).
Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.
>I think I understand the problem better then you do.
You think you do.
Yup.
You're in ignorance.
That is not a sentence.
-
Nice thread, lots to read! My only comment would be that I got into the Amiga as a hobby and IMHO it is one of the best Hobbies around.
Anyone can go out and buy a PC and make it scream and we all know that PC won the market war with APPLE almost biting the dust several times. I'm finding it a challenge (At least as a newbie) to go out and find that rare accelerator or Amiga Model you want. I have to say though when I finaly got my A2000 blasting faster than a pissed of trucker it gave me a feeling I never had building my PC or Playing around with my old macs. I fell in love with it and just wish I had the cash back in the day to actually own one when it was top of the line.
Amiga Forever,
-
First of all, my application that I used to test several SB cards does not require any drivers, TSRs, or even COMMAND.COM/BIOS/etc.
On modern desktop PC, one needs a memory protected multi-tasking OS. The audio system must share it's resources to multiple applications e.g. Web Browser (with Flash's FLV), WinAMP, PowerDVD, Cakewalk Sonar and "Games For Windows" title(s).
It runs by directly going to the hardware I/O ports, DMA channels, IRQ vectors.
I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts returns.
I am not saying *ALL* sound blaster cards are backward compatible.
Most laptops in 2008 are shipped with HDA codec. Good luck with SB compatibility.
Despite it's name, the new soundblaster models are hardware incompatible with legacy Soundblasters. However, they have emulation drivers. This applies for SB128, SB512, SBLive!, SB Audigy, SB Audigy 2 and SB X-Fi.
I was giving an example, that it is possible for sound cards to maintain backward compatibility on the hardware level and the bullcrap about it's too complex nowadays is just that-- bullcrap.
It's easy with XNA. The industry made a good move in removing Creative Lab’s standard.
-
I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs. See post #570. My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly. Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."
Hi,
@Amigaski,
Really don't understand the debate here, the application programming interface as I stated before is usually kept in a library so that programmers can use that library to cut down on there programming time, why re-invent the wheel, most of this coding is written by the hardware deveopers to aid programmers in the use of their hardware. Now the Amiga was different since most hardware was kernal controlled and all hardware developers had to follow Commodores instructions on the developement of new hardware, that way when the Amiga was in the startup it would call out who or what is out there, and then the hardware would say I am here waiting your instructions. This way the Amiga knew what it could use and what kernal instructions to use to command the hardware, I could be wrong on this since it has been a while since I read the books on the Amiga, but pretty soon I will be breaking out those books to see exactly what Commodore was doing since I am trying to design a computer similar to the Amiga using an Intel Q6600 (yeh, if I can get my darn house to co-operate with me). I believe that if you use the sysinfo program you will see the kernal in action, the unknown boards will show up because someone broke Commodores instruction base for hardware development or the hardware was made after Commodores downfall. The only difference between Amiga and PC was that Commodore had a Kernal and PC had the command.com for normal hardware, then the PC had config.sys and Amiga had the startup-sequence. Which one did I like better, the Amigas startup instructions, because you could put the device drivers and the libs in their folders and you knew where they went and what they did, while the PC's are scattered through a numerous amount of directories. I don't even think wild bill gates actually knew what was going on in his system.
At this time I don't see any point to this debate because the applicatin programming set is used by both computers, the only difference is that Commodore had a built in Kernal, while the PC had a Command.com for hardware, while the application programming instruction set can also be used also for applications. If anything the Amiga wins this bout just by having its kernal in memory and didn't have to depend on mechanical means (hard drive) to load its instruction set for the normally used hardware, but also by todays modern bios, most instructions are already configured for the hardware in todays PC causing a lot slower boot time due to everything it has to find and control hardware wise, while the Amiga was pretty standard with no new advancements in hardware design.
smerf
-
As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines. Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.
Well, Paula didn't change much.
It would be a joke to compared CBM's OCS/ECS/AGA's evolution rate to NVIDIA's NV20/NV30/G70/G80/G200/G300(soon).
>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.
No, it works right now. If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program. You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.
You'll get PS3 instead. We all know PS3 was "designed to be hard to program" LOL.
-
I don't see the argument why you MUST have an API access only.
Re-target capability.
And if hardware compatibility can help make things more efficient,
Less efficient when dealing complex abstract objects. In modern game programming, you have middleware vendors to accelerate development. API libraries like PhysX or Havok.
PhysX enabled game can be made to run on
1. CPU e.g. X86 or PPC
2. GPU (CUDA processor)
3. PPU (PhysX Processor Unit)
4. CELL
Your program is simplistic in nature.
why not spend the time. I/O has improved but not as much as processor speeds.
Depends on the I/O. Hypertransport is magnitude faster than Amiga's joystick port.
Building a clustered supercomputer based on Amiga’s joystick port would be a joke.
And I gave the example of palette changes which (if you go time them) you will find they are not that much faster than amiga changing palette. This is just one example.
My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
>>>As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines. Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.
Sorry you are wrong the only way to get AGA to work was with the setpatch command that was put in your startup sequence.
>>>No, it works right now. If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program. You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.
The only way to program the hardware was through the machine language where you could bang the hardware with machine code instructions. Not recommended by Commodore.
>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.
>>>Straw-man argument. I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.
Sorry wrong again, if you can bang the Amiga hardware, you can certainly bang the PC hardware the same way, and since the new hardware is faster it will execute faster.
>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.
>>>Bullcrap. Go re-read the data.
Excuse me if you are using joystick data, I had a PCI card where i could use an Amiga Joystick on it and it worked just as fast as the Amiga (new hardware wins again)
>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.
>>>The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer. Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data. Your thinking is flawed. I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).
I believe you there, the PC joystick cards using variable resistors instead of switches was terrible, but my card which used the PCI slot for Amiga/Atari joysticks was just as fast if not faster than the Amiga.
>I think I understand the problem better then you do.
You think you do.
>...say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.
>>>That's not even the point. Joystick on Amiga is faster even if you do one sample every 1/60 second. And why are you narrowing to just USB; Gameport is also a valid joystick port for millions of PC owners.
OK I will agree with you on this one, the Amiga joystick was faster than most PC joystick cards but it was slower than the PCI card I had for Amiga/Atari joysticks, actually had to calibrate it to go slower so youn could see the cross hairs.LOL
>...that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.
You're in ignorance.
HI,
@Amigaski,
Sorry to tear you up like this, but the PC did have all kinds of special stuff made for it that was comparable or faster than the Amiga.
smerf
-
I was making the point that certain applications go directly to hardware yet don't effect the multitasking OS. They return and OS is still stable as it was. Even the examples of audio playback in Compute! magazines are directly writing to hardware registers rather than making APi calls.
You haven't answered Protracker 1 vs Octamed 4 vs Deluxe Music 2.0 interactions.
On modern GPU and using NVIDIA's Cg shaders
const static float3x3 m = float3x3(
0.2209, 0.3390, 0.4184,
0.1138, 0.6780, 0.7319,
0.0102, 0.1130, 0.2969);
inline float4 PS3_LogLuv_Encode(in float3 rgb)
{
float4 res; // float4(Ue, Ve, LeHigh, LeLow)
float3 Xp_Y_XYZp = mul(rgb,m);
Xp_Y_XYZp = max(Xp_Y_XYZp, float3(1e-6, 1e-6, 1e-6));
res.xy = Xp_Y_XYZp.xy / Xp_Y_XYZp.z;
float Le = 2 * log2(Xp_Y_XYZp.y) + 128;
res.z = Le / 256;
res.w = frac(Le);
return res;
}
Running this code through NVShaderPerf gives 5 cycles for 9 instructions. When inserted at the end of a longer shader where there is plenty of room for instruction pairing, the total overhead for the LogLuv conversion will be less than this, perhaps around 3 cycles.
This code snippet is use to enable HDR and hardware AA on PS3. The other exercise is to do the conversion from LogLuv back to RGB.
This type of optimisation works on Geforce 7. I like PS3 devs for taking care of Geforce 7 and other DirectX9c class GPUs.
If you have any modern GPU enquires, one should visit Beyond3D's forums i.e. you have professional game developers lurking in that particular forums.
On Amiga, without OpenGL shaders it's difficult to test shader code snippets from PS3 and XNA forums.
-
>...say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.
That's not even the point. Joystick on Amiga is faster even if you do one sample every 1/60 second.
Vista's default USB mouse poll rate is 125Hz or 1/125 per second. There are hacks to increase this default rate to 1000hz. My Logitech gaming mouse uses its own drivers.
USB2.0 can support external graphics card and sound card (e.g. external X-Fi).
http://winstars.manufacturer.globalsources.com/si/6008814464080/pdtl/USB-video/1014405597/USB-Graphics-Card-Adapter.htm
"A fast usb host can achieve 40 MBytes/sec. The theorical 60 MB/sec cannot be achieved, because of the margin taken between the sof's (125 us), so if a packet cannot take place before the sof, the packet will be rescheduled after the next sof. On top of that, all the USB transactions are handled by software on the PC. For instance, a USB host on a PCI bus will send or receive the data via the PCI bus; the stack will prepare the next data in memory and receive interrupt from the host."
And why are you narrowing to just USB; Gameport is also a valid joystick port for millions of PC owners.
As of 2008, laptop PCs has overtaken the desktop PC in annual unit sales. It would be difficult to find legacy game port on these laptops. Most laptops include an ExpressCard I/O port i.e. external PCI-Express X1 port.
-
Even on desktops you'd be hard pressed to find a gameport, most PCs sold within the last 3 or 4 years have simply had a bank of USB ports, with only a select few retaining the odd legacy port.
-
On a fixed platform be it one that's discontinued (Amiga) or an embedded or industrial controller, having those sorts of options is great and depending on the hardware again, hitting the hardware might be your only way of acomplishing something.
...
Some cases hardware access is the only way, but in some cases you have both options (API or hardware access) and hardware access is superior method.
>There are, just for (m)ATX boards 23 different variations. That's even before we look at the offerings from AMD. 23...
Even when vendors make VGA cards using VGA standard (which required hardware level compatibility), you had several ATI card variations-- some faster than others but they maintained hardware compatibility not API level compatibility.
-
I believe this was already responded to as to why you were wrong then too.
...
No, OCS registers are compatible with AGA. Give link where it was responded. I have so many OCS applications (going directly to hardware) that run fine on AGA. Applications relying on processor timing or using different ROM APIs may have problems.
>Without being able to show that the Amiga can distinguish and react to your output, your data is meaningless.
>Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.
It's as simple as writing an application to read joystick and move a sprite around and this sort of loop is present in many programs. The loop runs as fast as machine allows it.
>That is not a sentence.
It has a subject and predicate; therefore, it's a sentence.
-
Some cases hardware access is the only way, but in some cases you have both options (API or hardware access) and hardware access is superior method.
For the love of... And by the time you have full support for all of those motherboards in the example given, even with the specs, you're three or more years down the line and not even one line of code toward building a game or application that takes advantage of that "superior" speed. And after that you still have the minefield that is graphics and soundcards ahead of you... In the mean time, your competators, using API's are rolling in the cash made from their hardwork, you know, actually having produced and sold their applications, using todays hardware, not having had to worry about such things.
Things move too fast in the PC landscape for anything other then programs such as demos to be considered as viable candidates.
Even when vendors make VGA cards using VGA standard (which required hardware level compatibility), you had several ATI card variations-- some faster than others but they maintained hardware compatibility not API level compatibility.
LOL WUT? If you code for DirectX6, you can be pretty damn sure that that code will still run on DirectX10. Same for OpenGL. VGA support is fine if you only want the bare basics, the moment you make one step beyond those basics your workload increases exponentially.
I remember when I was heavily into BeOS and was talking to the Nvidia driver developer, to access things we take for granted, such as hardware acceleration, required huge amounts of code even for the small selection of cards that BeOS supported, and thats without any 3D effects being thrown into the mix. Simply getting the card to initialise changed from card to card, with some venders adding extra supprises on top of that. Just to get to the stage where the Geforce2MX through to the 6600 took around 5 years. And by that time the 6600 had been out for 2. Even then, after all that, some card models lacked things like overlay support.
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
...
Sorry to tear you up like this, but the PC did have all kinds of special stuff made for it that was comparable or faster than the Amiga.
smerf
Looks like you got your "quote" "/quote"s mixed up, but I'll address your points: (1) Yeah, you can build a custom joystick interface for your PC that's faster than Amigas-- but what's standard out there-- gameport and USB port based joysticks are inferior. Nor are PCs headed toward that direction of building PCI digital joystick cards nor parallel port based joystick interfaces. (2) Regarding going directly to hardware on PCs-- that's still a fantasy since modern PC hardware is NOT compatible on the hardware level. It's only compatible on API level. And that's the guts of my current argument-- if PC had hardware compatibility instead of API compatibility, it would allow for better more efficient software. Only legacy ports are giving you that option currently.
-
>Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.
It's as simple as writing an application to read joystick and move a sprite around and this sort of loop is present in many programs. The loop runs as fast as machine allows it.
I'm fairly certain that was more or less along the lines of what Karlos suggested... How many pages ago?
>That is not a sentence.
It has a subject and predicate; therefore, it's a sentence.
You cannot use the word ignorance as you did. It is gramatically incorrect and as such is invalid. It is not a sentence.
-
(2) Regarding going directly to hardware on PCs-- that's still a fantasy since modern PC hardware is NOT compatible on the hardware level.
Correct, and that is all to the good.
It's only compatible on API level. And that's the guts of my current argument-- if PC had hardware compatibility instead of API compatibility, it would allow for better more efficient software. Only legacy ports are giving you that option currently.
No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.
-
Originally Posted by koaftder View Post
To amigaksi:
Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?
With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code. Also depends on what the instructions are. One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.
You are thinking too hard about this question. I guess I should have framed the question better. Assume a Von Neumann machine with an extremely orthogonal instruction set, each instruction executing within a single machine cycle and no port I/O, all hardware interfaces mapped within a linear 32bit address space.
It's a question regarding software design which should lead to some more interesting conversation regarding hardware design and the symbiotic relationship between the two.
-
Looks like you got your "quote" "/quote"s mixed up, but I'll address your points: (1) Yeah, you can build a custom joystick interface for your PC that's faster than Amigas-- but what's standard out there-- gameport and USB port based joysticks are inferior.
.
USB multifunction modules that provides 1 MHz sampling speed .
http://www.iotech.com/products/pdaq3s.htm
USB modules that provides 2 MHz sampling speed.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15005752_ITM
"High Speed" USB has 125 usec to 4 sec maximum latency with bInterval 125 usec.
"Full Speed" USB has 1 msec to 255 msec maximum latency with bInterval 1 msec.
Most USB devices today are developed using a microcontroller, the microcontroller can be used to
queue up the data and make it available to the host in larger transfers, thereby decreasing the number
of transfers and increasing the size of each transfer and increasing efficiency.
Depending on many factors the host processor may not be able to transfer the interrupt data at
the requested interval. OS design, driver design, application software, CPU speed, and bus
bandwidth may all limit the host’s ability to meet the obligation to poll for interrupt transfer data
within the required interval.
The hardware is capable. It's up to the customer to select the right software solution i.e.
1. RTOS QNX, eCos.
2. Adding RT modules for Windows XP Embedded e.g. Venturcom RTX, INtime.
3. Switch MS Windows edition i.e. Windows CE .NET. Refer to http://www.windowsfordevices.com/articles/AT2137345992.html
Nor are PCs headed toward that direction of building PCI digital joystick cards
.
There's Catweasel IV. It's too bad it's not in ExpressCard format.
nor parallel port based joystick interfaces. (2) Regarding going directly to hardware on PCs-- that's still a fantasy since modern PC hardware is NOT compatible on the hardware level. It's only compatible on API level. And that's the guts of my current argument-- if PC had hardware compatibility instead of API compatibility, it would allow for better more efficient software. Only legacy ports are giving you that option currently.
I don’t know why you are addicted to this joystick thing?
What market are you targeting?
-
Don't forget Max Headroom was done on Amiga. If you can remember that.
:laughing:
Does being first count for anything nowadays?
-
You haven't answered Protracker 1 vs Octomed 4 vs Deluxe Music 2.0 interactions.
On modern GPU and using NVIDIA's Cg shaders
const static float3x3 m = float3x3(
0.2209, 0.3390, 0.4184,
0.1138, 0.6780, 0.7319,
0.0102, 0.1130, 0.2969);
inline float4 PS3_LogLuv_Encode(in float3 rgb)
{
float4 res; // float4(Ue, Ve, LeHigh, LeLow)
float3 Xp_Y_XYZp = mul(rgb,m);
Xp_Y_XYZp = max(Xp_Y_XYZp, float3(1e-6, 1e-6, 1e-6));
res.xy = Xp_Y_XYZp.xy / Xp_Y_XYZp.z;
float Le = 2 * log2(Xp_Y_XYZp.y) + 128;
res.z = Le / 256;
res.w = frac(Le);
return res;
}
Running this code through NVShaderPerf gives 5 cycles for 9 instructions. When inserted at the end of a longer shader where there is plenty of room for instruction pairing, the total overhead for the LogLuv conversion will be less than this, perhaps around 3 cycles.
This code snippet is use to enable HDR and hardware AA on PS3. The other exercise is to do the conversion from LogLuv back to RGB.
This type of optimisation works on Geforce 7. I like PS3 devs for taking care of Geforce 7 and other DirectX9c class GPUs.
If you have any modern GPU enquires, one should visit Beyond3D's forums i.e. you have professional game developers lurking in that particular forums.
On Amiga, without OpenGL shaders it's difficult to test shader code snippets from PS3 and XNA forums.
Now how does above relate to palette setting using a Windows APi call?
-
With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code. Also depends on what the instructions are. One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.
Don't forget Max Headroom was done on Amiga. If you can remember that.
:laughing:
Does being first count for anything nowadays?
It's a little known fact, but the stuttering was an unintended feature. The Amiga crashed so much they had to hire an assistant to "poll" the reset switch 5 times a second to keep it going. It wasn't a big deal because the Amiga booted so fast and besides, people liked the effect.
-
Well, Paula didn't change much.
It would be a joke to compared CBM's OCS/ECS/AGA's evolution rate to NVIDIA's NV20/NV30/G70/G80/G200/G300(soon).
...
Paula didn't change much is not the point. The other custom chips that did do enhancement are also backward compatible with OCS. Evolution rate should not impede people for making them backward compatible on hardware level. The point is that the methodology of going about it is inferior-- they are already targeting only API level compatibility.
-
USB multifunction modules that provides 1 MHz sampling speed .
http://www.iotech.com/products/pdaq3s.htm
USB modules that provides 2 MHz sampling speed.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15005752_ITM
I know anyone can build hardware for any computer to do anything computer is able to do. But we are looking at standards. If all I did was talk about Video Toaster features on Amiga 4000, it wouldn't be talking about the general Amiga audience.
>There's Catweasel IV. It's too bad it's not in ExpressCard format.
Yeah, some Atari people also built joystick interface using parallel port but PC games out there aren't using it nor does having many different non-standard joystick interfaces give you ability to do low-level programming.
>I don’t know why you are addicted to this joystick thing?
It was one of the things mentioned that is superior on Amiga, but some people can't understand that so the argument keeps going on and on.
>What market are you targeting?
Most of the audience. In amigas case, if you use the joystick interface $DFF00A, it works on all Amigas.
-
Correct, and that is all to the good.
...
That's bad that modern PCs aren't hardware compatible with each other.
>No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.
No, if hardware was compatible like earlier VGA cards, they would use SAME I/O ports, same IRQs, same MEMORY MAP areas, etc. And even if you had multiple boards in the same system (in rare cases), there's the plug-n-play hardware that allows you to remap the I/O ports. Take another good example-- parallel ports are always mapped to 378h, 278h, 3BCh and using plug-n-play you can have 3 parallel ports and each one can be mapped to any of the standard I/O port locations.
-
I'm fairly certain that was more or less along the lines of what Karlos suggested... How many pages ago?
...
That test is not needed if you understand the logic. I'll do it when I feel like it and have time.
>That is not a sentence.
>You cannot use the word ignorance as you did. It is gramatically incorrect and as such is invalid. It is not a sentence.
"You're in ignorance" is perfectly valid sentence and also reflects reality.
-
That's bad that modern PCs aren't hardware compatible with each other.
Again, I have to disagree with you. More on this in a sec.
>No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.
No, if hardware was compatible like earlier VGA cards, they would use SAME I/O ports, same IRQs, same MEMORY MAP areas, etc. And even if you had multiple boards in the same system (in rare cases), there's the plug-n-play hardware that allows you to remap the I/O ports. Take another good example-- parallel ports are always mapped to 378h, 278h, 3BCh and using plug-n-play you can have 3 parallel ports and each one can be mapped to any of the standard I/O port locations.
As I said in a previous post, that's all great for the very basics, but once you get into multiple layers of this and things become more complex, the hassle of maintaining this hardware compatability becomes emense, not to mention pointless - no desktop built in the last few years has a serial or parallel port, ISA hasn't been seen for over a decade and PCI has (largely) been discontinued, this is true especially of fast evolving things like graphics.
The modern x86_64 is perhaps one of the most kludgey processors ever created, it is essentially a highly advanced risc core that has to have a pile of extra logic to convert between what we know as x86 and what it uses internally. I read somewhere (ok, I could be wrong and I would appreciate being corrected on this) that nearly a third of all the logic built into an x86 core is there purely to translate between x86 and the risc part. A third!
x86 is considered by most to be a massive and hugely inefficient hack. It should have died with the P4 and moved over to the Itainium tbh, but no, AMD bolted on another hack and here we are, nearly a decade later with it limping on still.
Now consider how much extra logic would have to be built into a modern gpu so as to include hardware compatability with just the major jumps in gpu design over the years...
Can you even begin to imagine the horror such a chip would be? I don't even want to think about the thermal and power implications.
-
Paula didn't change much is not the point. The other custom chips that did do enhancement are also backward compatible with OCS.
The changes is comparatively minor. We are talking about following the latest micro-architecture paradigm and implementing them. From Nov 2006 to Q1 2010, you have G200 (SIMT) and G300 (MIMT*) designs being released.
In the GPU market, maximum math unit count at a given transistor budget is paramount. Adding legacy compatibility reduces the available transistors for math units.
Haven’t you noticed that ATI and NVIDIA are in GFLOPS and TFLOPS race?
Evolution rate should not impede people for making them backward compatible on hardware level.
It's a matter of priorities. The market with get a GPU with legacy ISA support i.e. Intel Larrabee.
The point is that the methodology of going about it is inferior-- they are already targeting only API level compatibility.
It's actually superior when factoring the maximising math unit count.
-
I know anyone can build hardware for any computer to do anything computer is able to do. But we are looking at standards. If all I did was talk about Video Toaster features on Amiga 4000, it wouldn't be talking about the general Amiga audience.
So you want it to be mainstream eh? I can do that...
USB2 Soundblaster Audigy2. (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Creative-Sound-Blaster-Audigy2-ZS-Video-Editor-71Ch-4Port-USB2-Hub-THX-External-USB2)
Ok perhaps that one too is a little OTT, but there are a great many other USB cards at much lower prices, and I'd bet good money that they too can sample at far, far higher rates then 1khz. I pointed to this one simply because it was the first one I found that had the sampling rate capabilities printed out up front. The other cards I looked at briefly are available to view here (http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=1-0-42-54-0). Note that as laptops are becoming more and more popular, these sorts of external usb based expansions are becoming ever more mainstream.
In a way the above box is almost as though the hardware has gone full circle - many old soundcards included a gameport, now they're including usb ports...
-
Again, I have to disagree with you. More on this in a sec.
>No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.
As I said in a previous post, that's all great for the very basics, but once you get into multiple layers of this and things become more complex, the hassle of maintaining this hardware compatability becomes emense, not to mention pointless - no desktop built in the last few years has a serial or parallel port, ISA hasn't been seen for over a decade and PCI has (largely) been discontinued, this is true especially of fast evolving things like graphics.
The modern x86_64 is perhaps one of the most kludgey processors ever created, it is essentially a highly advanced risc core that has to have a pile of extra logic to convert between what we know as x86 and what it uses internally. I read somewhere (ok, I could be wrong and I would appreciate being corrected on this) that nearly a third of all the logic built into an x86 core is there purely to translate between x86 and the risc part. A third!
Refer to http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architecture_of_AMDs_64bit_Core.html
It's about 10 percent for K8 Sledgehammer. The legacy tax is more apparent when you implement this as a GPU i.e. maximising math unit counts.
Unlike CPU vs CPU battles, the argument for clean designs is actually strong for the GPU market.
-
"You're in ignorance" is a perfectly valid sentence
fix'd.
and also reflects reality.
Pithy. Amusing given that you're the one whose backside has been handed back to them on a plate on pretty much every single point you've made thus far too.
-
Refer to http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architecture_of_AMDs_64bit_Core.html
It's about 10 percent for K8 Sledgehammer. The legacy tax is more apparent when you implement this as a GPU i.e. maximising math unit counts.
Ahh, cheers for that! I am curious though how it compares to other processors in the x86 family now though.
But again, thanks for pointing me to that.
-
I know anyone can build hardware for any computer to do anything computer is able to do. But we are looking at standards. If all I did was talk about Video Toaster features on Amiga 4000, it wouldn't be talking about the general Amiga audience.
>There's Catweasel IV. It's too bad it's not in ExpressCard format.
Yeah, some Atari people also built joystick interface using parallel port but PC games out there aren't using it nor does having many different non-standard joystick interfaces give you ability to do low-level programming.
>I don’t know why you are addicted to this joystick thing?
It was one of the things mentioned that is superior on Amiga, but some people can't understand that so the argument keeps going on and on.
>What market are you targeting?
Most of the audience. In amigas case, if you use the joystick interface $DFF00A, it works on all Amigas.
What about A1 and SAM?
-
Not to mention the Peg. Wasn't there some talk also of OS4 being able to run on a MacMini as well?
-
Not to mention the Peg. Wasn't there some talk also of OS4 being able to run on a MacMini as well?
found this poking around.
Amiga OS 4.0 Install CD for Mac Mini G4 (Moana Loader)
------------------------------------------------------
This CD will allow you to boot the Amiga OS 4.0 kernel and run the Amiga OS 4.0 installer. I've yet to try installing this on my hard drive.
The knows issues with the Moana loader are:
* Displays message that USB stack has not been loaded (USB keyboards and mice work)
* Doesn't detect the Mac Mini built-in Ethernet
* Doesn't detect the Mac Mini AirPort Extreme card
* Doesn't detect the Mac Mini Bluetooth device
* Probably a lot more I've not come across yet!
Testing has been performed with a Mac Mini G4 with the following specs:
Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: PowerMac10,2
Processor Name: PowerPC G4 (1.2)
Processor Speed: 1.5 GHz
Number Of CPUs: 1
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.9.4f0
This CD may/may not work on other Mac Mini G4 models.
Instructions for booting:
-------------------------
1) Boot into Open Firmware (Hold down "Option" "Command" "o" "f" when powering on)
2) First time users will only need to enter the following command once:
setenv boota-device cd:
3) Begin loading the OS 4.0 kernel/kickstart by typing in the following command:
boot cd:slb_v2
4) Select option "1. Amiga OS 4.x/MM_Full_silent_USB"
5) Press "Enter" at the "Installed mem: 1024 mega bega" prompt
6) Press "Enter" at the "About to build thecopy of the OF tree; Code start at 0x01800000; press any key" prompt
7) Press "Enter" at the "All init done; about to kill OF and start ExecSG; press any key" prompt
At this point, the screen should turn black and after a few seconds, the CD drive will spin up.
Eventually you'll see an AmigaDOS window displaying the message "USB stack not loaded". Oddly enough, USB keyboards and mice seem to work.
7) You'll be greeted with a "Welcome to the Amiga OS 4.0 Install CD" window, click on "Proceed"
8) On the next window, select your language, country and time zone and click "Use"
9) A window will pop up and will ask how the system time should be updated. Click on "System"
10) A window will pop up with the message "Your system time has been updated". Click on "OK"
11) Shortly after, a window will appear to advise you that you must select a keyboard. Click "OK"
12) Select your keyboard and click "Use"
If the start up appears to stall between steps 10 and 11, press "Ctrl C" and you should see a "WAIT: ***Break" message appear. The installer will now continue.
Good luck!
-
All I am stating regarding hardware standards is that they base it on I/O ports and memory maps like VGA/EGA/CGA was rather than API calls. That way, you don't have to rely on any drivers and API calls although those can also be present in a system.
>From the above statement, clearly not. I could program a "pallete change" for my GPU that simultaneously sets every colour register in parallel in a couple of shader clock cycles.
Now you call an API to do that which works on majority of PCs and see how well it performs as compared to Amiga swapping two palette registers or to a standard VGA swapping color registers. You can't just target your machine since we are talking about making it work in general; that's why I am talking hardware compatibility to begin with.
1) Not just my machine, any CUDA 1.0+ capable machine. That's every G80 upwards. There are more of those installed in machines today than there are amigas. Hence my code will run on more machines than yours.
2) It won't run on the rest. Well, there's a pity. Perhaps this is why API calls exist in the first place, eh?
>However, palette changes are a thing of the past for modern hardware. I haven't used a indexed colour mode for more than a few hours (usually when retgrogaming) in almost 10 years, even on the Amiga.
That's subjective.
No it isn't its FACT. The only time I have used indexed colour modes are on a physical AGA machine when playing old games. The rest of the time I run 32-bit truecolour displays, or at worst, high colour 16-bit ones.
But regardless, I was giving example where I/O accesses are better than API calls and Amiga I/O accesses aren't that slow.
Compared to speed of modern graphics memory it is ACHINGLY SLOW. Why don't you time how many palette registers you can update in 1 second? Doing it from either the copper or the CPU, you'll hit the limit of the bus speed. However you decide to divide the workload between the copper and CPU, you are going to be restricted by the write bandwidth, which is at best 7-8MB/s for AGA class hardware and even less for OCS/ECS.
That particular limitation is mitigated in current hardware, where memory bandwidth is in the GiB/s range. So, in the time it takes you to set just one palette register with an IO instruction, a modern G200 class GPU could have done all of them dozens of times over, that's even before you parallelise the code.
Assuming you want to set 256 32-bit registers, you can do so by moving a vector of 4 32-bit integers to the target location. CUDA executes parallel threads in "warps" of 32 threads. In the absence of any conditional branching, every thread in a warp runs the same instruction concurrently as it's neigbours.
So, you'd need a GPU kernel that you invoke as a pair of concurrent warps (giving 64 threads in total), where each thread sets a block of 4 registers using a vector of 4 ints, ensuring coalesced memory access.
64 threads each setting 4 registers in parallel, each thread running in parallel. On my GPU, which will happily run 24576 parallel threads at any one instant, that's only 64/24576 = 0.26% utilisation.
In theory, that's pretty damn fast, especially at 1.3GHz (shader clock of said PU)
In practise, it would take much longer to set up than it does to execute. That dominates the timing, so much so that I'd almost guarantee that a basic API call on the CPU that just does 256 successive 32-bit writes to the same address space would be faster in "real" time and would work on any graphics card.
So, for all I can actually set the registers faster by "hitting the metal", the end result is less portable and most likely slower than using the API since the job at hand is so easy to do anyway that it ceases to benefit from HW acceleration.
-
Ahh, cheers for that! I am curious though how it compares to other processors in the x86 family now though.
But again, thanks for pointing me to that.
While some members of the x86 family (I note the 286 and 386) were horrific fankenPuters... The x86_64 is actually pretty hot, AMD pretty much cleaned out all the old cruft and once the CPU is in "long mode", I can't think of a better* general purpose CPU right now :)
*it's pretty cheap too, always a bonus :D
-
What about A1 and SAM?
I'm only considering Amigas w/either OCS/ECS/ or AGA.
On what basis are those called "Amigas"?
-
fix'd.
Pithy. Amusing given that you're the one whose backside has been handed back to them on a plate on pretty much every single point you've made thus far too.
Can't understand English. Just declaring them false statements won't help. Every statement I made is correct.
Even DirectX is flawed which is irrelevant to my point is correct. Before DirectX 1.0, I had video cards that supported OpenGL, 3D rendering, MPEG4, VGA standard, hardware accerated rendering, etc. You are so biased, you only read those who reply to me and refuse to understand simple logical statements that are true regardless of what you say.
-
Again, I have to disagree with you. More on this in a sec.
>No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.
As I said in a previous post, that's all great for the very basics, but once you get into multiple layers of this and things become more complex, the hassle of maintaining this hardware compatability becomes emense, not to mention pointless - no desktop built in the last few years has a serial or parallel port, ISA hasn't been seen for over a decade and PCI has (largely) been discontinued, this is true especially of fast evolving things like graphics.
...
Complete rubbish-- didn't even address the point. I gave an EXAMPLE of parallel port. You can have hardware level compatibility for ANY DEVICE.
Re-read:
"No, if hardware was compatible like earlier VGA cards, they would use SAME I/O ports, same IRQs, same MEMORY MAP areas, etc. And even if you had multiple boards in the same system (in rare cases), there's the plug-n-play hardware that allows you to remap the I/O ports. Take another good example-- parallel ports are always mapped to 378h, 278h, 3BCh and using plug-n-play you can have 3 parallel ports and each one can be mapped to any of the standard I/O port locations."
>Now consider how much extra logic would have to be built into a modern gpu so as to include hardware compatability with just the major jumps in gpu design over the years...
When you add a brand new feature, you assing new standard I/O ports-- you maintain the previous ones. Like they maintained CGA/EGA when making VGA.
Get a clue.
-
So you want it to be mainstream eh? I can do that...
USB2 Soundblaster Audigy2. (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Creative-Sound-Blaster-Audigy2-ZS-Video-Editor-71Ch-4Port-USB2-Hub-THX-External-USB2)
Ok perhaps that one too is a little OTT, but there are a great many other USB cards at much lower prices, and I'd bet good money that they too can sample at far, far higher rates then 1khz. I pointed to this one simply because it was the first one I found that had the sampling rate capabilities printed out up front. The other cards I looked at briefly are available to view here (http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=1-0-42-54-0). Note that as laptops are becoming more and more popular, these sorts of external usb based expansions are becoming ever more mainstream.
In a way the above box is almost as though the hardware has gone full circle - many old soundcards included a gameport, now they're including usb ports...
You just stated something that doesn't even address the joystick 1Khz sampling. It's a NEW piece of audio hardware. I think they are plugging in USB 2.0 cards in Amigas as well.
-
Re-target capability.
...
If most of planet is PC-based, retarget capability is minor in comparison to what you get with hardware level compatibility:
(1) Faster code
(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)
(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)
(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.
>Less efficient when dealing complex abstract objects.
I have yet to see someone here to prove to me that API is required once you make a piece of hardware have more functionality. Making a piece of hardware more complex has no realtionship to whether it uses API-based compatibility or hardware compatibility.
>My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.
"My" is the keyword. Is it generic enough?
-
Before DirectX 1.0, I had video cards that supported OpenGL, 3D rendering, MPEG4, VGA standard, hardware accerated rendering, etc.
MPEG-4 came out 3 years after DirectX 1.0.
-
MPEG-4 came out 3 years after DirectX 1.0.
MPEG was there in the Matrox video cards and some ATI cards in early 1990s. It may not be called MPEG4 but it was for video encoding/decoding. Another big bug with DirectX was that it was API-based and hardly any existing video cards at the time supported it's functions.
-
MPEG was there in the Matrox video cards and some ATI cards in early 1990s. It may not be called MPEG4 but it was for video encoding/decoding.
Nope.
Another big bug with DirectX was that it was API-based and hardly any existing video cards at the time supported it's functions.
How is this a bug, exactly?
Besides, DirectX isn't API based. It is an API.
-
>My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.
"My" is the keyword. Is it generic enough?
Every GPU presently available is faster at writing to it's own register set than all versions of the amiga chipset are at changing their palette registers.
Even my old Permedia 2, which doesn't really count as being a GPU (there's no real programmability), can load it's RGB registers via the FIFO in less time than it takes OCS to do it.
Is that generic enough for you?
-
It seems like all the arguments are falling down. Why not just call it a day Amigaksi eh?
Come on! You've dragged this thread on for far too long. It stopped being funny a long time ago. :rolleyes:
-
Why is is quicker to have the main CPU(s) interacting with the memory space of the GPU? Is that just a waste of CPU cycles? Why should the CPU even be concerned with graphics once it's passed off the information? Aren't modern GPUs just and extension of what the Amiga was trying to do with it's graphics chips?
In a way you could say that Amiga lost the computer race but it's ideas and goals won.
You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point. It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access. You have less options with just API access. Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.
If most of planet is PC-based, retarget capability is minor in comparison to what you get with hardware level compatibility:
(1) Faster code
(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)
(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)
(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.
>Less efficient when dealing complex abstract objects.
I have yet to see someone here to prove to me that API is required once you make a piece of hardware have more functionality. Making a piece of hardware more complex has no realtionship to whether it uses API-based compatibility or hardware compatibility.
>My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.
"My" is the keyword. Is it generic enough?
-
It seems like all the arguments are falling down. Why not just call it a day Amigaksi eh?
Come on! You've dragged this thread on for far too long. It stopped being funny a long time ago. :rolleyes:
There comes a time when a man has to stand up and wipe the dung off his joystick.
-
Complete rubbish-- didn't even address the point. I gave an EXAMPLE of parallel port. You can have hardware level compatibility for ANY DEVICE.
Your point was irrelevant as a parallel port from 20 years ago is still a parallel port today, it's not been improved upon or had its function changed in all that time. Yes you could get some PCI card to add back that functionality. But then you're fighting your own complaint about it being nonstandard. Things have changed. USB is pretty much all you'll find on the back of a PC these days. As I stated (and you ignored) once you move beyond the basics and start having to add support for as many layers as have been added to GPUs you are creating sreious headaches for yourself.
Re-read:
When you add a brand new feature, you assing new standard I/O ports-- you maintain the previous ones. Like they maintained CGA/EGA when making VGA.
Not always, in some cases new I/O completely replaces the old, as with USB, as with things like hypertransport, as with things like PCI-E. With 3D effects being added and with huge architecture changes, maintaining the compatability for more then the basics, for GPU's would be a monumental pita and be hugely detrimental to performance.
Get a clue.
You first.
-
If most of planet is PC-based, retarget capability is minor in comparison to what you get with hardware level compatibility:
(1) Faster code
On slower GPUs that take an order of magnitude longer to code for.
(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)
Which works fine right up to the point your "perfect" app ends up in IRQ or I/O conflict with one or more other applications.
(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)
lulwut? Of course a driver is going to be required, do you seriously intend to have everyone write their own partial drivers implimenting only the bits they need... Your way would make Windows95 look stable by comparason.
(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.
Which you then have to make sure doesn't interact badly with other code also running, meaning having to test against hundreds if not thousands of other applications, each with their own custom code for accessing I/O, memory, GPU, sound etc.
I have yet to see someone here to prove to me that API is required once you make a piece of hardware have more functionality. Making a piece of hardware more complex has no realtionship to whether it uses API-based compatibility or hardware compatibility.
It does when your application has to acces that functionality in terms of the time it takes to build, it is not that you get more functionality, it's that you get that functionality with far far less effort with an API.
-
Nope.
...
What's in a name? "A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet." Matrox card I still have supports MPEG in hardware. DirectX isn't always doing it in hardware also if you want to get picky.
>How is this a bug, exactly?
Besides actual bugs, it's flawed that they gradually added functionality that already existed before it was introduced. Why couldn't they do it in 1.0?
>Besides, DirectX isn't API based. It is an API.
They are both correct.
-
On slower GPUs that take an order of magnitude longer to code for.
...
I was speaking in general about API vs. hardware level compatibility not GPU.
>Which works fine right up to the point your "perfect" app ends up in IRQ or I/O conflict with one or more other applications.
Wrong as already explained.
>lulwut? Of course a driver is going to be required, do you seriously intend to have everyone write their own partial drivers implimenting only the bits they need... Your way would make Windows95 look stable by comparason.
Wrong, drivers aren't needed.
>It does when your application has to acces that functionality in terms of the time it takes to build, it is not that you get more functionality, it's that you get that functionality with far far less effort with an API.
"It takes less effort" is subjective and your opinion nor is it a strong argument given the gains of having hardware compatibility.
Stop misquoting me-- you did it again.
-
Your point was irrelevant as a parallel port from 20 years ago is still a parallel port today, it's not been improved upon or had its function changed in all that time. Yes you could get some PCI card to add back that functionality. But then you're fighting your own complaint about it being nonstandard. Things have changed. USB is pretty much all you'll find on the back of a PC these days. As I stated (and you ignored) once you move beyond the basics and start having to add support for as many layers as have been added to GPUs you are creating sreious headaches for yourself.
...
This shows your ignorance of parallel ports. As I said "get a clue". The example is good.
-
It seems like all the arguments are falling down. Why not just call it a day Amigaksi eh?
Come on! You've dragged this thread on for far too long. It stopped being funny a long time ago. :rolleyes:
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
So I don't know what you are reading. Perhaps you need glasses.
-
Why is is quicker to have the main CPU(s) interacting with the memory space of the GPU? Is that just a waste of CPU cycles? Why should the CPU even be concerned with graphics once it's passed off the information? Aren't modern GPUs just and extension of what the Amiga was trying to do with it's graphics chips?
In a way you could say that Amiga lost the computer race but it's ideas and goals won.
The point is that whatever the API-based set up would do, the hardware level interface would do better. Even GPUs would have to offer similar functionality just as processors offer compatibility between Intel processors and AMD or some other processors.
So the points are valid as stated:
(1) Faster code
(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)
(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)
(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.
-
Every GPU presently available is faster at writing to it's own register set than all versions of the amiga chipset are at changing their palette registers.
Even my old Permedia 2, which doesn't really count as being a GPU (there's no real programmability), can load it's RGB registers via the FIFO in less time than it takes OCS to do it.
Is that generic enough for you?
Well the example is quite precisely defined. You need to swap two color indices. I know even for standard vga there's a fast way to upload entire palette but doing particular indices is slower per index time. So let's see the code where user requests index 3 swapped with index 15 and works for majority of PCs.
-
Well the example is quite precisely defined. You need to swap two color indices. I know even for standard vga there's a fast way to upload entire palette but doing particular indices is slower per index time. So let's see the code where user requests index 3 swapped with index 15 and works for majority of PCs.
Out of curiosity, given that most (if not all) PCs are capable of running a 32bit screendepth, how necesary would it be to swap and change parts of the palette? I mean I can understand if you're working in a colour limited environment like OCS or AGA, but truecolour? How common would such a requirement be?
-
This shows your ignorance of parallel ports. As I said "get a clue". The example is good.
Ok then, what do they have now that wasn't in good quality gear from 20 years ago? And how many itterations are there? Also, just as one final point. What can you do with them now, that wasn't possible 20 years ago?
Either way you failed to address the rest of the point.
-
I was speaking in general about API vs. hardware level compatibility not GPU.
>Which works fine right up to the point your "perfect" app ends up in IRQ or I/O conflict with one or more other applications.
Wrong as already explained.
No, I don't think you did, how do you propose to prevent these sorts of conflicts outside of an API, remember we did have this, much to the detriment of stability, see Win95 and 98 for details.
Just because you can create the "perfect" app doesn't mean that everyone can.
>lulwut? Of course a driver is going to be required, do you seriously intend to have everyone write their own partial drivers implimenting only the bits they need... Your way would make Windows95 look stable by comparason.
Wrong, drivers aren't needed.
If you're having to reinvent the wheel and have every application bang the metal to the extent the app requires, you are in effect writing a (partial) driver or framework for your application to sit on. You then have the joy of making sure others, doing the same thing don't cause collisions of I/O. As both hardware and applications become ever more complex (see for instance the list of things your average web browser can do and work out just what it would require to do it via your model) I can only see such a model ending in tears.
No, wait. I've actually seen it end in tears (see windows from 95 onwards), which is why most if not all OS's today don't allow for direct hardware banging.
In fact, the more I think about this the more I realise that at some point you'd end up with defacto API's anyway - companies or individuals would begin to specialise and coalesce on different parts of the arch, either sharing outright their individual frameworks or licensing them. You would at some point see these various parts trading information so as to allow for better interoperability and stability or even merging.
In the end you'd end up with either a small group of companies producing a framework from which all else is built, or more or less what you have now with Microsoft.
At which point, why bother having all the extra drain of retaining compatability at all.
>It does when your application has to acces that functionality in terms of the time it takes to build, it is not that you get more functionality, it's that you get that functionality with far far less effort with an API.
"It takes less effort" is subjective and your opinion nor is it a strong argument given the gains of having hardware compatibility.
The gains of hardware compatability, yes, lets add 10, 20, 30% extra silicon to every major I/O chip for stuff that's no longer used and long dead... Your entire argument is based on a fairytale world.
Stop misquoting me-- you did it again.
Not in that post I didn't. If you're seriously going to bitch about me breaking up your posts to address single points for the sake of readability (which btw is generally the accepted standard and has been since usenet) then I suggest you leave the internet.
-
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
Liar.
USB multifunction modules that provides 1 MHz sampling speed .
http://www.iotech.com/products/pdaq3s.htm
USB modules that provides 2 MHz sampling speed.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15005752_ITM
"High Speed" USB has 125 usec to 4 sec maximum latency with bInterval 125 usec.
"Full Speed" USB has 1 msec to 255 msec maximum latency with bInterval 1 msec.
Most USB devices today are developed using a microcontroller, the microcontroller can be used to
queue up the data and make it available to the host in larger transfers, thereby decreasing the number
of transfers and increasing the size of each transfer and increasing efficiency.
Depending on many factors the host processor may not be able to transfer the interrupt data at
the requested interval. OS design, driver design, application software, CPU speed, and bus
bandwidth may all limit the host’s ability to meet the obligation to poll for interrupt transfer data
within the required interval.
This is why.
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
They have, that you dismissed the points out of hand, moved the goalposts or just attacked the poster and continued to bang on about your fairyland instead is irrelevant.
So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
I believe Karlos did that already, you then moved the goalposts.
So I don't know what you are reading. Perhaps you need glasses.
NO U.
-
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
So I don't know what you are reading. Perhaps you need glasses.
Seriously nobody in the PC architecture world is trying to catch up with the Amiga. They just couldn't give a damn about a retro platform that only a few people use. Seriously they are not losing sleep over abandoning joystick ports.
Find and quote for us just one PC engineer that is actively working on a mission to play Amiga catchup and I will say that you have ground for your arguments.
Oops! That just negates this whole thread. Sorry!
Can someone Start serving those pankakes. There's a hungry crowd out here. :lol:
-
So let's see the code where user requests index 3 swapped with index 15 and works for majority of PCs.
Using OpenGL, a GPU could probably swap the entire scene out and redraw it faster than an Amiga could swap two colour indexes.
-
1. So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
2. So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
3. So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
4. So I don't know what you are reading. Perhaps you need glasses.
Oh, my...
1. http://www.overclock.net/faqs/73418-how-improve-mouse-response-accuracy-changing.html
After many pages reading your silly rants about a joystick port that should be polled faster than on 20-years-later technologies, I simply got bored and entered "USB polling frequency driver" into Google, which gave me many interesting results. Just read what the first result has to say, "Windows by default has the usb ports working at 125Hz of 1000Hz that USB is capable of, giving 8ms response times. You can change the frequency to 250Hz(4ms), 500Hz(2ms) and 1000Hz(1ms) to get better response times" and please don't bug everyone else with your foolish assumptions.
2. That's not true. Everyone else here explained you that APIs are better just because they allow programming in shorter times, compatibility-friendly with more HW configuraions and much more future-proof. Those are advantages that greatly surpass, in magnitude orders, your obsolete concerns about code optimization and speed. Wake up! We are in 2009, we have GHz-range processors out there and we don't need to bang the hardware anymore. You simply DON'T WANT to listen to people saying this.
3. You don't even need an example, it's plain logic. Every time your OCS chip does a clock cycle, any modern, low-value GPU has already executed thousands of instructions.
4. No, he doesn't need glasses. YOU need a reality check. Or maybe a travel ticket to fantasyland, to Amiga Neverland or so.
-
And so this saga ends.
-
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
So far no one has shown the advantage of surpassing (or even equaling) the Amiga joystick port.
We could go on and on like this... and the day will come you'll be the only one talking... and maybe (but I'm not even sure) that day you'll discover how useless it is... and that day you'll buy a cheap USB joystick and enjoy nice games of today... wondering... "how did I miss these jewels ?"
I guess we all agree the Amiga's joystick port is more precise than anything available elsewhere. The fact is this doesn't make the Amiga better than anything else... nor does it make anything else catching up the Amiga...
Now if we could simply move on...
BTW: I'm still waiting for you to show me a single Amiga commercial game that cannot be played with an USB joystick because the interface is too slow for it...
-
and that day you'll buy a cheap USB joystick and enjoy nice games of today... wondering... "how did I miss these jewels ?"
why do you think he hasn't played any games of today?
Actually more generally why is it assumed he only uses an Amiga?
-
To answer the question.
NO. The PC is terms of hardware alone passde the Amiga well over ten years ago. Probably more like 15. Lets get real.
-
To answer the question.
NO. The PC is terms of hardware alone passde the Amiga well over ten years ago. Probably more like 15. Lets get real.
And the user-experience?
-
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
A yawn subject.
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
APIs enables the hardware to change significantly and reduce hardware complexity i.e. save on
1. Transistor usage,
2. Energy consumption.
3. Maximised math units.
Geforce 9650M GT: 22watts/(32 SP* + 8 SSP**) = 0.55 watts*** per stream processor.
It has excellent performance per watt.
*Dual Issue Stream Processor.
**Special Stream Processor.
***Should be less than this i.e. not factoring texture units, Early-Z, Giga-threading, Filters, AA, Pure-Video 3(another SIMD array) and etc.
Example of significant hardware change is between disastrous Geforce FX 5800 (VILW based) and fixed Geforce 6800 (SIMD based).
Higher level API's advantage is to encapsulate complex functions e.g. PhysX, XNA.
So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
My Quake 3 (demo001, normal settings) results in +500 FPS.
So I don't know what you are reading. Perhaps you need glasses.
That's all you can do?
-
And the user-experience?
Able to run multiple FLV in HD, upscale DVD (e.g. PowerDVD 8), play Blu-Ray 1080p movies, mobility and 'etc'.
-
As much as I love my Amiga, and all things related to amiga, I would say the user experiece of Windows XP (Apart from slow booting times) is way better, useful quicker etc. And no i dont care it s a dual core am64 with 4 gig of ram versus 50mhz 040 and 32mb of ram.
My pc cost a lot less to make too.
-
And so this saga ends.
I think I agree with you here. The thread does seem to have run out of steam at this point.
Oh well. You could always start another controversial topic that will keep us entartained for pages and pages. or not. :lol:
It'll sure keep the site lively. ;)
-
Able to run multiple FLV in HD, upscale DVD (e.g. PowerDVD 8), play Blu-Ray 1080p movies, mobility and 'etc'.
I hate to nitpick, but he stated 'probably 15 years ago'.
I'd hardly see you doing any of those things on a bog standard PC from 1994 ;)
Heck, most of the PC's out there today can't do all of those things, let alone at the same time.
(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)
-
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
I think you're mixing up the USB stack and the API. The USB stack can have a hickup from time to time (well, in Windows that is). But an API is just a redirection, which, especially nowadays, doesn't cause any noticeable delay.
So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.
Eh? Palette index swapping? For at least 10 years, that isn't been used anymore. (when a 32 bit palette became common in 3d acceleration)
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
A Palette Swap is a concept most commonly found in fighting games. Palette Swaps occur when two or more characters share the same style sprite or character model with only minor color or cosmetic changes. Although visually similar, pallet swap characters may have very different moves and personalities.
So far as I can find a palette swap is used in only 38 games.
Oh my God that is a lot of games, how can I cope with this grave defect in API's, I am going to junk my PC and return to the Amiga because of this defect, to think that I am slowing down my computer when I play these 38 games out of thousands that are out there for the PC.
Thank You Amigaski for bringing this grave defect up, I will always be grateful to you
Palette swap games as follows:
1. Battletoads
2. World of Warcraft (now wonder I always lose, I didn't think I was that crummy)
3. Bionic Commando Rearmed
4. Soul Calibur IV
5. Super smash Bros. Brawl
6. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
7. Phantasy Star Universe
8. Mortal Kombat Armageddon
9. Soul Calibur III
10. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
11. Samurai Shodown V Special
12. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
13 Soul Calibur II
14. Supr Smash Bros. Melee
15. Advance Wars
16. Diablo II
17. Diablo Gift Pack
18. Sour Calibur
19. Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven
20. Mortal Kombat 4
21. Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa's Revenge
22. Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars
23. Mortal Kombat Trilogy
24. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
25. Lufla II: Rise of the Sinistrals
26. Mortal Kombat 3
27. Killer Instinct
28. Mortal Kombat II
29. Battletoads In Battlemaniacs
30. Mortal Kombat
31. SuperMario Bros. 3
32. Final Fight
33. Goldern Axe
34. Barbarian
35. Super Mario Bros.
36. Mario Bros.
37. Joust
38. World of Warcraft
There you have it people the 38 games made that have the critical pallette swap error using API,
Thank You Amigaski for this very important information, we are very obliged to you for this information.
Now can you tell us what kind of drugs that you are on, we would all like to get some of it because it has to be really good stuff.
smerf
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
A Palette Swap is a concept most commonly found in fighting games. Palette Swaps occur when two or more characters share the same style sprite or character model with only minor color or cosmetic changes. Although visually similar, pallet swap characters may have very different moves and personalities.
So far as I can find a palette swap is used in only 38 games.
Oh my God that is a lot of games, how can I cope with this grave defect in API's, I am going to junk my PC and return to the Amiga because of this defect, to think that I am slowing down my computer when I play these 38 games out of thousands that are out there for the PC.
Thank You Amigaski for bringing this grave defect up, I will always be grateful to you
Palette swap games as follows:
1. Battletoads
2. World of Warcraft (now wonder I always lose, I didn't think I was that crummy)
3. Bionic Commando Rearmed
4. Soul Calibur IV
5. Super smash Bros. Brawl
6. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
7. Phantasy Star Universe
8. Mortal Kombat Armageddon
9. Soul Calibur III
10. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
11. Samurai Shodown V Special
12. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
13 Soul Calibur II
14. Supr Smash Bros. Melee
15. Advance Wars
16. Diablo II
17. Diablo Gift Pack
18. Sour Calibur
19. Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven
20. Mortal Kombat 4
21. Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa's Revenge
22. Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars
23. Mortal Kombat Trilogy
24. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
25. Lufla II: Rise of the Sinistrals
26. Mortal Kombat 3
27. Killer Instinct
28. Mortal Kombat II
29. Battletoads In Battlemaniacs
30. Mortal Kombat
31. SuperMario Bros. 3
32. Final Fight
33. Goldern Axe
34. Barbarian
35. Super Mario Bros.
36. Mario Bros.
37. Joust
38. World of Warcraft
There you have it people the 38 games made that have the critical pallette swap error using API,
Thank You Amigaski for this very important information, we are very obliged to you for this information.
Now can you tell us what kind of drugs that you are on, we would all like to get some of it because it has to be really good stuff.
smerf
I think he meant the practice of changing the onscreen colours in non true colour systems, such as the index based palette colours used on the Amiga and VGA/SVGA 256 colour mode. As in, when you change (or swap) colour one from blue to green and all pixels which where blue are now green.
Which is not relevant in todays games anymore at all because no games made these days still use index colour modes like the old ones did and GFX cards are fast enough* to change every pixel on screen from one colour to another in less time than it takes to draw the pixels on screen anyway.
It was a cool trick back in the days though. Lots of copper tricks are based on the index colour nature of Amiga displays. Colour cycling is also one of the tricks make possible using this technique. Then again, they had to because the machines back then where 'not very good' at displaying true colour images. These days all these effects can be done the brute force way and developers no longer really care about 2D performance anymore.
*) By at least one order of magnitude, probably way more.
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sidewinder Precision Pro packet
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SW PP probably sends the same packet layout as the FFP version. This wasn't
tested yet, though.
Sidewinder hat data (for SW 3DP, FFP and PP)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Value Direction
0 Center
1 Up
2 Up-Left
3 Left
4 Down-Left
5 Down
6 Down-Right
7 Right
8 Up-Right
Sidewinder GamePad packet
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bit Button
0 Axis 1 Up (y)
1 Axis 1 Down (y)
2 Axis 0 Right (x)
3 Axis 0 Left (x)
4 Button 0 (A)
5 Button 1 (B)
6 Button 2 (C)
7 Button 3 (X)
8 Button 4 (Y)
9 Button 5 (Z)
10 Button 6 (L1)
11 Button 7 (R1)
12 Button 8 (Start)
13 Button 9 (M)
14 Parity
Can be either organized as 15 triplets carrying data in bit 0 only, or can
be five triplets (15 bits) using all three bits. The type of packet the SW
GP sends seems to be random? Because there can be more than one SW GP
chained, the data stream can be 15*n or 5*n bits long. The 15-triplet mode
allows connecting the SW GP only to a half of the joystick port.
Transmission speed is 100 or 300 kbit/sec, packet takes 250 us or 150 us
to transmit, depending on mode.
Joystick extensions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Additional buttons and hats ala CH Flightstick Pro
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Button state Meaning
0 Nothing pressed
1 Button 1
2 Button 2
3 Hat 1 left
4 Button 3
5 Button 5
6 Hat 2 down
7 Hat 1 down
8 Button 4
9 Button 6
10 Hat 2 right
11 Hat 1 right
12 Hat 2 left
13 Undefined
14 Hat 2 up
15 Hat 1 up
If more than one button is pressed they are either ORed together, or the
lowest one is signalled, depending on joystick model.
Hat switch ala TM FCS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Axis 3 resistance Meaning
0.2 kOhm Up
20.0 kOhm Left
40.0 kOhm Down
60.0 kOhm Right
82.0 kOhm Center
Digital mode of MS SideWinder joysticks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SideWinders send data through buttons. The transmission starts on a normal
measure trigger (out to port 0x201). Button 0 is used as clock (100 kHz),
other three buttons carry data. Data is valid at clock 0->1 transition,
LSB is transmitted first.
Maybe if you read this you will see that the 1khz is far surpassed by a PC joystick that clocks at 100khz or 300 kbit speeds.
and these results came from Radio Shack using Linux drivers on their gameports.
Once again can I get some of those drugs you are using, they have to be really good.
smerf
-
An internal Blu Ray drive will run around US$110. So it should have been a bog standard PC + US$110. The news said the US turned off it's non-HD TV last Saturday, where does that leave non-HD Amigas?
I hate to nitpick, but he stated 'probably 15 years ago'.
I'd hardly see you doing any of those things on a bog standard PC from 1994 ;)
Heck, most of the PC's out there today can't do all of those things, let alone at the same time.
(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)
-
I think he meant the practice of changing the onscreen colours in non true colour systems, such as the index based palette colours used on the Amiga and VGA/SVGA 256 colour mode. As in, when you change (or swap) colour one from blue to green and all pixels which where blue are now green.
Which is not relevant in todays games anymore at all because no games made these days still use index colour modes like the old ones did and GFX cards are fast enough* to change every pixel on screen from one colour to another in less time than it takes to draw the pixels on screen anyway.
It was a cool trick back in the days though. Lots of copper tricks are based on the index colour nature of Amiga displays. Colour cycling is also one of the tricks make possible using this technique. Then again, they had to because the machines back then where 'not very good' at displaying true colour images. These days all these effects can be done the brute force way and developers no longer really care about 2D performance anymore.
*) By at least one order of magnitude, probably way more.
Hi,
@Roondar,
Yes, I know, but I just wanted to show him just how signicant this is with today's modern graphic cards. I mean really you are comparing a chip that moves at a speed of no more than 14 mhz -28 mhz compared to a modern day graphics card that has core clock speeds of 400 mhz to 800 mhz or faster and is moving pixels like a freight train moving at the speed of light.
I mean come on I like the Amiga too, but after using Amiga Forever on my PC than going back to my Amiga 4000 it does seem like it is moving slow, but I like it like that because it keeps me from turning it on that much, should make it last longer.
smerf
-
An internal Blu Ray drive will run around US$110. So it should have been a bog standard PC + US$110. The news said the US turned off it's non-HD TV last Saturday, where does that leave non-HD Amigas?
Quite true. However, the fact it was not installed by default will be enough for 95% of the people owning a PC to not have one. Only a very small percentage of computer users actually care enough about such things to add stuff to their computer later (internally that is). I'm guessing most people will just buy a PS3 or standalone Blu-Ray player if they want one.
Case in point: the latest PC rage (well, over where I live anyway) is the netbook style mini-laptops. Everyone wants one. No one cares they have sub-par specs.
As to the Amiga.. Well, it's still a nice retro-puter even without NTSC being broadcast ;)
-
Hi,
@Roondar,
Yes, I know, but I just wanted to show him just how signicant this is with today's modern graphic cards. I mean really you are comparing a chip that moves at a speed of no more than 14 mhz -28 mhz compared to a modern day graphics card that has core clock speeds of 400 mhz to 800 mhz or faster and is moving pixels like a freight train moving at the speed of light.
I mean come on I like the Amiga too, but after using Amiga Forever on my PC than going back to my Amiga 4000 it does seem like it is moving slow, but I like it like that because it keeps me from turning it on that much, should make it last longer.
smerf
Like how I develop my C64 programs on WinVice these days and only test them on the real hardware afterwards. Don't wanna break my lovely 8-bitter!
Anyway, you are of course correct - modern day GFX cards run at silly speed (thats several steps above ludicrous speed by the way). The day for Amiga custom chips is long past.... Though that doesn't mean I don't love the old Ami ;)
-
An internal Blu Ray drive will run around US$110. So it should have been a bog standard PC + US$110. The news said the US turned off it's non-HD TV last Saturday, where does that leave non-HD Amigas?
Hi,
@persia,
Well we might be able to get one of them there boxes that you add on to get high def, I hear that a lot of places have $40 coupons to help ya all by one.
Another thing we can do is write to them there Amiga Inc. people, and get hold of errr whats his name Bill Gat err no McCooin ahh no Bill CoonMC, darn I must be getting old that don't sound right either, oh now I remember Bill Mckewn, no that don't seem right either you know he is the guy that says:
"Amiga has an established reputation for delivering phenomenal graphics and high performance multimedia on PCs and mobile devices."
Was that Bill McEwen, nah he never said that above stuff because he has never done anything yet, well anyhow maybe we could get him to make a HD card to replace the NTSC on the girl (Amiga).
smerf
-
Out of curiosity, given that most (if not all) PCs are capable of running a 32bit screendepth, how necesary would it be to swap and change parts of the palette? I mean I can understand if you're working in a colour limited environment like OCS or AGA, but truecolour? How common would such a requirement be?
That's the spirit-- just dismiss the whole argument by saying "it's useless."
The point was that APIs are slower so going directly to hardware on Amiga can in certain cases out-do PCs going through APIs. I gave ONE EXAMPLE of this and you want to dismiss it.
-
Ok then, what do they have now that wasn't in good quality gear from 20 years ago? And how many itterations are there? Also, just as one final point. What can you do with them now, that wasn't possible 20 years ago?
Either way you failed to address the rest of the point.
Go look it up yourself how the parallel ports did enhance-> SPP -> BPP -> EPP -> ECP and also ISA -> VESA-based -> PCI.
-
:argue: ---->:swords: --->:uzi::destroy: ---> :insane: + :crazy:
Where did the Popcorn smilie go to?
-
No, I don't think you did, how do you propose to prevent these sorts of conflicts outside of an API, remember we did have this, much to the detriment of stability, see Win95 and 98 for details.
Just because you can create the "perfect" app doesn't mean that everyone can.
...
If hardware that is backward compatible uses same I/O ports, IRQs, DMA channels-- there no conflicts to be resolved. When hardware vendors use their on I/O ports arbitrarily, their own IRQ channels, DMA channels then you have conflicts to resolve.
>If you're having to reinvent the wheel and have every application bang the metal to the extent the app requires, you are in effect writing a (partial) driver or framework for your application to sit on...
Ahhm, did you miss the list I gave of advantages; you wouldn't rewrite the driver-- the OS would have the functionality built-in without needing drivers and application would be able to go directly to hardware where driver functionality is not supported or inefficient (like palette example).
>The gains of hardware compatability, yes, lets add 10, 20, 30% extra silicon to every major I/O chip for stuff that's no longer used and long dead... Your entire argument is based on a fairytale world.
Sorry, you keep missing the point. That's your speculation 10-30% extra silicon. Even with some extra silicon, it's worth it given the benefits.
>Not in that post I didn't.
Okay, atleast you admit you did in some other posts.
-
Liar.
...
I told you go time the joystick ports-- it's not something that complex. Amiga is faster-- whether you use standard PC Gameport or serial protocol of USB joystick.
>They have, that you dismissed the points out of hand, moved the goalposts or just attacked the poster and continued to bang on about your fairyland instead is irrelevant.
You like to reply before you understand what is being stated. There's no fairytale that Amiga OCS is compatible with AGA at hardware level. PCs are forced to go through APIs for using modern hardware.
>I believe Karlos did that already, you then moved the goalposts.
Another false accusation. No one has posted any code to swap palette indices on PC faster than Amiga does it.
-
Using OpenGL, a GPU could probably swap the entire scene out and redraw it faster than an Amiga could swap two colour indexes.
People have problems in this thread sticking to the example. I can also switch entire frames by changing a video memory ptr on Amiga. But that isn't the point.
-
Seriously nobody in the PC architecture world is trying to catch up with the Amiga. They just couldn't give a damn about a retro platform that only a few people use. Seriously they are not losing sleep over abandoning joystick ports.
Find and quote for us just one PC engineer that is actively working on a mission to play Amiga catchup and I will say that you have ground for your arguments.
Oops! That just negates this whole thread. Sorry!
Can someone Start serving those pankakes. There's a hungry crowd out here. :lol:
The fact that they recently dropped the Gameport and decided to use USB joysticks (which are still slower to read) should tell you that someone is giving a hoot.
-
So far no one has shown the advantage of surpassing (or even equaling) the Amiga joystick port.
We could go on and on like this... and the day will come you'll be the only one talking... and maybe (but I'm not even sure) that day you'll discover how useless it is... and that day you'll buy a cheap USB joystick and enjoy nice games of today... wondering... "how did I miss these jewels ?"
I guess we all agree the Amiga's joystick port is more precise than anything available elsewhere. The fact is this doesn't make the Amiga better than anything else... nor does it make anything else catching up the Amiga...
Now if we could simply move on...
BTW: I'm still waiting for you to show me a single Amiga commercial game that cannot be played with an USB joystick because the interface is too slow for it...
I did move on but some person still is denying the fact Amiga joystick is superior.
As for "it's still useable". I say that about Amiga to: "I can still use it for what I do without needing the 3Ghz processor."
-
To answer the question.
NO. The PC is terms of hardware alone passde the Amiga well over ten years ago. Probably more like 15. Lets get real.
We already have so many speculations, but we are trying to get to the facts. Gameport was supported in XP so your claim it surprassed it 10 years ago is false. They still sell gameport based joysticks. Even USB ones are inferior in speed of accessing.
-
A yawn subject.
...
Hey I stopped arguing since it's obvious Amiga joystick port is faster, butl someone started to challenge it again.
>APIs enables the hardware to change significantly and reduce hardware complexity i.e. save on
>1. Transistor usage,
>2. Energy consumption.
>3. Maximised math units.
Hardware can be enhanced significantly and retain hardware compatibility. As for reducing hardware complexity-- well why do they retain processor compatibility then-- same argument can be applied there as well.
-
I think I agree with you here. The thread does seem to have run out of steam at this point.
Oh well. You could always start another controversial topic that will keep us entartained for pages and pages. or not. :lol:
It'll sure keep the site lively. ;)
At least you should wait for the person arguing to reply before declaring the subject closed.
-
I think you're mixing up the USB stack and the API. The USB stack can have a hickup from time to time (well, in Windows that is). But an API is just a redirection, which, especially nowadays, doesn't cause any noticeable delay.
Eh? Palette index swapping? For at least 10 years, that isn't been used anymore. (when a 32 bit palette became common in 3d acceleration)
You have to do many I/O instructions to get the joystick status compared to a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0. As for palette modes, they still have them in Photoshop; the point there was an example where API access would be inferior to the extent that Amiga would out do it.
-
Hi,
...
Maybe if you read this you will see that the 1khz is far surpassed by a PC joystick that clocks at 100khz or 300 kbit speeds.
and these results came from Radio Shack using Linux drivers on their gameports.
Once again can I get some of those drugs you are using, they have to be really good.
smerf
You must be on drugs if you think doing serial access via 201h is going to outdo the Amiga's move instruction. USB would be faster than 201h serial protocol. And we're not trying to surpass 1khz. Which is faster is the point. 1Khz is not the top limit for Amiga-- that was another subject regarding some applications requiring 1Khz sampling.
-
Oh, my...
1. http://www.overclock.net/faqs/73418-how-improve-mouse-response-accuracy-changing.html
After many pages reading your silly rants about a joystick port that should be polled faster than on 20-years-later technologies, I simply got bored and entered "USB polling frequency driver" into Google, which gave me many interesting results. Just read what the first result has to say, "Windows by default has the usb ports working at 125Hz of 1000Hz that USB is capable of, giving 8ms response times. You can change the frequency to 250Hz(4ms), 500Hz(2ms) and 1000Hz(1ms) to get better response times" and please don't bug everyone else with your foolish assumptions.
...
Which is faster: MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 or going through a serial protocol? I hope you know when you write a general application for some PC, you cannot assume they have some specialized card in there. You have to take the general case of Gameport or standard USB joystick.
>2. That's not true. Everyone else here explained you that APIs are better just because they allow programming in shorter times, compatibility-friendly with more HW configuraions..
Bullcrap. You can have APis on top of standard hardware and those systems are better. You can do things that APIs don't allow or are more inefficient at it.
>3. You don't even need an example, it's plain logic. Every time your OCS chip does a clock cycle, any modern, low-value GPU has already executed thousands of instructions.
Then give the APi calls that will swap the index #3 and #15. And I'll time them on my machine.
>4. No, he doesn't need glasses. YOU need a reality check. Or maybe a travel ticket to fantasyland, to Amiga Neverland or so.
I timed it myself. You go repeat the experiment and then reply.
-
(http://startupblog.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/popcorn.jpg)
Somebody order popcorn?
Happy to oblige ... double the usual amount especially for this thread :)
-
Happy to oblige ... double the usual amount especially for this thread :)
If you didn't draw it on an Amiga using quick palette swapping and high frequency joystick sampling, it's off topic. Sorry. :-(
-
The brute force approach.
Killer Nic:
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/bandwidth-vs-latency
Just in case you haven't drooled over it already.
-
The Killer NIC is cool (and if it could be used in an Amiga host environment, even coolor), but the problem with the Killer NIC and other types of TCP/IP offload engines is that they are often quickly outpaced by host CPUs and stacks. The Killer NIC, though, provides a complete host environemnt in and of itself, akin to a single board computer, so its usefulness extends beyond simple offloading.
-
You must be on drugs if you think doing serial access via 201h is going to outdo the Amiga's move instruction. USB would be faster than 201h serial protocol. And we're not trying to surpass 1khz. Which is faster is the point. 1Khz is not the top limit for Amiga-- that was another subject regarding some applications requiring 1Khz sampling.
Hi,
@Amigaski,
How did you know I was on drugs, I just got back from the dentist after having 2 molars pulled and she gave me some wonderful drugs that puts me in la la land, but I am not la la'ed out as much as you are.
Using the Algorithm that the human body can sense, even if the PC was running at 500 hz the eyes would not see any change in the movement of the cursor even though the Amiga's joystick port was moving at a hz speed of 50% faster. In this case the human body (eyes) would sense a faster movement only if the difference in speed was 3 times faster. Which means that you are probably correct, the joystick does move faster but the human eyes would not see it until it was moving at least 3 times the speed of the PC joytick. In other words just for the heck of it, try this:
Hook yourself up to a 1000V, then 3000V, then 9000V, they 27000V and then tell me at what voltage that your body has sensed a change in?
Then come back with an answer.
smerf
-
The brute force approach.
Killer Nic:
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/bandwidth-vs-latency
Just in case you haven't drooled over it already.
Hi,
@Fanscale
Didn't you start this thread?
smerf
-
Hook yourself up to a 1000V, then 3000V, then 9000V, they 27000V and then tell me at what voltage that your body has sensed a change in?
smerf
Don't tase me bro!
:roflmao:
-
If you didn't draw it on an Amiga using quick palette swapping and high frequency joystick sampling, it's off topic. Sorry. :-(
Hi,
@Trev,
Are you going to surrender the ship, are you going to quit, even though he is totally wrong, are you going to let this misguided person win this debate, are you ready, willing and able to accept defeat and admit that the PC still playing Amiga catchup?
What have these boards come to?
smerf
-
Yeah sorry about that Trev ... but due to an accident involving a particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands, my infininity improbable super-duper clockwork 'Start Me Up' PC running Winblows 934563463300000000000 beta candidate 2 and BinUAE decided to guru at a most unfortunately inappropriate time.
The end result was somebody constantly going on about his joystick for some reason or another *shrugs shoulders*
Meanwhile back in the real world ... MORE POPCORN!!! :)
-
Are you going to surrender the ship, are you going to quit, even though he is totally wrong, are you going to let this misguided person win this debate, are you ready, willing and able to accept defeat and admit that the PC still playing Amiga catchup?
No, I'm in the relevancy camp. No human can trigger a joystick input at 1 kHz, and no mainstream Amiga-compatible display has a refresh rate of 1 kHz. It's really a question of whether or not both an Amiga and a "PC" can sample, process, and respond to an input event in a timeframe that matters to both the application and the end user. In short, they both can.
Limiting the criteria under which either an Amiga or a "PC" can be said to be "still playing ... catchup" is a sad, sad way to win a debate in general terms. NTSC Amigas are faster than PAL Amigas, but that won't stop anyone from arguing over which is "better" in terms of end user experience. Change of subject: PAL Amiga still playing NTSC Amiga catchup?
My one thousandth post should have been more interesting.
-
Which is faster: MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 or going through a serial protocol?
in c#
joystickDevice.Poll();
This is faster for a number of reasons. First of all, I didn't have to write the entire application in assembly language. So what if you can read the joystick with one mov instruction? Reading a joystick ain't hard no matter what the language and API you have to deal with. What's hard is all of the other parts of the game you have to write, especially the graphics. I don't know about you, but I don't like writing graphics code in asm. Some of the crappiest, most inefficient code I've ever seen was written in assembly language. The whole mantra of "code written in assembly is the fastest there is" is an exaggeration beyond belief.
Second, I can read the value from two analog sticks and two analog flippers more than once per frame, I can do it as fast as the HID spec allows, and there can be a lot more analog controls on the device than that! Not so on the Amiga, only can do this once per frame. So much for the superior Amiga joy port.
With the Amiga Joy port, I get one 1980's era standard boring as hell joystick. Just one per port. Imagine playing Gears of War or Crysis with such a joystick. Might as well sit on the damn thing. On the PC I can have a dozen gaming devices. Mice, keyboards, steering wheels, foot pedals, yokes, game pads, classic style joys, harddrives, video output devices, video input devices, audio output devices, audio input devices, and the list goes on and on. All on one bus. With the Amiga joy port, I get.... a joystick... an old crappy joystick whose metal contact switches tie directly to I/O pins on some bizarre custom chip that's capable of recording the full glory of raw signal bounce. Oh how superior!
USB HID devices output perfect state information to the computer. There is no need to poll it a thousand times a second as humans can't click a button more than 10 times a second. With the USB bus, one can connect 127 devices to the bus, all working simultaneously. USB 2.0 can transfer 60 megabytes a second across the bus.
All this being said, the Amiga joystick port is just another para interface hanging off a custom chip. It is unusual in that you can fetch information from it rather quickly. One thing amigaski hasn't done in his argument is actually show real code that reads the joystick port as fast as he claims. He has a product which emulates joystick devices for the amiga by bit banging the para port on the pc, but notice he hasn't claimed there are games which are unusable using his hardware emulation product, which by it's very nature has to use the supposedly inferior db15 standard legacy joystick port or a keyboard for it's input.
The only devices that i'm aware of that actually use the limits of the Amiga joyport are audio digitizers that tie in to that port. I wouldn't be surprised if others on here know of additional devices that can use the capability of this interface. There are two words that accurately describe the Amiga Joystick/Mouse port: weird and suboptimal.
-
(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)
Or they say: "fast booting doesn't matter to me" , or "fast shut down doesn't matter to me" or "jerky menus don't happen""-knowing full well they do or "malwares only a consequence of how popular the PC is, so that makes it ok", or "the registry isn't so bad", knowing full well that the registry is an abomination, or a Linux PC 'just works' because they know a Linux PC can easily send you into command line hell just to get the hardware working at all, or to get the GUI up. You see if it doesn't matter to them, these things can be ignored and therefore the argument is WON.
-
Or they say: "fast booting doesn't matter to me" , or "fast shut down doesn't matter to me" or
They don't, many people simply use standby thus negating the issue. Thanks to memory protection, it is rare that a piece of software will take down the rest of the OS.
"jerky menus don't happen"
Jerky menus? Take an A1200, put a load on the cpu and watch as the rest of the system slows to a crawl.
I have a dual P2 (233Mhz) system here running BeOS, the cpus when running live streaming are constantly at 80%. The menus are just as fast as when the system is idling. Only difference is that app loading slows down, which is to be expected.
"malwares only a consequence of how popular the PC is, so that makes it ok"
Malware is a consiquence of people not bothering to secure their systems. It is not ok.
"the registry isn't so bad", knowing full well that the registry is an abomination
The registry is a database. If you can come up with a better solution to address being able to support and intergrate litterally hundreds of thousands of different pieces of hardware, the rest of the computing world would love to know. Linux, BeOS and (I believe) Mac all use a database help address this issue.
or a Linux PC 'just works' because they know a Linux PC can easily send you into command line hell just to get the hardware working at all, or to get the GUI up.
That was 2000 calling, their want their distribution back. And flaky hardware drivers are not a linux specific issue.
You see if it doesn't matter to them, these things can be ignored and therefore the argument is WON.
Correct, because many of the issues do not matter to the average user - they just want to use their applications. I for one am happy that I don't have to write my own scripts to get a cd-rom to run when I plug it in.
-
or "the registry isn't so bad", knowing full well that the registry is an abomination
How is the registry an abomination? I'm not looking for a debate; I'm just curious as to why you think it is.
A simplified abstraction of the registry is the tooltype, but rather than store named values in a shortcut (which is just an instance of the IShellLink object persisted to disk), they're stored in a centralized database.
The registry is more flexible than an initialization file, and if necessary, the two can be used hand-in-hand through mapping and redirection, assuming standard Windows APIs--GetPrivateProfileString(), SetPrivateProfileString(), et al--are used by the target application. In a multi-user system, you can work wonders with the registry at the data level that just aren't possible with initialization files. (You can get quite crafty with initialization files, but at some point, you end up with a database-like series of overlays, i.e. the registry.)
Granted, the hierarchical nature of the registry often leads to unnecessary complexity, but when used properly, the registry is a valuable tool.
-
They don't, many people simply use standby thus negating the issue. Thanks to memory protection, it is rare that a piece of software will take down the rest of the OS.
thanks to saving regularly, booting in 5 seconds, and using stable well written software, memory protection doesn't matter to me. I'd like it but I bet you'd like a 5 second boot as well. But to use your argument against you, memory protection doesn't matter to me, so Amiga wins for me.
Jerky menus? Take an A1200, put a load on the cpu and watch as the rest of the system slows to a crawl.
turn on your windows PC, wait for the start button/orb to appear and try to launch something and watch the menu stutter and leave garbage behind before it clears itself. Makes you feel good about your quadcore 4 gig ram SATA?
I have a dual P2 (233Mhz) system here running BeOS, the cpus when running live streaming are constantly at 80%. The menus are just as fast as when the system is idling. Only difference is that app loading slows down, which is to be expected.
i have a freeware scheduler "Executive" and i can render an animation in cinema 4d, whilst editing scenes and objects in Cinema 4D, send the resultant pics to Adpro for processing, save the files automatically, do a spot of house keeping with DOpus, paint a texture in Dpaint and the Operating System menues are just as fast as if had nothing loaded- on a 50 mhz machine with 16 meg ram
Malware is a consiquence of people not bothering to secure their systems. It is not ok.
malware is a consequence of having security risks in the OS that can be exploited. A security system is what must be used to close those holes- for a few days until another exploit is found. This then means a performance hit.
The registry is a database. If you can come up with a better solution to address being able to support and intergrate litterally hundreds of thousands of different pieces of hardware, the rest of the computing world would love to know. Linux, BeOS and (I believe) Mac all use a database help address this issue.
i don't have one on my Amiga. It doesn't matter to me. Therefore Amiga wins.
That was 2000 calling, their want their distribution back. And flaky hardware drivers are not a linux specific issue.
tell the thousands posting here: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=327 or here :http://forum.mandriva.com/ (just two examples) that they its 2009 and there problems DO NOT EXIST, its just that they are caught in an alternate reality where its always the year 2000
Correct, because many of the issues do not matter to the average user - they just want to use their applications. .
Correct. So using your argument against you: The software on my Amiga does what i want it to, reliably and efficiently and things such as nuclear physics sims, cloud computing, playing DVD's bluray and games on the PC don't matter to me and (increasingly to the average user) because a $30 DVD player does a better job of playing DVD's, and a $250 Bluray player does better job of playing Bluray and any game genre worth playing is available on any one of 3 consoles without the hassle of a PC (and a $600 PS 3 does all three).
I for one am happy that I don't have to write my own scripts to get a cd-rom to run when I plug it in
That was 1985 calling, their want their Workbench 1.3 floppy back.
And flaky hardware drivers-if any drivers exist AT all that is- are a particularly linux specific issue.
-
thanks to saving regularly, booting in 5 seconds, and using stable well written software, memory protection doesn't matter to me. I'd like it but I bet you'd like a 5 second boot as well. But to use your argument against you, memory protection doesn't matter to me, so Amiga wins for me.
Takes less then 5 seconds for me to come out of standby. And when you have either 3.5 or 3.9 running, just getting beyond softkick takes more then 5 seconds on an 040 1200.
turn on your windows PC, wait for the start button/orb to appear and try to launch something and watch the menu stutter and leave garbage behind before it clears itself. Makes you feel good about your quadcore 4 gig ram SATA?
I don't have a quadcore. And when you have a lot of high priority things being loaded up/run at once, even on an Amiga with Executive it'll crawl.
i have a freeware scheduler "Executive" and i can render an animation in cinema 4d, whilst editing scenes and objects in Cinema 4D, send the resultant pics to Adpro for processing, save the files automatically, do a spot of house keeping with DOpus, paint a texture in Dpaint and the Operating System menues are just as fast as if had nothing loaded- on a 50 mhz machine with 16 meg ram
And how many of those tasks require a realtime/extremely high priority? The music stream, regardless of all else happening on that machine (building up the database from FS queries, accessing and generating a web interface etc etc etc) all are going on, but the stream remains constant. Yes, I could lower the stream's priority and everything else would run a whole lot faster, but at the risk of breaking the streams continuity.
Even Executive, which I used to use myself, does not offer the level of granularity that BeOS does in terms of task priorty.
malware is a consequence of having security risks in the OS that can be exploited.
Sorry, but ALL operating systems have security holes. Buffer overflows in MUI anyone?
i don't have one on my Amiga. It doesn't matter to me. Therefore Amiga wins.
Clearly it does matter or you wouldn't have mentioned it.
tell the thousands posting here: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=327 or here :http://forum.mandriva.com/ (just two examples) that they its 2009 and there problems DO NOT EXIST, its just that they are caught in an alternate reality where its always the year 2000
Bad drivers happen, wierd and wonderful issues with hardware mixes happen. This is one of the drawbacks in having such a diverse hardware landscape.
That was 1985 calling, their want their Workbench 1.3 floppy back.
Heh, that was OS3.5, and rigging up an IDE CD-ROM drive on an A1200. Also had to do the same later with a MO drive.
And flaky hardware drivers-if any drivers exist AT all that is- are a particularly linux specific issue.
Flaky drivers can and will happen on just about any OS, I've seen it on AmigaOS, Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and BeOS... They are by no means specific to any OS.
-
Takes less then 5 seconds for me to come out of standby.
Standby does not equal boot. I asked 14 PC users if they leave the PC on all the time in standby. None do. Standby doesn't matter to them. Boot time does. Amiga wins.
And when you have either 3.5 or 3.9 running, just getting beyond softkick takes more then 5 seconds on an 040 1200.
i run Workbench 3.1, the OS my machine came with. Running OS 3.5 is like running XP on your 233 mhz pentium and OS 3.9 is like running Vista on your 233 mHz pentium. How would you go booting them? Will you enjoy that user experience, IF you could even get vista to boot.
I don't have a quadcore.
Sorry i thought Karlos's quadcore was "just an average PC", and on that basis i thought you just had an "average PC".
And when you have a lot of high priority things being loaded up/run at once, even on an Amiga with Executive it'll crawl.
Ah more "if's" and "whens". I don't, so it doesn't matter to me. default priorities are fine for me. Amiga wins.
And how many of those tasks require a realtime/extremely high priority? The music stream, regardless of all else happening on that machine (building up the database from FS queries, accessing and generating a web interface etc etc etc) all are going on, but the stream remains constant. Yes, I could lower the stream's priority and everything else would run a whole lot faster, but at the risk of breaking the streams continuity.
None require it. And they don't need to be. Therefore it doesn't matter to me. i don't stream anything, so it doesn't matter to me, either. Amiga wins.
Even Executive, which I used to use myself, does not offer the level of granularity that BeOS does in terms of task priorty.
you may be right, i honestly don't know enough about BeOS. however my A1200 multitasks smoothly, and always prioritises my input over anything else that might be needing CPU time.
Sorry, but ALL operating systems have security holes. Buffer overflows in MUI anyone?
true. but as it stands as of this moment, i have a greater chance of suffering from malware on a fresh out of the box windows install than I do on a fresh amiga os 3.1 install. The why's, buts, ifs don't matter, thems the facts.
Clearly it does matter or you wouldn't have mentioned it.
only to follow the same line of thinking as the PC camp: "yeah the registry is crap BUT....." But nothing. the registry is crap. My amiga doesn't have one, it doesn't matter to me, amiga wins.
Bad drivers happen, wierd and wonderful issues with hardware mixes happen.
i see. Its now a "feature". Ms PR dept would be proud of that one..
This is one of the drawbacks in having such a diverse hardware landscape.
I see. Another "But...." argument
[/QUOTE]
Heh, that was OS3.5, and rigging up an IDE CD-ROM drive on an A1200. Also had to do the same later with a MO drive.
OS 3.5 has many bugs in it. try OS 3.9, bet it works-unless you have one of those early almost-atapi drives, but thats a firmware fault on the drive, not a fault with the Amiga.
Flaky drivers can and will happen on just about any OS, I've seen it on AmigaOS, Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and BeOS... They are by no means specific to any OS.
True. But linux has more of it. And no I don't care about the "But", that HW manufacturers don't support Linux as much, or there's so much more PC hardware out there. No "Buts". It just is.
do you see a theme? If a PC can't do something as well as an amiga, its "PC users don't need it/use it/care about it/ so it doesn't matter". To them. But play that argument in favour of the Amiga as i have, and what happens? Amiga wins. Its pointless, ofcourse and its an argument that can never be lost.
-
Standby does not equal boot. I asked 14 PC users if they leave the PC on all the time in standby. None do. Standby doesn't matter to them. Boot time does. Amiga wins.
Woo, because 14 people, out of 1 billion is totally valid for extrapolating how people use their systems. Standby is perfectly valid if you use it. Even if you don't, the Amiga looses to a £1 pocket calculator by this measure.
Boot time does not matter unless you have to do it an awful lot, on the Amiga, owing to it's lack of MP, it does. On a windows/linux/mac box, you don't, you boot a maximum of once from the last time you turned it on and that is (for the vast majority of cases) all you need.
And in case you're wondering, 14 seconds does me just fine, thanks. I booted my system.... about 8 weeks ago now, so 14 seconds of booting in two months. Suddenly the boot time issue comes into context.
i run Workbench 3.1, the OS my machine came with. Running OS 3.5 is like running XP on your 233 mhz pentium and OS 3.9 is like running Vista on your 233 mHz pentium. How would you go booting them? Will you enjoy that user experience, IF you could even get vista to boot.
Yes 3.5 took longer to boot, as did 3.9. But once up and running I found it to be much more responsive more of the time then 3.1 with all the hacks/trimmings. Not to mention far less crash happy.
Sorry i thought Karlos's quadcore was "just an average PC", and on that basis i thought you just had an "average PC".
Do you even understand what the word average means? Clearly not.
Ah more "if's" and "whens". I don't, so it doesn't matter to me. default priorities are fine for me. Amiga wins.
I rigged that system up specifically for that one task. In that role, it is superb. The problem with forcing a system to specialise in one thing, is that you do so at the expense of others.
That you don't is not my concern.
None require it. And they don't need to be. Therefore it doesn't matter to me. i don't stream anything, so it doesn't matter to me, either. Amiga wins.
*shakes head and walks away.
you may be right, i honestly don't know enough about BeOS. however my A1200 multitasks smoothly, and always prioritises my input over anything else that might be needing CPU time.
This particular system is controled remotely via a web interface.
true. but as it stands as of this moment, i have a greater chance of suffering from malware on a fresh out of the box windows install than I do on a fresh amiga os 3.1 install. The why's, buts, ifs don't matter, thems the facts.
And a stock 3.1 install is by itself useless. Linux, BeOS, hell even windows offers far more capability out of the box then any AmigaOS release ever produced.
only to follow the same line of thinking as the PC camp: "yeah the registry is crap BUT....." But nothing. the registry is crap. My amiga doesn't have one, it doesn't matter to me, amiga wins.
There is no "registry is crap but", did you even bother to read Trev's post?
i see. Its now a "feature". Ms PR dept would be proud of that one..
Ugh, grow up. It is a logical consiquence, nothing more.
I see.
Not on the basis of your replies thus far you don't.
OS 3.5 has many bugs in it. try OS 3.9, bet it works-unless you have one of those early almost-atapi drives, but thats a firmware fault on the drive, not a fault with the Amiga.
ROTFL. Nothing can be the fault of your perfect Amiga can it?
To be clear, The IDEfix installer produced a script for the drive in question, but for whatever reason that script failed every three or four boots. I wrote my own which didn't.
The MO drive was a little more tricky but in the end it worked fine.
True. But linux has more of it.
Try telling that to those who run BeOS on modern hardware. Oh, silly me, that's right. Not knowing anything about it you carry on regardless.
[
do you see a theme?
Yes, you twist anything and everything that you can in order that "Amiga wins". It's childish.
If a PC can't do something as well as an amiga, its "PC users don't need it/use it/care about it/ so it doesn't matter". To them.
Given that the vast, vast vast number of PC users today haven't even heard of an Amiga, much less used one and use their computers in a different way to how the amiga is used, it is one hell of a stretch to say that. I can run a rediculously stripped down system that boots in short order too, but unless it can do what I want in a reliable and stable fashion all bets are off.
The amiga, especially once you started trying to go online could never be called the latter. A bridge too far.
But play that argument in favour of the Amiga as i have, and what happens? Amiga wins.
Ahh, but you didn't play the same argument. See, with the exception of yourself and amigaski, none of the rest of the folk here had to do mental and linguistic backflips in our interpritations or employ massive cognitive dissonance to "win".
Its pointless, ofcourse and its an argument that can never be lost.
This discussion was originally about technology, a point you clearly missed. Someone made a specific claim of technical superiority, not usage not preference, technical.
-
Woo, because 14 people, out of 1 billion is totally valid for extrapolating how people use their systems. Standby is perfectly valid if you use it.
Well, I deal in facts. I asked 14 PC users, ranging from occasional to moderate users and none used standby. None are computer hobbyists. You are a computer hobbyist. As other people on this board are. Most people are not. When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell us all.
Boot time does not matter unless you have to do it an awful lot, on the Amiga, owing to it's lack of MP, it does. On a windows/linux/mac box, you don't, you boot a maximum of once from the last time you turned it on and that is (for the vast majority of cases) all you need.
Like Is said: When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell me, and then you can use words such as "for the vast majority of cases".
And in case you're wondering, 14 seconds does me just fine, thanks. I booted my system.... about 8 weeks ago now, so 14 seconds of booting in two months. Suddenly the boot time issue comes into context.
Strange: 14 random users is too small a sample size, but you and a handful of people on a computer enthusiast's forum is representative of 1 billion users world wide. just coz you boot evry 8 weeks is not representative of the whole world, but do go on..
Yes 3.5 took longer to boot, as did 3.9. But once up and running I found it to be much more responsive more of the time then 3.1 with all the hacks/trimmings. Not to mention far less crash happy.
My 3.1 A1200 with all the trimmimgs, as you call them, - that i need- is at least as fast and as stable as 3.9. I've tried both.
Do you even understand what the word average means? Clearly not.
i took one semester in Statistics at University level, but please do enlighten me on what the word "average" means.
I rigged that system up specifically for that one task. In that role, it is superb. The problem with forcing a system to specialise in one thing, is that you do so at the expense of others.
That you don't is not my concern.
And that you DID, is not mine. But thats the point isn't it?
*shakes head and walks away.
sighs deeply and walks away
And a stock 3.1 install is by itself useless.
No, its still useful. But it can be made a lot nicer with a few add-ons that cost no money.
ROTFL. Nothing can be the fault of your perfect Amiga can it?
To be clear, The IDEfix installer produced a script for the drive in question, but for whatever reason that script failed every three or four boots. I wrote my own which didn't.
The MO drive was a little more tricky but in the end it worked fine.
Amigans call these "scripts" dosdrivers. Clearly a third-party utility generated a dosdriver with settings that were not compatible with your drive. If I had a dollar that thats happened to me with linux or windows over the years I'd be...you know how it goes.
Try telling that to those who run BeOS on modern hardware. Oh, silly me, that's right. Not knowing anything about it you carry on regardless.
I find it interesting that people need to bring up just about any PC hardware-OS combination to suit their argument even when that represents less than an insignificant percentage of PC's in the world, just to prove a point they've lost. So you can't win the boot argument with Windows so you bring on the BeOS argument. But BeOS runs on limited hardware and less people know about it than Amiga, so Windows is back. But Windows has the registry and malware. So linux is in. But Linux isn't as user-friendly out of the box. So we are back to Windows.
Yes, you twist anything and everything that you can in order that "Amiga wins". It's childish.
Its called "mirroring"
Given that the vast, vast vast number of PC users today haven't even heard of an Amiga, much less used one and use their computers in a different way to how the amiga is used, it is one hell of a stretch to say that. I can run a rediculously stripped down system that boots in short order too, but unless it can do what I want in a reliable and stable fashion all bets are off.
As opposed to the name on everyone's lips: BeOS. i can do what i need to do on it. And for evrything else, a simple household appliance or a console can outdo the PC. And no my Amiga isn't ridiculously stripped down. But its interesting you have to strip your PC down to a non-functional state in order to compete
Ahh, but you didn't play the same argument. See, with the exception of yourself and amigaski, none of the rest of the folk here had to do mental and linguistic backflips in our interpritations or employ massive cognitive dissonance to "win".
Actually a pro-PC user wnat to debate the grammarof the original post: Is it a question or a statement, as if that made any difference. A few others pointed out in what instances their amiga was superior to the PC for the intended use. And they pointed out some of the deficiencies in the PC that are simply not present in the amiga. But the usual "i don't care/ doesn't matter to me" cry of the masses drowned out any of that. BTW I hear Copernicus didn't have much support in his day either, but just goes to show that a popular opinion isn't always the right one.
This discussion was originally about technology, a point you clearly missed. Someone made a specific claim of technical superiority, not usage not preference, technical.
it was about seeing a PC do picture in picture, which the Amiga did years ago. As is the way of these things, many interpretations can sprout from a single statement and the PC camp turned it into an argument about usage and preference when it suited their case. Just providing same balance to the discussion.
-
go look it up yourself how the parallel ports did enhance-> spp -> bpp -> epp -> ecp and also isa -> vesa-based -> pci.
isa->e-isa->vlb->pci
-
Which is faster: MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 or going through a serial protocol?
That's a dishonest question.
But I'll bite.
The PC implementation (using API's etc) will be faster doing it's poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will be. Even if the serial protocol itself is slower, the vastly (and I do mean vastly) faster processor will need less time to execute the whole API based serial poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will take.
Now, that the serial port on the PC is usually sucky and hence slower to be sampled is another matter, but the fact is that the code driving said sucky serial port is extremely likely to be faster than the MOVE.W.
If only because your 3Ghz machine can execute it's code -literally- thousands of times faster and the API overhead is not adding thousands of times more code.
-
Hey I stopped arguing since it's obvious Amiga joystick port is faster, butl someone started to challenge it again.
>APIs enables the hardware to change significantly and reduce hardware complexity i.e. save on
>1. Transistor usage,
>2. Energy consumption.
>3. Maximised math units.
Hardware can be enhanced significantly and retain hardware compatibility. As for reducing hardware complexity-- well why do they retain processor compatibility then-- same argument can be applied there as well.
Depends on the priority. Notice the CPU didn't keep up with the GPU market in pure math performance.
-
Well, I deal in facts. I asked 14 PC users, ranging from occasional to moderate users and none used standby. None are computer hobbyists. You are a computer hobbyist. As other people on this board are. Most people are not. When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell us all.
Actually I'm firmly in the user camp these days. I've niether the time nor inclination to go around tweeking and tinkering. I just want to do the things I need to do with the minimum of hassle.
Like Is said: When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell me, and then you can use words such as "for the vast majority of cases".
And when you present documentation to show these people you supposedly surveyed you can claim the opposite.
Strange: 14 random users is too small a sample size, but you and a handful of people on a computer enthusiast's forum is representative of 1 billion users world wide. just coz you boot evry 8 weeks is not representative of the whole world, but do go on..
Well see, at least from this side, we have more evidence then your say so.
My 3.1 A1200 with all the trimmimgs, as you call them, - that i need- is at least as fast and as stable as 3.9. I've tried both.
Didn't mention one way or the other whether they were needed, as it happens the vast majority were - I would not for instance be happy using an Amiga without Opus Magellen on it.
i took one semester in Statistics at University level, but please do enlighten me on what the word "average" means.
1. a quantity, rating, or the like that represents or approximates an arithmetic mean (http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=Average&search=search).
But it is irrelevant, you made an assumption, which in this case was false.
I use laptops. And whist you can get quadcore laptops (which generally produce more heat then the legendary nut roasting P4 mobility ones did) mine isn't.
And that you DID, is not mine. But thats the point isn't it?
Overspecialise and you breed in weakness. More on this further down.
No, its still useful. But it can be made a lot nicer with a few add-ons that cost no money.
One of the biggest, and for me nicest parts of moving from AmigaOS was that when I installed BeOS or later Linux, I didn't have to prat around with dozens of disks to install all the other software I needed day to day. So from going from half a day to install, optimise and install all the stuff I needed to... around 20 minutes. It was a revelation and is actually something I miss whenever I had to setup a windows environment. Perhaps I'm spoiled in this.
Amigans call these "scripts" dosdrivers. Clearly a third-party utility generated a dosdriver with settings that were not compatible with your drive.
Nah, really?!
If I had a dollar that thats happened to me with linux or windows over the years I'd be...you know how it goes.
As does any person who has ever done anything more then just used the factory installed setup.
I find it interesting that people need to bring up just about any PC hardware-OS combination to suit their argument even when that represents less than an insignificant percentage of PC's in the world
BeOS at it's height barely scraped 1% of computer usage. Depending on who you ask, Linux now, with a much more varied landscape has just about hit 1%. The point was that minority OS's all have hardware support troubles.
just to prove a point they've lost.
So you can't win the boot argument with Windows so you bring on the BeOS argument.
Actually, the boot argument is a non starter - it is completely irrelevant when looked at over the long term. It only becomes a concern if your system is prone to crashing a lot. I brought BeOS into it with regard your "jerky menus" complaint. I pointed out that other systems did it better then the Amiga at high loads.
But Windows has the registry
You have not shown why having a database to deal with a huge amount of hardware configurations is a bad thing. Nor have you pointed to a more effective solution.
and malware.
With few exceptions, all OS's have malware for them, even your beloved Amiga.
So linux is in. But Linux isn't as user-friendly out of the box.
I'd have to disagree there.
But regardless, if nothing else it shows that all OS's have different strengths and weaknesses.
As opposed to the name on everyone's lips: BeOS. i can do what i need to do on it. And for evrything else, a simple household appliance or a console can outdo the PC. And no my Amiga isn't ridiculously stripped down. But its interesting you have to strip your PC down to a non-functional state in order to compete
Specialist appliances will almost always perform better then a do everything solution. But, as I pointed out with the BeOS streaming server, that specialisation comes at the cost of ubiquity. And yes, the Amiga is ridiculously stripped down compared to a modern OS. To get it to do what I take for granted on a modern OS (any of the ones I have mentioned), I would then have to add that functionality back in in the form of hacks, third party replacements (Magellen) and a pile of support software (such as MiamiDX) that on any remotely modern OS comes as standard with.
Expectations change. I can do more with an EeePC then I ever could with even a top of the line Amiga and for a fraction of the cost. Amiga, as elegant as the whole thing was could not meet my needs, if it meets yours great. But the rest of the world has moved on.
popular opinion isn't always the right one.
By the same token though, taking the oposite side doesn't make you right either.
-
At the end of the day, stick your average PC user in front of: Amiga OS, Linux, Windows, Mac.
Chances are they will figure out how to get on the Internet on the latter three, but stand no chance at all on the Amiga. Mainly because they would be lucky if they even had a TCP/IP stack on it.
Come on, lets be realistic. The point here is, that for the vast majority of user a PC does exactly what they need it to do. This might mean it can't do a few things the Amiga could do, mainly because they are things your average user does not need to do. The PC is a mainstream "do it all" machine, it makes no sense wasting time and money including backwards compatibility, except wheres its absolutely essential. That is why they removed 16bit support from Windows some time back, it was no longer useful and just added bloat, bugs and more importantly a LOT of time wasted for the development team making sure it was still compatible with all the new stuff.
As we said before, why bother including support for the PC to be able to do stuff that 99.9% of the userbase do not need, and can easily be done on custom hardware more efficiently? If the Amiga is better at this than a modern PC then excellent, but it also proves the point that it would make no sense using a PC to do it. Why would you want to use a Ghz CPU eating around 150W of juice, to do something that a custom board could probably do in 10W?
-
If hardware that is backward compatible uses same I/O ports, IRQs, DMA channels-- there no conflicts to be resolved. When hardware vendors use their on I/O ports arbitrarily, their own IRQ channels, DMA channels then you have conflicts to resolve.
The Wintel PC is an open platform.
>If you're having to reinvent the wheel and have every application bang the metal to the extent the app requires, you are in effect writing a (partial) driver or framework for your application to sit on...
Ahhm, did you miss the list I gave of advantages; you wouldn't rewrite the driver-- the OS would have the functionality built-in without needing drivers and application would be able to go directly to hardware where driver functionality is not supported or inefficient (like palette example).
If the userland applications "hits-the-metal", who will arbitrate the device's access?
I'm still waiting on Protracker vs OctaMED V4 vs Deluxe Music.
>The gains of hardware compatability, yes, lets add 10, 20, 30% extra silicon to every major I/O chip for stuff that's no longer used and long dead... Your entire argument is based on a fairytale world.
Sorry, you keep missing the point. That's your speculation 10-30% extra silicon. Even with some extra silicon, it's worth it given the benefits.
As for the benefits, it depends on the market.
The legacy percentage for AMD K8 Winchester is larger than AMD K8 Sledge-Hammer i.e.
1. K8 Sledge-Hammer, ~10 percent for legacy 105 million.
2. K8 Winchester i.e, ~17 percent for legacy from 68.5 million.
-
At the end of the day, stick your average PC user in front of: Amiga OS, Linux, Windows, Mac.
Chances are they will figure out how to get on the Internet on the latter three, but stand no chance at all on the Amiga. Mainly because they would be lucky if they even had a TCP/IP stack on it.
Come on, lets be realistic. The point here is, that for the vast majority of user a PC does exactly what they need it to do. This might mean it can't do a few things the Amiga could do, mainly because they are things your average user does not need to do. The PC is a mainstream "do it all" machine, it makes no sense wasting time and money including backwards compatibility, except wheres its absolutely essential. That is why they removed 16bit support from Windows some time back, it was no longer useful and just added bloat, bugs and more importantly a LOT of time wasted for the development team making sure it was still compatible with all the new stuff.
As we said before, why bother including support for the PC to be able to do stuff that 99.9% of the userbase do not need, and can easily be done on custom hardware more efficiently? If the Amiga is better at this than a modern PC then excellent, but it also proves the point that it would make no sense using a PC to do it. Why would you want to use a Ghz CPU eating around 150W of juice, to do something that a custom board could probably do in 10W?
My dual core 2.2 Ghz CPU eats around 35Watts.
-
Actually I'm firmly in the user camp these days. I've niether the time nor inclination to go around tweeking and tinkering. I just want to do the things I need to do with the minimum of hassle.
You're on an obscure forum about a commercially dead computer platform espousing the virtues of an even more esoteric OS like BeOS, you are a tinkerer my friend a computer hobbyist. No shame in that. But representative of the 1 billion PC users out there you are not.
And when you present documentation to show these people you supposedly surveyed you can claim the opposite.
Ha Ha. Too funny. Here's my "double blind" study: I asked my work mates: "Do you leave your computer on for days weeks or months? Show of hands please". No hands went up. "OK then what do you do?" We turn it on when we need to use it and then and shut it down when we finished" they said.
Well see, at least from this side, we have more evidence then your say so.
of a select bunch of experienced computer hobbyists.
Didn't mention one way or the other whether they were needed, as it happens the vast majority were - I would not for instance be happy using an Amiga without Opus Magellen on it.
I used it on Amikit. I can easily live without it.
1. a quantity, rating, or the like that represents or approximates an arithmetic mean (http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=Average&search=search).
But it is irrelevant, you made an assumption, which in this case was false.
I use laptops. And whist you can get quadcore laptops (which generally produce more heat then the legendary nut roasting P4 mobility ones did) mine isn't.
Does the word "sarcasm" mean anything to you? I was being sarcastic that a quadcore with 4 gig ram and 600+ mb graphics card was considered "an average PC". I wasn't really apologizing to you. Sorry.......err not really, sarcasm again.
Overspecialise and you breed in weakness. More on this further down.
One of the biggest, and for me nicest parts of moving from AmigaOS was that when I installed BeOS or later Linux, I didn't have to prat around with dozens of disks to install all the other software I needed day to day. So from going from half a day to install, optimise and install all the stuff I needed to... around 20 minutes. It was a revelation and is actually something I miss whenever I had to setup a windows environment. Perhaps I'm spoiled in this.
Don't get me wrong: I did play around with BeOS ages ago. And I liked it a lot. In fact IMO it was the most responsive multimedia OS for a PC you could get. Has many amiga-like qualities. I think Be even tried to poach many Amiga users. But alas I never got it to work on a later P3 and so gave up on it.
But interesting point you make. Once you've set up your Amiga environment, its pretty much done. Not sure about BeOS, but remind me again what is the experience of the other 99 % of PC users..
BeOS at it's height barely scraped 1% of computer usage. Depending on who you ask, Linux now, with a much more varied landscape has just about hit 1%. The point was that minority OS's all have hardware support troubles.
Good we agree that Linux and BeOS have hardware support troubles. So lets get on the Windows bandwagon coz it doesn't..but over at MS Land we have that damn pesky registry, where all the malware hides (we think, no-one can be REALLY sure whats meant to be there or not)
Actually, the boot argument is a non starter - it is completely irrelevant when looked at over the long term. It only becomes a concern if your system is prone to crashing a lot.
Or heaven forbid, if you turn your computer off once or twice a day coz you only want to check an email, or a weather report, or check the latest headlines and then leave your home. And do it again when you get home. For example.
I brought BeOS into it with regard your "jerky menus" complaint. I pointed out that other systems did it better then the Amiga at high loads.
And those arguments were negated.
You have not shown why having a database to deal with a huge amount of hardware configurations is a bad thing. Nor have you pointed to a more effective solution.
Like I said: over at MS Land we have that damn pesky registry, where all the malware hides (we think, no-one can be REALLY sure whats meant to be there or not). Yes your security software will know most of the malware most of the time, but not all of it, and even then many (most?) PC users are paying Symentic, Trend, Kaspersky etc for the privelege.
With few exceptions, all OS's have malware for them, even your beloved Amiga.
Never said otherwise. But they don't affect my Amiga.
But regardless, if nothing else it shows that all OS's have different strengths and weaknesses.
Now THAT is a Eureka moment!!!! Nail-Head.
To get it to do what I take for granted on a modern OS (any of the ones I have mentioned), I would then have to add that functionality back in in the form of hacks, third party replacements (Magellen) and a pile of support software (such as MiamiDX) that on any remotely modern OS comes as standard with.
You have a TCP stack in OS 3.5 and Os 3.9. DOpus 4 is free, it does the job.
Expectations change. I can do more with an EeePC then I ever could with even a top of the line Amiga and for a fraction of the cost. Amiga, as elegant as the whole thing was could not meet my needs, if it meets yours great. But the rest of the world has moved on.
Absolutely expectations change. But there still a few little things or not so little things the PC could learn from the Amiga concept.
By the same token though, taking the oposite side doesn't make you right either.
Hey you were the one who sought a safety-in-numbers, not me.
-
holy s#it! The size of these replies! T to tha L semicolon D R
LOL
-
People have problems in this thread sticking to the example. I can also switch entire frames by changing a video memory ptr on Amiga. But that isn't the point.
Still limited to Amiga's memory design and graphic's processor speed. You want to start a frame per second race? Let's see HAM8 vs ....
CUDA GPUs have extremely large instruction issue per cycle rate, extremely large registers (e.g. can go up to 512 KByte), super-scalar (dual issue per SP) pipelines, extremely large SMT, caches (both hardware and software managed), high speed memory (and designed specifically for graphics i.e. GDDRx types), Ghz range stream processors(SP), multiple ROPS,Triple digit (e.g. 400Mhz) Mhz dual RAMDACs and 'etc'.
The amount of “Instructions in flight” (both in parallel and sequential(in pipeline)) in CUDA GPU kills any classic Amiga IGP chipset.
Should I bring in ATI Xenos?
-
i have a freeware scheduler "Executive" and i can render an animation in cinema 4d, whilst editing scenes and objects in Cinema 4D, send the resultant pics to Adpro for processing, save the files automatically, do a spot of house keeping with DOpus, paint a texture in Dpaint and the Operating System menues are just as fast as if had nothing loaded- on a 50 mhz machine with 16 meg ram
And you had the audacity to call my A1200 machine a frankenstein?
Executive is a complete hack into exec. A very well written one, I might add and one I was happy to use for many years. However, since we're on the subject, why don't you read the documentation and see where the entire motivation and basis for Executive came from? That's right, Un*x. All linux kernels have such a scheduler and modern ones are significantly improved compared to those around when Executive was written.
-
And you had the audacity to call my A1200 machine a frankenstein?
Man, Karlos I cut you deep with that "Frankenstein" thing back there. I really am sorry. Ok. Look you have an "expanded" Amiga. Better?
Executive is a complete hack into exec. A very well written one, I might add and one I was happy to use for many years. However, since we're on the subject, why don't you read the documentation and see where the entire motivation and basis for Executive came from? That's right, Un*x. All linux kernels have such a scheduler and modern ones are significantly improved compared to those around when Executive was written.
Actually I did read the guide for executive about a decade ago. From memeory, Executive offers more than one unix-like scheduler. It offers several, some that have nothing to do with Unix. Which you can select and turn off without rebooting. Can any other PC OS do this?
In any case nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from others. Hell it worked for Microsoft. And the scheduler in Linux was a subject of debate about 12-18 months as it was viewed as good server scheduler, but not that good for a desktop. Hell an mp3 playing back could make GUI stutter. Things may have improved, don't know, couldn't be bothered fartsing around with it anymore, but I play with linux from time to time. Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.
What's better about the new schedulers?
-
Man, Karlos I cut you deep with that "Frankenstein" thing back there. I really am sorry. Ok. Look you have an "expanded" Amiga. Better?
Actually I did read the guide for executive about a decade ago. From memeory, Executive offers more than one unix-like scheduler. It offers several, some that have nothing to do with Unix. Which you can select and turn off without rebooting. Can any other PC OS do this?
In any case nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from others. Hell it worked for Microsoft. And the scheduler in Linux was a subject of debate about 12-18 months as it was viewed as good server scheduler, but not that good for a desktop. Hell an mp3 playing back could make GUI stutter. Things may have improved, don't know, couldn't be bothered fartsing around with it anymore, but I play with linux from time to time. Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.
What's better about the new schedulers?
There's AROS X86....
-
You have to do many I/O instructions to get the joystick status compared to a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0. As for palette modes, they still have them in Photoshop; the point there was an example where API access would be inferior to the extent that Amiga would out do it.
Duh, if that would be executed at the same speed of nowadays computers, OF COURSE an API between it slow things down.
Have you ever thought of companies not wanting to spend a lot of money to rewrite their code for every stupid little hardware revision? And btw. I tend to write my code as readable as possible, to make it as maintainable as possible. API's make it easy for programmers to be quickly able to work with the hardware.
Of course it's fun to be hardware banging, to have all the hardware for yourself. In your own time.
-
Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.
Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.
What's better about the new schedulers?
Combined with ever increasing levels of optimisation on the various window managers, they seem to make for a more.. Responsive? Free flowing perhaps? user experience. Certainly I've not seen an MP3 stutter type issue for a good many years and even then only on very very overtaxed hardware.
That said, if you used lighter weight window managers such as Enlightenment or IceWM, you tended to be ok even on (relatively) old hardware.
-
There's AROS X86....
You have a choice of schedulers? That you can change without re-booting?
Well thats good for the large army of PC's with Aros users out there..
-
Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.
Combined with ever increasing levels of optimisation on the various window managers, they seem to make for a more.. Responsive? Free flowing perhaps? user experience. Certainly I've not seen an MP3 stutter type issue for a good many years and even then only on very very overtaxed hardware.
That said, if you used lighter weight window managers such as Enlightenment or IceWM, you tended to be ok even on (relatively) old hardware.
here was an article that I read at the time about the very issue of the multi-tasking abilities of Windows Linux and AmigaOS, by a kernel developer. Its an interesting read. things may have moved on since then, ofcourse.
-
You have a choice of schedulers? That you can change without re-booting?
It's not that it isn't possible, it's that doing so makes for a retarded design.
-
Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.
Its just a shame that you can't run AmigaOS on some modern hardware and see it really fly.
-
Its just a shame that you can't run AmigaOS on some modern hardware and see it really fly.
You can, with UAE. You can have the Amiga setup you could never afford, for free at that.
-
My dual core 2.2 Ghz CPU eats around 35Watts.
My dual core 2.1Ghz laptop eats around 35W. However my dual core 2.0Ghz PC eats nearer 150W, due to the GPU, HDD, CPU, having higher consumption.
The point I was trying to make is that you are never going to a get a general purpose PC down to the same power levels as a custom board, and the custom board will do the job better for these silly high-polling, hardware banging tasks that are being argued about in this thread.
Sure you CAN build fairly low power PCs, I in fact own a MiniITX touchscreen PC (board built into monitor) and am planning to upgrade it with lower power parts. However you are pretty much talking custom boards then. MiniITX boards often have hardware your average PC does not (watchdog timer, special digital connections for custom hardware) which is the point - the PC market has custom boards for this purpose as your average PC does not need the extra cost of including this stuff.
Your average PC is designed for Windows and does not expect hardware banging from anything but Windows and its drivers. That is also why hardware does not bother to be backwards compatible, its not needed for the software 99.9% if people are running. And the other 0.01%, can buy custom hardware to do what they want as they will also need custom software, so its well out of the scope of a common PC.
-
true. but as it stands as of this moment, i have a greater chance of suffering from malware on a fresh out of the box windows install than I do on a fresh amiga os 3.1 install. The why's, buts, ifs don't matter, thems the facts.
rotfl; what sort of Internet can a fresh install AOS3.1 reach anyway? Dodging malware because your computer is so ancient isn't a benefit for your system. Otherwise clearly the C64 is much better then an Amiga system because it can't get any malware at all.
-
You can, with UAE. You can have the Amiga setup you could never afford, for free at that.
Okay, I forgot to add *natively*.
-
OS does retain control of the hardware but it application can also use it directly-- the way it's set up in Amiga. APIs will always be worse than direct control from efficiency point of view and knowing exactly what is happening in the system.
no if you access the hardware directly you are doing an end run around the os. this introduces the potential for failure on future(or even current) hardware.
-
You're on an obscure forum about a commercially dead computer platform espousing the virtues of an even more esoteric OS like BeOS, you are a tinkerer my friend a computer hobbyist. No shame in that. But representative of the 1 billion PC users out there you are not.
A long time ago maybe, that BeOS server was an experiment that I found useful and sucessful enough to leave in an operational state. I've not tinkered with any OS or piece of hardware like that since. Nor have I actually touched that system in a while thinking about it.
Indeed my current system is a laptop - bought for a variety of reasons, not least was me not having to tinker.
Does the word "sarcasm" mean anything to you? I was being sarcastic that a quadcore with 4 gig ram and 600+ mb graphics card was considered "an average PC". I wasn't really apologizing to you. Sorry.......err not really, sarcasm again.
You might want to work on that then, it came across as pure condescension.
But interesting point you make. Once you've set up your Amiga environment, its pretty much done. Not sure about BeOS, but remind me again what is the experience of the other 99 % of PC users..
Varies depending on their system, many folks these days have vender supplied rescue disks they can lob in to restore in the event of a cataclysm, which not only restores the OS, but the applications. Others, perhaps those who bought their systems from smaller outlets might have an OEM disk and effectively have to reinstall their apps all over again. And then of course there are those that build their own.
Good we agree that Linux and BeOS have hardware support troubles.
My point was that Linux's support is (and likely was at the time of BeOS) far greater. To say it is an issue that particularly afflicts Linux is misleading.
So lets get on the Windows bandwagon coz it doesn't..but over at MS Land we have that damn pesky registry, where all the malware hides (we think, no-one can be REALLY sure whats meant to be there or not)
Given the vast amount of options Windows supports, what would you propose as a replacement of the registry database? Remembering that both BeOS and Linux have similar systems built into them.
You have a TCP stack in OS 3.5 and Os 3.9. DOpus 4 is free, it does the job.
The stack that came with 3.5 and 3.9 didn't work with my ISP. Dopus 4 was too limited for me. Either way, functionality that I expected, nay, demanded had to be added into the base install.
Absolutely expectations change. But there still a few little things or not so little things the PC could learn from the Amiga concept.
In many ways I feel things like the EeePC and Ebox are pretty much there in terms of concept. Macs possibly more so.
I also feel that those small cheep computers will likely pave the way for more appliance like devices that offer base office and web functionality.
-
People have problems in this thread sticking to the example. I can also switch entire frames by changing a video memory ptr on Amiga. But that isn't the point.
Modern hardware is so powerful that swapping an entire scene out using the GPU can be done so much faster compared to an Amiga swapping two colours around. Legacy Amiga hardware is old and slow.
PC still playing catchup? Sure, if digital, 9pin joysticks are your thing. But the rest of the world has moved on to big and better things.
-
amigaksi,
The Olympics are over buddy. Let's put out the flame :madashell: and move on to other things.
-
amigaksi,
The Olympics are over buddy. Let's put out the flame :madashell: and move on to other things.
Stop the bullcrap; you're just serving as a biased sidekick like some others. Be objective and perhaps you will see such a clear cut point.
-
Still limited to Amiga's memory design and graphic's processor speed. You want to start a frame per second race? Let's see HAM8 vs ....
CUDA GPUs have extremely large instruction issue per cycle rate, extremely large registers (e.g. can go up to 512 KByte), super-scalar (dual issue per SP) pipelines, extremely large SMT, caches (both hardware and software managed), high speed memory (and designed specifically for graphics i.e. GDDRx types), Ghz range stream processors(SP), multiple ROPS,Triple digit (e.g. 400Mhz) Mhz dual RAMDACs and 'etc'.
The amount of “Instructions in flight” (both in parallel and sequential(in pipeline)) in CUDA GPU kills any classic Amiga IGP chipset.
Should I bring in ATI Xenos?
Once you accept that Amiga can swap palette indices faster than API-based modern system, we can looks at other examples where Amiga wins. I am not contesting you have more graphics horsepower overall in modern graphics cards but in some cases Amiga still wins when you look at time spent by CPU especially if you are going through APIs. Frame per second race is also as easy as setting video memory pointers on Amiga. I believe we had some of this discussion before-- regarding playing .anim files and decompressing them on-the-fly using a double-buffered approach. Time to switch between frames is just for flipping pointers.
-
At the end of the day, stick your average PC user in front of: Amiga OS, Linux, Windows, Mac.
Chances are they will figure out how to get on the Internet on the latter three, but stand no chance at all on the Amiga. Mainly because they would be lucky if they even had a TCP/IP stack on it.
...
That's a biased comparison. Internet browsers and websites mainly developed after Amigas stopped manufacturing. They revised Windows many times to integrate internet and it's bloated websites into it. I bet if internet was a big thing during Amiga's development, people would have had optimized browsers running on it within its RAM/processor limits. People develop and optimize for what the target machine is.
>Come on, lets be realistic. The point here is, that for the vast majority of user a PC does exactly what they need it to do. This might mean it can't do a few things the Amiga could do, mainly because they are things your average user does not need to do.
It's a speculation to say Amiga only does those things PC cannot do that average user does not need to do so. Many people use PCs today for painting, gaming, etc. can do the same on Amiga.
>The PC is a mainstream "do it all" machine, it makes no sense wasting time and money including backwards compatibility, except wheres its absolutely essential.
It's absolutely necessary to maintain backward compatibility-- they do it on APi level and I was proposing they do it at hardware level so a programmer can have the best of both worlds.
>That is why they removed 16bit support from Windows some time back, it was no longer useful and just added bloat, bugs and more importantly a LOT of time wasted for the development team making sure it was still compatible with all the new stuff.
16-bit support is NOT bloated. The entire Windows 3.1 OS fits in 1Megabyte. Compare this with some application on XP where one of the hundreds of DLLs it uses is 1 Megabyte each. By the way, the processors still support backward compatibility of 8-bit and 16-bit; it's stupidity not to include it within the latest OS.
>As we said before, why bother including support for the PC to be able to do stuff that 99.9% of the userbase do not need, and can easily be done on custom hardware more efficiently? If the Amiga is better at this than a modern PC then excellent, but it also proves the point that it would make no sense using a PC to do it. Why would you want to use a Ghz CPU eating around 150W of juice, to do something that a custom board could probably do in 10W?
Custom board would have to be put into a PC as well right so the wattage would add up. Someone can make the same argument Amiga can do everything and just needs a custom board for dealing with bloated internet websites/applications.
-
Once you accept that Amiga can swap palette indices faster than API-based modern system
You have not provided one shred of evidence to back that assertion up.
It's been bugging me for days as to why I've had this sense of deja vu...
I know where I've read this sort of crap before. Back in the bygone days of Usenet there was a spacker there who was claiming his A4000's 233Mhz PPC cpu was *faster* then a then top end AthlonXP on the basis that the 604 took something like 3 cycles to execute an instruction compared to the XP's 5, whilst ignoring the fact that the Athlon in question ran at over 2.5Ghz.
How are you doing SG?
-
That's a dishonest question.
But I'll bite.
The PC implementation (using API's etc) will be faster doing it's poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will be. Even if the serial protocol itself is slower, the vastly (and I do mean vastly) faster processor will need less time to execute the whole API based serial poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will take.
Now, that the serial port on the PC is usually sucky and hence slower to be sampled is another matter, but the fact is that the code driving said sucky serial port is extremely likely to be faster than the MOVE.W.
If only because your 3Ghz machine can execute it's code -literally- thousands of times faster and the API overhead is not adding thousands of times more code.
I wasn't referring to the old serial port-- but USB HID being a serial protocol. The I/O instructions aren't running at 3Ghz. In fact, I have experimented a lot with I/O to parallel ports and other I/O instructions and some old machines running at 100Mhz...400Mhz have faster parallel ports than machines running at 1Ghz and above. Take for example a Toshiba Tecra 8000 at 300Mhz-- it's parallel port gets 1 megabytes/second easily (going direct to hardware of course). Now take a Thinkpad A31 (1.6Ghz) and it's parallel port gets only 700Kilobytes/second (going direct to hardware w/o bullcrap APis).
So a MOVE.W on Amiga OCS takes a few microseconds consistently. Using a serial protocol involves a lot more I/O instructions which aren't that much faster as processor speeds are.
-
no if you access the hardware directly you are doing an end run around the os. this introduces the potential for failure on future(or even current) hardware.
Not if hardware is backward compatible. You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware. There's many on PCs as well as Amiga. It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them.
-
Modern hardware is so powerful that swapping an entire scene out using the GPU can be done so much faster compared to an Amiga swapping two colours around. Legacy Amiga hardware is old and slow.
PC still playing catchup? Sure, if digital, 9pin joysticks are your thing. But the rest of the world has moved on to big and better things.
As I just explained to someone above, the I/O on modern systems is NOT as fast as the processors (or even memory accesses). Even if you use GPU, you still have to feed the parameters from host CPU to GPU using API calls. There's many more things than just joysticks especially if you rely on APi calls on PCs.
-
Depends on the priority. Notice the CPU didn't keep up with the GPU market in pure math performance.
Compatibility is a MAJOR thing to have. CPUs weren't trying to keep up with GPUs as their target wasn't just pure math performance. But they did maintain backward compatibility on hardware level. And I bet hardly anyone would upgrade to a new PC if it WASN'T backward compatible. You could say why not make people use high level languages (like APIs) with some translation layer and allow processors to start anew everytime, but that's a suboptimal approach.
-
Hi,
@Amigaski,
How did you know I was on drugs, ...
Because of your experiments that you wanted me to repeat:
"Hook yourself up to a 1000V, then 3000V, then 9000V, they 27000V and then tell me at what voltage that your body has sensed a change in?"
>Using the Algorithm that the human body can sense, even if the PC was running at 500 hz the eyes would not see any change in the movement of the cursor even though the Amiga's joystick port was moving at a hz speed of 50% faster. In this case the human body (eyes) would sense a faster movement only if the difference in speed was 3 times faster. Which means that you are probably correct, the joystick does move faster but the human eyes would not see it until it was moving at least 3 times the speed of the PC joytick...
Using same argument, I can play Amiga games perfectly fine on a 7.16Mhz OCS machine and since the frame rate doesn't miss a beat (as far as user experience goes) I'm better off than buying a 3Ghz machine to do something similar with no guarantees that it may not skip a frame every now and then (especially with a Wifi card plugged in).
-
As I just explained to someone above, the I/O on modern systems is NOT as fast as the processors (or even memory accesses).
Still faster than all Amiga hardware.
Even if you use GPU, you still have to feed the parameters from host CPU to GPU using API calls.
Complied shader programs are programs. CPU is fast enough to feed the GpGPU e.g. Fold@Home GPU2 client.
-
Hi,
@Trev,
Are you going to surrender the ship, are you going to quit, even though he is totally wrong, ...
smerf
I see your mental attitude is just to try to "win" regardless of what the TRUTH is. You are totally wrong and misguided. Your example of using port 201h serially is inferior even to USB HIDs.
-
Amigaski/SG as seen earlier in this thread:
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/Pulling_at_straws.jpg)
Clearly, in need of a liberal application of
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/cluebat_poster2.jpg)
-
So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.
then you are not reading too well.
the ability to retarget a command IS the advantage. there is no feasable way to have easy to program direct hardware programming that all chips support and still advance at a reasonable rate.
this is what happens in current systems today.
Hardware>driver(translator)>directX(or other standard api)>program
when new hardware comes out all that needs to be made is a driver to translate to the api. this is the strength of the system. yes there is some sacrifice in speed but even with this sacrifice you don't lose much.
you can't have your cake and eat it too.
-
No, I'm in the relevancy camp. No human can trigger a joystick input at 1 kHz, and no mainstream Amiga-compatible display has a refresh rate of 1 kHz. It's really a question of whether or not both an Amiga and a "PC" can sample, process, and respond to an input event in a timeframe that matters to both the application and the end user. In short, they both can.
Limiting the criteria under which either an Amiga or a "PC" can be said to be "still playing ... catchup" is a sad, sad way to win a debate in general terms. NTSC Amigas are faster than PAL Amigas, but that won't stop anyone from arguing over which is "better" in terms of end user experience. Change of subject: PAL Amiga still playing NTSC Amiga catchup?
My one thousandth post should have been more interesting.
It's still relevant though that joysticks are faster on Amiga since you use up less CPU time even if you read them 60Hz. As for palette modes, I bet it's faster even on modern hardware to set up a paletted mode for editing cartoons, line-art, cad/cam, schematics, and other things that rely on exact coloring and do not want shading which would bloat the file size unnecessarily. Paletted pictures would compress a lot more losslessly than saving them as 32-bit image files and would be far less data to deal with when editing them. So in that case, swapping palette indices is a useful feature.
If you want to argue PAL Amiga playing NTSC catchup-- you have to compare with timers. Timers are suppose to work at exact rates. And in that scenario, the Copper method of doing cycle-exact transactions w/ZERO latency is the ideal method of doing it. Not only is it ZERO latency w/558ns accuracy, but there's not INTERRUPT overhead involved. No stacks to save current processor conditions and return from interrupt. Here Amiga wins as well.
-
Simply put when the Amiga is running a CPU that is capable of decoding a 1080p Blu-Ray DVD and doing something else at the same time, then I'll believe that it's as fast as a pc or faster. legacy bus and ports which are designed to handle specific speeds and timer resolutions don't tell the tale, neither does the Front Side Bus or North Bridge or Southbridge specs on a particular unit. Most SATA controllers today don't live up to the transfer speeds (even at burst rates) that are in their "general specification" due to other hardware factors.
Wait until we see wireless USB.. That will no doubt be an interesting discussion here. I can't belive we are having a timing resolution discussion here outside of the 1980s.. as they say "Only Amiga Makes it Possible!!"
-
Compatibility is a MAJOR thing to have. CPUs weren't trying to keep up with GPUs as their target wasn't just pure math performance. But they did maintain backward compatibility on hardware level.
Erm, modern X86 CPUs includes micro-code translation engines i.e. on-chip firmware (look up tables) based decoders.
And I bet hardly anyone would upgrade to a new PC if it WASN'T backward compatible.
Unlike the GPU, the CPU is the host for control code. The application of hit-the-metal vs abstraction are dependent on needs.
-
amigaksi,
You're having a John Rambo moment: "The war is over, John. Let those people go in peace."
-
How is the registry an abomination? I'm not looking for a debate; I'm just curious as to why you think it is.
A simplified abstraction of the registry is the tooltype, but rather than store named values in a shortcut (which is just an instance of the IShellLink object persisted to disk), they're stored in a centralized database.
The registry is more flexible than an initialization file, and if necessary, the two can be used hand-in-hand through mapping and redirection, assuming standard Windows APIs--GetPrivateProfileString(), SetPrivateProfileString(), et al--are used by the target application. In a multi-user system, you can work wonders with the registry at the data level that just aren't possible with initialization files. (You can get quite crafty with initialization files, but at some point, you end up with a database-like series of overlays, i.e. the registry.)
Granted, the hierarchical nature of the registry often leads to unnecessary complexity, but when used properly, the registry is a valuable tool.
It's useful until it becomes corrupt and renders the entire system unbootable. And of course, you have to deal with applications that write stuff to it and never remove it (bloating it) and spyware/viruses screwing with it. Continuously reading/writing same file means higher probability of failure of system than reading/writing different files. I have seen several systems that wouldn't go into Windows because of registry corruptions. I suppose you can get "lucky" if the back-up didn't get corrupted as well. However, it would still affect start-up/shut-down times since you could corrupt the registry if you just turn off the machine and restoring it would increase start-up time.
-
amigaksi,
You're having a John Rambo moment: "The war is over, John. Let those people go in peace."
:roflmao:
-
It's useful until it becomes corrupt and renders the entire system unbootable. And of course, you have to deal with applications that write stuff to it and never remove it (bloating it) and spyware/viruses screwing with it.
.
I still recall Saddam Virus from mag cover CD on my classic Amiga 500.
Continuously reading/writing same file means higher probability of failure of system than reading/writing different files. I have seen several systems that wouldn't go into Windows because of registry corruptions. I suppose you can get "lucky" if the back-up didn't get corrupted as well. However, it would still affect start-up/shut-down times since you could corrupt the registry if you just turn off the machine and restoring it would increase start-up time.
This an OS issue. Run AROS X86.
-
I wasn't referring to the old serial port-- but USB HID being a serial protocol. The I/O instructions aren't running at 3Ghz. In fact, I have experimented a lot with I/O to parallel ports and other I/O instructions and some old machines running at 100Mhz...400Mhz have faster parallel ports than machines running at 1Ghz and above. Take for example a Toshiba Tecra 8000 at 300Mhz-- it's parallel port gets 1 megabytes/second easily (going direct to hardware of course). Now take a Thinkpad A31 (1.6Ghz) and it's parallel port gets only 700Kilobytes/second (going direct to hardware w/o bullcrap APis).
So a MOVE.W on Amiga OCS takes a few microseconds consistently. Using a serial protocol involves a lot more I/O instructions which aren't that much faster as processor speeds are.
All of which still does not change that, despite a slower to react bit of port hardware that the PC will spend less actual time running the code to poll said port, even with the API overhead.
Or in simpler terms: the PC can do more other stuff while waiting for the IO device to be ready than the Amiga can. Which is to say that even though it uses API's to access hardware, thanks to being really, really, really fast it still is faster than the Amiga to execute the relevant code (i.e. poll the hardware).
That it needs to wait longer for the hardware to be ready is irrelevant because this discussion is not about the speed of a parrallel port controller (which is the primary cause newer PC's have slower ports) but about the overhead incurred by the API's and drivers driving said controller.
-
You have not provided one shred of evidence to back that assertion up.
It's been bugging me for days as to why I've had this sense of deja vu...
...
I did give method on Amiga: $DFF186/$DFF19E for indices 3 and 15. You save your shadowed registers from RAM to these locations. As for API method, there's only standard API for setting logical palettes not physical palette entries.
I know you can insult people at a higher rate than USB 2.0 but that won't help you win the argument.
-
Still faster than all Amiga hardware.
Complied shader programs are programs. CPU is fast enough to feed the GpGPU e.g. Fold@Home GPU2 client.
It depends on the I/O port. Also different motherboards I have timed give different results for same I/O ports. If you went directly to hardware on PC in standard VGA mode, you can set palette indices faster but the point was making an API do it since nowadays video modes are nonstandard assuming you even have a paletted mode. CPU is fast enough to feed the GPU but what is the overhead as compared to doing a few MOVE.W on Amiga.
-
then you are not reading too well.
the ability to retarget a command IS the advantage. there is no feasable way to have easy to program direct hardware programming that all chips support and still advance at a reasonable rate.
this is what happens in current systems today.
Hardware>driver(translator)>directX(or other standard api)>program
when new hardware comes out all that needs to be made is a driver to translate to the api. this is the strength of the system. yes there is some sacrifice in speed but even with this sacrifice you don't lose much.
you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I have read it will-- just the simple palette index problem should tell you how inefficient it is to go through APIs vs. doing it via hardware.
Not everything needs to be retargetted. It's better to have both API and hardware level compatibility so if you want to retarget go through the API. Why force people to accept retargetability even if they don't need it and force them to use less efficient means.
There's not just sacrifice in speed though. You also have restrictions on what API allows you to do with the hardware. Many Amiga games wouldn't be possible if they only relied on API calls.
-
It depends on the I/O port. Also different motherboards I have timed give different results for same I/O ports. If you went directly to hardware on PC in standard VGA mode, you can set palette indices faster but the point was making an API do it since nowadays video modes are nonstandard assuming you even have a paletted mode. CPU is fast enough to feed the GPU but what is the overhead as compared to doing a few MOVE.W on Amiga.
As the RSX pixel shader example shows, you have factor in instruction pairing i.e. parallelism.
-
I have read it will-- just the simple palette index problem should tell you how inefficient it is to go through APIs vs. doing it via hardware.
Not everything needs to be retargetted. It's better to have both API and hardware level compatibility so if you want to retarget go through the API. Why force people to accept retargetability even if they don't need it and force them to use less efficient means.
With GPUs, parallelism and maximum math unit counts are the priories.
There's not just sacrifice in speed though. You also have restrictions on what API allows you to do with the hardware.
The thin libCGM didn't solve RSX's design flaw.
Many Amiga games wouldn't be possible if they only relied on API calls.
Amiga's API is primitive.
-
in c#
joystickDevice.Poll();
This is faster for a number of reasons. First of all, I didn't have to write the entire application in assembly language. So what if you can read the joystick with one mov instruction? Reading a joystick ain't hard no matter what the language and API you have to deal with. What's hard is all of the other parts of the game you have to write, especially the graphics. I don't know about you, but I don't like writing graphics code in asm. Some of the crappiest, most inefficient code I've ever seen was written in assembly language. The whole mantra of "code written in assembly is the fastest there is" is an exaggeration beyond belief.
...
It's given someone knows high level language and assembly, he can produce more efficient and faster code in assembly since he can better deal with misalignment, registerizing variables, use the flags optimally, etc.
>Second, I can read the value from two analog sticks and two analog flippers more than once per frame, I can do it as fast as the HID spec allows, and there can be a lot more analog controls on the device than that! Not so on the Amiga, only can do this once per frame. So much for the superior Amiga joy port.
No, now you are comparing another aspect of the Amiga joystick port-- the ability to deal with analog signals as well. Games pick the better interface-- the digital one. On PC even you are forced to use the analog joystick since that's the standard. And even in the analog case, Amiga reads the POTs with one MOVE-- the hardware is doing the sampling for you. I have never even seen an analog joystick on Amiga-- just paddles in some rare applications.
>With the Amiga Joy port, I get one 1980's era standard boring as hell joystick. Just one per port. Imagine playing Gears of War or Crysis with such a joystick. Might as well sit on the damn thing. On the PC I can have a dozen gaming devices. Mice, keyboards, steering wheels, foot pedals, yokes, game pads, classic style joys, harddrives, video output devices, video input devices, audio output devices, audio input devices, and the list goes on and on. All on one bus. With the Amiga joy port, I get.... a joystick... an old crappy joystick whose metal contact switches tie directly to I/O pins on some bizarre custom chip that's capable of recording the full glory of raw signal bounce. Oh how superior!
Wrong. PC's gameport doesn't give you those options. USB bus gives you ability to have faster buffer transfers but Amiga uses a different port for buffer-based transfers. Digital joysticks are and were the norm for Ataris/Amigas/C64/Vic-20/Sega/STs/etc. whereas PCs were using the inferior analog joysticks. So the Amiga's joystick port is optimized for digital joysticks. Analog joysticks are crappy so only computer that used them were PCs which were NOT into gaming.
>USB HID devices output perfect state information to the computer...
That's a speculative remark. Whatever you read from joystick port you can end up reading from USB HID device.
>All this being said, the Amiga joystick port is just another para interface hanging off a custom chip.
Aren't all ports some sort of interface hanging off a chip-- keyboard port on PC is hanging off some 8042 or compatible.
>It is unusual in that you can fetch information from it rather quickly. One thing amigaski hasn't done in his argument is actually show real code that reads the joystick port as fast as he claims. He has a product which emulates joystick devices for the amiga by bit banging the para port on the pc, but notice he hasn't claimed there are games which are unusable using his hardware emulation product, which by it's very nature has to use the supposedly inferior db15 standard legacy joystick port or a keyboard for it's input.
I can also read digital joystick data and feed it to Amiga/Ataris not just analog joysticks. And the fact that I have gone through all these timings is why I am so certain the analog joysticks are slower and inferior to digital joysticks and on top of that the interface for reading even analog values on Amiga is superior (due to less CPU useage). By the way, the simulation of joysticks is only one part-- the same interface also simulates mice for various machines, disk drives, digitized paddles, etc.
It's not a big deal to write code to read joysticks as fast as I claim.
>The only devices that i'm aware of that actually use the limits of the Amiga joyport are audio digitizers that tie in to that port. I wouldn't be surprised if others on here know of additional devices that can use the capability of this interface. There are two words that accurately describe the Amiga Joystick/Mouse port: weird and suboptimal.
Amazing that you labeled it "mouse port" but did not mention that Mouse is one of the devices that port handles. And you can send pulses through the joystick port for mouse every few microseconds (not milliseconds). Joystick port also handles Light Pens, Paddles, Dongle-stuff, and also lets you control pins for input or output for controlling custom devices although there's a parallel port for doing that as well.
-
Erm, modern X86 CPUs includes micro-code translation engines i.e. on-chip firmware (look up tables) based decoders.
Unlike the GPU, the CPU is the host for control code. The application of hit-the-metal vs abstraction are dependent on needs.
However, they are maintaining compatibility, they are USING UP SILICON. And I really don't think it's a big deal to add some silicon to maintain backward compatibility. The actual silicon uses up only a small amount of the ICs space anyway so if they made the IC a millimeter bigger, it's no big deal given how miniaturized the fabrication process has become.
Since CPU is the host for control code, it has to spend time doing I/O to tell GPU to swap palette indices (assuming majority of GPUs out there even support paletted mode).
-
Look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiIr2oJZ0l4
amigaksi vs PC users
-
CUDA GPUs have extremely large instruction issue per cycle rate, extremely large registers (e.g. can go up to 512 KByte), super-scalar (dual issue per SP) pipelines, extremely large SMT, caches (both hardware and software managed), high speed memory (and designed specifically for graphics i.e. GDDRx types), Ghz range stream processors(SP), multiple ROPS,Triple digit (e.g. 400Mhz) Mhz dual RAMDACs and 'etc'.
The amount of “Instructions in flight” (both in parallel and sequential(in pipeline)) in CUDA GPU kills any classic Amiga IGP chipset.
You only have to look at the functionality available for CUDA devices:
For Compute 1.0
- The maximum number of threads per block is 512
- The maximum sizes of the x-, y-, and z-dimension of a thread block are 512, 512 and 64, respectively
- The maximum size of each dimension of a grid of thread blocks is 65535
- The warp size is 32 threads
- The number of registers per multiprocessor is 8192;
- The amount of shared memory available per multiprocessor is 16 KB organized into 16 banks
- The total amount of constant memory is 64 KB
- The cache working set for constant memory is 8 KB per multiprocessor
- The cache working set for texture memory varies between 6 and 8 KB per multiprocessor
- The maximum number of active blocks per multiprocessor is 8
- The maximum number of active warps per multiprocessor is 24
- The maximum number of active threads per multiprocessor is 768
- For a texture reference bound to a one-dimensional CUDA array, the maximum width is 213
- For a texture reference bound to a two-dimensional CUDA array, the maximum width is 216 and the maximum height is 215
- For a texture reference bound to a three-dimensional CUDA array, the maximum width is 211, the maximum height is 211, and the maximum depth is 211
- For a texture reference bound to linear memory, the maximum width is 227
- The limit on kernel size is 2 million PTX instructions
- Each multiprocessor is composed of eight processors, so that a multiprocessor is able to process the 32 threads of a warp in four clock cycles
For Compute 1.1
- Support for atomic functions operating on 32-bit words in global memory
For Compute 1.2
- Support for atomic functions operating in shared memory and atomic functions operating on 64-bit words in global memory
- Support for warp vote functions
- The number of registers per multiprocessor is 16384
- The maximum number of active warps per multiprocessor is 32
- The maximum number of active threads per multiprocessor is 1024
For Compute 1.3
- Support for double-precision floating-point numbers
Compare the above with the capability of the copper and blitter combined. I'm not knocking the native amiga hardware, it is capable of all kinds of strange and wonderful things when coded directly but any CUDA Compute 1.0 capable GPU utterly surpasses it potential. It isn't really a fair comparison however.
-
The fact that they recently dropped the Gameport and decided to use USB joysticks (which are still slower to read) should tell you that someone is giving a hoot.
perhaps you misinterpret this. there is this movement in the pc world where legacy ports are getting replaced by a single port(to make them cheaper). perhaps that is where the reason lies.
keyboard
at>ps2>usb
mouse
serial>ps2>usb
joystick
joyport>usb
Printer
Parallel>usb
External Modem
serial>usb
see a trend?
-
Not if hardware is backward compatible. You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware. There's many on PCs as well as Amiga. It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them.
actually you just told us why an api is important.
You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware.
now while that is true just because you can don't always mean you WILL have well behaved programs. as such the api offers an easy way to write a program and Forces you to make the program compliant.
another thing a good api has contingencies in case a function does not work. it is not just about speed but also reliability. operating directly on the hardware could cause an exception which could freeze not only the active program but also lock up the os as well. even if that program was written properly.
-
Not everything needs to be retargetted. It's better to have both API and hardware level compatibility so if you want to retarget go through the API. Why force people to accept retargetability even if they don't need it and force them to use less efficient means.
simply because there is no one entity that can force all hardware manufacturers to abide in any one standard. as such there has to be a buffer this buffer is the api.
There's not just sacrifice in speed though. You also have restrictions on what API allows you to do with the hardware. Many Amiga games wouldn't be possible if they only relied on API calls.
this is true however as these new features come into existance the api is updated with functions that allow you to use the features that programmers need and want implemented. as such those games are still possible you just need to be creative with what you have.
-
It's given someone knows high level language and assembly, he can produce more efficient and faster code in assembly since he can better deal with misalignment, registerizing variables, use the flags optimally, etc.
This is simply not true.
Optimizing code is already quite hard to do in higher level languages*. Going to lower levels does not make it easier, it makes it harder because you now have to both choose the best algorithm (where 95-99% of your performance will come from - even the best assembly coded Bubble Sort ever won't beat even the lousiest Visual Basic Heap Sort ever for anything above say a thousand entries to be sorted), the best way to implement the algorithm you chose considering your application requirements and you also have to do that in the best, most optimal way possible in assembly.
Chances are you can do one or two well enough and fail at the other(s).
Not to mention that modern compilers are actually quite good at doing all the things you suggest as they use the same tricks you describe. Or the fact that todays programs tend to be a 'tad' more complicated than something as trivial as sending some bits over a parralel port. When your sourcecode is measured in megabytes you should be damn happy you didn't need to think about how to access the screen to write a few pixels on it but could just call a library to do so and be done with it.
*) This is one of the reasons that optimizing compilers these days optimize your code and their own assembly output instead of just optimizing their assembly output. And contrary to what you might think, the step where they optimize your handwritten code is by far the biggest gain, optimizing the assembly (better/optimal register use, unrolling loops, alignment, etc) gains less in almost all cases.
-
It's useful until it becomes corrupt and renders the entire system unbootable. And of course, you have to deal with applications that write stuff to it and never remove it (bloating it) and spyware/viruses screwing with it. Continuously reading/writing same file means higher probability of failure of system than reading/writing different files. I have seen several systems that wouldn't go into Windows because of registry corruptions. I suppose you can get "lucky" if the back-up didn't get corrupted as well. However, it would still affect start-up/shut-down times since you could corrupt the registry if you just turn off the machine and restoring it would increase start-up time.
None of those points are specific to Windows or the registry. They affect all systems. I've seen several systems with corrupt registry files as well--several out of tens of thousands. In all cases, the corruption was caused by a disk fault, and all could have been prevented if the end user had been paying attention to the diagnostic warnings generated by the disks.
I've had more issues with corrupt files on OFS/FFS file systems over the last few months than I've had with NTFS file systems over the entire history of Windows NT.
-
Man, Karlos I cut you deep with that "Frankenstein" thing back there. I really am sorry. Ok. Look you have an "expanded" Amiga. Better?
*sigh* I guess you have to punctuate all satirical remarks with smilies these days :(
Actually I did read the guide for executive about a decade ago. From memeory, Executive offers more than one unix-like scheduler. It offers several, some that have nothing to do with Unix. Which you can select and turn off without rebooting. Can any other PC OS do this?
The registered version offered several scheduling models based on established models already used by different Unix based operating systems of the day. The non-registered version only has the one basic model.
Now, as for disabling the dynamic task scheduler, the only reason you can do this under AmigaOS is because it doesn't use one by default anyway. Most Unix based OSes don't have a model similar to exec's fixed priority one (by which I mean tasks are assigned priorities that the OS doesn't adjust) simply because it isn't a good model for a many process multi-user system.
As for switching algorithms, the reason you shouldn't have to do this is because the OS should know better than you what every process is up to and what model best fits.
What's better about the new schedulers?
Many things. For instance, modern schedulers have access to far more meta data about processes than Executive did, such as how much memory, IO, swap etc is in use, the load average history, type of load (compute or transpute bound) and so on for every process in the system. These data give them far more to go on when deciding what processes to service immediately and what can wait. They also understand how to distribute load across multiple CPU's and multiple cores on multiple CPU's, which really is not a simple thing to do well.
We had a server go slightly mental after somebody had written some really bad code that essentially fork bombed the machine. It's load average was over 1000 at this point (I think on that revision of the kernel, load averages might even wrap at 1024, so it could have been even higher) and it was over 20GiB into swap. In short, the system was being brought to it's absolute knees with thousands of amok processes constantly trying to spawn further ones and every one of them trying to grab memory. It is a testament to the scheduler that the problem could be fixed through a normal ssh login. Most other OSes would have simply locked up and died long before this.
-
Incidentally, when I say "custom hardware" I was not referring to a PC addon card. I was referring to embedded designs such as Minimig, that would be a completely dedicated, custom board, designed to do something far more efficiently than a PC can.
Programmable micro-controllers are so cheap these days, people are using them for everything.
I mean, does it really make sense to boot our PCs just to do a sum? No, we still have pocket calculators (though mostly likely probably use our mobile phones).
-
however my A1200 multitasks smoothly, and always prioritises my input over anything else that might be needing CPU time.
I'm just randomly jumping in, but that statement is simply not true. Exec's scheduler provides absolutely no guarantees regarding input. I'll grant you this, though: If every Amiga developer wrote solely to published APIs (not directly to hardware) and used priority levels recommended for user-level applications, then Exec's scheduler would give the appearance of prioritizing input over other system activity.
A more advanced scheduler could in fact provide such a guarantee. Exec didn't do anything that any decent workstation OS didn't already do better. What it did do--and we all know this--was provide workstation-like mutlitasking to consumers at a very affordable price. If Exec had done everything BSD, System V, VMS, NonStop, and other contemporary systems did at the time, it would have been outside the budget of all but the wealthiest consumers. (EDIT: And having been cross-developed on SunOS systems, I can't help but wonder if Carl and the rest of the gang weren't tempted to "borrow" features.)
-
however my A1200 multitasks smoothly, and always prioritises my input over anything else that might be needing CPU time.
Really ? Now do this simple test:
1. At idle, open a WB window full of icons (let's say 50).
2. Now run something that eats quite a lot of CPU, let's say 80% (like a video player)
3. Close, and open the same window again
Notice the difference. And tell me again that your input is prioritised...
This is where modern OS perform a lot better. First of all they use cache for any sort of things. So this kind of window wouldn't cause all icons to be reloaded again... Then they scale a lot better with high CPU usage... Something Exec cannot do. Because it's, well, simple...
-
Simply put when the Amiga is running a CPU that is capable of decoding a 1080p Blu-Ray DVD and doing something else at the same time, then I'll believe that it's as fast as a pc or faster.
PC's that are 15 years newer than the last classic amiga that was built have trouble doing this. What exactly is your point?
-
PC's that are 15 years newer than the last classic amiga that was built have trouble doing this. What exactly is your point?
If by that time scale you mean PC's currently on sale, then I'd only be able to agree with the caveat that the observation it applies to some systems. You can buy/build PCs in the 500 quid range that will manage 1080p playback perfectly well. You don't even need a high end graphics card, my work Radeon X300 with MPlayer under fedora manages it, the principal limitation there is the fact it's a single core P4 (which is pretty much yesterdays kit now).
-
You might want to work on that then, it came across as pure condescension.
Hmm I thought you took it to be an apology.
Varies depending on their system, many folks these days have vender supplied rescue disks they can lob in to restore in the event of a cataclysm, which not only restores the OS, but the applications. Others, perhaps those who bought their systems from smaller outlets might have an OEM disk and effectively have to reinstall their apps all over again. And then of course there are those that build their own.
i was more referring to the endless updates, some of which will result in a non-bootable system (Linux especially), some which will result in hardware not working as well as before (eg I installed the latest Nvidia drivers for my Windows XP PC, and then could only get VESA), most which just plug security holes, a few which add additional features, all of which seem to slow down your PC then what it was before.
Given the vast amount of options Windows supports, what would you propose as a replacement of the registry database? Remembering that both BeOS and Linux have similar systems built into them.
Here's one possibility: I understand that having drivers for a lot of hardware allows things like plug and play to work. But it also means you have information on your system about hardware that will never be used. So why not make hardware with built in flash that holds the drivers for that hardware only. The software in flash identifies the hardware to the OS, the OS then installs the driver off the flash. Information only relevant to actual hardware that is installed is then stored by the OS.
The stack that came with 3.5 and 3.9 didn't work with my ISP.
Strange. Its also strange that you installed Idefix with OS 3.5 to get your IDE CDROM to work. OS 3.5 has an updated scsi.device with atapi support. If you install OS 3.5 over an existing Workbench 4.0/3.1 that has Idefix installed then the OS 3.5 will use the atapi.device from Idefix. If you install Idefix after you install OS 3.5, you may get a conflict.
Dopus 4 was too limited for me. Either way, functionality that I expected, nay, demanded had to be added into the base install.
fair enough. Personally i find Dopus 4 fine, actually i even use it to manage my Win XP files running it under Winuae. With the death of the parent company there was very little official OS support, so that fell on third parties like GPSoft.
In many ways I feel things like the EeePC and Ebox are pretty much there in terms of concept. Macs possibly more so.
I also feel that those small cheep computers will likely pave the way for more appliance like devices that offer base office and web functionality.
actually office and web are pretty much the only thing that the PC will dominate in the future: console games outsell PC games, and despite Mediacentre/MythTV/Viiv the PC doesn't dominate digital TV/DVD/Bluray/PVR's in the lounge room, where consumer appliances rule.
-
Really ? Now do this simple test:
1. At idle, open a WB window full of icons (let's say 50).
2. Now run something that eats quite a lot of CPU, let's say 80% (like a video player)
3. Close, and open the same window again
Notice the difference. And tell me again that your input is prioritised...
This is where modern OS perform a lot better. First of all they use cache for any sort of things. So this kind of window wouldn't cause all icons to be reloaded again... Then they scale a lot better with high CPU usage... Something Exec cannot do. Because it's, well, simple...
Firstly a drawer with 50 icons is not common and indicates bad organisation of his data by the user.
Secondly, I had Cinema 4d do a render, i could instantaneously select the window, close it an re-open it, and the window was populated a little slower than before but I didn't notice the wait pointer, and yes, it executed MY COMMAND, rather then making me click on the close gadget half a dozen times, and then another half a dozen times to open the folder again.
As regards to caching, you can enable directory caching, thats a function of the file system, has been for a long time. Works even better with SFS or PFS3.
-
If by that time scale you mean PC's currently on sale, then I'd only be able to agree with the caveat that the observation it applies to some systems. You can buy/build PCs in the 500 quid range that will manage 1080p playback perfectly well. You don't even need a high end graphics card, my work Radeon X300 with MPlayer under fedora manages it, the principal limitation there is the fact it's a single core P4 (which is pretty much yesterdays kit now).
i'm talking PC's that were on sale barely 2 years ago. On my Win XP Athlon 4800+ using integrated graphics, 1080i Full HDTV occassionally skips a frame.
What else can you do when you play 1080p on the pentium 4?
-
rotfl; what sort of Internet can a fresh install AOS3.1 reach anyway? Dodging malware because your computer is so ancient isn't a benefit for your system. Otherwise clearly the C64 is much better then an Amiga system because it can't get any malware at all.
"fresh" as in without security software
-
It's not that it isn't possible, it's that doing so makes for a retarded design.
here's some facts: Linux can and does offer the user a choice of schedulers. A different scheduler does change the behaviour of the OS significantly. The fact that more than one scheduler exists on Linux suggests the default scheduler's performance doesn't perform as well in all usage scenarios, otherwise there would be no need for a different scheduler. So allowing the user to choose a different scheduler is not such a retarded idea in the eyes of Linux developers themselves. Now here's the rub: the scheduler is built into the kernel: and its one scheduler per kernel. You wanna change your scheduler, then you use a different kernel. You don't simply switch of the old scheduler, and select the new one from a list of schedulers that you'd like. like you do with amiga and executive.
-
here's some facts: Linux can and does offer the user a choice of schedulers. A different scheduler does change the behaviour of the OS significantly. The fact that more than one scheduler exists on Linux suggests the default scheduler's performance doesn't perform as well in all usage scenarios, otherwise there would be no need for a different scheduler. So allowing the user to choose a different scheduler is not such a retarded idea in the eyes of Linux developers themselves. Now here's the rub: the scheduler is built into the kernel: and its one scheduler per kernel. You wanna change your scheduler, then you use a different kernel. You don't simply switch of the old scheduler, and select the new one from a list of schedulers that you'd like. like you do with amiga and executive.
You missed the point of my reply. You argued that pc operating systems can't change the scheduler and have it valid after a reboot. I said that makes for a retarded design. You can never be sure of what's hanging around in memory after a reset. That is all.
-
You missed the point of my reply. You argued that pc operating systems can't change the scheduler and have it valid after a reboot. I said that makes for a retarded design. You can never be sure of what's hanging around in memory after a reset. That is all.
I argued that the amiga can change the scheduler without a reboot, but you can switch the Amiga on and off if you like to clear what's in memory, its not as if it takes any longer than a soft reset...wait a minute..thats anther argument isn't it... Actually i don't think windows can change the scheduler at all, reboot or not. And Linux needs a different kernel altogether to boot from to change the scheduler. And who knows what other changes you didn't bargain for might be in that kernel..
-
i was more referring to the endless updates, some of which will result in a non-bootable system (Linux especially)
Only time I've ever had a linux update crap out an install was once when moving from Ubuntu 5.x to 6.x. But as with windows, it's better to do a clean install of an OS rather then an update. Does it happen? Sure. Happens to windows too, only when it happens there, it makes the news.
Here's one possibility: I understand that having drivers for a lot of hardware allows things like plug and play to work. But it also means you have information on your system about hardware that will never be used. So why not make hardware with built in flash that holds the drivers for that hardware only. The software in flash identifies the hardware to the OS, the OS then installs the driver off the flash. Information only relevant to actual hardware that is installed is then stored by the OS.
Which in turn would mean that either all OS's adopt compatability for these drivers, or more likely, windows alone gets drivers. The problem is that at some point the OS has to deal with all these different drivers regardless if they're supplied by CD or on onboard flash, now if you've only got to deal with a tiny handful then a loose collection of files as in the Amiga will almost certainly suffice. But at some point this will become very difficult to manage and maintain. The logical way to do with sorting it all out is a database. Given that many other OS's take this approach, perhaps the registry, far from being a bad idea, may simply have earned a bad reputation from the bad old days of windows 9x...
Strange. Its also strange that you installed Idefix with OS 3.5 to get your IDE CDROM to work.
Nono. To get to the point where I could install 3.5/3.9 I had to get idefix to do it's thing, I then had to go back and edit the script so that it worked reliably. This is before I installed 3.5.
Mind you this was all years and years ago now.
actually office and web are pretty much the only thing that the PC will dominate in the future: console games outsell PC games, and despite Mediacentre/MythTV/Viiv the PC doesn't dominate digital TV/DVD/Bluray/PVR's in the lounge room, where consumer appliances rule.
Possibly. Tbh I think the PC as we know it will continue for a long time to come. It as a platform is far too versatile. The thing that make it what it is today will keep it going - it's flexability. It's not the best gaming system by virtue of its complexity, its not the best anything, but it does more things well enough that it is useful in its own right. What you will see however is more very capable pieces of hardware that are purpose built to do a small subset of these functions in a more appliance like fashion. I think the EeePC and Ebox are merely a taste of that.
-
Only time I've ever had a linux update crap out an install was once when moving from Ubuntu 5.x to 6.x.
I've ended up with a non-booting PCLOS just by installing a SNES emulator from the repo. A dependency was updated, which KDE needed an update for, which was available but not installed by synaptic.
Which in turn would mean that either all OS's adopt compatability for these drivers, or more likely, windows alone gets drivers. The problem is that at some point the OS has to deal with all these different drivers regardless if they're supplied by CD or on onboard flash, now if you've only got to deal with a tiny handful then a loose collection of files as in the Amiga will almost certainly suffice. But at some point this will become very difficult to manage and maintain. The logical way to do with sorting it all out is a database. Given that many other OS's take this approach, perhaps the registry, far from being a bad idea, may simply have earned a bad reputation from the bad old days of windows 9x...
theres a logical leap here ( non-Windows support aside): why does my PC need to keep a database of thousands of hardware pieces that are not and will not be present on my machine, if each piece of hardware that i can buy comes with it own self installing drivers in flash ROM?
And if a hardware manufacturer wants to support alternative OS's whats stopping them from putting a driver on the same flash rom? And what's stopping the alternative OS users from reading the Win driver in ROM and reverse engineering it, isn't that what they soemtimes do now anyway?
Nono. To get to the point where I could install 3.5/3.9 I had to get idefix to do it's thing, I then had to go back and edit the script so that it worked reliably. This is before I installed 3.5.
Mind you this was all years and years ago now.
the atapi system was a hack to let cheap IDE interfaces-which were ubiquitous on the PC to recognise IDE-equivalents of peripheral which were available for scsi, because PC's didn't come with scsi interfaces. IDEFix was a commercial third part utility that attempted to give the same functionality to the IDE interface on the A1200 and A4000. It was therefore a utility based on a hacked idea. Its not unexpected that early versions of IDEfix may not have worked 100%. No doubt you knew this. Its not the Amiga's fault that it didn't comply with what was a hacked PC interface design initially. IDEFix 97 worked well, and OS 3.5 and OS 3.9 included this functionality as standard.
-
I argued that the amiga can change the scheduler without a reboot, but you can switch the Amiga on and off if you like to clear what's in memory, its not as if it takes any longer than a soft reset...wait a minute..thats anther argument isn't it... Actually i don't think windows can change the scheduler at all, reboot or not. And Linux needs a different kernel altogether to boot from to change the scheduler. And who knows what other changes you didn't bargain for might be in that kernel..
Oops, I read your original post last night thinking you were arguing that you can change the scheduler and reboot with it intact. Sorry.
As far as schedulers go, I've never messed with it on linux. Never felt the need, and I've been using linux for dang near 15 years. Never had an issue with it on windows either.
-
As far as schedulers go, I've never messed with it on linux. Never felt the need, and I've been using linux for dang near 15 years. Never had an issue with it on windows either.
ha ha. That neatly paraphrases what I've been saying: Pro-Amiga: "Amiga can do x better". pro-PC: "i don't use or need x, i don't care, it therefore doesn't matter. PC wins". Its an argument that can be easily reversed: i dont use cloud computing, i watch DVD's on a DVD player, i don't watch Bluray, i play games on consoles not PC's, so none of these PC features matter.
Well Win 7's scheduler works differently and gives higher priority to user-initiated commands, and Linux offers entire kernels with different schedulers, so clearly schedulers do matter to users out there, if not to yourself. And it would be a nice if PC gave you a choice, and a simple way of making that choice. But they don't.
-
theres a logical leap here ( non-Windows support aside): why does my PC need to keep a database of thousands of hardware pieces that are not and will not be present on my machine, if each piece of hardware that i can buy comes with it own self installing drivers in flash ROM?
From an individual level, what you're saying makes sense. The problem is that Windows hardware support stretches back for nigh on a decade. With each new itteration of hardware bringing more capabilities and additions. It means that you can take your copy of windows XP and install it as easily on a machine first produced in 2000 as you could on a system that is still warm from the production line today. How do you deal with the miriad of hardware variations and mixes (which probably number tens of millions of possibilities) without one?
And if a hardware manufacturer wants to support alternative OS's whats stopping them from putting a driver on the same flash rom? And what's stopping the alternative OS users from reading the Win driver in ROM and reverse engineering it, isn't that what they soemtimes do now anyway?
Depends on the device, but lets take graphics cards as a good example. The drivers for both windows and Linux are more or less the same size. So instead of having, lets say a 30+ meg flash chip and all the electronics that go to support it, you're now up to 60, and then there'll be some versions of linux that'll need it in a different package format and so on and so on. It comes down to two things essentially, at least for the above example: The added cost of designing it into the hardware and fitting it in the way you suggest as well. And the cost of having to supply a miriad of drivers for various OSs. Verses a 1pence CD and leaving the other OS's either to supply vender made drivers via repos or OSS equivalents.
No doubt you knew this. Its not the Amiga's fault that it didn't comply with what was a hacked PC interface design initially. IDEFix 97 worked well, and OS 3.5 and OS 3.9 included this functionality as standard.
I was using IDEfix 97. But to get to the point where you could install 3.5 or 3.9, you had to have a working dosdriver which the 3.5 boot disk could copy to itself to allow the installation to take place. Either way this is all immaterial. I fixed it, it worked for the entire of the time I had both the 1200 and the drive in question (which was many years, indeed it was still connected and functional when I finally let the system go back in.... 2003 or so).
-
All of which still does not change that, despite a slower to react bit of port hardware that the PC will spend less actual time running the code to poll said port, even with the API overhead.
Or in simpler terms: the PC can do more other stuff while waiting for the IO device to be ready than the Amiga can. Which is to say that even though it uses API's to access hardware, thanks to being really, really, really fast it still is faster than the Amiga to execute the relevant code (i.e. poll the hardware).
That it needs to wait longer for the hardware to be ready is irrelevant because this discussion is not about the speed of a parrallel port controller (which is the primary cause newer PC's have slower ports) but about the overhead incurred by the API's and drivers driving said controller.
It depends on what instructions you try to do in parallel. If you do an IN AL,DX then TEST AL,128 obviously, you processor has to finish the IN instruction however long it takes. I was giving case where using AMIGA direct access outdoes PC going through API since API is more restricted than going directly to PC hardware. So, you can't draw the conclusion that API access will be still faster than Amiga going direct to hardware. If API call was just doing the exact thing you would have done with the hardware, then you can say the overhead is minimal given processor speed of PC. Also for input like USB input of joystick or gameport input of joystick, you will be doing multiple I/O instructions whereas Amiga does one.
I don't know what you mean by parallel port controller is primary cause of slower ports. It's not. Parallel ports are usually PCI in the latest machines that have them; however, there are other I/O ports like 60h..64h (keyboard) that are much slower.
-
I still recall Saddam Virus from mag cover CD on my classic Amiga 500.
This an OS issue. Run AROS X86.
It's an OS issue but that's what that particular point was about. Amiga OS doesn't fill up some big file which failing causes an entire system failure. I think they should allow system boot to continue allowing user to disable registry useage.
-
With GPUs, parallelism and maximum math unit counts are the priories.
The thin libCGM didn't solve RSX's design flaw.
Amiga's API is primitive.
Yeah, parallelism and math units may be priority because everything is already standardized toward some API, but it would be better if hardware level compatibility was standardized and then API can still be built on top of that.
Amiga's API may not be as rich as modern APIs but even modern APIs don't offer the flexibility of going directly to hardware. There are many things that are still inefficient using API approach. As I stated, it's HLI (hardware limiting interface).
-
ha ha. That neatly paraphrases what I've been saying: Pro-Amiga: "Amiga can do x better".
But as was shown in the case of joystick polling, it couldn't.
pro-PC: "i don't use or need x, i don't care, it therefore doesn't matter. PC wins".
With a landscape as diverse as the PC, going from nano-itx through to quadcore desktops and ending with rackmounted blade servers and everything in between. With all the different operating systems that run within that ecosystem, comparasons of a technical nature are for the most part pointless, especially when what you're comparing it to was starting to look outdated compared to those same PCs by the time AGA was comming out. Hell even addon cards for the Amiga at the time could outperform AGA in every respect, graphics, sound, I/O - the works.
It's not about being pro anything, indeed to even start to think in those terms is a gross misunderstanding of the situation. This was about pure technical points. Nothing more. It is you and your chum amigaski that have attempted to turn it into a "Pro-PC, Pro-Amiga" debate, no one else.
Well Win 7's scheduler works differently and gives higher priority to user-initiated commands, and Linux offers entire kernels with different schedulers, so clearly schedulers do matter to users out there, if not to yourself. And it would be a nice if PC gave you a choice, and a simple way of making that choice. But they don't.
Linux is used in different roles. As you yourself pointed out in an earlier comment - Linux schedulers (at least at the time) were better suited for servers. Now you have branches more specialised toward desktop usage. Different requirements require different solutions. I would imagine that the Windows server systems have no end of tweeks that make them perform better in a server role then its desktop counterpart.
Choice in this case only makes sense if you understand the consiquences of that choice. Chances are, if you know what a scheduler is and how differences in what it does effects a system, chances are you know enough about the system to be able to change it anyway. If building computers has taught me one thing, it is that the user, for the most part doesn't particularly care about choice, so long as it does what they expect, when they expect it. If you put in a preference system that allowed the user to access and alter every single option from the get go, they would almost certainly be overloaded (at best) and complain, or worse, start fiddling and then complain when it broke.
-
perhaps you misinterpret this. there is this movement in the pc world where legacy ports are getting replaced by a single port(to make them cheaper). perhaps that is where the reason lies.
keyboard
at>ps2>usb
mouse
serial>ps2>usb
joystick
joyport>usb
Printer
Parallel>usb
External Modem
serial>usb
see a trend?
There may be move toward USB, but the fact that they left certain ports in while eliminating gameport should indicate they are trying to improve gaming interface. I.e., they are admitting gameport sucks and user is better off using another interface. Newer audio cards also aren't using gameport although it was built-in into many audio cards.
-
It depends on what instructions you try to do in Parallel ports are usually PCI in the latest machines that have them; however, there are other I/O ports like 60h..64h (keyboard) that are much slower.
Nope, it's on the Super I/O chip, which can be on it's own IC or integrated into the northbridge. Either way it's on the low pin count bus along with the flash rom and other crap.
-
actually you just told us why an api is important.
...
I never said API is useless-- it's inferior to hardware level compatibility. What I stated is:
"Not if hardware is backward compatible. You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware. There's many on PCs as well as Amiga. It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them."
>now while that is true just because you can don't always mean you WILL have well behaved programs. as such the api offers an easy way to write a program and Forces you to make the program compliant.
You can have API applications that corrupt things as well. Amiga applications/games that go directly to hardware are being used and there are thousands of them. Just because someone abused that advantage doesn't mean you should get rid of that advantage. Perhaps, they should first worry about getting rid of spyware/viruses which use APIs to attack the system.
>another thing a good api has contingencies in case a function does not work. it is not just about speed but also reliability. operating directly on the hardware could cause an exception which could freeze not only the active program but also lock up the os as well. even if that program was written properly.
You can also cause exceptions by kernel drivers bugs which are using APIs but are at ring 0. Bugs can exist in both. And for some applications, you don't want the OS involved. You can still have I/O protection and memory protection in hardware (as exists now) even when application goes directly to hardware.
-
Nope, it's on the Super I/O chip, which can be on it's own IC or integrated into the northbridge. Either way it's on the low pin count bus along with the flash rom and other crap.
What are you saying "NOPE" to? He stated that parallel port is causing slowdown of other ports which is false. Each device can cause it's own slow-downs.
-
simply because there is no one entity that can force all hardware manufacturers to abide in any one standard. as such there has to be a buffer this buffer is the api.
...
That's the chaotic scenario now because they are BASING STANDARD on APIs. Preivously, all manufacturers were complying with hardware standards-- look at PS/2 keyboards and ports, look at parallel ports, look at VGA/EGA/CGA cards, look at serial ports, look at floppy drive interfaces at 3F0..3f7h, etc. By the way, even now there are devices that are based on hardware standards based on ACPI specification. So whoever thinks it's not doable nowadays is just speculating.
>this is true however as these new features come into existance the api is updated with functions that allow you to use the features that programmers need and want implemented. as such those games are still possible you just need to be creative with what you have.
You are more restricted with APIs; APIs are slower and inefficient. APIs are more inexact. You can also update hardware and allow previous software to still run the same.
-
From an individual level, what you're saying makes sense. The problem is that Windows hardware support stretches back for nigh on a decade. With each new itteration of hardware bringing more capabilities and additions. It means that you can take your copy of windows XP and install it as easily on a machine first produced in 2000 as you could on a system that is still warm from the production line today. How do you deal with the miriad of hardware variations and mixes (which probably number tens of millions of possibilities) without one?
Fair points. But what about this: On first installation, all motherboards have a BIOS that detects your OS and gives the OS details of the hardware that actually exists on the motherboard. The OS then installs the drivers for the motherboard components which exist in flash ROM. The OS then queries the different interfaces for any added cards eg graphics cards, sound cards, NAND drives that need their own drivers, which each card store in its own flash ROM. If you buy a printer, scanner, external hard drive, its drivers are in flash ROM as well. As new cards with new features come about, there is an update to the OS API's eg an update to Direct X, to support these features, and each card must have drivers in flash rom that are compliant with this new API. HMM this is starting to sound a bit like autoconfig, where devices such as those for scsi cards, accelerators existed in ROM, or installed off floppy into devs/dosdrivers
Depends on the device, but lets take graphics cards as a good example. The drivers for both windows and Linux are more or less the same size. So instead of having, lets say a 30+ meg flash chip and all the electronics that go to support it, you're now up to 60, and then there'll be some versions of linux that'll need it in a different package format and so on and so on. It comes down to two things essentially, at least for the above example: The added cost of designing it into the hardware and fitting it in the way you suggest as well. And the cost of having to supply a miriad of drivers for various OSs. Verses a 1pence CD and leaving the other OS's either to supply vender made drivers via repos or OSS equivalents.
.
Ok so cost is the problem. But flash is getting cheaper all the time. Yes supporting Linux would fall by the way side, but its not like hardware manufacturers are falling over themselves to give Linux even a printer driver
-
You are more restricted with APIs; APIs are slower and inefficient. APIs are more inexact. You can also update hardware and allow previous software to still run the same.
Yep, its so much better to bang the hardware directly have things break when new machines come out. Or new hardware comes out and the old software runs too quickly.
Coz banging the hardware directly has worked so well for the Amiga. Look where it is now..
-
I argued that the amiga can change the scheduler without a reboot...
The "Amiga" can't--a third party product can. Anyone so inclined (and qualified) could write a similar extension for Linux or Windows.
And Linux needs a different kernel altogether to boot from to change the scheduler. And who knows what other changes you didn't bargain for might be in that kernel..
Who knows? You do. You have the source.
-
Fair points. But what about this: On first installation, all motherboards have a BIOS that detects your OS and gives the OS details of the hardware that actually exists on the motherboard. The OS then installs the drivers for the motherboard components which exist in flash ROM. The OS then queries the different interfaces for any added cards eg graphics cards, sound cards, NAND drives that need their own drivers, which each card store in its own flash ROM. If you buy a printer, scanner, external hard drive, its drivers are in flash ROM as well. As new cards with new features come about, there is an update to the OS API's eg an update to Direct X, to support these features, and each card must have drivers in flash rom that are compliant with this new API. HMM this is starting to sound a bit like autoconfig, where devices such as those for scsi cards, accelerators existed in ROM, or installed off floppy into devs/dosdrivers
With the exception of the motherboard being required to detect what OS was running on it, and the source of the drivers, you've also described more or less what happens when a modern OS gets installed (Windows calls it plug and play) and indeed, every subsiquent hardware change. It doesn't however address the point about having to support all of the hardware out there. How are you going to manage all this stuff, on all of the various wierd and wonderful hardware that is floating around out there, with one OS without a database at some point?
Ok so cost is the problem. But flash is getting cheaper all the time. Yes supporting Linux would fall by the way side, but its not like hardware manufacturers are falling over themselves to give Linux even a printer driver
The cost of intergrating huge flash gates however is the main cost associated with your suggestion and unlike the actual hardware, implimenting what you're suggesting and designing it into the board will only ever increase as the hardware becomes ever more capable with each generation.
-
It's given someone knows high level language and assembly, he can produce more efficient and faster code in assembly since he can better deal with misalignment, registerizing variables, use the flags optimally, etc.
In a perfect world, where programmers are immaculate and hardware documentation is written by God himself. In the real world programmers have a hard time dealing with pointers in C and buffer overruns by 1 are common place. It gets even worse when folks start writing stuff in assembler, especially on processors with complicated opcodes and general purpose registers that aren't really general purpose.
>Second, I can read the value from two analog sticks and two analog flippers more than once per frame, I can do it as fast as the HID spec allows, and there can be a lot more analog controls on the device than that! Not so on the Amiga, only can do this once per frame. So much for the superior Amiga joy port.
No, now you are comparing another aspect of the Amiga joystick port-- the ability to deal with analog signals as well. Games pick the better interface-- the digital one. On PC even you are forced to use the analog joystick since that's the standard. And even in the analog case, Amiga reads the POTs with one MOVE-- the hardware is doing the sampling for you. I have never even seen an analog joystick on Amiga-- just paddles in some rare applications.
I'm just writing about the Amiga joystick port you've labeled as "superior". You don't get to dismiss reading potentiometers with said port just because it makes you mad it's so dang slow at doing that operation. Lots of games take in pot values. You're just gonna have to live with that.
>With the Amiga Joy port, I get one 1980's era standard boring as hell joystick. Just one per port. Imagine playing Gears of War or Crysis with such a joystick. Might as well sit on the damn thing. On the PC I can have a dozen gaming devices. Mice, keyboards, steering wheels, foot pedals, yokes, game pads, classic style joys, harddrives, video output devices, video input devices, audio output devices, audio input devices, and the list goes on and on. All on one bus. With the Amiga joy port, I get.... a joystick... an old crappy joystick whose metal contact switches tie directly to I/O pins on some bizarre custom chip that's capable of recording the full glory of raw signal bounce. Oh how superior!
Wrong. PC's gameport doesn't give you those options. USB bus gives you ability to have faster buffer transfers but Amiga uses a different port for buffer-based transfers. Digital joysticks are and were the norm for Ataris/Amigas/C64/Vic-20/Sega/STs/etc. whereas PCs were using the inferior analog joysticks. So the Amiga's joystick port is optimized for digital joysticks. Analog joysticks are crappy so only computer that used them were PCs which were NOT into gaming.
I wasn't refering to the damn db15 legacy PC game port that hasn't been screwed into the side of a case in the past 10 years. The bit about connecting harddrives , sound cards and multiple game pads should have been your clue that I was talking about USB.
>USB HID devices output perfect state information to the computer...
That's a speculative remark. Whatever you read from joystick port you can end up reading from USB HID device.
No it's not. You'll never read signal noise from a USB gaming device. Try it.
>All this being said, the Amiga joystick port is just another para interface hanging off a custom chip.
Aren't all ports some sort of interface hanging off a chip-- keyboard port on PC is hanging off some 8042 or compatible.
The 8042 *is* the ps/2 keyboard/mouse controller on the PC. The Amiga joystick port hangs off the Denise chip. A chip that handles video timings and sprite crap, and also apparently, the joystick interface. That's a hack, it probably wasn't even originally designed to be joystick interface.
>It is unusual in that you can fetch information from it rather quickly. One thing amigaski hasn't done in his argument is actually show real code that reads the joystick port as fast as he claims. He has a product which emulates joystick devices for the amiga by bit banging the para port on the pc, but notice he hasn't claimed there are games which are unusable using his hardware emulation product, which by it's very nature has to use the supposedly inferior db15 standard legacy joystick port or a keyboard for it's input.
I can also read digital joystick data and feed it to Amiga/Ataris not just analog joysticks. And the fact that I have gone through all these timings is why I am so certain the analog joysticks are slower and inferior to digital joysticks and on top of that the interface for reading even analog values on Amiga is superior (due to less CPU useage). By the way, the simulation of joysticks is only one part-- the same interface also simulates mice for various machines, disk drives, digitized paddles, etc.
It's not a big deal to write code to read joysticks as fast as I claim.
Of course reading the pots are slow, it's slow ass legacy hardware, on both the amiga side and PC side. It's been a long time since I've read the data from a db15 legacy pc joy port. Perhaps 15 years ago. Not that it matters, but how fast can you read a pot on a legacy PC joy port? Maybe getting a good reading from an old, cheap ass ADC is stupid slow. It's not on modern devices, the kind that plug into the USB port. The issue isn't that the device is slow, or that analog controls are crap, its that the hardware reading them is crap, and old.
>The only devices that i'm aware of that actually use the limits of the Amiga joyport are audio digitizers that tie in to that port. I wouldn't be surprised if others on here know of additional devices that can use the capability of this interface. There are two words that accurately describe the Amiga Joystick/Mouse port: weird and suboptimal.
Amazing that you labeled it "mouse port" but did not mention that Mouse is one of the devices that port handles. And you can send pulses through the joystick port for mouse every few microseconds (not milliseconds). Joystick port also handles Light Pens, Paddles, Dongle-stuff, and also lets you control pins for input or output for controlling custom devices although there's a parallel port for doing that as well.
[/quote]
Yea, sure, you can do all that with one port, but only one device on each port. Also, when was the last time you saw a light pen? Never saw one on the amiga, must have been mid 80's I ever saw one, and that was on some computer I can't recall, but it did have floppy disks the size of dinner plates.
On the PC, the legacy ports aren't used, they're often not even present. Nobody wants a slow port that can only have one device attached to it.
This whole argument that you have is based on two things: One is that you're comparing the Amiga joy port to a legacy db15 PC joy port that nobody uses anymore. That's ridiculous. The other is that you insist that polling the piss out of an analog stick whos mechanical switches tie directly onto the pins of the denise chip is of any value. I assure you it's not. All you're picking up is gobs of signal bounce. It's the farthest thing you could ever get from superior that one can imagine.
If you're gonna make a rational set of arguments, at least compare the Amiga joy port to an actual interface the PC uses, namely, USB. Anything else is dishonest and a waste of time.
-
Yeah, parallelism and math units may be priority because everything is already standardized toward some API, but it would be better if hardware level compatibility was standardized and then API can still be built on top of that.
Hardware was standardized. The PC market eventually settled on VGA, and all was well. Along came 3dfx, the Glide API, and Quake, and all of a sudden, VGA didn't satisfy the demands of the market. Nvidia stepped in with the Riva TNT, and along with Id and a few other major software players of the time, Nvidia helped bring OpenGL to the mainstream consumer market. It continues today, albeit with fewer major players.
If hardware were standardized, no one solution would stand above the rest, and the market would stagnate and eventually die. Standardizing APIs allows both hardware and software designers to innovate without interfering with the other's core competencies. It's a good place to be. Really. (The APIs aren't technically standardized either. You have lots to choose from. More competition, more drive to innovate.)
-
There may be move toward USB, but the fact that they left certain ports in while eliminating gameport should indicate they are trying to improve gaming interface. I.e., they are admitting gameport sucks and user is better off using another interface. Newer audio cards also aren't using gameport although it was built-in into many audio cards.
Hi,
@Amigaski & Stefcep2,
Speaking of Amiga joysticks my joystick broke for my Amiga 4000 today so off I went to Wally world to get a new one and you know what I couldn't find one darned 9 pin joystick in the whole darned place, so that makes my joystick port mighty slow as a matter of fact not really moving.
Now lets talk about moving blitters, sprites, graphics etc.
I have a 250 mhz ppc in my Amiga 1200, now even though my ppc is moving at 250 mhz, what is the speed of my aga chipset, could it possibly be 14 mhz or the original board frequency. Which means as far as graphics go my ppc is sitting there waiting for a reply from my AGA chipset and it is doing absolutely nothing. So as you can see one of the main problems of the Amiga was that you could increase the speed of the CPU but you still had the problem of all the rest of the board moving S L O W L Y.
Now we come down to the joystick, since the Amiga uses the mouse port as a joystick port they are one and the same, what can this possibly mean, not to many ways to upgrade, this could be one of the reasons that the Amiga died the original designers of the Amiga which started out building a great game console left no room for advancement so as a game machine of that time era it was the greatest thing since greased bananas but in time the greased banana slowly became clogged with dirt and just couldn't move as fast and it became obvious that it would cost too much to clean it and regrease it to keep up with the new banana's on the block.
Now I can add more memory on the PPC board and I can add a graphics extender and then a new graphics card on that ppc board but is it really worth the cost to expand it if I could find the parts to do that today. The answer is not likely, it would be cheaper to buy a new modern up to date computer, this leaves me with 2 options, a PC and an Apple, since PC's are the least expensive and the easiest to find parts for I chose the PC. Now it we look at the Apple, it is expensive, and once again I am left to the mercy at having a specialized computer that after a couple of years would be obsolete, and not only that but I am controlled by the manufacturer about what I can use in it as far as upgrades and what kind of software I can use on it, and not only that but the maker of apple thinks that everybody that uses it is an idiot and makes it so that you can make close to no changes to the system, which keeps me from playing with it like I would like to. In other words the Apple computer is for those people that just want to turn it on. use it and then turn it off. Not my idea of using a computer, I like to experiment and try things on them, and I have crashed and burned more than one computer. I have 3 dead Amiga's and 3 dead CD 32 cards as proof of my insane ideas and I am not going into the PC's that I have crashed and burned.
Now for you PC users, I have had run about 3 contests a year for the last 3 years of PC users saying that there was no way that my 25 mhz machine could beat there 2.2 dual core and quad core babies in doing certain applications, like downloading files off the internet, printing a letter, playing music, and playing video, formatting a floppy, or backing up some files off a hard disk or transferring files from one hard disk to another hard disk, doing a 10 picture slide show and then playing at least one round of a tetris like game where we turned on our computers on at the same time, well I hate to say this but not even a quad core could beat the Amiga at these tasks, not only did I play the game of tetris but I usually wound up playing the game soliton while I waited for those fast over rated windows based PC's to get finished, seems most of them ran into trouble during the format and transfer of files to the floppy disk, while the Amiga cruised past them using diskmaster to format and copy stuff to the floppy disks and hard disks. I know you PC users will yell foul, but it is what it is, in real time with all that horse power the PC sucks. Now I have never had a Linux user challenge this because lets face it, there just aren't two many of them, and Apple users, a total waste of good electricity, I don't even think they know what multi tasking is, and if they had it they sure nuff didn't know how to use it, Apple users have to be the most incompetent computer users in the world.
smerf
-
I'd flunk smerfs test - I don't have a floppy drive ;)
-
I'd flunk smerfs test - I don't have a floppy drive ;)
Hi,
@the_leander
Know what you mean, the last 2 people that took the challenge I had to lend them my usb floppy drive, in a way I cheated on this since most PC's almost shut down when trying to format a floppy disk and write to them. It is just one of those area's where the Amiga excels by its hardware design. Another area is playing music while they are trying to do this stuff, playing music really put a hit on the PC's CPU and even though we are tasked with playing 10 songs, most PC users try to copy me and use multi tasking while playing the music, but when they do that it puts a pretty good hit on their system, even dual cores slow down a little when trying this. OK, I rigged the thing a little bit, but they all agreed to the terms, and they all lost. The major thing is, that most of them till this day can't believe that a 25 mhz machine, with a 2 gig hard drive, and 18 megs of memory completed all those tasks before their machine, as a matter of fact the first time I did this was against a 1.1 ghz PC with windows 2000, I had everything done before he even got his destop screen up. It was my best victory. I loved it.
smerf
-
i'm talking PC's that were on sale barely 2 years ago. On my Win XP Athlon 4800+ using integrated graphics, 1080i Full HDTV occassionally skips a frame.
What else can you do when you play 1080p on the pentium 4?
Plenty. Drink coffee, eat popcorn :lol:
Seriously though, you missed the point I was making. The P4 can just about handle it and not always. It'll drop frames, especially if I'm working away (on the second monitor).
Since the classic Amiga, from a hardware perspective is pretty much a static platform it's easy to forget that 2 years is a hell of a long time in the mainstream PC market. Typical CPU performance alone has tended to double within that time frame.
The new machines sold today are significantly more powerful than their equivalent price range counterparts 2 years ago. My work P4 is a couple of years older still. It can just about do 1080p, machines sold today tend to take it in their stride.
-
Hi,
@the_leander
Know what you mean, the last 2 people that took the challenge I had to lend them my usb floppy drive, in a way I cheated on this since most PC's almost shut down when trying to format a floppy disk and write to them. It is just one of those area's where the Amiga excels by its hardware design. Another area is playing music while they are trying to do this stuff, playing music really put a hit on the PC's CPU and even though we are tasked with playing 10 songs, most PC users try to copy me and use multi tasking while playing the music, but when they do that it puts a pretty good hit on their system, even dual cores slow down a little when trying this. OK, I rigged the thing a little bit, but they all agreed to the terms, and they all lost. The major thing is, that most of them till this day can't believe that a 25 mhz machine, with a 2 gig hard drive, and 18 megs of memory completed all those tasks before their machine, as a matter of fact the first time I did this was against a 1.1 ghz PC with windows 2000, I had everything done before he even got his destop screen up. It was my best victory. I loved it.
smerf
There has to be something wrong with their machines if they can't play back 10 audio streams concurrently. Most current generation games will throw a few dozen audio streams together at any given instant and find plenty of time to render some eye popping visuals.
-
There has to be something wrong with their machines if they can't play back 10 audio streams concurrently. Most current generation games will throw a few dozen audio streams together at any given instant and find plenty of time to render some eye popping visuals.
But they won't be able to use a joystick as quick as an unexpanded A500 can! Bwahaha PCs suck so much!!!! :-)
-
Hi,
@the_leander
Know what you mean, the last 2 people that took the challenge I had to lend them my usb floppy drive, in a way I cheated on this since most PC's almost shut down when trying to format a floppy disk and write to them.
Oddness. Formatting floppies, even on win2k always seemed fine on my athlonxp system (which is... 4PC's ago), then again I did set it so that each explorer window ran in it's own individual thread, which improved multitasking performance (not to mention stability) no end.
So, what exactly were the terms for this challenge?
I mean, was it a from boot race or?? Just curious.
-
There has to be something wrong with their machines if they can't play back 10 audio streams concurrently. Most current generation games will throw a few dozen audio streams together at any given instant and find plenty of time to render some eye popping visuals.
Hi,
@Karlos,
P poor planning mostly on their part, they tried to copy me by putting on music, trying to format their floppy drive, and then trying to copy files from one hard drive to another while downloading files off the internet at the same time, try it on your PC and see what happens, I know when I try to format a floppy on my machine it sort of clogs up the whole buss lines and renders the computer almost useless. Some things just never change on a PC.
smerf
-
There has to be something wrong with their machines if they can't play back 10 audio streams concurrently. Most current generation games will throw a few dozen audio streams together at any given instant and find plenty of time to render some eye popping visuals.
Can someone explain the sluggish IDE/editor performane of QBasic under Windows XP. The programs run fine (at the speed you will expect from the CPU).
-
The "Amiga" can't--a third party product can. Anyone so inclined (and qualified) could write a similar extension for Linux or Windows.
but they haven't, and at least some of them want a different scheduler to the standard one Linux gives them, but the the closest they have is to make you use a different kernel.
Who knows? You do. You have the source.
How many people in the world really know what all the source code in the Linux kernel does? And which would you prefer: a GUI driven utility that installs with two clicks, that lets you change your scheduler to suit you preferred usage pattern, or going through the entire source code to make sure your new kernel with the updated scheduler will even let you boot?
-
Hi,
@Karlos,
P poor planning mostly on their part, they tried to copy me by putting on music, trying to format their floppy drive, and then trying to copy files from one hard drive to another while downloading files off the internet at the same time, try it on your PC and see what happens, I know when I try to format a floppy on my machine it sort of clogs up the whole buss lines and renders the computer almost useless. Some things just never change on a PC.
smerf
But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet: "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter. PC wins"
-
But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet: "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter. PC wins"
Oh do grow up.
-
Oh do grow up.
yeah you are right, it IS a juvenile way to look at it but hell its managed to convince most people here so I thought I'd give it a shot...again.
-
The responses to smerfs tests has been one of curiosity and speculation on possible causes. Nothing like what you're implying.
yeah you are right, it IS a juvenile way to look at it but hell its managed to convince most people here so I thought I'd give it a shot...again.
The only person who is taking this line, parodied or otherwise, is you.
-
How many people in the world really know what all the source code in the Linux kernel does?
Probably about the same as the number who understand what a scheduler does.
And which would you prefer: a GUI driven utility that installs with two clicks, that lets you change your scheduler to suit you preferred usage pattern,
What, you mean something like this:
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/Performance.png)
or going through the entire source code to make sure your new kernel with the updated scheduler will even let you boot?
You don't need to do that, you select the module you want. Hell, in a large distro like Ubuntu I suspect you could replace the scheduler module from precompiled binaries from the repos if you knew where to look.
-
The responses to smerfs tests has been one of curiosity and speculation on possible causes. Nothing like what you're implying.
The only person who is taking this line, parodied or otherwise, is you.
But I've heard it said sooo many times and I swear ot wasn't me saying it.
-
But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet: "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter. PC wins"
It is a valid response, tell me how many music tracks you can play while saving a program to an audio cassette on your amiga?
Once hardware has become obsolete, it is no longer on the good side of the catch up game.
-
Probably about the same as the number who understand what a scheduler does.
A lot more would know what a scheduler does, considerably less would know what the entire source code of the Linux kernel does.
What, you mean something like this:
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/Performance.png)
Something like it, but it does not change the scheduler itself, but merely gives you one of two choices. You might call it Scheduler-Lite, you know, the margarine of scheduling GUI's.
You don't need to do that, you select the module you want. Hell, in a large distro like Ubuntu I suspect you could replace the scheduler module from precompiled binaries from the repos if you knew where to look.
firstly do KNOW or merely suspect? Secondly I doubt it would interest non-coders to dabble with the kernel source code.
-
It is a valid response, tell me how many music tracks you can play while saving a program to an audio cassette on your amiga?
Once hardware has become obsolete, it is no longer on the good side of the catch up game.
Too funnny!! We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game. Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's. Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)
-
Too funnny!! We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game. Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's. Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)
The catch up game is a two horse race, and you don't want to be the trailing horse...
I've never saved any PC program to a floppy using a Mac (or Window Vista), can it be done?
Audio cassettes are still being made and used, I even dusted off my old ZX81 and loaded a space invaders game from Audio Cassette to show my younger brother* a little while ago!
*He's 14 and has little idea what a floppy disk is, CDROM, Email and USBflash drives are all he knows.
-
Something like it, but it does not change the scheduler itself
Being able to switch modes was your big "win" for the Executive drop in replacement for the Amiga. You can't replace Exec with Executive and not have the Amiga in question reboot in order to change it.
, but merely gives you one of two choices. You might call it Scheduler-Lite, you know, the margarine of scheduling GUI's.
It fulfills the requirement of being able to fundamentally change sheduling within the OS without requiring a reboot. Interesting that since I pointed to it you're now trying to dismiss it as something lesser when it clearly matches the original complaint.
firstly do KNOW or merely suspect? Secondly I doubt it would interest non-coders to dabble with the kernel source code.
rotfl. Re read what you've written there, now compare it to what you're accusing everyone else who disagrees with you of doing.
-
Being able to switch modes was your big "win" for the Executive drop in replacement for the Amiga. You can't replace Exec with Executive and not have the Amiga in question reboot in order to change it.
Err I remember that you need to restart the Executive *server* when changing schedulers, not reboot. But I already said it doesn't matter either way, as it only takes 5 seconds longer, so who cares really?
It fulfills the requirement of being able to fundamentally change sheduling within the OS without requiring a reboot. Interesting that since I pointed to it you're now trying to dismiss it as something lesser when it clearly matches the original complaint.
Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.
rotfl. Re read what you've written there, now compare it to what you're accusing everyone else who disagrees with you of doing.[/QUOTE]
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION: DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL? IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?
-
Err I remember that you need to restart the Executive *server* when changing schedulers, not reboot. But I already said it doesn't matter either way, as it only takes 5 seconds longer, so who cares really?
Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.
rotfl. Re read what you've written there, now compare it to what you're accusing everyone else who disagrees with you of doing.
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION: DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL? IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?[/QUOTE]
Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.
-
Err I remember that you need to restart the Executive *server* when changing schedulers, not reboot. But I already said it doesn't matter either way, as it only takes 5 seconds longer, so who cares really?
Executive is a service within the OS, when switching between modes yes, sure it'll need to stop and restart, just like the windows scheduler. Ripping out Exec and replacing it with Executive is different altogether, and as such you're not comparing like for like.
Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.
By that omission you've just discounted Executive, since that is precisely what you're doing.
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION:
NO U.
See, I can act a complete twunt too with caps.
-
Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION: DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL? IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?
You have to remember that scheduling algorithms available now are far in advance of what was available back in the 90's... as Karlos correctly pointed out, the amount of metadata the algorithm can call upon in Linux/WinNT/OSX is huge, these OSs use very complex dynamic system to ensure a fair spread of CPU time (across multiple cores!)... If you could add such a system to the Amiga Exec (you can't since much of this metadata relies on memory protection etc) then you could compare...
-Edit- What I'm trying to say is that swapping out the schedular on a modern system doesn't make much sense... You are basically complaining that the new Ford Mondeo doesn't have anywhere to stick the crank handle...
-
but they haven't, and at least some of them want a different scheduler to the standard one Linux gives them, but the the closest they have is to make you use a different kernel.
Executive for AmigaOS simply tried to bring over some of the UNIX scheduling abilities; UNIX already has fairly fine grained control over processes and prioritys ranging from userspace (ie, nice, renice ..) through to the POSIX system calls.
But really this is irrelevant; when I ran Executive on my Amiga, I left it at the defaults that the application recommended and forgot about it. The same applies pretty much with the stock kernel that Linux distros ship with. Somebody else has picked some decent settings and for 99% of the users they'll leave it as is.
It's only relevant to people when try to prove that a system that has had no development on it for the past 15 years is suddenly better then the latest tech.
-
I feel cheated the floppy has been left behind... Oh wait you can have adf files.
2GB USB flash drive ~$15. Pack of ten floppy disks ~$5. PC floppy drive ~$15
I think that is the definition of obsolete.
Notice: To be taken as directed. Please read the label and consult a Doctor if symptoms persist.
-
That's the chaotic scenario now because they are BASING STANDARD on APIs. Preivously, all manufacturers were complying with hardware standards-- look at PS/2 keyboards and ports, look at parallel ports, look at VGA/EGA/CGA cards, look at serial ports, look at floppy drive interfaces at 3F0..3f7h, etc. By the way, even now there are devices that are based on hardware standards based on ACPI specification. So whoever thinks it's not doable nowadays is just speculating.
Ahem, you did forget firmware’s role?
An ACPI system consists of a series of ten tables. These ten tables define which devices are present on the system and what their capabilities are as they relate to configuration and power management. These tables are built by the system BIOS at boot. When the system boots, it looks for specific entries contained in two of these tables (the Fixed ACPI Description table [FACP] and the Root System Description table [RSDT]) to determine if the system is ACPI compliant. This information is extracted from these tables in the form of an OEM ID, OEM TABLE ID, OEM REVISION, and CREATOR REVISION. If these tables are not present or the information contained in the descriptors above is invalid, the system is assumed to be non-ACPI and the legacy hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is installed.
For Windows, google "ACPI HAL"(hardware abstraction layer).
>this is true however as these new features come into existance the api is updated with functions that allow you to use the features that programmers need and want implemented. as such those games are still possible you just need to be creative with what you have.
You are more restricted with APIs;
It fosters rapid GPU hardware development.
APIs are slower and inefficient. APIs are more inexact.
Depends on APIs.
-
It fosters rapid GPU hardware development.
This is true, having a standard API allows designs to improve rapidly, The Amiga hardware went basically unchanged for 8 years... the C64 even longer... but your average nVidia GFX chip has a product life cycle of 6months!!!
Can you imagine how much work it would take to ensure that 30 generations (assuming a new product every 6 months since 1994) of hardware compatibility was included in the latest chip?
-
It depends on what instructions you try to do in parallel. If you do an IN AL,DX then TEST AL,128 obviously, you processor has to finish the IN instruction however long it takes. I was giving case where using AMIGA direct access outdoes PC going through API since API is more restricted than going directly to PC hardware.
One could develop a better mouse driver. There's nothing stopping you developing a better mouse driver.
Logitech's SetPoint software allows a user to set polling rates as high as 1000Hz.
Another 1000Hz poll enabled gaming mouse is Razer's DeathAdder/Mamba.
One the reasons in purchasing a gaming PC mouse is it's poll rates.
USB Mouserate Switcher 1.1. enable poll rates of +3000hz.
-
It depends on what instructions you try to do in parallel. If you do an IN AL,DX then TEST AL,128 obviously, you processor has to finish the IN instruction however long it takes. I was giving case where using AMIGA direct access outdoes PC going through API since API is more restricted than going directly to PC hardware. So, you can't draw the conclusion that API access will be still faster than Amiga going direct to hardware. If API call was just doing the exact thing you would have done with the hardware, then you can say the overhead is minimal given processor speed of PC. Also for input like USB input of joystick or gameport input of joystick, you will be doing multiple I/O instructions whereas Amiga does one.
Unless it's interupted during the IN AL,DX by say, the task scheduler and gets to do something else. IO is almost always done in an synchronous way on PC's. And I'm pretty sure that waiting on the joyport/parrallel port/serial port/whatever port doesn't actually stop me (and therefore the processor) from doing other things.
I don't know what you mean by parallel port controller is primary cause of slower ports. It's not. Parallel ports are usually PCI in the latest machines that have them; however, there are other I/O ports like 60h..64h (keyboard) that are much slower.
I misread which port you where talking about.
-
Once you accept that Amiga can swap palette indices faster than API-based modern system, we can looks at other examples where Amiga wins. I am not contesting you have more graphics horsepower overall in modern graphics cards but in some cases Amiga still wins when you look at time spent by CPU especially if you are going through APIs.
The APIs doesn’t hinder the compute performance. Modern desktop host CPUs are sufficiently fast enough to feed the GPU. Remember, modern GPUs are superscalar, pipelined, higly paralleled and highly threaded architecture.
With current CUDA processor, you can have 768 active stream threads per 8 SP cluster i.e. the front-end is larger than the available stream units. My Geforce 9500M GS GPU (32 SPs) can have 3072 active threads.
Frame per second race is also as easy as setting video memory pointers on Amiga. I believe we had some of this discussion before-- regarding playing .anim files and decompressing them on-the-fly using a double-buffered approach. Time to switch between frames is just for flipping pointers.
CUDA processor has multiple texture address units. You did not address "frame per second" rate. Comparing Amiga's play back capabilities against ATI's UVD and NVIDIA's PureVideo is laughable.
-
CUDA processor has multiple texture address units. You did not address "frame per second" rate. Comparing Amiga's play back capabilities against ATI's UVD and NVIDIA's PureVideo is laughable.
I'm beginning to think that amigaksi is actually not debating the actual time needed in some of his examples, but purely how many processor cycles it takes to achieve them. I could be wrong here, but if he does it would explain some of his objections.
Needless to say, this is not a very good way to look at things. Almost everything in modern computers (and that includes setting up the GPU) is IO limited and not processor limited. Severly so. Even onboard RAM is considered 'very slow' by the processors of these days. And that doesn't even go into the effects caches, multicore, pipelining, branch prediction, etc have on just how many cycles something takes to do.
In essence the IO overhead limits or even outright negates any API overhead you might incur.
-
I'm beginning to think that amigaksi is actually not debating the actual time needed in some of his examples, but purely how many processor cycles it takes to achieve them. I could be wrong here, but if he does it would explain some of his objections.
He basically implies, that today’s engineers are dumb and stupid. He didn't factor in the overall performance of the system. Refer to my posted PS3 RSX shader example in relation to instruction pairing.
Needless to say, this is not a very good way to look at things. Almost everything in modern computers (and that includes setting up the GPU) is IO limited and not processor limited.
In terms of computation intensity, Geforce 9400 IGP kills Core 2 Quad using the same memory bus.
-
He basically implies, that today’s engineers are dumb and stupid. He didn't factor in the overall performance of the system. Refer to my posted PS3 RSX shader example in relation to instruction pairing.
And all of that is only considering the hardware side. The whole argument breaks down on the software level anyway - software these days is so much more complicated that you don't want to think about the hardware while writing it (to such an extent as is possible). You don't want to think about the endianness of your processor, the type of harddisk controller you are interfacing with, etc, etc.
You only want that level of control when absolutely needed and not as a basic requirement to write software. You don't want all that added headache when you are writing your enterprise-class ERP product or multi-gigabyte multimedia program (something like, say, World of Warcraft). This is the real reason API's are such a good thing and it's one that is being completely glossed over.
In terms of computation intensity, Geforce 9400 IGP kills Core 2 Quad using the same memory bus.
Indeed, though I will add that the average GPU is not in all situations a good CPU (even though you can run code on them). The reverse is, however, never true. Even a really fast CPU is still not going to beat a GPU at its tasks.
And it doesn't change anything about my statement, really (except maybe the bit about GPU access). If main RAM is too slow for your CPU that means your CPU is not going to be computation limited but IO limited instead. Let alone how many wait states you'd introduce by getting data of a stupendously slow thing like a harddisk or even worse, a USB mouse.
Lucky us programming evolved beyond polling until it's done in most cases and, wisely, this is only done these days when it can't be helped (or you have a bad programmer :P).
-
He basically implies, that today’s engineers are dumb and stupid.
Speaking of Engineers does anyone know if the original 3DFX creators are still at the helm of NVidia?
I'm asking because the attempts I've seen to emulate reflections and shadows in 3D games is pretty dodgy.
-
And also...
I've seen better physics simulations from Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner compared to the CGI in Mr. Spielbergs War of the Worlds.
I hate to say it, but CGI in most movies is nonsense because they don't properly calculate the physic, light distortion, light scattering etc.
-
But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet: "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter. PC wins"
It's true that my current system has a multiformat card reader where the floppy might fir but my old AMD duron has a floppy disk drive and I never had any problems using it with either Win2K, WinXP or Linux.
I do fully recognise the "floppy death" syndrome that seems to infect PC's from a decade ago when people were using Win9x. I think it had more to do with the design of Windows than the hardware.
Actually, my work PC also has a floppy drive. Let me mount /dev/floppy and see what it does...
-
Nope, no real handicap from using the floppy drive. Finding a disk to test was much more difficult :lol:
-
There may be move toward USB, but the fact that they left certain ports in while eliminating gameport should indicate they are trying to improve gaming interface. I.e., they are admitting gameport sucks and user is better off using another interface. Newer audio cards also aren't using gameport although it was built-in into many audio cards.
actually that port was the easiest to replace because it was relatively unused by most users. those that did use them just went with the flow and upgraded to usb. they were not singling out gameport users. ps2 users resisted the change so they tended to hang around. same with parallel users(until usb printers became common) now they may or may not be there an motherboards. serial ports are sill used for industrial applications even tho outdated so those are usually still on the motherboards.
-
I never said API is useless-- it's inferior to hardware level compatibility. What I stated is:
"Not if hardware is backward compatible. You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware. There's many on PCs as well as Amiga. It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them."
i know what you said. but you qualified your statement with "well-behaved."
well-behaved apps could go to the hardware more efficiently BUT this is only if there is no hardware errors in compatibility. the api allows a buffer zone as i said so that if the hw has bugs the manufacturer can work around them. also if an api fails then there is coding that will reset the api so the os does not die. however if you go direct to hardware there is no such coding at present to handle this kind of event which has the potential to lock up the os.
You can have API applications that corrupt things as well. Amiga applications/games that go directly to hardware are being used and there are thousands of them. Just because someone abused that advantage doesn't mean you should get rid of that advantage. Perhaps, they should first worry about getting rid of spyware/viruses which use APIs to attack the system.
yes you can however the api reduces that chance and also can recover from bad coding easier.
You can also cause exceptions by kernel drivers bugs which are using APIs but are at ring 0. Bugs can exist in both. And for some applications, you don't want the OS involved. You can still have I/O protection and memory protection in hardware (as exists now) even when application goes directly to hardware.
by definition direct to hardware is DIRECT there is no floodgates in between for protection. if you do we are back to the api model.
from the direcX wiki
DOS allowed direct access to video cards, keyboards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_keyboard) and mice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse), sound devices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_card), and all other parts of the system, while Windows 95, with its protected memory model, restricted access to all of these, working on a much more standardized model. Microsoft needed a way that would let programmers get what they wanted, and they needed it quickly; the operating system was only months away from being released. Eisler (development lead), St. John, and Engstrom (program manager) worked together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX.
-
It really hard to think of a use for a floppy, they hold about a quarter of an average song or half a holiday snap. My Flash drive is far smaller and holds 8 GB.
My experience with floppies was not a happy one, they were prone to failure, slow and just cantankerous. I don't miss them one bit.
I hate to nitpick, but he stated 'probably 15 years ago'.
I'd hardly see you doing any of those things on a bog standard PC from 1994 ;)
Heck, most of the PC's out there today can't do all of those things, let alone at the same time.
(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)
It's true that my current system has a multiformat card reader where the floppy might fir but my old AMD duron has a floppy disk drive and I never had any problems using it with either Win2K, WinXP or Linux.
I do fully recognise the "floppy death" syndrome that seems to infect PC's from a decade ago when people were using Win9x. I think it had more to do with the design of Windows than the hardware.
Actually, my work PC also has a floppy drive. Let me mount /dev/floppy and see what it does...
-
It really hard to think of a use for a floppy, they hold about a quarter of an average song or half a holiday snap. My Flash drive is far smaller and holds 8 GB.
My experience with floppies was not a happy one, they were prone to failure, slow and just cantankerous. I don't miss them one bit.
I miss floppies, like I miss smallpox...
-
Yep, its so much better to bang the hardware directly have things break when new machines come out. Or new hardware comes out and the old software runs too quickly.
Coz banging the hardware directly has worked so well for the Amiga. Look where it is now..
You mix up nonstandard hardware with standard hardware. If hardware is standardized on I/O ports, memory map, etc. the old software still works on new hardware the same way.
You're speculating that Amiga going bankrupt is due to hardware compatibility. That's one of it's good points.
-
You mix up nonstandard hardware with standard hardware. If hardware is standardized on I/O ports, memory map, etc. the old software still works on new hardware the same way.
You're speculating that Amiga going bankrupt is due to hardware compatibility. That's one of it's good points.
Commodore was unable to react as quickly other companies...
-
In a perfect world, where programmers are immaculate and hardware documentation is written by God himself. In the real world programmers have a hard time dealing with pointers in C and buffer overruns by 1 are common place. It gets even worse when folks start writing stuff in assembler, especially on processors with complicated opcodes and general purpose registers that aren't really general purpose.
...
We're not talking about some individual's capability to program. We are talking about OBJECTIVELY which is better-- having ASM and C together is better than just C. Similarly, having API and direct hardware access is better than just API.
>I'm just writing about the Amiga joystick port you've labeled as "superior". You don't get to dismiss reading potentiometers with said port just because it makes you mad it's so dang slow at doing that operation. Lots of games take in pot values. You're just gonna have to live with that.
More applications use digital joystick since it's superior to analog input. You are using a self-contradictory argument. First you state I don't get to dismiss pots and then you go later and dismiss light pens. And on top of that, I am not dismissing the pots-- I am stating they also use up less CPU time. But they are not as useful given you also have the choice of using digital joysticks whereas on PCs, you don't. "Lots of games" is vague. Majority of games use digital joysticks. You can also start sampling pots for smaller values rather than wait for scan to complete. You can also use MOUSE on the joystick port.
>I wasn't refering to the damn db15 legacy PC game port that hasn't been screwed into the side of a case in the past 10 years. The bit about connecting harddrives , sound cards and multiple game pads should have been your clue that I was talking about USB.
Gameports were on audio cards a few years ago and supported by XP. Even your USB is slower to read than a MOVE.W on Amiga.
>No it's not. You'll never read signal noise from a USB gaming device. Try it.
Bullcrap. I can read some joysticks on Amiga w/o any signal noise whereas others have noise. It depends on quality of joystick. There's nothing in your USB cable that's going to prevent signal noise. If you want to perform some special software algorithm afterwards, then you slow down read time even further.
>The 8042 *is* the ps/2 keyboard/mouse controller on the PC. The Amiga joystick port hangs off the Denise chip. A chip that handles video timings and sprite crap, and also apparently, the joystick interface. That's a hack, it probably wasn't even originally designed to be joystick interface.
Mouse on 8042 is ALSO a hack. Denise was built for controlling multiple devices. That's really a lame argument.
>Of course reading the pots are slow, it's slow ass legacy hardware, on both the amiga side and PC side. It's been a long time since I've read the data from a db15 legacy pc joy port.
You have no choice but to read analog. If you had both analog and digital (like Amiga), you will see how quickly people would have used digital in majority of cases.
>...not on modern devices, the kind that plug into the USB port. The issue isn't that the device is slow, or that analog controls are crap, its that the hardware reading them is crap, and old.
For games requiring motion in 8-directions, it's EASIER and FASTER to use digital joysticks.
They now are forced into analog joysticks where they are UNNECESSARY.
>Yea, sure, you can do all that with one port, but only one device on each port. Also, when was the last time you saw a light pen?
See here's your inconsistency. I never saw analog joysticks being used either but if you want to count them in then mine as well count in all other devices on the joystick ports and there's plenty of them. There's also trackballs, foot pedals, steering wheels, etc.
>This whole argument that you have is based on two things: One is that you're comparing the Amiga joy port to a legacy db15 PC joy port that nobody uses anymore. That's ridiculous.
We are comparing with REALITY-- PCs have mainly relied on gameport for joystick input and Amiga has relied on digital joysticks. When you write a game, you have to live with REALITY of what's out there.
>All you're picking up is gobs of signal bounce. It's the farthest thing you could ever get from superior that one can imagine.
You still don't get it. It depends on the joystick and all that data which you conveniently picked out a few values to suit your needs was NOT bounce. There are REAL millisecond readings that are not bounce. If you are so sure about bounce, then explain why you get a series of millisecond readings and also a series of submillisecond readings. Can that happen using same joystick and both be noise? And what prevents someone from pressing fire button while moving joystick at arbitrary time?
>If you're gonna make a rational set of arguments, at least compare the Amiga joy port to an actual interface the PC uses, namely, USB. Anything else is dishonest and a waste of time.
I compared to both since both are out there.
-
This is simply not true.
...
[/quite]
It's true. You can get more efficient code if you know Assembly language coding. Just as API is restricting you from hardware so high level languages restrict you from using the full power available of the processor.
>Optimizing code is already quite hard to do in higher level languages*. Going to lower levels does not make it easier, it makes it harder because you now have to both choose the best algorithm (where 95-99% of your performance will come from - even the best assembly coded Bubble Sort ever won't beat even the lousiest Visual Basic Heap Sort ever for anything above say a thousand entries to be sorted), the best way to implement the algorithm you chose considering your application requirements and you also have to do that in the best, most optimal way possible in assembly. ...
You are mixing algorithms with optimizations. If you have the same algorithm, asm version wins over high level language version.
>Not to mention that modern compilers are actually quite good at doing all the things you suggest as they use the same tricks you describe. Or the fact that todays programs tend to be a 'tad' more complicated than something as trivial as sending some bits over a parralel port.
Well, don't think it's trivial sending bits over a parallel port. In my application, even the minimal overhead of API call to do parallel port output/input is enough to make application undoable. It has to be done via direct to hardware method. Compilers can only optimize the functionality supported by the high level languages and that also according to some preset algorithm. ASM programming gives you more power for programming.
-
None of those points are specific to Windows or the registry. They affect all systems. I've seen several systems with corrupt registry files as well--several out of tens of thousands. In all cases, the corruption was caused by a disk fault, and all could have been prevented if the end user had been paying attention to the diagnostic warnings generated by the disks.
I've had more issues with corrupt files on OFS/FFS file systems over the last few months than I've had with NTFS file systems over the entire history of Windows NT.
I don't think it's disk fault as reformatting disk drive or reinstalling registry (if you had backup and had used FAT32 and booted via DOS) made system useable again.
Yeah, there's MTBF of disks, but the idea of writing to same file over and over again for all that information verses many different files makes disaster bigger on registry than on Amiga.
Amiga disk failures are due to MTBFs or disks lying around in dirt/damp places.
-
Hardware was standardized. The PC market eventually settled on VGA, and all was well. Along came 3dfx, the Glide API, and Quake, and all of a sudden, VGA didn't satisfy the demands of the market. Nvidia stepped in with the Riva TNT, and along with Id and a few other major software players of the time, Nvidia helped bring OpenGL to the mainstream consumer market. It continues today, albeit with fewer major players.
If hardware were standardized, no one solution would stand above the rest, and the market would stagnate and eventually die. Standardizing APIs allows both hardware and software designers to innovate without interfering with the other's core competencies. It's a good place to be. Really. (The APIs aren't technically standardized either. You have lots to choose from. More competition, more drive to innovate.)
More APIs less hardware standards translates to: (1) More confusion, (2) more inexactness, (3) more restrictions as to what a standard game/application can do, (4) more inefficient code, (4) more bloated OSes with hundreds of drivers and different APIs supported. If they had just standardized the I/O ports or memory map areas, then the competition can still be there.
-
I'm beginning to think that amigaksi is actually not debating the actual time needed in some of his examples, but purely how many processor cycles it takes to achieve them. I could be wrong here, but if he does it would explain some of his objections.
Needless to say, this is not a very good way to look at things. Almost everything in modern computers (and that includes setting up the GPU) is IO limited and not processor limited. Severly so. Even onboard RAM is considered 'very slow' by the processors of these days. And that doesn't even go into the effects caches, multicore, pipelining, branch prediction, etc have on just how many cycles something takes to do.
In essence the IO overhead limits or even outright negates any API overhead you might incur.
No I am actually looking at time of execution of I/O instructions. API does have substantial overhead if it's not exactly meant for doing what you want to do with the computer. Then you have to go through the inefficient API calls and suffer the penalties of inexactness and slowness.
-
Unless it's interupted during the IN AL,DX by say, the task scheduler and gets to do something else. IO is almost always done in an synchronous way on PC's. And I'm pretty sure that waiting on the joyport/parrallel port/serial port/whatever port doesn't actually stop me (and therefore the processor) from doing other things.
...
It's not done in parallel usually.
-
I don't think it's disk fault as reformatting disk drive or reinstalling registry (if you had backup and had used FAT32 and booted via DOS) made system useable again.
Reformatting or restoring the file would most likely place the data on a good sector, leaving the bad sector unused and waiting for the next unwitting block of data to be written to it. It depends on the disk and the allocation scheme used.
Yeah, there's MTBF of disks, but the idea of writing to same file over and over again for all that information verses many different files makes disaster bigger on registry than on Amiga. Amiga disk failures are due to MTBFs or disks lying around in dirt/damp places.
Of course, but it could also be caused by an interruption to the OFS/FFS file system routines, which are in no way fault tolerant.
The most likley cause of the problem in both cases (regsitry on NTFS v. arbitrary data on OFS/FFS) is a disk failure or a catastrophic system failure. Edge cases related to file system deficiencies and unsynchronized access to data structures are less common, but NTFS obviously has an edge over OFS/FFS.
-
More APIs less hardware standards translates to: (1) More confusion, (2) more inexactness, (3) more restrictions as to what a standard game/application can do, (4) more inefficient code, (4) more bloated OSes with hundreds of drivers and different APIs supported. If they had just standardized the I/O ports or memory map areas, then the competition can still be there.
By defining those standards, you limit innovation. How wide are the ports? 1 byte? 4 bytes? 8 bytes? How large is the framebuffer? 256 kilobytes? 4 megabytes? 256 megabytes? 1 gigabyte?
The only surefire way to provide both backward and forward compatibility is an API, regardless of where that API is implemented.
-
Commodore was unable to react as quickly other companies...
I won't stand for negative comments about God... er I mean Jay. I would speculate that Dave simply didn't understand Jay's approach to things and needed a full redesign to go forward. I believe Dave's gripe was that you couldn't alter one chip without affecting the others.:hammer:
I think more likely cost was really the problem. i.e. Commodore wanted it to run on 'pixie dust' not money.:confused:
-
It's not done in parallel usually.
It's not? Even the Amiga did things in parallel, hence the sensitivity to actions that interfered with system timing, e.g. a CAS instruction.
Most (not all, but most) new systems sold today have at least two CPU cores, never mind the number of independent execution units on the cores themselves. Parallel execution is now the de facto standard, whether your software is aware of it or not. You can ignore parallel execution, of course, but only to the detriment of the rest of the system.
-
What, you mean something like this:
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/Performance.png)
This setting changes the length of the quantum assigned to tasks. By default, the applications/programs setting assigns a quantum of 2 ticks to background threads and 6 ticks to threads owned by the foreground process. The background services setting assigns a quantum of 12 ticks to all threads. You can also modify the default and boosted tick counts.
So, Windows doesn't allow you to change the scheduler, but it does allow you to change the behavior of the scheduler.
Linux allows you to change the scheduler, but the different schedulers are sometimes just variations on the same theme, i.e. variable v. fixed quantums.
Both systems implement some form of priority boosting. Windows supports accounting (scheduling metadata) through various add-ons. Linux probably does, too, but I don't know off the top of my head.
-
Oddness. Formatting floppies, even on win2k always seemed fine on my athlonxp system (which is... 4PC's ago), then again I did set it so that each explorer window ran in it's own individual thread, which improved multitasking performance (not to mention stability) no end.
So, what exactly were the terms for this challenge?
I mean, was it a from boot race or?? Just curious.
Hi,
It was just a task race, the rules were that he would pick a task, then I would pick a task, we would pick about 10 tasks and see who would get done first, from the time we hit the on switch to the finish time. Like some people would pick a video ( we had to pick one that both machines could play) download certain files, format a floppy and then fill it with some files, backup a hard drive, or copy files from one hard drive to another, you know common everyday tasks that people do with their computers. I mean there were somethings that he would pick that it would be impossible for the Amiga to do, and then there were somethings that I would pick that a PC couldn't do (like running windows for a whole year without a crash). Now today I don't know if the Amiga could compete with the new Quad Core or the new Intel 7 chip. I know that one test formatting a hard drive and running programs off of another fell through since the sata drives came out. I used to like the one on partitioning a 2 gig partition on hard drive and formatting it, it took the PC forever to do this or doing a defrag on a hard drive. Yep one of these days I may make up a list and have my son run my Quad Core and I will run the Amiga to see which one wins. By the way have you noticed I haven't said Apple at all.
smerf
-
You are mixing algorithms with optimizations. If you have the same algorithm, asm version wins over high level language version.
In what way? Performance? Maintainability? Cost?
For what target audience? Hardware designers? Compiler designers? Application programmers?
-
Look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiIr2oJZ0l4
amigaksi vs PC users
Hi,
@Fanscale
That was great, I could see Amigaski now, walking into a pc store and blowing away every PC there, while screaming.
smerf
-
and then there were somethings that I would pick that a PC couldn't do (like running windows for a whole year without a crash).
OK, you know that was a silly comment. Of course Windows can run for a year without a "crash." You're not likely to run a video player or a game on consumer grade hardware for a year without a crash, but you're also not expecting 100% uptime under those conditions.
-
My dual core 2.2 Ghz CPU eats around 35Watts.
Hi,
@Hammer,
Would you care to repharase that, your CPU may use 35 watts, but what size is your power supply, your video card, your audio chips or card, your hard drive, your CD-ROM player (or DVD) your memory, your USB ports, and your fancy little cpu cooler.
add them all up
and your computer is probably equal to one heck of a room heater
-
There seems to be a consensus that a Mac/PC is actually designed for SOHO/Satanic Accountants.:madashell:
Maybe I should have titled this, "Smartphones, still playing Amiga catchup."
I can see that consoles have surpassed their original design (adding live etc.)
But, some are holding out (including myself) that the Amiga was designed to be a home computer...
Happy New Years btw. I can still see this argument continuuing for a while yet.
-
Most smartphones have passed the Amiga long ago, did you see the new Samsung Android?
There seems to be a consensus that a Mac/PC is actually designed for SOHO/Satanic Accountants.:madashell:
Maybe I should have titled this, "Smartphones, still playing Amiga catchup."
I can see that consoles have surpassed their original design (adding live etc.)
But, some are holding out (including myself) that the Amiga was designed to be a home computer...
Happy New Years btw. I can still see this argument continuuing for a while yet.
-
Stop the bullcrap; you're just serving as a biased sidekick like some others. Be objective and perhaps you will see such a clear cut point.
Hi,
@amigaksi,
Like what that the joystick is faster than a PC's, sorry I don't use one in any of the latest games that I have purchased. Listen if you alter the tests in your favor than any computer can beat the other one, I do this to unsuspecting PC users who have never seen an Amiga and then I try to pick the PC's weakest points just so them there suckers can be destroyed by a 25 mhz machine. Its just so much fun, which computer do I like better, well if a crook tried to rob me and he asked me which computer he shoul steal, I would probably say take the PC, it is one of the latest greatest computers on the market today, just check out the stores, and you will be able to pawn it for more money. That old yellowing white computer there was made in 1993 and is only 25 mhz, it is so old that you can't even use windows on it but I mean if you want to take the time and effort to carry it out, you are the crook.
Why would I do that, because I still can get another Quad Core, but darn it sure would be hard to get another Amiga.
Face it Amigaksi, even I one of the first 5 people in the Jacksonville FL area to buy an Amiga knows that it has seen better days, the hardware is old, the OS is old and by trickery we can make the Amiga beat unwary PC users. Heck I haven't written a program in about 10 years, I have all my programming books for the Amiga in a box up in the attic, I have about 10 boxes full of Amiga parts, boards etc. I have about 12 disk boxes, and 5 disk file boxes full of Amiga programs, and yes some where up there I have 3 different joysticks and one competition gamepad for the Amiga, also a CD32 with a SX-1, 2 A3000,
one A1200 with a ppc 250 card, an amiga 500 an Amiga 1000 board (my wife chucked my other 1000 since the day she sat down naked in front of my 1080 monitor and said do you know what this means, and I answered, yes your blocking my monitor, women just get angry about nothing) and then my A4000 which sits on my desk still using it might add. Our only hope is that Mr. Bill McEwen makes an Amiga OS for the barebone PC.
smerf
-
But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet: "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter. PC wins"
Hi,
@stefcep2,
I know the reason PC's got rid of floppy drives is that when they format them it drags down out 2.4 ghz CPU and brings the computer to a stand still.
smerf
-
I feel cheated the floppy has been left behind... Oh wait you can have adf files.
2GB USB flash drive ~$15. Pack of ten floppy disks ~$5. PC floppy drive ~$15
I think that is the definition of obsolete.
Notice: To be taken as directed. Please read the label and consult a Doctor if symptoms persist.
Hi,
@Fanscale,
Wow, we can tell your rich, because you shop the high class stores, or maybe you don't know how to shop, I just bought 2 2 gig usb flash drives for $9.95, thats 4 gig of CF drive space for $9.95 and not used either. As far as floppies, I just go through the dumpsters in back of the computer stores, sometimes dumpster diving could bring you some surprising stuff, like four 1.1ghz computers with 30 gig hard drives and 512 mbyte memory. @ external scsi enclosures, and over 500 floppy disks of which 100 where of the 720 K brand.
smerf
-
(my wife chucked my other 1000 since the day she sat down naked in front of my 1080 monitor and said do you know what this means, and I answered, yes your blocking my monitor,
Ooh, ooh I know...
Both are works of art by two great masters.
-
Ooh, ooh I know...
Both are works of art by two great masters.
Oh, that has so many choice follow ups. If only this weren't a family-friendly board....
-
Too funnny!! We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game. Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's. Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)
Hi,
@stefcep2,
Yes it can, just get a stereo phono plug, plug it in the stereo output of the Amiga, and then take the other side and plug it into your cassette player. You know have a way to record the tracks of analog music to your cassette player.
Oh, you said programs, hmmm this might be a tough one, I do know that they had made a backup program that used to save / backup your programs to a video cassette recorder (VCR) and I believe Amiga Computing had the plans in one of their rags on how to build it, but darn the magazines were one of the things my wife chucked during the move. I am sure that with a little modification you could probably record it to a cassette tape because I know that back in 1978 I built one for the C64, it wasn't that hard to build either.
smerf
-
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION: DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL? IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?
Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.[/QUOTE]
Hi,
at [-f filename] [-l] [-m] [-d job [job ...]] TIME
smerf
-
Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.
Hi,
at [-f filename] [-l] [-m] [-d job [job ...]] TIME
smerf[/QUOTE]
What does the windows equivalent of chron have to do with what's been discussed?
-
AGAIN. ANSWER THE QUESTION: DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL? IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?
Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is.
I see we are back to the "Pro-Amiga: "Amiga can do x better". pro-PC: "i don't use or need x, i don't care, it therefore doesn't matter. PC wins" train of argument agin.
Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.
And its even easier to just use a different kernel with a different schedule thats already been compiled for you and is already in the repo there for you. But thats not the point: Neither are as easy and configurable and as powerful as just double clicking an icon and selecting your scheduler from a GUI that includes several choices, and allows further configuration options for individual tasks, from the same GUI. An average AMiga user can do this without ny knowledge of coding or compiling code, and back in the day most of the members of the Amiga group I belonged to did it. NO PC OS OR THIRD PARTY UTILITY THAT I KNOW OF ALLOWS THIS, NOR HAS ANYONE DEMONSTRATED THATS IT IS AVAILABLE OR EVEN POSSIBLE.
-
This setting changes the length of the quantum assigned to tasks. By default, the applications/programs setting assigns a quantum of 2 ticks to background threads and 6 ticks to threads owned by the foreground process. The background services setting assigns a quantum of 12 ticks to all threads. You can also modify the default and boosted tick counts.
So, Windows doesn't allow you to change the scheduler, but it does allow you to change the behavior of the scheduler.
Linux allows you to change the scheduler, but the different schedulers are sometimes just variations on the same theme, i.e. variable v. fixed quantums.
Both systems implement some form of priority boosting. Windows supports accounting (scheduling metadata) through various add-ons. Linux probably does, too, but I don't know off the top of my head.
But none let you set the priority of individual tasks. The Windows system decides what is a "program" and what is a "background" task. You may for example want a higher priority given to a *particular* task in the background, but not to other background tasks. Windows won't let you do this: any task whose window you haven't made active becomes a background task, and will eventually get lower priority to any task whose window is active, or vice versa depending on if you give more cpu time to "programs" or "background" tasks.
-
Yeah but how many wind chimes can the average PC user need?
Originally Posted by stefcep2
Too funnny!! We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game. Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's. Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)
-
We're not talking about some individual's capability to program. We are talking about OBJECTIVELY which is better-- having ASM and C together is better than just C. Similarly, having API and direct hardware access is better than just API.
But it is not objective when you're dismissing a huge chunk of where issues lay. It would be objective only if you take into account peoples skills. I tried explaining this to you earlier but you dismissed it because it didn't fit in with your magical fairyland.
More applications use digital joystick since it's superior to analog input.
Citation. Now.
You are using a self-contradictory argument. First you state I don't get to dismiss pots and then you go later and dismiss light pens.
You're bitching at someone else dismissing a highly specialised and none too often used tech?
Hypocrite much?
Gameports were on audio cards a few years ago and supported by XP. Even your USB is slower to read than a MOVE.W on Amiga.
As has been shown, USB can be made to poll as fast, if not faster then ithe Amigas.
Have you actually shown an Amiga game yet that uses even a tenth of your supposed 1khz response time?
You have no choice but to read analog. If you had both analog and digital (like Amiga), you will see how quickly people would have used digital in majority of cases.
Citations, do you have any?
We are comparing with REALITY-- PCs have mainly relied on gameport for joystick input and Amiga has relied on digital joysticks. When you write a game, you have to live with REALITY of what's out there.
The reality is that there hasn't been a Gameport based joystick, digital or otherwise released for sale in at least 6 years. It's all USB.
I compared to both since both are out there.
Good luck trying to find a supply of Gameport joysticks. You'll need it.
But he is correct, if you're going to make a comparason you do so on what is actually in use, we're not even talking top end gear here either, USB has been the standard pretty much this whole century. Even by the time of Windows2000 Gameport was considered legacy.
To do anything else would be an excersise in redundancy. What's next, you prove Amigas are superior to PC's because of ISA?
-
It's true that my current system has a multiformat card reader where the floppy might fir but my old AMD duron has a floppy disk drive and I never had any problems using it with either Win2K, WinXP or Linux.
I do fully recognise the "floppy death" syndrome that seems to infect PC's from a decade ago when people were using Win9x. I think it had more to do with the design of Windows than the hardware.
Actually, my work PC also has a floppy drive. Let me mount /dev/floppy and see what it does...
Floppy lock-outs happens on Win XP. Never tried on my vista laptop.
Yes with Linux, you have to mount it, I just have to stick the floppy in and the amiga knows a about it
Here's another example: try to format a disk, which was probably dodgy. Win PX kept trying and trying and trying for minutes, locking me out totally. The amiga would try three times, then give up and tell you it can't do the format, takes a few seconds, at no stage did it lock me out.
-
I feel cheated the floppy has been left behind... Oh wait you can have adf files.
2GB USB flash drive ~$15. Pack of ten floppy disks ~$5. PC floppy drive ~$15
I think that is the definition of obsolete.
Notice: To be taken as directed. Please read the label and consult a Doctor if symptoms persist.
1. You can buy them.
2. If you can buy them, the manufacturers are making money on them.
3. If they are making money on them, people are buying them.
4. If people are buying them, they are using them.
5. If people are using them, they are not obsolete.
-
It's only relevant to people when try to prove that a system that has had no development on it for the past 15 years is suddenly better then the latest tech.
So why are there Linux kernels compiled with different schedulers readily available in most Linux repo's? Must mean the Linux user community has already had this very discussion, and felt the need to re-compile their kernel with a new scheduler, just to try to catchup to the Amiga? Kernels with different schedulers exist because they offer something the standard one doesn't. Whether you want to make use of it is besides the point.
-
It's all down to the trolling at this point. One fellow wants to state that a computer from the 80's is superior by comparing it to interfaces the PC hasn't used in years. And now we have an argument that the floppy disc isn't obsolete. I say that if you are going to dwell in this inanity, then you know what to sit on and where to cut your self with that metal floppy disk shield.
The amiga was great because back in the day the graphics knocked your socks off. Commodore made bad decisions and went tits up and the innovation stopped. I still use the Amiga to this day because I love those old games and enjoy repairing the hardware as it progressively fails. I wouldn't bother fixing an old PC. But I'm not so deluded that I think other architectures haven't surpassed the Amiga 1,000 times over, and I enjoy the new hardware we have at our disposal today.
And... Still running AROS on a junk machine and love the new developments, looking forward to Anubis.
-
Hi,
@Hammer,
Would you care to repharase that, your CPU may use 35 watts, but what size is your power supply, your video card, your audio chips or card, your hard drive, your CD-ROM player (or DVD) your memory, your USB ports, and your fancy little cpu cooler.
add them all up
and your computer is probably equal to one heck of a room heater
It's a Q1 2008 "gaming" 15.4" laptop. According RMclock, the entire system consumes around 25 watts to 55 watts.
-
It's all down to the trolling at this point.
The amiga was great because back in the day the graphics knocked your socks off.
The Amiga was great for a lot of reasons other than the graphics. But if the A500's graphics is what made it great for you, then I'll take that into account when giving any credibility to what you post.
-
But none let you set the priority of individual tasks.
What? Have you used Windows or Linux in the last five years?
Windows:
Bring up task manager, Process Tab, right click on the intended process, select priority.
Linux:
Open up gnome-system-monitor, select processes, select intended process, select priority.
All nice and point and clicky.
-
But none let you set the priority of individual tasks. The Windows system decides what is a "program" and what is a "background" task. You may for example want a higher priority given to a *particular* task in the background, but not to other background tasks. Windows won't let you do this: any task whose window you haven't made active becomes a background task, and will eventually get lower priority to any task whose window is active, or vice versa depending on if you give more cpu time to "programs" or "background" tasks.
That's not true. Windows provides fine grained control over priorities, both in APIs and user accessible GUIs (hint: Task Manager). You're also a bit confused. Priorities affect scheduling, but they don't affect quantums. All threads except those with real-time priority can be preempted by the scheduler, and starved threads will eventually have their priorities boosted to compensate for overactive higher priority threads.
You're also oversimplifying foreground v. background. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your experience doesn't extend much beyond single-user--i.e. a single window station--desktop systems. That's OK, though. Microsoft publishes more documentation than any other software vendor, and it's all publicly available. For free.
-
So why are there Linux kernels compiled with different schedulers readily available in most Linux repo's? Must mean the Linux user community has already had this very discussion, and felt the need to re-compile their kernel with a new scheduler, just to try to catchup to the Amiga? Kernels with different schedulers exist because they offer something the standard one doesn't. Whether you want to make use of it is besides the point.
Some people want to use Linux on servers, so they have a different kernel to those that want to use it on a Desktop machine. Some people want a kernel that has a nice boot splash screen, whilst others don't want video output at all. And considering that Linux can
support so much more hardware then the AmigaOS can its not surprising that there are
so many different kernel versions available.
Of course, changing schedulers from user space isn't anything spectacular. Linux has had the ability for a while, http://dynsched.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/iosched.htm for examples of changing the process and IO schedulers. Normally when kernels are built all of the schedulers are built as well, its just a matter of changing the one the kernel is running with. And where the Amiga is still playing catchup - these are all part of the standard kernel - no third party hack like Executive on the Amiga, needed.
-
Commodore was unable to react as quickly other companies...
And during VGA standard card development, some bigger companies beat other smaller companies in developing standard VGA cards that had backward compatbility in hardware.
-
Ahem, you did forget firmware’s role?
An ACPI system consists of a series of ten tables. These ten tables define which devices are present on the system and what their capabilities are as they relate to configuration and power management. These tables are built by the system BIOS at boot. When the system boots, it looks for specific entries contained in two of these tables (the Fixed ACPI Description table [FACP] and the Root System Description table [RSDT]) to determine if the system is ACPI compliant. This information is extracted from these tables in the form of an OEM ID, OEM TABLE ID, OEM REVISION, and CREATOR REVISION. If these tables are not present or the information contained in the descriptors above is invalid, the system is assumed to be non-ACPI and the legacy hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is installed.
...
There's more than ten tables. It looks like they append newer tables as newer hardware is added. You can fetch various things like I/O port addresses for SMI and so forth and read/write directly to I/O ports. If all the chaos of various other audio/video/ethernet/etc. cards didn't arbitrarily use I/O port, memory map resources they could have fixed the I/O port addresses but ACPI is dealing with in best way given the chaos of people using their own I/O ports/memory maps.
>It fosters rapid GPU hardware development.
>Depends on APIs.
APIs are always slower than going direct. You can draw that conclusion logically without having to measure the time. They still have to develop GPU hardware to newer functions supported by API and still use some I/O method so I don't see how much harder it can be to develop to some specified I/O ports and memory map.
-
actually that port was the easiest to replace because it was relatively unused by most users. those that did use them just went with the flow and upgraded to usb. they were not singling out gameport users. ps2 users resisted the change so they tended to hang around. same with parallel users(until usb printers became common) now they may or may not be there an motherboards. serial ports are sill used for industrial applications even tho outdated so those are usually still on the motherboards.
Must be a billion gameports out there-- perhaps a few million trashed. So it's hard to make a statement-- it's unused. Perhaps, you don't use the gameport. And my motherboard has a parallel port and PS/2 connectors -- no serial port. So your speculation serial ports are still around is just your experience. I see more desktops with parallel ports. By the way, Microsoft must have done some gaming research to come up with XBOX joysticks.
-
i know what you said. but you qualified your statement with "well-behaved."
...
You can have well-behaved of any software-- one that goes direct to hardware or API.
>well-behaved apps could go to the hardware more efficiently BUT this is only if there is no hardware errors in compatibility.
That's worse for APIs. If there are hardware errors, they are usually published and kept so you know they will be there. If you fix them in APIs, then you have to worry about whether the user has the erroneous version or newer version. Sometimes hardware errors are taken as features like enabling 7 bitplanes in OCS to enable a static mask bpldat.
>the api allows a buffer zone as i said so that if the hw has bugs the manufacturer can work around them. also if an api fails then there is coding that will reset the api so the os does not die. however if you go direct to hardware there is no such coding at present to handle this kind of event which has the potential to lock up the os.
Sorry, but application API access is protected by OS but drivers using APIs aren't. So they are likely to cause OS lockups just as well as one going direct to hardware. But you can also protect applications going direct to hardware using IOPM.
>by definition direct to hardware is DIRECT there is no floodgates in between for protection. if you do we are back to the api model.
Sorry, that's not how IOPM works and there's no API model involved. If you wanted to protect your hard drive I/O ports, you can protect them via OS and application can go direct to hardware and only OS will get control if application accesses those I/O ports you protected. Application does not have to use API. My application (MPDOS Pro) is an example that goes direct to hardware on I/O ports and does not use any API calls and keeps OS stable.
-
Reformatting or restoring the file would most likely place the data on a good sector, leaving the bad sector unused and waiting for the next unwitting block of data to be written to it. It depends on the disk and the allocation scheme used.
Of course, but it could also be caused by an interruption to the OFS/FFS file system routines, which are in no way fault tolerant.
The most likley cause of the problem in both cases (regsitry on NTFS v. arbitrary data on OFS/FFS) is a disk failure or a catastrophic system failure. Edge cases related to file system deficiencies and unsynchronized access to data structures are less common, but NTFS obviously has an edge over OFS/FFS.
Actually, hard drives are more robust now then they were in the past. But writing to hard drive (especially registry) when there's power outage or you turn off the system can cause corruption of the file and that problem has nothing to do with hard drive failure. It can happen on brand new hard drive. My point is that in that case Amiga's simpler style of writing data to separate files would cause less damage.
-
By defining those standards, you limit innovation. How wide are the ports? 1 byte? 4 bytes? 8 bytes? How large is the framebuffer? 256 kilobytes? 4 megabytes? 256 megabytes? 1 gigabyte?
The only surefire way to provide both backward and forward compatibility is an API, regardless of where that API is implemented.
Sorry, but I did give many examples of how this standard can be hardware based and not limit innovation. VGA was 8-bit initially. They made 16-bit VGAs (ISA) then 32-bit (VESA) and then 32-bit (PCI) and then AGP and so forth. Even if you wanted to add new ports, you can still retain the old ones. API is the inferior method of doing it. It may be cheaper (save some silicon), but it's worse for the general user who can better optimize things going directly to hardware.
-
Sorry, but I did give many examples of how this standard can be hardware based and not limit innovation.
No the hell you didn't. You've just given us platitudes about BS while ignoring how modern hardware works.
-
It's not? Even the Amiga did things in parallel, hence the sensitivity to actions that interfered with system timing, e.g. a CAS instruction.
Most (not all, but most) new systems sold today have at least two CPU cores, never mind the number of independent execution units on the cores themselves. Parallel execution is now the de facto standard, whether your software is aware of it or not. You can ignore parallel execution, of course, but only to the detriment of the rest of the system.
If you do an IN AL,DX and then switch contexts the stack will save (EAX,EDX) at least which are related to the IN instruction thus no parallel instruction can execute until this one finishes. I am just speaking of context switching on the same processor. You have to wait for IN to finish to use the joystick data or whatever other device you are doing IN from.
-
No the hell you didn't. You've just given us platitudes about BS while ignoring how modern hardware works.
You look like you had a bad day.
-
The Amiga was great for a lot of reasons other than the graphics. But if the A500's graphics is what made it great for you, then I'll take that into account when giving any credibility to what you post.
I remember when the old man brought that Amiga 1000 home back in '85. Other kids had the NES, some had the c64. We had PC's in school. That a1k blew it all away. Nothing could compare. I remember going to a software store in Dallas texas back then, and seeing the Juggler demo projected on the wall. I caught my first taste of C on the amiga. Used that machine until 1993. When we moved to North Carolina in 1990, I never saw Amiga anything since. No software in the stores, no Amigas on display. I do remember around 1995, the Weather Channel had a problem. A CLI window was on display, for the whole nation to see. Thats the last i ever saw amiga anything in the wild.
-
If you do an IN AL,DX and then switch contexts the stack will save (EAX,EDX) at least which are related to the IN instruction thus no parallel instruction can execute until this one finishes. I am just speaking of context switching on the same processor. You have to wait for IN to finish to use the joystick data or whatever other device you are doing IN from.
Nope, this is wrong. Nobody uses that hardware, no modern machines ship with it. Folks haven't used it in 10 years.
-
You look like you had a bad day.
I had a great day.
-
I had a great day.
Then you should have read post #857 where I clearly stated the examples:
That's the chaotic scenario now because they are BASING STANDARD on APIs. Preivously, all manufacturers were complying with hardware standards-- look at PS/2 keyboards and ports, look at parallel ports, look at VGA/EGA/CGA cards, look at serial ports, look at floppy drive interfaces at 3F0..3f7h, etc. By the way, even now there are devices that are based on hardware standards based on ACPI specification. So whoever thinks it's not doable nowadays is just speculating.
>this is true however as these new features come into existance the api is updated with functions that allow you to use the features that programmers need and want implemented. as such those games are still possible you just need to be creative with what you have.
You are more restricted with APIs; APIs are slower and inefficient. APIs are more inexact. You can also update hardware and allow previous software to still run the same.
-
Nope, this is wrong. Nobody uses that hardware, no modern machines ship with it. Folks haven't used it in 10 years.
You did have a bad day. I use IN AL,DX in 2.8Ghz Dell machine and in this other AMD Sempron 3000+ machine. Unless PCs have this instruction, they aren't backward compatible and not really "PC"s.
-
Hi,
@amigaksi,
Like what that the joystick is faster than a PC's, sorry I don't use one in any of the latest games that I have purchased. Listen if you alter the tests in your favor than any computer can beat the other one, I do this to unsuspecting PC users who have never seen an Amiga and then I try to pick the PC's weakest points just so them there suckers can be destroyed by a 25 mhz machine.
...
It's real data done on a 2.8Ghz Dell machine. If you don't think it's real, rather than LIE and MISLEAD others, you have to go and repeat the experiment. And if you don't have time for that, I suggest getting MPDOS software and trying the simulation yourself with your own games and joysticks and do the recordings yourself. I'm sure you are familiar with scientific method (and ethics as well not to throw bullcrap of whatever comes up on the top of your head).
>Face it Amigaksi, even I one of the first 5 people in the Jacksonville FL area to buy an Amiga knows that it has seen better days, the hardware is old, the OS is old and by trickery we can make the Amiga beat unwary PC users.
I am not trying to make it beat a PC; it's what happens in some cases.
>Heck I haven't written a program in about 10 years, ...
That's the problem. You have lost your memory of what Amiga is capable of (or purposely want to be in ignorance).
-
You did have a bad day. I use IN AL,DX in 2.8Ghz Dell machine and in this other AMD Sempron 3000+ machine. Unless PCs have this instruction, they aren't backward compatible and not really "PC"s.
You're missing something there aren't you? IN AL, DX is kinda ambiguous isn't it? It's as if there was a temporal component missing....
-
Hi,
@stefcep2,
I know the reason PC's got rid of floppy drives is that when they format them it drags down out 2.4 ghz CPU and brings the computer to a stand still.
smerf
Floppy access is slower on newer OSes than in older ones. May be I/O protection and/or virus checking that slows things down so much.
-
You're missing something there aren't you? IN AL, DX is kinda ambiguous isn't it? It's as if there was a temporal component missing....
Check the intel references.
-
You look like you had a bad day.
And you look like having been hit in a terrible accident, being sleeping for years, and then woke up and started writing here. Seriously: we have tried for pages and pages to let you understand that time changed, hardware evolved, programming rules also and habits too.
I even quoted a passage that said USB ports can poll at 1 KHz, and you replied to me that I have to look at the "standard PC configurations". Oh, my God! "standard configurations": if it isn't standard USB, what can be considered standard on a PC nowadays?
You are incredible: "there sare billions of gameports out there". There aren't ANY. There have not been a single gameport in any average PC for years now, nor there are PC-compatible joysticks/Wheels (yes, to a PC gameport and USB you can connect also wheels) with gameport plug anymore. Gameports were common on soundcards a long ago, but only for a simple reason: they also provided MIDI functions with a simple adapter cable. Now nobody uses them for this reason anymore. Even discrete sound cards are practically dead, and used by a niche. We are in 2009, w-a-k-e u-p!
You are neverending this meaningless, pointless, silly, crazy joystick port and hardware-banging arguments even if you are the last man all over the world believing in them, but if NOBODY ELSE agrees with you, maybe you should start dubitating about them, shouldn't you? Sorry for being harsh, but when it's too much, it's too much.
regards,
-
Check the intel references.
No thanks, I'm very familiar with them, having been working on my own little hobby kernel written in fasm for the past few months.
-
But it is not objective when you're dismissing a huge chunk of where issues lay. It would be objective only if you take into account peoples skills. I tried explaining this to you earlier but you dismissed it because it didn't fit in with your magical fairyland.
...
I never even argued point about ASM vs. high level languages with you before so stop lieing. It's objective that you have more power using ASM than a high level language. High level language gives you subset of what you can do with ASM. It's logical. You are in a fairyland because you are inept to even comprehend what I am stating. I can also write insults, but I prefer rationality.
>Citation. Now.
I already gave citation in this thread. You only reply many days later so as to confuse people as if it was never stated. In Amigas games/applications, it's digital joystick or mouse-- no analog joysticks. Maybe there's some rare exceptions.
>You're bitching at someone else dismissing a highly specialised and none too often used tech?
I compared with both USB and Gameport. Where have you been?
>Hypocrite much?
You are a biased side-kick. He seems to understand the subject more than you so why not let him reply.
>As has been shown, USB can be made to poll as fast, if not faster then ithe Amigas.
That's not the point. If you go back and RE-READ this thread, you will see that I stated Gameport cannot do 1Khz not USB. I said USB is slower than reading joystick on Amiga. You are lost.
>Have you actually shown an Amiga game yet that uses even a tenth of your supposed 1khz response time?
How many times are you going to keep repeating the same question and not reply to the responses given? I don't forget that fast.
>The reality is that there hasn't been a Gameport based joystick, digital or otherwise released for sale in at least 6 years. It's all USB.
Good for you. There's about a billion Gameports out there so it's still should be considered in the analysis along with USB.
>To do anything else would be an excersise in redundancy. What's next, you prove Amigas are superior to PC's because of ISA?
You can fantasize with your fairy tales all you want. It's a fact that gameports and USB devices are both out there. As I stated, people still sell joysticks based on gameport. XP supported gameports as well and most people where I live still use XP.
-
PC wins. Can i have my rep points back now, please?
-
And you look like having been hit in a terrible accident, being sleeping for years, and then woke up and started writing here. Seriously: we have tried for pages and pages to let you understand that time changed, hardware evolved, programming rules also and habits too.
...
You can speculate all you want. He's claiming "IN AL,DX" is not present. It is present on all the PCs I have used and I gave two examples.
>I even quoted a passage that said USB ports can poll at 1 KHz, and you replied to me that I have to look at the "standard PC configurations". Oh, my God! "standard configurations": if it isn't standard USB, what can be considered standard on a PC nowadays?
You misunderstood it. Why don't you reply to my refutation rather than twist things. USB is faster than Gameport, but it's still slower than Amiga's move instruction. I didn't say it was same speed as Gameport which has problems reaching 1khz sampling.
>You are incredible: "there sare billions of gameports out there". There aren't ANY.
Liar. This is easily disproveable. I have two in front me right now and I know Dell and Compaq have sold similar models with gameports on them.
>There have not been a single gameport in any average PC for years now, nor there are PC-compatible joysticks/Wheels (yes, to a PC gameport and USB you can connect also wheels) with gameport plug anymore. Gameports were common on soundcards a long ago, but only for a simple reason: they also provided MIDI functions with a simple adapter cable. Now nobody uses them for this reason anymore. Even discrete sound cards are practically dead, and used by a niche. We are in 2009, w-a-k-e u-p!
Look at what's out there not what's being produced right now. When you right some software you have to consider what's out there-- not which machine you have because you keep ugrading every few months.
>You are neverending this meaningless, pointless, silly, crazy joystick port and hardware-banging arguments even if you are the last man all over the world believing in them, but if NOBODY ELSE agrees with you, maybe you should start dubitating about them, shouldn't you? Sorry for being harsh, but when it's too much, it's too much.
Speak for yourself. Many people agree with me. How can you make a statement "NOBODY else agrees with you." You don't even know all the people I speak to. Same bogus statement as earlier-- THERE ARE NO GAMEPORTs. You are not being harsh. Just making invalid statements that are DISPROVEN by a child.
-
PC wins. Can i have my rep points back now, please?
I think "REP" stands for "Real Emulation Programs". If you haven't used REPs, then that goes to zero.
-
PC wins. Can i have my rep points back now, please?
i gave you +1, it's a net +1 for you from me because i never gave you a -1. I see you went from 0 to 2, i still don't understand how this works.
-
It's all down to the trolling at this point. One fellow wants to state that a computer from the 80's is superior by comparing it to interfaces the PC hasn't used in years. And now we have an argument that the floppy disc isn't obsolete. I say that if you are going to dwell in this inanity, then you know what to sit on and where to cut your self with that metal floppy disk shield.
...
It's not trolling. PC I/Os aren't that fast. Anything requiring multiple I/Os becomes comparable on Amiga using a single I/O. And in some cases, Amiga surpasses PC. I compared with USB and Gameport. Floppy disks aren't obsolete if that's all you need to play games or write your software. Burning CDs is usually slower than copying a file to/from floppy and floppies work with older machines that don't have Flash drive capability or drivers (like Win98SE). Hey, why don't you just give up on the joysticks and do research on palette index data swapping. I prefer programs on older machines that are highly optimized and work flawlessly at 60Hz. If it gets the job done, why label it obsolete.
-
Incidentally, when I say "custom hardware" I was not referring to a PC addon card. I was referring to embedded designs such as Minimig, that would be a completely dedicated, custom board, designed to do something far more efficiently than a PC can.
Programmable micro-controllers are so cheap these days, people are using them for everything.
I mean, does it really make sense to boot our PCs just to do a sum? No, we still have pocket calculators (though mostly likely probably use our mobile phones).
Granted custom boards can do better than Copper chip but those won't count in comparing PCs vs. Amiga.
-
It's not trolling. PC I/Os aren't that fast. Anything requiring multiple I/Os becomes comparable on Amiga using a single I/O. And in some cases, Amiga surpasses PC. I compared with USB and Gameport. Floppy disks aren't obsolete if that's all you need to play games or write your software. Burning CDs is usually slower than copying a file to/from floppy and floppies work with older machines that don't have Flash drive capability or drivers (like Win98SE). Hey, why don't you just give up on the joysticks and do research on palette index data swapping. I prefer programs on older machines that are highly optimized and work flawlessly at 60Hz. If it gets the job done, why label it obsolete.
I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.
Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.
Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.
-
Hi,
@Amigaski & Stefcep2,
Speaking of Amiga joysticks my joystick broke for my Amiga 4000 today so off I went to Wally world to get a new one and you know what I couldn't find one darned 9 pin joystick in the whole darned place, so that makes my joystick port mighty slow as a matter of fact not really moving.
...
As I stated before, might does not make right. Just because market is flooded with analog joysticks, that does not necessarily make them better. I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).
>...frequency. Which means as far as graphics go my ppc is sitting there waiting for a reply from my AGA chipset and it is doing absolutely nothing. So as you can see one of the main problems of the Amiga was that you could increase the speed of the CPU but you still had the problem of all the rest of the board moving S L O W L Y.
That's similar to I/O and memory on PC. They don't work at the clock speed of processor.
-
I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.
Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.
Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.
I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior. I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware. In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times. So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there. If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.
Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.
-
I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).
Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.
-
Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.
It works fine. You just read a smaller range. I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances. You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.
I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)". But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games. I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.
-
I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior. I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware. In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times. So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there. If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.
Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.
You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. An algorithm written in asm for 68k will vary across the different 68k processor models just like it does across the various IA32 model processors. There are real time operating systems for both families but they're not called AmigaOS or Windows. Keep in mind that real time os's also make use of APIs to abstract from the hardware. Take a look at QNX for example. Where people demand the most performance, disk and graphics, you can't get away from abstraction. Nobody in their right mind would want apps writing directly to disk interface and people expect applications to play nice with the windowing environment.
These days people expect to be able to play World of Warcraft in a window and be able to see what's going on in yahoo instant messenger and occasionally check out what new messages are floating in on their facebook page.... on the same screen at the same time. You can't get this kind of functionality by allowing software to bang directly on the hardware.
-
It works fine. You just read a smaller range. I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances. You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.
I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)". But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games. I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.
Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?
-
But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games. I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.
I guess you prefer to play flight simulators(eg. Falcon 4.0) on digital joysticks too? It's pointless to compare analog joysticks to digitals. They are meant to be used in totally diffirent purposes.
PS. Analog mouse is just too flimsy for Workbench use. I prefer Amiga+cursor key for everyday use. ;)
-
1. You can speculate all you want. He's claiming "IN AL,DX" is not present. It is present on all the PCs I have used and I gave two examples.
2. You misunderstood it. Why don't you reply to my refutation rather than twist things. USB is faster than Gameport, but it's still slower than Amiga's move instruction. I didn't say it was same speed as Gameport which has problems reaching 1khz sampling.
3. >You are incredible: "there sare billions of gameports out there". There aren't ANY.
Liar. This is easily disproveable. I have two in front me right now and I know Dell and Compaq have sold similar models with gameports on them.
4. Look at what's out there not what's being produced right now. When you right some software you have to consider what's out there-- not which machine you have because you keep ugrading every few months.
5. Speak for yourself. Many people agree with me.
1. It might be, but the question still remain the same: who cares?
2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".
I won't laugh at this statement, since the gaming market has slightly evolved from the 16-bit age, and I won't even try to count how many times modern games are visually better and more sophisticated than old 2D platforms and shooters, even if they rely on APIs and 3D hardware drivers, but in the following pages you lost the point of your initial statement, which is:
"faster joystick polling ---> more suitable for games"
The more people answered to you, the more you introduced captions to your arguments, and the gameport vs USB one is one of them. Sorry, the PC has ABANDONED gameports. The use USB for game controllers, so if you want to do a fair comparison, you have to deal with USB and FORGET gameports. You said "Amiga gameport can handle 1KHz", I answered "ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.
3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming. That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all. PC market constantly evolves and newer machines replace older ones, which get used for other purposes or dismissed/trashed. Newer machines haven't gameports and, if they have them, they get unused since you can't buy new game devices using it. And that's a fact.
5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.
-
The more people answered to you, the more you introduced captions to your arguments, and the gameport vs USB one is one of them. Sorry, the PC has ABANDONED gameports. The use USB for game controllers, so if you want to do a fair comparison, you have to deal with USB and FORGET gameports. You said "Amiga gameport can handle 1KHz", I answered "ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.
Sounds like a better test; compare some digital USB joysticks on the Amiga vs the PC.
-
I'm a huge fan of analogue joysticks - I had a PC one attached to my Amiga for years. Hell, I even made an adaptor circuit for it and mounted it inside my case so I could just plug it into the PC-style gameport on the back. I even used the analogue joystick to play Geoff Crammond's F1GP because it was so nasty to play with a digital joystick and one button. It's pretty much essential for any decent flight sim too.
Incidentally, the whole thing with a PC analogue joystick not giving a full deflection on the Amiga is a limitation of how the Amiga treats the paddle inputs, not because of a poorly designed joystick. It's well documented that some modifications are needed to improve its action on the Amiga, hence the adaptor circuit I build for my A1200 tower.
-
LOL, just noticed the tags at the bottom of the thread... Quite appropriate IMO!
amiga , anal retentive , catchup , circle jerking , cloud cuckoo land , complete bollocks , delusional fanaticism , denial , fantasy , flamefest , loljoystick , perpetuum argumentum , playing , sit on the joystick , troll , uninformed
-
And also...
I've seen better physics simulations from Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner compared to the CGI in Mr. Spielbergs War of the Worlds.
I hate to say it, but CGI in most movies is nonsense because they don't properly calculate the physic, light distortion, light scattering etc.
Too true. I find in many ways it looks a lot worse than when it used to be done raytracing on an Amiga as they seemed to pay more attention to detail when it comes to those things. But then, isn't that what raytracing was all about?
-
Must be a billion gameports out there-- perhaps a few million trashed. So it's hard to make a statement-- it's unused.
i have seen very few joyports on motherboards and the lack of joyport joysticks are deafening. in the past joyports were mounted on sound cards and not the motherboard. and those ports were most often used as midi ports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
The 15-pin game port is no longer provided on presently manufactured PCs, though adapters exist that allow older joysticks and controllers to connect via USB. However, Microsoft's Vista operating system natively lacks all game port support, even for USB adapters.
Perhaps, you don't use the gameport. And my motherboard has a parallel port and PS/2 connectors -- no serial port. So your speculation serial ports are still around is just your experience. I see more desktops with parallel ports.
a few serial port mobos
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135063
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131288
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130095
and even if they don't have one on board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=serial+port&x=0&y=0
By the way, Microsoft must have done some gaming research to come up with XBOX joysticks.
i would assume so. if they didn't then they are crazy.
-
As this thread just refuses to die I thought "What the heck! let me just throw some more fuel on this fire".
Anyway does any Bus Arch 'expert' want to explain how these darn things work?
USB to Gameport Converter (http://www.usb-port.com/rm203.html)
I'm just a little confuzzled about all the polling malarky.
:roflmao:
-
That's worse for APIs. If there are hardware errors, they are usually published and kept so you know they will be there. If you fix them in APIs, then you have to worry about whether the user has the erroneous version or newer version. Sometimes hardware errors are taken as features like enabling 7 bitplanes in OCS to enable a static mask bpldat.
i see you really don't know what an api is do you? hardware errors are fixed in the driver NOT the api. the only reason an api changes if there is new additions to the api. aka the difference between directx 9 and 10.
Sorry, but application API access is protected by OS but drivers using APIs aren't. So they are likely to cause OS lockups just as well as one going direct to hardware. But you can also protect applications going direct to hardware using IOPM.
http://www.grahamwideman.com/gw/tech/Delphi/iopm/index.htm
Under NT, "user-mode" code (ie: applications written by mere mortals) is not allowed to access hardware directly, hence when your application attempts to execute an I/O instruction you get an exception. The idea is, of course, that hardware resources are things that no application should just take over at will, instead it should be up to the operating system (and its drivers) to arbitrate between different apps requests to use those resources.
That's the theory. Turns out that the NT kernel maintains a map of I/O port addresses that each process is allowed to access, and for your apps that's normally set to "none". But we can tell NT to use a different I/O Permissions Map (IOPM) for our process and thereby gain access to the ports. This approach is of course very naughty from a disciplined OS standpoint, so not recommended for widely distributed commercial apps. But for those times when you just need to hack on some hardware, who has time to write a proper NT device driver?
Sorry, that's not how IOPM works and there's no API model involved. If you wanted to protect your hard drive I/O ports, you can protect them via OS and application can go direct to hardware and only OS will get control if application accesses those I/O ports you protected. Application does not have to use API. My application (MPDOS Pro) is an example that goes direct to hardware on I/O ports and does not use any API calls and keeps OS stable.
see above.
-
PC market constantly evolves and newer machines replace older ones, which get used for other purposes or dismissed/trashed.
No it was the cheap add in cards actually. VGA card, SVGA card, sound card etc.
I came close to buying a 2000HD in 89, but splurged on games instead.
PC parts went down in price a lot quicker too. It was AU$1000 for 20MB, then 52MB hard drive. You could get one for the PC for only AU$400.
-
P.S. Can we drop the hardware calls argument. They are fine for dedicated arcade systems, but have no place on a modern computer. The bitching should be aimed at said operating systems.
I learned PEEK/POKE statements on the Vic 20. But I had no need to hit the hardware on the Amiga. Did I miss out on anything? Probably not.
-
I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior. I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware. In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times. So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there. If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.
Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.
And we have been arguing back, that its illogical to use that as an argument because the PC is not aiming for that market.
The point being, the fact that the PC cannot do things as real-time as the Amiga is not a failing of the PC so is not "playing catchup". The PC has evolved to do what the "average user" wants it to do. If you want to do something specialised, use specialised hardware - thats the point.
Also any argument about digital joysticks is pointless. Yes most Amiga games used digital, because that was all you needed for the games of the time and it was cheaper to build a digital joystick. Nobody is going to spend good money mass producing something which is not needed, the reason less used peripherals are always (and were always) more expensive than common ones. But today, games are in 3D and you need the control of not just an analog joystick but TWO as well as analog triggers. The argument for analog buttons (something Xbox had but Xbox 360 might not, but Playstation 2/3 does) is less so, its a personal preference and most people do not care. (I am comparing games consoles as those pads are often used on PC by gamers or PC clones of them) It allows more precise controls for the games of today and is why I actually enjoy modern games more than I ever did Amiga ones. I did not really become a gamer until analog joypads game out with 3D gaming, those old games just did not hold my interest for the most part.
There are exceptions, I used the love Deluxe Galaga and would play Warblade (its PC reinvention) if I could on a games console with seamless hiscore tables for my friends list. But even that potentially would play better analog, as you have more precise control over the speed you are moving (although that is part of the skill of the game so it would remain a digital control).
Bottom line, the power of the Amiga joyport is not an advantage for games. As others have said, there is no logic to reading what the user is doing any faster than the screen redraw rate because you need the user/game feedback. If you measure what the user was doing with the joystick more than once between refreshes they most likely would end up doing something they did not intend in the game, because you can only react to what you SEE. What use is measuring the user pushing right even 2 times per refresh when you cant move them accordingly on screen as it may cause them to hit something, because they couldnt SEE that they needed to let go after 1 sample.
-
Well amigaksi,
Using the philosophy, "If you can't beat em join them." Have you polled the Catweasel Mk IV? (the joystick ports) It should be a much fairer comparison.
-
So why are there Linux kernels compiled with different schedulers readily available in most Linux repo's?
Because What works well in one situation (desktops) does not work so well in others (servers). When you support as much hardware, in so many different circumstances as linux, or BSD or even Windows for that matter, it makes sound sense to have a platform flexable enough to allow for such tuning.
-
You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. An algorithm written in asm for 68k will vary across the different 68k processor models just like it does across the various IA32 model processors. There are real time operating systems for both families but they're not called AmigaOS or Windows. Keep in mind that real time os's also make use of APIs to abstract from the hardware. Take a look at QNX for example. Where people demand the most performance, disk and graphics, you can't get away from abstraction. Nobody in their right mind would want apps writing directly to disk interface and people expect applications to play nice with the windowing environment.
These days people expect to be able to play World of Warcraft in a window and be able to see what's going on in yahoo instant messenger and occasionally check out what new messages are floating in on their facebook page.... on the same screen at the same time. You can't get this kind of functionality by allowing software to bang directly on the hardware.
You can still have APIs and go directly to the hardware. I am not saying everything should be done over again by every application. I use Amiga's API to set up things and then go directly to hardware where I need it. I don't get that option for most things on PCs.
-
P.S. Can we drop the hardware calls argument. They are fine for dedicated arcade systems, but have no place on a modern computer. The bitching should be aimed at said operating systems.
I learned PEEK/POKE statements on the Vic 20. But I had no need to hit the hardware on the Amiga. Did I miss out on anything? Probably not.
PEEK/POKE would be slow although you can use them to go directly to hardware. LDA/STA would be the method for 6502 based machines. Here's an example for Atari 400:
MyDLI: PHA
Lda #128
Sta 205
Sta 53771 ;start 8 pot counters (53760..53767)
NxtScanLine: Lda 53764
STA WSYNC ;54282 is wait for end of scanline
STA COLBK ;53274 is Background color register
Dec 205
Bne NxtScanLine
PLA
RTI
This one uses the analog joystick inputs on paddle #4 on the Atari as a scanline counter to show 128 colors (one per scanline).
-
I never even argued point about ASM vs. high level languages with you before so stop lieing.
Actually you have repeatedly gone on about how APIs are so slow without providing any data whatsoever to back it up. You sir, are lying.
You are in a fairyland because you are inept to even comprehend what I am stating. I can also write insults, but I prefer rationality.
Right... The hardware guys, the software guys, and everyone in between else have effectively stated in various degrees of detail where you are going wrong. You willfully ignore this and continue talking about something that isn't (your makebelief world of total hardware compatability) in order to shore up your argument. Anyone using logic would have long ago started to re-evaluate their position. That you haven't shows you to be nothing more then a fundie.
I already gave citation in this thread.
No, you gave a p-poor example that was shot down soundly by every other person on this thread for a variety of reasons.
You only reply many days later
Oh I'm sorry, some of us have a life outside of evangelising 20 year old hardware.
>You're bitching at someone else dismissing a highly specialised and none too often used tech?
I compared with both USB and Gameport. Where have you been?
Which brings us back to the point that Gameport has been dead for the better part of 10 years now and unavailable to purchase via soundcards outside of ebay and similar for at least 5.
>Hypocrite much?
You are a biased side-kick. He seems to understand the subject more than you so why not let him reply.
Hah! Biased? Probably, I have a low tollerance for demonstrably BS posts such as those you have been ejaculating.
That's not the point.
Yes it is, your original point was that the Amiga was better suited on the basis that it could react faster. You have since modified (I'm being kind here, slimed would be more accurate) your argument when it was shown that your original had no legs.
I said USB is slower than reading joystick on Amiga. You are lost.
And you were shot down, you then added the nonsense about the gameport.
How many times are you going to keep repeating the same question and not reply to the responses given? I don't forget that fast.
I have replied whenever asked and no one else has replied with a more technical answer. And to answer your question: I'll stop when you start backing up your argument with facts instead of baseless statements.
Good for you. There's about a billion Gameports out there so it's still should be considered in the analysis along with USB.
Err, no. As has been pointed out (repeatedly), Gameport is dead, in the same way that ISA is dead. Or are you now going to go on about other random legacy I/O to prove the supposed superiority?
You can fantasize with your fairy tales all you want.
It was a reasonable point. That you can't see it only goes to back up my assersions that you're nothing but a fundie.
It's a fact that gameports and USB devices are both out there. As I stated, people still sell joysticks based on gameport. XP supported gameports as well and most people where I live still use XP.
By that same argument, so is ISA and I suspect if you looked hard enough, MFM and other wonderful ports of yesteryear. So again you've been thoroughly shot down on, well everything you've said so far, got anything else or are you done making a fool of yourself?
TL;DR
NO U
-
I guess you prefer to play flight simulators(eg. Falcon 4.0) on digital joysticks too? It's pointless to compare analog joysticks to digitals. They are meant to be used in totally diffirent purposes.
PS. Analog mouse is just too flimsy for Workbench use. I prefer Amiga+cursor key for everyday use. ;)
My mouse sends digital data on Amiga and PC. Digital joysticks are also easier to use unlike your keyboard example. Many PC games I have seen source code to -- sample analog values and convert them to digital values.
-
Tl;dr
no u
-
PMyDLI: PHA
Lda #128
Sta 205
Sta 53771 ;start 8 pot counters (53760..53767)
NxtScanLine: Lda 53764
STA WSYNC ;54282 is wait for end of scanline
STA COLBK ;53274 is Background color register
Dec 205
Bne NxtScanLine
PLA
RTI
I'm sorry I actually understood that, I feel dirty.
-
Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?
Yes.
-
Actually you have repeatedly gone on about how APIs are so slow without providing any data whatsoever to back it up. You sir, are lying.
...
If you think I need data to back up a logical statement that APIs are slower than going direct to hardware, you have a problem.
>Right... The hardware guys, the software guys, and everyone in between else have effectively stated in various degrees of detail where you are going wrong.
Give the link.
>No, you gave a p-poor example that was shot down soundly by every other person on this thread for a variety of reasons.
Wrong. Some people sided with me. But you haven't even replied to refutations handed to you so why would you read those.
>Hah! Biased? Probably, I have a low tollerance for demonstrably BS posts such as those you have been ejaculating.
You have no understanding of what I wrote so I think you are better off leaving it to others to reply and take your insults elsewhere. Because insults don't seem to change the truth or affect me.
>Yes it is, your original point was that the Amiga was better suited on the basis that it could react faster. You have since modified (I'm being kind here, slimed would be more accurate) your argument when it was shown that your original had no legs.
Amiga is FASTER to react to joystick input. I am sticking to the point. Amiga can sample at 15Khz not just 1Khz.
>And you were shot down, you then added the nonsense about the gameport.
I originally started with gameport not added it later.
>I have replied whenever asked and no one else has replied with a more technical answer.
Go reply then. All my arguments have a REALITY basis.
>Err, no. As has been pointed out (repeatedly), Gameport is dead, in the same way that ISA is dead. Or are you now going to go on about other random legacy I/O to prove the supposed superiority?
If you read your own comments in this thread, you will see that you have modified your views. I can still use Gameport under Vista/XP and I never dismissed USB either which by the way can also be put in Amiga machines.
It was a reasonable point. That you can't see it only goes to back up my assersions that you're nothing but a fundie.
By that same argument, so is ISA and I suspect if you looked hard enough, MFM and other wonderful ports of yesteryear. So again you've been thoroughly shot down on, well everything you've said so far, got anything else or are you done making a fool of yourself?
TL;DR
NO U[/QUOTE]
-
Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?
-
i have seen very few joyports on motherboards and the lack of joyport joysticks are deafening. in the past joyports were mounted on sound cards and not the motherboard. and those ports were most often used as midi ports.
...
Your original argument was they all went toward USB. But from your own links-- they have parallel port, PS/2 ports, etc. They did make machines w/o gameports from same companies that also offered models w/gameports. Yeah, you had to get a sound card for those machines that didn't have a gameport in order to get one.
>a few serial port mobos
>http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357
That link shows parallel port as well.
>and even if they don't have one on board
>http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&>Order=BESTMATCH&Description=serial+port&x=0&y=0
You can also buy gameport cards as well.
>i would assume so. if they didn't then they are crazy.
Yeah, so someone was giving a hoot about gaming interfaces.
-
Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?
Seeing as the thread starter himself mentioned that it's time to quit the argument I would think locking it would be a good thing.
I think it's already gone beyond the "lively debate" stage and is now just going all over the place. :crazy:
-
i see you really don't know what an api is do you? hardware errors are fixed in the driver NOT the api. the only reason an api changes if there is new additions to the api. aka the difference between directx 9 and 10.
...
Just as you avoid erroneous API calls or work around them, you can deal with hardware bugs and work around them. It's the same for both-- but I would say worse for APIs as too many versions confuse things.
I know how IOPM works. You have a very shallow understanding of it. You can go direct to hardware and still have IOPM.
-
Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?
and then some.
:madashell:.:madashell:.:madashell:.:madashell:
-
If you think I need data to back up a logical statement that APIs are slower than going direct to hardware, you have a problem.
When it's tied to such gems as "PC I/Os aren't that fast". You're right, I do have a problem, because as has been pointed out, any reduction in performance by the API has more then been offset by the increase in hardware speed. Unless you can show the numbers, the whole argument fails. This is what I was trying to get accross to you with the point about objectivity - you don't dismiss something that big and get to claim to still be objective or logical.
Give the link.
Start at the beginning till you're back here. (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=41778)
Wrong. Some people sided with me. But you haven't even replied to refutations handed to you so why would you read those.
Those "refutations" have been sliced and diced by better folk than I. And the of those that "sided with you", with the exception of stefcep2, each and every one of them did so with caveats that tore the argument propper to pieces.
You have no understanding of what I wrote
I question that you understand half of it, certainly given your responses at times.
Because insults don't seem to change the truth or affect me.
You're quite correct, doesn't change the point that you're wrong on every level on this one.
Amiga can sample at 15Khz not just 1Khz.
Oh it's 15khz, got anything to prove that the Amiga can actually differentiate the signal bounce from the actual pulse then?
Go reply then. All my arguments have a REALITY basis.
Why? Others already have, in far greater detail and covering points I would not have thought of.
If you read your own comments in this thread, you will see that you have modified your views. I can still use Gameport under Vista/XP and I never dismissed USB either which by the way can also be put in Amiga machines.
And again, you can use ISA on XP as well (why you'd want to is another matter entirely).
-
1. It might be, but the question still remain the same: who cares?
...
Cop out. That's what you always wind up with when you have no arguments left-- who cares? Well, who cares about 2Ghz or 7Mhz? To me (and millions of others) having IN AL,DX is more significant than processor speed.
>2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".
It can do more than 1Khz. You are twisting things again. All I said was some games can use the 1Khz. It's more accurate. And AMIGA IS FASTER in reading the joysticks regardless of the sampling rate of the joystick.
>"ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.
You don't even follow the flow of arguments. API vs. direct hardware is a separate point (more generic). Joystick polling is slower on PC whether you use API or direct hardware. Stop misquoting me.
>3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming.
Sorry, but you said there NO gameports out there. I don't see how you equate # of gameports with 486/Pentium/P3s.
>That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all.
Sorry, Amiga also involved quite a bit and with hardware level compatibility. Your speculation that it killed us all is absurd. Why not state something logical or something people can prove. Anyone can state his opinion. The point is PC still hasn't equalled or surpassed PCs in all respects not "who cares".
>5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.
That's what you done anyway thus far in this thread.
-
When it's tied to such gems as "PC I/Os aren't that fast". You're right, I do have a problem, because as has been pointed out, any reduction in performance by the API has more then been offset by the increase in hardware speed. Unless you can show the numbers, the whole argument fails. This is what I was trying to get accross to you with the point about objectivity - you don't dismiss something that big and get to claim to still be objective or logical.
...
Don't mix things again to confuse people. Chewbacca Defense.
PC I/O is slower than processor speed and memory speed (separate point).
Regardless of how fast the hardware speed, APis are slower than going direct to hardware.
>Those "refutations" have been sliced and diced by better folk than I.
IF you think so, then let them refute other things as well.
>You're quite correct, doesn't change the point that you're wrong on every level on this one.
All you do is blurt out the same FALSE statements "torn to pieces" or similar remarks like "wrong on every level". Shows how inept you are at understanding technical facts. As I stated above, leave it what you consider "better folk".
>Oh it's 15khz, got anything to prove that the Amiga can actually differentiate the signal bounce from the actual pulse then?
Here it is again: Chewbacca Defense.
-
Cop out. That's what you always wind up with when you have no arguments left-- who cares? Well, who cares about 2Ghz or 7Mhz? To me (and millions of others) having IN AL,DX is more significant than processor speed.
>2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".
It can do more than 1Khz. You are twisting things again. All I said was some games can use the 1Khz. It's more accurate. And AMIGA IS FASTER in reading the joysticks regardless of the sampling rate of the joystick.
>"ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.
You don't even follow the flow of arguments. API vs. direct hardware is a separate point (more generic). Joystick polling is slower on PC whether you use API or direct hardware. Stop misquoting me.
>3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming.
Sorry, but you said there NO gameports out there. I don't see how you equate # of gameports with 486/Pentium/P3s.
>That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all.
Sorry, Amiga also involved quite a bit and with hardware level compatibility. Your speculation that it killed us all is absurd. Why not state something logical or something people can prove. Anyone can state his opinion. The point is PC still hasn't equalled or surpassed PCs in all respects not "who cares".
>5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.
That's what you done anyway thus far in this thread.
If game controller in question is a usb device and running Windows XP SP2, "usbport.sys" can be hacked(via Hex edit) to support higher poll rate.
For 2006 Linux, the mainline kernel was patched to allow for the USB polling rate to be changed. There are two ways to do this. First a parameter can be added to the kernel commandline:
-usbhid.mousepoll=[polling interval] (e.g. for polling interval, 250, 500, or 1000 would be entered.)
The second method is when the driver is built as a module in which case the following command would go into either /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.conf depending on the distribution:
- options usbhid mousepoll=[polling interval]
-
And we have been arguing back, that its illogical to use that as an argument because the PC is not aiming for that market.
The point being, the fact that the PC cannot do things as real-time as the Amiga is not a failing of the PC so is not "playing catchup". The PC has evolved to do what the "average user" wants it to do. If you want to do something specialised, use specialised hardware - thats the point.
...
If PCs don't care about doing the real-time stuff and leave it to hardware, then Amiga wins. If PCs don't care about digital joysticks or making interface faster, then Amiga wins. I can say Amiga wasn't meant for faster and faster processor design. Actually, even Atari ST was faster than Amiga in terms of processor speed although Amiga came out afterwards.
>Also any argument about digital joysticks is pointless.
There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks.
>Bottom line, the power of the Amiga joyport is not an advantage for games. As others have said, there is no logic to reading what the user is doing any faster than the screen redraw rate because you need the user/game feedback.
That was already refuted a few times. Even if you don't need the high rate to read the joystick, you spend LESS CPU TIME if your joystick is faster.
Even for analog inputs, Amiga just has to start the POTGO and read the value at end of frame. It's done by hardware.
-
Your original argument was they all went toward USB. But from your own links-- they have parallel port, PS/2 ports, etc. They did make machines w/o gameports from same companies that also offered models w/gameports. Yeah, you had to get a sound card for those machines that didn't have a gameport in order to get one.
uh? do you not understand what moving toward is? i mean if they were eliminated you wouldn't need to move toward anything. i said there was resistance to eliminating ps2, that there is still industrial apps for serial and to a lesser extent parallel. i did say the transition from joyport to usb was an easier switch since joysticks in general are not super popular and in particular joyport versions.
That link shows parallel port as well.
yes i know i put one in there on purpose. there are so few :roflmao:
this is the model they are going for(without the ps2 ports(stillto much resistance to completely get rid of em yet.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387
You can also buy gameport cards as well.
and yet i didn't say they were not available just being actively phased out.
btw AT adapters are available for keyboards too. but are they mainstream?
Yeah, so someone was giving a hoot about gaming interfaces.
For a GAMING CONSOLE for them to ignore the gamepad would be stupid.
-
Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?
How is it clearly not true?
PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced. They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced. They are still playing catch-up in some areas. Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.
-
Don't mix things again to confuse people. Chewbacca Defense.
I think you should re read what you've written.
PC I/O is slower than processor speed and memory speed (separate point).
Regardless of how fast the hardware speed, APis are slower than going direct to hardware.
Which has for the last time been noted, but with the caveat that the I/O in question is an order or two of magnitude faster then what you're comparing it against, the result being that the speed loss in software is more then made up for in raw hardware performance.
How are you not getting this?
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWW
>Oh it's 15khz, got anything to prove that the Amiga can actually differentiate the signal bounce from the actual pulse then?
Here it is again: Chewbacca Defense.
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
Until you can show (with real, verifiable evidence) that the Amiga can react to such input your whole argument is bunk.
-
uh? do you not understand what moving toward is? i mean if they were eliminated you wouldn't need to move toward anything. i said there was resistance to eliminating ps2, that there is still industrial apps for serial and to a lesser extent parallel. i did say the transition from joyport to usb was an easier switch since joysticks in general are not super popular and in particular joyport versions.
...
The part about serial being more significant than parallel: I have dealt with hundreds of machines including laptops and parallel port is there but serial is not.
Some companies never had a gameport on the motherboard to begin with-- they were targetting businesses. So audio cards w/gameports were used and still available along with corresponding joysticks. So I think not supporting gameport would be dropping quite a few users out there.
>and yet i didn't say they were not available just being actively phased out.
btw AT adapters are available for keyboards too. but are they mainstream?
The gameport support is more recent phenomena than AT keyboards. I bought a surround-sound souped up audio card w/game port just 3 years ago.
>For a GAMING CONSOLE for them to ignore the gamepad would be stupid.
They ended up using those controllers on PCs as well.
-
How is it clearly not true?
PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced. They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced. They are still playing catch-up in some areas. Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.
APIs enables the PC to quickly adapt and assimilate technologies.
-
...
Which has for the last time been noted, but with the caveat that the I/O in question is an order or two of magnitude faster then what you're comparing it against, the result being that the speed loss in software is more then made up for in raw hardware performance.
How are you not getting this?
...
You are not getting it: if I have IN AL,DX which takes 1 microsecond and w/API bullcrap it takes 1.2 microseconds then if you speed up hardware so IN AL,DX takes 0.6 microseconds then the API version will still be slower.
>I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
If you purposely try to confuse things to escape from your dilemma of being wrong (being refuted), you are using Chewbacca defense.
>Until you can show (with real, verifiable evidence) that the Amiga can react to such input your whole argument is bunk.
That's wrong. Faster interface is useful even if user cannot react to such input. You are toggling back and forth between different views.
-
APIs enables the PC to quickly adapt and assimilate technologies.
They are doing some sort of hardware interface anyway even when they target APIs, but instead of all manufacturers of said product using same hardware interface they are using same APIs which is suboptimal.
-
Just as you avoid erroneous API calls or work around them, you can deal with hardware bugs and work around them. It's the same for both--
in an api you program to a standard codeset which the os can trap and kill if it goes awry.
in direct hardware you have a set of commands(loose wording) that directly control the hardware that has the potential to let multiple programs access this hardware simultaneously. this creates the possibility of causing a hardware lockup killing the system.
but I would say worse for APIs as too many versions confuse things.
uh nope if a piece of software requires directx 10 or higher it is cut and dry. directx 10 even has backwards compatibility with previous versions. also this piece of software installs the version it needs on install.
I know how IOPM works. You have a very shallow understanding of it. You can go direct to hardware and still have IOPM.
yea i do have a shallow understanding of it. but what i understand is that it is a gate system. and the port is open or closed. that it is very simplistic in operation. but closing the barn door after a lockup is not of any use.
In order for the os to really control the flow you will have to adopt some form of api this way the os can refuse to pass on something that is not properly executed. this is the point of an api.
-
Cop out. That's what you always wind up with when you have no arguments left-- who cares? Well, who cares about 2Ghz or 7Mhz? To me (and millions of others) having IN AL,DX is more significant than processor speed.
>2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".
It can do more than 1Khz. You are twisting things again. All I said was some games can use the 1Khz.
DirectInput can detect poll rates higher than 1Khz.
It's more accurate. And AMIGA IS FASTER in reading the joysticks regardless of the sampling rate of the joystick.
Read up on USB "High Speed" 125 usec spec.
>"ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.
You don't even follow the flow of arguments. API vs. direct hardware is a separate point (more generic). Joystick polling is slower on PC whether you use API or direct hardware. Stop misquoting me.
USB "Full Speed" poll rate can be higher than 1Mhz.
-
Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?
Or it could be renamed the "the great PC v Amiga flamewar" and keep it as the fighting pit for people that want to duke it out so that they don't open equivalent threads elsewhere.
-
Or it could be renamed the "the great PC v Amiga flamewar" and keep it as the fighting pit for people that want to duke it out so that they don't open equivalent threads elsewhere.
ROFLMAO.:roflmao:.:roflmao:
Proceed with nonsense forthwith.
-
They are doing some sort of hardware interface anyway even when they target APIs, but instead of all manufacturers of said product using same hardware interface they are using same APIs which is suboptimal.
You haven't addressed Protracker 1.0 vs OctaMed V4 vs Deluxe Music interactions.
How would they know every CUDA processor variant? G84M A2 and A3 stepping has different voltage parameters. Drivers can detect the steppings and adapt accordingly. The reasons for different stepping are due to manufacturing issues. Geforce 9650M GT and Geforce 9500M GS have memory timings.
Is the user land programmer going re-implement the power management for my GPU?
Setting the wrong P-states can destroy the GPU e.g. if you didn't install the latest NVIDIA driver and BIOS patches, you might invoke NVIDIA's G84/G86's "blackscreen of death".
Setting the wrong memory timings can corrupt display e.g. Geforce 9650GT running mod desktop driver corrupts the display, while it's fine on Geforce 9500M GS.
Subsequent hardware fixes introduce inconsistencies.
Standards usually have a long verification times e.g. X64 development vs CUDA development.
-
The part about serial being more significant than parallel: I have dealt with hundreds of machines including laptops and parallel port is there but serial is not.
lol i think you should look again. nearly every machine i have seen that has parallel has at least one serial port.
Some companies never had a gameport on the motherboard to begin with-- they were targetting businesses. So audio cards w/gameports were used and still available along with corresponding joysticks. So I think not supporting gameport would be dropping quite a few users out there.
let it go this was old tech.
The gameport support is more recent phenomena than AT keyboards. I bought a surround-sound souped up audio card w/game port just 3 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
Since about 1990, the game port has usually been integrated with a PC I/O (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O) or sound card (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_card), either ISA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture) or PCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect), or as an on-board feature of some motherboards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherboard); before that, it was usually on a dedicated ISA card. Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) has discontinued game port support with Windows Vista (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista),[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port#cite_note-0)
http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2keyboard/
IBM AT Keyboard (1984)
eh only 6 years apart.
They ended up using those controllers on PCs as well.
things developed for one market can often be used in other markets. the xbox controller was made for xbox. people wanted to use it on a pc so when the market speaks things happen (well sometimes, it sure made them think about it then.)
-
You are not getting it: if I have IN AL,DX which takes 1 microsecond and w/API bullcrap it takes 1.2 microseconds then if you speed up hardware so IN AL,DX takes 0.6 microseconds then the API version will still be slower.
USB "High Speed" spec has 125 usec. IF the APIs brought USB "High Speed" to Amiga’s joystick speed, you shouldn't see USB "High Speed" having 40MB/s effective bandwidth.
From usb faq
Signals
1. Does USB support data rates besides 12 Mb/s and 1.5 Mb/s?
A: Yes. The new hi-speed data transfer rate is 480 Mb/s. There is, however, wide variation in edge rates. With typical line loads, full speed devices usually fall in the 12-25 ns range, and low-speed devices typically range 110-225 ns.
-
Or it could be renamed the "the great PC v Amiga flamewar" and keep it as the fighting pit for people that want to duke it out so that they don't open equivalent threads elsewhere.
Or simply "The Delusional in the Amiga crowd versus reality 101".
Color me amazed that vBulletin seems to be readily handling 1 thread with over a thousand replies. Xoops would have croaked by now.
Also... LOVE the tags for the thread...
-
If PCs don't care about doing the real-time stuff and leave it to hardware, then Amiga wins.
QNX RTOS X86 likes to say hi.
If PCs don't care about digital joysticks
The digital joystick's on-off nature doesn't belong in simulation type games. Amiga's digital joysticks would $uck on PS3's Grand Turismo 5.
or making interface faster, then Amiga wins. I can say Amiga wasn't meant for faster and faster processor design. Actually, even Atari ST was faster than Amiga in terms of processor speed although Amiga came out afterwards.
Atari ST has a !@#$% IGP.
-
P.S. Can we drop the hardware calls argument. They are fine for dedicated arcade systems, but have no place on a modern computer. The bitching should be aimed at said operating systems.
I learned PEEK/POKE statements on the Vic 20. But I had no need to hit the hardware on the Amiga. Did I miss out on anything? Probably not.
Capcom's Street Fighter IV Arcade edition runs on Core 2 Duo and Geforce 7900GS based wintel PC (aka TAITO TYPE X2).
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=905
-
Color me amazed that vBulletin seems to be readily handling 1 thread with over a thousand replies. Xoops would have croaked by now.
vBulletin can cope with a lot more than that... More than 2600 posts in this vBulletin-based forum thread (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=36866&page=106) and that isn't remotely "big" as far as threads go. The Tech Report's monster thread (http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42526) is currently at 487 pages with 14,500+ posts (it's "part 2" - they locked "part 1" at 477 pages when things got a little slow due to the server having difficulty parsing the thing, but phpBB has improved a bit since then, so they might not lock the second instalment yet, time will tell).
-
Perhaps this thread could be the beginning of a new coffee house section, well actually given the delusional nature of these postings maybe it should be called the crack house section.
How is it clearly not true?
PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced. They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced. They are still playing catch-up in some areas. Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.
-
Perhaps this thread could be the beginning of a new coffee house section, well actually given the delusional nature of these postings maybe it should be called the crack house section.
Don't get me wrong folks, I'm delusional that a thread on this site can still pull 1000+ responses in a short time. I just wish it was all threads.. Then we might actually be able to say that the Amiga isn't dead after all..
:laughing:
-
Don't get me wrong folks, I'm delusional that a thread on this site can still pull 1000+ responses in a short time. I just wish it was all threads.. Then we might actually be able to say that the Amiga isn't dead after all..
:laughing:
Well, my Amiga's don't appear to be quite dead yet.
The platform?
There is that saying about horses....
-
And taxes....
-
Perhaps this thread could be the beginning of a new coffee house section, well actually given the delusional nature of these postings maybe it should be called the crack house section.
Did somebody say crack!? Oh goodie!
(http://koft.net/static/pix/amiga_smoke_dont_breathe_this.jpg)
-
Did somebody say crack!? Oh goodie!
It's Rainbow Boing Crack._:confused:_lol
Disclaimer:
Although cocaine is found in nature so are poisonous fungi, radioactive uranium and inedible brussel sprouts. Seriously, don't try this at home kids.
-
If you do an IN AL,DX and then switch contexts the stack will save (EAX,EDX) at least which are related to the IN instruction thus no parallel instruction can execute until this one finishes. I am just speaking of context switching on the same processor. You have to wait for IN to finish to use the joystick data or whatever other device you are doing IN from.
What's not clear to me after reading Intel's manuals is whether or not IN/INS/OUT/OUTS assert LOCK# (they don't appear to do so explicitly), or if it's the responsiblity of the system designer to manage locking in a multiprocessor environment based on the state of M/IO#. The documentation implies that IN/INS/OUT/OUTS should be atomic at the processor level, which I assume means the package itself, multiple cores inclusive. I'm obviously fuzzy on the details.
Memory mapped I/O appears to play by the same rules associated with all other memory accesses, i.e. atomicity is either implied by the instruction, explicitly requested via the LOCK prefix for compatible instructions, or managed by the programmer via higher level methods.
Anyway, if you have one task polling I/O and another task processing the data, you obviously have to coordinate between the two. On a modern system, if you haven't explicitly set the affinity of the task, you have to assume the tasks may run simultaneously on separate processors. Unnecessarily stalling one processor while it waits for another would be indicative of a bad design.
-
That was already refuted a few times. Even if you don't need the high rate to read the joystick, you spend LESS CPU TIME if your joystick is faster.
Do you really think the CPU TIME used to poll the joystick in any recent PC is even high enough to be mesured ??
Come on: it's 2009. PC won (even Apple use PC based hardware), Apple has a multitasking OS, and Sun has been bought by Oracle... Hello ! :)
-
Or simply "The Delusional in the Amiga crowd versus reality 101".
How about "comp.sys.amiga.advocacy rides again!" ?
Color me amazed that vBulletin seems to be readily handling 1 thread with over a thousand replies. Xoops would have croaked by now.
Also... LOVE the tags for the thread...
Another vBulletin forum I visit has a thread that's well over 1000 pages by now and it handles it just fine :)
-
I don't mind so much, the current status of the Amiga. It is what it is, which is to say a niche machine that's still fun to play with, and reminds us of a simpler time. Hell, I'd tinker with C64's if I had them.
What really gets to me on the pet peeve level is that in 2009, a full 15 years after the death of Commodore, there are still those so desperate to hang on to "what used to be", that they invent the smallest, most asinine reasons that they believe the Commodore Amiga -- a computer almost 8 times removed from Moore's Law -- is still a commercially competitive (not to even mention viable) platform...
While it's fun to debate these small niglets of factual stupidity, the Amiga is a "was" machine now, and I think we'd all be much happier -- if not less entertained -- if everyone could just come to grips with that and enjoy it for what it is. Not what it was. Not what it "could have been".
A hobby machine. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now shut up, plug in your Pro Joystick and play F-18 Interceptor until your fingers bleed. I command it! :)
-
What really gets to me on the pet peeve level is that in 2009, a full 15 years after the death of Commodore, there are still those so desperate to hang on to "what used to be", that they invent the smallest, most asinine reasons that they believe the Commodore Amiga -- a computer almost 8 times removed from Moore's Law -- is still a commercially competitive (not to even mention viable) platform...
I find it doubly bizarre that those who regard it in that light are usually quite dismissive of things like UAE that can actually transform an OS3.x installation into a platform that can actually hold it's own thanks to the exponential increase in raw horsepower you get from it.
-
Did somebody say crack!? Oh goodie!
(http://koft.net/static/pix/amiga_smoke_dont_breathe_this.jpg)
OMG, it's 420Dude :lol:
-
I'm betting a bucket of broccoli that this type of comparison discussion will fever on into the next decade.
-
Now shut up, plug in your Pro Joystick and play F-18 Interceptor until your fingers bleed. I command it! :)
All my 80's era digital joysticks are broken. :-( Actually, my Nintendo and Sega gamepads all work fine. It's just the Atari-style ones that don't work. You know what I'd really like to do? Transfer my SB Live! and Voodoo 3 to a PC, install MS-DOS and Wing Commander: Prophecy, hook up my Sidewinder stick, and re-live some awesome 90's-style Glide effects. Loved the rings on the explosions. (I originally played it on two SLI'd Voodoo 2 cards. Not sure if the experience would be the same on a Voodoo 3.)
EDIT: Mini rant: Selling Origin to EA was the worst thing that could have happend to Ultima and Wing Commander. Why oh why did this sale take place? Maybe we'll see a new Wing Commander (or even an epic remake) someday. If Apple buys EA, though, who knows what will happen. Also, I liked Ultima VIII and Ultima IX and was very disappointed when Ultima X was cancelled.
-
I'm betting a bucket of broccoli that this type of comparison discussion will fever on into the next decade.
That's OK. It keeps people coming back and clicking Wayne's advertisements. But wait. Where are the advertisements? It mostly just cycled between AmigaKit and Elbox, but....
-
Very true. I keep reading these myself. :-)
-
I'm back on Blitz Basic myself, coding like a maniac. Lots of fun.
-
Did somebody say crack!? Oh goodie!
Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..
Wayne
-
Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..
Wayne
The thread hasn't devolved to comparisons to Hitler yet, but it will eventually, as all threads do.
-
Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..
Wayne
OMG!!! Stop being like an old Austrian dude with a weird Germany complex and strange ideas about race and empire...
:P
-
Republicans hate poor people.
-
Republicans hate poor people.
Republicans hate poor people with money. They're fine with poor people as long as they're dependent on Republican-owned corporations for survival. Poor is relative of course. The corporations pay the poor just enough to cover the costs of consumerism, and that money makes its way back into the hands of the corporation, of course. It's a wonderfully cyclical system. The way taxes are structured, though, all the money eventually ends up in the hands of the government, e.g.:
corporation -> poor $100 - poor $75 government $25
poor -> corporation $75 - corporation $56 goverment $19
corporation -> poor $56 - poor $42 government $14
and so on...
Isn't that a wonderful oversimplification?
-
Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..
Wayne
Hmm, did you just godwin yourself? :lol:
(http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q285/the_leander/godwin.jpg)
-
Someone should post a photo of a chimpanzee preening session, for first nitpicker. That behaviour is also guaranteed.
-
Someone should post a photo of a chimpanzee preening session, for first nitpicker. That behaviour is also guaranteed.
I'll add that to the list of stock images I'm collecting and will upload to my photobucket accound when needed :lol:
-
in an api you program to a standard codeset which the os can trap and kill if it goes awry.
in direct hardware you have a set of commands(loose wording) that directly control the hardware that has the potential to let multiple programs access this hardware simultaneously. this creates the possibility of causing a hardware lockup killing the system.
...
You are thinking doing multitasking while someone is accessing directly the hardware and trying to avoid conflicts, but I am talking about just allowing an application to use hardware directly. You can do that with IOPM or Amiga does it by the application not allowing other applications to run at the same time.
>uh nope if a piece of software requires directx 10 or higher it is cut and dry. directx 10 even has backwards compatibility with previous versions. also this piece of software installs the version it needs on install.
But they also fixed bugs in higher and higher versions of DirectX; so you need to know whether to avoid the bugs or not.
>yea i do have a shallow understanding of it. but what i understand is that it is a gate system. and the port is open or closed. that it is very simplistic in operation. but closing the barn door after a lockup is not of any use.
>In order for the os to really control the flow you will have to adopt some form of api this way the os can refuse to pass on something that is not properly executed. this is the point of an api.
No, you don't need an API. Windows for each task keeps track of an IOPM and it can set IOPM to enable hardware ports needed by that application and application directly accesses that port without any API/drivers involved.
-
DirectInput can detect poll rates higher than 1Khz.
Read up on USB "High Speed" 125 usec spec.
USB "Full Speed" poll rate can be higher than 1Mhz.
If you look at just the I/O overhead involved for fetching state of joystick, you will see that it involves multiple I/O instructions and other overhead and it's slower than a MOVE.W of Amiga. And you are going through API which doesn't allow you to take over the USB for just joystick.
-
But they also fixed bugs in higher and higher versions of DirectX; so you need to know whether to avoid the bugs or not.
And this is different to hardware bugs, or (unknown to the author) unexpected differences in hardware how?
No, you don't need an API. Windows for each task keeps track of an IOPM and it can set IOPM to enable hardware ports needed by that application and application directly accesses that port without any API/drivers involved.
If that's the case, why, in the name of all that is holy, have you been railing against windows and specifically its APIs like they nailed your mom in your bed for 50+ pages?
-
You haven't addressed Protracker 1.0 vs OctaMed V4 vs Deluxe Music interactions.
...
I am not familiar with those applications. Perhaps, you want to give description of what needs to be addressed from hardware standpoint?
-
...
Setting the wrong memory timings can corrupt display e.g. Geforce 9650GT running mod desktop driver corrupts the display, while it's fine on Geforce 9500M GS.
Subsequent hardware fixes introduce inconsistencies.
Standards usually have a long verification times e.g. X64 development vs CUDA development.
Didn't see that bottom part-- even CGA had method of setting frequencies that damaged monitors but VGA didn't allow for that on hardware level.
Actually, I would favor not even fixing hardware bugs in future upgrades to hardware-- so it remains consistent. In fact, many people use the hardware bugs as features in their applications and expect them. I know in Atari GTIA chip has a color clock delay in one of the graphics modes which people use to produce interlaced modes with double resolution.
-
lol i think you should look again. nearly every machine i have seen that has parallel has at least one serial port.
...
Sorry, 10 of the 12 machines I have do not have serial ports but have parallel ports.
>let it go this was old tech.
Sorry, gameport is more recent than you think.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
>http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2keyboard/
>eh only 6 years apart.
You miscomputed. Game ports were on motherboards in 1990s as well as on audio cards. I bought an audio card w/gameport just a few years ago.
>things developed for one market can often be used in other markets. the xbox controller was made for xbox. people wanted to use it on a pc so when the market speaks things happen (well sometimes, it sure made them think about it then.)
Original point was that someone is giving a hoot about gaming interface.
-
And this is different to hardware bugs, or (unknown to the author) unexpected differences in hardware how?
...
anwered recently.
>If that's the case, why, in the name of all that is holy, have you been railing against windows and specifically its APIs like they nailed your mom in your bed for 50+ pages?
There's mechanism in hardware to support varous I/O port direct access but if audio/video/etc. boards don't even use same I/O ports or same method of accessing them, what use are they. First you need hardware level compatibility.
-
USB "High Speed" spec has 125 usec. IF the APIs brought USB "High Speed" to Amiga’s joystick speed, you shouldn't see USB "High Speed" having 40MB/s effective bandwidth.
From usb faq
Signals
1. Does USB support data rates besides 12 Mb/s and 1.5 Mb/s?
A: Yes. The new hi-speed data transfer rate is 480 Mb/s. There is, however, wide variation in edge rates. With typical line loads, full speed devices usually fall in the 12-25 ns range, and low-speed devices typically range 110-225 ns.
Only if you do buffered transfers are you going to get high transfer rates. For fetching just state of joystick, you have considerable overhead. And there's a big "IF" there as well since USB joysticks are using very low rate to begin with.
-
If you look at just the I/O overhead involved for fetching state of joystick, you will see that it involves multiple I/O instructions and other overhead and it's slower than a MOVE.W of Amiga. And you are going through API which doesn't allow you to take over the USB for just joystick.
Nobody wants to poll the joystick at 1kHz. Nobody anywhere in the entire world. Nobody, that is, except for you.
Let's just distil all this down to the basic facts here.
You have not given any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise to demonstrate that any commercial software ever written for the Amiga uses high resolution joyport polling to better capture the user's input.
The single, meaningful example of why polling the joystick at anything like the kHz range makes sense was given not by you, but by me. That example was the cassette tape interface for ZXAM which basically converts the incoming tape audio to a series of pulses on the joyport fire pin.
Your ability to record the joystick at a high rate in no way whatsoever demonstrates that River Raid (your chosen example) does so. Your sole evidence for this was that replaying events captured at a higher rate gave better, more predictable results. That does not tell you anything about the actual sample rate of the game itself. All it tells you is that you can better reconstruct the original joystick event stream by recording it at a higher rate. This is basic sampling theory: the reconstruction of any signal is better at higher sampling rates. It does not mean that the game is sampling at this rate. For instance, if I sample spectrum audio at 8kHz, replaying it back to the spectrum tends not to work very well. Recording and replaying at 22kHz works very well. We do not infer from this that the spectrum is reading data at 11kHz (the highest frequency you can hope to reconstruct at 22kHz). Far from it, it switches between 1-2 kHz using PWM encoding for bits.
The joystick example is the same. Even if River Raid samples the joystick once per frame only, you will be able to replay a recorded sequence of events more accurately if that recording is at a much higher sample rate than the game is using, simply because your recorded signal more closely resembles the original signal at higher rates and not because the game requires it.
So, you might very well be able to poll your joystick at a faster rate using CIA timing but I'm still waiting for an explanation as to what tangible advantage this gives with respect to human input for a joystick.
-
What's not clear to me after reading Intel's manuals is whether or not IN/INS/OUT/OUTS assert LOCK# (they don't appear to do so explicitly), or if it's the responsiblity of the system designer to manage locking in a multiprocessor environment based on the state of M/IO#. The documentation implies that IN/INS/OUT/OUTS should be atomic at the processor level, which I assume means the package itself, multiple cores inclusive. I'm obviously fuzzy on the details.
Memory mapped I/O appears to play by the same rules associated with all other memory accesses, i.e. atomicity is either implied by the instruction, explicitly requested via the LOCK prefix for compatible instructions, or managed by the programmer via higher level methods.
Anyway, if you have one task polling I/O and another task processing the data, you obviously have to coordinate between the two. On a modern system, if you haven't explicitly set the affinity of the task, you have to assume the tasks may run simultaneously on separate processors. Unnecessarily stalling one processor while it waits for another would be indicative of a bad design.
Xchg does a LOCK even if you don't specify one. IN/OUT also can be delayed by device w/wait states so it's not that they have some fixed time of execution that you can multitask on for a fixed amount of time. Plus, they use the bus-- address/data lines to do the IN/OUT.
-
Actually, I would favor not even fixing hardware bugs in future upgrades to hardware-- so it remains consistent. In fact, many people use the hardware bugs as features in their applications and expect them.
And here folks is one of the reasons why the Amiga croaked. You get an installed base of
"programmers" who know everything and expect bugs not to be fixed.
-
Yep, why would anyone at Microsoft would know or care about a computer that died 15 years ago? Oh, they are in Seattle and if they are ice hockey fans they might have heard of the Amiga Centre at Kent....
-
Actually, I would favor not even fixing hardware bugs in future upgrades to hardware-- so it remains consistent. In fact, many people use the hardware bugs as features in their applications and expect them. I know in Atari GTIA chip has a color clock delay in one of the graphics modes which people use to produce interlaced modes with double resolution.
Today, they're called exploits, and both hardware and software vendors are under extreme pressure from trillion dollar industries to close them as quickly as possible.
-
Xchg does a LOCK even if you don't specify one. IN/OUT also can be delayed by device w/wait states so it's not that they have some fixed time of execution that you can multitask on for a fixed amount of time. Plus, they use the bus-- address/data lines to do the IN/OUT.
Lots of instructions have implied locks, but I was talking about port-based I/O specifically. Latency aside, I'm curious about the implications to multiprocessor systems. In a NUMA system, if remote nodes are not prevented from executing while another node is busy, you could run two I/O-related threads out of phase, preventing stalls and linearly scaling the performance of the system, i.e. it would be perfectly parallel--in so far as the system allowed. You'd still have to deal with latency, but only per-processor. While one processor is waiting on the next I/O, the other processor is processing the previous I/O. I need to look at the AMD manuals.
-
What really gets to me on the pet peeve level is that in 2009, a full 15 years after the death of Commodore, there are still those so desperate to hang on to "what used to be", that they invent the smallest, most asinine reasons that they believe the Commodore Amiga -- a computer almost 8 times removed from Moore's Law -- is still a commercially competitive (not to even mention viable) platform...
who said they believe the Commodore amiga is still commercially competitive platform?
-
I find it doubly bizarre that those who regard it in that light are usually quite dismissive of things like UAE that can actually transform an OS3.x installation into a platform that can actually hold it's own thanks to the exponential increase in raw horsepower you get from it.
Interesting. So what you are saying is that its the lack of raw computing power of the hardware-not the OS itself- that prevents it from holding its own?
-
Interesting. So what you are saying is that its the lack of raw computing power of the hardware-not the OS itself- that prevents it from holding its own?
In this day and age, I'd say the lack of horsepower was the bigger handicap compared to modern machines. More horsepower allows you to upgrade almost everything else about the system without it impacting on the end user experience. OS3.x has a few fundamental deficiencies that horsepower alone can't really fix (lack of protected memory, no SMP capability etc) but as far as the basic role of an OS goes, I don't think it's nearly as antiquated as the hardware. AmiKit demonstrates this quite well. You can run it on a real amiga, but it feels slow (certainly on my kit) compared to an unmodified 3.x. On UAE, however, it's fine. Faster than basic 3.9 is on my 040 by a wide margin.
-
I am not familiar with those applications. Perhaps, you want to give description of what needs to be addressed from hardware standpoint?
Access conflicts.
-
Nobody wants to poll the joystick at 1kHz. Nobody anywhere in the entire world. Nobody, that is, except for you.
Let's just distil all this down to the basic facts here.
You have not given any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise to demonstrate that any commercial software ever written for the Amiga uses high resolution joyport polling to better capture the user's input.
The single, meaningful example of why polling the joystick at anything like the kHz range makes sense was given not by you, but by me. That example was the cassette tape interface for ZXAM which basically converts the incoming tape audio to a series of pulses on the joyport fire pin.
Your ability to record the joystick at a high rate in no way whatsoever demonstrates that River Raid (your chosen example) does so. Your sole evidence for this was that replaying events captured at a higher rate gave better, more predictable results. That does not tell you anything about the actual sample rate of the game itself. All it tells you is that you can better reconstruct the original joystick event stream by recording it at a higher rate. This is basic sampling theory: the reconstruction of any signal is better at higher sampling rates. It does not mean that the game is sampling at this rate. For instance, if I sample spectrum audio at 8kHz, replaying it back to the spectrum tends not to work very well. Recording and replaying at 22kHz works very well. We do not infer from this that the spectrum is reading data at 11kHz (the highest frequency you can hope to reconstruct at 22kHz). Far from it, it switches between 1-2 kHz using PWM encoding for bits.
The joystick example is the same. Even if River Raid samples the joystick once per frame only, you will be able to replay a recorded sequence of events more accurately if that recording is at a much higher sample rate than the game is using, simply because your recorded signal more closely resembles the original signal at higher rates and not because the game requires it.
So, you might very well be able to poll your joystick at a faster rate using CIA timing but I'm still waiting for an explanation as to what tangible advantage this gives with respect to human input for a joystick.
Well, I'm not sure about Amiga games -since I didn't seriously look into how their inner loops work- but I am sure about C64 and other 8 bit games.
On these machines the CPU is usually the limiting factor and most games just run one game loop per frame displayed. On the C64, since most interesting things are done through clever usage of interrupts, this effectively means a 50/60Hz polling rate for user input*.
On machines without raster interrupt such as the Spectrum it's more tricky to accurately say, but the average Spectrum game is quite lucky if it actually reaches a 60Hz update cycle for it's graphics. And since these games also update input once a frame at best you get a roughly 20-60Hz polling rate for user input*.
Now, like I said, I'm less sure about this on the Amiga. But I'm willing to state that most games on it will still follow the same model: update (most) everything once a frame, leading to a 50Hz/60Hz joystick polling frequency.
On a sidenote, the average human adolescent has a reaction time of about 215 milliseconds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time), this drops with age. This translates to a reaction time of slightly over 10 frames (at 50Hz).
*) The assumption here being that the designer did not deliberately slow down reading user input. Though I've not seen this myself I'm pretty certain that a game updating its screen at 25Hz can get away with sampling the joystick at 25Hz without people noticing this much if at all.
-
Didn't see that bottom part-- even CGA had method of setting frequencies that damaged monitors but VGA didn't allow for that on hardware level.
Actually, I would favor not even fixing hardware bugs in future upgrades to hardware-- so it remains consistent. In fact, many people use the hardware bugs as features in their applications and expect them. I know in Atari GTIA chip has a color clock delay in one of the graphics modes which people use to produce interlaced modes with double resolution.
Such statements would be unwise in the light of Geforce FX VLIW experiment.
-
How is it clearly not true?
PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced.
They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced. They are still playing catch-up in some areas. Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.
Classic Amiga wasn't a serious threat against SGI and it's OpenGL standard. Both ATI and NVIDIA follows the SGI’s approach.
Classic Amiga is not competing against the “PC” i.e. it’s competing against redressed old school RISC vendors e.g. DEC (AMD, Intel, Microsoft), SGI (ATI, NVIDIA).
-
You are thinking doing multitasking while someone is accessing directly the hardware and trying to avoid conflicts, but I am talking about just allowing an application to use hardware directly. You can do that with IOPM or Amiga does it by the application not allowing other applications to run at the same time.
>uh nope if a piece of software requires directx 10 or higher it is cut and dry. directx 10 even has backwards compatibility with previous versions. also this piece of software installs the version it needs on install.
But they also fixed bugs in higher and higher versions of DirectX; so you need to know whether to avoid the bugs or not.
>yea i do have a shallow understanding of it. but what i understand is that it is a gate system. and the port is open or closed. that it is very simplistic in operation. but closing the barn door after a lockup is not of any use.
>In order for the os to really control the flow you will have to adopt some form of api this way the os can refuse to pass on something that is not properly executed. this is the point of an api.
No, you don't need an API. Windows for each task keeps track of an IOPM and it can set IOPM to enable hardware ports needed by that application and application directly accesses that port without any API/drivers involved.
"Hit the metal" userland applications would break on Windows Terminal Environment and reduce stability.
-
You are thinking doing multitasking while someone is accessing directly the hardware and trying to avoid conflicts, but I am talking about just allowing an application to use hardware directly. You can do that with IOPM or Amiga does it by the application not allowing other applications to run at the same time.
locking up the hw so only one program can access at a time is not my idea of an efficient way of doing things. furthermore in this environment of multitasking this is not feasable.
But they also fixed bugs in higher and higher versions of DirectX; so you need to know whether to avoid the bugs or not.
bugs? what bugs? srry but if a bug exists the only person that has to deal with it is the programmer and driver writer. the end user don't see the issue typically.
No, you don't need an API. Windows for each task keeps track of an IOPM and it can set IOPM to enable hardware ports needed by that application and application directly accesses that port without any API/drivers involved.
you are missing my point. iopm to my knowledge has no error correcting built in. it opens the ports for one app then if that app crashes iopm don't immediately close the ports and reset the hardware. then the next app comes in but either can't open the port or open it then crash. an api can detect and correct as well as make programming more uniform.
-
Sorry, 10 of the 12 machines I have do not have serial ports but have parallel ports.
and all 5 of mine and the 6 computers i have worked on did have serial and parallel. as well as the 3 computers i have at work.
Sorry, gameport is more recent than you think.
sorry but 1990 is not recent. also if it was that recent microsoft wouldn't have dropped support for it.
You miscomputed. Game ports were on motherboards in 1990s as well as on audio cards. I bought an audio card w/gameport just a few years ago.
are you sure? i coulda sworn 1990 - 1984 = 6
birth year of both are only 6 years apart.
Original point was that someone is giving a hoot about gaming interface.
no your point as stated was that you believe someone created the hardware because they cared about the poor performance of the joyport. the hardware transition was more about eliminating old standards to reduce cost. even if the usb interface had no performance increase they still would have eliminated the joyport(among other ports) since they would not have to license the use of many ports and could focus on one style of input port.
-
in this enviroment of multitasking this is not feasable.
Not trying to turn this place in lolcats, but:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3363/3641134774_2a813fccaf.jpg?v=0)
Did you mean: environment
-
Classic Amiga isn't competing against anything, the company that produced it went belly up 15 years ago. It's a hobby machine that some of us find fun to play with, it's a bit of history. It's a great learning tool to learn the basics. Modern OSs do everything for us, the Amiga doesn't, it forces you to understand what you are doing and do it manually. There is no competition for classic Amiga except the competition against time and electronics...
Classic Amiga wasn't a serious threat against SGI and it's OpenGL standard. Both ATI and NVIDIA follows the SGI’s approach.
Classic Amiga is not competing against the “PC” i.e. it’s competing against redressed old school RISC vendors e.g. DEC (AMD, Intel, Microsoft), SGI (ATI, NVIDIA).
-
Did you mean: environment
you right i don't spel wel when i an in a hurry.
-
Classic Amiga isn't competing against anything, the company that produced it went belly up 15 years ago. It's a hobby machine that some of us find fun to play with, it's a bit of history. It's a great learning tool to learn the basics. Modern OSs do everything for us, the Amiga doesn't, it forces you to understand what you are doing and do it manually. There is no competition for classic Amiga except the competition against time and electronics...
THANK YOU! Someone actually "gets it".
Wayne
-
and all 5 of mine and the 6 computers i have worked on did have serial and parallel. as well as the 3 computers i have at work.
...
That doesn't prove that serials are preferred over parallel. They did have both and then they dropped serial before parallel.
>sorry but 1990 is not recent. also if it was that recent microsoft wouldn't have dropped support for it.
Hello, AT DIN5 connectors went a long time ago before gameports.
>no your point as stated was that you believe someone created the hardware because they cared about the poor performance of the joyport. the hardware transition was more about eliminating old standards to reduce cost. even if the usb interface had no performance increase they still would have eliminated the joyport(among other ports) since they would not have to license the use of many ports and could focus on one style of input port.
Sorry, but they made newer joysticks for USB-- they had to substitute with something.
-
Today, they're called exploits, and both hardware and software vendors are under extreme pressure from trillion dollar industries to close them as quickly as possible.
But they (hardware bugs) are useful to have around if they help to make better more optimal software.
-
Lots of instructions have implied locks, but I was talking about port-based I/O specifically. Latency aside, I'm curious about the implications to multiprocessor systems. In a NUMA system, if remote nodes are not prevented from executing while another node is busy, you could run two I/O-related threads out of phase, preventing stalls and linearly scaling the performance of the system, i.e. it would be perfectly parallel--in so far as the system allowed. You'd still have to deal with latency, but only per-processor. While one processor is waiting on the next I/O, the other processor is processing the previous I/O. I need to look at the AMD manuals.
Well go look at the manuals because I don't think you can parallel process two I/O instructions.
Implicit locks are only on XCHG as far as documentation on Pentium that I have.
-
Well, I'm not sure about Amiga games -since I didn't seriously look into how their inner loops work- but I am sure about C64 and other 8 bit games.
On these machines the CPU is usually the limiting factor and most games just run one game loop per frame displayed. On the C64, since most interesting things are done through clever usage of interrupts, this effectively means a 50/60Hz polling rate for user input*.
On machines without raster interrupt such as the Spectrum it's more tricky to accurately say, but the average Spectrum game is quite lucky if it actually reaches a 60Hz update cycle for it's graphics. And since these games also update input once a frame at best you get a roughly 20-60Hz polling rate for user input*.
Now, like I said, I'm less sure about this on the Amiga. But I'm willing to state that most games on it will still follow the same model: update (most) everything once a frame, leading to a 50Hz/60Hz joystick polling frequency.
On a sidenote, the average human adolescent has a reaction time of about 215 milliseconds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time), this drops with age. This translates to a reaction time of slightly over 10 frames (at 50Hz).
*) The assumption here being that the designer did not deliberately slow down reading user input. Though I've not seen this myself I'm pretty certain that a game updating its screen at 25Hz can get away with sampling the joystick at 25Hz without people noticing this much if at all.
Problem is more about getting all states of joysticks regardless of what a human's reaction time is.
-
locking up the hw so only one program can access at a time is not my idea of an efficient way of doing things. furthermore in this environment of multitasking this is not feasable.
...
It is efficient-- that's what I meant by taking over the hardware. So some critical application can write the most optimal game or application. OS still exists and can do it's own multitasking. See Amiga computer as an example.
>bugs? what bugs? srry but if a bug exists the only person that has to deal with it is the programmer and driver writer. the end user don't see the issue typically.
We are talking about programmer.
>you are missing my point. iopm to my knowledge has no error correcting built in. it opens the ports for one app then if that app crashes iopm don't immediately close the ports and reset the hardware. then the next app comes in but either can't open the port or open it then crash. an api can detect and correct as well as make programming more uniform.
No, IOPM will only protect disk i/o or other things it doesn't want accessed and allow application to go directly to hardware and leave it to application if it wants to crash itself since it won't hurt the OS.
-
Classic Amiga isn't competing against anything, the company that produced it went belly up 15 years ago. It's a hobby machine that some of us find fun to play with, it's a bit of history. It's a great learning tool to learn the basics. Modern OSs do everything for us, the Amiga doesn't, it forces you to understand what you are doing and do it manually. There is no competition for classic Amiga except the competition against time and electronics...
There are still things Amiga does that modern PCs cannot do. In fact, many retro machines allow for doing things in more accurate manner than PCs and Amiga is the top gun of those machines. Have you ever written some method of timing how long a piece of code takes on a PC? Take into account the caching, various CPU frequencies, power management, C1 states, memory speeds, I/O speeds, etc.
And what makes it all the worst-- APIs! You don't know what code is behind the APIs on different systems. It's all hodge podge when it comes to estimating time of code.
-
Well go look at the manuals because I don't think you can parallel process two I/O instructions.
Implicit locks are only on XCHG as far as documentation on Pentium that I have.
Sorry, I started speaking in general terms, i.e. lock as opposed to LOCK#.
So, I looked at the manuals, and in a multiprocessor system, two processors can run I/O in parrellel, e.g. execute IN simultaneously. Whether or not they can access the same port simultaneously is up to the target device and whatever is doing bus arbitration.
-
OK, you know that was a silly comment. Of course Windows can run for a year without a "crash." You're not likely to run a video player or a game on consumer grade hardware for a year without a crash, but you're also not expecting 100% uptime under those conditions.
Hi,
UHHHH, Maybe if you only use a Windows installed computer once or twice a year, come to think of it I have never seen a Windows computer that is used every day go without at least 2 crashes a year, that is why the place where I work has an IT department staffed with about 200 personnel, they are either fixing computers or re-installing windows on them. My one last thought, would you board an aircraft if you knew that windows was running all the digital instrumentation on it?, or would you drive a auto if you knew windows was running your auto computer?
Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
PC users can you claim this?
smerf
-
Classic Amiga isn't competing against anything, the company that produced it went belly up 15 years ago. It's a hobby machine that some of us find fun to play with, it's a bit of history. It's a great learning tool to learn the basics. Modern OSs do everything for us, the Amiga doesn't, it forces you to understand what you are doing and do it manually. There is no competition for classic Amiga except the competition against time and electronics...
I was mainly referring to SGI and DEC during the early 90s.
-
Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
PC users can you claim this?
smerf
My work PC had an uptime of over 1 year until a power cut took it down. That's one full year of running a full desktop environment, without crashing or manual rebooting.
It was running fedora 5. After the reboot it was running fedora 10 ;)
-
I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
PC users can you claim this?
smerf
That's because you haven't heard of pr0n.
-
Problem is more about getting all states of joysticks regardless of what a human's reaction time is.
If there’s a problem with USB’s data capturing capabilities then would a problem with audio capturing capabilities. Note that my mouse is basically an optical scanner.
-
Hi,
UHHHH, Maybe if you only use a Windows installed computer once or twice a year, come to think of it I have never seen a Windows computer that is used every day go without at least 2 crashes a year, that is why the place where I work has an IT department staffed with about 200 personnel, they are either fixing computers or re-installing windows on them. My one last thought, would you board an aircraft if you knew that windows was running all the digital instrumentation on it?, or would you drive a auto if you knew windows was running your auto computer?
Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
PC users can you claim this?
smerf
The X64 PC can still run MS-DOS 1.0.
-
The X64 PC can still run MS-DOS 1.0.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean via an emulation. I thought 16-bit support was dropped in 64-bit mode. Not that I've checked too deeply.
-
It's a Q1 2008 "gaming" 15.4" laptop. According RMclock, the entire system consumes around 25 watts to 55 watts.
Hi,
@Hammer
Ok, I would probably buy that, I keep forgetting a lot of people use laptops, even though they are unexpandable, slow, have poor graphics, and the only way to improve them is to buy a new one, I am not knocking you, I have a laptop too, a toshita satlite. I run Ubuntu 8.04 on it because I got tired of waiting for 35 minutes for it to boot up, and then another 10 minutes for it to call up Internet Explorer. With Ubuntu it cut down the load time to about 5 minutes and about a minute load time for FireFox. Sometimes i would rather use a C64, it booted and loaded faster.
smerf
-
Hi,
@Trev,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Microsoft publishes more documentation than any other software vendor, and it's all publicly available. For free.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hey Trev, I really read a lot of BS on this post but this line takes the cake.
By the way nice Penquin avatar, does this mean your a Linux fan boy?
smerf
-
Only if you do buffered transfers are you going to get high transfer rates.
The point was to capture information from analogue world and convert it to digital world.
For fetching just state of joystick, you have considerable overhead.
It doesn’t negate the higher poll rates.
And there's a big "IF" there as well since USB joysticks are using very low rate to begin with.
Due to the dominance of 3D FPS and RTS, the mouse is the primary gaming device on the PC.
-
Due to the dominance of 3D FPS and RTS, the mouse is the primary gaming device on the PC.
Don't forget racing simulations. Here, you still get wheels, pedals etc.
-
Hi,
@Hammer
Ok, I would probably buy that, I keep forgetting a lot of people use laptops, even though they are unexpandable, slow, have poor graphics, and the only way to improve them is to buy a new one, I am not knocking you, I have a laptop too, a toshita satlite. I run Ubuntu 8.04 on it because I got tired of waiting for 35 minutes for it to boot up, and then another 10 minutes for it to call up Internet Explorer. With Ubuntu it cut down the load time to about 5 minutes and about a minute load time for FireFox. Sometimes i would rather use a C64, it booted and loaded faster.
smerf
Laptops are usually shipped with slow hard disks i.e. upgrade to 7200 RPM types.
After NVIDIA's mobile G8X GPU mess and EU's WEEE directive, large number of 14 to 15.4 laptops includes replaceable MXM GPU card. For example, 14.1 inch ASUS N80 laptop includes a replaceable MXM-II GPU card.
Refer to
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39253999,00.htm
In 2008, there's about 31 million gaming laptops sold i.e. an install base that rivals Xbox360 and larger than PS3.
Refer to http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html
"The study further found that 42 million PC desktops and 31 million notebooks capable of playing games were shipped during the year;"
In terms of annual gaming laptop unit growth (i.e. 31 million per year), it easily beats the combined Nintendo Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 annual unit growth.
-
Don't forget racing simulations. Here, you still get wheels, pedals etc.
In terms of revenue, racing simulations is minor in the PC market. **PC is dominated by MMORPG (in FPS format) and casual gaming (e.g. EA's Sims).
Anyway, US tax payer funded America’s Army 3.0 (using UnrealEngine3) is reported to have 20 million connections(downloads, on-line play) since June 17.
Stats
http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion
-
... that is why the place where I work has an IT department staffed with about 200 personnel, they are either fixing computers or re-installing windows on them.
I'm one of those IT department staffers and have been for about 15 years. Not in your company, most likley, but nonetheless, it's what I do. We spend the majority of our time dealing with application issues. Hardware and operating system issues are few and far between.
My one last thought, would you board an aircraft if you knew that windows was running all the digital instrumentation on it?, or would you drive a auto if you knew windows was running your auto computer?
Absolutely not. Windows wasn't designed for critical aircraft and auto systems. It's OK if Windows is running my stereo, though. EDIT: I wouldn't want Amiga OS flying the plane either. What was your point?
Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
At the moment, my towered A1200 mysteriously resets every time I attempt to use a Voodoo.card video mode. !@#% I would reinstall and get everything to a known good state, but something's wrong with Paula or one of the CIAs. Every drive I try seeks/clicks three times and then fails to read the disk.
PC users can you claim this?
I'd been running my last Windows XP-based system using the same base install for about three years when one of my hard disks failed. (Before anyone says anything re: my previous post, yes, I'd been ignoring the warning signs.) It was a stripe sans parity, so I lost everything. C'est la vie. There's nothing I hate worse than dealing with backups, so of course, I don't run them at home.
-
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Microsoft publishes more documentation than any other software vendor, and it's all publicly available. For free.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hey Trev, I really read a lot of BS on this post but this line takes the cake.
You're kidding, right? I'm assuming you haven't visited Microsoft's web site any time in the last ten years.
By the way nice Penquin avatar, does this mean your a Linux fan boy?
You meant "you're," but that's OK. No, it means I run (or ran--it's been a while) Linux on my Sega Dreamcast, hence the orange Sega Swirl.
I enjoy computing in general and have lots of different systems. I can afford whatever the industry throws at me, so unlike most people, I don't have to choose one thing or the other and then vehemently claim I made the best choice in a dire effort to avoid buyer's remorse.
The only thing that's brought me close to fanboy status is The Cure, but even Robert Smith tests my patience now and again.
At any rate, we both like Amigas or else we wouldn't be here, right?
-
And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits. (not that the PS3 does not have APIs, but it requires the developer to do the work to get the 7 SPEs doing anything useful whereas the 360 does not)
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/
-
And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/
Dude. Thanks for that. I haven't opened my PS3 copy of Ghostbusters yet, so I'm going to take it back and get the Xbox 360 version instead. I prefer the Xbox 360 controllers anyway. I'm 6'5". The PlayStation controllers are made for little people with little hands. ;-)
-
And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/
Factor in RSX's pixel shaders stalling during texture operations i.e. a known designed flaw for Geforce 6/7 series.
Anyway, more on
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-vs-ps3-face-off-round-20
Xbox 360 wins again in most of the multi-platforms.
-
Or it could be renamed the "the great PC v Amiga flamewar" and keep it as the fighting pit for people that want to duke it out so that they don't open equivalent threads elsewhere.
Hi,
I vote keep it open, I bet this thread has the highest % rate for reading than anything else on Amiga.org, I think Wayne should pay Amigaksi for this fight, it is the first time in years where I thought about going un in the attic and pulling out my old Amiga hardware and program books.
This whole thread is ridiculous, where else could we have this much fun?
smerf
-
Shouldn't the GB PS3 issue be about overpriced low spec hardware? Making it just a glorified Blu-Ray Player?
-
Hi,
I vote keep it open, I bet this thread has the highest % rate for reading than anything else on Amiga.org, I think Wayne should pay Amigaksi for this fight, it is the first time in years where I thought about going un in the attic and pulling out my old Amiga hardware and program books.
This whole thread is ridiculous, where else could we have this much fun?
smerf
Well, somebody has to start it.
-
Hi,
@Amigaksi,
You made the statement:
"There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks."
Now I just found one of my old Amiga joysticks that don't work, I opened it up and it seems like it has a couple pieces of copper in there that act like springs and open and close like a switch, maybe you could explain how when these springs touch that I get a digital signal out of it, I am really confused and maybe you can help me figure out what went wrong with my joystick, I tried hooking up a VOM to it and it doesn't even move when I press the joystick, I looked for a digital signal comming out when I closed the good copper pieces, but my friend who owns it says that now signal is comming out of this joystick, and that it is totally useless and broke. Maybe you can help me out in troubleshooting this joystick.
smerf
-
Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..
Wayne
Hi,
@Wayne,
If you closed this thread, we would just start a new one that reads
"Did that Nazi actually close the PC still playing Amiga catchup" thread
is your life complete now?
smerf
-
Shouldn't the GB PS3 issue be about overpriced low spec hardware? Making it just a glorified Blu-Ray Player?
Yeah but my glorified Blu-ray player IS more compatible than other Blu-ray players, runs a free music video streaming service and gave me a few minutes of fun in Playstation Home when it was running an online community game.
That said, for any serious gaming its Xbox 360 all the way. I too hate the Playstation pads, they give me the worst cramp. Also the Xbox has a built-in scaler that outputs a far superior picture to my TV than its internal scaler can achieve. Seeing as 99% of games are 720p needing upscaling to 1080p, it makes a HUGE difference. A few games on PS3 do software upscaling, some look about as good as Xbox but others are terrible.
I think PS3 fits our argument quite well. Its an example of hardware that tried to leave too much control in the hands of the developers. Its lagging behind Xbox in game related features because they never thought to set aside some RAM and CPU cycles for multitasking, so only newer games can support advanced features like in-game messaging and custom soundtracks. Its pretty sad that a system with a mandatory hard drive actually has less functionality in-game than a system that has to cater for the fact you might not have a HDD attached (Xbox).
-
Hi,
@Amigaksi,
You made the statement:
"There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks."
Now I just found one of my old Amiga joysticks that don't work, I opened it up and it seems like it has a couple pieces of copper in there that act like springs and open and close like a switch, maybe you could explain how when these springs touch that I get a digital signal out of it, I am really confused and maybe you can help me figure out what went wrong with my joystick, I tried hooking up a VOM to it and it doesn't even move when I press the joystick, I looked for a digital signal comming out when I closed the good copper pieces, but my friend who owns it says that now signal is comming out of this joystick, and that it is totally useless and broke. Maybe you can help me out in troubleshooting this joystick.
smerf
And I thought you were going to ask how sampling at high frequency the action of the two copper strips touching , and the many variations in resistance it will have as it makes contact, is actually useful to a game. Rather than just sampling once per frame and having a tolerance to determine if you pushed a button/direction or not. ;)
Incidentally, this thread is the longest I have spent on amiga.org since joining. I sadly do not have space to setup my Amiga and neither are there any games really that I need it to play, except the Amiga version of Mr Nutz which was cool.
-
My work PC had an uptime of over 1 year until a power cut took it down. That's one full year of running a full desktop environment, without crashing or manual rebooting.
It was running fedora 5. After the reboot it was running fedora 10 ;)
Hi,
@Karlos,
Last I heard fedora 5 didn't have a thing to do with winblows, but you did bring up something interesting to me, a Linux program that crashed, huh, I am beginning to wonder, I have been using Ubuntu since the 6.04 version ( I believe about 3 years) and it hasn't crashed or failed me yet. My post was mostly aimed at microslot fanboys who think that winblows is the best thing since Apple Macs
Hello I am an Apple, Hello I am a PC, and Hello I am a worm for both Apple and PC's
smerf
-
THANK YOU! Someone actually "gets it".
Wayne
Hi,
@ Wayne
That the Amiga is the best thing since boiled peanuts.
smerf
-
That's because you haven't heard of pr0n.
Hi,
@Fanscale
Is that anything like pOrn?
smerf
-
The X64 PC can still run MS-DOS 1.0.
Hi,
But only in an emulator, or virtual drive
smerf
-
You're kidding, right? I'm assuming you haven't visited Microsoft's web site any time in the last ten years.
You meant "you're," but that's OK. No, it means I run (or ran--it's been a while) Linux on my Sega Dreamcast, hence the orange Sega Swirl.
I enjoy computing in general and have lots of different systems. I can afford whatever the industry throws at me, so unlike most people, I don't have to choose one thing or the other and then vehemently claim I made the best choice in a dire effort to avoid buyer's remorse.
The only thing that's brought me close to fanboy status is The Cure, but even Robert Smith tests my patience now and again.
At any rate, we both like Amigas or else we wouldn't be here, right?
Hi,
@Trev,
Like the answers, and your right, the reason I like my Amiga is because fun to see how far I can take the old girl before she kicks. I really think the Amiga is the most Amazin computer I have ever owned, there is something magical about it, can't put a finger on it but when I get on an Amiga it is just plain fun, all the other computers I just use, maybe it is the fast joystick port.
smerf
-
In 2008, there's about 31 million gaming laptops sold i.e. an install base that rivals Xbox360 and larger than PS3.
Refer to http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html
"The study further found that 42 million PC desktops and 31 million notebooks capable of playing games were shipped during the year;"
In terms of annual gaming laptop unit growth (i.e. 31 million per year), it easily beats the combined Nintendo Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 annual unit growth.
gaming-capable and used to play games on are not the same thing. Go to any retail outlet and you'll find Pc gets about 20% shelf space. Ofcourse you can download PC games, but thats not relatively common. PC gaming these days is heading towards role play/strategy genre that takes years off your life, and the FPS coz of the mouse and keyboard control, byt FPS's on consoles are becoming popular, just depends on what you prefer as a control method.
-
And I thought you were going to ask how sampling at high frequency the action of the two copper strips touching , and the many variations in resistance it will have as it makes contact, is actually useful to a game. Rather than just sampling once per frame and having a tolerance to determine if you pushed a button/direction or not. ;)
Incidentally, this thread is the longest I have spent on amiga.org since joining. I sadly do not have space to setup my Amiga and neither are there any games really that I need it to play, except the Amiga version of Mr Nutz which was cool.
Hi,
@alexatkin,
Wow!! I never thought of that, I will have to look into that, but in all re ality, I wanted to play rolling thunder again, I don't know of anybody that beat that game, and you definitly need a good joystick to play it, and it has to move fast.
smerf
-
I run a small computer department at a University and I can tell you what keeps the IT department running, people who really shouldn't be using a pencil without safety glasses being given a computer to play with. ;) ;)
God knows how many deaths we'd have if they had Amigas instead of PCs...
Hi,
UHHHH, Maybe if you only use a Windows installed computer once or twice a year, come to think of it I have never seen a Windows computer that is used every day go without at least 2 crashes a year, that is why the place where I work has an IT department staffed with about 200 personnel, they are either fixing computers or re-installing windows on them. My one last thought, would you board an aircraft if you knew that windows was running all the digital instrumentation on it?, or would you drive a auto if you knew windows was running your auto computer?
Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.
PC users can you claim this?
smerf
-
You're kidding, right? I'm assuming you haven't visited Microsoft's web site any time in the last ten years.
As much as I dislike M$, I have to give them some credit. Their developer documentation
is pretty good.
-
As much as I dislike M$, I have to give them some credit. Their developer documentation
is pretty good.
Yea it is, and so are their tools. Best in the industry. It's one of the things they've done right. Apple is working very hard to catch up to it.
-
Poor cache usage...:roflmao:
Could Windows problem be poor usage of the cpu cache? I'm using XP and whenever the optical drive spins up the OS slows to a crawl. Why is it putting the brakes on? Why does XP need to wait for the drive... how many cpu cycles does it need? Optimally, the most important OS functions should stuffed in the cpu cache (its 2MB). If that was the case, Windows would be blindingly fast.
-
Windows and Linux/BSD are more efficient than OSX. I like the mac and have house full of 'em but lets face it, it's on the bottom of the pile.
-
Poor cache usage...:roflmao:
Could Windows problem be poor usage of the cpu cache? I'm using XP and whenever the optical drive spins up the OS slows to a crawl. Why is it putting the brakes on? Why does XP need to wait for the drive... how many cpu cycles does it need? Optimally, the most important OS functions should stuffed in the cpu cache (its 2MB). If that was the case, Windows would be blindingly fast.
Windows doesn't slow down, the shell (explorer.exe) does. Try disabling autoinsert notification/autoplay.
CPU caches don't work that way. Windows does, however, keep all the key bits in memory.
-
Problem is more about getting all states of joysticks regardless of what a human's reaction time is.
This one line does not negate my post somehow you know. If you have a point regarding what I wrote, please make it instead of writing something that only adresses a single line of text in there and totally ignores the rest.
And another thing:
For a joystick port, the only 'problem' facing programmer is to read out the joystick fast enough a human can't notice you did so. The old 8 bit computers where slow, but the programmers of the time managed to fix this 'problem' by reading the state of the joystick at between 20-60Hz. This was more than plenty for people, it looked as if the ship/ninja-dude/thing-on-a-spring/whatever reacted directly instead of with a delay (exceptions here being due to slow animations, not slow joystick reading).
This means that polling a joystick at a rate of 20ms or faster is quite ok. You don't actually need it to be any faster and I'm 100% certain that programmers (being I know how they think as I a) am one and b) observed the works of the 8-bit crowds) only do what is needed and no more: they poll the joystick state once every frame. Not two times, not ten times. And definitely not at 1 KHz, which would be an utter waste of resources.
Now, had you written this about mice you actually may have had a point. But then, we do have PC mice that track at 1KHz. Notice that these mice are USB based and no one seems to have lag issues with them.
-
And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits. (not that the PS3 does not have APIs, but it requires the developer to do the work to get the 7 SPEs doing anything useful whereas the 360 does not)
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/
To be fair, the PS3 also has a weaker GPU and a worse memory scheme than the Xbox 360. I see these to be more of a problem. Especially since Sony does have tools available to get you to use the SPU's relatively well even if you don't know how to (API's even :P).
-
Hi,
But only in an emulator, or virtual drive
smerf
PC-DOS 1.0
"It booted flawlessly on a 3.00GHz PIV."
Refer to http://vetusware.com/download/PC-DOS%201.00/?id=4356
-
gaming-capable and used to play games on are not the same thing. Go to any retail outlet and you'll find Pc gets about 20% shelf space.
Retail space wouldn’t indicate market size.
Ofcourse you can download PC games, but thats not relatively common. PC gaming these days is heading towards role play/strategy genre that takes years off your life, and the FPS coz of the mouse and keyboard control, byt FPS's on consoles are becoming popular, just depends on what you prefer as a control method.
Reference 1 http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion
The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
• In emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe the PC has become the de facto platform of choice for games as console systems have not had major penetration in most countries.
• Even in North America and Western Europe the PC is the leading single platform for games with over $6 billion in combined revenue from those markets.
• Broadband penetration has been a key driver of growth and revenue growth for PC games, and is directly tied to growth in broadband penetration.
• The three biggest trends in 2008 were 1) the growth of online digital distribution via services like Valve’s Steam; 2) the growth of free games with a virtual item purchase model and 3) the growing presence of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven.
• Top PC games regularly generate over $50 million at retail revenue but can generate substantially more in subscription and/or add-on revenue.
• Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the leading products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. World of Warcraft is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue. The Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft outsold its predecessor. In 2008, two major new subscription MMOGs (Warhammer Online and Age of Conan) sold over 1 million units at retail.
• Digital distribution, free-to-play models and retail game cards are well-established in Asia, but just starting to emerge in North America and Europe.
Reference 2 http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;5
• According to the PCGA's 2008 Horizon's Report, PC gaming software saw global revenues reach $12.7 billion in 2008, a year-over-year rise of $1.9 billion, or nearly 18 percent. Overall, the study found that the PC software and hardware market stood at $68 billion in 2008.
Reference 3 http://www.edge-online.com/news/ea-pc-becoming-worlds-largest-games-platform
• "Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has said that “the online part of our business is growing as much as 60% year over year" and that the PC is rapidly becoming the largest gaming platform in the world."
-
To be fair, the PS3 also has a weaker GPU and a worse memory scheme than the Xbox 360. I see these to be more of a problem. Especially since Sony does have tools available to get you to use the SPU's relatively well even if you don't know how to (API's even :P).
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sony-playstation-ps3-developers-hirai,news-3346.html
"Sony says PS3 Intentionally Hard for Developers"
"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.
-
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sony-playstation-ps3-developers-hirai,news-3346.html
"Sony says PS3 Intentionally Hard for Developers"
"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.
That's a very interesting way of saying "we f%%ked up on both our hardware development and developer tools". In fact it's so bad now that Activision are threatening to pull out of the market (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6531367.ece). Having difficult to code for hardware and poor dev tools is fine if you're the market leader such as with PS2. But PS3 is trailing hard behind both Wii and the 360 in terms of numbers and both of those have mature and efficient dev suites available to them. Tbh I can see the PS3 being this generations Dreamcast.
-
That's a very interesting way of saying "we f%%ked up on both our hardware development and developer tools". In fact it's so bad now that Activision are threatening to pull out of the market (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6531367.ece). Having difficult to code for hardware and poor dev tools is fine if you're the market leader such as with PS2. But PS3 is trailing hard behind both Wii and the 360 in terms of numbers and both of those have mature and efficient dev suites available to them. Tbh I can see the PS3 being this generations Dreamcast.
Unless Apple enters the console gaming market, a reduced competition would be bad for consumers.
-
Retail space wouldn’t indicate market size.
Reference 1 http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion
The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
• In emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe the PC has become the de facto platform of choice for games as console systems have not had major penetration in most countries.
• Even in North America and Western Europe the PC is the leading single platform for games with over $6 billion in combined revenue from those markets.
• Broadband penetration has been a key driver of growth and revenue growth for PC games, and is directly tied to growth in broadband penetration.
• The three biggest trends in 2008 were 1) the growth of online digital distribution via services like Valve’s Steam; 2) the growth of free games with a virtual item purchase model and 3) the growing presence of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven.
• Top PC games regularly generate over $50 million at retail revenue but can generate substantially more in subscription and/or add-on revenue.
• Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the leading products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. World of Warcraft is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue. The Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft outsold its predecessor. In 2008, two major new subscription MMOGs (Warhammer Online and Age of Conan) sold over 1 million units at retail.
• Digital distribution, free-to-play models and retail game cards are well-established in Asia, but just starting to emerge in North America and Europe.
Reference 2 http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;5
• According to the PCGA's 2008 Horizon's Report, PC gaming software saw global revenues reach $12.7 billion in 2008, a year-over-year rise of $1.9 billion, or nearly 18 percent. Overall, the study found that the PC software and hardware market stood at $68 billion in 2008.
Reference 3 http://www.edge-online.com/news/ea-pc-becoming-worlds-largest-games-platform
• "Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has said that “the online part of our business is growing as much as 60% year over year" and that the PC is rapidly becoming the largest gaming platform in the world."
This is quite interesting to read. Especially since financial reports of these companies suggest that the PC is trailing the consoles. Case in point, let's look at EA:
Total PC: 430
Total Consoles : 1,799
Total mobility (DS, PSP, etc): 572
The Xbox 360 alone makes EA more money ($589 million) than the PC ;)
(All in millions of $, from page 103 of their financial statement for 2008, http://investors.ea.com/annuals.cfm)
The same story is found for most of the bigger publishers.
BTW, I'm not saying the the PC market isn't bigger (even though that report you referred to is being sneaky in including online revenue on the PC side and not doing so for the consoles - even though Xbox live, PSN etc make quite a lot of money). But it's also much more crowded and so harder to make money in for bigger parties.
-
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sony-playstation-ps3-developers-hirai,news-3346.html
"Sony says PS3 Intentionally Hard for Developers"
"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.
I suppose that EDGE was just a joke then and they don't actually use OpenGL after all?
You are taking PR talk from the CEO and pretending it's fact. This is not wise ;)
-
This is quite interesting to read. Especially since financial reports of these companies suggest that the PC is trailing the consoles. Case in point, let's look at EA:
Total PC: 430
Total Consoles : 1,799
Total mobility (DS, PSP, etc): 572
The Xbox 360 alone makes EA more money ($589 million) than the PC ;)
(All in millions of $, from page 103 of their financial statement for 2008, http://investors.ea.com/annuals.cfm)
The same story is found for most of the bigger publishers.
BTW, I'm not saying the the PC market isn't bigger (even though that report you referred to is being sneaky in including online revenue on the PC side and not doing so for the consoles - even though Xbox live, PSN etc make quite a lot of money). But it's also much more crowded and so harder to make money in for bigger parties.
The key part of PC gaming’s growth is in Asia.
-
I suppose that EDGE was just a joke then and they don't actually use OpenGL after all?
Refer to RSX's LibCGM.
You are taking PR talk from the CEO and pretending it's fact. This is not wise ;)
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/10/valve-wont-develop-for-ps3-because-its-too-hard/
"Valve won’t develop for PS3 because it’s too hard".
http://news.softpedia.com/news/It-039-s-Very-Hard-To-Program-on-the-PlayStation-3-Says-Wheelman-Dev-107298.shtml
"We've heard Square Enix and Capcom, two local Japanese companies, complain about the problems they encountered when creating something for Sony's console, as opposed to the Xbox 360, which handles much better, and which, in Capcom's case, was the key to the Western market, in which Microsoft's console is more popular due to its lower price tag.
Recently, the executive producer for Wheelman, Shaun Himmerick, talked about the challenges the game he supervised encountered when it was brought to the PS3 from the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. He put it quite bluntly though, and stated that developing for the Japanese console was a real pain and you really needed to know what you were doing."
http://www.businessinsider.com/game-developer-rips-ps3-as-difficult-to-work-with-2009-2
But Midway Games (MWY) veteran Shaun Himmerick is less sanguine. In an interview with ThisXboxLife.com, Shaun says coding for the PS3 is "a huge pain in the ass.""
http://www.videogamer.com/news/exclusive_ea_explains_no_ps3_red_alert_3.html
EA says it's "tough to develop" for PS3.
He said: "We actually announced a PS3 version early on but that was when we were still doing a lot of technical exploration of the architecture. PS3 is a very powerful system but as you guys know it's very exotic and tough to develop for and our engine really at the time wasn't designed for PS3."
-
This one line does not negate my post somehow you know. If you have a point regarding what I wrote, please make it instead of writing something that only adresses a single line of text in there and totally ignores the rest.
...
Because the rest of your message was already dealt with before. Don't get that much time to look-up references back in the same thread given size of thread. You may be confusing games polling analog joysticks during only VBIs or such but joystick ports are read any time without requiring any interrupts or VBIs. There are many programs on 8-bit (on Atari) that just have a main loop that reads the joystick and sets appropriate graphical elements or flags. From the BASIC source codes I have on Amiga, they also don't use any VBIs to read joystick ports.
>For a joystick port, the only 'problem' facing programmer is to read out the joystick fast enough a human can't notice you did so. The old 8 bit computers where slow, but the programmers of the time managed to fix this 'problem' by reading the state of the joystick at between 20-60Hz. This was more than plenty for people, it looked as if the ship/ninja-dude/thing-on-a-spring/whatever reacted directly instead of with a delay (exceptions here being due to slow animations, not slow joystick reading).
The argument given before was that you can sample audio at lower rate like 11Khz and it may appear the same as 22Khz but there is a difference of accuracy of some frequency components. And the other example given before was that of MP3 audio which distorts certain samples to get higher lossy compression ratios but sounds basically same as linear audio. You can't prove just by looks-- you have to take into account whether reading at those higher rates ACTUALLY improves accuracy of input.
>This means that polling a joystick at a rate of 20ms or faster is quite ok. You don't actually need it to be any faster and I'm 100% certain that programmers (being I know how they think as I a) am one and b) observed the works of the 8-bit crowds) only do what is needed and no more: they poll the joystick state once every frame. Not two times, not ten times. And definitely not at 1 KHz, which would be an utter waste of resources.
The question is not what you can get away with but what is more accurate. It's not a waste if you have that time available; if processor is idle-- mine as well let the main loop run as fast as possible.
>Now, had you written this about mice you actually may have had a point. But then, we do have PC mice that track at 1KHz. Notice that these mice are USB based and no one seems to have lag issues with them.
If you examine technical description of 8-bit machines, you will find that even C64/Ataris had a FAST polling mode for their potentiometer readings-- fast pot scan which scanned in the potentiometers within 2 TV scanlines which translates to 15.75Khz/2 polling capability. So whatever the purpose, it was there in the hardware.
-
PC-DOS 1.0
"It booted flawlessly on a 3.00GHz PIV."
Refer to http://vetusware.com/download/PC-DOS%201.00/?id=4356
That's what I figured-- processors are backward compatible so DOS should work but OS purposely is not allowing older 16-bit applications not to run. Another case of APIs/high level stuff limiting what the hardware is capable of.
-
The key part of PC gaming’s growth is in Asia.
Which doesn't change that the PC gaming alliance is not actually making more money than the 'combined console consortium' (the PDF itself says the PC market is about 30% of the whole), despite having many more manufacturers, a bigger market presence and having a growing market (Asia) behind them.
-
Refer to RSX's LibCGM.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/10/valve-wont-develop-for-ps3-because-its-too-hard/
"Valve won’t develop for PS3 because it’s too hard".
http://news.softpedia.com/news/It-039-s-Very-Hard-To-Program-on-the-PlayStation-3-Says-Wheelman-Dev-107298.shtml
"We've heard Square Enix and Capcom, two local Japanese companies, complain about the problems they encountered when creating something for Sony's console, as opposed to the Xbox 360, which handles much better, and which, in Capcom's case, was the key to the Western market, in which Microsoft's console is more popular due to its lower price tag.
Recently, the executive producer for Wheelman, Shaun Himmerick, talked about the challenges the game he supervised encountered when it was brought to the PS3 from the Xbox 360 and PC platforms. He put it quite bluntly though, and stated that developing for the Japanese console was a real pain and you really needed to know what you were doing."
http://www.businessinsider.com/game-developer-rips-ps3-as-difficult-to-work-with-2009-2
But Midway Games (MWY) veteran Shaun Himmerick is less sanguine. In an interview with ThisXboxLife.com, Shaun says coding for the PS3 is "a huge pain in the ass.""
I didn't say it wasn't hard to program. I said that Sony is trying to make it better and that they are using standard API's.
-
Hi,
@Amigaksi,
You made the statement:
"There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks."
Now I just found one of my old Amiga joysticks that don't work, I opened it up and it seems like it has a couple pieces of copper in there that act like springs and open and close like a switch, maybe you could explain how when these springs touch that I get a digital signal out of it, I am really confused and maybe you can help me figure out what went wrong with my joystick, I tried hooking up a VOM to it and it doesn't even move when I press the joystick, I looked for a digital signal comming out when I closed the good copper pieces, but my friend who owns it says that now signal is comming out of this joystick, and that it is totally useless and broke. Maybe you can help me out in troubleshooting this joystick.
smerf
I know there's a common problem with joysticks where the wire going into the connector goes bad so even if joystick is fine, you need to replace the wire.
-
Because the rest of your message was already dealt with before. Don't get that much time to look-up references back in the same thread given size of thread. You may be confusing games polling analog joysticks during only VBIs or such but joystick ports are read any time without requiring any interrupts or VBIs. There are many programs on 8-bit (on Atari) that just have a main loop that reads the joystick and sets appropriate graphical elements or flags. From the BASIC source codes I have on Amiga, they also don't use any VBIs to read joystick ports.
I did not say they used a VBI interrupt to read the joystick port. I said they polled it once per main loop. And I also stated that this main loop will run once per frame.
Anyway, C64 games do it exactly as I describe and no one ever commented about C64 games being less accurate to control than Atari 8 bit ones. Ever. On top of that I seriously doubt that 8 bit Atari games have a main loop that runs faster than once a frame.
Furthermore.... Amiga basic programs!?
Sigh. Amiga basic is dead slow. You are not seriously telling me you think these games update their main loop more than once per frame?
>For a joystick port, the only 'problem' facing programmer is to read out the joystick fast enough a human can't notice you did so. The old 8 bit computers where slow, but the programmers of the time managed to fix this 'problem' by reading the state of the joystick at between 20-60Hz. This was more than plenty for people, it looked as if the ship/ninja-dude/thing-on-a-spring/whatever reacted directly instead of with a delay (exceptions here being due to slow animations, not slow joystick reading).
The argument given before was that you can sample audio at lower rate like 11Khz and it may appear the same as 22Khz but there is a difference of accuracy of some frequency components. And the other example given before was that of MP3 audio which distorts certain samples to get higher lossy compression ratios but sounds basically same as linear audio. You can't prove just by looks-- you have to take into account whether reading at those higher rates ACTUALLY improves accuracy of input.
This is not relevant, because the games don't actually do it. And no one seems to notice.
>This means that polling a joystick at a rate of 20ms or faster is quite ok. You don't actually need it to be any faster and I'm 100% certain that programmers (being I know how they think as I a) am one and b) observed the works of the 8-bit crowds) only do what is needed and no more: they poll the joystick state once every frame. Not two times, not ten times. And definitely not at 1 KHz, which would be an utter waste of resources.
The question is not what you can get away with but what is more accurate. It's not a waste if you have that time available; if processor is idle-- mine as well let the main loop run as fast as possible.
8 Bit CPU's did not have the time available. They ran their game loops once a frame.
Humans cannot react much faster than 200 or so ms. This means any input polling above twice that rate (100 ms) is not needed because this will perfectly reproduce the original input (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_theorem). Polling at 50Hz is polling at 20ms, which is ten times the desired frequency, meaning you beat the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem by a factor of five allready.
So, 50Hz polling will get you a perfect reproduction of what a human can input*. Which means sampling joystick input at 1Khz is an utter waste of resources.
*) Note that this is only true for digital joysticks. Analog input devices are another matter.
>Now, had you written this about mice you actually may have had a point. But then, we do have PC mice that track at 1KHz. Notice that these mice are USB based and no one seems to have lag issues with them.
If you examine technical description of 8-bit machines, you will find that even C64/Ataris had a FAST polling mode for their potentiometer readings-- fast pot scan which scanned in the potentiometers within 2 TV scanlines which translates to 15.75Khz/2 polling capability. So whatever the purpose, it was there in the hardware.
And how many 8 bit machines had enough CPU power and memory to both read at that rate and actually do something with the results?
What really happened is that they read the results at a set frequency and interpolate the result based on the prior reading. Now, I did not do much with paddles and the like, but I'm willing to bet I already know at what frequency games such as breakout/arkanoid are sampling the analog input.
-
That's what I figured-- processors are backward compatible so DOS should work but OS purposely is not allowing older 16-bit applications not to run.
Constant switching between 16bit and 32bit modes introduces performance penalties.
Another case of APIs/high level stuff limiting what the hardware is capable of.
Another case of your lack knowledge on how modern X86 processors work.
-
Which doesn't change that the PC gaming alliance is not actually making more money than the 'combined console consortium' (the PDF itself says the PC market is about 30% of the whole), despite having many more manufacturers, a bigger market presence and having a growing market (Asia) behind them.
From this PDF, http://www.pcgamingalliance.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=15559
"The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo."
-
From this PDF, http://www.pcgamingalliance.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=15559
"The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo."
My comments come from the same PDF. The console market as a whole is much bigger than the PC one.
-
I didn't say it wasn't hard to program. I said that Sony is trying to make it better and that they are using standard API's.
It's either thin-layer LibCGM or PSGL (OpenGL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant except for the use of Cg instead of GLSL).
-
Constant switching between 16bit and 32bit modes introduces performance penalties.
...
Hah. They allow 16-bit applications to run fine under 32-bit versions of Vista but not 64-bit versions. There's no constant switching going on. Processor supports it but Vista 64-bit won't allow 16-bit applications.
>Another case of your lack knowledge on how modern X86 processors work.
No, processor is fine. It's another case of a big bully (Microsoft) trying to control things and make decisions for the rest of the world.
-
My comments come from the same PDF. The console market as a whole is much bigger than the PC one.
Like Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, the PC is just like any other gaming platform.
-
Hah. They allow 16-bit applications to run fine under 32-bit versions of Vista but not 64-bit versions.
If you run a 16bit Windows userland program, it runs within a layer called Windows On Windows (WoW). WoW supports applications using the Win16 API and relies on NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine). "Applications running in virtual 8086 mode generate a trap with the use of instructions that involve input/output (I/O), which can negatively impact performance".
Try running Stunt Car Racer DOS or EA's 688 Attack Sub DOS on Vista.
There's no constant switching going on. Processor supports it but Vista 64-bit won't allow 16-bit applications.
(http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Dd180732.tnawinx64a(zh-tw,TechNet.10).gif)
The AMD64 processor in Long Mode doesn't support Real and Virtual 8086 modes.
Legacy support is best run in Microsoft’s VirtualPC, VMWARE, SUN’s VirtualBox, DosBox(software emulator for DOS/Win16 games) and 'etc'.
I prefer SUN's VirtualBox i.e. USB2.0 support.
-
If you run a 16bit Windows userland program, it runs within a layer called Windows On Windows (WoW). WoW supports applications using the Win16 API and relies on NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine).
Try running Stunt Car Racer DOS or EA's 688 Attack Sub DOS on Vista.
(http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Dd180732.tnawinx64a(zh-tw,TechNet.10).gif)
The AMD64 processor in Long Mode doesn't support Real and Virtual 8086 modes.
Legacy support is best run in Microsoft’s VirtualPC, VMWARE, SUN’s VirtualBox, DosBox(software emulator for DOS/Win16 games) and 'etc'.
So I have to run a 16-bit emulator under Vista-64 to run 16-bit applications although processor supports it in hardware. It's better to boot into Vista-32. Are those applications like VirtualPC using processor hardware or doing a software emulation of 16-bit application?
-
I did not say they used a VBI interrupt to read the joystick port. I said they polled it once per main loop. And I also stated that this main loop will run once per frame.
...
Once per frame boils down to VBI or some IRQ that's 1/60 second.
>Anyway, C64 games do it exactly as I describe and no one ever commented about C64 games being less accurate to control than Atari 8 bit ones. Ever. On top of that I seriously doubt that 8 bit Atari games have a main loop that runs faster than once a frame.
Believe me, all sample codes you find in books in BASIC and w/inline ASM don't wait for any 1/60 second IRQ/VBI to read joysticks.
>Furthermore.... Amiga basic programs!?
>Sigh. Amiga basic is dead slow. You are not seriously telling me you think these games update their main loop more than once per frame?
Sure, especially if code is small and running on 68020 or better.
>This is not relevant, because the games don't actually do it. And no one seems to notice.
You can just base it on someone's experience of noticing it that's why the examples of 22Khz/11Khz and MP3 were relevant.
>8 Bit CPU's did not have the time available. They ran their game loops once a frame.
You can't generalize on that since there's code that does read joysticks and there's no frame interrupts involved.
>Humans cannot react much faster than 200 or so ms. This means any input polling above twice that rate (100 ms) is not needed because this will perfectly reproduce the original input (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_theorem)...
As stated before, one human reaction does not translate to one joystick state.
>And how many 8 bit machines had enough CPU power and memory to both read at that rate and actually do something with the results?
Two scanlines is 228 CPU cycles on Atari; they have entire DLIs running per scanline so you can do something with it.
>What really happened is that they read the results at a set frequency and interpolate the result based on the prior reading. Now, I did not do much with paddles and the like, but I'm willing to bet I already know at what frequency games such as breakout/arkanoid are sampling the analog input.
I never said you have to sample at higher rates, but that it's more accurate. You have to apply Nyquist rate to the highest frequency component present in the signal if you want to PERFECTLY reproduce the signal and don't know the phase shift (which is true in this case).
-
So I have to run a 16-bit emulator under Vista-64 to run 16-bit applications although processor supports it in hardware.
The lack of Virtual 8086 mode when you're in Long Mode is a documented limitation of the x64 ISA.
It's better to boot into Vista-32. Are those applications like VirtualPC using processor hardware or doing a software emulation of 16-bit application?
http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2005/pac346.pdf
"VT-x requires small emulator for real mode code".
-
Once per frame boils down to VBI or some IRQ that's 1/60 second.
>Anyway, C64 games do it exactly as I describe and no one ever commented about C64 games being less accurate to control than Atari 8 bit ones. Ever. On top of that I seriously doubt that 8 bit Atari games have a main loop that runs faster than once a frame.
Believe me, all sample codes you find in books in BASIC and w/inline ASM don't wait for any 1/60 second IRQ/VBI to read joysticks.
>Furthermore.... Amiga basic programs!?
>Sigh. Amiga basic is dead slow. You are not seriously telling me you think these games update their main loop more than once per frame?
Sure, especially if code is small and running on 68020 or better.
>This is not relevant, because the games don't actually do it. And no one seems to notice.
You can just base it on someone's experience of noticing it that's why the examples of 22Khz/11Khz and MP3 were relevant.
>8 Bit CPU's did not have the time available. They ran their game loops once a frame.
You can't generalize on that since there's code that does read joysticks and there's no frame interrupts involved.
>Humans cannot react much faster than 200 or so ms. This means any input polling above twice that rate (100 ms) is not needed because this will perfectly reproduce the original input (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_theorem)...
As stated before, one human reaction does not translate to one joystick state.
A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.
-
Strange that the lack of 16-bit mode in AMD64 is lambasted but the lack of direct hardware backwards compatibility for the 680x0 series is ignored ;)
-
Strange that the lack of 16-bit mode in AMD64 is lambasted but the lack of direct hardware backwards compatibility for the 680x0 series is ignored ;)
Ahh, but you have to understand, this is what he means by "objectivity".
It only counts if it can be twisted (no matter by how much) to support his argument. :lol:
-
A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.
Symbolically however, the more scans that hit (1/On) the 'harder' the result.
-
For Hitchhikers fans:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3627/3644154440_e743ccfb92.jpg?v=0)
:roflmao:
-
Strange that the lack of 16-bit mode in AMD64 is lambasted but the lack of direct hardware backwards compatibility for the 680x0 series is ignored ;)
I already made it clear there are some minor differences even in x86 architecture but they are still sold as and documented as "backward compatible". To be technically strict about it, if a program is emulating 68000, it should run like a 68000. If a program emulates 68020, it should run like a 68020. Not that I run a 68000 emulator and it runs like some hybrid between 68000 and 68020 w/screwed timing and latencies of frames and audio.
To eliminate 16-bit mode is a MAJOR difference as there are millions of DOS programs and Windows 3.x programs out there. As far as I know, you can disable caching on the later 680x0 processors to make them more compatible. Strictly, you know the frequencies are incompatible but at least they can be called opcode compatible.
-
Ahh, but you have to understand, this is what he means by "objectivity".
It only counts if it can be twisted (no matter by how much) to support his argument. :lol:
You are being biased. If I go from 680x0 to 80486, I can say they are NOT compatible. If I go from 68000 to 68020, you can't treat it the same way "NOT compatible." That's being biased.
-
A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.
Hi,
@Amigaksi,
Try this on your amazingly fast joystick port:
7. Do you need USB 2.0?
Almost every conceivable peripheral has a USB 2.0 version ranging from a HDTV tuner, a micro hard drive to even video card / USB monitor. So, even if you buy a all-in-one HP multimedia PC with all the gizmos, you'll still need something USB. (Maybe not Everything USB).
Should you own a laptop, you may like to know that USB is also your ticket out of the proprietary world. It used to be that docking stations must all match that exact notebook model due to the proprietary connection. Now, you can just plug in a USB 2.0 docking station, and you'll get a USB hub, 7.1 surround audio, serial converters, Ethernet plus a notebook holder.
8. How does USB 2.0 handle today's applications?
Many have asked us how USB 2.0 or Hi-Speed USB mode specifically can handle today's ever-changing applications, particularly in the multimedia field. The original USB has an inherent problem to meet the bandwidth requirement of then current CD burners and hard drives. If memory serves us well, USB CD burners hit the bottleneck at 8x or 1.2MByte/s, and USB hard drives couldn't exceed a pitifully 1MByte/s.
When USB 2.0 introduced Hi-Speed USB mode, it boosted bandwidth to 480Mbit/s or 60Mbyte/s. The forty-fold jump from the original USB's 12Mbit/s has paved way for a number of improved devices. As we've seen, there is a dual SDTV tuner, each of the tuners consumes 8Mbit/s after the MPEG-2 conversion. For DVB-T/B USB tuners, each HDTV stream requires 55Mbit/s or 11% of what USB 2.0 offers. Technically, Certified Wireless USB can handle several HDTV channels simultaneously. For a few USB Video Class-enabled camcorders available, DV mandates 3.6Mbyte/s (or 43Mbit/s) for the linear video stream; it fills up a hard drive at a rate of 13GB per hour.
As for a lot of USB storage, burning a DVD-R at its fastest rate or 16x takes up 21MByte/s or 169Mbit/s. That translates to 35% of overall USB 2.0 speed. Hard drives, however, demand huge amount of bandwidth that USB 2.0 cannot meet; we've seen a USB 2.0 hard drive has sustained 36 to 40MBbyte/s in the absolute best scenario. USB flash drives have also reached 33MByte/s, but there seems to be some limitations in the NAND itself so you shouldn't expect their speeds to skyrocket in a next year or two. For most consumers, there shouldn't be a problem with running out of bandwidth.
Can your amazingly fast joystick port run HDTV?
If USB 2.0 could do this, a joystick should be a walk in the park
smerf
-
A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.
But it does register many states for a given reaction. You move from left to right and you get a state of no direction for some time. You press a fire button and change directions independently so there's possibility of states that last for millisecond or less.
And as far as the argument:
>This is not relevant, because the games don't actually do it. And no one seems to notice.
You can't base it on experience of noticing but have to take into account the actually what can happen. Just like audio digitizing and MP3 conversion from wave files.
-
You are being biased.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
If I go from 680x0 to 80486, I can say they are NOT compatible. If I go from 68000 to 68020, you can't treat it the same way "NOT compatible."
Did you even bother to read... No wait, by your responses I already know the answer to that one.
That's being biased.
I really don't.
-
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Did you even bother to read... No wait, by your responses I already know the answer to that one.
I really don't.
You are biased if you think the 68000 is incompatible with 680x0 processors. They are opcode compatible although there are minor differences. I already stated the problem with frequency changes. You don't know what biased means although you are exemplifying it.
-
Hi,
@Amigaksi,
Try this on your amazingly fast joystick port:
7. Do you need USB 2.0?
...
I already admitted for buffer transfers, USB is faster than joystick port. But Amiga doesn't use joystick port for buffer-type transfers.
-
To eliminate 16-bit mode is a MAJOR difference as there are millions of DOS programs and Windows 3.x programs out there. As far as I know, you can disable caching on the later 680x0 processors to make them more compatible. Strictly, you know the frequencies are incompatible but at least they can be called opcode compatible.
No they can't. Many opcodes are not supported on later 680x0 processors that were supported by earlier ones.
The 68020 changed the behaviour of some opcodes on the 68000 that will cause any software using them to crash. You cannot move bits from or to the status register outside of supervisor mode on 68020+. Since most operations on this register were actually condition code related, they added opcodes to read/write the CCR instead none of which can be used on the 68000. So, you can write code that uses the SR in userspace on the 68000 that won't work on the 68020+ or code that uses the CCR in userspace on the 68020 which won't work on the 68000. You either use separate code for each CPU or you install a trap handler of some sort for the privilege violation. It cannot be called opcode compatible any more.
Next, the 68040 threw away dozens of valid 68881 opcodes. You cannot use any of the transcendal operations or use the 68881/2 mathematical constants. You will get an illegal exception if you try to do so. Again, you must either write code that does not use these opcodes, or you install a handler for the unimplemented instruction exception and emulate them on trap.
Next, the 68060 threw away 64-bit integer arithmetic (multiply and divide) that were implemented in 68020, 68030 and 68040. You cannot use any of these opcodes without invoking an illegal instruction exception. Again, you must rewrite your code not to use them or install a handler for the unimplemented instruction exception and emulate them on trap.
The 680x0 series is not fully backwards compatible purely in hardware. It must use software assist. It says so in my copies of the user manuals and the examples above are all easily demonstrated.
-
You are biased if you think the 68000 is incompatible with 680x0 processors.
There are incompatabilities and they're so great that they need emulation to cover. They also change from model to model.
minor differences.
So minor that the Phase5 had to provide dummy 68040 libraries to even allow an 060 based accelerator card to boot.
You don't know what biased means although you are exemplifying it.
Disagreeing with your patent and demonstratable nonsense!=biased.
You are SG and I claim my £5.
-
So minor that the Phase5 had to provide dummy 68040 libraries to even allow an 060 based accelerator card to boot. 5.
Mind you, CyberPatcher was a fantastic system though. Why trap unimplemented instructions when you can replace them with a direct branch to the handler code after the first trap?
-edit-
You are biased if you think the 68000 is incompatible with 680x0 processors.
What's biased about it? It's just the way it is. Motorola actually did a good job in making the SR privileged and dumping the least used instructions into software emulation for later CPUs. It allowed them to focus on making the silicon faster for the vast majority of object code.
You only have to look at the 68040 FPU performance compared to the 68882 or the 060 performance compared to the 040 to see they were right to do so. The only thing that surprised me was dropping the 64-bit arithmetic in the 060. I wouldn't have thought that was underutilized in the previous models.
-
There are incompatabilities and they're so great that they need emulation to cover. They also change from model to model.
...
"Great" for you. They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.
>Disagreeing with your patent and demonstratable nonsense!=biased.
Nonsense that I think 68000 is compatible with 68020 and you don't. If you can establish that 0x86 is less incompatible, perhaps I can take you seriously.
-
Mind you, CyberPatcher was a fantastic system though. Why trap unimplemented instructions when you can replace them with a direct branch to the handler code after the first trap?
I ended up using Oxypatcher in the end for pretty much this reason. The speed boost was phenominal - what would take me 4 or more hours to render would take me a little over 2.
Further to my original point though. Try removing 68040.library on an Amiga that uses an 040 processor and see how far it gets you...
-
"Great" for you. They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.
See my previous post.
>Disagreeing with your patent and demonstratable nonsense!=biased.
Nonsense that I think 68000 is compatible with 68020 and you don't.
Citation please. I think you'll find no such post where I say these two models are "incompatable".
-
This thread reminds me of another famous argument. Check out 2:59 on this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q2ABS7wSxU&feature=topvideos
:roflmao:
-
Nonsense that I think 68000 is compatible with 68020 and you don't. If you can establish that 0x86 is less incompatible, perhaps I can take you seriously.
I'm confused by this whole argument. The differences between the various 680X0 revisions are well-known and well documented. The differences between the various 80X86 revisions are well-known and well documented as well. So, any code that relies on a feature of an earlier version of a CPU that doesn't exist or has changed in a future version of a CPU will be incompatible without some sort of workaround, e.g. 68040.library.
I don't see the lack of VM86 when an Intel or AMD processor is running in 64-bit mode as a limitation. One could suppose, however, that if Intel had designed the x64 model, it might have included it. Intel chose to focus on the Itanium, though, and the market adopted an arguably incomplete model produced by AMD.
As an architect/engineer/administrator/monkey of Windows systems, the last thing I want to support is software running in NTVDM, whether it's DOS or Windows based. If you're not gaming, NTVDM is wonderful; however, I've always disliked not being able to arbitrarily choose the target VM of a Windows application. It's either shared or isolated. It would have been nice to include support for multiple shared VMs that didn't require working around limitations in the GUI.
There. That was a Microsoft criticism. I have lots of them, but I still like Windows, and in general, Microsoft does a great job of making sure my business runs smoothly. Don't start with the virus stuff. Please. Humans work for Microsoft, and humans are fallible. That's never going to change. Somewhere underneath all the logos and litigation, there's a software engineer just like you and me, working under extreme amounts of pressure, just doing his best to feed his family and produce a product of which he can be proud, in so far as the project and the market will let him.
-
"Great" for you. They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.
whatwhatwhatwhat!?
That's incredible, if you didn't exist, someone should have invented you: every night I come here to see if there are any news, and you always bring to me some delight.
Ok, so X64 architecture has dropped 16 bit compatibility. And now? How can we live with this? "there are millions of DOS/Win31 programs out there". One for every gameport? Once again, I have to inform you that we are in (late) 2009, 10 years after that 16-bit programming has been considered "deprecated" on the x86 architecture, and that today almost nobody still uses DOS. So anyone willing to use ancient code and ancient programs has the ability to run them on a virtual machine.
What are you? Some sort of technoecologist, desperately fighting for obsolete solutions preservation?
-
Yeah, the reason for backward compatibility is to provide a bridge so that software manufacturers can catch up with the new system. You provide it for a reasonable amount of time and then you move on. The only reason anyone is interested in running 15+ year old software for the Amiga is because the company that produced the Amiga *DIED* 15 years ago. If they had survived *nobody* would care if the current Amiga OS was compatible with with the old stuff.
I couldn't do 10% of what I do now on 15 year old software. Life moves on. That's the way in the computer world. In the Mac world Carbon is finally being put to bed, it's junk but it had to be there initially, now it's just a waste of good electrons... This is what happens in living systems. You evolve and progress or you die.
whatwhatwhatwhat!?
That's incredible, if you didn't exist, someone should have invented you: every night I come here to see if there are any news, and you always bring to me some delight.
Ok, so X64 architecture has dropped 16 bit compatibility. And now? How can we live with this? "there are millions of DOS/Win31 programs out there". One for every gameport? Once again, I have to inform you that we are in (late) 2009, 10 years after that 16-bit programming has been considered "deprecated" on the x86 architecture, and that today almost nobody still uses DOS. So anyone willing to use ancient code and ancient programs has the ability to run them on a virtual machine.
What are you? Some sort of technoecologist, desperately fighting for obsolete solutions preservation?
-
Symbolically however, the more scans that hit (1/On) the 'harder' the result.
I was referring to direction, deceleration and acceleration on the classic digital joystick.
-
See my previous post.
...
I did, it's your normal misunderstanding.
>Citation please. I think you'll find no such post where I say these two models are "incompatable".
So they are compatible like it states here:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68020/
-
whatwhatwhatwhat!?
That's incredible, if you didn't exist, someone should have invented you: every night I come here to see if there are any news, and you always bring to me some delight.
Ok, so X64 architecture has dropped 16 bit compatibility. And now? How can we live with this? "there are millions of DOS/Win31 programs out there". One for every gameport? Once again, I have to inform you that we are in (late) 2009, 10 years after that 16-bit programming has been considered "deprecated" on the x86 architecture, and that today almost nobody still uses DOS. So anyone willing to use ancient code and ancient programs has the ability to run them on a virtual machine.
What are you? Some sort of technoecologist, desperately fighting for obsolete solutions preservation?
Some people still use DOS and Win98SE and other OSes that boot up in real-mode (16-bit).
The argument is whether it's considered compatible w/o 16-bit support not how many people still use it. VGA still has CGA modes but hardly anyone uses them.
Insults can be said by anyone-- so stick to rational arguments.
-
"Great" for you. They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.
Both Real86 and Virtual86 modes are available in legacy mode.
-
Some people still use DOS and Win98SE and other OSes that boot up in real-mode (16-bit).
Run it in legacy mode.
The argument is whether it's considered compatible w/o 16-bit support not how many people still use it
The legacy mode includes support for Real86 and Virtual86 modes.
-
To be fair, the PS3 also has a weaker GPU and a worse memory scheme than the Xbox 360. I see these to be more of a problem. Especially since Sony does have tools available to get you to use the SPU's relatively well even if you don't know how to (API's even :P).
Actually there is a lot of argument that the memory is more efficient and that clever coding of the SPEs can make up for the limitations of the GPU and even surpass the 360s one.
Personally, even if true I see that as a cop out. Surely the point of a good games console is to make the developers job as easy as possible.
It also cannot alter the fact that the Xbox 360 could use almost all its memory for textures if the software only needed a tiny amount for its use, and vice versa. Plus there are a lot of the functions the PS3 has (voice chat in-game, custom soundtracks, etc) that were tagged on after launch and require a LOT more memory taken away from the games than the Xbox, as the Xbox had those functions built-in to the OS and optimised for its allocated memory space since day one. But we digress off topic now.
-
Actually there is a lot of argument that the memory is more efficient and that clever coding of the SPEs can make up for the limitations of the GPU and even surpass the 360s one.
Personally, even if true I see that as a cop out. Surely the point of a good games console is to make the developers job as easy as possible.
It also cannot alter the fact that the Xbox 360 could use almost all its memory for textures if the software only needed a tiny amount for its use, and vice versa. Plus there are a lot of the functions the PS3 has (voice chat in-game, custom soundtracks, etc) that were tagged on after launch and require a LOT more memory taken away from the games than the Xbox, as the Xbox had those functions built-in to the OS and optimised for its allocated memory space since day one. But we digress off topic now.
One of the major features of NVIDIA's G80 is the decoupled shader and texture units. ATI Xenos also includes this design.
-
I was referring to direction, deceleration and acceleration on the classic digital joystick.
Indeed. It may be more accurate to sample quicker, but if someone presses left then right, then lets go of the joystick entirely, all within a screen redraw - your game does not need to know that. In fact if your game DID react to that action it would seem like the game is not responding correctly to user input, as far as the person at the controls was concerned.
This cannot be compared to audio where you are trying to replicate an analog signal by digital means, so naturally the more detail you can record the better. Whereas you do not need to record exactly what the persons hands are doing to sufficiently replicate what the game needs to know to react fast enough for it to appear seamless to a human being.
Maybe if we 1kHz refresh rates on our TV/monitors we could perceive the difference (even if we cannot outright see every single frame itself) but we do not. Its just logical that if you have a 60Hz screen update then that is the absolute fastest you need to update your game state and so the fastest you need to capture joystick input.
All your game needs to know is the state of the joystick right at the moment it needs to take action based on that input. You are only going to take action once per screen redraw or again, it will appear to the user that the game is reacting oddly to user input.
In fact, most games may react even slower. I remember distinctly that some games seem too sensitive to user input and could have done with making sure you are pressing the same button for several screen redraws before reacting. Its all about synchronising the game response with the users reaction time.
So again, the polling speed of the Amiga joyport is no more useful for gaming than USB1. Alas a PC keyboard seems pretty slow to react but its still "fast enough" for most games, to the point that home-made MAME cabinets using PCs just have a little keyboard emulator circuit wired up to the joystick and buttons.
-
Retail space wouldn’t indicate market size.
Reference 1 http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/3766/pc-largest-single-platform-for-gaming-revenue-is-about-11-billion
The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
• In emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe the PC has become the de facto platform of choice for games as console systems have not had major penetration in most countries.
• Even in North America and Western Europe the PC is the leading single platform for games with over $6 billion in combined revenue from those markets.
• Broadband penetration has been a key driver of growth and revenue growth for PC games, and is directly tied to growth in broadband penetration.
• The three biggest trends in 2008 were 1) the growth of online digital distribution via services like Valve’s Steam; 2) the growth of free games with a virtual item purchase model and 3) the growing presence of game cards at major retailers like 7-Eleven.
• Top PC games regularly generate over $50 million at retail revenue but can generate substantially more in subscription and/or add-on revenue.
• Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the leading products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. World of Warcraft is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue. The Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft outsold its predecessor. In 2008, two major new subscription MMOGs (Warhammer Online and Age of Conan) sold over 1 million units at retail.
• Digital distribution, free-to-play models and retail game cards are well-established in Asia, but just starting to emerge in North America and Europe.
Reference 2 http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;5
• According to the PCGA's 2008 Horizon's Report, PC gaming software saw global revenues reach $12.7 billion in 2008, a year-over-year rise of $1.9 billion, or nearly 18 percent. Overall, the study found that the PC software and hardware market stood at $68 billion in 2008.
Reference 3 http://www.edge-online.com/news/ea-pc-becoming-worlds-largest-games-platform
• "Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has said that “the online part of our business is growing as much as 60% year over year" and that the PC is rapidly becoming the largest gaming platform in the world."
Retailers are not in it to make a loss. Space costs money. PC games don't make as much for them because they don't sell as much.
I doubt very much that PC game sales would get anywhere near console game sales, may be if you compare individual consoles yes, but not the whole console game market.
-
Basically we are looking at a trend of a shift to PCs from specialised game machines. If it continues and there is evidence, at least in Asia, that it is continuing, PCs will overtake the specialised game machines in total. The market is not static, what is today may not be tomorrow. And you are right, one indication will be the stores, they will lag the trend only by a month or so, but they will reflect local and not global preferences.
-
Retailers are not in it to make a loss.
.
Offcourse they don't.
Space costs money. PC games don't make as much for them because they don't sell as much.
I doubt very much that PC game sales would get anywhere near console game sales, may be if you compare individual consoles yes, but not the whole console game market.
These consoles are treated as individual platforms. The PC(Games For Windows) is just like any other gaming platforms.
Dell’s direct sale model doesn’t require the classic retail model.
-
Offcourse they don't.
These consoles are treated as individual platforms. The PC(Games For Windows) is just like any other gaming platforms.
Dell’s direct sale model doesn’t require the classic retail model.
"Pssst, hey buddy, here is a 50 if you display my console games up front k".
-
"Pssst, hey buddy, here is a 50 if you display my console games up front k".
50 aint gonna cut it.
At EB during the time when Gamecube was out, Nintendo was at the back of the store no advertising in store, nothing. When the Wii and DS started to boom, mainly because of Nintendo's marketing, Nintendo now gets the most shelf space-the DS alone get as much as PC, plus the Wii, at the front of the store. PC's games are somewhere down the back. Successful sales get you more prominent shelf space, it must be since the PS1 and N64 days that PC got more space than consoles.
-
I did, it's your normal misunderstanding.
Aparently I understand enough about the differences to know that as each model was produced, more and more emulation had to be put in place to cover. The situation by the time we get to the 040 and the 060 those differences are so great that AmigaOS will not boot without having patches in place. Something you are trying to squirm around that now by citing the 68020 only. Bt
>Citation please. I think you'll find no such post where I say these two models are "incompatable".
So they are compatible like it states here:
Oh no you don't, you accused me of being:
biased if you think the 68000 is incompatible with 680x0 processors.
So again, citation please. I think you'll find no such post where I say these two models are "incompatable".
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68020/
LOL! You call that evidence? So we have Karlos who has the actual Motorola manuals, which explain the various difficulties and potential coding pitfalls with regard the 68k. You have the rest of the Amiga using world knowing full well that if you yank the 040 library from an 040 Amiga system it won't boot (same for the 060) and you have what amounts to a magazine brochure... Come back when you get a clue.
-
The Great Windows Disk Access Caper:
as an experiment in leanness I turn off file indexing in Windows XP. It takes longer to search for files, but at the same time there are no random disk accesses. I'm still being taxed up to %20 CPU at idle, but this probably a 3rd party app doing that. I shall have a look for it.
-
@the_leander
You can boot an 040 machine without the 040.library, so long as you don't run SetPatch (and I mean, come on, who wants to have bugs in their OS fixed anyway, right) and go straight for a no Startup-Sequence boot.
What you get then is something that claims to be 68040 without any FPU support. Data caches are also typically disabled, since without the 68040.library you don't get your MMU support in order to mark different regions as cacheable or not (see first attachment). So without the MMU, all memory is marked non cacheable since ChipRAM and cache don't really mix.
Running SetPatch installs the 68040 library, adding handlers for the unimplemented instructions, enables the MMU and turns on caching for fast memory (see second attachment)
So in short, yes you can "boot" an 040 system without the library, but it really isn't worth it.
-
You evolve and progress or you die.
Seems like Amiga people chosed neither... They definitely don't want to progress or evolve, neither want to die. Or at least admit they are dead.
Guess this whole thread shows that clearly. Amiga is dead but its gameport is still the best... and so on.
-
Amiga is dead but its gameport is still the best... and so on.
But is it? I can plug a large hard disk in what passes for my PC's gameport today and transfer files through it at over 400Mb/s.
I can't really do that on the amiga gameport.
-
So in short, yes you can "boot" an 040 system without the library, but it really isn't worth it.
I stand corrected. However, having to disable important parts of the OS as well as hobbling the cpu and leaving you needing prayer that what you're using doesn't do anything that would normally be caught by 68040.library to me seems even worse then it simply refusing to boot at all.
-
But is it? I can plug a large hard disk in what passes for my PC's gameport today and transfer files through it at over 400Mb/s.
I can't really do that on the amiga gameport.
I think warpdesign was being ironic :)
-
I don't see why amigaksi can't acknowledge the Catweasel Mk IV, I assume it has it's own clock/timer on board.:bitch:
-
So in short, yes you can "boot" an 040 system without the library, but it really isn't worth it.
I stand corrected.
My system had any number of patches that necessitated the need for the MMU's presence. Having to loose most of the performance both in terms of software patches and hobbling the cpu would imho be as bad as it simply not booting - the result would be much the same as I wouldn't be able to use half of the software I owned at the time. Also having to pray that none of the software I could still use called one of those unsupported instructions does not inspire confidence.
-
The Great Windows Disk Access Caper:
as an experiment in leanness I turn off file indexing in Windows XP. It takes longer to search for files, but at the same time there are no random disk accesses. I'm still being taxed up to %20 CPU at idle, but this probably a 3rd party app doing that. I shall have a look for it.
I've always disabled the indexing service on the XP machines I've worked with/on, it really drags it down. I mean, if you're spending that much time finding things, you really have personal problems...
;)
-
I don't see why amigaksi can't acknowledge the Catweasel Mk IV, I assume it has it's own clock/timer on board.:bitch:
Because that'd blow his argument up! Don't you follow this thread? He's being "objective" - which apparently means you have to dismiss any information that is contrary to your position and call anyone who points this out biased.
:laughing:
-
I stand corrected.
Not entirely, though. The stability of the 040 system, if allowed to boot up to a full workbench without the 040.library would be seriously compromised. Any code compiled for an FPU will fail the moment it calls any operation the 040 had to emulate.
-
I think warpdesign was being ironic :)
No, I realise that. It was for our "amiga joyport is superior" friend.
-
CD32 vs SNES:
Q: How big was the SNES marketing in the USA?
In Australia the C64 and the A500 were the most popular games machine until Playstation came along. SNES got the highest penetration because of Mario and Street Fighter, from anecdotal evidence.
I realise it was the -soon to be bankrupt Escoms- job to reissue the CD32, so ignore that fact.
I don't have much energy for this argument, just mild curiosity. On the plus side I'm think you could turn all this into a book: a final footnote in the Amiga history.
-
CD32 vs SNES:
Q: How big was the SNES marketing in the USA?
In Australia the C64 and the A500 were the most popular games machine until Playstation came along. SNES got the highest penetration because of Mario and Street Fighter, from anecdotal evidence.
I wouldn't have thought the A500's popularity extended till the PS came out. I was a student working nights at a major toy retailer in 1990 or so, and we kept 5 A500's and games, but the SNES software outsold it at least 10:1
-
Just when you thought it was safe to kiss this thing goodbye: RAM: disk. Discuss.
-
Because that'd blow his argument up! Don't you follow this thread? He's being "objective" - which apparently means you have to dismiss any information that is contrary to your position and call anyone who points this out biased.
:laughing:
or dismiss any information that is contrary to your position by saying that you personally don't use it, and therefore don't need it and so it doesn't matter..finished off with LOL
-
Just when you thought it was safe to kiss this thing goodbye: RAM: disk. Discuss.
I'll take the defense... Hard drives are so fast nowadays you don't need it. Vista can make use of flash drives for RAM.
-
Just when you thought it was safe to kiss this thing goodbye: RAM: disk. Discuss.
I like the RAM disk. I like RAD even more, in that you can copy a minimal OS install into one and it's very nippy.
The original idea behind the RAM disk was for rapid temporary storage, especially on floppy based Amigas. If you have a fast hard disk, there's less reason to use it. The other use for it is to hold your environment data. However, it isn't really best suited for this, particularly if there are lots of small files (as ENV tends to become). HappyEnv eliminates this problem.
So, the question remains, what does your RAM disk get used for now? Well, there's still T: and CLIPS:
Does anybody with a hard disk make regular use of their RAM disk for temporary extractions and so on these days?
-
1. Hard drives are fast, but files are so big. So access from hard drive on a PC will never be as fast as access from a dynamic RAM: drive.
2. Writing and deleting files frequently as would happen if you used your hard drive as a dumping ground for eg unarchiving stuff which you delete afterwards results in disk fragmentation, reducing your PC's performance over time.
3. Its a pain to have to delete unwanted files, wouldn't you just prefer they weren't there next time ypou booted... oh hang-on no-one here boots up anymore so yeah you have to remember to delete otherwise you'll soon have a lot of crap you don't want filling mots of yor hard drive.( don't tell me, hard drives are so BIG now THAT akso doesn't matter).
4. what about installing and running software in RAM just to check it out?
-
Re: RAM/RAD disk
A user could get confused and not back up a file to the hard drive. It's better to let the OS do this. Windows can pick the best files to put in RAM itself.
-
1. Hard drives are fast, but files are so big. So access from hard drive on a PC will never be as fast as access from a dynamic RAM: drive.
Erm, that's a bit of a silly way to put it. Really big files aren't going to fit comfortably into memory either. Chances are they'll get paged out to hard disk anyway.
2. Writing and deleting files frequently as would happen if you used your hard drive as a dumping ground for eg unarchiving stuff which you delete afterwards results in disk fragmentation, reducing your PC's performance over time.
That really depends on your filesystem. Using your Amiga's RAM disk to save disk fragmentation is all well and good but you're ultimately just fragmenting the memory instead. Which isn't a great idea. With 256MB of ram, I've been unable to run an application needing 32MB without a reboot due to this issue.
3. Its a pain to have to delete unwanted files, wouldn't you just prefer they weren't there next time ypou booted... oh hang-on no-one here boots up anymore so yeah you have to remember to delete otherwise you'll soon have a lot of crap you don't want filling mots of yor hard drive.( don't tell me, hard drives are so BIG now THAT akso doesn't matter).
Use /tmp for your dumping ground and use tmpwatch. Problem solved.
4. what about installing and running software in RAM just to check it out?
Sure, that's handy sometimes.
Incidentally, you do realise that RAM disks are available on other operating systems, right?
For example:
$ mkdir /var/ramdisk
$ mount -t tmpfs none /var/ramdisk -o size=16m
Et voila, a 16MiB ram disk. It's actually more like RAD, in that it's fixed size, but like RAM: it's entirely volatile.
-
Erm, that's a bit of a silly way to put it. Really big files aren't going to fit comfortably into memory either. Chances are they'll get paged out to hard disk anyway.
That really depends on your filesystem. Using your Amiga's RAM disk to save disk fragmentation is all well and good but you're ultimately just fragmenting the memory instead. Which isn't a great idea. With 256MB of ram, I've been unable to run an application needing 32MB without a reboot due to this issue.
Use /tmp for your dumping ground and use tmpwatch. Problem solved.
Sure, that's handy sometimes.
Incidentally, you do realise that RAM disks are available on other operating systems, right?
For example:
Et voila, a 16MiB ram disk. It's actually more like RAD, in that it's fixed size, but like RAM: it's entirely volatile.
I was thinking more of windows regarding fragmentation. I've never experienced the RAM: fragmentation due to reading and writing to the RAM: disk. i used it to store animation frames, which then color reduced, resized, deleted and replaced with the processed frames, which were finally compressed into an animation automatically with an arexx script.
One of the features of the Amiga's ram: disk is that its dynamic, only as big as it needs to be and handles transparently for the user by the OS. Can this be done in Linux ?
-
I get a feeling is designed around manipulated big files. e.g. a spreadsheet or a powerpoint presentation. Also it would optimised (not the best choice of words) for larger hard drives.
It's only us (ex)Amigans that notice it's poor performance on small files, include mp3/mp4 sized files. (Yes I know EIDE drives on the Amiga were slow, I was lucky enough to have SCSI II on my A2000)
-
Erm, that's a bit of a silly way to put it. Really big files aren't going to fit comfortably into memory either. Chances are they'll get paged out to hard disk anyway.
That really depends on your filesystem. Using your Amiga's RAM disk to save disk fragmentation is all well and good but you're ultimately just fragmenting the memory instead. Which isn't a great idea. With 256MB of ram, I've been unable to run an application needing 32MB without a reboot due to this issue.
Use /tmp for your dumping ground and use tmpwatch. Problem solved.
Sure, that's handy sometimes.
Incidentally, you do realise that RAM disks are available on other operating systems, right?
For example:
Et voila, a 16MiB ram disk. It's actually more like RAD, in that it's fixed size, but like RAM: it's entirely volatile.
I actually shoved 8GB of RAM into my Linux box and stuck /tmp into tmpfs as well as commonly used users tmp directories. Its very handly and there is still plenty of RAM left for normal caching. For example the first login to KDE is quite slow, the second login is lightening fast.
You also forgot to mention that tmpfs has a fixed size but not a fixed size in memory. It only uses as much RAM as its contents and if it gets full it pages itself to disk.
Though, how did we end up on this subject anyway? It doesn't have any bearing on the thread that I can see.
-
I was thinking more of windows regarding fragmentation. I've never experienced the RAM: fragmentation due to reading and writing to the RAM: disk. i used it to store animation frames, which then color reduced, resized, deleted and replaced with the processed frames, which were finally compressed into an animation automatically with an arexx script.
Put one large file (ie around half the free memory) into the ram disk, a small file, then another large one. Now delete the two large files and leave the smaller one. Chances are, your available free memory is split into two big chunks.
One of the features of the Amiga's ram: disk is that its dynamic, only as big as it needs to be and handles transparently for the user by the OS. Can this be done in Linux ?
Not sure, I've never tried it. Probably not, at least not the way I suggested earlier.
-edit-
You also forgot to mention that tmpfs has a fixed size but not a fixed size in memory. It only uses as much RAM as its contents and if it gets full it pages itself to disk.
There you go then :)
-
I should point out that under ext3 etc, "large files" in linux are only as large as their contents too, due to sparse file support. Instead of allocating N empty blocks for a large file on disk, it only allocates blocks that are written to.
-
For example the first login to KDE is quite slow, the second login is lightening fast.
I totally gave up on KDE with 4.x *shudder*
-
still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.
What about Windows? Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..
-
Found one, game over plyr 1:
http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php
-
still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.
What about Windows? Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..
google: Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for windows ram disk
doh
-
google: Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for windows ram disk
doh
Results 1 - 10 of about 74,900 for amiga ram disk.
Bugger! :lol:
Failed at googlewar.
-
Found one, game over plyr 1:
http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php
what was interesting about this was this:
"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."
So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue. Quite simply, they aren't.
secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and
Thirdly $50!!!!!! or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that. Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..
-
what was interesting about this was this:
"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."
So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue. Quite simply, they aren't.
secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and
Thirdly $50!!!!!! or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that. Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..
RAM is precious... if you want super duper mega ultra highspeed large storage... then you use an SSD... but to be honest I find a nice modern ordinary Harddrive fast enough... even my laptop drive is fast enough for 24bit/96Khz multitrack recording!
-
@stefcep2
Don't conflate seek times with transfer rates. For large files seek time is usually insignificant compared to the time taken to read or write the data. Here, transfer rates dominate. Now, RAM is certainly faster than hard disk here too, but what you have to consider is whether or not it matters. When streaming blue ray content, for example, existing SATA drives have ample transfer speeds, so you don't gain anything from putting it in RAM.
Conversely, for repeated access to lots of small files, seek times dominate. However, modern hard disks tend to have large caches to mitigate this and filesystems may add additional memory based caching on top of that too.
-
what was interesting about this was this:
"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."
So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue. Quite simply, they aren't.
secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and
Thirdly $50!!!!!! or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that. Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,800,000 for free windows ram disk
-
CD32 vs SNES:
Q: How big was the SNES marketing in the USA?
In Australia the C64 and the A500 were the most popular games machine until Playstation came along.
In May, Nintendo's Wii console sold 289,500 units; Microsoft sold 175,000 Xbox 360 consoles. Sony's PlayStation 3 trailed behind with 131,000 units, and actually sold 117,000 PlayStation 2 consoles. Kotick said that because the Wii and Xbox 360 are selling so well, games generate a better return on invested capital than they do on the PlayStation 3. He also added that Sony's games division lost $597 million last year, and it may need to risk more losses if the PlayStation 3 is to evolve.
This is what I was talking about, the Playstation 2 is still selling under the inertia of its games. Not everyone wants the latest, shiniest, fastest.
-
Yeah, the reason for backward compatibility is to provide a bridge so that software manufacturers can catch up with the new system. You provide it for a reasonable amount of time and then you move on. The only reason anyone is interested in running 15+ year old software for the Amiga is because the company that produced the Amiga *DIED* 15 years ago. If they had survived *nobody* would care if the current Amiga OS was compatible with with the old stuff.
I couldn't do 10% of what I do now on 15 year old software. Life moves on. That's the way in the computer world. In the Mac world Carbon is finally being put to bed, it's junk but it had to be there initially, now it's just a waste of good electrons... This is what happens in living systems. You evolve and progress or you die.
Believe it or not some software is more efficiently done in real-mode. You get to take over the system and write software that works almost exactly as you want it (not as good as Amiga) but as close as you can get it. Win98SE, Win 3.x, DOS, and some others still support real mode. I still use MS-Word 2.0-- it's fast and loads almost instantly and the OS to use it fits on a floppy drive.
-
Aparently I understand enough about the differences to know that as each model was produced, more and more emulation had to be put in place to cover. The situation by the time we get to the 040 and the 060 those differences are so great that AmigaOS will not boot without having patches in place. Something you are trying to squirm around that now by citing the 68020 only. Bt
...
Looks like you corrected yourself here. Also, your "great" word is questionable. All of my 68000 software runs fine on various AGA/ECS machines with various 680x0 accelerators and no libraries are involved.
>Oh no you don't, you accused me of being:
In post #1169, you stated there are incompatibilities and you also claimed they are "great". If the incompatibilities are great, that sums up to saying the processors are incompatible. If they are minor and involve some rarely used instruction, the processors are still considered compatible.
>So again, citation please. I think you'll find no such post where I say these two models are "incompatable".
It sums up to that w/post #1169 and word "great."
>LOL! You call that evidence? So we have Karlos who has the actual Motorola manuals, which explain the various difficulties and potential coding pitfalls with regard the 68k. ..
I also have many manuals stating they are opcode compatible. I wanted to give a link on web since I don't want to go through all my manuals.
>You have the rest of the Amiga using world knowing full well that if you yank the 040 library from an 040 Amiga system it won't boot (same for the 060) and you have what amounts to a magazine brochure... Come back when you get a clue.
Looks like you corrected yourself here. So you needed to get a clue. I use boot disk-based applications that don't involve installing any libraries.
-
Believe it or not some software is more efficiently done in real-mode. You get to take over the system and write software that works almost exactly as you want it (not as good as Amiga) but as close as you can get it. Win98SE, Win 3.x, DOS, and some others still support real mode. I still use MS-Word 2.0-- it's fast and loads almost instantly and the OS to use it fits on a floppy drive.
What is this "floppy disk" of which you speak? I don't think I've seen one on a modern computer?
-
Seems like Amiga people chosed neither... They definitely don't want to progress or evolve, neither want to die. Or at least admit they are dead.
Guess this whole thread shows that clearly. Amiga is dead but its gameport is still the best... and so on.
You need to go on with "and so on" and state the other reasons why Amiga is still useful. If PC is playing catch-up in some areas, PC needs to evolve in those areas so you have no argument.
And why does one have to update to 3Ghz if the work can easily be done with a sub 100Mhz machine with a superior direct to hardware compatibility where you know exactly what is happening in the system from software perspective and don't have to play guessing games.
-
What is this "floppy disk" of which you speak? I don't think I've seen one on a modern computer?
Because you live in a world of illusion where bloated applications and inexact OSes rule and overrun by spyware/viruses and require gigabytes of data to keep your OSes functioning.
-
I stand corrected.
My system had any number of patches that necessitated the need for the MMU's presence. Having to loose most of the performance both in terms of software patches and hobbling the cpu would imho be as bad as it simply not booting - the result would be much the same as I wouldn't be able to use half of the software I owned at the time. Also having to pray that none of the software I could still use called one of those unsupported instructions does not inspire confidence.
Get a clue. I am talking 680x0. There is NO "great" difference to need a library. You want to exaggerate and distort the truth and claim there's a great difference then that's as good as saying they are incompatible. Biased.
-
Because that'd blow his argument up! Don't you follow this thread? He's being "objective" - which apparently means you have to dismiss any information that is contrary to your position and call anyone who points this out biased.
:laughing:
You are the one correcting yourself and you're the one who is baised exaggerating minor differences and dare speak of "objectivity." You have first BE OBJECTIVE before you can accuse others; hyprocrite.
-
Get a clue. I am talking 680x0. There is NO "great" difference to need a library. You want to exaggerate and distort the truth and claim there's a great difference then that's as good as saying they are incompatible. Biased.
See my earlier post. Any software needing 68881/2 instructions not directly implemented in the 040 FPU will fail on 68040 without the 68040.library loaded. You will just get a fatal F line exception based guru instead. Beyond that, all software will run significantly slower without the 68040.library since the data cache cannot be readily enabled without the library.
The situation is even worse on the 060 where any 32x32->64 bit integer multiplication will fail without the proper 060 support code installed.
They are not minor differences.
-
See my earlier post. Any software needing 68881/2 instructions not directly implemented in the 040 FPU will fail on 68040 without the 68040.library loaded. You will just get a fatal F line exception based guru instead. Beyond that, all software will run significantly slower without the 68040.library since the data cache cannot be readily enabled without the library.
The situation is even worse on the 060 where any 32x32->64 bit integer multiplication will fail without the proper 060 support code installed.
They are not minor differences.
But we are talking compatibility; to use the enhanced features, you can use a library or enable them directly with some MOVEC or whatever. It's better that they don't enable the enhanced features by default. 68881 is not a standard feature of 68000 machines.
-
The 68881 is the official motorola FPU for use with 68000, 68010 and even low speed 68020. 68882 is the official motorola FPU for use with higer speed 68020 and 68030. If you have an FPU for a 68000 machine it will almost certainly be a 68881.
MOVE to/from CCR is indeed better but it only exists with 68010 and above. You can't use it in 68000 object code.
-
You need to go on with "and so on" and state the other reasons why Amiga is still useful. If PC is playing catch-up in some areas, PC needs to evolve in those areas so you have no argument.
The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.
You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?
And why does one have to update to 3Ghz if the work can easily be done with a sub 100Mhz machine with a superior direct to hardware compatibility where you know exactly what is happening in the system from software perspective and don't have to play guessing games.
Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
-
Deja Vu. I think amigaksi is a die hard strategist. He will hold onto his bad play until you a) Flinch b) Make a mistake.
-
Because you live in a world of illusion where bloated applications and inexact OSes rule and overrun by spyware/viruses and require gigabytes of data to keep your OSes functioning.
Great sense of humor you have there, Askii. Have you heard the saying 'if the only tool you have is a hammer evyerthing ooks like a nail"?
-
Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
Tut, what's wrong with good old ProTracker on a 512K A500? The timing is perfect and has no latency bullcrap like you get with your tragically inferior generic PC rubbish. Macbook Pro indeed :rolleyes:
-
Because you live in a world of illusion where bloated applications and inexact OSes rule and overrun by spyware/viruses and require gigabytes of data to keep your OSes functioning.
So use Linux. When people cotton on to the fact that they don't have to pay for it (I can't underestimate the Sadomasochistic nature of ppl), the games and apps will come pouring in. It's no wonder M$ is so desperate to get a foothold on the internet, they know the OS war is lost. In this day and age any 2 bit hack can put together an operating system. The future lies in services.
Anything else?
-
Tut, what's wrong with good old ProTracker on a 512K A500? The timing is perfect and has no latency bullcrap like you get with your tragically inferior generic PC rubbish. Macbook Pro indeed :rolleyes:
You can have my Emu10k DSP when you pry it out of my cold dead hand. nuf said.
-
You can have my Emu10k DSP when you pry it out of my cold dead hand. nuf said.
I see your EMU10K and raise you a MOS Technology 8634!!
Emu10K... pah, I have one of those on a card I'm not even using (in my old PC) ;)
Actually I found my old SBLive 1024 a bit of a pain for line in audio capture. There's a noise floor of about -80dB that you can't seem to get rid of.
-
You are the one correcting yourself
Yes, yes I did, because I didn't consider booting up with a comprimised OS.
and you're the one who is baised
There's that word again. You truly do not know what that word means. I've stated my position, but I'll be clearer for the headstickers among us:
I do not give a rats ass what platform I use so long as it runs the software I need in an acceptable fashion. Towards this end I could use an SGI workstation, a Sun workstation, an IBM workstation, a Mac, or a PC running any of the BSDs, Linux or even Windows. It makes no difference to me so long as it's stable and reasonably fast.
How is the above bias? Oh yes, that's right, it's bias because I don't agree with your unsubstantiated nonsense, that's how.
exaggerating minor differences
Those same minor differences you absolutely lambasted the PC for. Either way the point remains, if you write software that uses functions specific to the 68000, there is an ever increasing risk of them not working at all with each successive model in that series unless you have software emulation to paper over the cracks - something you claimed (repeatedly I might add) was not necessary at all.
and dare speak of "objectivity."
I do so dare. I'm not the one making claims that cannot be backed up, further I'm willing to be corrected when I mess up. Anything less is a clear sign of a fanatic (or a retard, much the same tbh).
So, where are the figures to back up your claims? What's that? You don't have any? Well that's a shocker!
You have first BE OBJECTIVE before you can accuse others
I am. The difference is that I, along with most of the rest of the English speaking world have a very different understanding of what that word means. To you it seems to mean "you are objective and unbiased only if you agree with me, no matter how far off the ball I am".
hyprocrite.
Given your p-poor understanding of the words objective and bias, I'm not that worried about you calling me other names.
-
Yes, yes I did, because I didn't consider booting up with a comprimised OS.
What do you mean, compromised? (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=512802&postcount=321) ;)
-
I see your EMU10K and raise you a MOS Technology 8634!!
Emu10K... pah, I have one of those on a card I'm not even using (in my old PC) ;)
Actually I found my old SBLive 1024 a bit of a pain for line in audio capture. There's a noise floor of about -80dB that you can't seem to get rid of.
I still have one too!!! With the "live drive", it was a good card and I did a lot of work on it from about 2001 to 2004... Then I moved on to Mac and Firewire equipment. You are right though, the Live isn't great for recording :(
-
Dodgy M$ timer:
This is an experiment for those of you with good internal clocks. Play your favourite House/Dance track on Windows Media Player and watch the progression bar. To me, it doesn't appear to keep the beat.
Let me know.
-
What do you mean, compromised? (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=512802&postcount=321) ;)
That thing is scary... I just had a flashback, and thought it was '88 again.
-
Dodgy M$ timer:
This is an experiment for those of you with good internal clocks. Play your favourite House/Dance track on Windows Media Player and watch the progression bar. To me, it doesn't appear to keep the beat.
Let me know.
A few years ago (2003), I wanted to get some of my old OctaMED files into Logic 5...
The solution I came up with was to play the OctaMED file via MIDI into the PC, which was set to record... (The Amiga had no way of getting files out other than via floppy, and OctaMED's save SMF function refused to save properly).
I had both machine set to the same BPM... but the Amiga drifted out quite dramatically over the course of 3min... I had no choice but to work out the Average BPM and use that... quantizing the musical data on the PC later... That was my first experience with the lameness of the Amiga's timing.
-
I totally gave up on KDE with 4.x *shudder*
Unfortunately every time I try to give up on KDE I find none of the alternatively do everything I want.
KDE4 has a lot of good features, its just REALLY bloated and unstable. My login regularly suddenly crashes, that very rarely happened with KDE3 and doesn't generally happen with KDE4 under light use - but who wants a 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM for "light use"?
I have been half tempted to just run AmiWM, would have loved it had it continued development but its plain ugly by todays standards and lacking in functionality. Even Gnome is missing some things I use on a day to day basis that KDE has, sadly.
-
Anything with less than 4 cores is a light use machine....
Unfortunately every time I try to give up on KDE I find none of the alternatively do everything I want.
KDE4 has a lot of good features, its just REALLY bloated and unstable. My login regularly suddenly crashes, that very rarely happened with KDE3 and doesn't generally happen with KDE4 under light use - but who wants a 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM for "light use"?
I have been half tempted to just run AmiWM, would have loved it had it continued development but its plain ugly by todays standards and lacking in functionality. Even Gnome is missing some things I use on a day to day basis that KDE has, sadly.
-
I have been half tempted to just run AmiWM, would have loved it had it continued development but its plain ugly by todays standards and lacking in functionality. Even Gnome is missing some things I use on a day to day basis that KDE has, sadly.
That's what I've been saying for years; release an Amiga window-manager for X and make it compatible with KDE and Gnome or the FreeDesktop.org now. Sell it for $9.95.
-
I had both machine set to the same BPM... but the Amiga drifted out quite dramatically over the course of 3min... I had no choice but to work out the Average BPM and use that... quantizing the musical data on the PC later... That was my first experience with the lameness of the Amiga's timing.
OctaMED (or CAMD or the interface driver?) doesn't support an external clock? Can it act as a clock source? EDIT: OK, so I guess CAMD just passes along system messages, and it's up to the devices and sequencer to decide how to use and interpret clock messages. There's an old thread here on Amiga.org talking about MED supporting legacy MIDI clock messages but not MIDI timecode. Sounds like Bars 'N Pipes is good to go, though. Wish I still had my AMAS. Just have the DSS8+ now and no MIDI interface. Don't feel like wiring my own (which I'd probably foul up anyway).
I have a Creative/E-mu 1212m in my PC. It's a decent card, but I'm not very fond of the software interface.
I just bought Logic Express for my MacBook Pro, and I've got my Motif ES8 connected via USB. I've been trying to track down an mLAN interface, but they're no longer in production, and I don't trust eBay for this. :-/ I also need a low latency audio interface for the Mac. Any suggestions? Something that's supported on both Windows and Mac OS would be ideal, but not required. Cost is a factor, but only because I don't plan on using the interface very often; otherwise, I'd probably just buy something nice from MOTU.
-
Get a clue. I am talking 680x0. There is NO "great" difference to need a library. You want to exaggerate and distort the truth and claim there's a great difference then that's as good as saying they are incompatible. Biased.
Everyone's been pretty clear about where the compatibility issues lie. You can't use a 68040 or 68060 in an Amiga without certain software workarounds, and optimizations (read: hacks) that work on a 68000 might not work on a later processor.
-
3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM for "light use"
Maybe no one. But in a few months it will be the standard anyway... Like Core2/4Go is now.
-
Thirdly $50!!!!!! or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that. Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..
There are a lot of *free* RamDisk for Windows. No need to spend any money over it. And for years there have been *free* RamDisk for Windows. There were also a free RamDisk for DOS.
Executive *wasn't* free by that time. Some applications refuse to work or crash with some schedulers... This is a hack.
-
OctaMED (or CAMD or the interface driver?) doesn't support an external clock? Can it act as a clock source? EDIT: OK, so I guess CAMD just passes along system messages, and it's up to the devices and sequencer to decide how to use and interpret clock messages. There's an old thread here on Amiga.org talking about MED supporting legacy MIDI clock messages but not MIDI timecode. Sounds like Bars 'N Pipes is good to go, though. Wish I still had my AMAS. Just have the DSS8+ now and no MIDI interface. Don't feel like wiring my own (which I'd probably foul up anyway).
Yeah, OctaMED's MIDI support wasn't the most amazing thing ever... I didn't bother messing around, this was 6 years ago... got the job done... haven't worried about it since. :)
I have a Creative/E-mu 1212m in my PC. It's a decent card, but I'm not very fond of the software interface.
Oh E-mu... how the mighty have fallen... I must get myself an old EMAX-II, some time...
I just bought Logic Express for my MacBook Pro, and I've got my Motif ES8 connected via USB. I've been trying to track down an mLAN interface, but they're no longer in production, and I don't trust eBay for this. :-/ I also need a low latency audio interface for the Mac. Any suggestions? Something that's supported on both Windows and Mac OS would be ideal, but not required. Cost is a factor, but only because I don't plan on using the interface very often; otherwise, I'd probably just buy something nice from MOTU.
If you only need a single audio in, then I recently used a "Blue Icicle" (http://www.equixotic.com/2008/11/07/blue-icicle-xlr-to-usb-mic-converter/) USB interface. The Audio quality is great, low latency (uses core audio) and it provides Phantom power. For a £50 interface, wonderful!
I have had a number of different interface over the years, but whenever I start a new project... I always go back to my Edirol FA-101... I bought it back in September 2004... and it's been my workhorse ever since... Other interfaces have come and gone, but not this one... for both studio and live work, it's built like a tank.
If I were to buy an interface today, it would be a MOTU UltraLite Mk3.
-
The final curtain:
If Amiga was still alive today it would indistinguishable from a PC. There hardware would have changed/adapted to keep costs down. It would be an X86-64 system. The OS would have to compete against a no doubt more advanced M$ Windows. Amiga OS itself would probably be heavily bloated to cover all the different tasks expected of it. Windows is your Amiga brother from another mother.
-
That doesn't prove that serials are preferred over parallel. They did have both and then they dropped serial before parallel.
roflmao so my machines don't prove anything nor does the the motherboards i linked but your 10-12 do??????? seriously your idea of proof is lost somewhere.
Hello, AT DIN5 connectors went a long time ago before gameports.
yea because someone cared about keyboard interfaces more. besides ps2 ports were still compatible with AT ports(with a pin adapter) so really all that changed was the packaging.
Sorry, but they made newer joysticks for USB-- they had to substitute with something.
what is that supposed to mean??
-
It is efficient-- that's what I meant by taking over the hardware. So some critical application can write the most optimal game or application. OS still exists and can do it's own multitasking. See Amiga computer as an example.
i see so efficiency = hogging the hardware. sorry but in the world of multitasking this don't have a place. the os determines what software gets priority but does not let anything hog the hardware.
We are talking about programmer.
the programmers chose the version of the api they are going to program to. as such if they decide to progran to 9.0c then that is what they state as the required version. microsoft also includes compatibility for all versions in the latest version. well except windows 7. windows 7 comes with directx 11 but dx9 is not included that i can tell but it can be installed seperately tho.
No, IOPM will only protect disk i/o or other things it doesn't want accessed and allow application to go directly to hardware and leave it to application if it wants to crash itself since it won't hurt the OS.
look if the app directly controls the hw. This when this app crashes an os friendly app will try to access the same hw it might lock the os. or if two programs attempt to access the same hw they may cause a crash. instability abounds in this situation.
-
Guys, to be honest some of the technical detail you've gone into is over my head. You are probably right about how more advanced modern PC operating systems are, in particular how their multitasking systems and memory protection ought to make for a more responsive system. What i can argue though is what I see in front of me with my machines.
So I got out the 060 A1200 and just had a play with it. No executive or other speed hacks. I set up a Real 3D animation render in 640x480 24 bit shadows, reflection, refraction antialias, saving each frame progressively to hard drive, basically all knobs on. I screen flicked to workbench: it was instantaneous. On workbech screen (8 colors 640x480 productivity) the mouse pointer moved as smoothly and precisley as if nothing was happening in the background. I double clicked my hard drive partition with 25 drawers, no delay in opening and displaying them in window. I started unarchiving a 10 meg zip file to hard drive with Real 3D still going. I closed the window, the close gadget responded instanteously to my mouse click. Opened the partition again, no delay. Opened the games drawer with 28 drawers, no delay in displaying the window contents. Dragged the window, no delay in redrawing the window. Right clicked to bring the Workbench menu bar, which has 11 menues, many with submenu. Sliding the mouse pointer along the menu bar, each menu drawn instaneously drawn, no delay, no screen garbage left behind, no overlap of each menu as a new one is erased, no sticking or skipping of the mouse pointer as I slide it down each menu, mouse pointer totally smooth. Don't forget both Real 3D and the archiver are writing periodically to the internal hard drive.
Yes it takes longer to do the render in Real, it takes longer to unarchive the zip, but THE SYSTEM is still very snappy.
Contrast this with Vista on my 2.4 ghhz c2D with 4 gig ram and 7200 rpm hard drive and 256 meg Geforce 9200: The start menu jerks up, especially if I select the orb whenever anything is being read/written to the hard drive. The mouse pointer jerks as well, disappearing and reappearing somewhere unpredictably. The system cannot highlight each item in the start menu as I move my mouse pointer, so it "jumps", ie it can't keep with the mouse pointer. I am in Firefox on its menu bar and I move my mouse along the menu bar: I can see momentarily an overlap of the new menu and the previous menu. Mind you, I have not started any CPU intensive task in the background. It just feels like the GUI is covered in molasses, a crap user experience. And no its not just MY laptop, I see it on my brothers vista laptop as well. I don't care how many processes it has to do in the bachground that I don't know about, its simply no longer good enough, we should be well and truly past this rubbish with the hardware specs we are running. So yeah you can argue about all the technical advancements of the modern PC and its modern OS's, at the end of the day, what matters is what I see and feel in front of me.
-
Try running your raytracer at priority 20. And in the case that it uses a separate process for rendering, bump that up to 20.
-
The final curtain:
If Amiga was still alive today it would indistinguishable from a PC. There hardware would have changed/adapted to keep costs down. It would be an X86-64 system. The OS would have to compete against a no doubt more advanced M$ Windows. Amiga OS itself would probably be heavily bloated to cover all the different tasks expected of it. Windows is your Amiga brother from another mother.
It was stated before and in the book "On the Edge", that the "Next" Amiga's were going to loose the Amiga OS and use Windows NT., So even then, it was know that the Amiga would have been just another Windows box by now.
I mean hey, once you have the software, and it is proven on "generic" hardware, its just a matter of time, before they start slipping Generic hardware under the hood to save costs.
-
Try running your raytracer at priority 20. And in the case that it uses a separate process for rendering, bump that up to 20.
Why? I want a responsive system, and I have that be default.
-
Why? I want a responsive system, and I have that be default.
I agree.
-
still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.
What about Windows? Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..
Hi,
When DOS was around there used to be a small program that you could actuate through DOS commands to make a ram disk, I used to use it all the time to make 2K ram disks to put programs or save data into.
Tihs is a tset, if you can raed tihs lnie it maens taht you are one of the few poelpe in the wrold taht prboly fulnekd sepellnig.
smerf
-
@stefcep2
Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.
-
What is this "floppy disk" of which you speak? I don't think I've seen one on a modern computer?
Hi,
@juan_fine
The first floppy disk that I can remember was 8 inch by 8 inch square with a rectanular hole usually in the upper left hand corner, this was the top of the floppy disk, the inside of the floppy disk was a thin round piece of magnetic medium that you could actually shake and it would bend or flap thus the term floppy disk. You would take this floppy disk holding the disk so that the notch was on the right hand side and insert it into a floppy drive, now the notch when uncovered would let the disk be written to and I believe the 8 inch floppy disk held a whopping 73 kbytes of data ( I could be wrong, it was a long time ago). Then they invented the 5.25 floppy disk that held a unheard of amount of data 180 kbytes, then they came up with a dual side floppy disk where you could write on both sides that held 360 kbytes of data, life was good, then they came up with a disk that they called a mini floppy disk that was 3.5 inches, why they called it a floppy disk I don't know because the magnetic medium was housed in a hard thin plastic casing, the first mini disk held 720 kbytes and then later on improved to 1.4 mbytes, the one thing I can tell you the 5.25 disks didn't hurt as much as the little plastic mine disks when the wife gets mad at you and starts throwing them at you, I mean those little plastic disks hurt when they bounced off your head.
smerf
-
@smerf
Thank you, Hewhochonolisestechnology. You know the generations of our ancestors. Cloud God smiles on you this day.
-
The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.
You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?
Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
Hi,
@bloodline,
excuse me, I will take my 3.1 operating system and load it into my old, slow, obsolete Amiga 4000 faster than you could load your Apple, Linux, or Windows whatever operating system. So there take that, stick that in your floppy disk (oops you don't have one) and smoke it. And I heard your music and don't like it anyway, even if you do have a small recording studio, the Amiga beats you there too, it has big equipment for big good recordings, but then what do you expect out of a Mac except a lot of noise.
smerf
-
@stefcep2
Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.
Hi,
@Damion.
I do it every day on my A1200, have no problems at all, As a matter of fact the other day I had my A1200 on playing mp3, was surfing the web and backing up the hard drive using DM2 with lharc and had a window open viewing pictures that I had just taken with my cannon camera.
Do you know how to use a A1200
smerf
-
Not entirely, though. The stability of the 040 system, if allowed to boot up to a full workbench without the 040.library would be seriously compromised. Any code compiled for an FPU will fail the moment it calls any operation the 040 had to emulate.
You never understood my point. If I take an OCS machine with 68000 and run the program which works fine and now switch to an accelerator 68020/68030/68040/etc., the program should work fine (barring some rare exception). You keep throwing in FPU/MMU into the picture to confuse things and thus your so-called experiment is a failure.
-
I don't see why amigaksi can't acknowledge the Catweasel Mk IV, I assume it has it's own clock/timer on board.:bitch:
This point was already addressed in this thread. I guess you didn't read it when we were talking about parallel port joystick interfaces and this one. Amazingly, the general "sidekick" gives his/her view in post #1200 as if he/she missed that point too. Custom hardware can be built for any machine and that does not count as a standard component of a particular system.
-
@stefcep2
Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.
I was rendering a 3d animation in a solid renderer, Real 3D, each frame was being saved to hard drive progressively, flicked to the workbench screen, unarchiving a zip file to hard drive, opening and closing a partition on the same hard drive with 30-odd drawers repeatedly, moving the open window on screen, opening the menu bar in workbench and selecting different menus with no perceptible slow down with any of these system functions. The 68060 doesn't even work up a sweat playing a 128 bit rate mp3.
I used to listen to mp3's with Ibrowse browsing on an A4000 68060 with a CV64 over a hypercom serial port years ago, basic system functions like opening drawers, menus, mouse movement were unaffected.
-
The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.
You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?
...
I did in post #275 (way back). I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed. Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc. Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software. So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.
>Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things. I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.
>What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
You may have that-- but is that a standard. If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.
-
Deja Vu. I think amigaksi is a die hard strategist. He will hold onto his bad play until you a) Flinch b) Make a mistake.
Not really. I have been quite lenient with regards to "logic" used by others. I am more of a realist. There are some unique features of Amiga and those are the points I am trying to get across. I know in a technical debate, you just try to pin someone on some point but then nobody learns anything from that-- just a mental excercise of victory/defeat.
-
Great sense of humor you have there, Askii. Have you heard the saying 'if the only tool you have is a hammer evyerthing ooks like a nail"?
It wasn't a joke. I'll only joke if it's also true otherwise I will explicitly state that it's a joke if it doesn't reflect reality. You can run some applications faster using older OSes; that's a fact. It may be true for all applications but all applications are not available for older OSes.
I can boot up Windows 3.1 using a floppy disk just like I can boot up an Amiga OS using a floppy disk.
-
Yes, yes I did, because I didn't consider booting up with a comprimised OS.
...
Depends on the OS. Regardless, we are talking about compatibility.
>There's that word again. You truly do not know what that word means. I've stated my position, but I'll be clearer for the headstickers among us:
You are biased. There is sufficient proof given by you.
>How is the above bias? Oh yes, that's right, it's bias because I don't agree with your unsubstantiated nonsense, that's how.
I don't like the way this Amiga.org is organized. As soon as you hit reply, you can't tell what I originally stated. I am going to reply that part in my next reply.
>Those same minor differences you absolutely lambasted the PC for. Either way the point remains, if you write software that uses functions specific to the 68000, there is an ever increasing risk of them not working at all with each successive model in that series unless you have software emulation to paper over the cracks - something you claimed (repeatedly I might add) was not necessary at all.
If you get more exact with this rather than juggle words like "risk" you will see that 680x0 are backward compatible with 68000.
>I do so dare. I'm not the one making claims that cannot be backed up, further I'm willing to be corrected when I mess up. Anything less is a clear sign of a fanatic (or a retard, much the same tbh).
Okay, then keep correcting yourself as I reply.
>So, where are the figures to back up your claims? What's that? You don't have any? Well that's a shocker!
Again, wait for next reply as I can't remember what you replied to.
>I am. The difference is that I, along with most of the rest of the English speaking world have a very different understanding of what that word means. To you it seems to mean "you are objective and unbiased only if you agree with me, no matter how far off the ball I am".
You are biased and NOT objective and speaking about objectivity then makes you a hypocrite.
-
With several concurrent CPU intensive processes running, the system (while perhaps still usable) will become less responsive. Especially an A1200 with slow IDE/PCMCIA interfaces. While it may be acceptable to you, using the CPU to decode MP3 has an obvious impact on system performance, period. Try listening to a 320k net stream with a DSP card, then switch back to CPU decoding and tell me there's no difference... LOL.
"I can do it without problems" isn't the same as "it doesn't slow down at all"
But don't let me stop you guys from having fun with your magic A1200's.
-
...
I do not give a rats ass what platform I use so long as it runs the software I need in an acceptable fashion. Towards this end I could use an SGI workstation, a Sun workstation, an IBM workstation, a Mac, or a PC running any of the BSDs, Linux or even Windows. It makes no difference to me so long as it's stable and reasonably fast.
How is the above bias? Oh yes, that's right, it's bias because I don't agree with your unsubstantiated nonsense, that's how.
...
I never said that was biased. You are biased in many things you have stated in the two threads.
>So, where are the figures to back up your claims? What's that? You don't have any? Well that's a shocker!
Okay, this one wasn't Amiga.org's fault. You are being vague. Don't answer for me. I did back-up my claim and gave procedure of how to test it. You are just all talk-- mostly based on your mental speculations and bias toward PC.
I have better understanding of "bias" and "objectivity" than you do because I am unbiased and objective.
-
Everyone's been pretty clear about where the compatibility issues lie. You can't use a 68040 or 68060 in an Amiga without certain software workarounds, and optimizations (read: hacks) that work on a 68000 might not work on a later processor.
We're talking object code compatibility (I called it opcode compatibility). It's not my labeling it but what other's have claimed as well:
http://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/datasheet/522/68040.php
This is another link since some people thought the previous link I gave was "my" brochure.
-
The Amiga interface (Workbench) is very logical, don't you think? I don't know how to describe better.
-
With several concurrent CPU intensive processes running, the system (while perhaps still usable) will become less responsive. Especially an A1200 with slow IDE/PCMCIA interfaces. While it may be acceptable to you, using the CPU to decode MP3 has an obvious impact on system performance, period. Try listening to a 320k net stream with a DSP card, then switch back to CPU decoding and tell me there's no difference... LOL.
"I can do it without problems" isn't the same as "it doesn't slow down at all"
But don't let me stop you guys from having fun with your magic A1200's.
But thats simply because 15 year old motorolla cpu's are running at 50 mhz not 3000 mhz. Even so core system functions are extremely snappy, if there is slow down its not perceptible in the example I gave.
Much of what is done on PC's these days boils down to number crunching: decoding/encoding music/video/archives and yes a 3000 mhz cpu will do it faster than a 50 mhz. Big deal. Its not the OS that makes your 3000 mhz CPU run at 3000 mhz, but it is the OS that decides if playing back that video is more important than a command you've issued.
-
Guys, to be honest some of the technical detail you've gone into is over my head. You are probably right about how more advanced modern PC operating systems are, in particular how their multitasking systems and memory protection ought to make for a more responsive system. What i can argue though is what I see in front of me with my machines.
So I got out the 060 A1200 and just had a play with it. No executive or other speed hacks. I set up a Real 3D animation render in 640x480 24 bit shadows, reflection, refraction antialias, saving each frame progressively to hard drive, basically all knobs on. I screen flicked to workbench: it was instantaneous. On workbech screen (8 colors 640x480 productivity) the mouse pointer moved as smoothly and precisley as if nothing was happening in the background. I double clicked my hard drive partition with 25 drawers, no delay in opening and displaying them in window. I started unarchiving a 10 meg zip file to hard drive with Real 3D still going. I closed the window, the close gadget responded instanteously to my mouse click. Opened the partition again, no delay. Opened the games drawer with 28 drawers, no delay in displaying the window contents. Dragged the window, no delay in redrawing the window. Right clicked to bring the Workbench menu bar, which has 11 menues, many with submenu. Sliding the mouse pointer along the menu bar, each menu drawn instaneously drawn, no delay, no screen garbage left behind, no overlap of each menu as a new one is erased, no sticking or skipping of the mouse pointer as I slide it down each menu, mouse pointer totally smooth. Don't forget both Real 3D and the archiver are writing periodically to the internal hard drive.
Yes it takes longer to do the render in Real, it takes longer to unarchive the zip, but THE SYSTEM is still very snappy.
Contrast this with Vista on my 2.4 ghhz c2D with 4 gig ram and 7200 rpm hard drive and 256 meg Geforce 9200: The start menu jerks up, especially if I select the orb whenever anything is being read/written to the hard drive. The mouse pointer jerks as well, disappearing and reappearing somewhere unpredictably. The system cannot highlight each item in the start menu as I move my mouse pointer, so it "jumps", ie it can't keep with the mouse pointer.
On your Amiga, install Amikit.
My ASUS G1SN laptop is fine i.e. it has Geforce 9500M GS with 512MB dedicated VRAM. I use Google Chrome and IE8.
Does your Geforce 9200 GS have dedicated VRAM?
-
You never understood my point. If I take an OCS machine with 68000 and run the program which works fine and now switch to an accelerator 68020/68030/68040/etc., the program should work fine (barring some rare exception). You keep throwing in FPU/MMU into the picture to confuse things and thus your so-called experiment is a failure.
Run Breathless 3D AGA game on 68060 without 68060.library.
The "MC68060 processor, can't directly execute 64bit divisions and multiplications and Breathless engine use a lot of these instructions."
Refer to
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/MC68060UM.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Reference%20Manuals&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation
Goto page 391
"Table D-1. M68000 Family Instruction Set and Processor Cross-Reference"
For desktop CPUs (for 68K based PC market), Motorola’s lossy legacy protection ultimately leads to PowerPC.
-
I did in post #275 (way back). I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed. Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc. Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software. So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.
If you had ever written anything more complicated than a simple shoot'em up or platformer, then even on the amiga, you would avoid using the sprite hardware and use the blitter... And the hardware colision detection was also only useful for the simplest of tasks... Software routines were simply better.
>Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things. I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.
I have written several subranging routines on the amiga I know how to fake 14bit the audio, the results are noisy and certainly not suitable for professional audio... Or even modern consumer Hi-Fi equipment!
>What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
You may have that-- but is that a standard. If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.
The laptop is standard, albeit top of the range CPU. The laptop comes as standard with a 24bit 48Khz audio interface! Something that you can't get for the Amiga at all (which even with expensive hardware never got beyond 16bit @44100Hz.
The is no FireWire for amiga, thus no good audio interfaces :)
-
The Amiga interface (Workbench) is very logical
I wouldn't say that...
Just give an Amiga, a Windows machine, a Mac to people who never ever touched a computer and we'll see which one is the more logical, or... intuitive...
-
Ok, so what's the point here ? 68k family being backward compatible ?
It seems to me that software written for 68040+ won't run correctly without 68040 library.
So maybe in theory it is. But in reality you cannot rely on that it seems... Why do we need 30 pages to argue on that ?
-
I did in post #275 (way back). I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed. Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc. Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software. So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.
A CUDA GPU can resolve collisions i.e. as PhysX (Physics) CUDA accelerator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQMbFQVLhMc&feature=channel
One should not compared a modern GPU to Amiga's IGP.
>Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things. I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.
>What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
You may have that-- but is that a standard. If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.
Most Intel "SantaRosa" class laptops includes HDA class sound chip. My ASUS "SantaRosa" class laptop is similar to MacBook Pro of the same era.
-
I did in post #275 (way back). I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed. Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc. Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software. So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.
>Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.
For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things. I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.
>What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...
You may have that-- but is that a standard. If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.
Most Intel "SantaRosa" laptops includes HDA class sound chip.
-
You never understood my point. If I take an OCS machine with 68000 and run the program which works fine and now switch to an accelerator 68020/68030/68040/etc., the program should work fine (barring some rare exception).
No, you claimed the M68K was hardware backwards compatible whilst lambasting x64 for not supporting 16-bit directly in hardware. We merely demonstrated that the M68K isn't as directly backwards compatible as you claim.
If you accept that some form of missing or privileged instruction handling is necessary for higher 68K processors to run old 68000 code, then you can't slate x64 for needing the same.
Any exception is an exception. The SR should never have been accessible to user model and Motorola acknowledged this mistake.
You keep throwing in FPU/MMU into the picture to confuse things and thus your so-called experiment is a failure.
Yes, you are confused by it. But that doesn't change the argument that M68K does not retain direct backwards compatibility in hardware at each generation. And, FYI, I can get the same class of unimplemented instruction exception on 68060 just by running perfectly good 68020 code. No FPU/MMU required, just long multiplication.
-
The laptop is standard, albeit top of the range CPU. The laptop comes as standard with a 24bit 48Khz audio interface! Something that you can't get for the Amiga at all (which even with expensive hardware never got beyond 16bit @44100Hz.
The is no FireWire for amiga, thus no good audio interfaces :)
Asus F5R comes with a Realtec chip that is also capable of 24bit 48khz (there is another option for 24bit 96khz but I've never tried it). The F5R can be had for less then £400. So yes, audio wise, Bloodline's mac is standard.
Btw stefcep2, I have to say I really don't recognise the stutter you're talking about.
-
Btw stefcep2, I have to say I really don't recognise the stutter you're talking about.
The stutter is there on my machine, but I'm certain if i could just get a video card that had 512 MB video ram, or a quadcore CPU or a SSD it would disappear..
Wasn't there a couple of DJ's in the UK that got a top 10 dance hit using two copies of Protracker running on an A500 ans an A1200 plus TV's? Ultimately having all the technology in the world isn't gonna make your music magically better if you don't have the talent. People have been listening to and creating fantastic recorded music for a lot longer than firewire's been around. In fact i read that one of the fastest growing areas in music sales is vinyl records: the sound has more warmth, its more natural, and in terms of playback, valve amps are still the bees knees. All of this is analogue. For a lot of people, despite all the wiz bang PC hardware and software, analogue music is still the benchmark.
As far as video goes, I watch a fair bit of football (soccer) on digital pay TV on a plasma: I hate the way playfield lines/markings have visible stepping when they are not vertical or horizontal to the camera and the way players have a "halo" of compression artifacts around them as they move on the ground. Sometimes even the grass appears to move with a slight camera movement as the technology interpolates different regions of grass color.
Why? Because the real world isn't a digital one. Digital sound, and video will always be an approximation.
-
The stutter is there on my machine, but I'm certain if i could just get a video card that had 512 MB video ram, or a quadcore CPU or a SSD it would disappear..
Are you using Aero by any chance?
Why? Because the real world isn't a digital one. Digital sound, and video will always be an approximation.
Have to say, from my own perspective, digital terrestrial TV (freeview), both in terms of sound and picture quality is very much clearer here then analogue is. Not quite the difference between VHS and DVD, but not far off. Not ever having owned a massive telly I can't comment on artifacts. Perhaps you should have the TV dialed in professionally. From what you're describing it sounds like your contrast, brightness and sharpness levels are set waaay too high.
-
Are you using Aero by any chance?
Have to say, from my own perspective, digital terrestrial TV (freeview), both in terms of sound and picture quality is very much clearer here then analogue is. Not quite the difference between VHS and DVD, but not far off. Not ever having owned a massive telly I can't comment on artifacts. Perhaps you should have the TV dialed in professionally. From what you're describing it sounds like your contrast, brightness and sharpness levels are set waaay too high.
i DID have aero on, but even with it off, especially when there is any hard drive activity, there is a delay-albeit slight- in the start menu opening or menus dropping down from the menu bar. Look its not something that i can't live with it, it just doesn't feel as responsive as what I am used to on Amiga, and IMO with all the raw hardware power, I expect it not to happen at all. Amy be my expectations are too high.
Digital no doubt is clearer in the sense that you don't get any ghosting, or snow like you do with analogue when the signal weakens.
What I'm talking about are definately digital compression artifacts. I see the same thing with display TV's at retailers, and Pay TV booths in shopping centres, even with the newest panels with 1080i. Its due to the way that fast moving objects like football players
are displayed in front of the background grass: there's a lot of quick variation in color between where the outline of the player ends and the background begins, and the system has to interpolate an in-between color or two, resulting in a fringe. If you also look at the crowd moving past in the background as the camera follows a player, its basically shown as blocky incomprehensible mess, again due to compression interpolation of fast moving regions. This is also visible on DVD IF you have fast moving action like watching sport.This has been especially noticeable in the Confederations Cup in Sth Africa at the moment. Initially I thought it was my TV doing the scaling but it happens on all the TV's I've watched on display
-
i DID have aero on, but even with it off, especially when there is any hard drive activity, there is a delay-albeit slight- in the start menu opening or menus dropping down from the menu bar. Look its not something that i can't live with it, it just doesn't feel as responsive as what I am used to on Amiga, and IMO with all the raw hardware power, I expect it not to happen at all. Amy be my expectations are too high.
Hmmm, oddness. I know the 9200 is right at the low end with regard Aero compatability, but assuming it has 128 or even 256mb of it's own ram it should be plenty... Mind if I mull over this a bit? I might be able to provide a solution that'll be far less costly then having to buy new kit.
Digital no doubt is clearer in the sense that you don't get any ghosting, or snow like you do with analogue when the signal weakens.
What I'm talking about are definately digital compression artifacts. I see the same thing with display TV's at retailers, and Pay TV booths in shopping centres, even with the newest panels with 1080i. Its due to the way that fast moving objects like football players
are displayed in front of the background grass: there's a lot of quick variation in color between where the outline of the player ends and the background begins, and the system has to interpolate an in-between color or two, resulting in a fringe. If you also look at the crowd moving past in the background as the camera follows a player, its basically shown as blocky incomprehensible mess, again due to compression interpolation of fast moving regions. This is also visible on DVD IF you have fast moving action like watching sport.This has been especially noticeable in the Confederations Cup in Sth Africa at the moment. Initially I thought it was my TV doing the scaling but it happens on all the TV's I've watched on display
So it's an upscaling problem then? I know a lot of cheeper dvd players have this issue and all but a few of the freeview/freesat/sky boxes are the same... I have heard of really good upscaling dvd players from Philips, as far as freeview boxes go I don't know. I'll concede on this one however - unless the upscale is done well it will look shockingly bad, especially on a large panel. I've not heard any recomendations for digiboxes that do it well either tbh.
Lowering the contrast and brightness a touch might help in the meantime reduce the obviousness of it. But you're right in as much as poor upscalling will make it look a propper dogs dinner.
-
YAWN!!!! This thread still going :confused: I lost interest around a 1000 posts ago...
-
especially when there is any hard drive activity, there is a delay-albeit slight-
double check to make sure dma is on on your hard drives. barring that make sure you are using manufacturer drivers and not default ones from microsoft(they suck)
What I'm talking about are definately digital compression artifacts. I see the same thing with display TV's at retailers, and Pay TV booths in shopping centres, even with the newest panels with 1080i. Its due to the way that fast moving objects like football players
are displayed in front of the background grass: there's a lot of quick variation in color between where the outline of the player ends and the background begins, and the system has to interpolate an in-between color or two, resulting in a fringe. If you also look at the crowd moving past in the background as the camera follows a player, its basically shown as blocky incomprehensible mess, again due to compression interpolation of fast moving regions. This is also visible on DVD IF you have fast moving action like watching sport.This has been especially noticeable in the Confederations Cup in Sth Africa at the moment. Initially I thought it was my TV doing the scaling but it happens on all the TV's I've watched on display
yea this is normal behavior for an lcd tv. it has to do with the responsiveness in color changing. the tv can't keep up with the changes. they are getting better but have not beaten the responsiveness of a crt yet. i personally still use a hdtv crt atm. and just as the leander said upscaling plays it's part in this issue too.
-
yea this is normal behavior for an lcd tv. it has to do with the responsiveness in color changing. the tv can't keep up with the changes. they are getting better but have not beaten the responsiveness of a crt yet. i personally still use a hdtv crt atm. and just as the leander said upscaling plays it's part in this issue too.
Oooh, I always wanted a HD CRT! What model is it?? Could only find one on sale in Ireland when I went looking, and it wasn't great. I'm still gutted the whole world went with LCD seemingly to do with fashion rather than quality. I still have a lovely Trinitron monitor for my computer and a (non-HD) Philips CRT TV.
As for the artifacts, it's not just the responsiveness of LCD panels, a large part of it is simply the compression used by the digital broadcaster. It's like what you see when you watch a YouTube video for example, fast changing lines don't survive the compression particularly well. This will also show up on a full 1080p panel with a 1080p source if it's to do with compression. And HDTV signals tend to be compressed like that, so even with a full-HD decoder and a full-HD TV, you'll get more artifacts on channels which use more compression.
-
double check to make sure dma is on on your hard drives. barring that make sure you are using manufacturer drivers and not default ones from microsoft(they suck)
yea this is normal behavior for an lcd tv. it has to do with the responsiveness in color changing. the tv can't keep up with the changes. they are getting better but have not beaten the responsiveness of a crt yet. i personally still use a hdtv crt atm. and just as the leander said upscaling plays it's part in this issue too.
I look at the drivers for the hard drive, thanks, I am using MS ones.
HDTV CRT: Geez you would've paid a packet for that new. I've read the best CRT can still outdo the best plasma/LCD for responsiveness, color balance and sharpness. Do tell: what model is it?
-
Oooh, I always wanted a HD CRT! What model is it??
phillips 32pw9100d it is hard to find info on it since it was a model produced for wal-mart stores(and a dang sight cheaper than the lcd models at the time.)
Could only find one on sale in Ireland when I went looking, and it wasn't great. I'm still gutted the whole world went with LCD seemingly to do with fashion rather than quality.
i tink it was more about convenience. my crt hdtv weighs in the neighborhood of 150 pounds(us)
As for the artifacts, it's not just the responsiveness of LCD panels, a large part of it is simply the compression used by the digital broadcaster. It's like what you see when you watch a YouTube video for example, fast changing lines don't survive the compression particularly well. This will also show up on a full 1080p panel with a 1080p source if it's to do with compression. And HDTV signals tend to be compressed like that, so even with a full-HD decoder and a full-HD TV, you'll get more artifacts on channels which use more compression.
yea garbage in garbage out. that was why i was focusing on the hardware itself. another thing is signal loss causes pixelation(glitches) up to and including loss of picture too.
-
I look at the drivers for the hard drive, thanks, I am using MS ones.
check all your drivers particularly your sound, chipset, processor(if available), and vid card. i think the hd will always show up as an ms driver.
the problem with the default drivers(ones on the vista disk) is though they are written by the manufacturer (in some cases) they have to make the driver very generic due to space constraints on the cd(or dvd) as such much of the hardware acceleration is missing(or not working efficiently) so the inital install drivers are just to get you going till you can aquire the real drivers.
HDTV CRT: Geez you would've paid a packet for that new. I've read the best CRT can still outdo the best plasma/LCD for responsiveness, color balance and sharpness. Do tell: what model is it?
it's been a while since i bought it but i think i paid $700 for it new wile lcd panels were still $1500 to $2000.
-
HDTV CRT: Geez you would've paid a packet for that new. I've read the best CRT can still outdo the best plasma/LCD for responsiveness, color balance and sharpness. Do tell: what model is it?
Even an average CRT can still outdo LCD in many areas. I still use a lovely 32" Philips CRT without HD and I find it nicer to watch most things with than most LCD panels. Don't get me wrong, the image from a good 1080 LCD and a PS3 is incredible! But LCDs constantly disappoint me in the low light or high contrast areas compared to a decent CRT, which probably cost about half as much.
-
Even an average CRT can still outdo LCD in many areas. I still use a lovely 32" Philips CRT without HD and I find it nicer to watch most things with than most LCD panels. Don't get me wrong, the image from a good 1080 LCD and a PS3 is incredible! But LCDs constantly disappoint me in the low light or high contrast areas compared to a decent CRT, which probably cost about half as much.
Hi,
Go to this site if you want to find out which OS rules, it is a great site and the person reviewing the OS's hit the nail right on the head.
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/musical-geek-friday-every-os-sucks/
smerf
-
Hi,
@bloodline,
excuse me, I will take my 3.1 operating system and load it into my old, slow, obsolete Amiga 4000 faster than you could load your Apple, Linux, or Windows whatever operating system. So there take that, stick that in your floppy disk (oops you don't have one) and smoke it. And I heard your music and don't like it anyway, even if you do have a small recording studio, the Amiga beats you there too, it has big equipment for big good recordings, but then what do you expect out of a Mac except a lot of noise.
smerf
Hi,
I would like to recognize Wayne and Bloodline for not being trolled into any of my rants and raves, Wayne you can take a lot of hits and I think that is fantastic.
Bloodline, couldn't troll you into anything either, I like your music as different as I think it is, it is very good.
Had to clear this up, just trying to get a hit to see what you would think.
anyhow Gentlemen, good going, I had to clear this up and you both spoiled my fun
smerf
-
YAWN!!!! This thread still going :confused: I lost interest around a 1000 posts ago...
Hi,
Then what are you doing here?
smerf
-
Oooh, I always wanted a HD CRT! What model is it?? Could only find one on sale in Ireland when I went looking, and it wasn't great. I'm still gutted the whole world went with LCD seemingly to do with fashion rather than quality. I still have a lovely Trinitron monitor for my computer and a (non-HD) Philips CRT TV.
As for the artifacts, it's not just the responsiveness of LCD panels, a large part of it is simply the compression used by the digital broadcaster. It's like what you see when you watch a YouTube video for example, fast changing lines don't survive the compression particularly well. This will also show up on a full 1080p panel with a 1080p source if it's to do with compression. And HDTV signals tend to be compressed like that, so even with a full-HD decoder and a full-HD TV, you'll get more artifacts on channels which use more compression.
Hi,
I have a Sony Braveria, 52 inch HDTV, that runs at 60 hz or 120 hz, looks mighty nice to me and I haven't noticed what you are talking about. Maybe it just because I am half blind.
smerf
-
Problem is more about getting all states of joysticks regardless of what a human's reaction time is.
Using Microsoft Habu gaming mouse (powered by Razer), I was able reach less than 1.0 ms e.g. 0.041 ms, 0.004 ms.
-
Using Microsoft Habu gaming mouse (powered by Razer), I was able reach less than 1.0 ms e.g. 0.041 ms, 0.004 ms.
For a mouse that is totally relevant. A mouse can detect your movements down to a really really small degree. If you are playing a FPS and precisely controlling your movement it is perfectly possible that you might want to turn around quicker than the screen refresh rate can achieve smoothly, in fact its pretty much guaranteed.
A digital joystick on the other hand is something you can only make decisions on what direction you need to press based on the last screen refresh, so capturing any quicker is of no use. How is it useful to know if you pressed left then right between screen refreshes when it only needs to know what you are doing right before it updates the screen?
If you were pressing left, then quickly shifted to right but the screen refreshed right before the joystick registered right, then that should naturally count as you pushing nothing. It knowing more information would not make any difference, the value right at the moment the game logic needs it is what you want. Its not like you are going to be changing the game several time between refreshes as then the game would seem out of your control as you can only react to what you can see and hear, and those events would be triggered on the refresh.
So seriously, if you were refreshing the joystick port so fast you could register that you pressed left, then nothing, then right - how exactly does that help the game? It just makes everything more complicated. Your game does not need to know what you were pressing a few ms ago.
-
For a mouse that is totally relevant. A mouse can detect your movements down to a really really small degree. If you are playing a FPS and precisely controlling your movement it is perfectly possible that you might want to turn around quicker than the screen refresh rate can achieve smoothly, in fact its pretty much guaranteed.
A digital joystick on the other hand is something you can only make decisions on what direction you need to press based on the last screen refresh, so capturing any quicker is of no use. How is it useful to know if you pressed left then right between screen refreshes when it only needs to know what you are doing right before it updates the screen?
If you were pressing left, then quickly shifted to right but the screen refreshed right before the joystick registered right, then that should naturally count as you pushing nothing. It knowing more information would not make any difference, the value right at the moment the game logic needs it is what you want. Its not like you are going to be changing the game several time between refreshes as then the game would seem out of your control as you can only react to what you can see and hear, and those events would be triggered on the refresh.
So seriously, if you were refreshing the joystick port so fast you could register that you pressed left, then nothing, then right - how exactly does that help the game? It just makes everything more complicated. Your game does not need to know what you were pressing a few ms ago.
No the more accurate version is to take into account joystick state the instant it changes. All other means are approximations. As I said numerous times, what difference does it make if I sample audio at 22Khz or 44Khz-- not much but logically there's a difference if you know there can be frequency components that won't get captured at 22Khz. And what difference does it make if it's losslessly compressed audio or MP3. You may not experience a difference but that's looking at it subjectively.
-
there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds. Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things?
teh epic joystick thread. a.org hall of fame
-
No the more accurate version is to take into account joystick state the instant it changes. All other means are approximations. As I said numerous times, what difference does it make if I sample audio at 22Khz or 44Khz-- not much but logically there's a difference if you know there can be frequency components that won't get captured at 22Khz. And what difference does it make if it's losslessly compressed audio or MP3. You may not experience a difference but that's looking at it subjectively.
The great joystick man who denies signal bounce in his own data and talks about KHz this and Hz that and truck loads of stuff but never mentioned Nyquist.
-
As I said numerous times, what difference does it make if I sample audio at 22Khz or 44Khz-- not much but logically there's a difference if you know there can be frequency components that won't get captured at 22Khz.
What exactly is this difference?
-
The highest audio tone that can be captured is very slightly less than one-half the sampling rate of an analog-to-digital convertor.
So the 22khz rate will not save sounds much above 10kHz and will result in music missing the highest harmonics,whereas 44(actually 44.1kHz) sampling will save all the sounds even the best human ears can hear,that is up to 22kHz.Most people lose the hearing of higher pitched sounds as the person ages,especially if exposed to lots of loud sounds.
-
Most people lose the hearing of higher pitched sounds as the person ages,especially if exposed to lots of loud sounds.
I guess we're all screwed then, after listening to Amigaski's banter. :roflmao:
-
The highest audio tone that can be captured is very slightly less than one-half the sampling rate of an analog-to-digital convertor.
So the 22khz rate will not save sounds much above 10kHz and will result in music missing the highest harmonics,whereas 44(actually 44.1kHz) sampling will save all the sounds even the best human ears can hear,that is up to 22kHz.Most people lose the hearing of higher pitched sounds as the person ages,especially if exposed to lots of loud sounds.
Bzzt, but thanks for playing even though the question was addressed to a different person...
-
The highest audio tone that can be captured is very slightly less than one-half the sampling rate of an analog-to-digital convertor.
So the 22khz rate will not save sounds much above 10kHz and will result in music missing the highest harmonics,whereas 44(actually 44.1kHz) sampling will save all the sounds even the best human ears can hear,that is up to 22kHz.Most people lose the hearing of higher pitched sounds as the person ages,especially if exposed to lots of loud sounds.
But how anyone can compare sampling a digital joystick to sampling analog audio, is beyond me.
With audio, its quite obvious that capturing as much accuracy as possible, especially during mixing/mastering, is useful. The more accurate data you have, the more accurately you will be mixing it. So that once you drop it back down to 44.1 or 48Khz, you are getting a better approximation. Thats just plain maths, the more precision the better the more accurate the result.
Now a digital Joystick? Nobody has yet explained how being able to tell what happened to the joystick between screen refreshes actually has any bearing at all on a game. Yes sampling quicker is more accurate, nobody every denied that. But accuracy is only any good when its actually useful.
A mouse its useful to sample quicker, the electronics can counteract any questionable result that way (especially led/laser mice, you could get a rogue reflection from dust, a crack, poor mouse mat) and most of all - there will be less lag from the mouse itself.
Just look at LCD TVs. The biggest lag on an LCD TV is not the pixel response time, its how quickly the TV can process the signal and actually tell those pixels to change. That is one reason why a cheap TV and an expensive one often can be really different, even if they are using the same LCD panel.
So yeah, the Amiga joystick port is fast, and it might be useful if you are using it for some custom purpose rather than a joystick. But then if you are going that direction why use such old technology when you could just use a modern PIC using far far less electricity. I mean its a silly argument as there are things the Minimig can do that neither the Amiga nor PC can do, but that does not mean PC is trying to catch up to it.
-
I guess we're all screwed then, after listening to Amigaski's banter. :roflmao:
:roflmao:
-
For a mouse that is totally relevant. A mouse can detect your movements down to a really really small degree. If you are playing a FPS and precisely controlling your movement it is perfectly possible that you might want to turn around quicker than the screen refresh rate can achieve smoothly, in fact its pretty much guaranteed.
(SNIP)
Bought the gaming mouse for a WAN/LAN party e.g. America's Army 3.0 (using UnrealEngine3).
-
The great joystick man who denies signal bounce in his own data and talks about KHz this and Hz that and truck loads of stuff but never mentioned Nyquist.
FACT: I did talk about Nyquist in this thread. Search it.
FACT: I never used the sub-millisecond readings to make my claim of 1Khz sampling being useful. What you extracted from the data was sub-millisecond only data.
FACT: In my application, even signal bounce is relevant data. You should mimic the exact behavior of the joystick in a joystick recorder.
-
But how anyone can compare sampling a digital joystick to sampling analog audio, is beyond me.
With audio, its quite obvious that capturing as much accuracy as possible, especially during mixing/mastering, is useful. The more accurate data you have, the more accurately you will be mixing it. So that once you drop it back down to 44.1 or 48Khz, you are getting a better approximation. Thats just plain maths, the more precision the better the more accurate the result.
Now a digital Joystick? Nobody has yet explained how being able to tell what happened to the joystick between screen refreshes actually has any bearing at all on a game. Yes sampling quicker is more accurate, nobody every denied that. But accuracy is only any good when its actually useful.
A mouse its useful to sample quicker, the electronics can counteract any questionable result that way (especially led/laser mice, you could get a rogue reflection from dust, a crack, poor mouse mat) and most of all - there will be less lag from the mouse itself.
Just look at LCD TVs. The biggest lag on an LCD TV is not the pixel response time, its how quickly the TV can process the signal and actually tell those pixels to change. That is one reason why a cheap TV and an expensive one often can be really different, even if they are using the same LCD panel.
So yeah, the Amiga joystick port is fast, and it might be useful if you are using it for some custom purpose rather than a joystick. But then if you are going that direction why use such old technology when you could just use a modern PIC using far far less electricity. I mean its a silly argument as there are things the Minimig can do that neither the Amiga nor PC can do, but that does not mean PC is trying to catch up to it.
Yeah, you can build customized hardware on PC or Amiga or Minimig, but we were talking about using standard PC (what most people have out there). So that if you wrote a game, you can estimate that joystick reading will take 1.8 microseconds or something like that.
-
roflmao so my machines don't prove anything nor does the the motherboards i linked but your 10-12 do??????? seriously your idea of proof is lost somewhere.
...
Okay, great they may have gone back to serial ports, but they did produce machines with parallel ports w/o serial ports.
>yea because someone cared about keyboard interfaces more. besides ps2 ports were still compatible with AT ports(with a pin adapter) so really all that changed was the packaging.
AT keyboards with DIN5 are gone for good and they went a long time before joysticks for gameports or gameports. Joysticks for gameports are still being sold.
>what is that supposed to mean??
They got rid of the gameport knowing people can still use USB so they had some thought about it but still playing catch-up to Amiga with its superior joystick interface.
-
i see so efficiency = hogging the hardware. sorry but in the world of multitasking this don't have a place. the os determines what software gets priority but does not let anything hog the hardware.
...
No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware. Application can take over the timer interrupt that OS is using for multitasking so OS won't be multitasking. As I stated, see Amiga as an example of a computer that does this. OS supports multitasking applications but it also supports single tasking applications that can use hardware fully to get the task done most efficiently.
>the programmers chose the version of the api they are going to program to. as such if they decide to progran to 9.0c then that is what they state as the required version. microsoft also includes compatibility for all versions in the latest version. well except windows 7. windows 7 comes with directx 11 but dx9 is not included that i can tell but it can be installed seperately tho.
But normally, there's conflict when people have newer versions verses older versions of some software. I know there some DLLs (for borland C++) where fixing things made some older applications non-functional.
>look if the app directly controls the hw. This when this app crashes an os friendly app will try to access the same hw it might lock the os. or if two programs attempt to access the same hw they may cause a crash. instability abounds in this situation.
As I said, there's no multitasking when application takes over hardware but even in multitasking, you can have applications go directly to hardware as long as they know they're the only ones accessing it. You can corrupt things even using API. A good application that goes directly to hardware should be able to restore hardware to its normal state. I do it for parallel ports-- I use them directly and then restore them to the state they were in.
-
No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware.
.
Audio devices usually needs to be shared e.g. browser (e.g. multiple Flash FLV), Mediaplayer/DivX/WinAMP (e.g. MP3, AVI, WMV), PowerDVD (e.g. Blu-Ray), system alerts/effects, Game for Windows, Skype, WinUAE, VirtualBox, Windows Remote Desktop and 'etc'.
Application can take over the timer interrupt that OS is using for multitasking so OS won't be multitasking. As I stated, see Amiga as an example of a computer that does this. OS supports multitasking applications but it also supports single tasking applications that can use hardware fully to get the task done most efficiently.
.
Hit-the-metal applications breaks on Windows Remote Desktop or Windows Terminal environment.
-
Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5
The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.
It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...
If Amiga were still running things , we'd all be on Ibm.org wondering what could have been... I love the Amiga but sometimes I take off my rose coloured glasses to rest my eyes. ;-)
-
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Sa-NAXwzFm8/Skp8JJ6Kc9I/AAAAAAAAArw/8DJTW9FSBQs/s400/SlicedPig.jpg)
-
AT keyboards with DIN5 are gone for good and they went a long time before joysticks for gameports or gameports. Joysticks for gameports are still being sold.
I'm sure that gameport joysticks are being sold, look hard enough and you'll probably find niche venders supplying AT keyboards too. Hell, you can still buy megadrive 9 pin pads if you look around. That does not however change the fact that no PC has shipped with such a port for the better part of half a decade or more.
They got rid of the gameport knowing people can still use USB so they had some thought about it but still playing catch-up to Amiga with its superior joystick interface.
Oh lawdy, where to start...
First off, you have yet to prove your own claims about the Amiga's 9pin port. I'm sorry to say, but until you do that, everything else is null and void.
Second off, USB is more flexable, faster in every sense of the word then the Amigas joystick ports (not withstanding your claims thus far) and more capable then all of the Amiga's expansion ports combined - none offer the flexability that USB does.
And finally: You have been shown how to provide the backup to your speed claims, are you going to actually test them or just keep on repeating the same old debunked rubbish?
-
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Sa-NAXwzFm8/Skp8JJ6Kc9I/AAAAAAAAArw/8DJTW9FSBQs/s400/SlicedPig.jpg)
:confused:
C'est un Cochon?
-
Okay, great they may have gone back to serial ports, but they did produce machines with parallel ports w/o serial ports.
so what? i never claimed that serial or paralel ports didn't exist anymore-you said serial didn't. what i did say was that the joyport was the easiest to replace and as such is not included in the vast majority on motherboards available. there are some people who like you believe the joyport is the ultimat interface for the pc so they will pay for an adapter to use the joysticks they currently have. despite this the joyport is a dead technology and has been for a loooooong time.(aka i bought a microsoft sidewinder2 force feedback joystick USB circa late 90's and 3 gamepads USB)
AT keyboards with DIN5 are gone for good and they went a long time before joysticks for gameports or gameports. Joysticks for gameports are still being sold.
you give joyports too much credit.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000123&Description=joystick&name=PC%20Game%20Controllers
yep joyports are really dominating. :P
They got rid of the gameport knowing people can still use USB so they had some thought about it but still playing catch-up to Amiga with its superior joystick interface.
/facepalm
-
I'm starting to think this guy spends a little too much time playing with his joystick and inserting objects into his joyport......... o_O
-
No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware. Application can take over the timer interrupt that OS is using for multitasking so OS won't be multitasking. As I stated, see Amiga as an example of a computer that does this. OS supports multitasking applications but it also supports single tasking applications that can use hardware fully to get the task done most efficiently.
you you want to go back to the dark ages of single tasking huh? let's see how far this gets us today. load ie to browse web. plugins won't work since they are additional tasks. k also while ie is running you can't listen to music since that is not the primary task either. single tasking has not only broken windows but also amiga os,linux, and any other os that employs multitasking. single tasking died a long time ago. i propose we leave it there.
But normally, there's conflict when people have newer versions verses older versions of some software. I know there some DLLs (for borland C++) where fixing things made some older applications non-functional.
?? we are talking api not programming languages. get back on track.
As I said, there's no multitasking when application takes over hardware but even in multitasking, you can have applications go directly to hardware as long as they know they're the only ones accessing it. You can corrupt things even using API. A good application that goes directly to hardware should be able to restore hardware to its normal state. I do it for parallel ports-- I use them directly and then restore them to the state they were in.
and as i said previously this is a multitasking os environment NOT a single tasking environment. an api allows multiple programs to play nice with the hardware.
-
A good application that goes directly to hardware.....
Am I the only person who thinks that this is an oxymoron?
Gaz
-
Am I the only person who thinks that this is an oxymoron?
I think it's bloody hilarious :) Please feed the troll.
-
It's a metaphor for banging the hardware whilst multitasking...
:confused:
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Sa-NAXwzFm8/Skp8JJ6Kc9I/AAAAAAAAArw/8DJTW9FSBQs/s400/SlicedPig.jpg)
C'est un Cochon?
-
OMG.. this thread is STILL going on ? lol
-
Yeah, you can build customized hardware on PC or Amiga or Minimig, but we were talking about using standard PC (what most people have out there). So that if you wrote a game, you can estimate that joystick reading will take 1.8 microseconds or something like that.
But your whole argument is that the PC does NOT have the necessary standard hardware and that the Amiga does, so it is better. Therefore you cannot argue against customised hardware as according to you, its the only way the PC can compare to the Amiga.
I fail to see how any of this applies to modern game programming. Your whole argument has been that the Amiga joyport is good because it can do things that are completely useless for game programming. Why would a game need to record EXACT joystick actions? It doesn't. If it was any use, PCs would still be able to do it. Games consoles use Bluetooth and other variable latency inputs which are perfectly fine for gaming. Arguing that having lower latency, being able to probe them quicker, would actually be of any benefit at all, is silly.
No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware. Application can take over the timer interrupt that OS is using for multitasking so OS won't be multitasking. As I stated, see Amiga as an example of a computer that does this. OS supports multitasking applications but it also supports single tasking applications that can use hardware fully to get the task done most efficiently.
Now you are talking about single tasking? Guess what, even games consoles are multitasking, multi-threaded computers. Surely the kind of hardware banging you are talking about makes even DMA really tricky - how would you ever pull those textures in? The whole point of modern programming is you have different helper threads which can deal with various parts of your game, be written by different developers, but all interact with each other for the end product. So again, I fail to see how your arguments have any bearing in reality.
-
To continue.
http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbthread.pl/amiga/expand/163649?page=1
quote from foobar
"You forgot; they** still can not accurately poll a digital joystick at 1000Hz. "
**Refers to the X86 PC camp..
-
PC/Mac/Spacr/Everything under the sun with its usb port, wins.
-
Here in Australia we would say:
PC still playing Amiga tomato sauce
Since the word catchup never really got here.