A Big missing classic feature on the new Amiga's?

[Karlos]

I think maybe some of us like me are just getting lazy many of the disks actually had the same boot info as the workbench. I remember creating a special Pagestream disk  that loaded every thing on my ram and would run faster. Of course all the games especially the good one .....

I used to have custom configured boot floppies for running various software, such as octamed, protracker and the sampler software for my old parallel port sampler on the same floppy.

It was necessary in the days before getting a hard disk but I'd argue that having to boot a different disk for each major application you use made a mockery of a system designed around multitasking.

[Piru]

it died a deserving death. it would bring no benefits with current systems.

[kolla]

There's this adventure game that you boot directly into also on Amiga NG systems, I heard it's quite addictive... Linux I think it's called.

[Amiga_Nut]

I think it's important to remember PC<>AMIGA, never has been never will be.

Now the fact there are millions of combinations of all the necessary components to get a PC to power on is no excuse for the complete pile of bloatware crap that is Vista or Win7 no....requiring Ghz of CPU speed just to show a mouse pointer on a screen and double click on things to run them from icons IS A JOKE!

But it is also important to remember only Amiga made it possible, because when a disk boots on an Amiga it knows there will only be one type of chipset, or a very compatible subset of it. Also important to remember some of the functionality in the Kickstart ROM includes things that you need to copy onto even an MS-DOS floppy with the Format /S command. Command.com is required on all PC boot floppies in the 80s, but on the Amiga there is core OS code already there ready to run. Tandy tried this by putting Windows V2 onto a set of 1mb boot roms for one of their machines. Disaster though because Windows is too much of a work in progress to want on a boot ROM.

The Amiga was a console and a computer at the same time, it had the advantages of both. The 360 doesn't let you do anything beyond play games or movies, the PC has so many levels between the crappy Win7 code (let alone the game code) and the actual hardware that it's a real joke, but necessary due to how the PC has always been.

Can't really blame IBM, they designed the PC as a business machine, you CAN blame Microsoft for all their dirty tactics to get their crappy OS everywhere since Win95 though.

Taking Linux as an example, yes you can boot a Live CD distro sure, but it will be like running Windows games in 'Safe Mode' which if you have ever tried it doesn't even work usually, and even on 2D games runs about 20x slower if it does work. I am guessing people have forgotten the DOS days where you needed to run a different EXE depending on which brand of 3D card you brought  There are just too many combinations of components in a PC to ever allow it to become a replacement for consoles. And yes the fact Amiga died as a paradigm/ideal and Playstation began its meteoric rise to conquering the home market to the tune of nearly 300 million consoles sold by Sony alone so far in various generations you see why.

Just because the MSN/Facebook brigade buy PCs, many many people got fed up with dodgy PC OS and just went and bought a PS1/2/3 for fuss free gaming, before this time consoles were just geeky things or toys for little babies who wanted to play Mario in the 80s. The fact these 3D games machines generated graphics far in excess of a PC costing 3x as much was the final catalyst. The PC gaming market is now in serious trouble....and if it dies so does the Microsoft hold on the OS market. Hooray \o/

OS4 on PS3 would have given you back your dream situation...creative computer, beautiful OS, games that PCs can't compete with on price because its running on a close platform. Sadly Amiga Inc were a bunch of clueless twats and so the opportunity is gone forever. Ho-hum.

edit: There's no real commercial games market for Mac OS X but even so it is just Linux on expensive hardware for fanboys. Neither OS X or Windows is a real choice, it's like saying you can either be strangled or drowned to a victim die...what a choice NOT!

[Tension]

OS4 on PS3 would have given you back your dream situation...creative computer, beautiful OS, games that PCs can't compete with on price because its running on a close platform. Sadly Amiga Inc were a bunch of clueless twats and so the opportunity is gone forever. Ho-hum.

Sony were the real twats by disabling the OtherOS option.

Sure, it's a 'voluntary' upgrade, but if you dont upgrade, you cant play online.

Bastards*

*http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=52115&highlight=bastards

[Cammy]

I really hope someone at A-Eon or Hyperion is in contact with these guys to get their new SDK and 3D rendering engine before it becomes the next big thing http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

Some cool new technology like that might make the new Amigas more attractive.

[Karlos]

I really hope someone at A-Eon or Hyperion is in contact with these guys to get their new SDK and 3D rendering engine before it becomes the next big thing http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

Just checked out their site quickly. How intriguing...

I dunno if it is my imagination but in each screen shot, every instance of a given object in a scene appears to have the same orientation (look at the bundles of grass, for example). I hope that's not a feature of how it works.

[Cammy]

I have a feeling those demonstration models and videos are only limited by the amount of time the artist could put into them, hopefully the technology itself allows for more creative freedom than the demonstrations show.

One thing that I was concerned about was dynamic lighting, all of the objects seem to have their own lighting and shading but no shadows around them.

[Karlos]

One thing that I was concerned about was dynamic lighting, all of the objects seem to have their own lighting and shading but no shadows around them.

Yeah, the lighting was particularly poor by current shader model technique standards.

I wonder if the same algorithm they use to calculate which "3d atoms" are hit by the viewport can be applied to light sources in the scene in order to project shadows.

Also, although their renderer runs on the CPU, perhaps it can be reimplemented to run on a GPU using one of the existing cross-GPU compute platforms (OpenCL/DirectCompute). Doing it on the card has got to be more efficient, unless the algorithm has no inherent parallelism (hard to imagine for a rendering technique) to exploit or requires a lot of random/scattered memory accesses.

Also, if you are rendering with the GPU, I imagine it's also easier then to perform proper depth culling (you may have noticed glitches in their videos) when rendering the points since z-buffers operate per pixel and are designed for precisely this job. It would also theoretically open up mixed-mode rendering. A lot of pixel shader effects are still available even when rendering point primitives.

-edit-

Regarding polygon detail, their arguments were rather old and I noticed they showed most games running in their lower detail settings (particularly noticable in the crysis/fallout 3 shots). Both games use more modern techniques, with better results, for simulating bumpy surfaces. However, DX11 introduces hardware tessellation via displacement maps. These have the effect of increasing the geometry in a scene substantially. Rather like applying a bump map that works on the actual geometry rather than as a dataset for a pixel shader.

[zylesea]

Not having to boot the OS to load programs, what I mean is on the classic Amiga you could use your Amiga without ever having to load up the OS/Workbench, games could boot straight up, even programs could self boot, all powered by the Kickstart. I think this is one of the reasons the Amiga had a edge over the PC in early days, no having to go into Dos or Windows to load a program, just slam the disk in and let it get on with it. I kind of liked this, because you could just use it like a game console, never having to touch the OS or complicated code to get a game or program running, why are these days gone,  I know this is not really an OS issue but more of a Bios and Uboot issue but do you think we will ever see this again on a computer?
 

 plus why does everything has to be installed, ok I know its quicker and easier no disk required etc, But kind of liked the option of not filling my hard disk up and having to use it to perform every task, these Linux Live disks proves that you dont really have to have a hard drive for everything.
 So what do you lot think?

I don't miss that. I like the convenience of having all ready after a fast boot up. But if i want to I can make a self booting CD with the apps I want and a tailored OS distribution. Really easy. Instead of a CD I can use an usb stick on devices that support booting off these things. But while I like that as backup solution or little exercise I don't use that option since, as said, I like the convenience of my full full featured system.
I am rather happy that floppes and the likes have more or less died out. usb sticks/drives for moving data/back ups is another issue.

[Karlos]

Since installing NICs in my classic machines, I can count the number of times I've used a floppy disk on the fingers of one hand. A hand that hasn't got any fingers.