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

[Karlos]

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.

You still can boot without a startup sequence in OS4 if you like. Of course, OS4's Kickstart lives on disk (how's that for a full on trip into retro land for you?), so you still need it available, even if it is on an external medium (install CD for example).

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?

You are sort of confusing the OS with Workbench, I think. Regardless of whether or not you started a full workbench session, or even just an amigados one without startup, AmigaOS was always loaded right from power on, even when booting from a non-os friendly game. What do you think activated the floppy drive and read in your game's bootloader?

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?

This is a bit of a nonsense argument these days, IMHO. How is it an advantage? Storage is vast and cheap today. You aren't going to fill a modern HD quickly by installing applications, especially Amiga ones. It's your data that takes up the room. My oldest still-in-service Amiga hard drive (1.2GB, utter peanuts by todays standards) still has plenty of free space after 15 years!

Booting straight into an app from disk was useful before I had a hard disk but I'd much rather be able to launch something without having to rifle around in a drawer full of disks, which usually takes longer than it does booting the system It was the whole reason I bought a hard disk for my Amiga in the first place and it was one of the single most useful hardware upgrades it ever had.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.