PeeCee Gamers ha! What a funny bunch eh. lol!

[Hammer]

And for many years resented Commodore for allowing the greatest travesty in computing to happen in such a way.

One should also blame Motorola's part in dumping 68k as their leading edge CPU.

As a CPU partner, Motorola doesn’t seems to have the same level of support as with Intel (or with AMD) in regards to legacy support and speed upgrade pace.….

What IF the original creators of Amiga had selected Intel (or AMD) as it’s CPU partner?

HW setup of i386 + 32bit OS + auto-config (plug and play) + custom chip (custom co-processors**) powered platform should sound familiar to the modern PC setups.

**chips which reduces the CPU’s burden.

Running on AROS on i386 (with similar level gfx and audio add-on card) box is closest to this “What IF” scenario.  

[Hammer]

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

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

[Hammer]

Bottom line, PC's are only good for 1st person games (which all seem to be the same to me) and those over complicated flight sims that need a load of buttons.

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

[Hammer]

I was quite late getting a PC in life, i would never touch one in the past as i never had the urge/need to get one , to them my friends it was all tweaking this, teaking that, mine is faster than yours,

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

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

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

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

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

play quake on a 60mhz Amiga computer

But how large is the resolution?

[Hammer]

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

What version of WinNT?

I think the strength of the Amiga is not just pre-emptive multi tasking at the OS level -- it was doing it at the hardware level,

With OS shared memory architecture, AmigaOS's main strength was its task switching speed.

An Amiga with just chipram;  i.e. this bus has to be shared with customs co-processors chips and CPU.

This should sound familiar to the modern PC.

In a modern PC, bandwidth has to shared with the following co-processors
1. GPU (a.k.a VPU),  
2. APU (a.k.a DSP),
3. SPP, (nForce’s case) nForce 2’s SPP (Northbridge chip)  is short for "Signal Platform Processor".

Thus the case for 128bit wide bus (via dual RAM channel controllers).

Of course one could plug-in dumb video and sound cards on a modern PC.    

PS; An Amiga with Fast RAM and Chip RAM is effectively has dual RAM controllers (minus the “cross-bar” technology).

[Hammer]

DOOM on a 486? why yes, thats bad graphic's especially zoomed in. Sadly that is not really because of DOS (it isn't a windows game really, if I recall correctly).

Both DOS and WinDOOM exist btw...

My school uses an Amiga 2000 (2500?) to do the scrolling text on its local TV channel, with Video Toaster. which goes to show how far ahead the Amiga was.

Note that the Video Toaster's does have it's own video processor...

Video Toaster's is not just a dumb add-on card...

Although X86 is getting up in the limits (2ghz Pentium Zeons in the best school computers, look like they're on life support.)

To go beyond (Northwood core) 3.06/3.2Ghz, the Pentium 4 will just get yet another core upgrade.
1. Prescott
2. Nocona

Refer to http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_03_26_Prescott_clues_for_Yamhill.html

Prescott core was stated to have 1Mb L2 cache, which is practically Pentium 4 Xeon in regards L2 cache size.

I would say "X86 is getting up in the limits" is somewhat false .

For "Slimming down Microsoft Windows ObeseWare(TM)" projects;
Refer to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8470

The problem (or strength i.e. depending on how you look at it) with X86’s CPU manufactures they seem to skip around the claimed limitations by issuing new cores.

[Hammer]

KingTutt wrote:
I see alot of people more recently complaining about the prices of the high end AmigaOne XE's. I'd just like to say that I payed about $700AUD for the Amiga 500 back in 1990 (for a then revolutionary system). Fast forward to 1996 and I was paying $3000AUD for a supposed superior system (Pentiium 100).

I’ll just say that you got ripped off… I only paid Pentium Classic 150Mhz white box system for around $1000 AUD in around the same time period as you.  

Mind you I did mention in an earlier post that It felt more like a downgrade for a very looong time. Windows 95 was hardly as groundbreaking as it was hyped up to be.

In business (i.e. office type environment), legacy support is important. In another words, X86 PC main strength has funded its weakness.

OS/2 Warp has support for Win16/DOS legacy**, but people was not interested with non-official upgrade path.

**There are major issues when running Win16/DOS legacy within OS/2 at that time. I’ll leave that for another time.

[Hammer]

Be more than happy to get back to you with that - I've sent an Email off to our IT staff for relevant details.

You could press Windows key + Pause button (at same time) for obtaining WinNT's release version...

The only point I made on the PC side of things is that the clock stops when I'm digitizing video -- something that shouldn't happen be it an OS problem or a programming problem.

I recall, NT drivers is at kernel level, thus a badly written driver may play havoc with user level programs (like your clock applet).  

[Hammer]

I highly doubt you we are referring to the same period (Jan 96) mate. At the time the highest specced Pentium was a 133Mhz, and they were way more expensive. 150Mhz was a few months away

Around March 1994 was release date for Intel Pentium @100mhz.

Around March 1995 was release date for Pentium Classic @ 120Mhz.

Around January 1996 was release date for Pentium Class @150Mhz.

Refer to http://www.redhill.net.au/c-4.html

Depending where you purchased your PC, the final price for your PC may be different to mine.

Just upgraded a whole system from there for under $400AUD for a mate of mine!

Depending on the spec btw. What was the spec?

[Hammer]

levelLORD wrote:
@ Hammer

Hi,

Last good RTS game that I was playing was Dune II on Amiga.

Mine would be Starcraft due to the story plot. Warcraft III comes close due added RPG elements.

Two days ago I purchased CC: Generals and nothing, I finished game after 10 hours of playing, 3 campaigns, 7 missions each... That is not a good game, at least for me.

What about multi-player?

[Hammer]

But if you ever think you're getting ripped off - consider these purchases (in Oz at the time too):

1982 - C64 - $300
1983 - 1541 drive $344.50 (I remember that one exactly)
1983 - 300 baud modem - $250
Amber monitor $150
1984 - 300/1200 baud modem (auto answer) $350
1984 - Pet 1001 drive (x2) $400 each
1985 - Pet HD 5mhz (canna remember model) $500

Was there a strong commodity market (relative to X86 PC) for PET/C64?