Why can't a windows machine do it.

[Tomas]

Besides, what does dual core say to you?

To me it says that they have kinda reached the speed limit per core with current technology, so to speed things up they instead give you two cpus in one. I personally welcome dual core, as it really improves multitasking which is one step closer to what amiga was with it's custom chipset.
The amiga was in a way a multicore system as well, just that each chip had a specific task to do.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

B00tDisk wrote:
Why can't a 12mhz amiga run a simple little raycasting/texturemapping engine like Wolf3d?  A PC can.  Golly, I guess the Amiga sucks.

It can.
But Wolf3d has never been properly ported to the A500.
Just look at Legend of Valour

[DonnyEMU]

That's just not true, I could do this any day in XAML with WPF. If you are interested in this check out the Visit Mix Website.


I think it's a matter of well how you are trying to do this, or why you are saying it can't. Certain windows have different types of "refresh" schemes about them and how the programmer set up the window to do it's redraw and refresh.

I keep hearing people here complain about PCs, most of the time it's not with up-to-date hardware or up-to-date operating systems.

I am not trying to be nasty here but when I follow a thread like this and see statements like:

"I think the only people who take Windows seriously are those who've never used anything else."..

I have to tell you I have done my share of both Amiga development on classic Amiga's using SAS C and Windows Development using Visual Studio since 1994.

The Amiga and PCs are no better or no worse than each other for capabilities and performance in these areas..

This is just another typical "Amiga" thread that mirror someone's perceptions of something that just isn't the case in reality. I can prove all that with timings and code examples if anyone wants to challenge me on it.



Even on the Amiga, you can set up a window that doesn't refresh itself and redraw properly. Many 1.1 and 1.2 programs for AmigaDOS had these problems specifically..

[Roj]

I keep hearing people here complain about PCs, most of the time it's not with up-to-date hardware or up-to-date operating systems.

But my experience with Windows is not with up-to-date hardware. I wish it was, but I don't see that as a practical option. The need to constantly update the hardware in order to see the system run the way it's supposed to is part of the reason I don't care for them. I'm big on first impressions, and I don't care for companies that take ten years to finally "get it right". Then again, I'm not big on companies that take ten years to do next to nothing either. ;-)

It's disappointing when I run into someone who has actually used an Amiga, but still thinks of them as close-to-stock A500s or A4000s, and then chuckles when I mention that they should try one that's had the benefit of newer hardware and expansions.

The Amiga and PCs are no better or no worse than each other for capabilities and performance in these areas.

I disagree. Performance-wise, the Amiga has been soundly beaten in nearly all areas. That's not why I still hang on to mine. It's never been purely about speed. I just have a fondness for the way things happen on the Amiga.

This is just another typical "Amiga" thread that mirror someone's perceptions of something that just isn't the case in reality.

But if that's what's happening on their system, that is reality. Maybe the developers didn't take the time to optimize their graphics engine, or maybe the company put pressure on them to get it out too quickly and didn't afford them the time to get it running more smoothly. In either case, it's not as glaring a problem with Amiga software, old or new.

[bfilipe]

Thomas wrote:
Sure it can! Though it will probably not run very well
Not that it ran very well on a 80286 with ega graphics either, which is basically the specs of the pcs back then.

Yes it did, I remember playing it very well, and finishing it in 1993 in my 12Mhz 286. But I also believe it depended on the graphic card you had. At that time I was using a 256KB ISA Boca VGA Card, that was fast but had some bugs with some software I used. Later replaced it with a Tridend 512Kb TVGA9000 (SVGA) and the newer card was slower than the older one in DOS (but much more stable).

And don't forget that this game was much lighter than Doom (this one required a full 486DX to play really well if I'm not mistaken).

The problem with PCs is that you can't simply measure it's performance based on CPU alone. Back then (and still now) many Top model PCs (with the fastest CPU) were sold with crappy SVGA cards. I remember seing a friends 486DX2 at 66 Mhz bought in Dec 1992 equiped with 420MB HDD, 4MB of ram and then a wimpy 512KB trident TVGA9000, instead of a good ISA SVGA card like a S3 with 1MB or 2 MB of Vram (this was before Vesa Local BUS).

I remember in 1995 having a cyrix 486DX at 40Mhz and 4Mb of Ram and when I replaced the SVGA card I was using (the same TVGA I had in the previous 286) with a VLB 1MB Cirrus SVGA card, the 3d performance in some games almost doubled. Red Baron comes to mind, since I had to switch off the turbo (and run at 25MHz) and sometimes disable the internal cache also to get the game down to a decent playable speed (this same game still crawls in my amiga 1200 equipped with a 40Mhz Apollo 1240 and 64MB of Ram).

Regards

[Jose]

Firefox scrolls very well at 1024x768x24on my Win2K with only a classic Athlon overclocked to 950Mhz, my small experience is that it depends on the application.
What I'm amazed is how well iBrowse scrolls at 800x600x24 with a cybervision and a mere WarpEnding at 40Mhz. Almost as good! Still waiting to experience an Amiga with an 060 66mhz or PowerPC, I bet the scrolling is close to perfect. Talk about efficient use of resources.

[stefcep2]

Its both a hardware and operating system problem.  The AmigaOS and hardware were always very tightly integrated.  SCALA running under Winuae on my dual Athlon 4800 scrolls very, very nicely, but the Windows native SCALA doesn't.  The architecture of the PC was based on the CPU doing everything, although thats changed with modern video cards having their own GPU's.  I remeber having to reboot my '030 A1200 after a GURU , booting up in 5 seconds and hearing Windows user complain about rebooting: I'd never used Windows at the time and thought well its only 5 seconds, what are they complaining about thinking Windows was like the Amiga.  Little did I know

Note that Linux running on a PC (in GUI mode) is not much better than Windows in this regard: Linux takes just as long to boot and shut down, and the interface can slow to a crawl.  In fact Linux multi-tasks worse than Windows.  One major Linux kernal developer CK has gone on record saying just how snappy and smooth his Amiga was 15 years ago, and with all of the hardware advancements since, we still can't replicate that user experience.  Sure CPU intensive stuff like encoding and decoding media is much faster, but the user experience is no better 15 years later. By now with thousand fold speed increases in hardware the OS should be booting up in no time and you should NEVER get locked out because you just stuck in a CD.  

The fact is that current PC hardware designs are determined by Windows specifications and as such the user experience will always be the way they are regardless of what OS you use.  There would need to be a fundamental architectural change for things to change, but it will never happen because we live in a Windows world.

[stefcep2]

y Tomas on 2007/9/19 16:11:12

Quote:

    Besides, what does dual core say to you?


To me it says that they have kinda reached the speed limit per core with current technology, so to speed things up they instead give you two cpus in one. I personally welcome dual core, as it really improves multitasking which is one step closer to what amiga was with it's custom chipset.
The amiga was in a way a multicore system as well, just that each chip had a specific task to do.

Speed what things up?  Most of your apps are single threaded ie each individual will run at the same speed as running on a single core cpu running at the same mhz, maybe slower, and yes I agree multitasking will improve because the other task ie app can use the other core.  Yeah this may make the user experience smoother if the tasks are cpu intensive, but hell why isn't a single cpu running at 3000 mhz enough to do this anyway?   Most PC users may burn a cd/dvd in the background , write word process, and browse or email at the same time.  Why do i need two or more cpu's running at 3000 mhz to do this? Its because the hardware architecture and the OS are crap.

[Opus]

only thing I see windoze doing better at, with all it's pure horsepower and ram, is flash anim! and...GAMES, which just get a PS3 and that's covered.

[clockmstr]

Ofcourse Windows is also a complete OS and not some half-arsed kludge like OS4...

Who really cares about sidescrolling when there are so many other useful tasks a PC can do effortlessly that are at best half-baked or at worst impossible on any Amiga?

Let's keep it in perspective.

[clockmstr]

It ran very well on my 12mhz 286 with EGA graphics, thank you very much.

[clockmstr]

It ran very well on my 12mhz 286 with EGA graphics, thank you very much.

[Terse]

What is the argument?  That a modern PC cannot sroll the screen as in a video game?  Bullcrap.  Play Platypus,a claymation 2d shooter from a few years go.  Scrolls fine at 60fps.

Or is this some kind of nerd debate about an esoteric kind of scrolling only l33t Amiga users can understand?

[57goldtop]

An Amiga 500 could smoothly scroll text vertically across a screen. An A500 ran with a CPU running at around 7MHz. A PC running windows with a CPU in excess of 2000Mhz doesn't seem to be capable of this feet why it that?

It has nothing to do with speed, timing rather.

The Amiga has a hardware vblank interrupt to handle scrolling and animation properly.

In Windows, updates to the screen have to be synchronized such that they never happen in the middle of the screen in order to have a smooth 60Hz display. This is in fact very difficult to do..

[clockmstr]

I can answer that since I've pretty much had PC's running concurrently with an Amiga of some sort.

The problem was with your IBM PC's which were specced ultra conservatively to be uber-reliable office machines but that also made them lousy gaming systems.

My EGA AMD 12Mhz 286 ran wolf3D as smooth as silk.

I got Quake playable on a overclocked 50Mhz 386DX40 with a very overclocked Cyrix FPU and decent SVGA graphics card.

Doom, ROTT and Duke Nuke'm 3D were smooth as silk on that system and better then the 486DX33 I had after until I installed a VLBUS graphics card and a DX2/66 CPU.

It just got better from there on... so many options, so many games.

[clockmstr]

Tripitaka wrote:

TheMagicM wrote:
please, the PC has way more firepower the the Amiga will ever have.  

Now come on....NEVER!! I hope one day to quote you on that.

  :lol:

That day will never come.