Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Amiga_Nut on May 12, 2011, 12:16:59 PM
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What it says on the tin really, some of us old enough had a C64 before an Amiga and it was brand loyalty to Commodore not the compatibility of the machine that led us to Amiga. The two are totally incompatible and have nothing technically in common but at the same time spiritually are successors to each other. After all C64 compatibility didn't make the C128 anywhere near a viable purchase....they were clinging on to the old technology too much.
So my question is this.....it's 1992....Commodore launch a radical new machine for the 4th time in their history totally incompatible with Amiga BUT absolutely a new paradigm in price performance that put it on par with Amiga 1000 vs PC-AT & original Macintosh.
Would you have bought it if it meant you could play Doom on a £300 machine as well as a Pentium 75mhz PC costing £1500 in 1994 OR would you have not bought it because you can't run your Amiga games on it?
Me personally, no offence, I wouldn't give a crap. If it was as revolutionary as the A1000 I couldn't have cared less if it was Amiga compatible or not, and better that than the luke warm upgrade that was AGA in 4000/1200/CD32.
The A1200 is to the A500 what the C128 is to the C64.
See what I am getting at?
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My software investment was too large to simply dump, plus I would have struggled to afford anything more than £300 when I was 13...
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It would have been a disaster for Commodore to release a computer that was completely incompatible with the Amiga by that time. Users were beginning to jump ship to IBM by that point so if they were going to loose their software investment anyway, I don't think they would have stuck with Commodore.
Having said all of that, pondering how disastrous that would have been, I find myself forced to say that I'm sure if Commodore would have been better off financially they would have tried something like this...
Plus/4
C65
C16
Empirical evidence my friends...
Cheers!
-P
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My software investment was too large to simply dump, plus I would have struggled to afford anything more than £300 when I was 13...
There is no reason to have thrown out your Amiga just because you bought a second system.
I left Apple to Amiga because the Amiga was amazing. I don't see a reason why I wouldn't have done the same had C= went to a next generation. I will point out the differences and the wake it caused when C= went AGA. Say C= went dual Sparc CPU system with a SMP/MP OS which broke 3.1 API to hell and back, I'd buy it without question because it would be a major evolutionary step by C=. TBH, I would have expected C= to take massive jumps like the Vic20/C64 to Amiga on a semi-regular basis, technology permitting and not be chained to the grave.
One of the reasons why C= failed is because C= failed to take those evolutionary steps. Even if C= went with Intel based Amigas, they could have gotten away with forcing the slightly slower 486s they had sitting in warehouses to the Amiga (called it Amiga 1486 for AIO design) while they bought the next slightly faster 486s for their Window and big Amiga boxes to maintain competitive sales. Add in the next generation Amiga gfx was going to be PCI, just produce a Windows driver for it, instant money maker in both computer worlds.
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@dammy
I would have to have sold my Amiga to help fund the purchase of the new machine. Don't forget I was 13 in '93!
I am also trying to put my mind into te frameset that I ha back then... I think I would have struggled to justify jumping to a new platform with all my games and applications, plus most evenings I spent writing little programs... I was too invested in the Amiga platform to jump... I didn't jump until 2000!!!
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I kept my C64 for years after I blagged an A1000 so made no difference to me. The point is half the reason AGA was luke warm was because it was a limited project with hands tied behind their backs forced to keep Amiga compatibility.
Point is if you had a super powerful machine it would have prevented you from going to 3DO/Jaguar/Sega/Nintendo etc. IBM was not the rival to the A1200/CD32 low end of the market no way. C64 wasn't rivalled by IBM PC in the CGA XT days either. OK A4000/030 yes but there simply wasn't a PC cheap enough in most of 93, we are talking A1200 vs games console for games playing mass market.
If you want to draw/write/program things keep your Amiga sure.
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Almost certainly. The Amiga was the wonder non-compatible upgrade path for my C128 at the time. Our C128 at the time had a 512k REU, pair of 1571s, 1581, mouse, monitor that was semi-Amiga compatible and lots of expensive Geos software.
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Surely not, there was no need to have a bang new machine.The amiga was enough expandable to support revolutions as a proof all actual devices that exist (pci adapters , usb ...) , unlike the c-64. Image the same question with PC or MAC, nonsense
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@dammy
I would have to have sold my Amiga to help fund the purchase of the new machine. Don't forget I was 13 in '93!
The poll said "would" and not "could." Therefore you can ignore the financial aspect of buying a new system. I had my Apple for awhile after I got the A500, I see no reason why I would have dumped it immediately after buying a new Uber Amiga if it wasn't backward compatible.
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1993 had me pretty much in the MS camp. I would have loved an alternative, but for me that was 7 years away with OS X....
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For me it wasn't a question of brand loyalty, it was simply the fact the Commodore produced the best & most innovative machines for their time... :)
Way back end of 81 start of 82 what were the main choices a ZX80/81 which was nothing more than a big calculator or the VIC20 with full size keyboard, slightly better graphics & far superior sound... no brainer that one... :)
Then came the C64, but by this time you had all sorts of other computers to choose from , Spectrum, Dragon, Oric Atom & Amstrad to name but a few, but the C64 won out again 64K RAM, superior gfx, sprites and the SID chip that made all the others sound like some old fashioned alarm on the first digital clocks... again a no brainer... :)
Then of course for me in 86 came the most advanced and elegant (OS wise) home computer ever conceived the Amiga, no need to explain that one... :)
Never parted with either the VIC20 or C64 because by then i had bought literally thousands of tapes for them and there was no way I was ever going to sell them even though they couldn't be used on the Amiga. So I just hung on to them so that I could still play those thousands of games while I began building up my new Amiga software collection... :)
By 92 and the A1200, for me there was no need for another computer (still never understand why people always bring doom into the equation) and from that day to this it's always been the Amiga and nothing else... :)
If CBM had ever brought out a new machine it would have to have been something as radical and as special as the C64 & A1000 were for their time. I certainly wouldn't have bought it just to play Doom and if that's all it was really capable of doing then I'd have passed on that one... :)
Still more than happy after 30 years of using these brilliant machines and will be until I kick the bucket, no PCs or latest consoles for me, the VIC20, C64 & Amiga cover everything I need from computers... :)
As for the Doom question... WHY... ;)
(PS:Couldn't answer the poll as nothing in it applies to me.... :))
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In 1993 I was a kid playing around with BASIC on a Mac IIcx - as long as the UI was as nice as System 7's I probably would never have known the difference ;)
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At the tender age of 13, thatd have depended on my parents,but given I kept my A1200 until 98 or 99, I am guessing no.
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They did release machines around that time frame that were incompatible with Amiga, PC clones including laptops. I didn't buy any of them and as long as there were decent Amigas I wouldn't have bought anything that wasn't Amiga compatible at the time.
I moved from C64 to 128 when it died to Amiga 500 to 2000 to 1200 then to Windows PC when the Pentium 3 made it at least start to work as well and games to play decently.
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For me it wasn't a question of brand loyalty, it was simply the fact the Commodore produced the best & most innovative machines for their time... :)
Way back end of 81 start of 82 what were the main choices a ZX80/81 which was nothing more than a big calculator or the VIC20 with full size keyboard, slightly better graphics & far superior sound... no brainer that one... :)
I've considered a Commodore tattoo, but Franko is more entitled to one than I. I didn't get my first Commodore until at least '86 or '87!
...one day I'll pin down the exact date..
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They did release machines around that time frame that were incompatible with Amiga, PC clones including laptops.
Yeah, but the question was about an Amiga-incompatible system that was a step forward. Commodore's PC clones were basically just okay, nothing special even by PC standards.
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The A1200 and A4000 cost a lot of development time and the chipset took up a lot of space because they were trying to keep things compatible IMO.
C128 sold badly and wasn't a huge improvement, ditto A1200. So I get the point.
If Commodore had produced a machine with radically new technology that allowed triple parallax 256 colour screens with 256 hardware sprites with realtime scaling and rotation and 8 channel 16bit audio with realtime echo/reverb/modulation/filtering then YES.
I love my Amiga, but owning a C64 and Amiga was not a problem. Owning machine X + Amiga + C64 again not a problem.
Trouble is none of the OCS designers were in house employees ditto C64s VIC2 and SID designers. Maybe if they had ended up with the 3DO or Flair2 chip set rivals secured this would have been their 3rd wonder machine.
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can't say yes or no to this. It's about software support for me. will if get imagine, imageFX, lightwave?
what's the game publisher support? what's the OS like ,price? etc. Otherwise your left with a Sam Coupe or Acorn Archimedes.
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Yeah, but the question was about an Amiga-incompatible system that was a step forward. Commodore's PC clones were basically just okay, nothing special even by PC standards.
PCs were useless machines in 1992, even a 80486 with ISA bus VGA and Soundblaster could barely replicate A500 games from 1986 apart from 256 colours on screen....until they moved *puke*
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can't say yes or no to this. It's about software support for me. will if get imagine, imageFX, lightwave?
what's the game publisher support? what's the OS like ,price? etc. Otherwise your left with a Sam Coupe or Acorn Archimedes.
It's quite clear OP is talking the same core market as C64 and A500 purchasers. NOT C128D or A2000/3000 users being professional. So around the £300-350 mark INSTEAD of a stock A1200 that 1000s bought in the hope of playing texture mapped 3D games not OCS games with a few extra colours twice as fast ;). The reference to the technical superiority is to show the trade off. A1000 was compatible with nothing else on launch day....didn't care myself......wouldn't have cared in 1992/93 if they had the same technological leap as C64 to Amiga.
Nobody cared if their Amiga was C64 compatible, which is why I could never have been conned into the Commodore 128D for £500 instead of £570 for an Amiga 500. The extra 384mb of RAM alone was worth more than the £75 difference.
I got a machine in both cases better than consoles available on launch day too and still both could do other things (graphics/db/music/financial/wp etc).
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In 1994 I needed a machine that was good at LeTeX, GIF, JPeg and networking. Later Java became important. If Commodores wonder machine could have done that as good as Linux, I would have bought one for the equivalent of 900$, because this was my budget.
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No, I'll think buy a PPC machine.
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The extra 384mb of RAM alone was worth more than the £75 difference.
Holy cow, that was one smoking A500!
:)
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Holy cow, that was one smoking A500!
:)
384kb ooops :roflmao:
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Yeah, I would have bought that 12GHz, 512MB Ram, 4TB hard drive system even if it wasn't Amiga compatible at under $300.
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Well the Acorn RISC based machine launched in 1987 with chunky pixel 256/4096 colour screens and 8 channel 16bit stereo sound and a CPU speed approx 16mhz 68030 speed.
A1200 was not cutting edge by a long shot, hell Acorn essentially built an Atari Falcon 7 years before Atari.
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PCs were useless machines in 1992, even a 80486 with ISA bus VGA and Soundblaster could barely replicate A500 games from 1986 apart from 256 colours on screen....until they moved *puke*
Dont forget the joys of windows 3.1
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Dont forget the joys of windows 3.1
Never used it, just played DOS games and wrote Dbase 3 databases, ran Dpaint PC and Imagine 2.0 rendering :)
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@dammy
I would have to have sold my Amiga to help fund the purchase of the new machine. Don't forget I was 13 in '93!
I am also trying to put my mind into te frameset that I ha back then... I think I would have struggled to justify jumping to a new platform with all my games and applications, plus most evenings I spent writing little programs... I was too invested in the Amiga platform to jump... I didn't jump until 2000!!!
You were 13. Man, I am feeling old........
I though you might be older.
Your avatar picture reminds me of what some of the British New Wave Rock Stars from back in the early 80's dressed like.
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I voted yes. The thing that I loved about the Amiga was it's hardware and if Commodore kept putting out excellent pieces of kit, then I'd stay in!
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C128 sold badly and wasn't a huge improvement
I came across something on commodore.ca the other day where Bil Herd replied to a message about the C128. He stated the C128 was only created because Commodore needed to be seen to be doing something before they released the Amiga.
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You were 13. Man, I am feeling old........
I though you might be older.
Your avatar picture reminds me of what some of the British New Wave Rock Stars from back in the early 80's dressed like.
Yeah, we were part of a new "new wave" :) it didn't take ;)
Actually the Acorn Archimedies is basically the best Commodore could have done at the time and we can see how well it worked out for Acorn...
Once a computer hits mass market, software support is vital... The Amiga, Mac and IBM-PC were all trading on software by the mid 90's .)
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I didn't get an Amiga because of brand loyalty.
Back in the early 80's, my mother was a teacher, and, as such, she was invited to the major technical college in South Australia at the time (the Levels) to see a revolutionary new computer, the Lisa.
While she was there, she was told about an even more revolutionary computer called the Lorraine, and she told me about it when she got home.
Shortly after that I got my first computer - a C64.
I got an Amiag when I got the opportunity - a secondhand Amiga 500 with 3 meg of RAM and a 20 Meg hard drive. I didn't get it because it was a Commodore.
I got it because it was a Lorraine, or, at least, a descendant of the Lorraine.
Lorraine, of course, was the original name of the Amiga 1000, long before Commodore got hold of it.
Had Atari succeeded in their attempt to get the IP of the Amiga rather than Commodore, I'd have bought an Atari Amiga. Brand loyalty doesn't count for much in my book.
Interestingly, before they went broke, Commodore were intending to drop Amiga OS and produce a PC that ran M$ Windows NT. I wouldn't have bought one of those.
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I didn't get an Amiga because of brand loyalty.
Back in the early 80's, my mother was a teacher, and, as such, she was invited to the major technical college in South Australia at the time (the Levels) to see a revolutionary new computer, the Lisa.
While she was there, she was told about an even more revolutionary computer called the Lorraine, and she told me about it when she got home.
Shortly after that I got my first computer - a C64.
I got an Amiag when I got the opportunity - a secondhand Amiga 500 with 3 meg of RAM and a 20 Meg hard drive. I didn't get it because it was a Commodore.
I got it because it was a Lorraine, or, at least, a descendant of the Lorraine.
Lorraine, of course, was the original name of the Amiga 1000, long before Commodore got hold of it.
Had Atari succeeded in their attempt to get the IP of the Amiga rather than Commodore, I'd have bought an Atari Amiga. Brand loyalty doesn't count for much in my book.
Interestingly, before they went broke, Commodore were intending to drop Amiga OS and produce a PC that ran M$ Windows NT. I wouldn't have bought one of those.
This is the proof that there was a time when amiga wasn't a religion but a computer.
And when people bought it they did it for its power(it was a descendant of lorraine), not due to religious belief.
For the same reason i think that if this question would have been made in the early 90s, nearly everyone would have answered YES.
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This is the proof that there was a time when amiga wasn't a religion but a computer.
And when people bought it they did it for its power(it was a descendant of lorraine), not due to religious belief.
For the same reason i think that if this question would have been made in the early 90s, nearly everyone would have answered YES.
The Amiga isn't a religion, it's a simple case of folk recognising something a bit special & different and favouring that to all the other same old, same old... :)
Seriously doubt if this question had been asked in the 90s nearly everyone would have answered yes... ;)
why... well like the huge leap the C64 was from the VIC 20 and then the giant leap the the Amiga was from the C64. Commodore would have had to come up with a new machine that was so amazing and so far ahead in time and everything in existence that with even the best technology at that time it would have been impossible... :)
It would also seem a lot of folk here were too young at that time and the only reason they had an Amiga was because they were given it as a Christmas or Birthday present, so really it was down to the parents (wiser) choice than some spotty 13 year old wanting the latest machine just to play Doom on... ;)
For those of us who were old enough to purchase things for ourselves most weren't influenced by the fact at that time (early 90s), that there were now other machines out there capable of competing with the Amiga or indeed bettering it. The simple reason being we knew that even since it's first launch the Amiga was something different and special in comparison to the PC route which may have been better hardware wise but it was nothing but mundane... :)
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@Franko
Amiga is a religion, it has all the features of one:
1. Belief that Amiga supporters are superior to others.
2. Belief that, despite evidence the the contrary, Amiga's are superior to other systems.
3. Arcane symbols and rituals.
4. Various worshiped "prophets".
5. Calm moderate supporters & insane fundamentalist loonies.
6. Rival sects, with slightly differing interpretations of the central ideas.
7. Powerful and corrupt leaders.
8. A firm belief in a Second Coming or a better time just around the corner.
I could go on...
7.
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@ Bloodline
No it's not.. :p
And yes you "could go on" (as you usually do) but why bother... you aint gonna convince me to your faith... ;)
PS: I would have responded to each point in turn, but I'm busy just now picking me nose... :D
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@Franko
Amiga is a religion, it has all the features of one:
1. Belief that Amiga supporters are superior to others.
2. Belief that, despite evidence the the contrary, Amiga's are superior to other systems.
3. Arcane symbols and rituals.
4. Various worshiped "prophets".
5. Calm moderate supporters & insane fundamentalist loonies.
6. Rival sects, with slightly differing interpretations of the central ideas.
7. Powerful and corrupt leaders.
8. A firm belief in a Second Coming or a better time just around the corner.
I could go on...
7.
That can be applied to any human activity. You are not listing the characteristics of a religion but the Behavior of the human race
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So a new gen Amiga not compatible with the originals? Seems if Commodore lived, that is what would have happened anyway. I might have bought such a thing provided it was better than other competing options and if it was well supported and if it were affordable. Back in the day I used to frequent an Amiga dealer down the street from me often. But as great as the big box Amigas were, I ran a pc compatible at the time due to cost. I had an A500 I bought used as well and it served me well for game playing mainly. So about the only way I would have been able to get the next greatest (and non compatible Amiga) would have been if it were in an A500 board format. I was poor at age 24 :)
Now if the C65 was released I would have bought one for sure. The reasoning being I was a total Pet4032 and C64 burnout. C65 specs still cool to me today. Someone should FPGA that baby, resurrect the latest DOS they were playing with, and I would become again an 8bit burnout. Sorry for the off topic here.
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So a new gen Amiga not compatible with the originals? Seems if Commodore lived, that is what would have happened anyway. I might have bought such a thing provided it was better than other competing options and if it was well supported and if it were affordable. Back in the day I used to frequent an Amiga dealer down the street from me often. But as great as the big box Amigas were, I ran a pc compatible at the time due to cost. I had an A500 I bought used as well and it served me well for game playing mainly. So about the only way I would have been able to get the next greatest (and non compatible Amiga) would have been if it were in an A500 board format. I was poor at age 24 :)
Now if the C65 was released I would have bought one for sure. The reasoning being I was a total Pet4032 and C64 burnout. C65 specs still cool to me today. Someone should FPGA that baby, resurrect the latest DOS they were playing with, and I would become again an 8bit burnout. Sorry for the off topic here.
The C65 was super cool. I remember Grapevine Group had them listed for sale in AmigaWorld magazine after C= went under and I thought "Well what possible purpose could buying one of those serve?"
GAH! WHY DIDN'T I BUY ONE? OR THREE?
(They go for $10k on ebay x-( )
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(http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/3116/churchofamiga.gif)
I don't think I would have jumped ship in 93. By that time, for good or ill, the pc was pretty much the standard. That was not the case when I bought my 1000 in 87 or so. Back then, jumping from the Atari 800 to the Amiga was a big leap in power, but there was no particular reason to pick any of several contenders except for the focus each machine had. Amiga with multimedia, Mac with publishing and the PC with early business stuff.
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(http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/3116/churchofamiga.gif)
I don't think I would have jumped ship in 93. By that time, for good or ill, the pc was pretty much the standard. That was not the case when I bought my 1000 in 87 or so. Back then, jumping from the Atari 800 to the Amiga was a big leap in power, but there was no particular reason to pick any of several contenders except for the focus each machine had. Amiga with multimedia, Mac with publishing and the PC with early business stuff.
I think if you go read infoworld magazine (the entire catalog of issues is online at google books) you'll find that as early as '87 the PC was pretty entrenched as a business machine. As terrible as it was, Windows 1.0 had been out for two years and late '87 saw Windows 2.0. VGA Standard came with the IBM PS/2 in April of '87.
Meanwhile, by 1987, Apple had released the Mac II with a faster CPU than the A2000 and support onboard SCSI as standard (you had to buy a card for the A2000).
C= was starting their long, slow-motion fumble by then by not following up the Amiga's stunning debut with more improvements, instead content to rest on their laurels and let 3rd party devs come up with a use for the Amiga (and support hardware likewise). OCS should have been gone, but ECS was still three years out.
Things were a lot more dynamic than "Well the Amiga ruled the roost from '85 to '94 then C= fell and suddenly PCs appeared." (I know that's not what you're suggesting but there's a lot of that sentiment around - and I say that as someone who scoffed at the PC world from '87 to '94!)
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Franko, keep in mind that if Commodore had won the PC wars with the Amiga, the Amiga would not have been something a bit special & different and it would have been same old, same old...
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Franko, keep in mind that if Commodore had won the PC wars with the Amiga, the Amiga would not have been something a bit special & different and it would have been same old, same old...
Even if that had been these case and Amiga had won, it would never have been the same old, same old. As the with the Amiga's OS there has never been anything like it before or since... :)
The Amiga still to this day has the smallest, most efficient and least resource hungry OS of any comparable home computer... :)
Compare it to Mac OSX 10.5 nearly 200,000 files just for a basic install and even with 2.5GB of memory it still has to use the HD as virtual RAM, no other computer even comes close to matching the Amiga's highly efficient OS... ;)
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Who gives a damn? Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.
S100 bus-based IMSAI users with 5mb hard drives, 24k of RAM and paper-tape readers would have viewed Amiga OS 1.3 as effete.
Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality). Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?
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1977 C= PET
1982 C= 64
1986 C= Amiga 1000
1990 C= ALL machines same technology as A1000
1994 C= bankrupt after small advancements of AGA in 91/92
The rot started in 86 when Los Gatos was closed an A1000 not marketed in 86 due to the A500/2000 projects running late into 1987. Commodore failed to jump to a revolutionary paradigm by 92/93 unlike the half decade revolutions they ushered in all their computer producing past.
I don't know what it should have been, but not AGA which wasted resource on keeping chipset OCS compatible.
Perhaps they should have licensed the Acorn A3010 Archimedes design....Acorn would have been a cheap acquisition in 90/91. £399 bought you effectively an A4000/030 power machine in 92....sobering thought no? 80386 33mhz speed polygon games AND AGA quality 2D games technically on paper with 4x more sound channels in 16bit quality.
With a Commodore badge that machine would have attracted the talented games programmers it deserved too.
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Who gives a damn? Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.
S100 bus-based IMSAI users with 5mb hard drives, 24k of RAM and paper-tape readers would have viewed Amiga OS 1.3 as effete.
Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality). Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?
You may not give a damn, but I do... :p
What the frig has Terabytes of HD space got to do with it... :confused:
The point is, using an HD as RAM (as well as wearing out the HD quicker) it's slower and less efficient than using physical RAM... ;)
But if your happy with that, then that's your problem not mine... :)
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Who gives a damn? Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.
The hell with that. If you only view increasing hardware specs as an excuse for code to get sloppier, what the hell good is it? All you're doing is wasting what should be a mind-boggling bounty.
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Who gives a damn? Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.
S100 bus-based IMSAI users with 5mb hard drives, 24k of RAM and paper-tape readers would have viewed Amiga OS 1.3 as effete.
Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality). Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?
1986 Workbench 1.1/1.2 was light years ahead of EVERYTHING this side of a UNIX server. Multitasking, different resolution screens per application to save memory, GUI that worked, 1:1 mapping of file location in GUI and physical location on disk, sophisticated text to speech, full access to Agnus/Paula/Denise features with OS still resident.
Then comes the killer..... IFF standard for sound, images and animation.
THIS is why nothing came close to Amiga in the mid 80s, NOTHING and why A1000 was the only machine in the history of personal/home computing to slaughter all in its path. As for memory it was application data NOT Workbench/Kickstart OS overhead that needed more RAM than inferior rivals, same reason you can't edit a 20 megapixel image on a 512mb Mac/PC. One single 21bit full PAL overscan image Digiview processed down to lo-res HAM from the buffer took more than the maximum RAM of a monochrome Mac costing 200% the RRP of A1000.
1984 Mac OS was barely more sophisticated than C64's GEOS + 1351 mouse and was silent and colourless so 128k was enough for that singletasking Apple fashionista £2500 wank. The 520ST ass raped the original Mac on every level possible (price/performance/speed,colour/OS,max res, appearace) within months...total wipeout....and STs 8mhz CPU is the only aspect it exceeds Amiga.
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Hi,
The reason I bought an Amiga 1000 2 weeks after it hit the market was that my Otrana attache computer finally died and I really didn't need a portable anymore. I was doing Lotus 123 and Dbase programs for the military and banks (yes you Amiga fiends, PC's had programmable programs back then) I was finishing up a program management system for the Navy back then, when I saw the Amiga, I saw a lot of power, with the new graphics and sound and then the salesman told me it would run msdos programs, this sold me on it, and I bought it. At first I used Lotus 123 and Dbase on the Transformer, then later I used VIP professional and dbman to do my programs. So I will say yes if Commodore brought out another kick butt machine I would of bought it, after all unlike Franko, I see the computer as a tool to use to accomplish your work, and if the Amiga still does it, why waste money, but then again I am a power user therefore today I use a 6 core AMD machine using a bloated slow OS called Windows, for gaming and Ubuntu OS for stability and keeping my data, music and pictures. I use my A4000 to keep a backup of all my data and oh yeah play some of its rock and roll games.
Amiga Forever rocks and I use it daily, why waste silicon power on the Amiga 4000 to play games. Still like the Amiga, and wouldn't trade it for anything, although I am thinking of selling my Amiga's, just to get up money for the wife just in case I expire, wouldn't want her to throw them away, or sell them for $5 or $10, now would we.
smerf
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Hi Smerf... :)
Sorry but I've got to say cobblers to that... :)
Why... well, I too am a "power user", I too need a computer that has stability, I too need a computer for keeping all my data, music and pictures and a whole lot more besides... ;)
BUT... I don't need a 6 core AMD machine using bloated Windoze to do that, no siree, I have a much better machine that does all that... wanna know what it is... :)
It's a Commodore A1200... :)
PS: If your thinking of expiring and wanna get some real money for your gear to tide the wife over, then I'll give you a fair price for em (provided you can deliver of course)... :)
PPS: Military, Banks... you must know some good secrets, c'mon spill the beans, I won't tell anyone, it's only me and you that read this rubbish anyways so who's gonna know... ;)
PPPS: Amiga forever is good but it's not much cop for a real Amiga User... :D
Cheers
Franko
SIDE NOTE: Why's it been so ruddy quiet and boring round here this week, has everyone died... :confused:
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I think if you go read infoworld magazine (the entire catalog of issues is online at google books) you'll find that as early as '87 the PC was pretty entrenched as a business machine. As terrible as it was, Windows 1.0 had been out for two years and late '87 saw Windows 2.0. VGA Standard came with the IBM PS/2 in April of '87.
Good points all, but I'm thinking that as a home/hobbyist computer when the Amiga was announced, the pc was off most people's radar. It was just too expensive, and aimed at the business market. By 93 I don't think commodore could have done anything.
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One of the things I've always noticed here when it comes to folk trying to claim PCs were better back then, is how they conveniently forget that when you purchased an Amiga you didn't need to purchase a special monitor to use it... ;)
The Amiga by design was created so that it would run straight off a household TV set with a perfect RGB picture unlike a PC which required you to purchase an expensive monitor either separately or as part of the package... ;)
Perhaps when making such comparisons folks should take that glaring fact into account... :)
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I may have bought a Commodore computer better than the Amiga but I would've wanted to know why drop the Amiga brand?
I loved my C64 and the jump to the Amiga 500 wasn't scary. My friends had them and it was a 'Commodore' Amiga 500! While the Amiga brand was running did we see any other Commodore computers? Nothing worth noticing, it was if when C bought Amiga the branding changed - Left Hand, Right Hand, Commodore Amiga.
I didn't own an Amiga 500, I owned a Commodore Amiga 500, in the same way I own a Commodore Amiga 4000, a Commodore Amiga 1200!
The original Amiga team we all know are legends! And it could have been an Atari Amiga, but I wonder how much trust we would have had in Amiga if it wasn't for Commodore buying it? Commodore were the best! You had a speccy but your mate had a C64! You know which one you wanted!
Now Commodore is long gone we crave the Amiga, with or without Commodore (without if Commodore - USA is anything to go by!).
Sad thing is guys, Jay is gone, Hi-Torro is too, Commodore-USA is another PC-clone shop, and Amiga? Amiga is a former shadow of what should have been great.
I make it sound like I think Commodore was great, but I'm kinda taking the Smeg here. We bought into the trust of the Commodore brand when Amiga was introduced, and once we were hooked you release that it was Commodore that was the poison.
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Oh, and one other thing:
Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality). Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?
No. For starters, Mac OS up through System 6 didn't have even cooperative multitasking, let alone the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking, and as for the memory requirements, even the Mac team knew that 128KB wasn't enough for practical use with more than one moderate-sized application and a document or two, which is why they designed the 128K Mac to be upgradable to 512KB, even though Jobs and Apple corporate made it difficult to get into in an attempt to force users to purchase a new "fat Mac" or pay for official upgrade service.
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My "fond" memories from early PC's was the hassle to get anything actually running on them.
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SIDE NOTE: Why's it been so ruddy quiet and boring round here this week, has everyone died... :confused:
Sorry Franko, I've been poncing around trying to do this kinda 'paperwork' thingy jobby, and get my workmates into some hardcore industrial action!
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Sorry Franko, I've been poncing around trying to do this kinda 'paperwork' thingy jobby, and get my workmates into some hardcore industrial action!
See that's what you get for being elected into the murky world of Politics, all that time you've got to spend now on paperwork fiddling your expenses... :)
Wow... "Hardcore" eh... when's the video getting released, hope it's as good as me German Porn collection... :D
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See that's what you get for being elected into the murky world of Politics, all that time you've got to spend now on paperwork fiddling your expenses... :)
Wow... "Hardcore" eh... when's the video getting released, hope it's as good as me German Porn collection... :D
Ah well there is some council paperwork to push around, but I'm also a union rep, god help me, and we are fighting for industrial action....if that happens there may well be a film, but I doubt you could ever call it 'porn'!
Having said that the germans will watch anything! A group of men stood around a burning bin with a van behind them and a tray of coffee [I don't like tea] and biscuits, smoking and swearing at management while cupping them selves and wearing vests [my personal choice!]
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@ LordSpunky
Right on Brother... :)
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Funny/citizensmith.jpg)
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@ LordSpunky
Right on Brother... :)
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
(http://i995.photobucket.com/albums/af79/frankosamiga/Funny/citizensmith.jpg)
:laughing: Thats the way! I feel the need for some power cuts!!! WHOOP!!!!
Anyway, I do digress, what was it I was dribbling on about?
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What about the sharp X68000 series, they even blew away even the amiga's graphics
Too bad they were only sold in Japan.
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What about the sharp X68000 series, they even blew away even the amiga's graphics
Too bad they were only sold in Japan.
Sharp x68000 was nice but technically limiting. It was basically designed to do games like SF2, Ghouls n Ghosts and Gradius specifically.
Oh and Amiga Space Harrier and Outrun should have been pretty much arcade perfect but for some real sloppy conversion work and minimum improvement on Atari source code.
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Sharp x68000 was nice but technically limiting. It was basically designed to do games like SF2, Ghouls n Ghosts and Gradius specifically.
Oh and Amiga Space Harrier and Outrun should have been pretty much arcade perfect but for some real sloppy conversion work and minimum improvement on Atari source code.
technically limiting?
Not really. The system was clearly superior to the Amiga. They're hard to find, but would make a neat system to port AROS to.
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The hell with that. If you only view increasing hardware specs as an excuse for code to get sloppier, what the hell good is it? All you're doing is wasting what should be a mind-boggling bounty.
Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me. That's a drop in the bucket. That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there. It doesn't mean jack.
I'm really sorry that technology has scaled. I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.
:/
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well, on one hand, its nice to have more capabilities available.
On the other hand, I do think there's something to be said for efficient software. With mobile devices, that's becoming more of a factor at least.
If you don't believe me, try installing Windows Vista on a netbook ;)
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1984 Mac OS was barely more sophisticated than C64's GEOS + 1351 mouse and was silent and colourless so 128k was enough for that singletasking Apple fashionista £2500 wank. The 520ST ass raped the original Mac on every level possible (price/performance/speed,colour/OS,max res, appearace) within months...total wipeout....and STs 8mhz CPU is the only aspect it exceeds Amiga.
Oh please. Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers. The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people. If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.
Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.
And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.
It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer". At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now. Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.
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well, on one hand, its nice to have more capabilities available.
On the other hand, I do think there's something to be said for efficient software. With mobile devices, that's becoming more of a factor at least.
If you don't believe me, try installing Windows Vista on a netbook ;)
I have a buddy who bought one with 7 preinstalled. I'll ask him what model it is. (No, Aero isn't/can't be turned on :D )
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Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me. That's a drop in the bucket. That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there. It doesn't mean jack.
I'm really sorry that technology has scaled. I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.
See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!? Yes, it's true that 20GB out of 2TB (or even a more common setup of 600GB) is a small percentage - it's still 8-12 times what a Windows XP install might take, and it damn well doesn't provide even five times the functionality.
This attitude of "oh, who cares, I have lots of space to blow" is reminiscent of someone who's just won the lottery and has no actual frame of reference for money in the amounts they now possess - even relatively small wastes can add up into large losses. Waste is waste and shoddiness is shoddiness, whether it amounts to a major problem or not. No amount of hardware capability is a sufficient excuse for sloppiness of that magnitude.
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See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!?
He's right though, in most cases it doesn't matter. Time to completion and minimizing bugs is more important.
As a developer, I love small efficient systems and fast, elegant code. In fact I spend more time on that than I should in my hobby projects. However, at work, getting things done in a reasonable amount of time means I'm going to be using high level languages, abstraction layers, APIs, and bloated third party libraries in order to get a complex product done in a reasonable amount of time. All that stuff takes space on your hard drive :)
My boss and customers don't care if the resulting .exe file is 8 MB instead of 800 KB or if it takes 10 ms instead of 1 ms to finish an operation. It's not worth doubling or tripling the development time for that.
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Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.
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@ Merax
You like Bootdisk have missed the whole point here... ;)
This is the AMIGA we're talking about not a business computer, doubt there are very few (if anyone) still left who use an Amiga to run a business these days... :)
All the bloated OS's and massive HDs etc... might be fine in the business world where time is money but we're talking about a home computer here that's basically 25 years old and is only really used these days by fans & hobbyists... :)
You say time to completion and minimising bugs is more important, then don't write such bloated code and you cut down on both, it's that simple... ;)
"I'm going to be using high level languages, abstraction layers, APIs, and bloated third party libraries", therein lye's your problem if you were able to code in efficient assembler language for your machine you wouldn't have to bother with most of that stuff you mention and save a hell of a lot of HD space (Hmm... thought that HD space didn't matter)... ;)
Your boss and customers may not care but then it's obvious from that statement that it's PCs you talking about and most PC users don't have a scooby doo about such things and wouldn't know the meaning of efficiency or elegance of an operation system if you slapped them in the face with one. They just want to point and click then sit there cursing and swearing when the thing doesn't work and then have to use a call centre or pay someone to tell them how to get the thing to work... :)
At the end of it all nothing can be said that will change the fact that the Amiga way of things was and is superior to the way modern day PCs are programmed and this crazy attitude PC users have of "but it doesn't matter I've got tons of HD space and CPU power" will ever allow you to change the fact that in comparison to an Amiga a PC and it's OS are bloated and a waste of resources... :)
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Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.
Same here, emotionally it seems like a waste. Maybe someday in the future when the exponential increases stop and software becomes more mature then the next best way to improve it will again be to optimize for speed, memory, and disk usage.
Franko - I agree with you, the extreme frugality when using computer resources was/is necessary on older systems like the Amiga. I was just trying to defend my profession a bit to say that modern bloat isn't necessarily sloppiness but rather the result of shifting priorities that resulted from the faster hardware being available.
If the software industry had held on to the "Amiga way", we may have slightly snappier OS's and more free hard drive space now, but there would be whole classes of applications that people currently enjoy that wouldn't be possible to write like that. Ironically, modern 3D games would be one of those.
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@ Merax
I understand where you're coming from with the business side of things but like I say, to me no matter how good modern day computers are when it comes to the OS and software they don't seem to be as efficient and therefore less resource hungry as they could be if more time was taken in the thought & creation of the OS and software... :)
PS: As modern 3D games is one of things I hate most about computers these days, I'll just not comment on that (I don't wanna start one of me rants)... :D
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Oh please. Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers. The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people. If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.
Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.
And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.
It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer". At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now. Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.
Well clearly I would love to hear about this personal/home computer better than Amiga 1000 between 84 and 87....go ahead Mr expert :roflmao: Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94
Sorry but I will take the opinion of a real expert of the time like Guy Kewney of PCW Magazine, he used and reviewed just about every machine made in the 80s and 90s.
Apple is only around today thanks to massive cash injection in shares from Gates due to potential court case over Win95....that and iBollox range.
Morgan UK still make their low tech/excessive profit/style over substance cars independently, doesn't mean they made better cars than their rivals in the 80s. Same deal with retro computer companies.
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Same here, emotionally it seems like a waste. Maybe someday in the future when the exponential increases stop and software becomes more mature then the next best way to improve it will again be to optimize for speed, memory, and disk usage.
Franko - I agree with you, the extreme frugality when using computer resources was/is necessary on older systems like the Amiga. I was just trying to defend my profession a bit to say that modern bloat isn't necessarily sloppiness but rather the result of shifting priorities that resulted from the faster hardware being available.
If the software industry had held on to the "Amiga way", we may have slightly snappier OS's and more free hard drive space now, but there would be whole classes of applications that people currently enjoy that wouldn't be possible to write like that. Ironically, modern 3D games would be one of those.
Bloat has always been the ethos in the corporate industry since the 80s.....write your application to achieve its core function, if it's slow buy a better box to execute it on. Until machines stop getting more powerful each successive generation this is the most economical way to do it.
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Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94
...uh, long filenames are nice, but they hardly make up for everything else kludgy and terrible about the Commodore DOS filesystem. And I say that as someone who likes the C64.
Bloat has always been the ethos in the corporate industry since the 80s.....write your application to achieve its core function, if it's slow buy a better box to execute it on. Until machines stop getting more powerful each successive generation this is the most economical way to do it.
"Most economical," maybe, but that doesn't make it good.
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"Most economical," maybe, but that doesn't make it good.
Frequently it does. The application that works is more "good" than the application that doesn't work. The application that exists genrerally works, while the application that doesn't exist does not. Thus the application that has been written is more "good" than the one that hasn't been written.
If I can cut the development time in half by using bloated code and thus be able to write two applications instead of one, then the second one that being economical made possible is pretty much always going to be better than it would have been if we had not gone for economy.
Much of my code at work is bloated. My team puts very little effort into optimizing on first run of applications. Why? Because the applications requested have 20% chance of never actually being used. Sad, but true. Many of the applications are requested so that the person requesting them can look like they are doing work. We still have to write them, but they won't get used.
The other factor is that my and my teams time is worth more than the cost of buying faster computers. Add to that that most speed slowdowns are on the user side, not the computer side. Things like waiting for input. Finally, the rate that new applications that get heavily used end up with so many change requests in the first year that trying to heavily optimize the code would mean that by the time the optimization has been done, it is no longer needed.
That doesn't mean that we never optimize. We put our optimization resource to the places that will get the most bang for the buck. At optimization time, we look first at applications that cannot scale well to meet demand. Then we look at applications that are heavily used. Then we look at applications that are just slow.
An application that takes the unreasonable time of 60 seconds to save a document is not going to be high on our list if it is only used twice a year for a semi-annual recording. You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.
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...uh, long filenames are nice, but they hardly make up for everything else kludgy and terrible about the Commodore DOS filesystem. And I say that as someone who likes the C64.
"Most economical," maybe, but that doesn't make it good.
Hey, try naming 200 picture files with just 8 characters. DOS on C64 is basic sure but you can replace it......but MSDOS was stuck with 8 character files until Win95 kludge to hide.
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There was a kludge long before win95 for long filenames. You just named your file as:
c:\the\weekend\that\we\spent\naked\in\the\woods\pic001.bmp
I'm not saying it was good. Just saying it was there.
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An application that takes the unreasonable time of 60 seconds to save a document is not going to be high on our list if it is only used twice a year for a semi-annual recording. You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.
I agree with what you are saying. I admire the purity of unbloated software but to optimise takes time and what is the point of doing that if the time it takes to optimise it is greater than the overall time it saves during runtime.
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Frequently it does. The application that works is more "good" than the application that doesn't work. The application that exists genrerally works, while the application that doesn't exist does not. Thus the application that has been written is more "good" than the one that hasn't been written.
If I can cut the development time in half by using bloated code and thus be able to write two applications instead of one, then the second one that being economical made possible is pretty much always going to be better than it would have been if we had not gone for economy.
Much of my code at work is bloated. My team puts very little effort into optimizing on first run of applications. Why? Because the applications requested have 20% chance of never actually being used. Sad, but true. Many of the applications are requested so that the person requesting them can look like they are doing work. We still have to write them, but they won't get used.
The other factor is that my and my teams time is worth more than the cost of buying faster computers. Add to that that most speed slowdowns are on the user side, not the computer side. Things like waiting for input. Finally, the rate that new applications that get heavily used end up with so many change requests in the first year that trying to heavily optimize the code would mean that by the time the optimization has been done, it is no longer needed.
That doesn't mean that we never optimize. We put our optimization resource to the places that will get the most bang for the buck. At optimization time, we look first at applications that cannot scale well to meet demand. Then we look at applications that are heavily used. Then we look at applications that are just slow.
An application that takes the unreasonable time of 60 seconds to save a document is not going to be high on our list if it is only used twice a year for a semi-annual recording. You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.
Only time program code is optimized is in embedded devices or handheld devices. Otherwise its too expensive to pay for 10s or 100s of hours of programmer time if £300 gets a new CPU. Also time costs companies more...unreleased code is useless to a company.
Outrun on Amiga is an example. Licence cost a fortune and what we got was the quickest development via updating Atari ST 68k ASM source, cheap. finished quicker so can get faster return on investment.
It is crap for us yes, but business is different and profit & revenue are the only concerns for corporate entities. Being unique is as good as it gets.
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Only time program code is optimized is in embedded devices or handheld devices. Otherwise its too expensive to pay for 10s or 100s of hours of programmer time if £300 gets a new CPU. Also time costs companies more...unreleased code is useless to a company.
Outrun on Amiga is an example. Licence cost a fortune and what we got was the quickest development via updating Atari ST 68k ASM source, cheap. finished quicker so can get faster return on investment.
It is crap for us yes, but business is different and profit & revenue are the only concerns for corporate entities. Being unique is as good as it gets.
Not as much crap for us than if the game was never written at all because the Licensing + complete rewrite would have been more expensive than what would allow it to be written.
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I agree with what you are saying. I admire the purity of unbloated software but to optimise takes time and what is the point of doing that if the time it takes to optimise it is greater than the overall time it saves during runtime.
That's a bit of a crazy statement to make and doesn't make the slightest bit of sense... :confused:
Of course it's going to take longer to write a piece of software & optimise it to perform a task than it is to have the programs "runtime" to perform it's task be longer or just slightly less than the time taken to write the software... ;)
I mean say for example a simple program to edit and save a JPeg picture... the programer took 3 days to write and optimise the software, you wouldn't expect it to take you the same 3 days to actually wait for the program to carry out that task, would you... :)
Doesn't make sense what you said there... :confused:
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Frequently it does. The application that works is more "good" than the application that doesn't work. The application that exists genrerally works, while the application that doesn't exist does not. Thus the application that has been written is more "good" than the one that hasn't been written.
You can say that the application isn't "good", but it is WAY more "Good" than if it didn't exist at all, which would be more likely if heavy optimization were the requirement.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't sufficient reasons to settle for sub-optimal code - yes, commercial software development takes time and money, and yes, it's more important to meet the parameters in a reasonable frame of time than to delay indefinitely in hopes of attaining perfection (this, for instance, is the reason people took to Linux and not GNU Hurd.)
But this idea that sub-optimal code is the ideal instead of something to be settled for, just because we now have hardware on which the difference is less noticeable, is something I will not accept. No way, nohow.
It is crap for us yes, but business is different and profit & revenue are the only concerns for corporate entities. Being unique is as good as it gets.
See, I'm not going to say that businesses shouldn't settle for what works for them as far as investment/return conisderations go. But I do not understand the now-prevailing notion that corporate financial considerations are the true measure of goodness.
Sure, it works for a business, because software to a business is either a tool to aid in the operation of the business, or a product to be created and distributed by the business. But when did that become the goal for ALL programmers!? Why should our tastes and our ideals be defined by the considerations of some non-existent company that we aren't a part of?
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Well clearly I would love to hear about this personal/home computer better than Amiga 1000 between 84 and 87....go ahead Mr expert :roflmao: Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94
Hey remember back when I was talking about 1987 and beyond, then you came in and started up with a bunch of irrelevant bullshit about 1984? Yeah, good times.
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Simplest way to look at how badly PC/Mac software is written is this example... take the Frodo C64 emulator I have on my A1200 with Blizzard PPC @240Mhz...
It runs in full screen at full speed (no frameskip) and with full audio... :)
Now take the C64 Emulator written for my other iMac PPC @800Mhz...
It runs in full screen but only at almost full speed with full audio (I have to skip every 2nd frame to achieve full speed)... :(
Why such a difference, simple sloppy non optimised coding on the Mac's version and running under an OS that consists of well over a hundred thousand files (again not optimised) and relies on constant HD access to do the simplest of OS tasks... ;)
Now surely an 800Mhz processor far superior (supposedly) Gfx board and all the rest of it's more modern circuits should be able to beat hands down an old A1200 with 240Hhz PPC board... ;)
The programmer of Frodo for the C64 took his time and optimised his code to get the best out of these limited resources and the results speak for themselves... :)
That's one the simple reason why no-one will ever convince me that modern day computers with all their GHz and Gigibytes will ever be better than the Amiga when the software (including the OS) are just bloated pieces of badly written crap... :)
PS:The C64 emulator "Vice" I have for working under OS4.0 on the Amiga is even worse, it's like watching a slide show of still pictures of C64 games, useless, simple reason for that is OS4.0 went the way of PC software Bloated and badly written... ;)
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That's a bit of a crazy statement to make and doesn't make the slightest bit of sense... :confused:
Of course it's going to take longer to write a piece of software & optimise it to perform a task than it is to have the programs "runtime" to perform it's task be longer or just slightly less than the time taken to write the software... ;)
I mean say for example a simple program to edit and save a JPeg picture... the programer took 3 days to write and optimise the software, you wouldn't expect it to take you the same 3 days to actually wait for the program to carry out that task, would you... :)
Doesn't make sense what you said there... :confused:
Sorry I wasn't very clear Franko. What I mean is the combined savings on all the runtimes you ever use the program for. I can understand though the drive to make programs perfect in the same way that the most beautiful mathematical equations are those that are concise but very profound.
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Oh and by the by, the original mac wasn't a "Fashion statement" (although that's what apple makes these days): it was an attempt to put the power of the Xerox Star on the common user's desk (rather, the 2nd attempt, the first having been the Lisa).
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but MSDOS was stuck with 8 character files until Win95 kludge to hide.
Or you could run Windows NT in 1993.
However your point proves that spending time perfecting software is actually a waste.
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I bought my A1200 in 1993. It was my first Amiga and I was very happy with it.
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Not as much crap for us than if the game was never written at all because the Licensing + complete rewrite would have been more expensive than what would allow it to be written.
I think we all agree Outrun was bad publicity for Amiga when potential puchasers were put off, yes it would have been better if it was never made.
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Or you could run Windows NT in 1993.
However your point proves that spending time perfecting software is actually a waste.
NT workstation was quite horrible to use on slow domestic IDE drives and couldn't play DOS games. OS/2 v2 was much better than MS stuff even for DOS gaming :)