Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: sim085 on August 15, 2009, 11:39:36 AM
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I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
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I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
The Amiga was neither the first nor the last machine to use dedicated graphics coprocessors and nifty DMA solutions. The concepts are very well alive today, though much more sophisticated.
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"...if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed?"
No.
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A new machine with a fixed gfx processor and fixed cpu would mean that coders would have to do their very best to get the most out of it, these days however a lot of pc coders prefer to wait for faster hardware in order to get their stuff working at decent speed, it's easier than to "get the most out of it" like most Amiga coders do ....
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Oooh troll thread ahead! ;)
But well, to be seriously, not really.
Though, custom chipsets, and an OS which takes full advantage of the hardware, and both being designed for nowadays purposes, is something desireable IMHO.
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A new machine with a fixed gfx processor and fixed cpu would mean that coders would have to do their very best to get the most out of it, these days however a lot of pc coders prefer to wait for faster hardware in order to get their stuff working at decent speed, it's easier than to "get the most out of it" like most Amiga coders do ....
It's kinda incomparable nowadays programming.
Lot more libraries have been created since. OpenGL, DirectX, and even, game programmers use todays ready-made engines like the Unreal engines.
To get the max out of the computer nowadays is to be concious as a programmer how the memory is used, and how you use the libraries you need.
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With today's technology (i.e. 64-bit DDR SDRAM at 143 MHz), you get 256 times the bandwidth of the ECS/OCS chipset.
The AGA was able to display 640x512 in 256 colors with 4 times the bandwidth of OCS/ECS chipset.
A new hardware with today's technology would be able to display 8 playfields with 256 colors each in 1280x1024 and would still have half the bandwidth available for Blitter, Copper and CPU.
This would be the most amazing 2D graphics engine ever created for games.
Of course, the Chip RAM size needs to be scaled the same way : 64MB is a minimum.
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I honestly haven't much of a clue, but I'm sure that a custom-chip approach like the Amiga's would still have its uses today. An entire computer system that has been designed so that every component works perfectly with every other component, no components have to resort to vague assumptions as to how others will act, and where the software has also been designed to make the most of the hardware, I'm sure, would reach a level of computing efficiency far beyond that, if at much higher cost.
I'm still amazed at just how much my A1200 can do with 2MB of RAM, a 14MHz processor, no active cooling (I hate massive CPU fansinks!), and an OS that fits in ~10MB of disk/ROM space. (And I can't wait to see what it can do with an accelerator board!) When you compare that to modern OSes that require about 100-1000 times those numbers (alright, they do much more than OS3, but not quite that much IMHO)... I'm sure that the Amiga's tight architecture was responsible in at least a small way for that.
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As far as integrating GFX/Audio w/ DMA on the motherboard, even most modern x86 boards do this, with a bypass ability to upgrade, which the Amiga didn't really have. (At the OS level, it did, but lots of "hardware banging" programs can't access enhanced GFX without the card doing wierd things, eg. I still need a VGA switch + scandoubler to play WHDload stuff) As far as proprietary GFX (eg. OCS/ECS/AGA being planar instead of chunky), API layers seem to make up the difference a bit, but the Classic systems are conceptually incompatible with the way other systems do it on a more specific level. But the overall concept is still sound, the only problem being with upgrading. The only problems I've had getting my A1200 towered and operating in a "modern" capacity, aside from cost, are the "fixed" nature of the custom hardware. While I still need AGA (in my case) for games and older software (DPIV can use RTG, but doesn't really like it), upgrading past the original specs. is a challenge when you have "native" hardware to bypass. The biggest prob is the KS ROMS, which I believe most OS4.x systems have opted for a system more similar to BIOS rather than kickstart, though I could be wrong. (Haven't had the pleasure of tinkering with an A1 or SAM, etc..) I use AOS 3.9, which required me to disassemble my 1200, swap out the 2 chips, and then run a ROM patcher on top of that. Been thinking of finding someone with a ROM burner and seeing if I can't bypass the whole boot, blizkick 3.9 rom, reboot process. If the ROMs are flashable, or more like NVRAM, it may be more convenient, and give the best of both worlds. (I know many x86 boards have flashable bios chips)
The biggest drawback to "Amiga" arcitecture (as I know it, the 680x0 based systems) is lack of expandability of the GFX/Audio in a more modular method, but between the flashable ROMs and less software being written to hardware (even windows has a hardware abstraction layer to code to rather than the CPU, would be interesting to see what would happen if HAL.DLL was ported to 6800x0 architecture) the Amiga's can (and does, considering lack of realization of an "apples to oranges comparison between kickstart and bios) model work.
Sorry if I'm a bit wordy on this post, the next task on my agenda for today involvles changing a cat litter box, when I live with 3 cats that apparently don't agree with the brand of cat food I recently bought.
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I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
By the "Amiga Architecture" do you mean a souped-up successor to AGA (think Natami) or something completely new that's inspired by the classic machines? The former would be a great platform for demos and hobbyists, but isn't ever going to beat a modern systems for 3D graphics etc. Tying AmigaOS to a custom architecture might not be the best idea either!
If CBM had carried on making Amigas to this day, they'd no doubt have been based on something very different to AGA anyway - look at the sorts of plans with the Acutiator architecture, which would itself have been ancient history by now. Some sort of custom hardware is perhaps a more attractive proposition for a console these days (look at the PS3), but it'd be a very different architecture to AGA.
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As far as integrating GFX/Audio w/ DMA on the motherboard, even most modern x86 boards do this, with a bypass ability to upgrade, which the Amiga didn't really have.
Yeah, but there are lots of different motherboard chipsets, not to mention NVIDIA vs ATI chipset. So trying to hardware bang like the old days and spread you code is much harder not to mention the complexity of the newer hardware.
What might be cool is like a base line spec (like A500 was sort the base line for a long time)
Now, DirectX is pretty much the base line these days. You right your code to that and then it takes care of what ever hardware you're on. Or OpenGL might be similar.
The question would be would it be relevant to have a base line hardware spec (like A500) instead of a software one like D3D?
Basically, either one motherboard is chosen and all software is written for that or you come up with a spec and all hardware is made to that spec.
I'm guessing most the hardware banging days are gone. Evertyhing abstracted through software is much easier to program to. And there is so much power it hardly makes sense to do it any other way these days.
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I honestly haven't much of a clue, but I'm sure that a custom-chip approach like the Amiga's would still have its uses today.
I think they are still relevent today. They are called the Wii, PS3, XBox 360...
These are basically like the A500. A Wii is a Wii is a Wii. You could write a hardware banging demo and know it will work on ALL the Wii's out there.
Problem is they are not like the Amiga in that anyone could program for an Amiga. You weren't locked out of the hardware like most of these systems.
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3 cats that apparently don't agree with the brand of cat food I recently bought.
Teach them to use the toilet, it's seriously easy. Haven't had a litterbox here in months.
As for architecture and Amigas, I use one to hold up the desk in the garage. I guess that makes it an architectural Amiga.
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No Amiga architecture is no more relevant today...
But if you enjoy your pC today remeber that in PC world they were very inspired by Amiga technology.
Check diagrams of A3000 motherboards and how buses were conceived. It inspired all modern PC architecture diagrams...
Check diagram blocks of CD32... It is the same of Playstation1...
Sony copied the same technology of CD32 but wisely added in Playstation vector graphics and a first 3d engine...
PCI BUS technology of PCs was inspired by Amiga Zorro BUS
Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology.
Micosoft buyed BlueRibbon Soundworks, the makers of Bars & Pipes to obtain that technology and incorporate it in Windows audio subsection in DirectX engine.
There is still an Amiga technology up to date and still unsurpassed:
AUTOCONFIG!
Plug and Play on PCs is nowadays a very stable and relying technology but in its early days it was called PLUG AND PRAY due to its instability...
Recognizing hardware peripherals it is the only modern techology were Amiga can teach a lesson to Peecees, because our Autoconfig System for recognizing and install on the fly hardware peripherals is still amazingly perfect... You can look at any ancient classic Amigas and take a look on how beautiful our system was....
PC engineers should take a look on Autoconfig so then they could improve Plug and Play technology more than usual and reach a new era even in hardware peripherals.
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I used some ideas found in the Amiga chipset in my Set-top-box gfx core which is in tens of thousands of homes today.
The ideas behind 2D gfx manipulation, particularly sprites and blitting has not changed for decades. The Amiga did certain things very well
Mobile phones & set-top-boxes very much use yester-year technology due to price constraints and memory constraints.
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But if you enjoy your pC today remeber that in PC world they were very inspired by Amiga technology.
Very much doubt that.
Check diagrams of A3000 motherboards and how buses were conceived. It inspired all modern PC architecture diagrams... Check diagram blocks of CD32... It is the same of Playstation1...
Erm these are industry standard schematic diagrams used for decades before and after Amiga.
Sony copied the same technology of CD32 but wisely added in Playstation vector graphics and a first 3d engine...
Rubbish. Like what? The inspiration for the technology of the PSOne was the SNES and the SuperFX chips. Sony were developing a CD addon for SNES to come out at the same time as the MegaCD when they chose to stop collaborating and make their own console. These decisions pre-date the CD32
PCI BUS technology of PCs was inspired by Amiga Zorro BUS
Again, not sure how true this is.
There is still an Amiga technology up to date and still unsurpassed: AUTOCONFIG!
If you really knew how it worked, you wouldn't say this.
Plug and Play on PCs is nowadays a very stable and relying technology but in its early days it was called PLUG AND PRAY due to its instability...
More likely due to the fact there were many different hardware platforms, all interpreting the specs slightly different. AmigaOS has the luxury of one common hardware platform.
Recognizing hardware peripherals it is the only modern techology were Amiga can teach a lesson to Peecees, because our Autoconfig System for recognizing and install on the fly hardware peripherals is still amazingly perfect... You can look at any ancient classic Amigas and take a look on how beautiful our system was....
But it had almost nothing to deal with!
PC engineers should take a look on Autoconfig so then they could improve Plug and Play technology more than usual and reach a new era even in hardware peripherals.
Or read your post, laugh and then return to their day job.
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A new machine with a fixed gfx processor and fixed cpu would mean that coders would have to do their very best to get the most out of it, these days however a lot of pc coders prefer to wait for faster hardware in order to get their stuff working at decent speed, it's easier than to "get the most out of it" like most Amiga coders do ....
With HD games, Xbox 360 and PS3 forces programmers to be efficient.
My laptop(with Geforce 9500M GS, which is based on H2 2007 Geforce 8600M GT) can play console ported HD games** at 720p HD and high details.
**Most PS3 and Xbox 360 games runs at 1280x720p HD.
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A new Amiga would make zero contribution to today's technology, it would be for retro enthusiasts like us, no one else.
I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
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I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
My laptop is equipped with two Intel X64 and one NVIDIA CUDA** processors.
**Includes 32 stream processors at 950Mhz.
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This type of question crops up more frequently than you might think. Why is that? Personally I don't believe its just nostalgia, and its not due to people lacking information or knowledge. Conversely, in the PC world, many many people express dissatisfaction in one form or another. All these Amiga user and all these PC users can't all be crazy!!
And I don't think you can just narrow it down as being hardware or operating system issue. Yes thats what computers are essentially but there's something about using Amiga that makes the user experience greater than just a sum of its parts. There's a feeling of control, responsiveness, accessability, simplicity and elegance that the amiga system gives that modern computers just quite don't have.
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A new Amiga would make zero contribution to today's technology, it would be for retro enthusiasts like us, no one else.
Depends on what the "new amiga" was hypothetically going to be.
Take for example, Windows 7. People are raving about it. Why? What makes it so much better than Vista that makes them say, yep, this IS better, I enjoy using it more than Vista? The central theme of Win 7 is simple: Be more responsive to the user, don't waste their time. Hence : Win 7 boots faster, it shuts down faster, its UAC isn't as intrusive and annoying, it does away with annoying pop-up notifications, it uses less hardware resources and consequently runs better on lower hardware, it has a simpler shut down menu, it FEELS more responsive because it prioritises user input higher than Vista. these ideas of simplicity, efficiency, putting the user in control are very Amiga-like.
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This type of question crops up more frequently than you might think. Why is that? Personally I don't believe its just nostalgia, and its not due to people lacking information or knowledge. Conversely, in the PC world, many many people express dissatisfaction in one form or another. All these Amiga user and all these PC users can't all be crazy!!
You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
Windows, for all it's faults does a pretty reasonable job of working well enough that most people don't really think about it - they're too busy with whatever application they're using. MacOS takes this simplicity and ease of use to another level again. Linux isn't there yet, but I think things like WebOS, ChromeOS/Android, Moblin etc are good steps forward.
Amiga did a good job in it's day of making computing accessable to folk. However, it has to be said that things have moved on a very long way from Windows 3.11.
And I don't think you can just narrow it down as being hardware or operating system issue.
Why not? There are litterally tens of billions of variations of both hard and software out there. Sooner or later you're going to run into quirks.
And that is completely discounting those who really have no business operating a computer (and yes, I do mean that - imho refusing to update or maintain your system, in this day and age should come with similar penalties to those who refuse to maintain their cars). I firmly believe that something like the European Computer Drivers Licence should be manditory to have before being able to use a computer online.
Amiga that makes the user experience greater than just a sum of its parts.
This is purely subjective. Yes, the Amiga was a great machine in it's day. But I would sooner go without a computer then be forced to give up the convenience, stability and flexability that comes with a modern OS.
There's a feeling of control, responsiveness, accessability, simplicity and elegance that the amiga system gives that modern computers just quite don't have.
They also (for the most part) don't have the crash happy issues, lack of support for standards, vast overpricing (some might say gouging) of hardware upgrades and so on and so on.
Simple OS's are nice, even useful as educational tools. But a non memory protected OS, with no security has no place in an online world outside of a classroom or museum.
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There is even more to Windows 7 than that..
DX COMPUTE
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/partner/archive/2009/07/24/windows-7-one-step-closer.aspx
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-directx-compute-gpgpu-windows,8349.html
Quote:
"With the introduction of Windows 7, the GPU and CPU will exist in a co-processing environment where each can handle the computing task they are best suited for," wrote Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia. "The CPU is exceptionally good at performing sequential calculations, I/O, and program flow, whereas the GPU is perfectly suited for performing massive parallel calculations."
Microsoft is doing its part by putting DirectX Compute in Windows 7, so that developers can make better use of the GPU for tasks other than just graphics acceleration. Having the GPU pitch in where possible will help take the load off of the CPU so that it can focus on other tasks. The ideal end result of this is that the PC should be more responsive thanks to efficient use of processing power.
Daniel gives an example of how a GPGPU could speed up a task: "With new software designed to take advantage of this capability you would be able to copy and transcode (convert a video from one format to another – a very computationally intensive task) a movie to your MTP supported portable media device up to 5 times faster when using the GPU as a co-processor with DX Compute, as compared to only doing the processing on the CPU."
Microsoft also natively supports GPU acceleration with a new Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for H.264 video content, most of which is encoded in high-definition formats and typically more taxing on the CPU.
"Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing – it has started already," said Daniel. "DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job."
DIRECTWRITE APIS- speeding up text rendering
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/08/12/paint-net-v3-5-enhanced-for-windows-7.aspx
and much much more
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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista. When the daily papers run routine articles on it and routinly describe Vista as "underwhelming", you know its not just some of the people who are not happy. Some of it wasn't deserved, most of it was. There's no doubt MS fast-tracked Win 7. And its clear that whilst new features are not a priority for Win 7, putting the user back in charge of their computer is. I always felt that i had that with Amiga.
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What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job."
And conceptually thats what the Amiga custom chip design with each chip having its own DMA were all about. Its what allowed a 7 mhz CPU machine to achieve things higher mhz systems could only dream of.
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I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista. When the daily papers run routine articles on it and routinly describe Vista as "underwhelming", you know its not just some of the people who are not happy. Some of it wasn't deserved, most of it was. There's no doubt MS fast-tracked Win 7. And its clear that whilst new features are not a priority for Win 7, putting the user back in charge of their computer is. I always felt that i had that with Amiga.
I was talking Windows in general.
Vista is a dog, no doubt, it is the ME of this generation. XP however, for all it's faults is still the tool of choice within the computer industry. I can't think of the number of people I've helped "downgrade" from Vista.
Why? Because it works, it is fairly consistant in it's performance, it's quirks are well known. Win7 is what Vista should have been and there is very little doubt about that, imho it'll quickly take over leaving the misery that was Vista a mere memory.
Vista's single biggest issue however was the fact that it had to follow up from XP. The vast vast vast majority of complaints about Vista if you look were also being made about XP upon it's release. Difference was there, XP was following on from ME or 98 for most people (2kpro is still imho the greatest release MS ever produced).
But the simple fact remains, XP (to a lesser extent Vista) and OSX offer a far more flexible and user friendly environment then Amiga could ever hope to offer.
Windows is a very stable and capable platform in ways that the Amiga could never hope to challenge.
OSX offers a level of ease of use that nothing else even comes close to challenging.
Linux is a superb server OS and now getting to the stage where it'll be able to take on the big boys on the home computing environment (yes, I include smartphones and netbooks in this catagory too). Even now however, it offers more then AmigaOS ever could.
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There is even more to Windows 7 than that..
DX COMPUTE
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/partner/archive/2009/07/24/windows-7-one-step-closer.aspx
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-directx-compute-gpgpu-windows,8349.html
Quote:
"With the introduction of Windows 7, the GPU and CPU will exist in a co-processing environment where each can handle the computing task they are best suited for," wrote Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia. "The CPU is exceptionally good at performing sequential calculations, I/O, and program flow, whereas the GPU is perfectly suited for performing massive parallel calculations."
Microsoft is doing its part by putting DirectX Compute in Windows 7, so that developers can make better use of the GPU for tasks other than just graphics acceleration. Having the GPU pitch in where possible will help take the load off of the CPU so that it can focus on other tasks. The ideal end result of this is that the PC should be more responsive thanks to efficient use of processing power.
Daniel gives an example of how a GPGPU could speed up a task: "With new software designed to take advantage of this capability you would be able to copy and transcode (convert a video from one format to another – a very computationally intensive task) a movie to your MTP supported portable media device up to 5 times faster when using the GPU as a co-processor with DX Compute, as compared to only doing the processing on the CPU."
Microsoft also natively supports GPU acceleration with a new Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for H.264 video content, most of which is encoded in high-definition formats and typically more taxing on the CPU.
"Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing – it has started already," said Daniel. "DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job."
DIRECTWRITE APIS- speeding up text rendering
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/08/12/paint-net-v3-5-enhanced-for-windows-7.aspx
and much much more
http://www.geeks3d.com/20090416/directx11-allows-directx10-hardware-to-execute-compute-shader/
http://www.nvidia.com/object/directcompute.html
Directx11 allows directx 10 hardware to execute Compute Shader 4.
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No Amiga architecture is no more relevant today...
But if you enjoy your pC today remeber that in PC world they were very inspired by Amiga technology.
No, not really no.
Check diagrams of A3000 motherboards and how buses were conceived. It inspired all modern PC architecture diagrams...
No, not really no.
Check diagram blocks of CD32... It is the same of Playstation1...
Sony copied the same technology of CD32 but wisely added in Playstation vector graphics and a first 3d engine...
These platforms have absolutely nothing in common no.
PCI BUS technology of PCs was inspired by Amiga Zorro BUS
Not really, no.
Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology.
HAHA :) No, not at all, no.
There is still an Amiga technology up to date and still unsurpassed:
AUTOCONFIG!
Still unsurpassed? Do you know how PCI works? There have been autoconfig-capable busses both before and after Zorro, you know..
Plug and Play on PCs is nowadays a very stable and relying technology but in its early days it was called PLUG AND PRAY due to its instability...
You're talking about ISA Plug and Play, which has *nothing* to do with the autoconfiguration capabilities of the PCI bus (and later incarnations of it).
Recognizing hardware peripherals it is the only modern techology were Amiga can teach a lesson to Peecees, because our Autoconfig System for recognizing and install on the fly hardware peripherals is still amazingly perfect... You can look at any ancient classic Amigas and take a look on how beautiful our system was....
The Amiga was a beautiful solution, but it doesn't cure cancer.
PC engineers should take a look on Autoconfig so then they could improve Plug and Play technology more than usual and reach a new era even in hardware peripherals.
You seem to be stuck in 1995.
(edit: fixed quotes + typo)
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(SNIP)
Sony copied the same technology of CD32 but wisely added in Playstation vector graphics and a first 3d engine...
Intel i860 (80860)** RISC/VLIW CPU+3D combo predates Sony's PS1 3D engine. Intel i860's 64bit SIMD design later influenced Pentium's 64bit MMX SIMD extensions.
**Intel i860 was used as geometry graphics accelerator for SGI's Onyx Reality Engine 2.
Intel i860 was first released in 1989. Intel will attempt to re-enter the discrete GPU market with Intel Larrabee(loosely based on Pentium I but with 512bit SIMD and many-core format).
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I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista.
It's horses for courses, really. I have Vista x64 simply to provide a DX10 gaming environment. It does that job very well indeed.
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HAHA :) No, not at all, no.
Oh dear...
People disinformed of their own platforms and adoption of its technology into other platforms...
What sobbying pitiful people...
http://retiary.org/ls/writings/alg_comp_patents.html
I took a break and checked my email.
Todor Fay, who is listed as the inventor on the Microsoft patent, had written me back most positively as follows:
>Would you or others in the composer community be interested in
>DirectMusic? It's far more extensible and pluggable than Bars&Pipes,* and it
>ships as part of the Windows OS. There's a pluggable authoring tool as well,
>so you can create music technologies and create the tools to edit the
>technologies hand in hand. One big objective is to make it easier to
>innovate.
>
>Developing this beast has been an incredibly gratifying experience for me.
>I'm very lucky to have this opportunity.
>
>Todor
Have I been overly cynical, thinking in general terms as though trying to formulate a rational policy based on general principles, from fear of loss of freedom?
[*Bars&Pipes was a patchable modular music architecture which Todor Fay wrote for the Amiga in the late 1980s and which he and his wife Melissa Grey published independently under their company name "Blue Ribbon Bakery".]
http://www.newbluefx.com/background.html
Founders Todor Fay and Melissa Jordan Grey launched NewBlue in 2001 to create innovative, expressive technologies. With a combined 45 years of experience in interactive multimedia technologies, they have spearheaded the development of myriad pioneering technologies, and have collaborated on the design and publishing of more than 55 hardware and software products on multiple computer platforms.
In 1988, Fay and Grey founded The Blue Ribbon SoundWorks, Ltd, an interactive audio software firm that designed music and audio software for musicians, composers, animators, and video production artists.
Among their notable projects was the development of the multimedia controller and musical soundtrack for Atlanta’s successful bid for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. The company was well-known for its Bars&Pipes line of music composition software which still boasts a following today.
In addition, they created AudioActive, the interactive audio engine that won Best of COMDEX for Multimedia in 1995. The pair collectively authored 22 audio-related technology patents. In 1995 the company was sold to Microsoft Corporation, where both principals held senior-level positions overseeing technology teams and drove the development of key products, including DirectMusic, the Interactive Music Architecture featured on MSN and other digital media products and technologies.
The duo has appeared as expert speakers, presenters and co-chairs on interactive audio at a range of professional forums, including the Game Developers Conference, Meltdown, WinHEC, XFest, Interactive Audio Special Interest Group and the MIDI Manufacturer's Association. You'll find NewBlue co-founder Todor Fay's DirectX Audio Exposed at fine bookstores worldwide.
http://www.amazon.com/DirectX-Audio-Exposed-Interactive-Development/dp/1556222882
DirectX® 9 Audio Exposed: Interactive Audio Development features a look into the most advanced interactive music and audio development system in history. DirectX Audio, a suite of tools and technologies developed by Microsoft, provides software engineers and content creators the ability to create interactive, adaptive, and dynamic audio content for use in host applications and stand-alone playback. In addition to providing a comprehensive tutorial-style look at the inner workings of the DirectX Audio libraries, this book includes discussions about the process of creating music and sound effects for games such as Halo and No One Lives Forever and explores the use of interactive music on the web and the future of DirectMusic.
Contributing authors include audio project managers Jason Booth and Marty O’Donnell, sound designer Jay Weinland, and interactive composers Tobin Buttram, Bjorn Lynne, Scott Morgan, Ciaran Walsh, and Guy Whitmore.
The companion CD contains the DirectX 9 SDK and the projects discussed in the book, including support materials and sample media.
About the Author
Todd M. Fay (aka LAX) is a business and production consultant working in and around the game, music, and television industries. His passion for music and interactive entertainment brought together the best of the best in the world of cutting-edge audio in DirectX 9 Audio Exposed.
Todor J. Fay (no relation to Todd Fay) drove the vision and design of DirectMusic at Microsoft and ultimately managed DirectX Audio API development. An industry expert, Todor is passionately dedicated to bridging the worlds of art and technology. After leaving Microsoft, Todor co-founded NewBlue Inc., an interactive technologies developer and consultancy.
Scott Selfon is the Xbox audio content consultant and has assisted with nearly 100 individual games. He was previously the DirectMusic Producer and DirectX Audio Scripting test lead, and has also worked on interactive web site sonification projects.
Other Patents by Todor Fay
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090048698
If you are unaware of, FYI Todor is the maker of Bars&Pipes, ask him about DirectX audio subsystem...
http://www.newbluefx.com/contact-us.html
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But can it sample a joystick at 1 KHz?
(http://www.ipass.net/a1idpirat/rotflmao2.gif)
It's horses for courses, really. I have Vista x64 simply to provide a DX10 gaming environment. It does that job very well indeed.
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The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga. Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU. A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.
The Amiga did it the other way around, putting operations into hardware.
In some respects the PC approach did make sense, as processors got more and more powerful there was no need for custom hardware for everything.
However the custom approach does have the advantage of efficiency, something that is becoming more and more important these days.
The Amiga philosophy is however alive and well, the chip in your mobile phone likely has multiple cores, many of these are custom designs. There's the a psuedo-custom approach which uses the increased performance of processors, rather than custom hardware they use a dedicated CPU.
The Amiga was the first computer to put things like a GUI, a real OS (with things like multi-tasking), and hardware acceleration all in one package. Now all computers are like this.
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The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga. Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU. A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.
I disagree.
The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage. Also an extremely fast bus.
One could say this follows the Amiga model. Or it just follows what makes sense. Not sure on that one.
Very Amiga-like, I'd say.
blakespot
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The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga. Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU. A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.
I dunno - I'm no hardware expert* so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the average PC these days does at least as much to offload stuff from the main CPU. The Copper might have been revolutionary for its time, but don't forget that it had three instructions - all it could really do was poke values into the custom chip registers at a given point on the screen. You could do amazing effects with the Copper but (I'd imagine - I've never programmed to the metal on an Amiga) you cannot do complex stuff like writing a value to a register conditional on the value of something else, without the CPU getting involved at some point. At any rate, the GPU in my x86 system does much more as a co-processor - the instruction set on a modern GPU, while being highly specialised for graphics, is capable of doing all the sorts of operations a CPU is and applying them to graphics.
Then there's sound: As far as I'm aware, Paula just grabs samples from the chip RAM through DMA and plays them out of the audio channels (taking into consideration the registers for stuff like channel volume) - she's not a processor. The EMU10k1 in my ageing SB Live card is a full-on DSP that can be programmed to run arbitrary effects on the audio stream. From what I understand that'd eat up CPU time on an Amiga (although Commodore were moving in this direction with their plans for a DSP on the A4000). You can even get physics processors now that run little programs to deal with stuff like object interactions in 3D space (the Amiga may have had collision detection between sprites, but a physics engine can then go on and determine what to do with the objects that collided, without having to ask the CPU at all!)
All-in-all, I'd say that the modern PC delegates tasks to other processors that the Amiga didn't. Not that this diminishes the Amiga whatsoever, given it was one of the first architectures to do this to any great extent :)
* Final warning: I'm really not a hardware guy but I think most of what I've said is kinda accurate:lol:
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The Amiga was the first computer to put things like a GUI, a real OS (with things like multi-tasking), and hardware acceleration all in one package. Now all computers are like this.
Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Television_Interface_Adapter) and ANTIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC). But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).
None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.
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I disagree.
The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage. Also an extremely fast bus.
One could say this follows the Amiga model. Or it just follows what makes sense. Not sure on that one.
Very Amiga-like, I'd say.
Not really. The chipset of the Amiga is an intergrated system, it's not designed to sit on a bus like PCI or zorro. For the PC, everything is sat on a general purpose bus (be it ISA, VESA, PCI, PCIE etc etc etc). Everything within the PC arch is modular in a way that the Amigas OCS, ECS and AGA sets simply never were.
It made for a great revolution at the time, but it simply could not maintain pace with the evolutionary process that the PC used.
The concepts of offloading things from the CPU were well understood by other companies then C= at the time of the Amiga. By the time of the A4000 however these concepts were being used far more effectively by other companies. Even within the Amiga world third party Zorro cards offered far greater performance then any C= chip.
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Oh dear...
People disinformed of their own platforms and adoption of its technology into other platforms...
What sobbying pitiful people...
What a sad case of wanting to believe.
What you claimed was (I quote): "Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology.".
This is funny, because Bars and Pipes does not even have an audio engine (MIDI != audio). It's a MIDI sequencer, and unlike e.g. Cubase/Logic etc. it's MIDI only, i.e. the audio engine you refer to doesn't even exist.
(btw - the patents (and the other stuff) you referred to is related to Algorithmic Composing, which is not the same thing as an audio engine at all. It's a fact that Blue Ribbon and their patents were purchased by Microsoft, but that's about it).
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Oooh troll thread ahead! ;)
But well, to be seriously, not really.
Though, custom chipsets, and an OS which takes full advantage of the hardware, and both being designed for nowadays purposes, is something desireable IMHO.
you mean.. like the Xbox , the Weee, the playstation... etc etc
so on the one hand I do agree, on the other hand.... I'm pretty happy with my macbook pro and my core2duo general purpose box and don't see the point of any new amiga-like architecture
Tom UK
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you mean.. like the Xbox , the Weee, the playstation... etc etc
Well, kind of, but all these console OS'es are severely slimmed down in useability, and AmigaOS isn't, au contraire.
so on the one hand I do agree, on the other hand.... I'm pretty happy with my macbook pro and my core2duo general purpose box and don't see the point of any new amiga-like architecture
Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?
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Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Television_Interface_Adapter) and ANTIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC). But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).
None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.
His point was that all these aspects were put together.
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None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.
No, but if the Amiga people back then thought making a computer wouldn't make any difference in the back then computing landscape, they certainly wouldn't have made a difference indeed.
Today needs todays revolutions, not todays bugfixes.
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Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?
My A1200's boot speed is unrivalled by any of my other computers! Chalk one point up for the Amiga.
ok sure modern operating systems do far more than the Amiga does while booting up, but 1) a lot of that is useless to me anyway, and 2) shh =P
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Well, kind of, but all these console OS'es are severely slimmed down in useability, and AmigaOS isn't, au contraire.
Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?
oh well ... be honest ... "useability" ... modern stuff offers just much more.
and "ready immediately" ? sure you're right... but using my boxes in stand-by mode.. 5 secs max ? preparing coffee or tea isn't as fast as that
I still like my migi for "old" stuff :-) no mistake there !
Tom UK
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But can it sample a joystick at 1 KHz?
LOL * 65536! Oh noes, the horror, why did you do that!!!
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His point was that all these aspects were put together.
The only thing you're missing out of the Apple was hardware acceleration. I suspect if you looked around you'd find UNIX boxes with all of those features and then some.
What the Amiga did was make such features that were available to high end businesses, was make it affordable to all.
And that's it.
No, but if the Amiga people back then thought making a computer wouldn't make any difference in the back then computing landscape, they certainly wouldn't have made a difference indeed.
Today needs todays revolutions, not todays bugfixes.
They were commissioned to do a job. They pushed the boat out because their employers let them get away with it. Eventually, they burned through their cash and had to go cap in hand to various big name companies to desperately save the situation.
They wanted to make the best computer they could. And they succeeded. However, within a handspan of years of their achievement, the PC was technologically superior in every aspect.
Bugfixes are the difference between your product being declared great, or your product being panned as a useless hunk of crap. Revolutions are happening and will continue to happen, but it is evolution that makes it continue.
To say that the Amiga arch is in any way relevant or even to suggest that it influenced todays PCs is at best a hell of a stretch and at worst an out and out falacy.
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Leander,
Apple did not have multitasking in 1984.
blakespot
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Look, I just spent $900 or so on a SAMiga and OS 4.1. I do not intend to replace my main machine (Mac Pro) with it. In truth, I believe the Mac does basically everything better than this new rig. But this is what got me - from Ars.
Whatever the ultimate fate of AmigaOS, it has been a privilege and a joy to use it. I still use my AmigaOne on a daily basis, and consider it my "fun computer." Whenever Windows or OS X annoys me, it's right there, fast and friendly and accessible. It feels like a personal computer in ways that computers haven't felt like in over a decade.
I want something that feels like a (modern, capable) home computer. So - is that enough reason for it to be relevant?
blakespot
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I disagree.
The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage. Also an extremely fast bus.
One could say this follows the Amiga model. Or it just follows what makes sense. Not sure on that one.
Very Amiga-like, I'd say.
blakespot
SATA uses no CPU time? In theory and spec sheets maybe. In practice, i call BS. The number of times I get "program x is not responding" when there is a SATA drive access is testament to that. And look at any CPU monitor and watch the spike in CPU usage as you load stuff off your drive. What's that about then?
So what if the busses are faster? its all negated by the size of the files that need to be processed. i can play a 250 k game of puyo puyo on an A500. Its a 3.5 mb download, archived, for Windows or Linux. Breakout is 450k on Amiga, 6 mb on Win. And the amiga version is smoother..
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SATA uses no CPU time? In theory and spec sheets maybe. In practice, i call BS. The number of times I get "program x is not responding" when there is a SATA drive access is testament to that. And look at any CPU monitor and watch the spike in CPU usage as you load stuff off your drive. What's that about then?
So what if the busses are faster? its all negated by the size of the files that need to be processed. i can play a 250 k game of puyo puyo on an A500. Its a 3.5 mb download, archived, for Windows or Linux. Breakout is 450k on Amiga, 6 mb on Win. And the amiga version is smoother..
I love Amiga. But I'll bet the 6MB ver loads faster on it than the 450K ver does on a powerful Amiga...
blakespot
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Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Television_Interface_Adapter) and ANTIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC). But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).
None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.
t
Err no. Apple had some rubbish called co-operative multitasking in 1988, not 1984.
the Amiga was the first affordable computer for the masses that made available pre-emptive multi-tasking in a GUI driven environment. In 1985. Given that no-one else had it till 1995, and not as good, I reckon thats pretty damned-impressive.
Having hardware that had graphics and sound chips that could function independently of the CPU at a time when most other computers required the CPU to be involved intimately in every task, including moving the mouse pointer, is the same philosophy used in modern PC architectures. The amiga had it first, and showed the way
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I love Amiga. But I'll bet the 6MB ver loads faster on it than the 450K ver does on a powerful Amiga...
blakespot
I'm willing to bet that it doesn't..it is up virtually instantaneously from the time i double click the icon to the start screen on an A1200 68060@40 mhz off a flash card.
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Leander,
Apple did not have multitasking in 1984.
Au contraire mon ami...
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS):
"Classic" Mac OS (1984–2001)
Main article: Mac OS history
Original 1984 Macintosh desktop
The "classic" Mac OS is characterized by its total lack of a command line; it is a completely graphical operating system. Noted for its ease of use and its cooperative multitasking
OS9 onwards had Preemptive multitasking.
Now, if you'd said Amiga was the first to have preemptive multitasking, you'd have been correct.
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Having hardware that had graphics and sound chips that could function independently of the CPU at a time when most other computers required the CPU to be involved intimately in every task, including moving the mouse pointer, is the same philosophy used in modern PC architectures. The amiga had it first, and showed the way
I highlighted the key word in this for you, since it clearly didn't register when you wrote it.
I'll restate again what I said previously: What the Amiga did, was bring features that would otherwise only be seen in high end gear down to the consumer.
These features would have found their way onto consumer systems regardless of the Amiga due to the trickle down effect of computer engineering. Whilst you might argue that the Amiga encouraged it to come down quicker to consumer PC's quicker, that is a different argument.
But to say that this influenced the PC arch? No. Sorry. Just no. On the PC everything hangs off of busses , which in turn all branch off from a northbridge/southbridge set (the northbridge has somewhat been subsumed by the cpu on the more recent editions of the x86 line). This was the case with the humble 286 all the way up to present day hex core monsters.
This choice allows for a highly modular and highly flexable setup in ways the Amiga simply could not compete with. It's why the PC arch hasn't really changed all that much in all this time, sure, busses have changed, gotten faster, but the base principles and concepts haven't.
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They were commissioned to do a job. They pushed the boat out because their employers let them get away with it. Eventually, they burned through their cash and had to go cap in hand to various big name companies to desperately save the situation.
They wanted to make the best computer they could. And they succeeded. However, within a handspan of years of their achievement, the PC was technologically superior in every aspect.
Bugfixes are the difference between your product being declared great, or your product being panned as a useless hunk of crap. Revolutions are happening and will continue to happen, but it is evolution that makes it continue.
To say that the Amiga arch is in any way relevant or even to suggest that it influenced todays PCs is at best a hell of a stretch and at worst an out and out falacy.
Leander stop trying to re-write history.
Firstly if the engineers at Commodore were "allowed" to do what they wanted by their employers, then there's a good chance that Amiga might have survived a lot longer. Commodore Inc, screwed up.
There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was. No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was. But some illegal business practices from MS, stupidity from IBM to let the x86 patent lapse, plus total business incompetence from Commodore, along with some smart business practices like selling cheap to the business world and subsidizing workers home computer if they ran MS crap, results in inferior technology eventually winning out. Apple was on its knees for the same reason, and was saved by a portable music player.
With the current iteration of Windows-yes thats still Vista in our part of the World, MS learned that users also want efficiency and control of their machines, so much so they created a new operating system to do it. But they had to foist their usual dross onto the public, suffer the backlash, and then react.
Conceptually, there's a lot of amiga in today's PC hardware and OS architecture. Co-processors, pre-emptive multitasking, fast boot and shut down, prioritising the user input over other tasks. The PC may go about it in a different way but the objectives are the same.
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This choice allows for a highly modular and highly flexable setup in ways the Amiga simply could not compete with. It's why the PC arch hasn't really changed all that much in all this time, sure, busses have changed, gotten faster, but the base principles and concepts haven't.
you're doing it again: trying to re-write history. Just before Commodores collapse, no-one-and I mean no-one- regarded the PC architecture of the day as being modern. In fact it was seen as down right archaic. The x86 hardware architecture ended up dominating that way because the patent was allowed to lapse by IBM, who themselves saw no future in the heap of junk that the x86 platform was. No patent meant every electronics hardware factory in Taiwan could mass produce the same junk for next to nothing, and intel could keep ramping up the mhz on its CPU's to overcome many of the bottle necks that existed throughout the system. Highly moduler and flexible, in ways the amiga simply couldn't compete? My backside!!! Name one thing you couldn't shove in a Zorro slot (since 1985) that let you do everything that an ISA or PCI slot let you have? And it autoconfiged. One will do.
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Au contraire mon ami...
OS9 onwards had Preemptive multitasking.
Now, if you'd said Amiga was the first to have preemptive multitasking, you'd have been correct.
"MultiFinder was the name of an extension software for the Apple Macintosh, introduced in System Software 5 in 1988 and included with System Software 6. It added the ability to co-operatively multitask between several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous systems, which could only run one application at a time. With the advent of System 7, MultiFinder became a standard integrated part of the operating system. It remained a part of the operating system until Mac OS X."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder
right back at ya..
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Leander stop trying to re-write history.
NO U.
Firstly if the engineers at Commodore were "allowed" to do what they wanted by their employers, then there's a good chance that Amiga might have survived a lot longer. Commodore Inc, screwed up.
They were comissioned to design and build a games console. They decided instead to build a full blown computer, ran out of cash. C= bought them up.
How is this rewriting history? Oh that's right, it isn't.
That Comodore couldn't organise a booze up in a brewery is besides the point.
Even before the release of the A4000, there were available for the Amiga (via zorro) both graphics and sound cards that offered far superior performance to AGA.
The writing was on the wall. Even the AAA set would have been behind the times - it was (if I remember my C.S.A.A Dave Haynie comments correctly) capable only of 16bit screenmodes whilst the PC was using 32bit chips as standard on desktops and had DSP soundcards.
Dave also pointed out that PCI slots were being looked into for precisely this reason - they would allow cheap access to powerful hardware.
There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was.
I remember a guy on here talking about how he litterally spent many hundreds getting an 060 card for his A4000, only for his brothers Pentium PC that in it's totality cost half as much run rings around it doing lightwave rendering.
No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was. But some illegal business practices from MS, stupidity from IBM to let the x86 patent lapse, plus total business incompetence from Commodore, along with some smart business practices like selling cheap to the business world and subsidizing workers home computer if they ran MS crap, results in inferior technology eventually winning out. Apple was on its knees for the same reason, and was saved by a portable music player.
Apple survive and thrive now because they offer an end to end computing experience that is seamless - Something that no one else can say they do in the general computing market. They were on their knees because it stubbornly refused to get off the PPC, yes, the iPod has been a runaway success, but be under absolutely no illusion: the move to x86 saved the computer lines.
Evolution doesn't promote "the best", it promotes "good enough". Both in terms of hardware and software, the Amiga was effectively end of life by the time AGA was released.
Conceptually, there's a lot of amiga in today's PC hardware and OS architecture. Co-processors, pre-emptive multitasking, fast boot and shut down, prioritising the user input over other tasks. The PC may go about it in a different way but the objectives are the same.
Because no computer ever had any of that before...
To declare pretty much all of these concepts as born of the Amiga is arrogant at best.
As for conceptually, no, the Amiga has more in common with a games console - a closed, tightly integrated system.
you're doing it again: trying to re-write history.
NO U.
Just before Commodores collapse, no-one-and I mean no-one- regarded the PC architecture of the day as being modern. In fact it was seen as down right archaic.
And? The fact is it doesn't have to be "modern". The bebox was modern, what it has to be is flexable, it has to be cheap. And I'd say one of the biggest selling points was the lack of patents involved.
The x86 hardware architecture ended up dominating that way because the patent was allowed to lapse by IBM, who themselves saw no future in the heap of junk that the x86 platform was. No patent meant every electronics hardware factory in Taiwan could mass produce the same junk for next to nothing, and intel could keep ramping up the mhz on its CPU's to overcome many of the bottle necks that existed throughout the system. Highly moduler and flexible, in ways the amiga simply couldn't compete? My backside!!!
I can take a motherboard and depending on what I plug into it, use it as the basis of a Asterisk telephone exchange, any number of server configurations, a silent low power office box, hardcore gaming system or anything in between. And the key part is I can rip out non necessary parts (such as graphics chips, for instance).
All from one motherboard. And by one I mean any ATX motherboard currently in production.
As for bottlenecks. There is really only one on a modern system and thats the hard drive. Its been the only real bottleneck for the past 10 years. SATA on it's own doesn't offer any significant performance boost over PATA, what it does offer (at least in just about any board you buy today) is cheep and easy RAID. Which does boost performance.
Name one thing you couldn't shove in a Zorro slot (since 1985) that let you do everything that an ISA or PCI slot let you have? And it autoconfiged. One will do.
Be affordable.
Be available.
"Right back at ya"
As for the Mac, I stand corrected.
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The Amiga architecture is like a boat anchor on an F1 car... I'm sure it would look cool, and you could come up with 9 billion reasons why an F1 car would need half a ton of barnacle covered wrought iron bolted to the side... but at the end of the day, your F1 car is gonna suck.
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What a sad case of wanting to believe.
What you claimed was (I quote): "Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology.".
This is funny, because Bars and Pipes does not even have an audio engine (MIDI != audio). It's a MIDI sequencer, and unlike e.g. Cubase/Logic etc. it's MIDI only, i.e. the audio engine you refer to doesn't even exist.
(btw - the patents (and the other stuff) you referred to is related to Algorithmic Composing, which is not the same thing as an audio engine at all. It's a fact that Blue Ribbon and their patents were purchased by Microsoft, but that's about it).
Bars and Pipes was it that was, i.e. nothing than a MIDI sequencer... But the method it used for passing data and dialoguing between its modules is the key feature used into direct music and then DirectX Audio Api.
At least so it was told to me from persons who asked Todor.
Maybe they were uncorrect, but I am sure it was so.
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Leander stop trying to re-write history.
Firstly if the engineers at Commodore were "allowed" to do what they wanted by their employers, then there's a good chance that Amiga might have survived a lot longer. Commodore Inc, screwed up.
There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was.
The Hombre (if that's what you're referring to) was basically a wholly new architecture and would not be backward-compatible except through software emulation. And in addition to AmigaOS, it was actually planned to run...Windows!!!
No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was.
Um, I think you have things backwards here. By this time, the Amiga was technologically ancient. I know because I upgraded my old Amiga 500 to a sparkling "new" Amiga 1200. My friend ditched his Amiga 500+ and bought a 486 instead. His PC ran circles around my Amiga, no matter how hard I refused to believe it...
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The Hombre (if that's what you're referring to) was basically a wholly new architecture and would not be backward-compatible except through software emulation. And in addition to AmigaOS, it was actually planned to run...Windows!!!
Um, I think you have things backwards here. By this time, the Amiga was technologically ancient. I know because I upgraded my old Amiga 500 to a sparkling "new" Amiga 1200. My friend ditched his Amiga 500+ and bought a 486 instead. His PC ran circles around my Amiga, no matter how hard I refused to believe it...
i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.
In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga? What were your specs? An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486. You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it. So i don't see how the 486 was superior.
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Um, I think you have things backwards here. By this time, the Amiga was technologically ancient. I know because I upgraded my old Amiga 500 to a sparkling "new" Amiga 1200. My friend ditched his Amiga 500+ and bought a 486 instead. His PC ran circles around my Amiga, no matter how hard I refused to believe it...
I had Amiga1200 and PC 486 DX2-66 MHz
Despite the fact it could render 3D images with enormous more speed than A1200, and it could handle 3D graphics better than Amiga1200 (Frontier game for example) it was too slow on bitmaps, and not only real 24 bit.
Also I had 8bit audio Soundblaster that rendered audio in Fm... It was pitiful compared to Amiga audio 8bit real DAC.
When using serious programs such as Ventura Publisher (in DOS with its own GUI interface) and other software in Windows, then it was totally not responsive to user... What a waste of power...
Once I tried a floppy version of QNX on my 486 PC... I was astonished! It flied....
Sure MS-DOS and Windows were the real snails that blocked the real power hidden in 486 Processor!
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i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.
it was not stupid to run Windows on Hombre... It was just an alternative solution.
And perhaps once there was a version of Windows running on PowerPC machines...
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i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.
In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga? What were your specs? An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486. You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it. So i don't see how the 486 was superior.
My spec was an Amiga 1200 with 4MiB fastram and a 40MHz FPU. That's generous too because most people didnt' have any fastram...
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NO U.
Apple survive and thrive now because they offer an end to end computing experience that is seamless - Something that no one else can say they do in the general computing market. They were on their knees because it stubbornly refused to get off the PPC, yes, the iPod has been a runaway success, but be under absolutely no illusion: the move to x86 saved the computer lines.
Apples resurrection occurred with the the cancellation of the Mac clones, and the release of the iPod and the fruity ppc macs. It took Jobs to make the company realise that they needed a point of difference, and that being a software-only company-which is where apple clones was heading-was not the way to go. Its a common business principle: do what YOU do, and do it well, don't copy what the competitor is doing. The move to x86 happened much later when it became clear that mac laptops could not be made with ppc chips of high enough clock speeds to compete with x86. Windows compatibility was added relatively recently, but no-one buys a Mac to run Windows, but its a bonus If someone really wants it.
Commodore OTOH, dabbled in making PC's, and therefore supporting their direct competitor and entering a crowded market place and giving up their point of difference, the Amiga operating environment. Thats why it was stupid that they apparantly also considered running Windows on their next-gen hardware at a time when MS was moving towards wiping alternative platforms out: if thats not giving your direct competitor a ringing endorsement i don't know what is. Stupid is the only way to describe it.
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My spec was an Amiga 1200 with 4MiB fastram and a 40MHz FPU. That's generous too because most people didnt' have any fastram...
OK so what couldn't you do that the 486 could..
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OK so what couldn't you do that the 486 could..
It simply couldn't keep up...
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I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?
Regards,
Sim085
No.
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Bars and Pipes was it that was, i.e. nothing than a MIDI sequencer... But the method it used for passing data and dialoguing between its modules is the key feature used into direct music and then DirectX Audio Api.
Ok. Then we can agree on the fact that "Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology." is a false statement.
Even if you replaced "Audio section of DirectX engine" with "DirectMusic", the statement would still be false, since it's not "taken directly by Bars & Pipes". It's based on similar concepts, inspired by Bars & Pipes, partly written by the same developer - but "taken directly" is a wild exaggeration.
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It simply couldn't keep up...
Doing what? Measured how? Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?
Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.
There's interesting review in Australian Commodore and Amiga review comparing Workbench 3.1 to Win 95 here? http://www.racevb6.com/acar/
Its the second last 1995 issue, its a nice read.
Comparing a 486 with Win 3.11 is a no contest.
:
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Doing what? Measured how? Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?
Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.
Well, perhaps the comparison was out of the box. A 486 out of the box is significantly faster than an A1200 out of the box.
Textured 3D games were a lot faster and smoother on a 486 with VGA than a non-RTG amiga, even with an 030 at a faster clockspeed. Just compare Doom on a 25MHz 486 with VGA to a 40MHz 68030 with AGA, let alone a stock 020.
Not that you could actually run Doom at the time, as it hadn't been ported. Try comparing, say, TFX to see the difference. It isn't particularly great on an 060, but works fine on a modest 486.
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Well, perhaps the comparison was out of the box. A 486 out of the box is significantly faster than an A1200 out of the box.
Textured 3D games were a lot faster and smoother on a 486 with VGA than a non-RTG amiga, even with an 030 at a faster clockspeed. Just compare Doom on a 25MHz 486 with VGA to a 40MHz 68030 with AGA, let alone a stock 020.
Not that you could actually run Doom at the time, as it hadn't been ported. Try comparing, say, TFX to see the difference. It isn't particularly great on an 060, but works fine on a modest 486.
3D was CPU intensive. The amiga was never just about the CPU, the PC was mostly about the CPU. The architecture was never designed with chunky graphics in mind. If it wasn't for Doom, it might not have mattered, for a bit longer any way. But then again, that 486 ney even Pentium PC could do what an 68020 with 4 meg and Scala could do at the time.
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@stefcep2
It is a nice read, I still have the mag here now. It was talking about usability and productivity and not raw power.
A 486 25mhz pumped out around 15-20 MIPS depending on the architecture. Comparable to a 68040 @ 25Mhz.
The 486 with 16Bit SB Cards in 93-94 was when the Amiga started being overtaken.
Gertsy
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3D was CPU intensive. The amiga was never just about the CPU,
Maybe not "just" but in the mid / late 90's it was getting tiresome to have my acclerated Amiga 1200 switched on through out the night rendering the most a simple low resolution animation in Imagine. Boy, I wanted a "fast/faster" Amiga back then. I really started to feel back then how Amiga was not going to go anywhere at that time with all the promises hopes and so on.
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It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 design is rather similar to the non-fastram Amiga design of old. AFAIK that is.
(from an abstract point of view, it is naturally not exactly the same thing)
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@stefcep2
It is a nice read, I still have the mag here now. It was talking about usability and productivity and not raw power.
A 486 25mhz pumped out around 15-20 MIPS depending on the architecture. Comparable to a 68040 @ 25Mhz.
The 486 with 16Bit SB Cards in 93-94 was when the Amiga started being overtaken.
Gertsy
Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion. It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions. So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.
'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D. Loved it.
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3D was CPU intensive. The amiga was never just about the CPU, the PC was mostly about the CPU. The architecture was never designed with chunky graphics in mind.
Something Jay Minor openly admitted he would have changed later. Besides, it wasn't the CPU load in Doom that made it infeasible on the amiga, it was principally the lack of chunky pixel displays. A fast 030 powered amiga, the likes of which were available at the time, can play doom just fine provided there's a graphics card (or even an akiko as in the cd32).
If it wasn't for Doom, it might not have mattered, for a bit longer any way. But then again, that 486 ney even Pentium PC could do what an 68020 with 4 meg and Scala could do at the time.
Doom was riding the wave of increasing CPU/gfx power, not driving it.
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It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 design is rather similar to the non-fastram Amiga design of old. AFAIK that is.
(from an abstract point of view, it is naturally not exactly the same thing)
Xbox 360 includes a discrete 10MB smart eDRAM framebuffer.
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Engineering is always a compromise. The Amiga was a damn near perfect set of compromises for the technology of the 1980s... But when technology moved on the compromises that made the Amiga great became a millstone around the engineers necks... The 90s killed the 5year old Amiga design as it simply wasn't relavant any more.
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Doing what? Measured how? Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?
To be honest, I think my Amiga probably crashed at least as often as my friend's PC...No memory protection and all that hardware banging...
As for what the PC was doing better. It was faster: my friend was playing around in 3D Studio and could have tezture mapped models moving in semi real time (if I recall correct) and raytracing was blazingly fast. Me in Real3D had like wireframe models and rendering took overnight...Ok, maybe I'm exagerating here, but it was obviously no contest which computer was faster. The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.
Now, I mentioned Real3D which is one of the few apps that would have benefitted from a faster CPU. But since "everyone" just had a baseline Amiga 1200 (if that, many people were hanging on the Amiga 500s), those few game companies still developing for the Amiga just targeted those baseline machines. Faster CPU didn't do su much since the game had to be playable without one. I remember the Sierra title "Rise of the dragon" actually had extra animations if you had a faster processor, but does that really make much difference for playability?
Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.
I'd say neither was probably particularly enjoyable to use. I can't exactly remember Win3.11 though, but as I recently dipped back into Amiga, I'm fully aware of the suckage that was Workbench. Give me a shell any time of the day...
There's interesting review in Australian Commodore and Amiga review comparing Workbench 3.1 to Win 95 here? http://www.racevb6.com/acar/
Its the second last 1995 issue, its a nice read.
Comparing a 486 with Win 3.11 is a no contest.
:
It's a bit tilted I'd say...Yeah, such points as Autoconfig, and possibly responsiveness (can't remember exatly), and video, I'll give the Amiga. But usability goes straight to Windows 95, and that's what matter. Not to mention availability of programs...
I have to question their technical competence though, as they claim that since Win95 was 32-bit, that meant a byte became 32 bits and made programs bloated...
Ahhh, this does bring back memories of when in the mid 90s I got Linux up and running on my new AMD K5 (first PC I bought). My friend (same 486 guy but now upgraded to Pentium 133MHz and Windows 95) commented on X11 and FVWM: "Yuck! It's like the old Amiga Workbench for goodness' sake"...And yeah, it wasn't particularly useful, especially compared with Windows, but all I needed it for was to bring up multiple xterms...
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Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion. It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions. So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.
'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D. Loved it.
BSOD occurs due to flaky hardware or flaky kernel space drivers.
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To answer the initial post question.
No, it's both surpassed and irrelevant.
Surpassed by competition (to pay respect of certain era).
Irrelevant by comparing scope of engineering process and computing concepts.
IMHO, if CBM eventually made it through stock horror, it would still get nailed few years later. Demise in 1994 has roots in 1989, maybe even earlier.
Maybe in some other dimension...:)
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Engineering is always a compromise. The Amiga was a damn near perfect set of compromises for the technology of the 1980s... But when technology moved on the compromises that made the Amiga great became a millstone around the engineers necks... The 90s killed the 5year old Amiga design as it simply wasn't relavant any more.
What the...was with the slow-mem trapdoor expansion port on the Amiga 500?! Freakin' useless crap. Imagine if people could have added a cheap fastram expansion in the trapdoor slot instead? Would have fixed the major problem with the Amiga which was that it was bandwidth-choked without fastram. Manufacturer's could even have used slower (and cheaper) memory than chipram since the 68k alone would be consuming it.
My guess as to the reason of hanging it on the chipbus was to make it possible to upgrade to a newer Agnus and have the memory be chipram. But since that conversion involved cutting traces on the motherboard and bringing out the soldering, I have some doubts that it was really a planned feature...
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Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion. It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions. So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.
'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D. Loved it.
CV64 includes a S3 Trio graphics accelerator i.e. a PC gfx accelerator.
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I had Amiga1200 and PC 486 DX2-66 MHz
Despite the fact it could render 3D images with enormous more speed than A1200, and it could handle 3D graphics better than Amiga1200 (Frontier game for example) it was too slow on bitmaps, and not only real 24 bit.
Also I had 8bit audio Soundblaster that rendered audio in Fm... It was pitiful compared to Amiga audio 8bit real DAC.
When using serious programs such as Ventura Publisher (in DOS with its own GUI interface) and other software in Windows, then it was totally not responsive to user... What a waste of power...
Once I tried a floppy version of QNX on my 486 PC... I was astonished! It flied....
Sure MS-DOS and Windows were the real snails that blocked the real power hidden in 486 Processor!
I recall doing the same thing with QNX X86...
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i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.
In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga? What were your specs? An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486. You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it. So i don't see how the 486 was superior.
That's Windows NT btw.
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The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga. Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU. A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.
The X86 CPU gained
1. SIMD co-processor unit.
2. Pre-fetch instructions and data units.
For DMA operations, modern X86 chipsets includes cache coherent hardware.
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In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga? What were your specs? An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486. You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it. So i don't see how the 486 was superior.
I've had a 486 with 16Mb RAM running Win95 (!) and a 68030/40Mhz A1200 with 8Mb Fast + 2Mb chip with 3.0 ROMs. Concentrating on stuff that's vaguely hardware related, I'd say that the A1200 won out on:
- Displaying digital photos on a lovely HAM-8 screen rather than 256 colours
- General responsiveness
- Doing cool stuff with video. In a few days I wrote a little AMOS program to do nice copper effects, plugged the A1200 into a video projector, and had a little effects system for concerts
On the other hand, the 486 had:
- Reasonable speed when running a 256 colour desktop. WB in 256 colours is an absolute dog on the A1200 and extremely frustrating
- A slightly shorter boot-up time. A lot of this will be down the the silly number of patches in the A1200's startup-sequence, although 95 had some of that functionality built-in for stuff like newicons. And I reckon the overall hard-drive access times on the 486 were a bit faster
- As others have said, the chunky video hardware is simply better suited to 3D than AGA
They're both about as unstable as each other :lol: Swings and roundabouts, really, although the fact that the 486 got chucked years ago and the A1200 is still going strong maybe suggests which system was more fun to use :)
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@ejstans
A500 is a great example of technology compromise Bloodline mentioned.
To be aware of what that actually means you have to know A1000 well in detail.
A500 - It wasn't designed for major upgrade path in mind, since for that purpose there was A2000 launched side by side. That crappy (as you said) trapdoor expansion was not part of Agnus upgrade either, but wise engineering made i.e. slow>chip ram hacks feasible at field service level. If you take a good look on various A500 revisions, you'll see the impact of cost economy on motherboard design - first revisions (Rev3 & 5) had then expensive DIL DRAM covering the whole lower left area for just a mere 512Kb of ChipRAM. In spite of hacks, I don't really belive CBM left trapdoor bus just to allow ChipRAM increase somewhere in future, when RAM price drop occur. It was a best-fitting solution for that time - it wouldn't compromise FastRAM bus; it won't help you with ChipRAM, but it may persuade Amiga development to start using. And it did in great exent, just after Kickstart v1.3 debut. Later revisons introduced cheaper DIL RAM with more capacity, which made platform even more attractive for modding. A500+ went to the edge, preparing for full 2Mb ChipRAM at the cost of trapdoor slot. So, in some way, CBM closed the circle.
If the crowd was left with true FastRAM only, platform wouldn't attract more audience than A1000 and there would be no A1200 nor else.
AFAIK, A500 trapdoor 512Kb expansion might be the most selling Amiga peripheral.
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@ejstans
A500 is a great example of technology compromise Bloodline mentioned.
To be aware of what that actually means you have to know A1000 well in detail.
A500 - It wasn't designed for major upgrade path in mind, since for that purpose there was A2000 launched side by side. That crappy (as you said) trapdoor expansion was not part of Agnus upgrade either, but wise engineering made i.e. slow>chip ram hacks feasible at field service level. If you take a good look on various A500 revisions, you'll see the impact of cost economy on motherboard design - first revisions (Rev3 & 5) had then expensive DIL DRAM covering the whole lower left area for just a mere 512Kb of ChipRAM. In spite of hacks, I don't really belive CBM left trapdoor bus just to allow ChipRAM increase somewhere in future, when RAM price drop occur. It was a best-fitting solution for that time - it wouldn't compromise FastRAM bus; it won't help you with ChipRAM, but it may persuade Amiga development to start using. And it did in great exent, just after Kickstart v1.3 debut.
If the crowd was left with true FastRAM only, platform wouldn't attract more audience than A1000 and there would be no A1200 nor else.
AFAIK, A500 trapdoor 512Kb expansion might be the most selling Amiga peripheral.
In what way is slowmem best fitting?! Your explanation just leaves me puzzled. Your last paragraph doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, the 512KiB expansion is probably the most sold peripheral. That's because it dropped in price extremely significantly. After awhile it could be bought for some $20 or so. Sideslot fastram cost like five to ten times this! Which expansion are people going to buy?
That's why I said: "imagine if the trapdoor ram had been fastram". There needed be no difference in the actual ram expansion; the only difference is which of the buses it would be on.
If the trapdoor had been on the fastram bus than the chipbus, how on earth would that be a bad thing and "not attract more audience than A1000"? Doesn't make any sense! And certainly doesn't seem like a reasonable compromise...
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Au contraire mon ami...
OS9 onwards had Preemptive multitasking.
Now, if you'd said Amiga was the first to have preemptive multitasking, you'd have been correct.
I'm afraid you're incorrect again. MultiFinder, released in 1988, allowed cooperative multitasking. Also, no version of Apple's "classic" OS (all Mac OS's prior to OS X) allowed preemptive multitasking. A sloppy threading capability was tacked onto, I think it was, Mac OS 8 - but it was not an ideal model.
Although, and most are unaware of this, the operating system of the Apple Lisa (which predated the Macintosh) offered cooperative multitasking and protected memory. It was based on a 5MHz 68000 -- all before the Mac existed on the market.
blakespot
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There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was. No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was. But some illegal business practices from MS, stupidity from IBM to let the x86 patent lapse, plus total business incompetence from Commodore, along with some smart business practices like selling cheap to the business world and subsidizing workers home computer if they ran MS crap, results in inferior technology eventually winning out. Apple was on its knees for the same reason, and was saved by a portable music player.
Not to lay down a tangent to the discussion, but Apple was saved by the iMac and Jobs' return. A portable music player turned the company into a massive force, though. The local retail stores helped significantly, as well.
blakespot
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OK.
I'm not 100% sure, but getting trapdoor to Zorro bus while leaving sidecar open for expansion would involve Buster which is no-go for entry level A500. Moreover, as you already know, all trapdoor expansions above 512Kb were built with so called "Gary adapters" which provided missing address signals needed for bank switching. The most advanced of those were designed to host 4Mb RAM which was used as part-Chip, part-Slow combo, never true Fast. I found this case most convincing on the issue of trapdoor mapped to Zorro bus.
Next, price difference - trapdoor vs sideslot (sidecar, whatever). Of course they were expensive - in 80% of cases they came as a secondary or tertiary feature, alongsinde SCSI/IDE controller or more potent CPU (020/030). A500 made it's fame through gaming which requirred stock 68000 and 1Mb RAM, untill 1991. Who needs 68020 and harddrive, out of productivity purposes ? For that matters, you go for big box Amigas.
When I said "... was left with true FastRAM only...not attract more audience... " I meant that trapdoor FastRAM was not feasible and that if there were no other alternative, all those pricey sideslot expansions would make A500 just another A1000. Does this makes any more sense at all ?
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OK.
I'm not 100% sure, but getting trapdoor to Zorro bus while leaving sidecar open for expansion would involve Buster which is no-go for entry level A500. Moreover, as you already know, all trapdoor expansions above 512Kb were built with so called "Gary adapters" which provided missing address signals needed for bank switching. The most advanced of those were designed to host 4Mb RAM which was used as part-Chip, part-Slow combo, never true Fast. I found this case most convincing on the issue of trapdoor mapped to Zorro bus.
I don't want it to be a Zorro device, just out of the chipmem bus onto the CPU bus so that it can be used in parallel with the custom chips. Making it a Zorro peripheral wouldn't make sense since the point is to make it cheap and I'm guessing the glue logic to support the Zorro protocol is at least partly responsible for making the sideport expansion so expensive.
Next, price difference - trapdoor vs sideslot (sidecar, whatever). Of course they were expensive - in 80% of cases they came as a secondary or tertiary feature, alongsinde SCSI/IDE controller or more potent CPU (020/030). A500 made it's fame through gaming which requirred stock 68000 and 1Mb RAM, untill 1991. Who needs 68020 and harddrive, out of productivity purposes ? For that matters, you go for big box Amigas.
This is a silly argument. Yes, gaming on Amiga 500 was restricted to 68k and 1MiB (slow)mem. But had a cheap way to add fastram been available as opposed to slowmem, of course the gaming companies would have taken advantage of it! Fastram means that the Amiga can actually operate the way it was intended: the custom chips can run in parallel with the CPU and provide extra processing capabilities. If there is no fastram, there is not enough available memory bandwidth and the copper and blitter will instead stall the processor! Not too mention the bitplanes...
When I said "... was left with true FastRAM only...not attract more audience... " I meant that trapdoor FastRAM was not feasible and that if there were no other alternative, all those pricey sideslot expansions would make A500 just another A1000. Does this makes any more sense at all ?
Okay, so you meant that it was either slowmem trapdoor expansion or no trapdoor expansion...
But I will question that, and maintain that it would make much more sense to have a cheap way of adding fastram so that the CPU would have enough memory bandwidth. Really, lack of bandwidth is probably the biggest short-coming of the architecture!
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@ejstans
The sideport is basicly a direct bus to the 68k (which is all zorro really was), if you want to have both the side port and fastram, you need to have some bus arbitration hardware (ie buster)... The A500 was a cheap device, so opted to have a single zorro slot and a single memory expansion (that was arbitrated by agnus to save costs).
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@ejstans
The sideport is basicly a direct bus to the 68k (which is all zorro really was), if you want to have both the side port and fastram, you need to have some bus arbitration hardware (ie buster)... The A500 was a cheap device, so opted to have a single zorro slot and a single memory expansion (that was arbitrated by agnus to save costs).
And the (fast) ROM ? ;)
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And the (fast) ROM ? ;)
The Kickstart ROM is addressed via gary, IIRC.
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Ah, ok, I looked at schematics. I basically forgot about DRAM...Agnus had to do the DRAM address translation (+refresh). That does explain it...Still, I think it's a bad compromise. I think it would have been worth it to add DRAM support to eg Gary in order to have cheap fastram...
But of course, that's in hindsight. Maybe Commodore thought cheap fastram sideport expansions would flouris?
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Amiga did a good job in it's day of making computing accessable to folk. However, it has to be said that things have moved on a very long way from Windows 3.11.
You mean to tell me windows 3.11 is not current. I must run out and get the new version.:roflmao:
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Ah, ok, I looked at schematics. I basically forgot about DRAM...Agnus had to do the DRAM address translation (+refresh). That does explain it...Still, I think it's a bad compromise. I think it would have been worth it to add DRAM support to eg Gary in order to have cheap fastram...
But of course, that's in hindsight. Maybe Commodore thought cheap fastram sideport expansions would flouris?
Well, by the time Commodore took control, it was all about saving money! Agnus has a DRAM controler, so they just used that.
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Well, by the time Commodore took control, it was all about saving money! Agnus has a DRAM controler, so they just used that.
Yeah, it's not such a completely bad idea as I thought, and it probably made the Amiga 500 (a little) cheaper. The Amiga 1000 shipped with only 256KiB but an option to upgrade to 512KiB. I guess maybe that's where the idea of the trapdoor expansion came from, even though in the Amiga 500 the extra memory couldn't be used by the custom chips.
Anyway, I'm glad the reason for slowmem was sorted out, because when I wasn't considering the DRAM addressing issue, I just thought it insane to tie the trapdoor expansion to the chipbus when it could as easily have (in my mistaken mind) been sitting directly on the CPU bus and been providing a great memory bandwidth injection. But if in penny-saving mode, I guess it made sense to do it that way, although it is a real shame...I mean, it probably wouldn't have costed so much to just clone the existing DRAM controller...
Ahhh, anyway, I do maintain that this was not a good compromise! Had they chosen my way, the Amiga of 1987 would have been just about perfect, considering the constraints of the time! :lol:
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I think you're right, Amiga was put on the road to irrelevancy when Commodore toke over, it just took a decade or so for it to happen.
(http://www.uclean.com/resources/images/products/thumbs/windcmd20_128x128.gif)
Well, by the time Commodore took control, it was all about saving money! Agnus has a DRAM controler, so they just used that.
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The penny pinching you have identified became a cancer in the Amiga Development... That is why the outdated AGA wasn't released until 92... When it needed to be out in 88...
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The penny pinching you have identified became a cancer in the Amiga Development... That is why the outdated AGA wasn't released until 92... When it needed to be out in 88...
Also communication between the dev teams in commodre was nonexistent!!! The CDTV team had no idea that the ECS chipset was even being worked on let alone ready to ship...
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Truly spoken... When it could've been:
- 1 MB chipmem (they just forgot to enlarge the registers!) & ECS capabilities with the first A500/2000s in 1987 + 8 bit lores graphics + chunky modes
- 32 bit chipset by 1990: 16 & 24 bit graphics in lores/hires, 16 bit audio, high density floppies, 32 bit blitter - even 8 MB chipmem
It would have been so easy to do, yet it didn't happen...
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Ah, ok, I looked at schematics. I basically forgot about DRAM...Agnus had to do the DRAM address translation (+refresh). That does explain it...Still, I think it's a bad compromise. I think it would have been worth it to add DRAM support to eg Gary in order to have cheap fastram...
But of course, that's in hindsight. Maybe Commodore thought cheap fastram sideport expansions would flouris?
Not exactly. :)
As Bloodline said, they had more important thing to care of.
Six months after A1000 debut, CBM was grasping to ensure liquid business since some massive loans were due settling. A massive fraction of revenue came from still actual 8-bit market, while A1000 sales were pretty discouraging, nowhere near the Atari competition. New CEO, Rattigan, cut the costs of perex and opex by splitting platform into 2 separate streamlines. Simpler and cheaper A500 was aimed at market penetration currenttly owned by C64 and A2000 shoot for performance/productivity line claimed by Atari. It would be nice to find some figures how much CBM saved on those A1000vsA500 and A1000vsA2000 ratios, but somehow it worked since just before launch of A500/2000 CBM reported profit.
Considering all issues of that specific time, I think that CBM might have done more damage after A1000 debut. They had second chance (1st goes to original Amiga team) with Rattigan, but greedy Gould fired him in split second. Not to mention the awful CBM marketing which blew every damn chance to expand userbase and increase organic market share.
IMHO, when we're discoussing what might been wise to do back then, I'll say that CBM might saved it's ass if they went IBM route. Licence chipset, open platform for 3rd party HW assemby and then apply more focus on SW development which would generate enough momentum of detailed concepts and ideas needing better HW. Unfortunatelly, when told about IBM route, those idiots understood only COMPATIBILITY.
Ahh...:furious:
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I've had a 486 with 16Mb RAM running Win95 (!) and a 68030/40Mhz A1200 with 8Mb Fast + 2Mb chip with 3.0 ROMs. Concentrating on stuff that's vaguely hardware related, I'd say that the A1200 won out on:
- Displaying digital photos on a lovely HAM-8 screen rather than 256 colours
...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time. It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1. What vidcard did you use..?
blakespot
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...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time. It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1. What vidcard did you use..?
Hmm, not entirely sure, although I think it had 1Mb of graphics memory and was an ISA card. I can definitely remember seeing dithering you wouldn't get with 24-bit colour.
At any rate I'd still say that, when it was released, a stock A1200 could better display still pictures (via HAM) than a PC with a mediocre graphics card. Not that that's an immense achievement really - if anything it shows how much the Amiga's advantages over the PC had diminished by the time AGA came around.
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Evolution doesn't promote "the best", it promotes "good enough". Both in terms of hardware and software, the Amiga was effectively end of life by the time AGA was released.
I agree, though a straight quote from Darwin fits even better in my opinion. -"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
In other words the future looks bright for Linux... ;)
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The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}
You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?
It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...
On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...
Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.
Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.
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The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}
You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?
It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...
On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...
Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.
A very masterpiece but it existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.
No I had never heard of this 'Breathless', especially not in 1993. As it was apparently released in 1996, which is about when my Amiga gave up its ghost, that's little wonder! :p
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The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.{/QUOTE}
You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?
It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...
On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...
Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.
Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.
Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...
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Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...
Ofcourse the PC did. But answer this: what hardware development occurred, other than a CD ROM from the owners of Amiga after Commodore's demise? Before Commodore died, PPC was where they were headed, new busses and new chipsets were planned and none of it ofcourse materialised.. What do you expect when all we got was bolt-ons to 7-10 year old architectures from third-parties. A 7-year old planar chipset wasn't as fast as a new PCI/AGP card with built-in 3D functions and chunky screen-modes. Amiga had nothing as good as Direct 3D? What do you expect when the parent company has no in-house hardware and software developers, and it even takes several years for a relatively minor OS update to be written.
Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030. And we knew what was better and why. Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't. Apple was shit-scared of Amiga, MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform. They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side. Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.
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Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...
In PC land, at around the same time, Quake had just been released. I played it on my mates PC at the time and was absolutely blown away by the graphics, the playability and the sheer fun of it. Later that year he was using Quakeworld and playing via dialup...
I remember breathless, it played like an absolute dog. Clunky, slow... Possibly the only FPS I ever played that was worse then Gloom. I played it about 3 months or so after I first tried Quake.
To say I was disapointed would be a grave, grave understatement.
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Ahhh, anyway, I do maintain that this was not a good compromise! Had they chosen my way, the Amiga of 1987 would have been just about perfect, considering the constraints of the time! :lol:
Commodore's marketing was simple:
1. A500, A600, A1200 cheapish games machine to play the 2D games that the were in vogue.
2. Anything with Zorro Slots: professional use, and 4 times the price for the privelage.
Not far off the Apple all-in-one Imac's Vs the expandable PPC towers that jobs introduced. If only Apple had a multi-tasking OS to go with their PPC technology in the days of Win 95.
That also explains the short-comings in the wedge-machines. Then when Commodore died, all that people could afford were the A1200, and so we all tried to turn them into A4000's which we all really wanted but could never afford
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Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030. And we knew what was better and why. Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't.
And a lot of those justifications worked great right up until you had to do any heavy duty work, at which point the Amiga was insanely overpriced for the job. I do not deny that the PC was a pig in terms of OS's available at the time. However to deny that AmigaOS was EOL, when even the engineers who were actually working on the next gen gear have admitted such is laughable.
As has also been pointed out, AAA (Nyx, and later hombre) would have been woefully underpowered in every respect compared to the PCI addon cards it would have had to go up against. Hell, even AGA looked damn tired compared to midrange PC gear.
Apple was shit-scared of Amiga,
For about 18 months until they realised that C= weren't going to do crap with it.
MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform.
And it's height was already a memory by the time AGA was released!
They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side. Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.
What you're ignoring is that the costs to get a high end amiga that could take on and beat a mid range PC of the day was substantially higher then the cost of that PC. It also ignores the fact that a pentium PC could utterly monster any A4000 or A1200 you cared to lob at it on every level.
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@stefcep2
It doesn't matter that the Amiga lacked development after '92 The topic of this thread askes if the amiga architecture is relevant today, what I (and others) point out is that the Amiga architecture wasn't even relevant in '92... As someone who was writing software for the amiga at the time, I remember the hoops one should have to jump through to do any that looked even remotely modern.
Yes the amiga has some cool hardware to do some specific effects, but this hardware was to compensate for the level of technology at the time... As chip technology improved the amiga architecture became a bottleneck, the Commodore engineers were working hard to rid themselves of it, and produce something at least comparable to off the shelf chips... But commodore folded.
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You never heard of Breathless Amiga clone game of DOOM?
It had all features of DOOM, including textures, shades, light effects, jumps, and on basic Amigas it could be even shrinked in pixels down to 160x120 to grant playability, or enlarged if you had had CPU with muscles...
That's not true though, now is it. Breathless had a very simple orthogonal map structure that had more in common with Wolfenstein 3D than Doom. In fact, I'd say from an engine perspective it essentially was Wolfenstein 3D with variable height floors and zone lighting.
Doom, OTOH, had a complete 2D BSP based engine that allowed a plan view of the map to have any arbitrary geometry.
What Breathless had going for it was the fact it was one of the first, if not the first game of it's class to use C2P rather than chunky display emulation. In the long run, that gave it a significant advantage on faster machines.
On accelerated Amigas Breathless game make use of more horsepower speed and it could even recognize graphics cards connected to amiga AFAIK...
Also to gain speed you could change textures from 1x1 pixels to 2x2 or 4x4 or even remove it and revert to solid rendering of surfaces without any textures.
Breathless was a real masterpiece but its existence was just barely known amongst amiga users due to the fallen of Commodore.
Alien Breed 3D 2 was technically way more advanced. Like Doom, it allowed for arbitary geometry (though it required you to do the job of a BSP tree generator when creating levels, manually subdividing your map into convex zones) and unlike doom, it allowed two levels of floors in the same zone, allowing the creation of bridges. The use of vertex illumination (goraud shaded) and support for polygon models was also more advanced. Lightsourced sprites were also supported. The water refraction effects were peerless on the amiga.
The principal problem was that it was also very, very slow.
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@stefcep2
It doesn't matter that the Amiga lacked development after '92 The topic of this thread askes if the amiga architecture is relevant today, what I (and others) point out is that the Amiga architecture wasn't even relevant in '92... As someone who was writing software for the amiga at the time, I remember the hoops one should have to jump through to do any that looked even remotely modern.
Yes the amiga has some cool hardware to do some specific effects, but this hardware was to compensate for the level of technology at the time... As chip technology improved the amiga architecture became a bottleneck, the Commodore engineers were working hard to rid themselves of it, and produce something at least comparable to off the shelf chips... But commodore folded.
Greetings,
...and 17 years later, we're still all discussing about it's relevance. A memory to some, yet it sticks like ROM. :D Oh, the Irony of it all! :) Any relevance of the Amiga's Technology today is all irrelevant. Without the support of the people who still uses it, is relevant. I say, use today's technology to develope a better or new Amiga architechture which takes advantage of faster machines of today. Like for example Windows 7.... yeah right! I mean emulation for backward compatibility, that's the reason why there's winuae, running on PSP, and so on.. Moving along... Sometimes it never hurts to look back once in a while. ;)
Regards,
GiZz72
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What Breathless had going for it was the fact it was one of the first, if not the first game of it's class to use C2P rather than chunky display emulation. In the long run, that gave it a significant advantage on faster machines.
So did it work better on a CD32 than an A1200?
Did Akiko work faster if you had an accelerator in the CD32? (ie would Breathless work better on a CD32/040 than an A1200/040?)
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Not sure if it used the akiko in any case.
The akiko, I believe, is able to take a block of 32 8-bit chunky pixels and spit them out as 32 words to separate bit planes at about the same speed as a 68040 is. By the time you get to 68040, the time it takes to physically push the data to chip ram has actually become the dominating factor. Of course, your 68040 could be doing something better with it's time, eg calculating the next frame.
It's probably fair to say that with an accelerator, the akiko is quite handy. Though it'll never be as quick and easy as just having a chunky display card.
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Touche @gizz72.
I'm with you. Amiga's relevance is not in it's architecture. It is in it's indelible imprint on our psyche.
Gertsy
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Touche @gizz72.
I'm with you. Amiga's relevance is not in it's architecture. It is in it's indelible imprint on our psyche.
Gertsy
@Gertsy
Exactly! Userbase makes or breaks an Architecture. That simply said. :D
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Hmm, not entirely sure, although I think it had 1Mb of graphics memory and was an ISA card. I can definitely remember seeing dithering you wouldn't get with 24-bit colour.
At any rate I'd still say that, when it was released, a stock A1200 could better display still pictures (via HAM) than a PC with a mediocre graphics card. Not that that's an immense achievement really - if anything it shows how much the Amiga's advantages over the PC had diminished by the time AGA came around.
i486 based PC should have come with VLB (VESA Local Bus)....
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Ofcourse the PC did. But answer this: what hardware development occurred, other than a CD ROM from the owners of Amiga after Commodore's demise? Before Commodore died, PPC was where they were headed, new busses and new chipsets were planned and none of it ofcourse materialised.. What do you expect when all we got was bolt-ons to 7-10 year old architectures from third-parties. A 7-year old planar chipset wasn't as fast as a new PCI/AGP card with built-in 3D functions and chunky screen-modes. Amiga had nothing as good as Direct 3D? What do you expect when the parent company has no in-house hardware and software developers, and it even takes several years for a relatively minor OS update to be written.
Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030. And we knew what was better and why. Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't. Apple was shit-scared of Amiga, MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform. They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side. Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.
I think it was PA-RISC not PPC.
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Commodore's marketing was simple:
1. A500, A600, A1200 cheapish games machine to play the 2D games that the were in vogue.
2. Anything with Zorro Slots: professional use, and 4 times the price for the privelage.
Not far off the Apple all-in-one Imac's Vs the expandable PPC towers that jobs introduced. If only Apple had a multi-tasking OS to go with their PPC technology in the days of Win 95.
Apple would be in the same position i.e. it will lose against the cloned PC platform.
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I agree, though a straight quote from Darwin fits even better in my opinion. -"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
In other words the future looks bright for Linux... ;)
Windows platform has ReactOS.
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So did it work better on a CD32 than an A1200?
Did Akiko work faster if you had an accelerator in the CD32? (ie would Breathless work better on a CD32/040 than an A1200/040?)
No it wouldn't - for one reason only: The CD32 only ever got an 030-50 accelerator, and they were as rare as hens teeth. ;)
One game it did make a difference on however was an Amiga only Bomberman clone that used c2p. I had an A1200 with an 040, and without using software c2p the game was unplayable, but the cd32, with its stock 020 (and an extra 8Mb ram) was able to play it without any such hacks.
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Akiko was a poor solution... Well, it was cheap anyway... A better solution would have be a nice chunky pixel mode added to Lisa... Perhaps only a single 800x600x8 mode but that would have kept the wolf from the door!
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Akiko's C2P converter just used some spare die area on a chip they needed anyway, probably it won the 'hey, what else could we do with xx spare transistors?' contest.
A somewhat decent solution would've been a converter sitting in Lisa's data path, converting the pixels on the fly. Next gen Lisa could have included those functions. As mentioned above, it wouldn't have been too big a pain to have included chunky modes at least for AGA.
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Akiko's C2P converter just used some spare die area on a chip they needed anyway, probably it won the 'hey, what else could we do with xx spare transistors?' contest.
A somewhat decent solution would've been a converter sitting in Lisa's data path, converting the pixels on the fly. Next gen Lisa could have included those functions. As mentioned above, it wouldn't have been too big a pain to have included chunky modes at least for AGA.
Thinking about it, a faster blitter and a separate framebuffer (physically separate from the chip ram) would also have been a good idea...