PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Trev]

You're right. Joystick polling is a much better test of computational power than a particle physics simulation.

[Trev]

i can assure you its not 20 seconds, its no less than 2 minutes, often 2 and half.

That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...

... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.

Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.

Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.

[Trev]

No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.

No, tasks and interrupts can be preempted in unpredictable ways.

[Trev]

In a similar vein, let me say that it may be good to ponder the thought that many of the greatest creative works of the past were produced with technology that is today considered "obsolete."

I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius.

I'm not an advocate of upgrading for upgrading's sake, so if a process designed for the Amiga still does the job it was meant to do, good for the process and the Amiga. There comes a time, however, when that system's total cost of ownership (or the risks associated with a possible failure of that system) will outweigh its return. Anyone that doesn't upgrade at that point in time (or really, slightly before) is putting their livelihood at risk.

EDIT: Let's also not forget Amiga.org's own recent history re: PHP obsolescence.

[Trev]

@Daedalus

You know most of the "delays" in Windows, e.g. Start Menu pop-ups, are artificial, right?  They're based on user interface studies, psychological studies, etc. Some things, though, like waiting for a window to minimize, have more to do with the application itself than Windows, i.e. the application has to respond to your minimize request and maybe it's still busy doing something else, like waiting on a synchronization object that's invisible to the user. The real problem with Windows is the differentiation among applications. Every developer thinks they know better than Microsoft (some actually do, and they're probably not running Windows) and instead of doing something the standard way, they do it their own way. The same problem happens on the Amiga when developers ignore the RKMs.

@Karlos

http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html

[Trev]

Four of those CPU processes are capable of being in the run state concurrently provided they aren't making atomic operations on the same area of memory. Which is highly unlikely because this is a virtual memory system. Most of the processes have no idea the others exist, let alone have the opportunity to lock something they own.

Let's not forget two threads in the same process attempting to access data in the same cache line, which one core will implicitly lock. Pad those data structures. NUMA systems, e.g. multi-socket AMD hosts, could see implicit locks on the memory bus as well.

[Trev]

True. But you can greatly minimize contention with creative use of pointers and padding. EDIT: (Unless you're using Java, in which case you're at the mercy of the VM's garbage collector to keep your data in order.)

[Trev]

Joystick gameports are in millions of existing PCs and they suck; they are inferior to Amiga's joystick ports. If you can't live with this fact of REALITY, that's not my problem.

You're right about game ports in general. As with most PC-compatible products, every vendor interpreted the specification differently, game port products from one manufacturer were often incompatible with products from another, and the game port itself performed rather poorly--hence USB.

The reality, though, is that game ports *were* in millions of existing PCs. They haven't been added to new PCs for years now, and mainstream electronics stores, e.g. Best Buy and Fry's Electronics in the Western United States, no longer carry game port-compatible products. This, among other things, is why operating systems provide hardware abstraction layers. (I know, it's obvious.) Performance is a trade-off, of course, but an input routine A will run on a system with API X, regardless of the underlying hardware. Smart programmers scale the features of their software to match the features reported by the API. That's the reality of today's consumer PC market.

[Trev]

Just off the top of my head...

I think film based movies were 24FPS, NTSC is around 30FPS and PAL is like 29FPS.

If you don't believe your EYES can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS, just try and use 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with a 60hz refresh rate. Painful…

Are we or are we not Amiga users? Broadcast video standards are the one thing we should all know, yeah? Film can be shot and projected at whatever mechanical rate the camera and projector are capable of using. 24 FPS is the de facto standard. NTSC is ~29.97 FPS and PAL is 25 FPS. (NTSC and PAL technically use fields and not frames, but we know that, too, right?)

Regarding what you can and can't see, it's subjective, just like the Amiga v. PC debate. ;-)

[Trev]

BUT starting your PC, issuing commands and general responsiveness via the GUI is still slower on the PC than the Amiga.

I haven't been using computers as long as some on this forum (I started in the early 80's), but I know this: I have never used a computer more responsive, subjectively speaking, than my current Windows system.

[Trev]

If only flames did as much damage to forum trolls as they did to "real" ones.

[Trev]

Wrong.  If I put my OS and application in ROM, then that would be the fastest boot up time.

Doesn't that depend on the bus connected to the ROM and the ROM package itself? You've just made a very general statement regarding ROM-based boot times. ;-)

[Trev]

I saw one person whose XP took 20 minutes to boot up before he could log in to the internet.  I think all the antivirus software, internet drivers, etc. took longer to initialize than the rest of the system.  So what he did was, he put Solitaire into the startup as the first task that started up.  So he played solitaire as the system booted and he told me he can finish one game by the time he was able to log into the internet.

That's not uncommon, unfortunately, and it's a product of many poorly written programs stepping all over each other. Vendors like HP and Dell sell services, so of course, they pre-install software-based advertisements geared at separating consumers from their money.

One very common slowdown is a product of I/O latency introduced by antivirus software during updates, at which time access to files is blocked or significantly delayed. I wish we lived in world where antivirus products were unnecessary, but unfortunately, the world is peopled with a**holes intent on making everyone else's life miserable. Like hardware vendors, antivirus vendors also sell services, so their consumer products are laden with yet more software-based advertisements.

[Trev]

Someone mentioned the security problems with Win PC's.  i would go so far as to say that PC security software ought to be cosdiered as part of the PC operating environment, without security software installed all the arguments about up-time, data reliabilty etc go out the window ( no pun) in the REAL world.  Then consider the responsiveness and boot time and the user experience..

In the business world, where we care about thinhs like I/Os per second, antivirus, open file managers, and other file system related tools are always part of the equation. The Windows kernel does start *very* quickly, but like Kickstart, it's not of much use without an operating environment.

[Trev]

Out of curiosity, does anybody know enough about hid game controllers to comment on if it's possible to get events from it with less than 1 ms between events? I know USB latency *round* trip is like 5 ms.

You could create a device that samples at an arbitrary frequency and buffers the data to the host system. You wouldn't get the data in "real-time," but it wouldn't matter. As long you process the data appropriately prior to the next screen update, you have the appearance of submillisecond sampling. This is where the psychology of user interaction and a cost-benefit analysis of your input scheme comes into play.