PC still playing Amiga catchup

[the_leander]

>You've said this time and time again. Prove it.

I prove it for myself.  You have to go repeat the experiment and prove it for yourself.  Why haven't you replied to my posts where you were refuted rather than wait a while and restate the same argument again.

The data was torn to shreds, all you've recorded is signal noise. You have yet to show that the computer can actually react to anything like the numbers you suggest.

>Excuse me? I've said from the beginning that banging the hardware on the modern desktop PC is an exersise in stupidity for many of the reasons given here already.

Because the point is not banging the hardware on modern existing systems where one system's hardware differs from another.  Point is, IF HARDWARE WAS BACKWARD COMPATIBLE, it's better to allow for API access as well as going direct to hardware.  

Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.

>...hardware legacy compatability. Do not try to turn this around because you've been called on your BS.

Your misunderstanding is NOT my problem.  The only part of modern hardware that you can do direct access via hardware is the legacy compatible ports and memory map areas.  That's a good thing.  Your the one who is trying to cheat by trying to misconstrue clear cut things.

Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.

>No it isn't. Unless you're trying to play some kind of pathetic game of semantics. "Commonly used desktop programs" is quite clear in of itself. But if you want to be a pedant, fine.

I don't care if you call them "common" or not.  They are USEFUL programs that require going directly to the hardware.

I C WUT U DID THAR!

Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.

 And there are thousands of such programs out there that require precise control of hardware and can't rely on vague, inexact API calls.

Yup, and the vast, vast majority of them are found in embedded situations where the hardware would be considered limited even by Spectrum users of the 1980's. You have yet to show (outside of your fairy land) how this would be in any way beneficial to the common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.

>That is a given. I note that you still managed to dodge the point again however.

You keep missing the simplest of points-- the joystick is faster to read on Amiga.  How can you possible understand something like real-time events.

You have not proved that the amiga will actually respond at anything like that sort of speed yet.

>Yes, and how many of those ways can be done without it having a detrimental effect on other processes. Further how can you maintain compatability across the huge differences between computers?

That's not the point.

That is precisely the point, it's the point that every other person on this board has been trying (and failing) to get through to you! Your response to the explanation of why your demands for full and complete hardware access has been to create a wonderful makebelief fairy land where hardware doesn't change even a fraction as radically as it has over the past 20 years!

You only go directly to hardware if it's backward compatible and you know it will work the same on other systems.

And since you can't do that, even between different models of the Amiga (which is again why C= stopped providing hardware diagrams of the chips in question and encouraged developers to use API's instead) the supposed performance increase in immediately offset by the fact that your code will have to be modified or at least take into account a great many variables in order to actually be useful to the rest of the world. The time it takes to do that as well as take advantage of the hardwares "full" capability is so great that in the mean time the hardware has moved on and you can do all that and more via an API in the same timeframe.

[the_leander]

Your getting too emotionally and can't think straight anymore.  Concede to a point that's irrelevant to my point is retarded for you to come up with.

On the contrary, when you say something as retarded as you did I will respond in kind. You brought it up, you were shot down and tried to squirm out of it any way you could.

And now this... :laughing:

[the_leander]

Hi,

@amigaski,

Do you ever have any idea what you are talking about, well lets explain it to you in very easy terms

Once upon a time a great computer was developed, it was called an Amiga, it had great features like stereo sound, great graphics, and a new feature called muti tasking meaning that it could run several programs at once due to pre-emptive tasking. This great computer held this domain for about 10 years until the big bad microsoft company developed windows with much support from hardware developers to take over the Amiga kingdom. Now Amiga owned by Commodore didn't have this support because they squandered all the money on such things as the PC-10 and PC-20 instead of improving the King Amiga, when the coffers went dry due to overspending in other areas the Amiga finally succumbed to being bankrupt, a great savior called Gateway said they would help poor king Amiga, but they to gave up because it seemed that microsoft had their hands into everything, it was rumored that microsoft paid Gateway a huge sum to drop development of the new Amiga. Now no one really has proof of this and it is just rumor. Then a new savior emerged, another Mister Bill, but alas all he could do was rewrite games for iphones (not very good ones either). Now during this time the hardware was advancing and the speed of the hardware increased, the graphics cards displayed more colors, and then came up with such things as shaders and math calculations to do such things as display vapors, fogs and dust on the new graphics hardware, poor Amiga was still bragging about faster boot times, and joystick speed ( I threw joystick time in because I know how hard you fought for this Amigaski) so as you can see children the versions of DX weren't really flawed they just imporoved with time, and if the evil microsoft would of told about their improvement in the shaders from version 10.0 to 10.1 then the hardware developers would have used it to improve their hardware.

have a nice day Amigaski, as much as I hate to say this, the old saying that the Amiga can emulate a PC, but can the PC emulate the Amiga is over, done with and no longer valid. The PC can not only emulate a PC, but has actually improved the Amiga through emulation, for now today the Amiga emulator program can use USB, DVD's, and even usb digital camera's, sata drives and most modern day hardware.

Amiga wins by default, because I still like it.
and thats all that counts

smerf

Smerf, I don't often agree with what you write, but every once in a while you'll produce a gem like this and I'm left with my jaw on the floor.

Bravo sir, and may your miggies continue to trundle on far into the future!

Thats actually brightened my day :afro:

[the_leander]

PROVE IT.  I torn to shreds someone's speculation that it's noise.  And NOISE is ALSO REQUIRED to be recorded for a joystick recorded in order to repeat the performance EXACTLY.  Get a brain before you reply.  And you have yet to reply to the LOGICAL facts already posted of why it's NOT noise.

NO U.

I don't do fundie logic. You claim it is superior, it is your task to show evidence to back up your point.

You're right, I've not replied, because others, with greater skill and knowledge than myself have already explained it to you earlier in this thread.

You chose to ignore it and or fallback to fairyland.

>Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.

It's not make believe.  Amiga has both hardware compatibility and API.  VGA is also.

No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability. And to get even that level of compatability required the inclusion of some hidious kludges in AGA. VGA is a nice touch for the most primative things within PC's, but even it has been superceeded by XGA now.

>Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.

That's you blurting out blindly whatever comes on the top of your head.  Go prove it for yourself.

It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.

All you have is your BLIND belief.  

No see, only one of us is having to resort to going into a magical fairyland to gain even the slightest amount of traction in this discussion.

You look like your too emotional biased to look at it rationally-- it shows when you start taking people's quotes and modifying them so you don't have to address the points.

No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.

>Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.

No, I only use PCs for internet and floppy simulations so that's COMMON application for me.  You dodged the question-- WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE COMMON to be useful?

Since the original point was made with respect to desktop computers (you later went so far as to include windows 98 as an example) I asked the question in the same context. I am not disputing your hard coded programs aren't useful to you, but one would think that you would even by your own admission concede you are not like >90% of computer users out there.

>...common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.

I am a common desktop user.

No, you're really not.

[the_leander]

Hi,

@the leander,

I am glad I brought some joy into your day, a lot of times I just like to troll, and stir up the pot.

Yes I still like the Amiga and still use it daily. but it is very limited in its features today and even though I hate to say this my Amiga is like an old Model T roadster, fun to play with. fun to soup it up and hot rod and fun to see how far I can take it to compete with modern day computers.

Now that I can fully understand, tweeking and tuning an amiga to do the more then it should on paper be able to do was a source of a stupendous amounts of hours of fun for me. I think in a way my EeePC does the same (for me) in that regard - it's limited hardware but you can really do so much with it.

Lately I have been gathering all my Amiga schematics to see what I can do to bring it up to modern day values, after a year of examining and looking at it, I have decided to take the original block diagram as developed by Mr. Jay Miner and build from there. I have decided to go with an Intel Q6600 processor, and try to develope from there, looks like a lot of work but it might be a challenge. I now have the original block diagram, Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and CD32 schematics. Now I am trying to match modern day tech to the block diagram and make decisions on the type of hardware and coding that I will have to use,

Hey best of luck! Sounds like a cool project.

my main problem is this house, every time I get started something breaks in the house that I have to fix (usuall a 6 month to a year project) and by the time I get back to the Amiga I forgot where I was at and have to spend another month calculating, and planning which way to go, by this time the technology has advanced and I try to start there. (never ending story)

LOL ain't that the truth!

Glad to see I brought you some joy, but I was getting tired of someone comparing old tech with new tech, sort of like saying a P51 could take on a F18 hornet because it can make the turns tighter.

smerf

Hmm, with a bit of cleaning the above would make excellent sig fodder, would you mind? (attribution would be there, obviously)

[the_leander]

They haven't either.

>No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability.

Wrong.  AGA is compatible with OCS.

No, it isn't. If it were, a sizeable chunk of OCS games would still work on AGA systems without the need for hacks and patches. Again, this is well documented.

But again you miss the point that hardware compatibility is better than being forced to go through APIs.  I wasn't talking about what it is now.  Just another case of you twisting things around in an attempt to miss the main point of discussion.

The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland. When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now. Of PC's of that Vintage, maybe, but in all honesty in terms of capability even by the time the A1200 came out there were better options available, even to Amiga users (third party graphics cards, DSP based soundcards etc).

>It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.

I already did.

No, you supplied data that showed nothing. You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.

>No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.

You can't understand is the problem.  

I think I understand the problem better then you do.

Where's the lies?  Go time the joysticks yourself and go see the timing for yourself.  It's not that hard to do.

You've been given a way of testing this one way or the other to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Now, if you do that and come back with the results, hell I'll be the first one to say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.

The lies come in when you've had it explained to you where you're going wrong, ignore that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.

[the_leander]

I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs.  See post #570.  My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly.

On a fixed platform be it one that's discontinued (Amiga) or an embedded or industrial controller, having those sorts of options is great and depending on the hardware again, hitting the hardware might be your only way of acomplishing something.

Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."

It's not circular reasoning. With a landscape as diverse as the modern PC desktop market it is the only way to be able to produce applications in a reasonable timeframe to reach a broad audience. Take a look at any medium to large PC venders and, just as a for instance here lets look at Scan.

There are, just for (m)ATX boards 23 different variations. That's even before we look at the offerings from AMD. 23. And it gets worse when you consider that within a year most of those models will be discontinued and replaced with something else. Now with an API, barring serious driver issues, if I write a program for windows/linux/whatever it'll run on all 23 of those motherboards. If I hit the hardware yes, I could potentially get it to run on those 23 motherboards, but by the time I'd worked out each motherboards kinks (actually, probably long before then) and gotten the full performance possible, you would no longer be able to get those motherboards and regardless it would still only constitute a drop in the ocean within the marketplace, probably less then 5% of all PC's currently in operation around the globe.

That is why it is considered that nobody in their right mind would do so.

[the_leander]

As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines.  Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.

I believe this was already responded to as to why you were wrong then too.

>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.

No, it works right now.  If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program.  You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.

Of course dear.

>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.

Straw-man argument.

Not so. A valid statement of fact.

I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.

In a tiny, nay, infinatesimal really seriously convoluted tasks, maybe.

>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.

Bullcrap.  Go re-read the data.

Without being able to show that the Amiga can distinguish and react to your output, your data is meaningless.

>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.

The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer.  Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data.  Your thinking is flawed.  I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).

Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.

>I think I understand the problem better then you do.

You think you do.

Yup.

You're in ignorance.

That is not a sentence.

[the_leander]

Even on desktops you'd be hard pressed to find a gameport, most PCs sold within the last 3 or 4 years have simply had a bank of USB ports, with only a select few retaining the odd legacy port.

[the_leander]

Some cases hardware access is the only way, but in some cases you have both options (API or hardware access) and hardware access is superior method.

For the love of... And by the time you have full support for all of those motherboards in the example given, even with the specs, you're three or more years down the line and not even one line of code toward building a game or application that takes advantage of that "superior" speed. And after that you still have the minefield that is graphics and soundcards ahead of you... In the mean time, your competators, using API's are rolling in the cash made from their hardwork, you know, actually having produced and sold their applications, using todays hardware, not having had to worry about such things.

Things move too fast in the PC landscape for anything other then programs such as demos to be considered as viable candidates.

Even when vendors make VGA cards using VGA standard (which required hardware level compatibility), you had several ATI card variations-- some faster than others but they maintained hardware compatibility not API level compatibility.

LOL WUT? If you code for DirectX6, you can be pretty damn sure that that code will still run on DirectX10. Same for OpenGL. VGA support is fine if you only want the bare basics, the moment you make one step beyond those basics your workload increases exponentially.

I remember when I was heavily into BeOS and was talking to the Nvidia driver developer, to access things we take for granted, such as hardware acceleration, required huge amounts of code even for the small selection of cards that BeOS supported, and thats without any 3D effects being thrown into the mix. Simply getting the card to initialise changed from card to card, with some venders adding extra supprises on top of that. Just to get to the stage where the Geforce2MX through to the 6600 took around 5 years. And by that time the 6600 had been out for 2. Even then, after all that, some card models lacked things like overlay support.

[the_leander]

>Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.

It's as simple as writing an application to read joystick and move a sprite around and this sort of loop is present in many programs.  The loop runs as fast as machine allows it.

I'm fairly certain that was more or less along the lines of what Karlos suggested... How many pages ago?

>That is not a sentence.

It has a subject and predicate; therefore, it's a sentence.

You cannot use the word ignorance as you did. It is gramatically incorrect and as such is invalid. It is not a sentence.

[the_leander]

(2) Regarding going directly to hardware on PCs-- that's still a fantasy since modern PC hardware is NOT compatible on the hardware level.

Correct, and that is all to the good.

It's only compatible on API level.  And that's the guts of my current argument-- if PC had hardware compatibility instead of API compatibility, it would allow for better more efficient software.  Only legacy ports are giving you that option currently.

No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.

[the_leander]

That's bad that modern PCs aren't hardware compatible with each other.  

Again, I have to disagree with you. More on this in a sec.

>No, what it would usher in would be a whole new round of I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts as different programs fought for control of hardware, oblivious to one another. As well as very painfully kludged hardware.

No, if hardware was compatible like earlier VGA cards, they would use SAME I/O ports, same IRQs, same MEMORY MAP areas, etc.  And even if you had multiple boards in the same system (in rare cases), there's the plug-n-play hardware that allows you to remap the I/O ports.  Take another good example-- parallel ports are always mapped to 378h, 278h, 3BCh and using plug-n-play you can have 3 parallel ports and each one can be mapped to any of the standard I/O port locations.

As I said in a previous post, that's all great for the very basics, but once you get into multiple layers of this and things become more complex, the hassle of maintaining this hardware compatability becomes emense, not to mention pointless - no desktop built in the last few years has a serial or parallel port, ISA hasn't been seen for over a decade and PCI has (largely) been discontinued, this is true especially of fast evolving things like graphics.

The modern x86_64 is perhaps one of the most kludgey processors ever created, it is essentially a highly advanced risc core that has to have a pile of extra logic to convert between what we know as x86 and what it uses internally. I read somewhere (ok, I could be wrong and I would appreciate being corrected on this) that nearly a third of all the logic built into an x86 core is there purely to translate between x86 and the risc part. A third!

x86 is considered by most to be a massive and hugely inefficient hack. It should have died with the P4 and moved over to the Itainium tbh, but no, AMD bolted on another hack and here we are, nearly a decade later with it limping on still.

Now consider how much extra logic would have to be built into a modern gpu so as to include hardware compatability with just the major jumps in gpu design over the years...

Can you even begin to imagine the horror such a chip would be? I don't even want to think about the thermal and power implications.

[the_leander]

I know anyone can build hardware for any computer to do anything computer is able to do.  But we are looking at standards.  If all I did was talk about Video Toaster features on Amiga 4000, it wouldn't be talking about the general Amiga audience.

So you want it to be mainstream eh? I can do that...

USB2 Soundblaster Audigy2.

Ok perhaps that one too is a little OTT, but there are a great many other USB cards at much lower prices, and I'd bet good money that they too can sample at far, far higher rates then 1khz. I pointed to this one simply because it was the first one I found that had the sampling rate capabilities printed out up front. The other cards I looked at briefly are available to view here. Note that as laptops are becoming more and more popular, these sorts of external usb based expansions are becoming ever more mainstream.

In a way the above box is almost as though the hardware has gone full circle - many old soundcards included a gameport, now they're including usb ports...

[the_leander]

"You're in ignorance" is a perfectly valid sentence

fix'd.

and also reflects reality.

Pithy. Amusing given that you're the one whose backside has been handed back to them on a plate on pretty much every single point you've made thus far too.

[the_leander]

Refer to http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architecture_of_AMDs_64bit_Core.html

It's about 10 percent for K8 Sledgehammer. The legacy tax is more apparent when you implement this as a GPU i.e. maximising math unit counts.

Ahh, cheers for that! I am curious though how it compares to other processors in the x86 family now though.

But again, thanks for pointing me to that.