PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Linde]

Hi,

WOW!!!

What a discussion on which computer is better, this is an Amiga site of course and so by that I declare the Amiga the winner, all you Linux and Windose users are LOSERS just by the fact that you are on an Amiga site.

Greetings to you too! You have to explain your argument a bit closer, because maybe I'm too much of a loser to see how it makes sense logically. I'm not here because I think Amiga is the superior platform, but because I like old computer systems and think the Amiga is particularly interesting. The Amiga sure is an impressive innovation but in a typical home/work environment today it just doesn't cut it for the tasks a user would normally expect a computer to perform.

Lets face it a computer is only as fast as a user can use it. There is no way any of you can type faster than your machine, therefore almost 100% of you are using too much horse power for what you are using it for.

Are you serious?  Then why don't you sit down and decode real time video on paper and just draw it yourself on the screen? Do you decompress zip files by reading the compressed data yourself? Do your drivers print you a message that you have to type in again to pass it to the system? Hell, why not move the laser around over a CD manually if you can do it just as responsively?

A computer is faster at what it does than every potential user, but it doesn't matter because most tasks it performs are tedious and complicated enough for it to be perceived as slow anyway.

Even when you play the most awesome games like fallout 3, crysis, far cry, doom 3, the computers today move much faster than what your senses can see. The only thing you are trying to do is get faster frame rates even though your eyes cannot see them, that is why most TV sets use the 22 fps rate anything above that is quite useless as far as the eye can see.

Judging from your totally misinformed point I take it that you have no knowledge at all about real-time graphics, and if you don't notice the difference between running a game at 60 fps and 22 fps you should probably see a doctor too, because it should be clear to anyone under 80. The reason 22 fps works for movies is because cameras don't really capture discrete moments of time on each frame, but rather pretty much everything between the frame before and the frame after, which introduces a lot of motion blur that conceals the slow frame rate.

Now, doing a similar effect on a computer costs a lot of time, because in the end it means rendering or extrapolating all the significant frames "in-between" too. I guess you could do it by hand pretty fast, though.

And no, TV sets aren't usually locked to 22 fps.

So please tone down the arrogance until you actually know what you're ranting about.

[Linde]

@Linde

I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help

I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism

[Linde]

Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.

Of course! I'm not saying anything about the user base overall (which I think is very nice and unpretentious), but my experience tells me that the occasional nutter who still argues that the amiga is a more capable system than PC:s honestly holds that misinformed opinion in most cases.

Though, I must say, my experience should also tell me that reasoning rarely changes their mind, hehe.

[Linde]

One thing interesting to note is that Amiga did do 30fps/60fps full screen (overscanned) and ran animations loaded from a floppy disk (880K). Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).

Sorry, but what does size optimization have to do with speed? That misconception takes away any relevance your argument might have had. Mind you, though, most of the games I play update the screen well faster than the monitor is able to. The reason that there might be some slowdown is that there is generally a lot more going on behind Far Cry 2 than Lotus III. And why would anyone link MFC to a "simple" Hello World?

Regarding "running animations from a floppy disk"... The PC too has a demo scene, and some of the best programmers cram down pretty damn impressive (real-time) animations with sound and music in less than 1k. Pretty hard to imagine happening on the Amiga, no?

Amiga didn't become obsolete-- it's just the company went bankrupt so further development/research stopped.

The A1200 was pretty weak compared to contemporary PC's which had already done fluid 256 color graphics and 16 bit multi-channel sound for some time (even an 8 channel 16-bit stereo consumer sound card had popped up a few months before).

Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion.

Really? And no, doing it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance on a multi GHz multi-core processor either way, but it would certainly be a waste of cycles to sample it that often.

Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.

If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port (and yes, I've done that too.) why not compare it to USB 3.0? Let's just say that it's in a different league when it comes to high precision timing.

[Linde]

Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS. That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC". No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).

Not where I come from, no. A PC running Linux is a PC running Linux ("PC running Linux" and "Linux box" aren't mutually exclusive, you see). As I know it, PC usually refers to the IBM PC compatibles and their current "descendants".

So the whole thing boils down to you grasping for some flawed definition to back your point up. And no, I don't think that Wintel PCs are playing catchup either.

Amiga was never just about the hardware, and never just about the OS, but rather it was about the sum of these: thats what determines the user experience. Microsoft and Apple(less so) are still yet to learn this.

Yes, monolithic system design is the way of the future. Sigh.

[Linde]

Do you bother to read the posts that you reply to?  Looks like not in this case.  I stated not many people optimize programs (which is a fact): "Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC)."

So how are these people who don't optimize their code a fault of the system design?

I just compiled a hello world program and it was 1 MB; doesn't mean all compilers do that or you can't change the settings and eliminate the MFC.

Congratulations. How did this ever pass off as a valid argument when you wrote it down? I can make you a 1 GB hello world example to compile, that's how much PC:s suck!

As far as your blunder that size has no relation to speed, ever check MPEG videos.  If they were uncompressed, it would affect the speed.

That's totally besides the point. Weren't we discussing program size in relation to speed? Because MPEG files are not programs, and a smaller program doesn't mean a faster program.

I'll guarantee that it won't work with nonstandard hardware on everyone's PCs.

That's true for most 1k intros (which are often tightly tied to the features of a specific GPU), but I have some great looking 256 byte intros (that often use standard VGA software rendering) and 64k (which work on most graphics cards) that run on anything I throw them at. Now show me a demo that runs on any "standard" amiga without modification i e WHDLoad.

By the way, do you know there is no extreme "small coding" (i e < 256 bytes) scene for the Amiga? There is too much overhead to set the chip set up to do something interesting without using non-standard APIs.

You seemed to missed some posts in this thread (or ignored them).  Just because some 8-channel 16-bit card is available does NOT mean that everyone has it or that you can utilize it in comparing Amiga with PC.  With new hardware add-ons, any computer can do anything.  Talk about hardware that's available to most homes and compare with that-- then you can write some application and know that it will work on 99% of PCs out there.

If you want to look at it that way, you can't even compare the two different systems. I would argue that this design difference (monolithic vs. modular) is one of the factors of the death of the Amiga. But I can tell you that pretty much every multimedia home PC had a SB16 compatible sound card for pretty much a decade after it was released.

Bullcrap.  You have NO understanding of the gameport nor I/O timing on PCs.  I/O is much much slower than even memory.  I suggest you try to time the gameport yourself.  And no, gameport is NOT obsolete because Vista doesn't have a driver for it.  It exists out there in millions of homes.

Oh, the game port. I can't try it because I don't know anyone with a gameport joy-pad. I have a gameport on some of my sound cards though, which I sometimes use for MIDI which works fine and dandy with no noticable jitter or delay at 31.25 kbits/second (although I understand that these are two separate interfaces).

It was on the PCI surround sound Mag Dog Audio board I purchased a couple of years ago.  It's NOT a waste of cycles to sample at 1Khz or above.  I wrote a joystick recorder program and the time between changes of direction/firing goes to less than 1 ms in some cases for games like River-raid and others.  I can say sampling audio at 44Khz is a WASTE of space, but it's required to capture all possible audible frequencies.  Similarly, sampling joystick at 60Hz is NOT good enough.

Show me a game that samples the joystick at 1000Hz. I can imagine some bullet hell shoot'em'up would need pretty high sample rates, but I don't think you'll ever see anything going up that high. It is DEFINITELY not common to sample at more than 300Hz, so the test case is hardly a practical one. Your fingers and eyes are not as sensitive to high frequency information as your ears.

But yeah, go ahead, show me a game that uses and benefits from that high joystick sampling. Most Amiga games, I'm sure, don't sample more than a couple of times per redraw.

Are you like confused?  USB 3.0 has NOTHING to do with high precision timing.

Confused? That makes two of us, then. Yes, you do need pretty tight timing to transfer data at 5 GB/s, and the latency is lower than ever with USB (not that latency was ever an inherent problem with USB pads and sticks).

USB 3.0 is a specification; it's not out there in any joysticks. Show me a joystick that uses USB 2.0!

Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O

If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port

general purpose I/O port

I/O port

...

Once again comparing Amiga with nonexistent products or products that hardly anyone has.

Say what you want (or you could compare to USB 2 instead), but I'll bet that in a couple of years there will be more users of USB 3.0 enabled PC:s than there were ever Amiga users.

Get real.

Haha.

[Linde]

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..

Oh yeah, Windows XP is insecure.

1. It's besides the point. We're still discussing PC:s here. Stop making invalid arguments based on the assumption that PC:s = Windows.

2. If we compare to Amiga OS, Windows XP actually is pretty damn secure.

[Linde]

Guys, you need to stop perpetuating the "amiga boots faster" argument until you have any idea of what tasks the machines are performing while they're booting.

Again, just going by default compiler settings.  Not purposely done.  Many people don't bother figuring out what is dead code and how to eliminate it so you end up with EXEs that take up megabytes of memory.  Never said PC sucks because it's full of applications that have tons of dead code or redundant code.

... which is why the argument was totally redundant and irrelevant to this discussion. I can make a bloated "Hello world" for Amiga, too, but I wouldn't hold it against the Amiga system.

The example I gave of animations running from floppy, the size of the data files and exes combined mattered.  If they weren't compressed and code highly optimized, the frame rate speed would suffer.

Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available.

Where exactly is the "hard drive storage" on a floppy? This is exactly what you were saying, seemingly unrelated to the floppy example. Concerning the example you gave with the Amiga (play an animation LOADED from floppy), uncompressed images would be faster anyway.

All in all it's a pretty whimsical argument anyhow to say that PC code is usually too "unoptimized" to play full frame rate animation, since pretty much all common media formats used on the PC are compressed and optimized enough to be streamed with low band-width.

Many boot block intros I have seen don't rely on any WHDLoad.

Seeing them run perfectly on any "standard" Amiga is not common, though.

If you write OCS software, it works on all Amigas.

Hahaha, yeah, well in reality most OCS demos are pretty incompatible with anything other than the machine they were coded for (remember, we have to GET REAL). "Optimizing" in the early Amiga days usually meant bypassing standard system functions, controlling the hardware directly and taking full advantage of the exact specifications of the machine. Change the hardware? Stops working. That's how it was for all Amiga models, as is it for all PC models. Even if you used the proper kernel functions on the Amiga old software titles would stop working properly with new ROM revisions and clock speeds.

You show me a demo that uses the audio card; they are all nonstandard.

Since audio cards are all "non-standard" there is a standard API present in any modern PC OS to provide transparent access to the functionality (like AHI on the Amiga), so yes, most PC demos and small intros (both in Linux and Windows) use the sound card. Can't you bother to look that up yourself? And even in the DOS days before there were standard APIs some demos (and most serious software and games) supported multiple soundcards perfectly anyway.

Here's I wrote my own boot block control code that allows me to control the Amiga from a PC:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320379502506

Pretty damn cool, but hardly relevant to your argument.

I wasn't going by "most".  Just like the audio example I gave.  One Khz is based on actual recorded joystick data from River-raid as I already mentioned.

Oh, you could probably record ultrasound in the MHz range but that still doesn't mean that it's relevant information to our hearing, much like kHz recording of hand movement isn't relevant to joystick handling (and if this isn't getting obvious to you by now, I don't really know what to tell you).

How exactly were you recording anyhow? Were you just recording the joystick directly, or were you counting how often the game polls for the joystick? In the latter case I would be pretty surprised since River Raid is one of those games where once-per-frame sampling would probably be sufficient.

You can't time a bit to appear to a device at an exact point in time unless you take over the hardware and have the exact spec of the controller.

But you can still have them predictable enough, apparently. My PS2 to USB interface performs great in all games I've tried it with.

But then you mine as well plug the usb card into an Amiga and do the same.

Who's playing catchup again? I'm not saying that the Amiga can't do stuff, my point is that PC:s don't really have anything to catch up to.

And this has nothing to do with joystick I/O.

If USB is the primary interface of your joystick (which probably is the common case), it must have!

Sorry, I don't argue about nonexistent products.  If you don't have a joystick port, it's not my problem.  Maybe the spec will get dropped and replaced with a different one.

Modern PC:s playing catchup with the Amiga are also non-existent, but we've been arguing religiously about those for the last few pages.

Joystick I/O was a bonus to the joystick interface; first you need to pick the joystick port before talking about I/O.  If you switch ports, I'll start talking about the expansion connector.

USB is not analogous to the expansion connector. USB is exactly what it is called - a universal serial bus. The closest thing you'l find in the "standard" Amiga hardware design? Don't know, maybe the clock port?

[Linde]

OK I'll say it again: more than 90% of PC's use Windows.  Some figures say 95%.  An assumption that is correct 95% of the time would be an acceptable one everywhere else except a few anal people on Amiga.org.  Linux has its own special shortcomings from a user perspective which i'll get to in a later post, and Macs are NOT PC's in the context of the original post.

If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").

2.  You miss the point:  if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly.  This might result in your losing your life savings.  Its a pretty big risk.  So you HAVE to use your XP PC with your security software..your PC takes a huge performance hit and what does that do to the responsiveness of your PC and the quality of user experience?  I actually have no qualms using my Amiga on the net without any security software.  Could someone hack into it and install malware?  Yep. Will it happen?  Nope.

Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.

Windows XP IS more secure, no matter how much more likely it is some external force will try to attack it. Amiga OS doesn't even have any basic protection from the programs it is running itself.

But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!

And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.

[Linde]

You missed the point again.  The default compiler settings produced it; it's not on purpose.  It's an observation-- not meant to say that PCs cannot produce optimized code.

So what IS the point? If you can't code or if you can't use a compiler you might make bloated programs? Surprise, surprise.

You missed the point again.  There's no hard drive involved.  The animation boots from floppy and runs.

"Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available."

NEVER said that.  PCs have enough horsepower to run the animation even with the bloat.  Chewbacca defense.

Oh, I'm sorry then. I misread your message.

That's what I stated-- that size matters to affect the speed ON THE AMIGA.  Your blunder that size has no bearing on speed is your problem in understanding.

No, size doesn't necessarily have direct correlation with speed unless you count the loading time from the disk or stream the content.

Complete rubbish.  My boot block stuff runs on all Amigas across the board.  Don't argue against things you don't understand.

I never said your bootblock stuff doesn't, but you'll have a pretty frustrating experience watching OCS and ECS demos or games without soft kicking or using WHDLoad.

Now is that after the OS loads or before.  If  your demo is 1K (as you say) but relies on the OS functions, then you have to wait for OS to load.

That is after the OS loads. Yes, interfacing with "any" soundcard on a PC relies on standard APIs. That's definitely a difference from the "standard" Amiga, but in most regards it's not a short-coming, which is why abstraction layers like RTG and AHI exist.

In 1k?  Bullcrap.

Probably not often in DOS demos, but it's definitely possible to support adlib compatible cards in 1k.

You should really think about it rather than repeating your mistake.  If I move the joystick around while pressing/releasing fire button, the time in state change can be 1 ms or less.

Yes, and a change in sound can happen over an infinitesimal amount of time. It doesn't mean that it's particularily important for our hearing.

I'm recording the state changes and timing the difference between the state change.

How often do you think the game itself is checking the state? Show me a game that utilizes the superior Amiga joystick port to its full potential!

Sorry, don't know of any joystick using PS2 port.

PS2 as in Playstation 2, not PS/2. I have an adapter to connect two PS2 compatible controllers to one USB port.

They are still playing catchup to joystick interface.

No. There is nothing to catch up to. Having a joystick port on a computer is totally redundant when you have universal serial interfaces.

They are still playing catchup to real-time useage of hardware registers (those that you are forced to go through APIs);

No. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years you know that software developers are trying to move further AWAY from the hardware. Transparency, modularity, uniformity, and in the end, system stability, at the expense of exact control. A pretty small price to pay to open up a whole new world of fast hardware development, in my opinion, while a rigid system design like the Amiga won't ever see that.

they are forced in playing catchup to timing things with zero latency.

PC:s may very well be (and are) used in low latency/real-time applications.

It's not the primary case; there are millions  of gameports.  USB joystick requires more cycles to read the joystick port than reading I/O port on Amiga as it is currently-- not the nonexisting ones you are speculating on.

Given the average life length of a typical PC game pad I'm pretty sure that there are more USB sticks in use. "There are millions of game ports"... How many USB ports do you think there are?

First show a joystick that beats the amiga.

The joypads I use have two separate analog joysticks, a directional pad and ten buttons ergonomically laid out. They work as respond as instantly as necessary for fast shooters as well as old platform games, even if my computer might not be able to sample them at 1000Hz (which I don't know since there are no games that do).

There really isn't anything like it for Amiga.

Show me a timer that can do the 558ns accuracy on any PC. Etc.

On some OS:s I'm sure it's possible. If you need to have timing that tight (i e for timing some sort of serial communication) in any of the mainstream general purpose OS:s you can often outsource the time critical stuff to a $1 PIC.

So don't compare apples and oranges then.  Pick a joystick port.

Dedicated interfaces for joysticks are a thing of the past, so there's really nothing else to compare to. Consoles too are moving to better solutions such as USB and Bluetooth.

[Linde]

But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots).  Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS.  On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.

The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.

Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?

[Linde]

yeah BUT ITS ISN"T AN THEY DON"T.  Imagine if we could get OS 3.1 running natively on quadcore machine.  We can't so we have to deal with reality, not what if fantasy..

By that logic cardboard boxes are also more secure than prisons. No one ever tried breaking out of cardboard boxes! Let's slowly begin putting criminals in boxes instead.

[Linde]

I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.

I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do.  Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.

Yeah, using Windows for totally elementary stuff like reading the joystick state at 1 kHz without jitter is something we have to look far into the future for. And for me, as a professional switch flipper having computer rebooting as my primary field of interest, light-switch booting speed is a very important factor.

[Linde]

I didn't mutate my stand.  I stated my criterion many times.  This was already refuted when I stated "barring Atari 2600 cartridge type boots".  BASIC is a ROM like cartridges.  It's true, if he only wants to use BASIC, he's fine-- for him it does boot faster.  But in the general case, I know the C64 are loading huge files of the disk drive and there's no boot option for that.

It still boots faster into its operating system than the Amiga. Should I add all activity on my PC to the start-up time? Because I open thousands of web browser tabs everyday, and sometimes open hundreds of folders and compressed archives, play a few games, sometimes three pretty complex IDE:s, many instances of Paint.net and Foxit Reader and more...

Let's pick another case to clarify why I think the C64 is SUPERIOR to the Amiga: I can boot "The Final Cartridge III" faster than you will ever be able to boot into Amiga OS or even the insert disk screen. TFC III contains functionality for basic usability - there is a mouse driven GUI, a calculator, some disk and tape utilities, a clock with a timer, a game data editor, a note pad where you can print, save and load text, and if you want you can very immediately exit into BASIC or a machine code monitor.

All in all, it's handled more responsively than possible with the inferior Amiga OS, and much much faster than the comparably primitive PC.

[Linde]

It happens by default with famous PC compilers.   Looks like you replied to this message without reading the entire posting since what you argued against initially was answered later.

Sigh. Please repeat it for me then. What exactly IS your point? Is it that not knowing what you're doing may result in bad code and less-than-optimal file sizes and execution times? Because yes, I very much agree with that, but I still don't see how it's relevant. You can produce horrible code on any system.

The anim files decompress on the fly-- no streaming or disk reads.

Then some form of lesser compression with bigger files and shorter extraction time would be faster.

But Amiga has the edge since if you use OCS standard hardware, it works across the board on all Amigas and you don't have to use APIs.

No, if you write an app that uses standard OCS hardware (let's say an old A500) or even uses the kernel functions that's in no way a guarantee in itself that it will work on other Amiga systems.

I'm glad you agree on something.

Great. So what are you trying to say?

Adlib is not supported by all audio cards and even those it's supported on don't use the same I/O port.

No, but Adlib sound was definitely supported in the majority of sound cards, and telling the program what port to use can be as simple as passing a parameter when launching it or reading an environment variable. Perhaps not common, but as I said, definitely possible.

In sound, 44Khz..48Khz is enough but in the case of joysticks, IT CAN make a difference.  It all depends on how fast the software is sampling the joystick and WHEN it samples.  Anyway, your point that humans can't react that fast is false since you can produce millisecond accurate state changes in the joystick that are not NOISE.

How come normal Amiga and C64 games feel so responsive when they read the joystick only once or twice per frame anyway?

I can say the same for Audio.  

Hahaha, let's see... Audio apps that make full and non-redundant use of 44.1 kHz audio... Well, to be honest I'd rather do multi-track destructive sound editing and recording at a higher frequency (and as high bit depth as possible) to get some frequency head room. If you've ever done any audio editing you know what I mean. A higher sampling frequency can also be used to account for a low bit depth (and yeah, in terms of recording and mixing, 16 bits often aren't quite enough). Some KORG recorders for example sample 1-bit sound at a 20-something MHz rate. The sound can then be filtered digitally for very high fidelity audio.

But yeah, you still didn't show me a game that utilizes 1 KHz joystick polling.

So, how does that make it faster than Amigas I/O port access like MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.

I never said it was faster, just superior in every other regard, and definitely SUFFICIENTLY fast.

It has catching up to do until you prove that you have faster joystick interface that people are using out there right now.

Amiga has some catching up to do with Burger King, because they are serving good hamburgers that people are eating right now.

Believe it or not, people still access hardware I/O ports on PCs in kernel drivers.  I write some of these so I know.

If you are writing kernel drivers you should know what a devastating effect unrestricted access to hardware registers could have in a complex system like Windows XP. I certainly don't want my Windows install to bluescreen as often and unexpectedly as my Amiga comes to a Guru meditation.

But PC has catching up to do in regards to Amiga's real-time set-up.

Windows XP isn't an optimal system for real-time applications, no, but what on earth made you believe that they were trying to be?

Not ports, USB joysticks that are faster than Amiga's joystick interface.

Well, there are none. Reading ADCs and multiple buttons and passing it serially to the application in a system-friendly way might never be as fast as reading five mechanical switches. Boo-hoo.

Analog sticks suck and 10+ button joysticks suck as well.  I rather have a one or two button joystick rather than complicate things for kids playing games with 10+ joysticks.  "Sorry you pressed Select instead of A".  "Sorry you pressed Start although it's labeled as Select."  "Sorry you pressed the right white button instead of left black one."  Now take this into context of a fast shoot-em up game.

LOL, you can make up would-be scenarios too, I see, but in real life kids are very fast to learn (often much faster than we are). Well, I guess not liking more than two buttons is a matter of taste, really, but most gamers and kids seem to agree with me.

They can all seem instantaneous, but there's factually some time they take.

If it SEEMS instantaneous (being a HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE), what the is the point of pushing it further?

Complete bullcrap.

Yeah, that's the next thing for you to show then (after you've shown me a 1 kHz joystick game): An ergonomic four axis analog controller with vibration and 10 buttons. In my opinion we're already in deep water at "ergonomic", because none of the Amiga controllers I've used have been ergonomically sound at all (well, maybe the joyboard ). Closest to beef is using a SEGA Mega Drive controller, I guess.

That's your worst argument so far.  Use a piece of hardware.  As I stated before, if I use hardware, anything can be done on any computer.

I'm sorry then, but that's the PC philosophy. External processors, controllers and hardware devices are used for everything. In the end it just means a huge amount of available (and compatible at API level) peripherals, expansions and gadgets at competitive prices, and a higher economic pressure for further development.