PC still playing Amiga catchup

[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.

[Linde]

You don't see the relevance that when applications install under Windows they fill up hundreds of DLLs and other bloated files.  

Oh, and every other Amiga program will do the same with libraries... Except that mostly I have to put them there manually. and they are oh-so-bloated! If anything, dynamically linked libraries retract from the "bloatedness".

My point still stands.  Amiga sped up the animation by shorter files and short data files.

Shorter maybe, but in that case, not by compression but by information reduction.

Bullcrap.  AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.

Oh, I am not speaking from any particular technical know-how, but as I said, using old ECS and OCS demos/games on an A1200 without WHDLoad or soft kicking will be a pain. Probably not so much the incompatibilities in the custom chips as because of incompatibilities in the different ROM revisions, RAM size and changes in clock speed.

You forgot this is a boot block; no parameters to pass.  And how would you know the port even if you could pass the parameters.

No, not boot block. If someone made a boot block demo for a particular PC model, they could make it work on every other machine of the same model, though, just as well as Amiga boot intros work for every computer of the same model.

I am surprised we are talking about boot block demos now though, since PC = Windows, apparently.

How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio? Sometimes you can't tell the difference.  You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.

It can indeed make a difference, but the question is whether this difference is important enough for our perception to take into account.

I told you any game like River-raid that has fast action and shooting can benefit from it.  You may get away with less rates, but that's just like audio-- you can get away with 22Khz in most cases.

Implementing that frequent polling in River Raid was probably beyond scope of the programmers or the machines it was made for. In the end, it means implementing sub-pixel movement and collision detection for every joystick "read cycle", and either way you will only see the changes when the screen redraws.

Also, you won't get away with 22 kHz if you want to be able to faithfully reproduce audible sound without loss of loads of audible information - that's only half the human hearing range, and a clearly perceptible difference, as opposed to the difference between reading the joystick 4 or 17 times per redraw.

And no, you still haven't shown me a game that benefits and uses 1 kHz joystick sampling, so the use case is still VERY artificial.

What other regard?  Digital joysticks are better than analog even at slower speeds of sampling.  There's no ambiguity regarding the direction.

You sort of missed the point of analog joysticks then. They are not there to send unambiguous up/down/left/right information. They give you full and precise control over the axes, for example to control a crosshair or fine movement controls of a player. Did I mention that my joypads have a digital directional pad too, by the way?

Take you bullcrap elsewhere if you can't refute the points.

I'm just reducing your argument to the absurd to show how little sense it makes. Amiga OS might provide a 1 kHz joystick orgy that the PC doesn't need (and no, not the Amiga either) and Burger King is providing hamburgers, which certainly isn't a feature the Amiga needs (though I would appreciate it dispensing hamburgers). Your argument makes the faulty assumption that when something doesn't have a particular vaguely attractive feature that something else does have, it needs or tries to "catch up".

People can access hardware even in protected mode.  I have done it myself in my application.

Congratulations. What are you complaining about then? Is it particularly hard?

So they are playing catch-up.  PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.

As I said, Windows isn't exactly aspiring to be real-time either, and I don't think Amiga OS was either. If the Amiga is more predictable in timing it's more likely a result of the simple system design than a thought-out feature.

Lame way to shove the point under the rug.

How so? It is true, isn't it?

It's real experiment.

And ten minutes later the kid gave up and never touched the controller again? Doesn't sound real at all. How old was the kid?

Because MP3 also seems instantaneous.  I see your lame reasons.  To you fake diamonds are just as good as real ones as long as they seem real.

MP3 is instantaneous? What are you talking about?

I'm sorry than that it has to play catch-up to Amiga.

I'm starting to think that I am feeding some popular fairy-tale creature by even bothering to argue with you.

[Linde]

Hi,

@everyone,

How many PC techs, or IT techs work for microsoft?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Linux?
How many PC techs, or IT techs work for Amiga?

Amiga has the least techs working for them, this means they have the most stable system that just works.

Amiga wins

PC and Linux users lose because they need professional help to keep their systems going.

Sounds Logical to me

smerf

lol

[Linde]

If everyone shared them.  But they don't, there are several versions of each DLL and I have seen when they do use a common directory, they cause conflicts.

And that's a problem totally non-existent on the Amiga...

LOSSLESS compression means no loss in information.  That's what it uses unlike MPEG4.

So you're trying to tell me that decompressing an image and writing it to the frame buffer is faster than directly writing an uncompressed image directly to the buffer. That might be true if you are typing the data down by hand from paper.

Good, so we agree AGA/ECS/OCS are backward compatible and directly accessing OCS hardware registers works on all amigas.

Yes, I can agree with that. But that doesn't mean that all "ocs software" is compatible with any Amiga. There is more to it than the chip set, as I pointed out. I think you understand this as well as I do, but you are playing a fool to be able to dismiss my argument.

You can't do a 1K demo on PC that uses audio card or the advanced features of VGA cards, etc. etc.  since OS first has to be loaded.  Amiga wins here in tight coding due to hardware level compatibility.

Yes you can, if you know the exact hardware configuration.

Not for me.  For me all OSes are the same since I just write kernel mode drivers.

Yes, because the concept of kernel mode drivers exists in every operating system available for the PC...

I dumped the actual data of River Raid in another post.

Data existing is not in itself an indicator that it is important to the end user. As pointed out, the sub-ms state changes are results of switch bouncing. Just because there are millions of magazines in the world doesn't mean that I am missing out stuff that is important to me by not reading them all.

When a human moves and when you redraw are unrelated.

Not in a computer game, when the screen redraw is sometimes the only feedback you get.  

Bullcrap.  The more you sample the joystick, the more accurate the results.

No, it's not bullcrap. YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ME A GAME THAT USES AND BENEFITS FROM 1 kHz JOYSTICK SAMPLING. That's still true, as it has been since I first pointed it out. As far as I know, there are VERY few games in the River Raid era where even the game logic (all the moving, AI decisions, counting of score etc) operates faster than the screen update.

If you read the same analog stick a few times, you will see that it returns different values (testing with gameport).  Thus, it's not as precise as you think and people usually people use range of values to do a particular thing so you already not using full range.

If you'd ever used joysticks for other things than measuring the time between state changes, you'd know that the values that the joysticks are precise enough, and no, while they are not usually exact they give you more precise control over direction than four on/off switches. You'd also know that in most games that utilize the analog sticks, the walking/turning speed/direction correlates exactly enough to the input.

If digital sticks with one button were superior for controllability, their market wouldn't have died out in the early 90s.

You didn't even refute a SINGLE point.  Just claiming it's "absurd" doesn't make it that.

I'm not saying that your argument was absurd. I was saying that it made no sense, and to prove my point I used your logic but applied it to something else. It's a common rhetorical device.

Your claim that people no longer use hardware directly.  They have less standard hardware, but they still use what little of it there is.

No, that was not what I was claiming. I said that developers are trying to move further away from hardware, which is why there are abstractions like drivers and APIs. If you think that the average software developer has as much use of accessing the hardware as before you are wrong.

Amiga can do it in software whereas you want to use additional hardware.  That's not a good comparison.

The Amiga can read four analog values at the same time and digitally convert them without hardware modification? The PC doesn't need any additional hardware besides what's in the joystick.

No, I wanted some kids to play games-- and they preferred Amiga/Atari games over PC games since controls were simple.  They didn't have to think "which of the 10+ buttons do I press."  Given they are kids, I didn't want to teach them:

Eenie meenie minie moe
pick a button to shoot the foe
if it's wrong then let it go
next time try another to blow

No of course, why would you want to teach them anything? Your kids are none like the kids I know. Either way your story is very anecdotal and not enough to support your argument. The truth is that most kids these days handle and enjoy far more advanced games and joy pads.

Sorry, MP3 also appears same as uncompressed audio to most people as analog joystick appears instantaneous like digital joystick.  Yet one is better than the other.

And you think that mp3 vs uncompressed audio is completely analogous to 100 Hz vs 1000 Hz?