PC still playing Amiga catchup

[koaftder]

It's obvious that people who are responding here about "Games for Windows" here have never done any real DirectX, Managed DirectX, Or XNA Game Studio programming at all and they are just talking out of their proverbial hats.. If you want to talk about support for more than just game controllers and want to add Windows Live and Xbox live including multiplayer over network (IP), and voice and instant messaging  and headset communication, not to mention the upcoming facial recognition and other technologies..

I suggest you visit the following URLs:

http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Pages/DirectX10.aspx

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

I don't think about programming a pots unit anymore, please that's done all for me in a standardized kind of way.. I think more about creating a game for the PC and deploying it on the X-box 360 and Zune (all of which cross port via the free XNA game studio 3.0).. And if you look at creators.xna.com there are all sorts of nice 3d and 2d multi-scroller games with (some are free), or I can program my own and sell it directly on X-box live and they are as good as any Amiga game I had back in the day..

Check out catalog.xna.com and get back with me about this discussion..

How often do you read from the controller class in XNA (; I bet it's once per render loop.

Done a little bit XNA stuff on the 360 myself. It's a pretty nice environment.

[koaftder]

To amigaksi:

Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?

[koaftder]

 Originally Posted by koaftder  View Post
To amigaksi:

Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?

With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code.  Also depends on what the instructions are.  One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.

You are thinking too hard about this question. I guess I should have framed the question better. Assume a Von Neumann machine with an extremely orthogonal instruction set, each instruction executing within a single machine cycle and no port I/O, all hardware interfaces mapped within a linear 32bit address space.

It's a question regarding software design which should lead to some more interesting conversation regarding hardware design and the symbiotic relationship between the two.

[koaftder]

With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code.  Also depends on what the instructions are.  One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.

Don't forget Max Headroom was done on Amiga. If you can remember that.
:laughing:
Does being first count for anything nowadays?

It's a little known fact, but the stuttering was an unintended feature. The Amiga crashed so much they had to hire an assistant to "poll" the reset switch 5 times a second to keep it going. It wasn't a big deal because the Amiga booted so fast and besides, people liked the effect.

[koaftder]

Not to mention the Peg. Wasn't there some talk also of OS4 being able to run on a MacMini as well?

found this poking around.

Amiga OS 4.0 Install CD for Mac Mini G4 (Moana Loader)
------------------------------------------------------

This CD will allow you to boot the Amiga OS 4.0 kernel and run the Amiga OS 4.0 installer.  I've yet to try installing this on my hard drive.

The knows issues with the Moana loader are:

 * Displays message that USB stack has not been loaded (USB keyboards and mice work)
 * Doesn't detect the Mac Mini built-in Ethernet
 * Doesn't detect the Mac Mini AirPort Extreme card
 * Doesn't detect the Mac Mini Bluetooth device
 * Probably a lot more I've not come across yet!

Testing has been performed with a Mac Mini G4 with the following specs:

Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: PowerMac10,2
Processor Name: PowerPC G4 (1.2)
Processor Speed: 1.5 GHz
Number Of CPUs: 1
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.9.4f0

This CD may/may not work on other Mac Mini G4 models.


Instructions for booting:
-------------------------

 1) Boot into Open Firmware (Hold down "Option" "Command" "o" "f" when powering on)
 2) First time users will only need to enter the following command once:
    setenv boota-device cd:
 3) Begin loading the OS 4.0 kernel/kickstart by typing in the following command:
    boot cd:slb_v2
 4) Select option "1. Amiga OS 4.x/MM_Full_silent_USB"
 5) Press "Enter" at the "Installed mem: 1024 mega bega" prompt
 6) Press "Enter" at the "About to build thecopy of the OF tree; Code start at 0x01800000; press any key" prompt
 7) Press "Enter" at the "All init done; about to kill OF and start ExecSG; press any key" prompt

At this point, the screen should turn black and after a few seconds, the CD drive will spin up.

Eventually you'll see an AmigaDOS window displaying the message "USB stack not loaded".  Oddly enough, USB keyboards and mice seem to work.

 7) You'll be greeted with a "Welcome to the Amiga OS 4.0 Install CD" window, click on "Proceed"
  On the next window, select your language, country and time zone and click "Use"
 9) A window will pop up and will ask how the system time should be updated.  Click on "System"
10) A window will pop up with the message "Your system time has been updated".  Click on "OK"
11) Shortly after, a window will appear to advise you that you must select a keyboard.  Click "OK"
12) Select your keyboard and click "Use"

If the start up appears to stall between steps 10 and 11, press "Ctrl C" and you should see a "WAIT: ***Break" message appear.  The installer will now continue.

Good luck!

[koaftder]

It seems like all the arguments are falling down. Why not just call it a day Amigaksi eh?

Come on! You've dragged this thread on for far too long. It stopped being funny a long time ago. :rolleyes:

There comes a time when a man has to stand up and wipe the dung off his joystick.

[koaftder]

Which is faster: MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 or going through a serial protocol?

in c#

Code: [Select]

joystickDevice.Poll();

This is faster for a number of reasons. First of all, I didn't have to write the entire application in assembly language. So what if you can read the joystick with one mov instruction? Reading a joystick ain't hard no matter what the language and API you have to deal with. What's hard is all of the other parts of the game you have to write, especially the graphics. I don't know about you, but I don't like writing graphics code in asm. Some of the crappiest, most inefficient code I've ever seen was written in assembly language. The whole mantra of "code written in assembly is the fastest there is" is an exaggeration beyond belief.

Second, I can read the value from two analog sticks and two analog flippers more than once per frame, I can do it as fast as the HID spec allows, and there can be a lot more analog controls on the device than that! Not so on the Amiga, only can do this once per frame. So much for the superior Amiga joy port.

With the Amiga Joy port, I get one 1980's era standard boring as hell joystick. Just one per port. Imagine playing Gears of War or Crysis with such a joystick. Might as well sit on the damn thing. On the PC I can have a dozen gaming devices. Mice, keyboards, steering wheels, foot pedals, yokes, game pads, classic style joys, harddrives, video output devices, video input devices, audio output devices, audio input devices, and the list goes on and on. All on one bus. With the Amiga joy port, I get.... a joystick... an old crappy joystick whose metal contact switches tie directly to I/O pins on some bizarre custom chip that's capable of recording the full glory of raw signal bounce. Oh how superior!

USB HID devices output perfect state information to the computer. There is no need to poll it a thousand times a second as humans can't click a button more than 10 times a second. With the USB bus, one can connect 127 devices to the bus, all working simultaneously. USB 2.0 can transfer 60 megabytes a second across the bus.

All this being said, the Amiga joystick port is just another para interface hanging off a custom chip. It is unusual in that you can fetch information from it rather quickly. One thing amigaski hasn't done in his argument is actually show real code that reads the joystick port as fast as he claims. He has a product which emulates joystick devices for the amiga by bit banging the para port on the pc, but notice he hasn't claimed there are games which are unusable using his hardware emulation product, which by it's very nature has to use the supposedly inferior db15 standard legacy joystick port or a keyboard for it's input.

The only devices that i'm aware of that actually use the limits of the Amiga joyport are audio digitizers that tie in to that port. I wouldn't be surprised if others on here know of additional devices that can use the capability of this interface. There are two words that accurately describe the Amiga Joystick/Mouse port: weird and suboptimal.

[koaftder]

holy s#it! The size of these replies! T to tha L semicolon D R

LOL

[koaftder]

You have a choice of schedulers?   That you can change without re-booting?

It's not that it isn't possible, it's that doing so makes for a retarded design.

[koaftder]

Its just a shame that you can't run AmigaOS on some modern hardware and see it really fly.

You can, with UAE. You can have the Amiga setup you could never afford, for free at that.

[koaftder]

here's some facts:  Linux can and does offer the user a choice of schedulers. A different scheduler does change the behaviour of the OS significantly.  The fact that more than one scheduler exists on Linux suggests the default scheduler's performance doesn't perform as well in all usage scenarios, otherwise there would be no need for a different scheduler.  So allowing the user to choose a different scheduler is not such a retarded idea in the eyes of Linux developers themselves.  Now here's the rub: the scheduler is built into the kernel: and its one scheduler per kernel.  You wanna change your scheduler, then you use a different kernel.  You don't simply switch of the old scheduler, and select the new one from a list of schedulers that you'd like.  like you do with amiga and executive.

You missed the point of my reply. You argued that pc operating systems can't change the scheduler and have it valid after a reboot. I said that makes for a retarded design. You can never be sure of what's hanging around in memory after a reset. That is all.

[koaftder]

I argued that the amiga can change the scheduler without a reboot,  but you can switch the Amiga on and off if you like to clear what's in memory, its not as if it takes any longer than a soft reset...wait a minute..thats anther argument isn't it...  Actually i don't think windows can change the scheduler at all, reboot or not.  And Linux needs a different kernel altogether to boot from to change the scheduler.  And who knows what other changes you didn't bargain for might be in that kernel..

Oops, I read your original post last night thinking you were arguing that you can change the scheduler and reboot with it intact. Sorry.

As far as schedulers go, I've never messed with it on linux. Never felt the need, and I've been using linux for dang near 15 years. Never had an issue with it on windows either.

[koaftder]

It depends on what instructions you try to do in  Parallel ports are usually PCI in the latest machines that have them; however, there are other I/O ports like 60h..64h (keyboard) that are much slower.

Nope, it's on the Super I/O chip, which can be on it's own IC or integrated into the northbridge. Either way it's on the low pin count bus along with the flash rom and other crap.

[koaftder]

It's given someone knows high level language and assembly, he can produce more efficient and faster code in assembly since he can better deal with misalignment, registerizing variables, use the flags optimally, etc.

In a perfect world, where programmers are immaculate and hardware documentation is written by God himself. In the real world programmers have a hard time dealing with pointers in C and buffer overruns by 1 are common place. It gets even worse when folks start writing stuff in assembler, especially on processors with complicated opcodes and general purpose registers that aren't really general purpose.

>Second, I can read the value from two analog sticks and two analog flippers more than once per frame, I can do it as fast as the HID spec allows, and there can be a lot more analog controls on the device than that! Not so on the Amiga, only can do this once per frame. So much for the superior Amiga joy port.

No, now you are comparing another aspect of the Amiga joystick port-- the ability to deal with analog signals as well.  Games pick the better interface-- the digital one.  On PC even you are forced to use the analog joystick since that's the standard.  And even in the analog case, Amiga reads the POTs with one MOVE-- the hardware is doing the sampling for you.  I have never even seen an analog joystick on Amiga-- just paddles in some rare applications.

I'm just writing about the Amiga joystick port you've labeled as "superior". You don't get to dismiss reading potentiometers with said port just because it makes you mad it's so dang slow at doing that operation. Lots of games take in pot values. You're just gonna have to live with that.

>With the Amiga Joy port, I get one 1980's era standard boring as hell joystick. Just one per port. Imagine playing Gears of War or Crysis with such a joystick. Might as well sit on the damn thing. On the PC I can have a dozen gaming devices. Mice, keyboards, steering wheels, foot pedals, yokes, game pads, classic style joys, harddrives, video output devices, video input devices, audio output devices, audio input devices, and the list goes on and on. All on one bus. With the Amiga joy port, I get.... a joystick... an old crappy joystick whose metal contact switches tie directly to I/O pins on some bizarre custom chip that's capable of recording the full glory of raw signal bounce. Oh how superior!

Wrong.  PC's gameport doesn't give you those options.  USB bus gives you ability to have faster buffer transfers but Amiga uses a different port for buffer-based transfers.  Digital joysticks are and were the norm for Ataris/Amigas/C64/Vic-20/Sega/STs/etc. whereas PCs were using the inferior analog joysticks.  So the Amiga's joystick port is optimized for digital joysticks.  Analog joysticks are crappy so only computer that used them were PCs which were NOT into gaming.

I wasn't refering to the damn db15 legacy PC game port that hasn't been screwed into the side of a case in the past 10 years. The bit about connecting harddrives , sound cards and multiple game pads should have been your clue that I was talking about USB.  

>USB HID devices output perfect state information to the computer...

That's a speculative remark.  Whatever you read from joystick port you can end up reading from USB HID device.

No it's not. You'll never read signal noise from a USB gaming device. Try it.

>All this being said, the Amiga joystick port is just another para interface hanging off a custom chip.

Aren't all ports some sort of interface hanging off a chip-- keyboard port on PC is hanging off some 8042 or compatible.  

The 8042 *is* the ps/2 keyboard/mouse controller on the PC. The Amiga joystick port hangs off the Denise chip. A chip that handles video timings and sprite crap, and also apparently, the joystick interface. That's a hack, it probably wasn't even originally designed to be joystick interface.

>It is unusual in that you can fetch information from it rather quickly. One thing amigaski hasn't done in his argument is actually show real code that reads the joystick port as fast as he claims. He has a product which emulates joystick devices for the amiga by bit banging the para port on the pc, but notice he hasn't claimed there are games which are unusable using his hardware emulation product, which by it's very nature has to use the supposedly inferior db15 standard legacy joystick port or a keyboard for it's input.

I can also read digital joystick data and feed it to Amiga/Ataris not just analog joysticks.  And the fact that I have gone through all these timings is why I am so certain the analog joysticks are slower and inferior to digital joysticks and on top of that the interface for reading even analog values on Amiga is superior (due to less CPU useage).  By the way, the simulation of joysticks is only one part-- the same interface also simulates mice for various machines, disk drives, digitized paddles, etc.

It's not a big deal to write code to read joysticks as fast as I claim.

Of course reading the pots are slow, it's slow ass legacy hardware, on both the amiga side and PC side. It's been a long time since I've read the data from a db15 legacy pc joy port. Perhaps 15 years ago. Not that it matters, but how fast can you read a pot on a legacy PC joy port? Maybe getting a good reading from an old, cheap ass ADC is stupid slow. It's not on modern devices, the kind that plug into the USB port. The issue isn't that the device is slow, or that analog controls are crap, its that the hardware reading them is crap, and old.

>The only devices that i'm aware of that actually use the limits of the Amiga joyport are audio digitizers that tie in to that port. I wouldn't be surprised if others on here know of additional devices that can use the capability of this interface. There are two words that accurately describe the Amiga Joystick/Mouse port: weird and suboptimal.

Amazing that you labeled it "mouse port" but did not mention that Mouse is one of the devices that port handles.  And you can send pulses through the joystick port for mouse every few microseconds (not milliseconds).  Joystick port also handles Light Pens, Paddles, Dongle-stuff, and also lets you control pins for input or output for controlling custom devices although there's a parallel port for doing that as well.

[/quote]

Yea, sure, you can do all that with one port, but only one device on each port. Also, when was the last time you saw a light pen? Never saw one on the amiga, must have been mid 80's I ever saw one, and that was on some computer I can't recall, but it did have floppy disks the size of dinner plates.

On the PC, the legacy ports aren't used, they're often not even present. Nobody wants a slow port that can only have one device attached to it.

This whole argument that you have is based on two things: One is that you're comparing the Amiga joy port to a legacy db15 PC joy port that nobody uses anymore. That's ridiculous. The other is that you insist that polling the piss out of an analog stick whos mechanical switches tie directly onto the pins of the denise chip is of any value. I assure you it's not. All you're picking up is gobs of signal bounce. It's the farthest thing you could ever get from superior that one can imagine.

If you're gonna make a rational set of arguments, at least compare the Amiga joy port to an actual interface the PC uses, namely, USB. Anything else is dishonest and a waste of time.

[koaftder]

Err I remember that you need to restart the Executive *server* when changing schedulers, not reboot.  But I already said it doesn't matter either way, as it only takes 5 seconds longer, so who cares really?


Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.


rotfl. Re read what you've written there, now compare it to what you're accusing everyone else who disagrees with you of doing.

AGAIN.  ANSWER THE QUESTION:  DO DIFFERENT PRECOMPILED SCHEDULER MODULES EXIST AND CAN THEY BY SIMPLY DROPPED INTO THE LINUX KERNEL?  IF SO WOULD THE AVERAGE USER PREFER THIS TO A SIMPLE DOUBLE-CLICK INSTALLATION?[/QUOTE]

Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.

[koaftder]

Average user doesn't care one way or the other. Average user doesn't even know what a scheduler is. Folks who do care are usually configuring machines to provide services, and a kernel recompile is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than tweaking apache or mysql for optimal performance.

Hi,

at  [-f filename] [-l] [-m] [-d job [job ...]] TIME

smerf[/QUOTE]

What does the windows equivalent of chron have to do with what's been discussed?