PC still playing Amiga catchup

[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?

[koaftder]

It's all down to the trolling at this point. One fellow wants to state that a computer from the 80's is superior by comparing it to interfaces the PC hasn't used in years. And now we have an argument that the floppy disc isn't obsolete. I say that if you are going to dwell in this inanity, then you know what to sit on and where to cut your self with that metal floppy disk shield.

The amiga was great because back in the day the graphics knocked your socks off. Commodore made bad decisions and went tits up and the innovation stopped. I still use the Amiga to this day because I love those old games and enjoy repairing the hardware as it progressively fails. I wouldn't bother fixing an old PC. But I'm not so deluded that I think other architectures haven't surpassed the Amiga 1,000 times over, and I enjoy the new hardware we have at our disposal today.

And... Still running AROS on a junk machine and love the new developments, looking forward to Anubis.

[koaftder]

Sorry, but I did give many examples of how this standard can be hardware based and not limit innovation.

No the hell you didn't. You've just given us platitudes about BS while ignoring how modern hardware works.

[koaftder]

The Amiga was great for a lot of reasons other than the graphics.  But if the A500's graphics is what made it great for you, then I'll take that into account when giving any credibility to what you post.

I remember when the old man brought that Amiga 1000 home back in '85. Other kids had the NES, some had the c64. We had PC's in school. That a1k blew it all away. Nothing could compare. I remember going to a software store in Dallas texas back then, and seeing the Juggler demo projected on the wall. I caught my first taste of C on the amiga. Used that machine until 1993. When we moved to North Carolina in 1990, I never saw Amiga anything since. No software in the stores, no Amigas on display. I do remember around 1995, the Weather Channel had a problem. A CLI window was on display, for the whole nation to see. Thats the last i ever saw amiga anything in the wild.

[koaftder]

If you do an IN AL,DX and then switch contexts the stack will save (EAX,EDX) at least which are related to the IN instruction thus no parallel instruction can execute until this one finishes.  I am just speaking of context switching on the same processor.  You have to wait for IN to finish to use the joystick data or whatever other device you are doing IN from.

Nope, this is wrong. Nobody uses that hardware, no modern machines ship with it. Folks haven't used it in 10 years.

[koaftder]

You look like you had a bad day.

I had a great day.

[koaftder]

You did have a bad day.  I use IN AL,DX in 2.8Ghz Dell machine and in this other AMD Sempron 3000+ machine.  Unless PCs have this instruction, they aren't backward compatible and not really "PC"s.

You're missing something there aren't you? IN AL, DX is kinda ambiguous isn't it? It's as if there was a temporal component missing....

[koaftder]

Check the intel references.

No thanks, I'm very familiar with them, having been working on my own little hobby kernel written in fasm for the past few months.

[koaftder]

PC wins. Can i have my rep points back now, please?

i gave you +1, it's a net +1 for you from me because i never gave you a -1. I see you went from 0 to 2, i still don't understand how this works.

[koaftder]

It's not trolling.  PC I/Os aren't that fast.  Anything requiring multiple I/Os becomes comparable on Amiga using a single I/O.  And in some cases, Amiga surpasses PC.  I compared with USB and Gameport.  Floppy disks aren't obsolete if that's all you need to play games or write your software.  Burning CDs is usually slower than copying a file to/from floppy and floppies work with older machines that don't have Flash drive capability or drivers (like Win98SE).  Hey, why don't you just give up on the joysticks and do research on palette index data swapping.  I prefer programs on older machines that are highly optimized and work flawlessly at 60Hz.  If it gets the job done, why label it obsolete.

I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.

Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.

Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.

[koaftder]

I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).  

Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.

[koaftder]

I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior.  I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware.  In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times.  So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there.  If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.

Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.

You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. An algorithm written in asm for 68k will vary across the different 68k processor models just like it does across the various IA32 model processors. There are real time operating systems for both families but they're not called AmigaOS or Windows. Keep in mind that real time os's also make use of APIs to abstract from the hardware. Take a look at QNX for example. Where people demand the most performance, disk and graphics, you can't get away from abstraction. Nobody in their right mind would want apps writing directly to disk interface and people expect applications to play nice with the windowing environment.

These days people expect to be able to play World of Warcraft in a window and be able to see what's going on in yahoo instant messenger and occasionally check out what new messages are floating in on their facebook page.... on the same screen at the same time. You can't get this kind of functionality by allowing software to bang directly on the hardware.

[koaftder]

It works fine.  You just read a smaller range.  I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances.  You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.

I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)".  But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games.  I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.

Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?

[koaftder]

Perhaps this thread could be the beginning of a new coffee house section, well actually given the delusional nature of these postings maybe it should be called the crack house section.

Did somebody say crack!? Oh goodie!

[koaftder]

Republicans hate poor people.