New classic boards

[MskoDestny]

songoku wrote:
Faster than anything else of its day, and honestly because of Agnes, Denise and Paula, I still think it could be on par with an AMD chip today that has to do all of that processing itself.  No wonder my CPU is overloaded and spends roughly half of its time at 100% capacity.

Guess what. Modern PCs have all kinds of hardware to offload tasks that the Amiga custom chips take care of. PCs have had 2D blitters for ages now and even 3D accelerators have been standard for years. Sound cards with DSPs that can do what Paula does and a whole lot more have been around for ages as well (though they haven't exactly become standard issue in large part because mixing a few audio channels together takes a trivial amount of processor time on a modern PC).

The Amiga was a great piece of hardware in its day, but many of the things that made the hardware special have long since been replicated on boring old x86 PC hardware.

If your CPU is seriously pegged at 100% half the time it's probably because your PC is stuffed to the gills with spyware.

As for the Minimig vs. CloneA they should be more or less functionally equivalent from the sounds of things. The Minimig should be more or less cycle accurate from the perspective of software running on it, it's just that the internal operation of the CloneA is closer to the real hardware. The Minimig isn't based off of UAE so much as the UAE sources were occasionally fill in gaps about hardware details the official hardware manuals don't cover.

[MskoDestny]

stopthegop wrote:
The difference is that these DMA co-processors were central elements in the design of the Amiga since its inception.  The Amiga was designed around this concept.  The PC was originally designed (and sold as) a drab tool for "business", its numbing green and black screen only reinforcing the point.  All of the multimedia razzle-dazzle of "fast" PCs today comes from contrived bolted-on sub-systems that, impressive as some of them might be, were antithesis to the original design and intention of the x86 PC.  The Amiga was a truly integrated system.

From a geek coolness factor the fact that the Amiga was designed with all these great things in mind is great, but from the perspective of my computer being a useful tool I don't give a crap. This is why I own an Amiga (cause I like cool geeky toys), but don't use one if I'm trying to get anything done.

PC makers love to abuse the word "innovate" to describe whatever they happen to be selling at the moment.  I've never heard anyone who knows the definition of "innovate" use it to describe their PC.

I don't know if I'd call the major computer manufacturers innovative at least not from a technological perspective. However, the companies that make the components (the CPUs, the GPUs, etc.) certainly are innovative.

Key word "boring".  The Amiga was (and is) a revolutionary machine.  I fail to see the point in spending a lot of money on a "modern" PC.  New PCs are just next year's trash.

To most people an Amiga is an over decade old piece of trash. Just because a piece of hardware was innovative in its day doesn't mean it is worthwhile for everyday use.

Why is it that only "fast" PCs are afflicted by this problem?  I use my Amiga online everyday.  It is just as fast now as the day I bought it.  I do an occasional disk defrag and it runs fine.  Why is so much time and effort needed with PCs to "remove spyware"?   Why is "spyware" on my PC in the first place?  Isn't Windows "secure"?  

More secure than Amiga OS, that's for sure. There's no spyware for the Amiga because no one uses it anymore and when it was reasonably popular the Internet wasn't and fast Internet connections weren't available to the public. There are certainly OSes that could claim they would have fewer problems with viruses and other malware if they had the same marketshare as Windows, but Amiga OS is not one of them.