PC still playing Amiga catchup

[smerf]

It's a Q1 2008 "gaming" 15.4"  laptop. According RMclock, the entire system consumes around 25 watts to 55 watts.

Hi,

@Hammer

Ok, I would probably buy that, I keep forgetting a lot of people use laptops, even though they are unexpandable, slow, have poor graphics, and the only way to improve them is to buy a new one, I am not knocking you, I have a laptop too, a toshita satlite. I run Ubuntu 8.04 on it because I got tired of waiting for 35 minutes for it to boot up, and then another 10 minutes for it to call up Internet Explorer. With Ubuntu it cut down the load time to about 5 minutes and about a minute load time for FireFox. Sometimes i would rather use a C64, it booted and loaded faster.

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@Trev,

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Microsoft publishes more documentation than any other software vendor, and it's all publicly available. For free.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hey Trev, I really read a lot of BS on this post but this line takes the cake.

By the way nice Penquin avatar, does this mean your a Linux fan boy?

smerf

[smerf]

Or it could be renamed the "the great PC v Amiga flamewar" and keep it as the fighting pit for people that want to duke it out so that they don't open equivalent threads elsewhere.

Hi,

I vote keep it open, I bet this thread has the highest % rate for reading than anything else on Amiga.org, I think Wayne should pay Amigaksi for this fight, it is the first time in years where I thought about going un in the attic and pulling out my old Amiga hardware and program books.

This whole thread is ridiculous, where else could we have this much fun?

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@Amigaksi,

You made the statement:

"There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks."

Now I just found one of my old Amiga joysticks that don't work, I opened it up and it seems like it has a couple pieces of copper in there that act like springs and open and close like a switch, maybe you could explain how when these springs touch that I get a digital signal out of it, I am really confused and maybe you can help me figure out what went wrong with my joystick, I tried hooking up a VOM to it and it doesn't even move when I press the joystick, I looked for a digital signal comming out when I closed the good copper pieces, but my friend who owns it says that now signal is comming out of this joystick, and that it is totally useless and broke. Maybe you can help me out in troubleshooting this joystick.

smerf

[smerf]

Now all we need is for someone to get mad, call the other person a Nazi and our lives will be complete..

Wayne

Hi,

@Wayne,

If you closed this thread, we would just start a new one that reads

"Did that Nazi actually close the PC still playing Amiga catchup" thread

is your life complete now?

smerf

[smerf]

My work PC had an uptime of over 1 year until a power cut took it down. That's one full year of running a full desktop environment, without crashing or manual rebooting.

It was running fedora 5. After the reboot it was running fedora 10

Hi,

@Karlos,

Last I heard fedora 5 didn't have a thing to do with winblows, but you did bring up something interesting to me, a Linux program that crashed, huh, I am beginning to wonder, I have been using Ubuntu since the 6.04 version ( I believe about 3 years) and it hasn't crashed or failed me yet. My post was mostly aimed at microslot fanboys who think that winblows is the best thing since Apple Macs

Hello I am an Apple, Hello I am a PC, and Hello I am a worm for both Apple and PC's

smerf

[smerf]

THANK YOU!  Someone actually "gets it".

Wayne

Hi,

@ Wayne

That the Amiga is the best thing since boiled peanuts.

smerf

[smerf]

That's because you haven't heard of pr0n.

Hi,

@Fanscale

Is that anything like pOrn?

smerf

[smerf]

The X64 PC can still run MS-DOS 1.0.

Hi,

But only in an emulator, or virtual drive

smerf

[smerf]

You're kidding, right? I'm assuming you haven't visited Microsoft's web site any time in the last ten years.



You meant "you're," but that's OK. No, it means I run (or ran--it's been a while) Linux on my Sega Dreamcast, hence the orange Sega Swirl.

I enjoy computing in general and have lots of different systems. I can afford whatever the industry throws at me, so unlike most people, I don't have to choose one thing or the other and then vehemently claim I made the best choice in a dire effort to avoid buyer's remorse.

The only thing that's brought me close to fanboy status is The Cure, but even Robert Smith tests my patience now and again.

At any rate, we both like Amigas or else we wouldn't be here, right?

Hi,

@Trev,

Like the answers, and your right, the reason I like my Amiga is because fun to see how far I can take the old girl before she kicks. I really think the Amiga is the most Amazin computer I have ever owned, there is something magical about it, can't put a finger on it but when I get on an Amiga it is just plain fun, all the other computers I just use, maybe it is the fast joystick port.

smerf

[smerf]

And I thought you were going to ask how sampling at high frequency the action of the two copper strips touching , and the many variations in resistance it will have as it makes contact, is actually useful to a game.  Rather than just sampling once per frame and having a tolerance to determine if you pushed a button/direction or not.

Incidentally, this thread is the longest I have spent on amiga.org since joining.  I sadly do not have space to setup my Amiga and neither are there any games really that I need it to play, except the Amiga version of Mr Nutz which was cool.

Hi,

@alexatkin,

Wow!! I never thought of that, I will have to look into that, but in all re ality, I wanted to play rolling thunder again, I don't know of anybody that beat that game, and you definitly need a good joystick to play it, and it has to move fast.

smerf

[smerf]

A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.

Hi,

@Amigaksi,

Try this on your amazingly fast joystick port:

7. Do you need USB 2.0?
Almost every conceivable peripheral has a USB 2.0 version ranging from a HDTV tuner, a micro hard drive to even video card / USB monitor. So, even if you buy a all-in-one HP multimedia PC with all the gizmos, you'll still need something USB. (Maybe not Everything USB).

Should you own a laptop, you may like to know that USB is also your ticket out of the proprietary world. It used to be that docking stations must all match that exact notebook model due to the proprietary connection. Now, you can just plug in a USB 2.0 docking station, and you'll get a USB hub, 7.1 surround audio, serial converters, Ethernet plus a notebook holder.

8. How does USB 2.0 handle today's applications?


Many have asked us how USB 2.0 or Hi-Speed USB mode specifically can handle today's ever-changing applications, particularly in the multimedia field. The original USB has an inherent problem to meet the bandwidth requirement of then current CD burners and hard drives. If memory serves us well, USB CD burners hit the bottleneck at 8x or 1.2MByte/s, and USB hard drives couldn't exceed a pitifully 1MByte/s.
When USB 2.0 introduced Hi-Speed USB mode, it boosted bandwidth to 480Mbit/s or 60Mbyte/s. The forty-fold jump from the original USB's 12Mbit/s has paved way for a number of improved devices. As we've seen, there is a dual SDTV tuner, each of the tuners consumes 8Mbit/s after the MPEG-2 conversion. For DVB-T/B USB tuners, each HDTV stream requires 55Mbit/s or 11% of what USB 2.0 offers. Technically, Certified Wireless USB can handle several HDTV channels simultaneously. For a few USB Video Class-enabled camcorders available, DV mandates 3.6Mbyte/s (or 43Mbit/s) for the linear video stream; it fills up a hard drive at a rate of 13GB per hour.

As for a lot of USB storage, burning a DVD-R at its fastest rate or 16x takes up 21MByte/s or 169Mbit/s. That translates to 35% of overall USB 2.0 speed. Hard drives, however, demand huge amount of bandwidth that USB 2.0 cannot meet; we've seen a USB 2.0 hard drive has sustained 36 to 40MBbyte/s in the absolute best scenario. USB flash drives have also reached 33MByte/s, but there seems to be some limitations in the NAND itself so you shouldn't expect their speeds to skyrocket in a next year or two. For most consumers, there shouldn't be a problem with running out of bandwidth.

Can your amazingly fast joystick port run HDTV?

If USB 2.0 could do this, a joystick should be a walk in the park

smerf

[smerf]

still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.

What about Windows?  Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..

Hi,

When DOS was around there used to be a small program that you could actuate through DOS commands to make a ram disk, I used to use it all the time to make 2K ram disks to put programs or save data into.

Tihs is a tset, if you can raed tihs lnie it maens taht you are one of the few poelpe in the wrold taht prboly fulnekd sepellnig.

smerf

[smerf]

What is this "floppy disk" of which you speak? I don't think I've seen one on a modern computer?

Hi,

@juan_fine

The first floppy disk that I can remember was 8 inch by 8 inch square with a rectanular hole usually in the upper left hand corner, this was the top of the floppy disk, the inside of the floppy disk was a thin round piece of magnetic medium that you could actually shake and it would bend or flap thus the term floppy disk. You would take this floppy disk holding the disk so that the notch was on the right hand side and insert it into a floppy drive, now the notch when uncovered would let the disk be written to and I believe the 8 inch floppy disk held a whopping 73 kbytes of data ( I could be wrong, it was a long time ago). Then they invented the 5.25 floppy disk that held a unheard of amount of data 180 kbytes, then they came up with a dual side floppy disk where you could write on both sides that held 360 kbytes of data, life was good, then they came up with a disk that they called a mini floppy disk that was 3.5 inches, why they called it a floppy disk I don't know because the magnetic medium was housed in a hard thin plastic casing, the first mini disk held 720 kbytes and then later on improved to 1.4 mbytes, the one thing I can tell you the 5.25 disks didn't hurt as much as the little plastic mine disks when the wife gets mad at you and starts throwing them at you, I mean those little plastic disks hurt when they bounced off your head.

smerf

[smerf]

The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.

You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?




Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.

What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...

Hi,

@bloodline,

excuse me, I will take my 3.1 operating system and load it into my old, slow, obsolete Amiga 4000 faster than you could load your Apple, Linux, or Windows whatever operating system. So there take that, stick that in your floppy disk (oops you don't have one) and smoke it. And I heard your music and don't like it anyway, even if you do have a small recording studio, the Amiga beats you there too, it has big equipment for big good recordings, but then what do you expect out of a Mac except a lot of noise.

smerf

[smerf]

@stefcep2

Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.

Hi,

@Damion.

I do it every day on my A1200, have no problems at all, As a matter of fact the other day I had my A1200 on playing mp3, was surfing the web and backing up the hard drive using DM2 with lharc and had a window open viewing pictures that I had just taken with my cannon camera.

Do you know how to use a A1200

smerf