PC still playing Amiga catchup

[shoggoth]

Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5

The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.

It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...

Dude, even an Atari can do split screen, and all of that has been available to PCs since forever. Even the ET4k chipset supported hardware scrolling, the Mach 64 had a sophisticated blitter (think the ET4k had one too, albeit not as capable), and this was like - what - 15-20 years ago.

Take a look at modern PC architecture. Separate busses, accellerated graphics subsystems, bus master controllers, nifty DMA solutions. It's not like all sane hardware concepts died with the Amiga.

Having said that, of course the Amiga is a wonderful machine and is still useful to date. It should however be viewed in it's rightful context.

[shoggoth]

Dude, you've recorded contact bounce (which means that you actually need to sample multiple values, which in turn means you get much longer readings than the ones you discussed earlier).

[shoggoth]

:lol: amigaski has forgotten that physical switches have a maximum switch frequency... any amiga joystick will use cheap switches that will switch far bellow 1khz

The funny part is that it's fairly common to poll the joysticks only once per VBL, which generally means every 20ms on the Amiga...

And polling at the frequency he mentions gives erroneous values - that actually means it's inferior to modern counterparts - which is even more funny considering the argument used in this discussion.

[shoggoth]

So in fact the Amiga hardware is inferior to the PC since it doesn't debounce the input signal hahaha

Human reaction time is also worth taking into the equation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time

Reaction time from visual stimulus is actially in the 200ms range, which means polling the joystick every 20ms is more than adequate.

[shoggoth]

Wrong.  When you move the joystick, left to right you go into a state of no-press for extremely small amount of time (sub millisecond); that's what you see there.  I only mentioned 1Khz; if you took that into account as relevant you would need much higher than 1Khz.  Your speculation that it's contact bounce is just that -- speculation.

No, it's fairly obvious that it's contact bounce:

239 0.034183 ms
231 0.011827 ms
239 0.011782 ms
231 0.034382 ms

1/(0.01ms / 1000) = 100000Hz. This is not joystick input from the user, this is contact bounce/noise. This is not speculation, it's an obvious conclusion based on your own readings. You on the other hand have interpreted this as "holy cow, this is accurate" - while it's actually not accurate at all.

[shoggoth]

If you sample at higher rates, you will capture more of the human reaction on the joystick than if you sample at lower rates.

That's true until you sample faster than the switch time of the joystick switches. Then you're recording contact bounce. Which you did.

[shoggoth]

Bullcrap.  You are taking only a small part of the data where fire button and joystick directions are changing.  It's not obvious if you take the data as a whole and see that the sub-millisecond timing only occurs sometimes.  If I stated microsecond changes as "accurate user input", I wouldn't be stating 1Khz.

Even if that was right, you still honestly believe that sampling the transition stages from e.g. left to right would have any impact on gameplay? Which planet are you from? What matters to the application is the intended directional input from the player, which renders the transition stages to be A: inaccurate and B: useless.

[shoggoth]

Am I the only person who thinks that this is an oxymoron?

I think it's bloody hilarious Please feed the troll.