PC still playing Amiga catchup

[jkirk]

well you must be the only person on the planet that sees no value in fast booting and shut down.  Go to any Win 7 forum and you'll see boot up and shut down time is a MAJOR concern of many many PC users, so much so that MS has gone out of its way to reduce both of these in Win 7, making sure that people know about this as well.  Unlike you, most people do turn their computers on and off numerous times in a day, maybe to surf a bit, send an email, do some banking, and then live the rest of their lives, only to do boot up a few hours later to do the same, or something completely different.

 quantify most. all you see on forums are a vocal few and not everyone. i for one am betatesting win 7 and have never posted anything. furthermore i don't shut my computer down as a pc really is really not designed to be started and shut down repeatedly.  

Regarding shut down, I don't like to remeber the times I've had to leave the house quickly but have to wait for the PC to shut down, or I leave after shut down, and coming home to find some stupid process has stopped the shut down and the PC's been on for 8 hours.  Never happened with Amiga..

 no the amiga refused to shut down. on my amigas i could never use the menu to shut down workbench. there was always a process running in the background that had to be killed first(usually several.) on my setup i could not find a program to automatically kill those processes. so i just hit the power swich to shut it down. since amigas didn't cache anything this was harmless as long as the hd drive light was not on. but guess what a pc does cache files on the harddrive so trying to hit the power switch can hurt it. this is the only reason you can shut down an amiga faster.  

Application start up time is a real measure of the user experience.  I get on the net on my A1200 68060 far more quickly than my PC.  I have the google home page up faster on ibrowse than i do with Firefox; from the time I launch both browsers  Its a joke that ancient hardware can do this.  Try loading Word 2003 on a PC from 2003 see how fast it loads..and tell me if you enjoy your experience with loading Fireox3 on that as well.

 lol you funny. yes ibrowse would load faster since it is optimized for the basic hardware for amigas. so it stands to reason that an 060 would blow it up quick. now for a something to blow your idea out of the water.  i have used windows xp on a 380mhz pc and had the same experience as my 3ghz athlon ----why you ask? because microsoft has built timers into the os so the feel won't change with succesive hw upgrades. this is an asthetic decision and the delays actually help with compatibility. go and load up a pc version gold box game on a modern computer and you will see what i mean.

[jkirk]

...and the AT was released the year before the Amiga came out, what's your point?

actually what hurt the amiga and ALL other computers was the pc/at was closely related to business computing. when people wanted to have a computer at home the first choice was a computer compatible with their work pc. however the aos didn't have any competition(os function wise) till win 95. at this point the amiga STARTED to show it's age. and by coincidence 1995  was 1 year after commodore went belly up. if commodore had survived i believe aos would have kept up with the pc but this was not to be.

granted aos stillhad advantages but in an os you look at the whole package not just bits and pieces. i could have the best revolver in the world but without bullets it is nothing more than a keepsake. maybe in a few years amiga can make a comback but with all the bickering between companies and backstabbing i have my doubts about that.

[jkirk]

As I said, you can have both APIs and hardware level compatibility.  For PCs, that's a big problem nowadays.

actually that is not an issue. if you allow direct hardware access then when the hardware changes you have to emulate the old chips. after a few generations that will be unwieldy as heck. this is why commodore was moving away from this idea of direct access before they died. they were trying to force everyone to create os friendly games and apps. this is so they could phase out hardware compatibility for older software. that was the first phase to allow retargetable graphics and sound.

[jkirk]

Hardware is not supposed to suddenly change-- it's suppose to retain backward compatibility like for example 8253 is still in modern PCs although they added other means for timing things.  It's more efficient to do ASM instructions that directly read/write I/O ports than go through API calls.

let me come at this from a different perspective.

how many chipsets are there currently?
vid cards?
sound cards?
lan cards?
each brand has their own way of addressing the hardware. there is no one generic hw codeset to directly address all brands of control chips. there is always some functions that will be manufacturer dependant.
now would you really want to program for each one individually or program for 1 api built into the os that does the translating for you?

now to compound this each generation of each manufacturer the direct means of addressing the chipset will change. are you willing to rewrite your program with each new piece of hardware release or would you rather program to a non-changing api that the manufacturer creates interface drivers for.

you see the original amiga and aga amiga had the advantage of being the same hardware regardless of machine so people were able to get away with banging the hardware while programming. this also stiffled what commodore could have done with their chipsets since they had to maintain hardware backwards compatibility. this is why commodore was trying to move people away from doing that.

[jkirk]

Don't see why it would "stifle" things.  Hardware compatibility is a good thing; API-level compatibility is not as good-- slower and harder to compute response time overall.

if you find one method inefficient in the current system you can change the system to be more efficient then create a driver to interface with the api. if we maintained hardware compatibility you would have to either create both chips on one die or use the existing inefficient method. both are bad since putting both on one chip would be expensive. and using the inefficient method will prevent optimization to improve performance.

[jkirk]

They speed up processors and functionality while maintaining compatibility; they sped up VGA and functionality while maintaining compatibility; Creative Labs made all those Sound Blaster cards while maintaining backward compatibility.

the only reason this is there now is for a generic driver in the bios to display bootup messages. and windows to load a generic driver on initial bootup. this is not backwards compatibility just a basic commandset.

nearly all soundcards use the soundblaster 16(compatible) commands also for a generic driver.  however to get the most out of it you need the driver for the card you are using. all they did was create a subset on the chip for the most basic functionality. so no there is no backward compatibility just SB16 compatibility.

simply you are mistaking backward compatibility to a basic codeset for initial bootup.

in cpu chips the basic x86 codeset is maintained as is the extensions added to improve the performance. the hardware does change tho they have to make allowances for all those commands. they become more complicated and problematic because of this.
see errata(pentium4)

[jkirk]

More often than not, this backward compatibly that the hardware offers, is actually just an emulation... which links nicely to amigaski's other "ignorance thread"...

true true

[jkirk]

Did I start this? Or were they already at each other throats? :griping:

Interesting read anyway.

lol no this has been going on on a couple threads.

[jkirk]

Take an easy example of trying to use more than 256K of VGA memory.  Each VGA card implemented its own I/O Window register like $3D4 or $3CE.  There are hundreds of different I/O Window registers some using 4K banks some 64K banks and then there are various methods of using the linear memory mode at various memory mapped locations.  Now all this could be a single Window register and single linear memory area if things were standard like they were for the basic VGA card (A000:0000, $3C0..$3DF, etc.).

they are standard. standard through the api. this way you create a program and the os retains control over the hardware. after all it is an Operating System. not window dressing for direct hardware access.

i am not going to say that the api system couldn't be implemented better. what i am saying is this method is fine and is not a problem.

[jkirk]

OS does retain control of the hardware but it application can also use it directly-- the way it's set up in Amiga.  APIs will always be worse than direct control from efficiency point of view and knowing exactly what is happening in the system.

no if you access the hardware directly you are doing an end run around the os. this introduces the potential for failure on future(or even current) hardware.

[jkirk]

So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.  

then you are not reading too well.
the ability to retarget a command IS the advantage. there is no feasable way to have easy to program direct hardware programming that all chips support and still advance at a reasonable rate.

this is what happens in current systems today.

Hardware>driver(translator)>directX(or other standard api)>program

when new hardware comes out all that needs to be made is a driver to translate to the api. this is the strength of the system. yes there is some sacrifice in speed but even with this sacrifice you don't lose much.

you can't have your cake and eat it too.

[jkirk]

The fact that they recently dropped the Gameport and decided to use USB joysticks (which are still slower to read) should tell you that someone is giving a hoot.

perhaps you misinterpret this. there is this movement in the pc world where legacy ports are getting replaced by a single port(to make them cheaper). perhaps that is where the reason lies.

keyboard
at>ps2>usb

mouse
serial>ps2>usb

joystick
joyport>usb

Printer
Parallel>usb

External Modem
serial>usb

see a trend?

[jkirk]

Not if hardware is backward compatible.  You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware.  There's many on PCs as well as Amiga.  It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them.

actually you just told us why an api is important.

You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware.

now while that is true just because you can don't always mean you WILL have well behaved programs. as such the api offers an easy way to write a program and Forces you to make the program compliant.

another thing a good api has contingencies in case a function does not work. it is not just about speed but also reliability. operating directly on the hardware could cause an exception which could freeze not only the active program but also lock up the os as well. even if that program was written properly.

[jkirk]

Not everything needs to be retargetted.  It's better to have both API and hardware level compatibility so if you want to retarget go through the API.  Why force people to accept retargetability even if they don't need it and force them to use less efficient means.

simply because there is no one entity that can force all hardware manufacturers to abide in any one standard. as such there has to be a buffer this buffer is the api.

There's not just sacrifice in speed though.  You also have restrictions on what API allows you to do with the hardware.  Many Amiga games wouldn't be possible if they only relied on API calls.

this is true however as these new features come into existance the api is updated with functions that allow you to use the features that programmers need and want implemented. as such those games are still possible you just need to be creative with what you have.

[jkirk]

There may be move toward USB, but the fact that they left certain ports in while eliminating gameport should indicate they are trying to improve gaming interface.  I.e., they are admitting gameport sucks and user is better off using another interface.  Newer audio cards also aren't using gameport although it was built-in into many audio cards.

actually that port was the easiest to replace because it was relatively unused by most users. those that did use them just went with the flow and upgraded to usb. they were not singling out gameport users. ps2 users resisted the change so they tended to hang around. same with parallel users(until usb printers became common) now they may or may not be there an motherboards. serial ports are sill used for industrial applications even tho outdated so those are usually still on the motherboards.