PC still playing Amiga catchup

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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.

I though I'd find a nice little article for you that details the problem Apple have faced:

"
Managing the platform

Another aspect to keeping technical specifications out of the limelight is that Apple is careful to expose access to hardware components in a manageable, sustainable manner. If developers are allowed to write "to the hardware," the result is a broken platform where the vendor can't move forward without breaking the apps.

Apple experienced this problem in the clever hacks to the classic Mac OS which resulted in destabilizing the system, a problem that got progressively worse after the company sanctioned the system patches in System 7 under the name Extensions. In Mac OS X, reference releases have been plagued by Input Manager hacks that similarly caused some serious compatibility problems.

That has led Apple down the road of a tightly managed iPhone platform where the execution of third party software requires code signatures and sandboxing, and where access to hardware has been roped off until the company could perfect abstracted public access to features in a way that can accommodate new underlying changes as future models are released.

Users shouldn't need to know how much RAM is available to the operating system of a mobile device, or how fast its primary CPU core is clocked at; what they should care about is how usable the device is and what it allows them to do. That's the message Apple is working to control."

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Sorry to disagree, but I can boot up in REAL mode in DOS using a floppy disk and write to same I/O registers directly for many sound blaster cards, read/write DMA data, read/write memory mapped areas for VGA, etc.  There's no OS running that is trapping the I/O locations or memory areas and emulating the features.  Some may be doing it in software, but those examples I gave I know aren't just software running in the background.

You have no idea what the BIOS, either on the mainboard or the PCI cards is actually doing. For example, the VESA/VGA support on many modern GFX cards is provided by emulation... The EFI firmware on a very modern Computer, uses emulation to support older technologies...

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Never heard of OpenCL-- but OpenGL is also an API standard.  I think the problem with VGA cards occurred when no hardware standard was set for going past it's basic 640*480*16/320*200*256.  People started writing their own methods of doing 640*480*65536, 1024*768*16777216, etc.  

Some important points here:

Even at that point, it wasn't that bad since you could set the mode via VESA BIOS and still go directly to A000:0000 and use the I/O ports for palettes.

The BIOS is a software API... the very thing you are arguing against... in fact it was the fact that the BIOS abstracted the hardware that lead to the popularity of CP/M (the forerunner of MSDOS).

But then it got worse and worse as more and more features got added by various vendors.

And this is why we use APIs!!! Ok, so you have now successfully argued against yourself, maybe you understand

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Ahh, cheers for that! I am curious though how it compares to other processors in the x86 family now though.

But again, thanks for pointing me to that.

While some members of the x86 family (I note the 286 and 386) were horrific fankenPuters... The x86_64 is actually pretty hot, AMD pretty much cleaned out all the old cruft and once the CPU is in "long mode", I can't think of a better* general purpose CPU right now



*it's pretty cheap too, always a bonus

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But Smerf don't you get their standard reply yet:  "they don't use a floppies, so they don't format them, they don't care, it doesn't matter.  PC wins"

It is a valid response, tell me how many music tracks you can play while saving a program to an audio cassette on your amiga?

Once hardware has become obsolete, it is no longer on the good side of the catch up game.

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Too funnny!!  We now have a "good" and "bad" side of the catch up game.  Floppies are still being made and still being used..on PC's.  Never ever saved any amiga program to an audio cassette ( can it be done)

The catch up game is a two horse race, and you don't want to be the trailing horse...

I've never saved any PC program to a floppy using a Mac (or Window Vista), can it be done?

Audio cassettes are still being made and used, I even dusted off my old ZX81 and loaded a space invaders game from Audio Cassette to show my younger brother* a little while ago!

*He's 14 and has little idea what a floppy disk is, CDROM, Email and USBflash drives are all he knows.

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Changing the scheduler to one of seven different types is not the same as changing the behaviour of a single scheduler.

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?

You have to remember that scheduling algorithms available now are far in advance of what was available back in the 90's... as Karlos correctly pointed out, the amount of metadata the algorithm can call upon in Linux/WinNT/OSX is huge, these OSs use very complex dynamic system to ensure a fair spread of CPU time (across multiple cores!)... If you could add such a system to the Amiga Exec (you can't since much of this metadata relies on memory protection etc) then you could compare...

-Edit- What I'm trying to say is that swapping out the schedular on a modern system doesn't make much sense... You are basically complaining that the new Ford Mondeo doesn't have anywhere to stick the crank handle...

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It fosters rapid GPU hardware development.

This is true, having a standard API allows designs to improve rapidly, The Amiga hardware went basically unchanged for 8 years... the C64 even longer... but your average nVidia GFX chip has a product life cycle of 6months!!!

Can you imagine how much work it would take to ensure that 30 generations (assuming a new product every 6 months since 1994) of hardware compatibility was included in the latest chip?

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It really hard to think of a use for a floppy, they hold about a quarter of an average song or half a holiday snap.  My Flash drive is far smaller and holds 8 GB.

My experience with floppies was not a happy one, they were prone to failure, slow and just cantankerous.   I don't miss them one bit.

I miss floppies, like I miss smallpox...

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You mix up nonstandard hardware with standard hardware.  If hardware is standardized on I/O ports, memory map, etc. the old software still works on new hardware the same way.

You're speculating that Amiga going bankrupt is due to hardware compatibility.  That's one of it's good points.

Commodore was unable to react as quickly other companies...

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

Wayne

OMG!!! Stop being like an old Austrian dude with a weird Germany complex and strange ideas about race and empire...

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But is it? I can plug a large hard disk in what passes for my PC's gameport today and transfer files through it at over 400Mb/s.

I can't really do that on the amiga gameport.

I think warpdesign was being ironic

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what was interesting about this was this:

"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."

So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue.  Quite simply, they aren't.

secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and

Thirdly $50!!!!!!  or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that.  Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..

RAM is precious... if you want super duper mega ultra highspeed large storage... then you use an SSD... but to be honest I find a nice modern ordinary Harddrive fast enough... even my laptop drive is fast enough for 24bit/96Khz multitrack recording!

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You need to go on with "and so on" and state the other reasons why Amiga is still useful.  If PC is playing catch-up in some areas, PC needs to evolve in those areas so you have no argument.

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?

And why does one have to update to 3Ghz if the work can easily be done with a sub 100Mhz machine with a superior direct to hardware compatibility where you know exactly what is happening in the system from software perspective and don't have to play guessing games.

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)...

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I see your EMU10K and raise you a MOS Technology 8634!!

Emu10K... pah, I have one of those on a card I'm not even using (in my old PC)

Actually I found my old SBLive 1024 a bit of a pain for line in audio capture. There's a noise floor of about -80dB that you can't seem to get rid of.

I still have one too!!! With the "live drive", it was a good card and I did a lot of work on it from about 2001 to 2004... Then I moved on to Mac and Firewire equipment. You are right though, the Live isn't great for recording

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Dodgy M$ timer:

This is an experiment for those of you with good internal clocks. Play your favourite House/Dance track on Windows Media Player and watch the progression bar. To me, it doesn't appear to keep the beat.
Let me know.

A few years ago (2003), I wanted to get some of my old OctaMED files into Logic 5...

The solution I came up with was to play the OctaMED file via MIDI into the PC, which was set to record... (The Amiga had no way of getting files out other than via floppy, and OctaMED's save SMF function refused to save properly).

I had both machine set to the same BPM... but the Amiga drifted out quite dramatically over the course of 3min... I had no choice but to work out the Average BPM and use that... quantizing the musical data on the PC later... That was my first experience with the lameness of the Amiga's timing.