What are the advantages of the present/future Amiga?

[alexh]

Beast96GT wrote:
If a new Amiga was produced:

1) What would be special about it?  What would make people want to buy it instead of a PC?  

It would be integrated into the head-rests of cars.

Beast96GT wrote:
2) How can the Amiga recreate the charm it once had as an inexpensive multimedia computer?

Dunno about you, but I certainly do not remember the Amiga as "inexpensive".

A Batman Pack which cost £399 in 1989 would cost in today's money (adjusting for inflation) £734.16. That is hardly inexpensive is it?

Beast96GT wrote:
3) What are the hardware solutions for the Amiga considering it typically uses hardware that can be outdated, limited in quantity, generally incompatible with market leader?

Emulation.

[alexh]

cicero790 wrote:
Do you know what vision is?
It is something that you force upon reality by strength of will. If the will fail, the intention fails.

Do you know what reality is?
It is something that is true from a certain  point of view at a certain time. it is no categorical imperative.

Do you know what insanity is? I think so ;-)

cicero790 wrote:
Tell me about the impossibility to create a highly innovative motherboard with Intel's chips and stamp the Amiga logo on it??

Impossibility, nothing. Improbability, well there is the mess which is who owns Amiga and its IP.

Plus have you never heard of AROS? The free x86 compatible OS in the Amiga style for generic (i.e. cheaper) PC's?

[alexh]

I have to disagree with quarkx (not for the first time).

The ethos of AmigaOS was to make the user experience easier and better to the point where it almost doesn't feel like you are using a computer.

It doesn't matter what hardware it uses. To be honest if you're even THINKING what the underlying hardware is then the OS + applications have not done their job correctly.

The most functional, easiest to use User experience is what it aims for. Stuff "just works".

Taking a crappy stoic stance of "it's not pure" is so lame and not what computing is all about.

You use words "Spirit" and "Soul" and I say that your ideas are the work of Beelzebub. You've missed the whole point of OS level computing!

You could argue that the spirit and soul of the Amiga was not in the OS level but in the bang the metal programming that grew up around the earlier computer systems. But I doubt very much you are a programmer or know anything about this area. You are just a user. (As am I)

[alexh]

you can bet there exists a program that will work on original Mac not on your so-called Mac.

I bet there are very few programs worth running that fall into this category.

If you find one of these programs and find you cannot live without it, there are numerous easy to use hardware level emulators at your disposal.

[alexh]

amigaksi wrote:
PCs are backward compatible for about 30 years; I can still run 8088 code on a Pentium IV.

No you cannot. The caches and internal pipeline structure means that a lot of code does not run as it was supposed to. I dont think you were a PC user during the transition to 32-bit x86 architecture and once again to the Pentium architecture. Either that or you've forgotten.

amigaksi wrote:
It does not matter the number; in fact, there can even be none-- just theoretically exist (someone may write one) and that would show it's not backward compatible.

Of course it matters. Creating a system that performs terribly for all applications just to support one or two rogue applications that are very rarely (if never) used (and have working equivalents) is just stupid. Like everything in life its a matter of numbers.

amigaksi wrote:
Well, unless the audio/kb/etc. of the new machine is a superset of the old machine, it would be hard to do any sort of emulation accurately.

Hard yes, but people have been working on them for decades. They are very good. Certainly good enough for a regular user. Because the MAC used libraries to abstract everything and there was far less "bang the metal" programming a highly accurate and compatible MAC emulator is far easier than say an Amiga emulator.

amigaksi wrote:
For example, you can't show real-time sprites all over a screen on a machine that does not have sprites.

Not true. It all depends on how much CPU power per VBL you have, what RAM bandwidth you have, what VBL synchronisation you have.

You think high level Amiga games use only hardware sprites? Of course not when the accelerated CPU's could pump 10x of them around in 1/10th the time.

[alexh]

quarkx wrote:
Why do you even bother with Amiga then if not for the hardware?

Same reason everyone else does. For the games & demos (and perhaps applications) they once used as kids.

quarkx wrote:
Why is the price of all the amiga stuff so expensive, if none of the hardware mattered?

But the price of all Amiga stuff isn't so expensive. You can pick up A500/600/1200 for next to nothing £10-20. The reason certain items are so expensive is because they were the items we coveted as children. The expensive addons we read about in magazines and dreamed of but could never afford. The GVP A530, Blizzard & Cyberstorm PPC, A3000 & A4000.

quarkx wrote:
By your argument, we should all just trash our amigas and run emulators, because the real stuff doesn't matter.

I would say that a great deal of us have done just that. The emulator is just a tool, it's easy to use. Works well (concededly far from perfect) and can perform much faster and to a higher specification than an Amiga we could realistically own.

It's still nostalgic to keep the old hardware. It looks better (or should I say different) on a TV that an emulator on a PC monitor. It sounds different. It feels different. But all these differences do not detract from the fact that it is slow and difficult to use compared to firing up the emulator. Which is why they remain in the cupboards for most of us a great deal of the time.

quarkx wrote:
The hardware is the most important part of any computer system, otherwise, you just have trash.

The software is everything. Today the hardware is nothing.(Although I admit that without the hardware in the first place there would have been no software).

[alexh]

DavidF215 wrote:
is there even an IDE available for AmigaOS development?

Cubic IDE

DavidF215 wrote:
Is StormC even still being updated or available? I recall SASC, but is it even still available? Are there any decent development tools for AmigaOS3.9 or 4.0?

There is GCC.

[alexh]

quarkx wrote:
without ordering it from halfway around the world and paying hundreds of dollars in shipping

I buy things from the USA all the time and do not pay lots of money on shipping. Put it on the boat with a 3 week delivery time costs very little!

quarkx wrote:
(and good luck getting that NTSC).An NTSC 1200 is  also rare, but not as hard to get as a 600.

Awe..

quarkx wrote:
Also, the software is worth NOTHING!

Did I say anything about worth? I said it MEANS everything.

quarkx wrote:
It's very hard to pirate Hardware

But as the years go buy it's more and more easy to emulate as the horsepower of the modern computers goes up and so does the number of hours of emulator programming.

amigaksi wrote:
Yeah, so stick to being a user then and stop telling people about what is the right way to program or better programming

Don't see me doing that ever... gimme some links. Answer: You cannot. All I said was you do not need a system with hardware sprites for realtime gfx. And you don't. FACT.

amigaksi wrote:
your statements reflect your inexperience. For some tasks you need to know the hardware behind the software.

Sometimes. Vary rarely at the user OS level.

amigaksi wrote:
If someone wrote a medical system to control medical instrumentation or some power plant relying to timing issues, he can't just get a new system that's not backward compatible (on the hardware level).

They have Amiga's controlling medical systems and power stations?

Yeah, I didn't think so. (AmigaOS is not an RTOS btw)

amigaksi wrote:
The Amiga systems retained their hardware register level compatibility, so it's more optimal to use it and NOTHING wrong with it. Read the PREFACE to Hardware Reference Manual for Amiga and it tells you the same.

Yeah right... not! They tried their best, but anyone who was present during the transition between OCS and ECS and once again between ECS and AGA will think differently. Numerous games failed to work or displayed graphical glitches. Admittedly it was usually the fault of the programmer who had set-bits in reserved fields in registers or used reserved hardware addresses (which were a mirror of another address)to get a few extra cycles of speed. 100% register compatibility... nope, didn't happen!

[alexh]

amigaksi wrote:

alexh wrote:
"To be honest if you're even THINKING what the underlying hardware is then the OS + applications have not done their job correctly."

From the very thing you replied to.

But we were talking about from the USER perspective! (OS + applications). The discussion concerned "Was a MAC was really a MAC if it had an INTEL processor?"

amigaksi wrote:
But you see the point that some applications are not even possible without going directly to hardware registers; even my floppy simulator does not work if I go through Windows API.

And you see the point that at the user level no-one cares! And if the OS designers and application programmers have done their jobs properly they do not even notice.

amigaksi wrote:
The defined bits are 100% backward compatible.

True, but the softies never listened.. they never do. Why use extra cycles to mask off those reserved bits when you can just overwrite them and it doesn't do anything :-)

[alexh]

amigaksi wrote:
It's always more optimal to go directly to hardware registers if the hardware is standardized

But it's even more optimal to go directly to the library level if the hardware is not standardized. Especially today.

amigaksi wrote:
and you also know exactly what is happening in your code and how many cycles it will take.

I can appreciate there are some very strange situations where that would be good. But I doubt you can count cycles on todays processors with all their caching, out of order execution and branch prediction? Or would I be surprised?

amigaksi wrote:

alexh wrote:
Like everything in life its a matter of numbers.

That's even more absurd.  It's okay to claim "Not everything is a matter of numbers" as an absolute claim since you only need one item to prove it like "love" or where quality is better than quantity.

All decisions today, especially in business are a matter of numbers. In our discussion I was trying to express that the decision makers at Apple decided that the customers need for the speed improvement offered by Intel processors was a bigger number than the customers need for 100% compatibility. And they were right, as the sale figures show.

amigaksi wrote:
Amiga is impossible to emulate for certain things on a PC.

Yes? Excluding I/O.. what would that be?

amigaksi wrote:
I would like to know what target machine (spec) you are comparing to since I have seen Macs emulated on Atari ST, Amiga, and various PCs and newer so-called "Macs".  That way we can better tell whether they can be called "Macs".

I was thinking modern x86 based systems.

amigaksi wrote:
Do you really think that setting 30 X,Y registers of sprites even on a 7.16Mhz OCS Amiga 1000 can be beat by a standard CPU/Graphics Card doing erasing/repainting of software sprites?

Surely it can? The bandwidth of DDR2 + 16x PCIe + 2.4GHz Core2Duo means the CPU can erase and repaint a 320x240x8 screen many thousands of times per VBL?

amigaksi wrote:
Think again.  It only takes a few microseconds on an Amiga 1000.

I'll try and do a little experiment and post back. Got to remember how to use VRAM shared memory extension :-)

[alexh]

persia wrote:
Tao Group is now Antix

Not true. Tao Group is gone. As is their IP, which they sold.

Antix is a new company formed from it's ashes doing something "totally" different.