PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Hammer]

Cop out.  That's what you always wind up with when you have no arguments left-- who cares?  Well, who cares about 2Ghz or 7Mhz?   To me (and millions of others) having IN AL,DX is more significant than processor speed.

>2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".

It can do more than 1Khz.  You are twisting things again.  All I said was some games can use the 1Khz.  It's more accurate.  And AMIGA IS FASTER in reading the joysticks regardless of the sampling rate of the joystick.

>"ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.

You don't even follow the flow of arguments.  API vs. direct hardware is a separate point (more generic).  Joystick polling is slower on PC whether you use API or direct hardware.  Stop misquoting me.

>3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming.

Sorry, but you said there NO gameports out there.  I don't see how you equate # of gameports with 486/Pentium/P3s.  

>That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all.

Sorry, Amiga also involved quite a bit and with hardware level compatibility.  Your speculation that it killed us all is absurd.  Why not state something logical or something people can prove.  Anyone can state his opinion.  The point is PC still hasn't equalled or surpassed PCs in all respects not "who cares".

>5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.

That's what you done anyway thus far in this thread.

If game controller in question is a usb device and running Windows XP SP2, "usbport.sys" can be hacked(via Hex edit) to support higher poll rate.

For 2006 Linux, the mainline kernel was patched to allow for the USB polling rate to be changed. There are two ways to do this. First a parameter can be added to the kernel commandline:
-usbhid.mousepoll=[polling interval] (e.g. for polling interval, 250, 500, or 1000 would be entered.)

The second method is when the driver is built as a module in which case the following command would go into either /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.conf depending on the distribution:
- options usbhid mousepoll=[polling interval]

[Hammer]

How is it clearly not true?

PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced.  They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced.  They are still playing catch-up in some areas.  Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.

APIs enables the PC to quickly adapt and assimilate technologies.

[Hammer]

Cop out.  That's what you always wind up with when you have no arguments left-- who cares?  Well, who cares about 2Ghz or 7Mhz?   To me (and millions of others) having IN AL,DX is more significant than processor speed.

>2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".

It can do more than 1Khz.  You are twisting things again.  All I said was some games can use the 1Khz.

DirectInput can detect poll rates higher than 1Khz.

  It's more accurate.  And AMIGA IS FASTER in reading the joysticks regardless of the sampling rate of the joystick.

Read up on USB "High Speed" 125 usec spec.
 

>"ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.

You don't even follow the flow of arguments.  API vs. direct hardware is a separate point (more generic).  Joystick polling is slower on PC whether you use API or direct hardware.  Stop misquoting me.

USB "Full Speed" poll rate can be higher than 1Mhz.

[Hammer]

They are doing some sort of hardware interface anyway even when they target APIs, but instead of all manufacturers of said product using same hardware interface they are using same APIs which is suboptimal.

You haven't addressed Protracker 1.0 vs OctaMed V4 vs Deluxe Music interactions.

How would they know every CUDA processor variant? G84M A2 and A3 stepping has different voltage parameters. Drivers can detect the steppings and adapt accordingly. The reasons for different stepping are due to manufacturing issues. Geforce 9650M GT and Geforce 9500M GS have memory timings.

Is the user land programmer going re-implement the power management for my GPU?
Setting the wrong P-states can destroy the GPU e.g. if you didn't install the latest NVIDIA driver and BIOS patches, you might invoke NVIDIA's G84/G86's "blackscreen of death".

Setting the wrong memory timings can corrupt display e.g. Geforce 9650GT running mod desktop driver corrupts the display, while it's fine on Geforce 9500M GS.

Subsequent hardware fixes introduce inconsistencies.

Standards usually have a long verification times e.g. X64 development vs CUDA development.

[Hammer]

You are not getting it:  if I have IN AL,DX which takes 1 microsecond and w/API bullcrap it takes 1.2 microseconds then if you speed up hardware so IN AL,DX takes 0.6 microseconds then the API version will still be slower.

USB "High Speed" spec has 125 usec. IF the APIs brought USB "High Speed" to Amiga’s joystick speed, you shouldn't see USB "High Speed" having 40MB/s effective bandwidth.

From usb faq
Signals
1.   Does USB support data rates besides 12 Mb/s and 1.5 Mb/s?

A:   Yes. The new hi-speed data transfer rate is 480 Mb/s. There is, however, wide variation in edge rates. With typical line loads, full speed devices usually fall in the 12-25 ns range, and low-speed devices typically range 110-225 ns.

[Hammer]

If PCs don't care about doing the real-time stuff and leave it to hardware, then Amiga wins.

QNX RTOS X86 likes to say hi.

 If PCs don't care about digital joysticks

The digital joystick's on-off nature doesn't belong in simulation type games. Amiga's digital joysticks would $uck on PS3's Grand Turismo 5.

or making interface faster, then Amiga wins.  I can say Amiga wasn't meant for faster and faster processor design.  Actually, even Atari ST was faster than Amiga in terms of processor speed although Amiga came out afterwards.

Atari ST has a !@#$% IGP.

[Hammer]

P.S. Can we drop the hardware calls argument. They are fine for dedicated arcade systems, but have no place on a modern computer. The bitching should be aimed at said operating systems.

I learned PEEK/POKE statements on the Vic 20. But I had no need to hit the hardware on the Amiga. Did I miss out on anything? Probably not.

Capcom's Street Fighter IV Arcade edition  runs on Core 2 Duo and Geforce 7900GS based wintel PC (aka TAITO TYPE X2).

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=905

[Hammer]

I am not familiar with those applications.  Perhaps, you want to give description of what needs to be addressed from hardware standpoint?

Access conflicts.

[Hammer]

Didn't see that bottom part-- even CGA had method of setting frequencies that damaged monitors but VGA didn't allow for that on hardware level.  

Actually, I would favor not even fixing hardware bugs in future upgrades to hardware-- so it remains consistent.  In fact, many people use the hardware bugs as features in their applications and expect them.  I know in Atari GTIA chip has a color clock delay in one of the graphics modes which people use to produce interlaced modes with double resolution.

Such statements would be unwise in the light of Geforce FX VLIW experiment.

[Hammer]

How is it clearly not true?

PCs have been playing catch-up ever since Amiga was introduced.  
They have had higher processor speeds/computational power even before Amiga was introduced.  They are still playing catch-up in some areas.  Their API method of approach is making it worse for them.

Classic Amiga wasn't a serious threat against SGI and it's OpenGL standard. Both ATI and NVIDIA follows the SGI’s approach.

Classic Amiga is not competing against the “PC” i.e. it’s competing against redressed old school RISC vendors e.g. DEC (AMD, Intel, Microsoft), SGI (ATI, NVIDIA).

[Hammer]

You are thinking doing multitasking while someone is accessing directly the hardware and trying to avoid conflicts, but I am talking about just allowing an application to use hardware directly.  You can do that with IOPM or Amiga does it by the application not allowing other applications to run at the same time.

>uh nope if a piece of software requires directx 10 or higher it is cut and dry. directx 10 even has backwards compatibility with previous versions. also this piece of software installs the version it needs on install.

But they also fixed bugs in higher and higher versions of DirectX; so you need to know whether to avoid the bugs or not.  

>yea i do have a shallow understanding of it. but what i understand is that it is a gate system. and the port is open or closed. that it is very simplistic in operation. but closing the barn door after a lockup is not of any use.
>In order for the os to really control the flow you will have to adopt some form of api this way the os can refuse to pass on something that is not properly executed. this is the point of an api.

No, you don't need an API.  Windows for each task keeps track of an IOPM and it can set IOPM to enable hardware ports needed by that application and application directly accesses that port without any API/drivers involved.

"Hit the metal" userland applications would break on Windows Terminal Environment and reduce stability.

[Hammer]

Classic Amiga isn't competing against anything, the company that produced it went belly up 15 years ago.  It's a hobby machine that some of us find fun to play with, it's a bit of history.  It's a great learning tool to learn the basics.  Modern OSs do everything for us, the Amiga doesn't, it forces you to understand what you are doing and do it manually.  There is no competition for classic Amiga except the competition against time and electronics...

I was mainly referring to SGI and DEC during the early 90s.

[Hammer]

Problem is more about getting all states of joysticks regardless of what a human's reaction time is.

If there’s a problem with USB’s data capturing capabilities then would a problem with audio capturing capabilities. Note that my mouse is basically an optical scanner.

[Hammer]

Hi,

UHHHH, Maybe if you only use a Windows installed computer once or twice a year, come to think of it I have never seen a Windows computer that is used every day go without at least 2 crashes a year, that is why the place where I work has an IT department staffed with about 200 personnel, they are either fixing computers or re-installing windows on them. My one last thought, would you board an aircraft if you knew that windows was running all the digital instrumentation on it?, or would you drive a auto if you knew windows was running your auto computer?

Now my A4000 which gets turned on for use at least twice a week hasn't crashed since 1993 and still has my data on it since then, and I must admit my 2 gig hard drive is getting quite full, I still have about 1.2 gig free for use, might be another 10 years and I will have to think about installing a larger hard drive.

PC users can you claim this?

smerf

The X64 PC can still run MS-DOS 1.0.

[Hammer]

Only if you do buffered transfers are you going to get high transfer rates.  

The point was to capture information from analogue world and convert it to digital world.

For fetching just state of joystick, you have considerable overhead.

It doesn’t negate the higher poll rates.

  And there's a big "IF" there as well since USB joysticks are using very low rate to begin with.

Due to the dominance of 3D FPS and RTS, the mouse is the primary gaming device on the PC.

[Hammer]

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

Laptops are usually shipped with slow hard disks i.e. upgrade to 7200 RPM types.

After NVIDIA's mobile G8X GPU mess and EU's WEEE directive, large number of  14 to 15.4 laptops includes replaceable MXM GPU card. For example, 14.1 inch ASUS N80 laptop includes a replaceable MXM-II GPU card.

Refer to
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39253999,00.htm

In 2008, there's about 31 million gaming laptops sold i.e. an install base that rivals Xbox360 and larger than PS3.
Refer to http://au.gamespot.com/news/6210424.html

"The study further found that 42 million PC desktops and 31 million notebooks capable of playing games were shipped during the year;"

In terms of annual gaming laptop unit growth (i.e. 31 million per year), it easily beats the combined Nintendo Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 annual unit growth.