PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Hammer]

So I have to run a 16-bit emulator under Vista-64 to run 16-bit applications although processor supports it in hardware.

The lack of Virtual 8086 mode when you're in Long Mode is a documented limitation of the x64 ISA.

It's better to boot into Vista-32. Are those applications like VirtualPC using processor hardware or doing a software emulation of 16-bit application?

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2005/pac346.pdf

"VT-x requires small emulator for real mode code".

[Hammer]

Once per frame boils down to VBI or some IRQ that's 1/60 second.

>Anyway, C64 games do it exactly as I describe and no one ever commented about C64 games being less accurate to control than Atari 8 bit ones. Ever. On top of that I seriously doubt that 8 bit Atari games have a main loop that runs faster than once a frame.

Believe me, all sample codes you find in books in BASIC and w/inline ASM don't wait for any 1/60 second IRQ/VBI to read joysticks.

>Furthermore.... Amiga basic programs!?
>Sigh. Amiga basic is dead slow. You are not seriously telling me you think these games update their main loop more than once per frame?

Sure, especially if code is small and running on 68020 or better.

>This is not relevant, because the games don't actually do it. And no one seems to notice.

You can just base it on someone's experience of noticing it that's why the examples of 22Khz/11Khz and MP3 were relevant.

>8 Bit CPU's did not have the time available. They ran their game loops once a frame.

You can't generalize on that since there's code that does read joysticks and there's no frame interrupts involved.

>Humans cannot react much faster than 200 or so ms. This means any input polling above twice that rate (100 ms) is not needed because this will perfectly reproduce the original input (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_theorem)...

As stated before, one human reaction does not translate to one joystick state.  

A digital joystick doesn't register "how soft" and "how hard" is the reaction.

[Hammer]

Symbolically however, the more scans that hit (1/On) the 'harder' the result.

I was referring to direction, deceleration and acceleration on the classic digital joystick.

[Hammer]

"Great" for you.  They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.

Both Real86 and Virtual86 modes are available in legacy mode.

[Hammer]

Some people still use DOS and Win98SE and other OSes that boot up in real-mode (16-bit).

Run it in legacy mode.

The argument is whether it's considered compatible w/o 16-bit support not how many people still use it

The legacy mode includes support for Real86 and Virtual86 modes.

[Hammer]

Actually there is a lot of argument that the memory is more efficient and that clever coding of the SPEs can make up for the limitations of the GPU and even surpass the 360s one.  

Personally, even if true I see that as a cop out.  Surely the point of a good games console is to make the developers job as easy as possible.  

It also cannot alter the fact that the Xbox 360 could use almost all its memory for textures if the software only needed a tiny amount for its use, and vice versa.  Plus there are a lot of the functions the PS3 has (voice chat in-game, custom soundtracks, etc) that were tagged on after launch and require a LOT more memory taken away from the games than the Xbox, as the Xbox had those functions built-in to the OS and optimised for its allocated memory space since day one. But we digress off topic now.

One of the major features of NVIDIA's G80 is the decoupled shader and texture units. ATI Xenos also includes this design.

[Hammer]

Retailers are not in it to make a loss.  
.

Offcourse they don't.

Space costs money.  PC games don't make as much for them because they don't sell as much.

I doubt very much that PC game sales would get anywhere near console game sales, may be if you compare individual consoles yes, but not the whole console game market.

These consoles are treated as individual platforms. The PC(Games For Windows) is just like any other gaming platforms.

Dell’s direct sale model doesn’t require the classic retail model.

[Hammer]

Guys, to be honest some of the technical detail you've gone into is over my head.  You are probably right about how more advanced modern PC operating systems are, in particular how their multitasking systems and memory protection ought to make for a more responsive system.  What i can argue though is what I see in front of me with my machines.

So I got out the 060 A1200 and just had a play with it.  No executive or other speed hacks.  I set up a Real 3D animation render in 640x480 24 bit shadows, reflection, refraction antialias, saving each frame progressively to hard drive, basically all knobs on.  I screen flicked to workbench: it was instantaneous.  On workbech screen (8 colors 640x480 productivity) the mouse pointer moved as smoothly and precisley as if nothing was happening in the background. I double clicked my hard drive partition with 25 drawers, no delay in opening and displaying them in window. I started unarchiving a 10 meg zip file to hard drive with Real 3D still going. I closed the window, the close gadget responded instanteously to my mouse click.  Opened the partition again, no delay.  Opened the games drawer with 28 drawers, no delay in displaying the window contents. Dragged the window, no delay in  redrawing the window.  Right clicked to bring the Workbench menu bar, which has 11 menues, many with submenu. Sliding the mouse pointer along the menu bar, each menu drawn instaneously drawn, no delay, no screen garbage left behind, no overlap of each menu as a new one is erased, no sticking or skipping of the mouse pointer as I slide it down each menu, mouse pointer totally smooth. Don't forget both Real 3D and the archiver are writing periodically to the internal hard drive.

Yes it takes longer to do the render in Real, it takes longer to unarchive the zip, but THE SYSTEM is still very snappy.

Contrast this with Vista on my 2.4 ghhz c2D with 4 gig ram and 7200 rpm hard drive and 256 meg Geforce 9200: The start menu jerks up, especially if I select the orb whenever anything is being read/written to the hard drive. The mouse pointer jerks as well, disappearing and reappearing somewhere unpredictably.  The system cannot highlight each item in the start menu as I move my mouse pointer, so it "jumps", ie it can't keep with the mouse pointer.

On your Amiga, install Amikit.

My ASUS G1SN laptop is fine i.e. it has Geforce 9500M GS with 512MB dedicated VRAM. I use Google Chrome and IE8.

Does your Geforce 9200 GS have dedicated VRAM?

[Hammer]

You never understood my point.  If I take an OCS machine with 68000 and run the program which works fine and now switch to an accelerator 68020/68030/68040/etc., the program should work fine (barring some rare exception).  You keep throwing in FPU/MMU into the picture to confuse things and thus your so-called experiment is a failure.

Run Breathless 3D AGA game on 68060 without 68060.library.

The "MC68060 processor, can't directly execute 64bit divisions and multiplications and Breathless engine use a lot of these instructions."

Refer to
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/MC68060UM.pdf?fpsp=1&WT_TYPE=Reference%20Manuals&WT_VENDOR=FREESCALE&WT_FILE_FORMAT=pdf&WT_ASSET=Documentation

Goto page 391
"Table D-1. M68000 Family Instruction Set and Processor Cross-Reference"

For desktop CPUs (for 68K based PC market), Motorola’s lossy legacy protection ultimately leads to PowerPC.

[Hammer]

I did in post #275 (way back).  I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed.  Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc.  Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software.  So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.

A CUDA GPU can resolve collisions i.e. as PhysX (Physics) CUDA accelerator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQMbFQVLhMc&feature=channel

One should not compared a modern GPU to Amiga's IGP.

>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.

For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things.  I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.

>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)...

You may have that-- but is that a standard.  If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.

Most Intel "SantaRosa" class laptops includes HDA class sound chip. My ASUS "SantaRosa" class laptop is similar to MacBook Pro of the same era.

[Hammer]

I did in post #275 (way back).  I stated some since then, but even those in post #275 haven't been addressed.  Part of the gaming interface is not just joystick speed but even the gaming elements are standard on amiga like sprites, collision detection, priority settings, blitter, etc.  Sure you can find some cards that may have a few of these but mostly it's done in software.  So amiga would win there as well when it you time how long it takes to find collision detection of various elements, move sprites around, etc.

>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.

For many things, Amiga audio is sufficient for things.  I know they have a method of doing 14-bit sound by merging amiga's audio channels which is more than enough for me.

>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)...

You may have that-- but is that a standard.  If not, you can buy an audio board for Amiga as well.

Most Intel "SantaRosa" laptops includes HDA class sound chip.

[Hammer]

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

Using Microsoft Habu gaming mouse (powered by Razer), I was able reach less than 1.0 ms e.g. 0.041 ms, 0.004 ms.

[Hammer]

I guess we're all screwed then, after listening to Amigaski's banter. :roflmao:

:roflmao:

[Hammer]

For a mouse that is totally relevant.  A mouse can detect your movements down to a really really small degree.  If you are playing a FPS and precisely controlling your movement it is perfectly possible that you might want to turn around quicker than the screen refresh rate can achieve smoothly, in fact its pretty much guaranteed.  
(SNIP)

Bought the gaming mouse for a WAN/LAN party e.g. America's Army 3.0 (using UnrealEngine3).

[Hammer]

No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware.
.

Audio devices usually needs to be shared e.g. browser (e.g. multiple Flash FLV), Mediaplayer/DivX/WinAMP (e.g. MP3, AVI, WMV), PowerDVD (e.g. Blu-Ray), system alerts/effects, Game for Windows, Skype, WinUAE, VirtualBox, Windows Remote Desktop and 'etc'.

 Application can take over the timer interrupt that OS is using for multitasking so OS won't be multitasking.  As I stated, see Amiga as an example of a computer that does this.  OS supports multitasking applications but it also supports single tasking applications that can use hardware fully to get the task done most efficiently.
.

Hit-the-metal applications breaks on Windows Remote Desktop or Windows Terminal environment.

[Hammer]

To continue.

http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbthread.pl/amiga/expand/163649?page=1

quote from foobar

"You forgot; they** still can not accurately poll a digital joystick at 1000Hz. "


**Refers to the X86 PC camp..