PC still playing Amiga catchup

[alexatkin]

It entirely depends on the game.

For example, I can pick up and play almost all racing games without having to learn the buttons.

The games I have a real problem with are RPGs like Fable 2, Oblivion and Fallout 3.  That said, those games would totally suck without all those buttons as you would spend too much time navigating the menu system.  Plus, those games are very much designed for you to play frequently and obsessively, so that you wont forget the controls.  If you can't get into those games due to the controls, then you have far more serious issues and those games are not for you.

Its true, I forgot what on earth I was doing on Oblivion because I left it too long since I last played.  Its also true however, that the controls are the least of my problems there, its the actual missions and what I did last that are bigger problems.  Even a complex control scheme you should be able to pickup after a few minutes.

Basically, you can't say modern gaming sucks simply because the games have more depth/detail and so require more controls.  I have more Xbox 360 games on my shelf that I love than I ever did on Amiga.  Granted partly because I was so young and had no money back then, but also partly because games are so much more fun.  

I, unlike some people, hate games which are so hard you only do a few levels then die and have to start again.  I used to get very bored with those games and while it means games are easier, I get a lot more enjoyment out of them which is the most important thing at the end of the day.

[alexatkin]

On the contrary, when Creative had to go from ISA sound cards to PCI ones they had a HELLOVA time making them backwards compatible.  There is also an endless list of "soundblaster emulation" cards which never worked right as because they were "hardware compatible" they couldnt fix it.  However if you use a higher level API and software drivers you can easily patch any compatibility problems later.

My god, I was upgrading in that era when they went from ISA to PCI for sound cards, half the time games wouldn't work properly.  Oh and lets not forget, soundblaster emulation on PCI sound cards is done in SOFTWARE, at least partially.  I believe its something to do with having to emulate the ISA chipset timings which is also why it did not work properly.

The switch to Direct X brilliant as you very very rarely get this sort of problem anymore, it just works.  Kinda breaks your whole argument that backwards compatibility is easy.

Now when talking graphics cards things get even worse as they are so much more complicated.  Do you REALLY think its cost effective to include legacy modes in every single new card you release?  

As for VESA, as I understand it that is still an API but it was mostly supported via the graphics card BIOS which is the only real difference between hardware and software support anyway.  That said, DOS games would always come with software VESA as many graphics cards lacked support, or supported the wrong specification.  So the whole VESA introduction could just have easily been done with software drivers anyway except as people were using DOS (Win95 was not yet a large enough install base to support exclusively) it was easier to keep it in the graphics card BIOS.  The instant enough people were using Win95 over pure DOS though they made the jump, as it was so much easier to support.  If keeping things in hardware was as good as you say, why was it so hard to get DOS games working properly compared to once they made the jump to Windows?
The overhead can't be that bad either as games still improved when we jumped to Windows instead of DOS, despite the fact by your argument the extra power in the PC should have been stolen in API inefficiencies.

And blimey, how large do you think the graphics card BIOS would need to be in order to have backwards compatibility for ALL GPU functions?  How often would it need to be patched to fix bugs?  Quite frankly, its just not practical and you damn well know it.  Using VESA as an argument just seems plain silly, given the above that early VESA was supported via software drivers - very much like how modern drivers support Direct3D today.

Nobody is saying that 100% accurate backwards compatibility would be a bad thing.  I'm sure there are a few benefits from a developers point of view (for a few very rare unusual applications), but you have to live in reality.  There is no PC standard which says your sound/graphics card must talk in this language (apart from VESA and old VGA standards), with these memory addresses, etc.  There is also the little thing of evolution to think of.  If you write a strict standard you are stuck with it, forever.  However with an API if you find more efficient ways of doing stuff at the hardware level, the only restriction is rewriting the software driver.  This is not a whole lot different to how it works at the hardware level except the risk/cost of doing it hardware level is insane (hard to fix once in production, huge BIOS to handle the translation).  And no, directly pushing bits around the GPU directly is simply insanity.  It was fine for Amiga because the chipset was relatively simple, but a modern graphics card GPU is going to be many times more complex than a whole Amiga so claiming that you should have the same hardware access is just plain silly.

Likewise when two competing companies make a graphics card with new functions, how on earth do you propose they would make them compatible with each other without an API?  You can't develop the standard that far in advance of the actual hardware development because you are keeping your cards close to your chest to beat the competition to market with the latest features.

Again, of course a hardware level API like VESA is handy if you want to bang the hardware more directly and save yourself some CPU cycles.  However nobody outside of an insane asylum is going to want that level of control.  Nobody actually NEEDS that level of control.

[alexatkin]

And this is where I am confused.

The whole argument here seems to be, isn't it better to be able to address the hardware directly for maximum efficiency as an API will always run code that "is not necessarily efficient for what you want to do" and "you do not know EXACTLY what it is doing".

Well guess what, you CAN address hardware directly - but you would effectively to writing your own OS.  The sheer nature of using an off-the-shelf OS makes it impractical to allow banging the hardware directly.  Why?  So that one application does not prevent another application from working correctly.  

Bang the hardware the wrong way or at the wrong time and you take the whole OS down.  This is why Vista changed the driver model to split it into kernel/user code instead of all being kernel code. Low-level driver code is the cause of 99% of Windows crashes.  Now instead of a lockup its able to reinitialise your graphics card so you do not lose your work.  Even Linux developers are trying to move as much as possible into userland for stability reasons.

APIs are brilliant for 99.9% of development.  If they weren't, they wouldn't exist.  
The other 0.1% that you NEED to bang the hardware directly on, well quite frankly its unlikely to be a mass market application so why would it even matter that you might need to build PCs with EXACT specifications so your application/OS will run?  In fact, surely some sort of embedded board is more suitable where you can choose EXACTLY what hardware you use.  A multi purpose PC will never be efficient (or necessarily usable at all) for 100% of the things you might want to use a computer for, at least not without additional hardware (it was already mentioned there are plenty of nice PIC boards for precise timing applications, etc).

And here lies the whole point.  Why would manufacturers bother to put a HUGE extra workload onto themselves in order to make their hardware compatible for that 0.1% of the development community who needs low-level access?

I find it hard to see that having low-level access to the GPU would be helpful in any way.  The whole reason APIs are good is because the time it would take to code low-level is completely nullified by the increase in computing power in the meantime.  By the time you optimise your code for current hardware, you could easily do the same thing using an API with the THEN current hardware.

I have Windows 7 running on a PC below its minimum specifications and its stuck using the Standard VGA driver (VESA presumably) and its almost as fast as using the stock driver on XP.  Sure with a standard advanced 2D/3D API for all cards it would be even faster, but again that is impractical and it wouldn't cover every eventuality.  

Often there are more efficient ways to operate different make/model cards for specific applications (games).  With a software driver it can detect the game running and use optimisations for that game - done by the card manufacturer who knows the most efficient way to code for their card.  Using your standards-based 3D this would be impossible, it would be down to the developers to put more effort into detecting different cards and tweaking the settings accordingly and altering how the API translates to low-level code would be harder, as its on the BIOS instead of a software driver.

[alexatkin]

Going on about how you could still bang the metal in Win98 is amusing, seeing as that was the single reason why it was such an unstable OS.

Personally, I do not want to go back to the days where I fire up a game, it crashes, and I have to hit the reboot button because said game had taken control from the OS so there was no way for the system to recover from that state.  Or even if the game did not crash, often it would have corrupted the OS environment so I still had to reboot before I could do anything else.

Now compared to today, you can usually recover from any crashed state because games are using standard API OS calls so the OS knows what it needs to cleanup.  You may still get some memory leaks, but at least you aren't forced to immediately reboot in order to continue using the computer.

Lets face it, even games consoles do not bang the hardware anymore for the most part.  They have an OS all their own, they multi-task and have to play nice.  Even then there are still stability issues because they run as close to the metal as possible on APIs.
Oh and they also still get to optimise and improve their gaming engines (yet another API).  Imagine the love if their engine had to bang the hardware directly, not to mention the complexity of porting it to other systems.

As has already been said.  The greatest thing about APIs is how you can write a game on the PC and easily port it to Xbox 360.  Even then there are quite enough optimisations you can do for that specific hardware, even though you are still writing for APIs.  There would be no use at all for banging the hardware as developers do not have the time/money to waste tweaking their code to that degree.

[alexatkin]

I have games on Amiga which take over the system and also come back to OS without it crashing so it's doable.  Also, I myself take over Windows 98SE OS and write directly to VGA memory and then restore the OS as if nothing happened.  In fact, there's a built in function in Windows 98SE although undocumented that lets you take over video registers.

Tweaking is unrelated to using hardware registers.

But you seem to be missing the obvious.  Code is so complicated these days (and hardware banging would not reduce that) that bugs will remain and said bugs cause MUCH greater problems if you are hardware banging than if you are using OS calls and other APIs.

Also, the reason for different versions of Direct X is again partly related to a need to NOT be fully backwards compatible, as its too complicated and actually reduces efficiency in the API.  

Often a newer version will remove older functions, because if you for example coding for Direct X 10 there are more efficient ways to do things and than calling some Direct X 9 function.  Also, developers often need a push to encourage use of the newer versions as if they don't use it, theres no point in the card supporting it.

Microsoft made a particular point for example of saying Direct X 10 was written specifically to take advantage of Windows Vista, with Direct X 9 still being included for backwards compatibility.  They are however, I believe, seperate libraries as a lot of changes in Direct X 10 involved more efficient ways of doing things that would not necessarily work well with some Direct X 9 API calls.

We can even use this example on HTML.  Certain tags get deprecated on newer versions to encourage the use of more efficient/clean/powerful ways of rendering a page layout.  If that did not happen, we would have an aweful mess of HTML 1 code with CSS.  In fact, to some degree that does happen but it would be a whole lot worse if they had not mandated that you cannot do certain things if you are aiming for HTML 3 compliance for example.

So basically, backwards compatibility while being useful is not always a good thing if it means you mixing/matching different ways of doing something.  Yes I know, HTML is not the same as banging registers but the reasons why its not a good idea are very similar.  The more different ways you can achieve the same thing, the more complicated the code and more likely you cause bugs and/or tread on other software causing instability.  You yourself pointed out that with an API you cannot be sure what calling a function is ACTUALLY doing.  Therefore is it logical to allow you do hardware banging, when you might be interfering with the code the API is executing?  

Doing hardware banging and API calls at the same time is just asking for trouble.
Doing just hardware banging is time comsuming to code, not useful for most people.  
So here we are today, mandating ONLY API calls be used.  Because its the safest more stable (and legible) way to code.

You also seemed to miss a point I made earlier.  We are not arguing that the PC is as good at precise timing as the Amiga, we know it isn't.  But the PC is intended to be an all purpose machine not for precise timing.  If you want strict timing you would use a more suitable machine, an embedded board of some kind or, guess what, the Amiga.  It does not mean the PC is "catching up", its the opposite, as the PC no longer NEEDS that functionality for what people use it for.

[alexatkin]

At the end of the day, stick your average PC user in front of:  Amiga OS, Linux, Windows, Mac.

Chances are they will figure out how to get on the Internet on the latter three, but stand no chance at all on the Amiga.  Mainly because they would be lucky if they even had a TCP/IP stack on it.

Come on, lets be realistic.  The point here is, that for the vast majority of user a PC does exactly what they need it to do.  This might mean it can't do a few things the Amiga could do, mainly because they are things your average user does not need to do.  The PC is a mainstream "do it all" machine, it makes no sense wasting time and money including backwards compatibility, except wheres its absolutely essential.  That is why they removed 16bit support from Windows some time back, it was no longer useful and just added bloat, bugs and more importantly a LOT of time wasted for the development team making sure it was still compatible with all the new stuff.

As we said before, why bother including support for the PC to be able to do stuff that 99.9% of the userbase do not need, and can easily be done on custom hardware more efficiently?  If the Amiga is better at this than a modern PC then excellent, but it also proves the point that it would make no sense using a PC to do it.  Why would you want to use a Ghz CPU eating around 150W of juice, to do something that a custom board could probably do in 10W?

[alexatkin]

My dual core 2.2 Ghz CPU eats around 35Watts.

My dual core 2.1Ghz laptop eats around 35W.  However my dual core 2.0Ghz PC eats nearer 150W, due to the GPU, HDD, CPU, having higher consumption.

The point I was trying to make is that you are never going to a get a general purpose PC down to the same power levels as a custom board, and the custom board will do the job better for these silly high-polling, hardware banging tasks that are being argued about in this thread.

Sure you CAN build fairly low power PCs, I in fact own a MiniITX touchscreen PC (board built into monitor) and am planning to upgrade it with lower power parts.  However you are pretty much talking custom boards then.  MiniITX boards often have hardware your average PC does not (watchdog timer, special digital connections for custom hardware) which is the point - the PC market has custom boards for this purpose as your average PC does not need the extra cost of including this stuff.

Your average PC is designed for Windows and does not expect hardware banging from anything but Windows and its drivers.  That is also why hardware does not bother to be backwards compatible, its not needed for the software 99.9% if people are running.  And the other 0.01%, can buy custom hardware to do what they want as they will also need custom software, so its well out of the scope of a common PC.

[alexatkin]

Incidentally, when I say "custom hardware" I was not referring to a PC addon card.  I was referring to embedded designs such as Minimig, that would be a completely dedicated, custom board, designed to do something far more efficiently than a PC can.

Programmable micro-controllers are so cheap these days, people are using them for everything.

I mean, does it really make sense to boot our PCs just to do a sum?  No, we still have pocket calculators (though mostly likely probably use our mobile phones).

[alexatkin]

And also...

I've seen better physics simulations from Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner compared to the CGI in Mr. Spielbergs War of the Worlds.

I hate to say it, but CGI in most movies is nonsense because they don't properly calculate the physic, light distortion, light scattering etc.

Too true.  I find in many ways it looks a lot worse than when it used to be done raytracing on an Amiga as they seemed to pay more attention to detail when it comes to those things.  But then, isn't that what raytracing was all about?

[alexatkin]

I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior.  I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware.  In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times.  So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there.  If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.

Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.

And we have been arguing back, that its illogical to use that as an argument because the PC is not aiming for that market.

The point being, the fact that the PC cannot do things as real-time as the Amiga is not a failing of the PC so is not "playing catchup".  The PC has evolved to do what the "average user" wants it to do.  If you want to do something specialised, use specialised hardware - thats the point.

Also any argument about digital joysticks is pointless.  Yes most Amiga games used digital, because that was all you needed for the games of the time and it was cheaper to build a digital joystick.  Nobody is going to spend good money mass producing something which is not needed, the reason less used peripherals are always (and were always) more expensive than common ones.  But today, games are in 3D and you need the control of not just an analog joystick but TWO as well as analog triggers.  The argument for analog buttons (something Xbox had but Xbox 360 might not, but Playstation 2/3 does) is less so, its a personal preference and most people do not care.  (I am comparing games consoles as those pads are often used on PC by gamers or PC clones of them) It allows more precise controls for the games of today and is why I actually enjoy modern games more than I ever did Amiga ones.  I did not really become a gamer until analog joypads game out with 3D gaming, those old games just did not hold my interest for the most part.

There are exceptions, I used the love Deluxe Galaga and would play Warblade (its PC reinvention) if I could on a games console with seamless hiscore tables for my friends list.  But even that potentially would play better analog, as you have more precise control over the speed you are moving (although that is part of the skill of the game so it would remain a digital control).

Bottom line, the power of the Amiga joyport is not an advantage for games.  As others have said, there is no logic to reading what the user is doing any faster than the screen redraw rate because you need the user/game feedback.  If you measure what the user was doing with the joystick more than once between refreshes they most likely would end up doing something they did not intend in the game, because you can only react to what you SEE.  What use is measuring the user pushing right even 2 times per refresh when you cant move them accordingly on screen as it may cause them to hit something, because they couldnt SEE that they needed to let go after 1 sample.

[alexatkin]

And THIS is what happens with modern hardware when you force developers to "bang on the hardware" vs developer friendly, API driven devkits. (not that the PS3 does not have APIs, but it requires the developer to do the work to get the 7 SPEs doing anything useful whereas the 360 does not)

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/ghostbusters-on-ps3-lags-behind-360-version-developer-explains/

[alexatkin]

Shouldn't the GB PS3 issue be about overpriced low spec hardware? Making it just a glorified Blu-Ray Player?

Yeah but my glorified Blu-ray player IS more compatible than other Blu-ray players, runs a free music video streaming service and gave me a few minutes of fun in Playstation Home when it was running an online community game.

That said, for any serious gaming its Xbox 360 all the way.  I too hate the Playstation pads, they give me the worst cramp.  Also the Xbox has a built-in scaler that outputs a far superior picture to my TV than its internal scaler can achieve.  Seeing as 99% of games are 720p needing upscaling to 1080p, it makes a HUGE difference.  A few games on PS3 do software upscaling, some look about as good as Xbox but others are terrible.

I think PS3 fits our argument quite well.  Its an example of hardware that tried to leave too much control in the hands of the developers.  Its lagging behind Xbox in game related features because they never thought to set aside some RAM and CPU cycles for multitasking, so only newer games can support advanced features like in-game messaging and custom soundtracks.  Its pretty sad that a system with a mandatory hard drive actually has less functionality in-game than a system that has to cater for the fact you might not have a HDD attached (Xbox).

[alexatkin]

Hi,

@Amigaksi,

You made the statement:

"There's good reason for it. Most computer companies used digital joysticks while PCs went for analog ones. Amiga also has analog interface as well, but people purposely chose digital joysticks."

Now I just found one of my old Amiga joysticks that don't work, I opened it up and it seems like it has a couple pieces of copper in there that act like springs and open and close like a switch, maybe you could explain how when these springs touch that I get a digital signal out of it, I am really confused and maybe you can help me figure out what went wrong with my joystick, I tried hooking up a VOM to it and it doesn't even move when I press the joystick, I looked for a digital signal comming out when I closed the good copper pieces, but my friend who owns it says that now signal is comming out of this joystick, and that it is totally useless and broke. Maybe you can help me out in troubleshooting this joystick.

smerf

And I thought you were going to ask how sampling at high frequency the action of the two copper strips touching , and the many variations in resistance it will have as it makes contact, is actually useful to a game.  Rather than just sampling once per frame and having a tolerance to determine if you pushed a button/direction or not.

Incidentally, this thread is the longest I have spent on amiga.org since joining.  I sadly do not have space to setup my Amiga and neither are there any games really that I need it to play, except the Amiga version of Mr Nutz which was cool.

[alexatkin]

To be fair, the PS3 also has a weaker GPU and a worse memory scheme than the Xbox 360. I see these to be more of a problem. Especially since Sony does have tools available to get you to use the SPU's relatively well even if you don't know how to (API's even ).

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.

[alexatkin]

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

Indeed.  It may be more accurate to sample quicker, but if someone presses left then right, then lets go of the joystick entirely, all within a screen redraw - your game does not need to know that.  In fact if your game DID react to that action it would seem like the game is not responding correctly to user input, as far as the person at the controls was concerned.

This cannot be compared to audio where you are trying to replicate an analog signal by digital means, so naturally the more detail you can record the better.  Whereas you do not need to record exactly what the persons hands are doing to sufficiently replicate what the game needs to know to react fast enough for it to appear seamless to a human being.  

Maybe if we 1kHz refresh rates on our TV/monitors we could perceive the difference (even if we cannot outright see every single frame itself) but we do not.  Its just logical that if you have a 60Hz screen update then that is the absolute fastest you need to update your game state and so the fastest you need to capture joystick input.

All your game needs to know is the state of the joystick right at the moment it needs to take action based on that input.  You are only going to take action once per screen redraw or again, it will appear to the user that the game is reacting oddly to user input.

In fact, most games may react even slower.  I remember distinctly that some games seem too sensitive to user input and could have done with making sure you are pressing the same button for several screen redraws before reacting.  Its all about synchronising the game response with the users reaction time.

So again, the polling speed of the Amiga joyport is no more useful for gaming than USB1.  Alas a PC keyboard seems pretty slow to react but its still "fast enough" for most games, to the point that home-made MAME cabinets using PCs just have a little keyboard emulator circuit wired up to the joystick and buttons.