PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?

Yes.

[amigaksi]

Actually you have repeatedly gone on about how APIs are so slow without providing any data whatsoever to back it up. You sir, are lying.

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If you think I need data to back up a logical statement that APIs are slower than going direct to hardware, you have a problem.

>Right... The hardware guys, the software guys, and everyone in between else have effectively stated in various degrees of detail where you are going wrong.

Give the link.

>No, you gave a p-poor example that was shot down soundly by every other person on this thread for a variety of reasons.

Wrong.  Some people sided with me.  But you haven't even replied to refutations handed to you so why would you read those.

>Hah! Biased? Probably, I have a low tollerance for demonstrably BS posts such as those you have been ejaculating.

You have no understanding of what I wrote so I think you are better off leaving it to others to reply and take your insults elsewhere.  Because insults don't seem to change the truth or affect me.

>Yes it is, your original point was that the Amiga was better suited on the basis that it could react faster. You have since modified (I'm being kind here, slimed would be more accurate) your argument when it was shown that your original had no legs.

Amiga is FASTER to react to joystick input.  I am sticking to the point.  Amiga can sample at 15Khz not just 1Khz.

>And you were shot down, you then added the nonsense about the gameport.

I originally started with gameport not added it later.

>I have replied whenever asked and no one else has replied with a more technical answer.

Go reply then.  All my arguments have a REALITY basis.

>Err, no. As has been pointed out (repeatedly), Gameport is dead, in the same way that ISA is dead. Or are you now going to go on about other random legacy I/O to prove the supposed superiority?

If you read your own comments in this thread, you will see that you have modified your views.  I can still use Gameport under Vista/XP and I never dismissed USB either which by the way can also be put in Amiga machines.


It was a reasonable point. That you can't see it only goes to back up my assersions that you're nothing but a fundie.



By that same argument, so is ISA and I suspect if you looked hard enough, MFM and other wonderful ports of yesteryear. So again you've been thoroughly shot down on, well everything you've said so far, got anything else or are you done making a fool of yourself?



TL;DR

NO U[/QUOTE]

[amigaksi]

i have seen very few joyports on motherboards and the lack of joyport joysticks are deafening. in the past joyports were mounted on sound cards and not the motherboard. and those ports were most often used as midi ports.

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Your original argument was they all went toward USB.  But from your own links-- they have parallel port, PS/2 ports, etc.  They did make machines w/o gameports from same companies that also offered models w/gameports.  Yeah, you had to get a sound card for those machines that didn't have a gameport in order to get one.

>a few serial port mobos
>http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357

That link shows parallel port as well.

>and even if they don't have one on board
>http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&>Order=BESTMATCH&Description=serial+port&x=0&y=0

You can also buy gameport cards as well.  

>i would assume so. if they didn't then they are crazy.

Yeah, so someone was giving a hoot about gaming interfaces.

[amigaksi]

i see you really don't know what an api is do you? hardware errors are fixed in the driver NOT the api. the only reason an api changes if there is new additions to the api. aka the difference between directx 9 and 10.

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Just as you avoid erroneous API calls or work around them, you can deal with hardware bugs and work around them.  It's the same for both-- but I would say worse for APIs as too many versions confuse things.  

I know how IOPM works.  You have a very shallow understanding of it.  You can go direct to hardware and still have IOPM.

[amigaksi]

1. It might be, but the question still remain the same: who cares?
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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.

[amigaksi]

When it's tied to such gems as "PC I/Os aren't that fast". You're right, I do have a problem, because as has been pointed out, any reduction in performance by the API has more then been offset by the increase in hardware speed. Unless you can show the numbers, the whole argument fails. This is what I was trying to get accross to you with the point about objectivity - you don't dismiss something that big and get to claim to still be objective or logical.

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Don't mix things again to confuse people.  Chewbacca Defense.

PC I/O is slower than processor speed and memory speed (separate point).
Regardless of how fast the hardware speed, APis are slower than going direct to hardware.

>Those "refutations" have been sliced and diced by better folk than I.

IF you think so, then let them refute other things as well.  

>You're quite correct, doesn't change the point that you're wrong on every level on this one.

All you do is blurt out the same FALSE statements "torn to pieces" or similar remarks like "wrong on every level".  Shows how inept you are at understanding technical facts.  As I stated above, leave it what you consider "better folk".

>Oh it's 15khz, got anything to prove that the Amiga can actually differentiate the signal bounce from the actual pulse then?

Here it is again: Chewbacca Defense.

[amigaksi]

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

>Also any argument about digital joysticks is pointless.  

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.

>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.  

That was already refuted a few times.  Even if you don't need the high rate to read the joystick, you spend LESS CPU TIME if your joystick is faster.

Even for analog inputs, Amiga just has to start the POTGO and read the value at end of frame.  It's done by hardware.

[amigaksi]

Is it about time to close this thread as pointless bickering over a subject which is clearly not true?

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.

[amigaksi]

uh? do you not understand what moving toward is? i mean if they were eliminated you wouldn't need to move toward anything. i said there was resistance to eliminating ps2, that there is still industrial apps for serial and to a lesser extent parallel. i did say the transition from joyport to usb was an easier switch since joysticks in general are not super popular and in particular joyport versions.

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The part about serial being more significant than parallel:  I have dealt with hundreds of machines including laptops and parallel port is there but serial is not.  

Some companies never had a gameport on the motherboard to begin with-- they were targetting businesses.  So audio cards w/gameports were used and still available along with corresponding joysticks.  So I think not supporting gameport would be dropping quite a few users out there.

>and yet i didn't say they were not available just being actively phased out.
btw AT adapters are available for keyboards too. but are they mainstream?

The gameport support is more recent phenomena than AT keyboards.  I bought a surround-sound souped up audio card w/game port just 3 years ago.

>For a GAMING CONSOLE for them to ignore the gamepad would be stupid.

They ended up using those controllers on PCs as well.

[amigaksi]

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Which has for the last time been noted, but with the caveat that the I/O in question is an order or two of magnitude faster then what you're comparing it against, the result being that the speed loss in software is more then made up for in raw hardware performance.

How are you not getting this?
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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.

>I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.

If you purposely try to confuse things to escape from your dilemma of being wrong (being refuted), you are using Chewbacca defense.

>Until you can show (with real, verifiable evidence) that the Amiga can react to such input your whole argument is bunk.

That's wrong.  Faster interface is useful even if user cannot react to such input.  You are toggling back and forth between different views.

[amigaksi]

APIs enables the PC to quickly adapt and assimilate technologies.

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.

[amigaksi]

in an api you program to a standard codeset which the os can trap and kill if it goes awry.
in direct hardware you have a set of commands(loose wording) that directly control the hardware that has the potential to let multiple programs access this hardware simultaneously. this creates the possibility of causing a hardware lockup killing the system.

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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.

[amigaksi]

DirectInput can detect poll rates higher than 1Khz.


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


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

If you look at just the I/O overhead involved for fetching state of joystick, you will see that it involves multiple I/O instructions and other overhead and it's slower than a MOVE.W of Amiga.  And you are going through API which doesn't allow you to take over the USB for just joystick.

[amigaksi]

You haven't addressed Protracker 1.0 vs OctaMed V4 vs Deluxe Music interactions.
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I am not familiar with those applications.  Perhaps, you want to give description of what needs to be addressed from hardware standpoint?

[amigaksi]

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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.

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.

[amigaksi]

lol i think you should look again. nearly every machine i have seen that has parallel has at least one serial port.
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Sorry, 10 of the 12 machines I have do not have serial ports but have parallel ports.

>let it go this was old tech.

Sorry, gameport is more recent than you think.  

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
>http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2keyboard/
>eh only 6 years apart.

You miscomputed.  Game ports were on motherboards in 1990s as well as on audio cards.  I bought an audio card w/gameport just a few years ago.

>things developed for one market can often be used in other markets. the xbox controller was made for xbox. people wanted to use it on a pc so when the market speaks things happen (well sometimes, it sure made them think about it then.)

Original point was that someone is giving a hoot about gaming interface.