PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").


Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.

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You just like comparing nonexistent things.  Compare with reality.  Amiga OS is a minority so it wins since it doesn't need as much security as Windows XP.

>But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!

You missed some posts.  C64 does not have BOOT option.  You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.  

>And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.

I have seen hundreds of users where there system slowed down by general use.  Majority of people are NOT experts at eliminating whatever garbage has gotten into their system.  It's the OS writers fault (who are constantly updating their OSes anyway) to realize this and fix it.  Otherwise, it can be stated that in general Windows XP boots slower than Amiga OS.

[amigaksi]

Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?

Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?

I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
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The problem with writing all the reasons at once is that the thread goes in all different directions.  So gradually different reasons are being mentioned starting with the simplest that the joystick interface on Amiga is much much superior to the PC's joystick interface.  Now, we have got some PC fanatics having problems with this obvious fact so how can someone prepare a list of other things that are more difficult to understand.

>We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.

Sorry missed those posts that make perfect sense.  Any reference?

>Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.

Too lazy to read the posts, but yet claim that PC side has made good arguments.  That's kind of hard to do.  Here's summary of what has been stated thus far:

(1) Amiga joystick interface kills PC gameport and even what's available on USB joysticks.
(2) Amiga (in general) boots up faster than PCs (in general).  Barring customized 32/64-bit ROM interfaces/boot setups.
(3) Amiga has a Copper which can allow you to time things to 558ns accuracy without the +/- bullcrap (latency) of modern PCs.  Amiga also has other timing mechanisms like audio timers, processor timing, etc. but those are like PC timers in that there's latency involved.  (4) Amiga allows direct access to hardware registers as well as API function calls.  PCs are stuck with mainly non-standard hardware I/O so you are forced to go through API calls which can take any amount of time (100 cycles to thousands of cycles).  This allows you to write tighter code that guarantee response time in cycles rather than some hodge-podge value.
(5) The above (3) and (4) combine to give a system that's more predictable and thus suited for real-time projects.  Amiga also has a parallel port as well which PCs unfortunately got rid of and thus doing parallel signal processing with exact timing also now favors Amiga more.
There's a few more like sprite engine, audio effects, video beam position reading, etc. that can also in some cases out do the PC.

[amigaksi]

This is so funny that PC people have to make hypothetical arguments like "In 2 years USB 3.0 will common place", "If Amiga had the majority..", etc. That just proves the point of this topic-- "PC still playing Amiga catchup."

[amigaksi]

No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.

But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots).  Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS.  On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.

The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.

[amigaksi]

Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:

I said that criterion a few times already.  You ever heard of autoboot ROMs vs. normal ROMs on SCSI cards on Amiga?  Why the prefix "auto" in autoboot.

[amigaksi]

Code: [Select]

while (argumentFails()) {
  mutateArgument();
}

Sounds like what you did with the joystick argument.

[amigaksi]

Hardly. My argument was consistent all the way through. Modern computers have far exceeded 20 year old ones in performance and capability. You and a couple of other bitter diehards were the ones suggesting you need to use sampling rates of obsolete ports and boot times as significant metrics.

Frankly, I find your entire attempt to justify the premiership of long obsoleted hardware above hardware that what was once inferior but has since evolved beyond recognition hilarious.
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That's your blind obsession.  You already think it's obsolete if it's old without refuting the legitimate argument.  But that's not how the modern world works.  Some companies produce better machines than others.  It doesn't always go with later machines have better technology. Even during when Gameport was being produced (XP era and prior), it was obsolete compared to Atari/Amiga joysticks.  They just never choose the superior interface.  
 
>Current machines have thousands of times the processing power, hundreds of times the memory and disk space available. You will find for the vast majority of all computer users, professional or otherwise, 20 year old hardware is of no practical use for their day to day needs nor live up to their expectations in terms of basic capability.

That's not relevant to the arguments presented.  Some people HAVE to use the PC becasuse of job/work requirements since that's the PC that happens to be marketed everywhere.

>I'm really sorry that you find yourself so opposed the notion that PC hardware has evolved far beyond the venerable miggy...

I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.

I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do.  Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.

[amigaksi]

Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?

I didn't mutate my stand.  I stated my criterion many times.  This was already refuted when I stated "barring Atari 2600 cartridge type boots".  BASIC is a ROM like cartridges.  It's true, if he only wants to use BASIC, he's fine-- for him it does boot faster.  But in the general case, I know the C64 are loading huge files of the disk drive and there's no boot option for that.

[amigaksi]

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I don't need to catch up with anything. You might need to catch up with reality though.

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That's subjective.  If you take the objective approach, PCs do in fact need catching up in some areas that make the Amiga unique in those cases.  And this topic was not to fulfill your needs but hope for an objective discussion.

>(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
>It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.

See, now if I make this subjective like you did, I would it makes a HUGE difference in boot-up time because I test low-level drivers which cause frequent crashes in XP.  You decrease your life span by the amount of time you wait for your system to boot.  It all adds up if you have to do it often.

>Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.

Nobody stated PC is inferior.  It's inferior in some aspects; that's a fact.  Even if you use it for hobbies/games, why not use a PC?  

You didn't reply to my message.

[amigaksi]

So what IS the point? If you can't code or if you can't use a compiler you might make bloated programs? Surprise, surprise.

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It happens by default with famous PC compilers.   Looks like you replied to this message without reading the entire posting since what you argued against initially was answered later.

>No, size doesn't necessarily have direct correlation with speed unless you count the loading time from the disk or stream the content.

The anim files decompress on the fly-- no streaming or disk reads.

>I never said your bootblock stuff doesn't, but you'll have a pretty frustrating experience watching OCS and ECS demos or games without soft kicking or using WHDLoad.

But Amiga has the edge since if you use OCS standard hardware, it works across the board on all Amigas and you don't have to use APIs.

>That is after the OS loads. Yes, interfacing with "any" soundcard on a PC relies on standard APIs. That's definitely a difference from the "standard" Amiga, but in most regards it's not a short-coming, which is why abstraction layers like RTG and AHI exist.

I'm glad you agree on something.

>Probably not often in DOS demos, but it's definitely possible to support adlib compatible cards in 1k.

Adlib is not supported by all audio cards and even those it's supported on don't use the same I/O port.

>Yes, and a change in sound can happen over an infinitesimal amount of time. It doesn't mean that it's particularily important for our hearing.

In sound, 44Khz..48Khz is enough but in the case of joysticks, IT CAN make a difference.  It all depends on how fast the software is sampling the joystick and WHEN it samples.  Anyway, your point that humans can't react that fast is false since you can produce millisecond accurate state changes in the joystick that are not NOISE.

>How often do you think the game itself is checking the state? Show me a game that utilizes the superior Amiga joystick port to its full potential!

I can say the same for Audio.  

>PS2 as in Playstation 2, not PS/2. I have an adapter to connect two PS2 compatible controllers to one USB port.

So, how does that make it faster than Amigas I/O port access like MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.

>No. There is nothing to catch up to. Having a joystick port on a computer is totally redundant when you have universal serial interfaces.

It has catching up to do until you prove that you have faster joystick interface that people are using out there right now.

>No. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years you know that software developers are trying to move further AWAY from the hardware. Transparency, modularity, uniformity, and in the end, system stability, at the expense of exact control...

Believe it or not, people still access hardware I/O ports on PCs in kernel drivers.  I write some of these so I know.  

>PC:s may very well be (and are) used in low latency/real-time applications.

But PC has catching up to do in regards to Amiga's real-time set-up.

>Given the average life length of a typical PC game pad I'm pretty sure that there are more USB sticks in use. "There are millions of game ports"... How many USB ports do you think there are?

Not ports, USB joysticks that are faster than Amiga's joystick interface.

>The joypads I use have two separate analog joysticks, a directional pad and ten buttons ergonomically laid out.

Analog sticks suck and 10+ button joysticks suck as well.  I rather have a one or two button joystick rather than complicate things for kids playing games with 10+ joysticks.  "Sorry you pressed Select instead of A".  "Sorry you pressed Start although it's labeled as Select."  "Sorry you pressed the right white button instead of left black one."  Now take this into context of a fast shoot-em up game.

>They work as respond as instantly as necessary for fast shooters as well as old platform games, even if my computer might not be able to sample them at 1000Hz (which I don't know since there are no games that do).

They can all seem instantaneous, but there's factually some time they take.

>There really isn't anything like it for Amiga.

Complete bullcrap.

>On some OS:s I'm sure it's possible. If you need to have timing that tight (i e for timing some sort of serial communication) in any of the mainstream general purpose OS:s you can often outsource the time critical stuff to a $1 PIC.

That's your worst argument so far.  Use a piece of hardware.  As I stated before, if I use hardware, anything can be done on any computer.

[amigaksi]

Yeah, using Windows for totally elementary stuff like reading the joystick state at 1 kHz without jitter is something we have to look far into the future for. And for me, as a professional switch flipper having computer rebooting as my primary field of interest, light-switch booting speed is a very important factor.

Read post #275.

[amigaksi]

It still boots faster into its operating system than the Amiga. Should I add all activity on my PC to the start-up time? Because I open thousands of web browser tabs everyday, and sometimes open hundreds of folders and compressed archives, play a few games, sometimes three pretty complex IDE:s, many instances of Paint.net and Foxit Reader and more...

Let's pick another case to clarify why I think the C64 is SUPERIOR to the Amiga: I can boot "The Final Cartridge III" faster than you will ever be able to boot into Amiga OS or even the insert disk screen. TFC III contains functionality for basic usability - there is a mouse driven GUI, a calculator, some disk and tape utilities, a clock with a timer, a game data editor, a note pad where you can print, save and load text, and if you want you can very immediately exit into BASIC or a machine code monitor.

All in all, it's handled more responsively than possible with the inferior Amiga OS, and much much faster than the comparably primitive PC.

If you like staring a OS booting and NOT doing anything, then you stick to that criterion.  I won't.  I also know how to burn files (applications) into ROMs and boot up Amiga.  Moot point given C64 userbase relies on disk drives.

[amigaksi]

So, basically sub ms joystick polling is mad important to you, but more than two buttons drives you up the wall. LOL, this gets better and better. Please continue.

It's a separate point regarding the buttons.  I never stated that sub ms is of prime importance but is required in some cases and that it's UNDOABLE on Gameport.  Even if you sample at 60Hz, Amiga wins but it is doable on PC gameports.  MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is faster than an entire algorithm using IN from 201h or serial protocol.

[amigaksi]

Under which specific cases is it required?

If you want to be a purist, it can make a difference at any time.  If you sample at 60Hz, you could just miss that case of state change which could make a difference in the game.  As I stated, the recording I did was from a River-Raid game.

[amigaksi]

Sigh. Please repeat it for me then. What exactly IS your point? Is it that not knowing what you're doing may result in bad code and less-than-optimal file sizes and execution times? Because yes, I very much agree with that, but I still don't see how it's relevant. You can produce horrible code on any system.

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You don't see the relevance that when applications install under Windows they fill up hundreds of DLLs and other bloated files.  

>Then some form of lesser compression with bigger files and shorter extraction time would be faster.

My point still stands.  Amiga sped up the animation by shorter files and short data files.

>No, if you write an app that uses standard OCS hardware (let's say an old A500) or even uses the kernel functions that's in no way a guarantee in itself that it will work on other Amiga systems.

Bullcrap.  AGA is backward compatible with OCS/ECS as per spec.

>No, but Adlib sound was definitely supported in the majority of sound cards, and telling the program what port to use can be as simple as passing a parameter when launching it or reading an environment variable. Perhaps not common, but as I said, definitely possible.

You forgot this is a boot block; no parameters to pass.  And how would you know the port even if you could pass the parameters.

>How come normal Amiga and C64 games feel so responsive when they read the joystick only once or twice per frame anyway?

How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio?  Sometimes you can't tell the difference.  You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.

>Hahaha, let's see... Audio apps that make full and non-redundant use of 44.1 kHz audio... Well, to be honest I'd rather do multi-track destructive sound editing and recording at a higher frequency (and as high bit depth as possible) to get some frequency head room. If you've ever done any audio editing you know what I mean. A higher sampling frequency can also be used to account for a low bit depth (and yeah, in terms of recording and mixing, 16 bits often aren't quite enough). Some KORG recorders for example sample 1-bit sound at a 20-something MHz rate. The sound can then be filtered digitally for very high fidelity audio.

That's a good point.  I am not arguing against that-- higher sampling rates make up for lower bit depths.

>But yeah, you still didn't show me a game that utilizes 1 KHz joystick polling.

I told you any game like River-raid that has fast action and shooting can benefit from it.  You may get away with less rates, but that's just like audio-- you can get away with 22Khz in most cases.

>I never said it was faster, just superior in every other regard, and definitely SUFFICIENTLY fast.

What other regard?  Digital joysticks are better than analog even at slower speeds of sampling.  There's no ambiguity regarding the direction.

>Amiga has some catching up to do with Burger King, because they are serving good hamburgers that people are eating right now.

Take you bullcrap elsewhere if you can't refute the points.

>If you are writing kernel drivers you should know what a devastating effect unrestricted access to hardware registers could have in a complex system like Windows XP. I certainly don't want my Windows install to bluescreen as often and unexpectedly as my Amiga comes to a Guru meditation.

People can access hardware even in protected mode.  I have done it myself in my application.  

>Windows XP isn't an optimal system for real-time applications, no, but what on earth made you believe that they were trying to be?

So they are playing catch-up.  PCs aren't real-time systems like Amiga is in terms of accuracy.

>Well, there are none. Reading ADCs and multiple buttons and passing it serially to the application in a system-friendly way might never be as fast as reading five mechanical switches. Boo-hoo.

Lame way to shove the point under the rug.

>LOL, you can make up would-be scenarios too, I see, but in real life kids are very fast to learn (often much faster than we are). Well, I guess not liking more than two buttons is a matter of taste, really, but most gamers and kids seem to agree with me.

It's real experiment.

>If it SEEMS instantaneous (being a HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE), what the is the point of pushing it further?

Because MP3 also seems instantaneous.  I see your lame reasons.  To you fake diamonds are just as good as real ones as long as they seem real.

>I'm sorry then, but that's the PC philosophy. External processors, controllers and hardware devices are used for everything...

I'm sorry than that it has to play catch-up to Amiga.

[amigaksi]

How come MP3 sounds like uncompressed linear 16-bit audio?  Sometimes you can't tell the difference.  You can't go by feeling; you have to look at it logically that it CAN make a difference.

MP3 sounds like crap, but not everyone can hear the distortion, and in fact, younger folks prefer MP3 to state of the art lossless codecs. Odd.



We really need to stop mixing terms. If Windows XP guaranteed that all operations completed within one year, it would be a real-time system, albeit a "slow" one. Neither Windows nor Amiga OS are real-time operating systems; however, both Amiga systems and modern PCs are capable of running real-time operating systems. Yes?

Re-read the post.  They are not real-time systems like the Amiga.  Any system can be declared to be real-time.  But PC is not as good as Amiga so don't equate them in regards to real-time operations.