PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

Nope, this is wrong. Nobody uses that hardware, no modern machines ship with it. Folks haven't used it in 10 years.

You did have a bad day.  I use IN AL,DX in 2.8Ghz Dell machine and in this other AMD Sempron 3000+ machine.  Unless PCs have this instruction, they aren't backward compatible and not really "PC"s.

[amigaksi]

Hi,

@amigaksi,

Like what that the joystick is faster than a PC's, sorry I don't use one in any of the latest games that I have purchased. Listen if you alter the tests in your favor than any computer can beat the other one, I do this to unsuspecting PC users who have never seen an Amiga and then I try to pick the PC's weakest points just so them there suckers can be destroyed by a 25 mhz machine.

...

It's real data done on a 2.8Ghz Dell machine.  If you don't think it's real, rather than LIE and MISLEAD others, you have to go and repeat the experiment.  And if you don't have time for that, I suggest getting MPDOS software and trying the simulation yourself with your own games and joysticks and do the recordings yourself.  I'm sure you are familiar with scientific method (and ethics as well not to throw bullcrap of whatever comes up on the top of your head).

>Face it Amigaksi, even I one of the first 5 people in the Jacksonville FL area to buy an Amiga knows that it has seen better days, the hardware is old, the OS is old and by trickery we can make the Amiga beat unwary PC users.

I am not trying to make it beat a PC; it's what happens in some cases.

>Heck I haven't written a program in about 10 years, ...

That's the problem.  You have lost your memory of what Amiga is capable of (or purposely want to be in ignorance).

[amigaksi]

Hi,

@stefcep2,

I know the reason PC's got rid of floppy drives is that when they format them it drags down out 2.4 ghz CPU and brings the computer to a stand still.

smerf

Floppy access is slower on newer OSes than in older ones.  May be I/O protection and/or virus checking that slows things down so much.

[amigaksi]

You're missing something there aren't you? IN AL, DX is kinda ambiguous isn't it? It's as if there was a temporal component missing....

Check the intel references.

[amigaksi]

But it is not objective when you're dismissing a huge chunk of where issues lay. It would be objective only if you take into account peoples skills. I tried explaining this to you earlier but you dismissed it because it didn't fit in with your magical fairyland.

...

I never even argued point about ASM vs. high level languages with you before so stop lieing.  It's objective that you have more power using ASM than a high level language.  High level language gives you subset of what you can do with ASM.  It's logical.  You are in a fairyland because you are inept to even comprehend what I am stating.  I can also write insults, but I prefer rationality.

>Citation. Now.

I already gave citation in this thread.  You only reply many days later so as to confuse people as if it was never stated.  In Amigas games/applications, it's digital joystick or mouse-- no analog joysticks.  Maybe there's some rare exceptions.

>You're bitching at someone else dismissing a highly specialised and none too often used tech?

I compared with both USB and Gameport.  Where have you been?

>Hypocrite much?

You are a biased side-kick.  He seems to understand the subject more than you so why not let him reply.

>As has been shown, USB can be made to poll as fast, if not faster then ithe Amigas.

That's not the point.  If you go back and RE-READ this thread, you will see that I stated Gameport cannot do 1Khz not USB.  I said USB is slower than reading joystick on Amiga.  You are lost.

>Have you actually shown an Amiga game yet that uses even a tenth of your supposed 1khz response time?

How many times are you going to keep repeating the same question and not reply to the responses given?  I don't forget that fast.

>The reality is that there hasn't been a Gameport based joystick, digital or otherwise released for sale in at least 6 years. It's all USB.

Good for you.  There's about a billion Gameports out there so it's still should be considered in the analysis along with USB.

>To do anything else would be an excersise in redundancy. What's next, you prove Amigas are superior to PC's because of ISA?

You can fantasize with your fairy tales all you want.  It's a fact that gameports and USB devices are both out there.  As I stated, people still sell joysticks based on gameport.  XP supported gameports as well and most people where I live still use XP.

[amigaksi]

And you look like having been hit in a terrible accident, being sleeping for years, and then woke up and started writing here. Seriously: we have tried for pages and pages to let you understand that time changed, hardware evolved, programming rules also and habits too.
...

You can speculate all you want.  He's claiming "IN AL,DX" is not present.  It is present on all the PCs I have used and I gave two examples.  

>I even quoted a passage that said USB ports can poll at 1 KHz, and you replied to me that I have to look at the "standard PC configurations". Oh, my God! "standard configurations": if it isn't standard USB, what can be considered standard on a PC nowadays?

You misunderstood it.  Why don't you reply to my refutation rather than twist things.  USB is faster than Gameport, but it's still slower than Amiga's move instruction.  I didn't say it was same speed as Gameport which has problems reaching 1khz sampling.

>You are incredible: "there sare billions of gameports out there". There aren't ANY.

Liar.  This is easily disproveable.  I have two in front me right now and I know Dell and Compaq have sold similar models with gameports on them.

>There have not been a single gameport in any average PC for years now, nor there are PC-compatible joysticks/Wheels (yes, to a PC gameport and USB you can connect also wheels) with gameport plug anymore. Gameports were common on soundcards a long ago, but only for a simple reason: they also provided MIDI functions with a simple adapter cable. Now nobody uses them for this reason anymore. Even discrete sound cards are practically dead, and used by a niche. We are in 2009, w-a-k-e  u-p!

Look at what's out there not what's being produced right now.  When you right some software you have to consider what's out there-- not which machine you have because you keep ugrading every few months.

>You are neverending this meaningless, pointless, silly, crazy joystick port and hardware-banging arguments even if you are the last man all over the world believing in them, but if NOBODY ELSE agrees with you, maybe you should start dubitating about them, shouldn't you? Sorry for being harsh, but when it's too much, it's too much.

Speak for yourself.  Many people agree with me.  How can you make a statement "NOBODY else agrees with you."  You don't even know all the people I speak to.  Same bogus statement as earlier-- THERE ARE NO GAMEPORTs.  You are not being harsh.  Just making invalid statements that are DISPROVEN by a child.

[amigaksi]

PC wins. Can i have my rep points back now, please?

I think "REP" stands for "Real Emulation Programs".  If you haven't used REPs, then that goes to zero.

[amigaksi]

It's all down to the trolling at this point. One fellow wants to state that a computer from the 80's is superior by comparing it to interfaces the PC hasn't used in years. And now we have an argument that the floppy disc isn't obsolete. I say that if you are going to dwell in this inanity, then you know what to sit on and where to cut your self with that metal floppy disk shield.
...

It's not trolling.  PC I/Os aren't that fast.  Anything requiring multiple I/Os becomes comparable on Amiga using a single I/O.  And in some cases, Amiga surpasses PC.  I compared with USB and Gameport.  Floppy disks aren't obsolete if that's all you need to play games or write your software.  Burning CDs is usually slower than copying a file to/from floppy and floppies work with older machines that don't have Flash drive capability or drivers (like Win98SE).  Hey, why don't you just give up on the joysticks and do research on palette index data swapping.  I prefer programs on older machines that are highly optimized and work flawlessly at 60Hz.  If it gets the job done, why label it obsolete.

[amigaksi]

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).

Granted custom boards can do better than Copper chip but those won't count in comparing PCs vs. Amiga.

[amigaksi]

Hi,

@Amigaski & Stefcep2,

Speaking of Amiga joysticks my joystick broke for my Amiga 4000 today so off I went to Wally world to get a new one and you know what I couldn't find one darned 9 pin joystick in the whole darned place, so that makes my joystick port mighty slow as a matter of fact not really moving.
...

As I stated before, might does not make right.  Just because market is flooded with analog joysticks, that does not necessarily make them better.  I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).  

>...frequency. Which means as far as graphics go my ppc is sitting there waiting for a reply from my AGA chipset and it is doing absolutely nothing. So as you can see one of the main problems of the Amiga was that you could increase the speed of the CPU but you still had the problem of all the rest of the board moving S L O W L Y.

That's similar to I/O and memory on PC.  They don't work at the clock speed of processor.

[amigaksi]

I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.

Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.

Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.

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.

[amigaksi]

Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.

It works fine.  You just read a smaller range.  I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances.  You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.

I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)".  But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games.  I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.

[amigaksi]

You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. An algorithm written in asm for 68k will vary across the different 68k processor models just like it does across the various IA32 model processors. There are real time operating systems for both families but they're not called AmigaOS or Windows. Keep in mind that real time os's also make use of APIs to abstract from the hardware. Take a look at QNX for example. Where people demand the most performance, disk and graphics, you can't get away from abstraction. Nobody in their right mind would want apps writing directly to disk interface and people expect applications to play nice with the windowing environment.

These days people expect to be able to play World of Warcraft in a window and be able to see what's going on in yahoo instant messenger and occasionally check out what new messages are floating in on their facebook page.... on the same screen at the same time. You can't get this kind of functionality by allowing software to bang directly on the hardware.

You can still have APIs and go directly to the hardware.  I am not saying everything should be done over again by every application.  I use Amiga's API to set up things and then go directly to hardware where I need it.  I don't get that option for most things on PCs.

[amigaksi]

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.

PEEK/POKE would be slow although you can use them to go directly to hardware.  LDA/STA would be the method for 6502 based machines.  Here's an example for Atari 400:

MyDLI:      PHA
      Lda   #128
      Sta   205
      Sta   53771      ;start 8 pot counters (53760..53767)
NxtScanLine:    Lda   53764
      STA    WSYNC      ;54282 is wait for end of scanline
      STA    COLBK      ;53274 is Background color register
      Dec   205
      Bne   NxtScanLine
      PLA
      RTI

This one uses the analog joystick inputs on paddle #4 on the Atari as a scanline counter to show 128 colors (one per scanline).

[amigaksi]

I guess you prefer to play flight simulators(eg. Falcon 4.0) on digital joysticks too? It's pointless to compare analog joysticks to digitals. They are meant to be used in totally diffirent purposes.

PS. Analog mouse is just too flimsy for Workbench use. I prefer Amiga+cursor key for everyday use.

My mouse sends digital data on Amiga and PC.  Digital joysticks are also easier to use unlike your keyboard example.  Many PC games I have seen source code to -- sample analog values and convert them to digital values.

[amigaksi]

Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?

Yes.