PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

See my earlier post. Any software needing 68881/2 instructions not directly implemented in the 040 FPU will fail on 68040 without the 68040.library loaded. You will just get a fatal F line exception based guru instead. Beyond that, all software will run significantly slower without the 68040.library since the data cache cannot be readily enabled without the library.

The situation is even worse on the 060 where any 32x32->64 bit integer multiplication will fail without the proper 060 support code installed.

They are not minor differences.

But we are talking compatibility; to use the enhanced features, you can use a library or enable them directly with some MOVEC or whatever.  It's better that they don't enable the enhanced features by default.  68881 is not a standard feature of 68000 machines.

[amigaksi]

Not entirely, though. The stability of the 040 system, if allowed to boot up to a full workbench without the 040.library would be seriously compromised. Any code compiled for an FPU will fail the moment it calls any operation the 040 had to emulate.

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.

[amigaksi]

I don't see why amigaksi can't acknowledge the Catweasel Mk IV, I assume it has it's own clock/timer on board.:bitch:

This point was already addressed in this thread.  I guess you didn't read it when we were talking about parallel port joystick interfaces and this one.  Amazingly, the general "sidekick" gives his/her view in post #1200 as if he/she missed that point too.  Custom hardware can be built for any machine and that does not count as a standard component of a particular system.

[amigaksi]

The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.

You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?


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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.

[amigaksi]

Deja Vu. I think amigaksi is a die hard strategist. He will hold onto his bad play until you a) Flinch b) Make a mistake.

Not really.  I have been quite lenient with regards to "logic" used by others.  I am more of a realist.  There are some unique features of Amiga and those are the points I am trying to get across.  I know in a technical debate, you just try to pin someone on some point but then nobody learns anything from that-- just a mental excercise of victory/defeat.

[amigaksi]

Great sense of humor you have there, Askii. Have you heard the saying 'if the only tool you have is a hammer evyerthing ooks like a nail"?

It wasn't a joke.  I'll only joke if it's also true otherwise I will explicitly state that it's a joke if it doesn't reflect reality.  You can run some applications faster using older OSes; that's a fact.  It may be true for all applications but all applications are not available for older OSes.

I can boot up Windows 3.1 using a floppy disk just like I can boot up an Amiga OS using a floppy disk.

[amigaksi]

Yes, yes I did, because I didn't consider booting up with a comprimised OS.
...

Depends on the OS.  Regardless, we are talking about compatibility.

>There's that word again. You truly do not know what that word means. I've stated my position, but I'll be clearer for the headstickers among us:

You are biased.  There is sufficient proof given by you.

>How is the above bias? Oh yes, that's right, it's bias because I don't agree with your unsubstantiated nonsense, that's how.

I don't like the way this Amiga.org is organized.  As soon as you hit reply, you can't tell what I originally stated.  I am going to reply that part in my next reply.

>Those same minor differences you absolutely lambasted the PC for. Either way the point remains, if you write software that uses functions specific to the 68000, there is an ever increasing risk of them not working at all with each successive model in that series unless you have software emulation to paper over the cracks - something you claimed (repeatedly I might add) was not necessary at all.

If you get more exact with this rather than juggle words like "risk" you will see that 680x0 are backward compatible with 68000.

>I do so dare. I'm not the one making claims that cannot be backed up, further I'm willing to be corrected when I mess up. Anything less is a clear sign of a fanatic (or a retard, much the same tbh).

Okay, then keep correcting yourself as I reply.

>So, where are the figures to back up your claims? What's that? You don't have any? Well that's a shocker!

Again, wait for next reply as I can't remember what you replied to.

>I am. The difference is that I, along with most of the rest of the English speaking world have a very different understanding of what that word means. To you it seems to mean "you are objective and unbiased only if you agree with me, no matter how far off the ball I am".

You are biased and NOT objective and speaking about objectivity then makes you a hypocrite.

[amigaksi]

...
I do not give a rats ass what platform I use so long as it runs the software I need in an acceptable fashion. Towards this end I could use an SGI workstation, a Sun workstation, an IBM workstation, a Mac, or a PC running any of the BSDs, Linux or even Windows. It makes no difference to me so long as it's stable and reasonably fast.

How is the above bias? Oh yes, that's right, it's bias because I don't agree with your unsubstantiated nonsense, that's how.
...

I never said that was biased.  You are biased in many things you have stated in the two threads.  

>So, where are the figures to back up your claims? What's that? You don't have any? Well that's a shocker!

Okay, this one wasn't Amiga.org's fault.  You are being vague.  Don't answer for me.  I did back-up my claim and gave procedure of how to test it.  You are just all talk-- mostly based on your mental speculations and bias toward PC.

I have better understanding of "bias" and "objectivity" than you do because I am unbiased and objective.

[amigaksi]

Everyone's been pretty clear about where the compatibility issues lie. You can't use a 68040 or 68060 in an Amiga without certain software workarounds, and optimizations (read: hacks) that work on a 68000 might not work on a later processor.

We're talking object code compatibility (I called it opcode compatibility).  It's not my labeling it but what other's have claimed as well:

http://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/datasheet/522/68040.php

This is another link since some people thought the previous link I gave was "my" brochure.

[amigaksi]

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.  

A digital joystick on the other hand is something you can only make decisions on what direction you need to press based on the last screen refresh, so capturing any quicker is of no use.  How is it useful to know if you pressed left then right between screen refreshes when it only needs to know what you are doing right before it updates the screen?

If you were pressing left, then quickly shifted to right but the screen refreshed right before the joystick registered right, then that should naturally count as you pushing nothing.  It knowing more information would not make any difference, the value right at the moment the game logic needs it is what you want.  Its not like you are going to be changing the game several time between refreshes as then the game would seem out of your control as you can only react to what you can see and hear, and those events would be triggered on the refresh.

So seriously, if you were refreshing the joystick port so fast you could register that you pressed left, then nothing, then right - how exactly does that help the game?  It just makes everything more complicated.  Your game does not need to know what you were pressing a few ms ago.

No the more accurate version is to take into account joystick state the instant it changes.  All other means are approximations.  As I said numerous times, what difference does it make if I sample audio at 22Khz or 44Khz-- not much but logically there's a difference if you know there can be frequency components that won't get captured at 22Khz.  And what difference does it make if it's losslessly compressed audio or MP3.  You may not experience a difference but that's looking at it subjectively.

[amigaksi]

The great joystick man who denies signal bounce in his own data and talks about KHz this and Hz that and truck loads of stuff but never mentioned Nyquist.

FACT: I did talk about Nyquist in this thread.  Search it.

FACT: I never used the sub-millisecond readings to make my claim of 1Khz sampling being useful.  What you extracted from the data was sub-millisecond only data.

FACT: In my application, even signal bounce is relevant data.  You should mimic the exact behavior of the joystick in a joystick recorder.

[amigaksi]

But how anyone can compare sampling a digital joystick to sampling analog audio, is beyond me.

With audio, its quite obvious that capturing as much accuracy as possible, especially during mixing/mastering, is useful.  The more accurate data you have, the more accurately you will be mixing it.  So that once you drop it back down to 44.1 or 48Khz, you are getting a better approximation.  Thats just plain maths, the more precision the better the more accurate the result.

Now a digital Joystick?  Nobody has yet explained how being able to tell what happened to the joystick between screen refreshes actually has any bearing at all on a game.  Yes sampling quicker is more accurate, nobody every denied that.  But accuracy is only any good when its actually useful.

A mouse its useful to sample quicker, the electronics can counteract any questionable result that way (especially led/laser mice, you could get a rogue reflection from dust, a crack, poor mouse mat) and most of all - there will be less lag from the mouse itself.

Just look at LCD TVs.  The biggest lag on an LCD TV is not the pixel response time, its how quickly the TV can process the signal and actually tell those pixels to change.  That is one reason why a cheap TV and an expensive one often can be really different, even if they are using the same LCD panel.

So yeah, the Amiga joystick port is fast, and it might be useful if you are using it for some custom purpose rather than a joystick.  But then if you are going that direction why use such old technology when you could just use a modern PIC using far far less electricity.  I mean its a silly argument as there are things the Minimig can do that neither the Amiga nor PC can do, but that does not mean PC is trying to catch up to it.

Yeah, you can build customized hardware on PC or Amiga or Minimig, but we were talking about using standard PC (what most people have out there).  So that if you wrote a game, you can estimate that joystick reading will take 1.8 microseconds or something like that.

[amigaksi]

roflmao so my machines don't prove anything nor does the the motherboards i linked but your 10-12 do? seriously your idea of proof is lost somewhere.

 ...

Okay, great they may have gone back to serial ports, but they did produce machines with parallel ports w/o serial ports.

>yea because someone cared about keyboard interfaces more. besides ps2 ports were still compatible with AT ports(with a pin adapter) so really all that changed was the packaging.

AT keyboards with DIN5 are gone for good and they went a long time before joysticks for gameports or gameports.  Joysticks for gameports are still being sold.

>what is that supposed to mean??

They got rid of the gameport knowing people can still use USB so they had some thought about it but still playing catch-up to Amiga with its superior joystick interface.

[amigaksi]

i see so efficiency = hogging the hardware. sorry but in the world of multitasking this don't have a place. the os determines what software gets priority but does not let anything hog the hardware.
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No, there's no multitasking needed if application runs going directly to hardware.  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.

>the programmers chose the version of the api they are going to program to. as such if they decide to progran to 9.0c then that is what they state as the required version. microsoft also includes compatibility for all versions in the latest version. well except windows 7. windows 7 comes with directx 11 but dx9 is not included that i can tell but it can be installed seperately tho.

But normally, there's conflict when people have newer versions verses older versions of some software.  I know there some DLLs (for borland C++) where fixing things made some older applications non-functional.

>look if the app directly controls the hw. This when this app crashes an os friendly app will try to access the same hw it might lock the os. or if two programs attempt to access the same hw they may cause a crash. instability abounds in this situation.

As I said, there's no multitasking when application takes over hardware but even in multitasking, you can have applications go directly to hardware as long as they know they're the only ones accessing it.  You can corrupt things even using API.  A good application that goes directly to hardware should be able to restore hardware to its normal state.  I do it for parallel ports-- I use them directly and then restore them to the state they were in.