Amiga vs PC

[amigaksi]

Wheres the far-less solution to using 10+ VSTs in fruityloops and making a 32 channel tune with line in and midi input added in as well?  I don't think there is one.  If there is, it probably isn't a great one and would induce suicidal thoughts.
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I don't get as much time these days for these threads, but your inconsistency is that you compare latest and greatest hardware add-ons with standard Amiga setup.  

About an hour later (post #39) you wrote:  "Yeah you can get a decent browsing experience if you set it up right and have the right hardware...it sure aint out-of-box internets ready."

You can also buy audio cards for the Amiga or even some sort of PCI interface.  None of my PC machines have 32 channels audio (which you keep mentioning).  Perhaps, it's being emulated in software but you can also do the same then on the Amiga.  Perhaps, the API is misleading in claiming its supporting all those functions which may or may not be present in your hardware.  When I write to a color register Move.w #$F00,$DFF180, it takes a lot more work on the PC and a lot more cycles because the hardware standard is gradually disappearing and it's more drivers and software calls and thus more inefficient and slower.  Of course, you have the faster processor and video cards but you see how his point of getting more done with less is valid.

[amigaksi]

Hi,

The Amiga can't hold a candle to todays modern PC. The modern PC has faster and more memory

I wish it didn't.  That just makes things so inconsistent.  Every machine can have a different speed memory and you need to program for the worst case of the slowest one.

hard drives that are 10 times faster for reading and writing data

Hard drives are obsolete and wish they were never invented.  Ataris had cartridges originally (some banked) and these flash devices seem to be taking things back full circle to back to memory types of drives rather than mechanical moving ones.  Hard drives are like a glitch in computer progress-- slow, prone to crash, inconsistent in read/writes, etc.  Better to use flash drives.

graphic cards that put the Amiga's AGA chips to shame

And hardly anyone programs its registers to get the maximum out of it.  Such a waste.

sound that is just about like the band played it and processing power beyond belief, but also the PC has no soul, it doesn't have people that stand behind it, cherish it and love turning it on, it doesn't have games that rock your soul like the Mackey's Megaball, Scorched Tanks and Soliton.

For games, sound is fine on the Amiga.  But there are issues with the PC games-- controllers are too complex and analog, gameplay is more like watching a movie-- not as addicting as pixel-exact collisions and where every pixel has significance, the games just look good but there are many DVD movies that look better.  If I didn't need to argue with people like you and wanted to play games, I wouldn't be using a PC.

[amigaksi]

modern computers are very consistant, mine is 64bit cpu, dx10, etc. You have to think differently when HAL and drivers are concerned , you are stuck back in 1994 if you think systems arent consistant.
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You never experienced 1994 or little of it so you made a statement whose exact opposite is true.  In 1994, you can consistently write to I/O ports for VGA, serial/parallel ports, even estimate cycle counts, etc.  Do you even know what the word consistent means in the context stated by me above?  Calm down and think before you write.

Hard drive are still here and better than anything else including flash by orders of magnitude when size speed and reliability are concerned.

More bullcrap.  Flash technologies is faster and more reliable.  I have destroyed several hard drives before there MTBF just because they were in the cold weather in my car or because of hitting bumps on the road.  Hard drives are less reliable and I was speaking of cartridge type comparisons which is not restricted to just flash-- you can have SRAM, EEPROM, EPROM, etc. They are all more reliable than hard drives.  

Drivers do hit the registers otherwise no graphics card would ever work, do you know what HAL is (Hardware Abstraction Layer) you seem to really be stuck in 1994. We are talking about "modern computers" here.

Yeah, but one graphics card hits one register while another one hits another-- inconsistent and non-standard.  You have NO IDEA what you are talking about.  First understand and then reply.

[amigaksi]

Well, you are a fine one to talk

You're still thinking of graphics cards as they were a decade ago. They have totally and utterly changed. I guarantee you wouldn't know where to begin trying to bang modern GPU hardware if you are still thinking in terms of direct register access, at least if you want to use any modern features.

Drivers exist for a  good reason. My graphics card, for example, has literally thousands of GP registers (as well as "constant" memory) that are shared between 240 stream processors on demand by a hardware many-thread scheduling engine. Even when writing code for the GPU using CUDA, the object code that NVCC produces is not specific to that GPU. Instead, it's a bytecode that is JIT translated at runtime for the hardware.

And, FYI, the VESA compatible registers haven't really changed much, which is why it's almost always possible to use a modern card without any specific drivers. As long as "use" means open a basic frame buffer. If you want to bang those registers, you'll probably get away with it just fine.

I am not against drivers but it's better to have both options-- being able to go direct to hardware as well as driver or API interface.  I would think you already know some of the great stuff written using direct to hardware method on old PCs and Amiga.  And it's a superior interface to have the standardized hardware.

About VESA, that was also an API since when VGA started to add modes like 640*480*256, manufacturers started doing it their own ways.  Currently, my PC that I write this message from only gives me option for 16-bit or 32-bit-- nothing standard.  Perhaps, it exists in my hardware but OS won't let me get to it.  And all the modes which are superior to Amiga's standard graphics are non-standard from the hardware perspective.

Even a frame buffer of 640*480*256 requires accessing nonstandard I/O ports even by different version of cards made by SAME manufacturer.  I have an ATI VGA with 16MB that uses some port 0x56EC to set the 64K window whereas a later ATI RADEON uses some other I/O ports.  Then there are some cards that use 4K windows and some 16K windows and so on.

[amigaksi]

It was fun, banging the metal. However, you cannot deny that many 68000 OCS/ECS titles that did it, mysteriously stopped working on 68020/AGA and point blank refused to do so without degraders and so on. Ultimately this is where blindly depending on hardware configuration X gets you. Hardware changes, even on the Amiga.

The driver model exists not just to ensure that applications have a consistent API to hardware but to allow hardware vendors to radically change their internal hardware. This has to be done, if you want to improve performance. If graphics card manufacturers stuck to using a fixed IO/commandset that any old hacker could bang away at, there's no way we'd ever have migrated from old fixed function graphics pipelines to modern fully-programmable stream-processor machines.

It's quite possible to have upgrading of hardware and maintain hardware register compatibility.  It happened up to point of VGA (as far as graphics cards go); they went from CGA->EGA->VGA.  After that manufacturers started concocting their own methods and I/O ports as there was no one setting a standard.  The fact that there are OCS/ECS demos/games/etc. that do work on AGA proves my point.

[amigaksi]

Superior ? Is it superior that any change in the hardware (evolution means change usually) will break pretty much every application coded using direct access ?
And I think you underestimate the complexity of hardware today: it's not just 3 registers you play with. It's far too complex to be accessed directly.
Last but not least, software was bypassed for a reason at that time: software wasn't complete and/or slowed everything down. As big as the OS are now (and yes, every OS, including OS4/MorphOS even though they are both less heavier than modern OS) the resources needed are negligeable compared to what's available, so it isn't a problem anymore.
Accessing hardware directly only would introduce problems today.
Again: welcome to 2010.

VGA is not 3 registers-- it's hundreds of registers.  More were added from EGA.  It's superior; if you know the difference between BASIC or C and ASSEMBLY, then you know what I'm talking about.  Assembly language is superior, but I'm not against BASIC/C.  Going direct to standardized hardware is optimal whereas going through some software API is slower, inefficient, and inexact although it may help you develop faster.  And last but not least, software has caused problems by their incompatibility and bugs.  Many Windows 3.x functions are obsolete in modern Windows API.  Ooops, you can't even run Windows 3.x stuff anymore-- "Please obtain copy of 32-bit/64-bit version from vendor or obtain Microsoft version."  What a joke!  Nice sales pitch given most technical people know that processor is quite capable of supporting Windows 3.x.  What if vendor is long dead and gone or no longer developing for Windows?  Old PCs from 1990s were backward compatible; now the incompatibility, bloated ware, dead code, etc. have increased.  Yeah, welcome to 2010.  You would screw up if you went directly to hardware nowadays because the hardware is non-standard and inconsistent.  So Amiga wins, it has a superior interface-- I can still write OCS code that works on AGA going directly to hardware.

[amigaksi]

And the fact there are many that don't equally proves otherwise.

No, it doesn't.  That it's do-able is the point.  You can directly go to the hardware and still have it work across the board on all Amigas.  There's a lot of API-based software that no longer works on modern PCs.  See my other post.

[amigaksi]

in regards to the original post, if the Amiga is so great it should be able to stand toe to toe with anything modern computing throws at it, and it should just be so easy and simple to get it to that competitive state.

It doesn't have the music setup I am looking for, so that means it can't.  
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That's subjective.  There are certain things where Amiga excels at even without having been upgraded all these years.  So it's not like the rotary phone->touch tone phone analogy which is an enhancement in all respects.

[amigaksi]

That's the point though. Without hacking or degrading, such examples just don't work, which is the only proof you need that hacking hardware directly is not a good idea if compatibility is important to you.

They work without hacking or degrading.  You are mixing up OCS/ECS/AGA registers with OS calls and memory differences.  The AGA chipset was purposely made to be backward compatible and register compatible.  Have you narrowed it down to the registers-- no.  You just assumed it.

[amigaksi]

By your own (flawed) reasoning the fact that API-based software still does work on modern PC's demonstrates that it is doable, and thus proves that API based systems are the way forward.
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You are misunderstanding and mixing things up.  I never said that API doesn't work.  I said I can find API examples that don't work just like you can find some OCS-based software that doesn't work on AGA machines.  According to your FAULTY logic, no one should use APIs because it can cause trouble.  But the fact that it's do-able means there's nothing wrong with it.  Similarly, just because you can have some software that abused OCS registers beyond their definition, that doesn't mean that you should stop going direct to hardware.  Can you ban Leander from this topic-- that's one troll that wasted my time previously and I won't deal with her side-kick bullcrap.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it. Hardware banging, in the modern age, is for embedded projects and the like. it has _no_ place whatsoever on modern desktop machines except for the implementation of hardware drivers.

Hey even for embedded stuff and hardware drivers, you have inferiority to Amiga since you have to write drivers for every graphics device, audio device, etc.

As for not being able to run old software thanks to hardware changes, I take it you forgot about features like hardware virtualisation or even emulation? After all, there's not much you could do in DOS on a 286 that you couldn't comfortably emulate today if you really wanted to.

I think there's DOSBOX, but it doesn't run Windows 3.1 and it has its limits unlike running it in native mode.  Hey, if they can run Windows 3.1 in Windows XP and 98, they should be able to do it in 64-bit OSes.

Hardware banging and ignoring the OS was never truly encouraged on the Amiga (at least by the people that designed the hardware and software), you are lucky that anything worked from ECS to AGA. And, given that post AGA was set to go in wildly different directions, you'd be even luckier if anything worked beyond that.

It's a science-- nothing hodge podge like you are making it out to be.  From what I have debugged, only OCS stuff not working on AGA was API-related-- making calls to wrong areas of older OSes or mixing up different memories-- fast memory, chip memory, and 16-bit/32-bit whatever.

You can assume all sorts of utterly ridiculous nonsense if, as an application developer, you view your machine as hardware up rather than software down. For example, the VBR on the 68000 was at a fixed location starting at address 0. From your standpoint, it's t thus perfectly fine when taking over the machine to put your own handlers in that first 1K of memory. And some obviously did, which is why when 68010+ based systems started appearing and the OS got the opportunity to relocate the VBR to somewhere helpful, like fast ram, their code failed miserably. And that's just from "hardware banging" the CPU, let alone assuming other facets of the system architecture would never change.

Frankly I'm glad that not too many people thought your way about development or there's no way we'd ever be using 68060, RTG or AHI. You might find it comfortable in 68000/OCS-only land, but don't assume everybody else did.

I'm so sorry you missed the point entirely.  There's nothing wrong with having APi standard and hardware level compatibility.  I'm glad many people banged the hardware as that's the really cool software that now exists on Amiga and is more efficient and faster than API-based stuff.  Yeah, I agree processors did change but even in that case if many people utilized features that weren't doable on 68020 or later-- they would made the chip more compatible.

[amigaksi]

Well, first let me say sorry for making a post that obviously caused so much fuss, second while we went off topic in places the question I was originally asking was what would it take if the money was endless to make a super amiga? I was thinking that a motherboard with pci express or agp express would be a start, this would give the graphics a leap start, second a new processor, not an intel or an amd but something new, the amiga was good because it didnt depend on one huge processor to do all the work but instead shared the work load through various chips. add to that solid state hdds to keep size and sound and costs down and a nice new OS with inbuild touch screen technology support and its the foundation of a new amiga? no?

I think there's some natami forum for the next generation amiga.

[amigaksi]

I accept your point Karlos, but for me one of the most enjoyable things about using the Amiga is the challenge in making something work on it that really shouldn't...

The OCS registers work 100% on ECS and AGA.  It's not a big challenge to make OCS stuff work on AGA.  Just have to avoid assuming 7.16Mhz 68000 and few other details.  The OCS stuff that doesn't work with AGA isn't just using OCS registers-- the problems are mostly caused by other factors.

[amigaksi]

Or Product B gets the sale because Manager Z read an article, written by a journalist instead of a technician, in a magazine and decided Product B would be better because everybody else uses it.

The problem there was that she denounced amiga because of her needs and going by some specialized non-standard audio card; if you allow for hardware add-ons, you could have gotten 20 bits DAC/ADC audio card for Amiga in 1990s as well:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/search.pl?product=soundstage&company=

[amigaksi]

I have noticed that rabbit chasing occurs frequently around here. As amigasi mentioned, the Natami project desires to simply upgrade the Amiga chipset hardware and keep going.

PCI express would probably be the better starting point as AGP is old school now. ARM is a possible contender, and there is a rumor that AmigaOS4 will be ported to it.

Amiga needs more software now than anything else.

Need some popcorn reading about the API vs. direct access discussion. Would an API that maintains an optimized, hardware banging code base adequately satisfy?

Problem with API is not only efficiency of code and speed, but also that it's restrictive and inexact.  For example, on standard VGA you can write to an I/O port to do hscroll, vscroll, and line replication (all via hardware).  You can do similar on Amiga (of course).  Now, when nonstandard VGA cards took over many didn't even support these three features for the better graphics modes so even if you had an API that does hscroll, vscroll, and line replication-- the ones that don't support it will be emulating it via copying buffers and slower means.  And then add to that trouble, suppose you wanted to read in user input during VBI and do the hscroll/vscroll at that time, you are in some trouble.  So if you program for worst case scenario, you would avoid doing it in VBI.

[amigaksi]

For what I do, there could be no way I could do all my work on an Amiga.  Even something as simple as signing onto facebook or webcam with my friends and family. Does the Amiga do that?  Sure eventually they could make a client to do such things, but it would be painful.
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Internet was pretty much something that came after Amiga architecture was designed just like game ports, digitized audio/accelerated graphics was something of an afterthought on PCs of the 1980s.  

Sure if your comparing an ancient 486 and Windows 3.11, id pick the Amiga up any day, but we are talking for today's standards..  No Amiga programs could ever touch the features/abilities of that on PCs today.  Sure you might be able to do something good or produce something worthwhile on your Amiga, but it will take awhile...

It works both ways even today.  Atari 800 Pac-man is 8K cartridge (like many other games) and Amiga games are also pretty small given what they do whereas same things on PCs use up a ton of more code assuming you have some good interface to play them.  I'm glad you picked Amiga over 486 as processor should not be the only determining factor.  You have to take into account graphics power, audio power, gaming control, collision detection, etc.  Digital joysticks are always superior to analog for most games.