Amiga vs PC

[stefcep2]

lol, stubby fingers.  You sure are a riot.



Don't look stubby to me.  

and yes that's a mickey table cloth, and no I don't give a rats ass if someone thinks its homo.

It wasn't the table cloth that made me think it...not that there's anything wrong with that..

[stefcep2]

I can't speak for every PC ever built (there's always soemone who seems to come up with something "unusual" in these threads), but I can honestly say that compared to the PC's I've used and seen used by other, the Amiga could do more (FAR more) with far less.

An A1200 running at 14 mhz and 8 mb fast ram could fit a TCP stack, a browser, an email client, newsreader, an FTP client, IM,  a paint package like Dpaint, a word processor and even do a 3D render in the background ) especially if you had an FPU, play music/mods, a file manager like Dopus on top of a GUI OS-with god knows how many little commodities running in the background and the thing was still responsive to the user.  I can't imagine any x86 platform doing that.

I'm not sure if  that advantage in the efficient use of hardware resources was there by design or as a consequence of little hardware development since Commodores demise, nor if that would have continued if AmigaOS survived today.  But what has been achieved by tiny teams of programmers with Morphos/AmigaOS/AROS suggests it might have (yes I know they run on limited hardware, but thats what custom chips were in a way).

So for me, Amiga was all about efficiency, elegance and making me feel that the system obeyed me, and for me that made up for the lack of the brute power of a PC.

[stefcep2]

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.


Funny story! Don't we all do that on an x86 platform every day? I know I do:
TCP stack: Yep.  
Browser to reply to this kind of stupidity: Yep!
e-mail: lol duh?
FTP: sho' am good
IM: 3 of them at once! + IRC
paint: Lol Photoshop CS3 to make 4chan.org funnies
among other stuff too, and then I usually even play a game at the same time! 3D rendering!  Networked gaming even!  

In 8 meg with 2 meg video ram..I doubt it!!!

Maybe the PC's you are using are pieces of shit or you don't know how to keep them running properly.

The essence of the post was that you can do more with less on Amiga.  I know a fair bit about making my PC run properly, But even with smaller footprint of Win 3.1, I doubt I'll get all the software I mentioned or equivalents to run in 8 meg and 2 meg video in x86.

I think the efficiency is due to the nature/era of the platform.  When you introduce unique chips, they tend to function better.

I think you're wrong about the era being the reason, because PC's and Macs of the same era needed more hardware resources and did less, but you're right to say it was the "nature" of the Amiga platform.

[stefcep2]

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.

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

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.

I think you over-estimate the success in the real world of the HAL's.  People still have problems getting particular video/audio/wireless/bluetooth etc and motherboard combinations to work properly or at all.  In Windows and Linux.  And no its not due to shit HW/bleeding edge HW, with immature drivers either.  

IMO the best test of just how well HAL's work or don't work is trying to set up a gaming and media centre PC.  It can be real simple, or it can be every bit as difficult as getting hardware to work together as it was in the Win 3.1.  For example, I have NEVER been able to get my TV tuner to show the TV guide through Mediacentre without crashing it-thats with Vista Home premium and now Win 7 Ultimate.  Yet it works in Ubuntu, and the same USB tuner works on a different motherboard.  And this is pretty generic hardware I'm talking, not some bleeding edge thing with immature drivers.  Log onto the various media centre forums and you'll see countless posts with similar problems.

The usual come back to this is that MS and Linux community can't test every hardware combo out there.  Well that's the whole point of the HAL: you shouldn't need to, it should just work. And I no longer buy the MS claim that the HW vendor didn't follow the rules or the drivers was bad, in all such cases-maybe the rules/concepts themselves aren't right?

That brings me to the other philosophical advantage of Amiga: custom, uniform hardware.  Oh yes, I know that over time custom hardware may get out-performed.  Yet if we look at the PS3 and Xbox-5 or so years old-has that really happened in a way that matters to the user?  PC gaming and PC media centres?  The relative sales would suggest people care less and less for this.  1080p games and bluray from a PS3 on a 55 inch plasma looks stunning.  And more is being achieved on the same hardware every year.  Because the software programmers have no choice but to write ever more clever, efficient, code, coz they won't get another gig of ram to be sloppy with, or another couple of cores to pay with. Conceptually very amiga-like..  And its closer to plug and play than any x86 platform ever was.

[stefcep2]

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.  

I don't care about the behind the scenes stuff because its all relative.  I care about ease-of-use.  my fruityloops setup is more expansive and easy to use than an Amiga sound setup.

its called changing times.  thats all.  More power to people still using octamed, etc.... but I have found better solutions.  *shrug*

i see. so what you're saying is that 1992 hardware and software can't match 2010 hardware and software.  really!   Well according to Moore's law, computing power should have increased by 2 to the power of 12 in that time (doubles every 18 months) so I'd say you're about right.

Lol, doing all of that on an Amiga w/ 8meg and 2meg is about as fun as jamming your shaft in a bugzapper.

A PC of the same era wouldn't even find enough resources to move the mouse pointer, if you actually managed to load the browser.

[stefcep2]

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.

i'd say in another 5 years, the PS3 and Xbox 360 will still have new software available.  All backwards compatible with the very first editions.  And that generation of software will in likelihood make the HW do things that no-one thought was possible.   Eventually pushing the HW to its limits.  Like some of the amazing demo's that we see running on '030 A1200' with just a bit of fast ram.

[stefcep2]

Superior ? Is it superior that any change in the hardware (evolution means change usually) will break pretty much every application coded using direct access ?

I question the trade off in stability that is made to have so much choice of HW, and by the frequent upgrading to better-specced PC HW ( which history shows never seems to match the hype anyway. )

The PS3 and Xbox are pretty complex beasts, and those platforms will be going for another 5 years (10 in total) without the need for changing interfaces/video cards/sound cards.  Sure they have HAL, due to complexity, not for backward compatibility as the HW won't change for 10 years.  And its likely that the games and media playnack facilities will compete with whatever the PC  is doing (1920x1080 and 7.1 sound FFS).  Ease of use and stability is unsurpassed.  So if not not games and media playback what's left for the PC? Comms and Office work, which a single core cpu and 512 MB RAM can do?  Software development-hardly mainstream.  Maybe some niche things like video-editing, image editing, music making.

[stefcep2]

Windows 3.11 + IE4 on a 8 Meg 486 was more capable and standards compliant than AOS was up until the relatively recent release of webkit based browsers.

I've done internet on an 8Meg Amiga, there are a lot of words one could use to describe the experience, fun doesn't feature among them however.

Every single website loading up was a concern - would this one take up too much ram to display and knock out the system?

The only really safe way to do it was to disable image loading and run one application at a time if you were going anywhere near the internet.

Bullshit.

[stefcep2]

Is that your qualified opinion? Browsing on my old A1200 with 040/16MB fast (when the 040 card works, but that's a different story) on AGA is not a lot of fun, either. It starts off fine but sooner or later (depending on how many image intensive pages I've visited), I'm down to my last MB of memory and my 040 feels more like an 020 until I either flush the images or turn them off. That's with a minimal installation of OS3.5 and the usual 040 speedup patches installed (RemApollo, 040 ieee math libraries etc).

When?  In the Win 3.1 days or today?  

It's not just a case of misremembering either. This behaviour was observed recently, during the development of the old browser proxy for iBrowse/Aweb.

Aah so its today. You want to view the bloated mess thats the web today on a 40 mhz cpu with 32 Mb ram.  Sheesh.

FYI  I used the same spec A1200 in 64 colors dblscan(fblit and Ftext) till about 2002 with Aweb/Ibrowse.  Sure over the years, it got slower as web pages became bloated with more and more useless banners and images.  Being on dial up didn't help matters so i switched off images.  I also ran netscape 4 communicator under shapeshifter with Mac SO 7.5.5 and the savage driver in 640x480 256 colors (the screen was in fast ram mapped with the MMU). The Aweb/Ibrowse set up was faster. The speed  advantage of YAM over communicator was even more stark.

Eventually i went to the A4000/68060/CV64 running Ibrowse 2, on dial up till 2007 or so, and never experienced this BULLSHIT about worrying if the next web page would crash the system!

With some of posts some "Amigans" here make, you'd think their machines did nothing but crashed at the first single mouse pointer movement after booting.  All the software on aminet must have been created with amiga's in an alternate reality, as according to Leander, the Amiga was one useless, perpetually crashing mess.  For him NOTHING worked.

[stefcep2]

It was 16MB and 25MHz. So I guess you feel even more let off the hook. FYI, the proxied version of amiga.org has considerably less "bloat", especially while it was in early development, so comparable to the good old days. The first version was somewhat overzealous in what it stripped out, the resulting pages could hardly be described as bloated

Be that as it may, I was viewing this site's pages under a different user name from about 1998.  I never experienced this event that you and Leander describe.  NEVER.  Sounds like the lack the of protected memory argument: yeah you could crash your amiga, yeah you could lose data, yet gigabytes of software, pics, songs were created by users anyway.

I'm also guessing your 060 had more than 16MB?

 128 MB.  But I don't think I got less than 112 MB free.  Unlike what's been said here I don't recall accessing sites I needed to being unusually difficult, although I did need to install some encryption update to do my banking.  To have hardware built in 1992 still function like that is remarkable.

That's not true, his needs simply exceeded what his machine was capable of . It happens to most people.

No issue with people buying whatever meets their needs.  Its the incessant revisionist negativity that is tiresome.

[stefcep2]

Now had you pointed out that something like an A500/2000 etc didn't have a serial port capable of utilising a 33.6/56k modem unlike your average early 90s PC.............

but you could get them easily enough as add-ons for zorro, clock port etc..not sure about the A500 though..

[stefcep2]

@ Leander

The problem I have in believing just how great IE on an 8 meg 486 and Win 3.1 ran is that at the time virtually everyone used Netscape,and even payed to do so.  None of the PC magazines recommended it, and everyone I knew agree IE4 was shit.  Evryone at the time was running Win 95 at least a well.  Secondly I did have a 200 mhz 603e power mac with 32 mb ram and both  IE4 and Netscape communicator ran like a  three-legged dog on that machine under Mac OS 8.  I honestly can't see how IE 4 under 3.11 and 486 could have run as well as you say it did.

would bring the Amiga to its knees with a native browser.

If you say so.  A graphics card made all the difference to me.

E5 was so far ahead of the game that it got to the stage that I would only browse the web on the Amiga using shapeshifter running MacOS 7.1 with IE5 installed. There was absolutely nothing on the Amiga that could match it for compatibility on the web.

Read that again: I could emulate a Mac on my Amiga and get better, faster, more compatible results than I could natively.

IE5 on the same hardware under emulation suffered far less slowdown and got me a whole hell of a lot further

You could not have run Win 95 under emulation without it looking like a slideshow, so i'm assuming you emulated a Mac on your Amiga.  The thing is I spent an eternity on PPC cyberstorm 68060/604e trying Fusion ppc to boot PPC MacOS 7.6 and 8.0 and NEVER got past the bomb screen.  You do know that IE 5 was PPC MacOs 7.6+ only, right?  So 68K 7.1 would not have done.  So I'd like to know how, exactly, you got a PPC IE5 to run in your Amiga under emulation?

[stefcep2]

Let's face it, it has changed a lot over the years. Here are just some of them:

Processor:
16-bit -> 32-bit -> 32-bit + SIMD (MMX, 3DNow, SSE etc) -> 64-bit multicore

Peripheral buses:
ISA -> PCI -> PCI + AGP -> PCIe -> PCIe 2.0 (not to mention the other PCI fork, PCI-X)

PCIe couldn't be more different to PCI, using high speed point to point serial "lanes" rather than parallel (which limits the achievable speeds significantly).

HD interfaces:
PC/XT -> IDE (PIO) -> UDMA IDE -> SATA -> SATA II (not to mention SCSI variants)

Other peripheral buses:
Serial/Parallel/PS2 -> USB -> USB2 -> USB3

Video:
Mono -> CGA -> EGA -> VGA -> SVGA -> HD

Audio
Beeper -> 8-bit + FM -> 16-bit + wavetable -> 24-bit HD + wavetable + DSP etc

I'm not really sure what there is that needs to change, other than people's concepts of what a PC actually is. It's not a "PeeCee", wintel box or any of the other decade old names people like to use. It's a modular computer made from standardised parts that is capable of running a myriad of different operating systems.

So if computing power doubles every 18 months, and the A4000 was circa 1992, do you feel that your 2010 PC gives you the power of 2^12 (ie 4096) A4000's working at the same time?

[stefcep2]

It is actually transistor count that is suppose to double.

Maybe, but I've heard the general expression "computing power" being used, whatever that means.

"David House, an Intel colleague,[18] had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.[19]"-Wiki

[stefcep2]

Motorola 68040 ~ 27.5 MIPS at 25 MHz
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE ~ 147,600 MIPS at 3.3 GHz

That's 5367 times the power of an A4000.

benchmarks don't reveal true performance.  I wonder if you could render a Lightwave animation in 1/4096th of the time?