PC still playing Amiga catchup

[paolone]

Oh, my God! This flame made me laugh out loud at least twice. This joystick polling frequency argument frankly is the most silly I've ever heard in a computer architecture discussion, even more ridicolous than the old boot-time whining, and the only conclusion I can see for it, is that my Commodore 16 was the most powerful PC of all times, since it "booted" instantly, even faster than my later Commodore 128 (which took at least 1 second to initialize). My Amigas and then my PCs have always took more time to be ready for my input. So the C16 is the absolute winner here =)

PS: everywhere else, a "joystick polling frequency" argument would have been motivation for laughs, not for a 200 messages-long discussion. Please, let's do a reality check soon.

[paolone]

(about instant shutdown tuening off the machine)

You're work in a server-client environment.  Many people at home don't, many people shut down their PC's daily, to them it matters..Its a feature that many PC user would be glad to have, but no YOU might not care, but so what, it DOESN"T CHANGE THE FACT THAT PC's STILL CAN"T DO IT.

Oh, really? That's exactly what I do to turn off my Icaros Destkop machine: i press the button and the PC is off. Immediately.

But don't think it's the safest feature on earth: if you turn off your computer while it's writing to disk, it doesn't matter if you're using AmigaOS, Windows, AROS or MacOS X, you'll kill the accessed file and you can also ruin the whole filesystem, with a random degree of pain. A shutdown procedure is not simply a bloated pointless loose of time, but a safer way to close operations and leave everything in a good shape.

[paolone]

Actually from another POV its been the reverse: my impression is that some pro-PC people believe the *PC* is perfect and any flaws regarding its hardware eg joystick polling, hardware initialisation and boot times and shut downs, user-interface slow downs, propensity for malware, registry clogging, hard drive fragmentation, hardware incompatibility (Linux), etc have not been accepted as the flaws that they are but rather have been excused for various reasons (the PC does more, it can crunch number faster, the PC has industry standard software compatibility, more people use a PC), despite the Amiga being superior at many of these things.

PCs aren't perfect but allow a wider range of options and a unmatched degree of customization. Most of the 'defects' you mentioned either depend on software, or are plain silly (there's NO "joystick port" on PCs you can compare the Amiga's ones to. And well, I'd suspect any EHCI controlled USB 2.0 port is quite more reliable and fast than ANY "1 KHz"-polling 9 pin joystick port, and in newest PCs there are a dozen available on the motherboard), while considering the Amiga "still superior" for these really marginal aspects cries for an urgent reality check.

The irony of life, is that in its glorious days, Amiga meant innovation. Now "innovation" is what is keeping the PC platform alive, even if there are cheaper and more reliable solutions for games - like nextgen consoles and so on - and sales are growing only for notebooks and netbooks. And people who once brought the flag of innovation, now prefer to close their eyes and appear as dumb with silly arguments like this 1-KHz fool and the evergreen faster boot-time. If you prefer, I can give you another: the Amiga keyboard had the left Ctrl button where mother IBM decided it should stay. Modern PCs placed it somewhere else: odd. :roflmao:

[paolone]

Go read post #275.  You are doing Chewbacca Defense.  You are trying to confuse people by misrepresenting the actual argument.  You don't have to do 1Khz sampling and still Amiga joystick interface is superior.

Yes, but the issue here is: "who cares?".

Maybe you're the only one all over the world. Doesn't this suggest anything to you?

[paolone]

Reality check: software is worthless without hardware to run it on. Rather than slamming what was once state of the art (I don't suppose you could have done better?) saying it was "underpowered" because it wasn't convenient for what you personally imagined was the One True Way of doing things, consider that people who wrote the naughty code ("cheat") actually created successful products.

I've just 'bolded' two words and you've got your answer. Times change, habits change, ways to do things change. A long ago moving balls over lines was a fast way to do computation, today any mobile phone can do the job of a pocket calculator, many magnitude orders faster, simplier and more accurate (in a word: better). Everything that once was a good thing, today is a hack. It happens for TV sets (no more banging on the tv-tuner frequency with a potentiometer, but choosing fixed frequencies pressing keys on remote command), it happens for computers (no more banging the hardware, but calling APIs), and every time progress has its advantages (many) and drawbacks (very few). Yes, flawed code is always flawed code, but how many chances there are, now, that it can mess up the whole operating system if it crashes? On AmigaOS, the same. On any other CURRENT architecture with protected memory, almost zero. I agree with you when you say that old 'hacks' were sometimes state of the art and masterpieces (who can forget Amiga demos?), but I absolutely can't think banging the hardware would be feasible TODAY. The price is a fraction of my 2.6+ GHz processor power, or the inability (:roflmao:) to poll my joystick port (:roflmao:) 1000 times per second? I can live with it.

regards,

[paolone]

1. You are speculating it's "progress" to use only APIs.  It's FACTUALLY a big hit on creativity.

2. In other cases for real-time scenarios, Amiga hardware level compatibility makes it superior to API versions of the same program on PC.  

3. Your 100Mhz or 2.6+GHz processor does not affect your I/O speed.

1. We must have two different ideas about what 'creativity' is, so I won't answer to this.

2. Perfect. So please write some assembly lines that poll @1KHz the damn 9-pin joystick port on my old Amiga 1200 and let's run it (natively) on my SAM too. I'm curious to see if the "Amiga hardware level compatibility" is still a working, good idea. A we're not talking about PCs, here.

3. Obvious. Peripherals are supposed to work under precise TIMINGS. A 2.6 GHz processor won't make my USB pen faster, but this isn't what a higher CPU frequency is supposed to do.

[paolone]

1. So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.

2. So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.  

3. So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.

4. So I don't know what you are reading.  Perhaps you need glasses.

Oh, my...

1. http://www.overclock.net/faqs/73418-how-improve-mouse-response-accuracy-changing.html

After many pages reading your silly rants about a joystick port that should be polled faster than on 20-years-later technologies, I simply got bored and entered "USB polling frequency driver" into Google, which gave me many interesting results. Just read what the first result has to say, "Windows by default has the usb ports working at 125Hz of 1000Hz that USB is capable of, giving 8ms response times. You can change the frequency to 250Hz(4ms), 500Hz(2ms) and 1000Hz(1ms) to get better response times" and please don't bug everyone else with your foolish assumptions.

2. That's not true. Everyone else here explained you that APIs are better just because they allow programming in shorter times, compatibility-friendly with more HW configuraions and much more future-proof. Those are advantages that greatly surpass, in magnitude orders, your obsolete concerns about code optimization and speed. Wake up! We are in 2009, we have GHz-range processors out there and we don't need to bang the hardware anymore. You simply DON'T WANT to listen to people saying this.

3. You don't even need an example, it's plain logic. Every time your OCS chip does a clock cycle, any modern, low-value GPU has already executed thousands of instructions.

4. No, he doesn't need glasses. YOU need a reality check. Or maybe a travel ticket to fantasyland, to Amiga Neverland or so.

[paolone]

You look like you had a bad day.

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.

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

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.

regards,

[paolone]

1. 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.  

2. 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.

3. >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.

4. 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.

5. Speak for yourself.  Many people agree with me.

1. It might be, but the question still remain the same: who cares?

2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".

I won't laugh at this statement, since the gaming market has slightly evolved from the 16-bit age, and I won't even try to count how many times modern games are visually better and more sophisticated than old 2D platforms and shooters, even if they rely on APIs and 3D hardware drivers, but in the following pages you lost the point of your initial statement, which is:

"faster joystick polling ---> more suitable for games"

The more people answered to you, the more you introduced captions to your arguments, and the gameport vs USB one is one of them. Sorry, the PC has ABANDONED gameports. The use USB for game controllers, so if you want to do a fair comparison, you have to deal with USB and FORGET gameports. You said "Amiga gameport can handle 1KHz", I answered "ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.

3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming. That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all. PC market constantly evolves and newer machines replace older ones, which get used for other purposes or dismissed/trashed. Newer machines haven't gameports and, if they have them, they get unused since you can't buy new game devices using it. And that's a fact.

5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.

[paolone]

"Great" for you.  They purposely tried to make them compatible-- what minor differences there are don't compare with eliminating the 16-bit mode completely.

whatwhatwhatwhat!?

That's incredible, if you didn't exist, someone should have invented you: every night I come here to see if there are any news, and you always bring to me some delight.

Ok, so X64 architecture has dropped 16 bit compatibility. And now? How can we live with this? "there are millions of DOS/Win31 programs out there". One for every gameport? Once again, I have to inform you that we are in (late) 2009, 10 years after that 16-bit programming has been considered "deprecated" on the x86 architecture, and that today almost nobody still uses DOS. So anyone willing to use ancient code and ancient programs has the ability to run them on a virtual machine.

What are you? Some sort of technoecologist, desperately fighting for obsolete solutions preservation?