What are the advantages of the present/future Amiga?

[mdwh2]

Beast96GT wrote:
1) What would be special about it?  What would make people want to buy it instead of a PC?  

The same reasons people buy Macs: avoiding viruses etc; wanting an all-in-one combined hardware/OS package from the same company; just wanting to be different.

2) How can the Amiga recreate the charm it once had as an inexpensive multimedia computer?

All computers these days have the charm of being inexpensive multimedia computers. So there's no need to recreate it, just offer what everyone else offers these days.

3) What are the hardware solutions for the Amiga considering it typically uses hardware that can be outdated, limited in quantity, generally incompatible with market leader?

Well obviously it would be silly to use years old hardware, and there's no reason to restrict it to such hardware. The hardware solutions are those on the market today, which includes hardware that is compatible with Windows.

alexh wrote:
Dunno about you, but I certainly do not remember the Amiga as "inexpensive".

A Batman Pack which cost £399 in 1989 would cost in today's money (adjusting for inflation) £734.16. That is hardly inexpensive is it?

It was inexpensive compared to the alternatives to the time (e.g., PCs costing twice as much). But yes, computers of today are even more inexpensive.

[mdwh2]

zylesea wrote:
The issue of going x86 was discussed a zillion times already. the prob is the endianess. either you lose binary compatibilty (like AROS) or you lose cpu cycles (needed to continously swap endianess) - which wouldn't comply with the 'elegance through simplicity' approach.

It wasn't a problem for Apple.

And given that a modern x86 can run rings around the fastest '060, even with the burden of emulation, I'd say that's a far more elegant and simple solution than using outdated and expensive hardware.

DigitalQ wrote:
I consider that all modern computers running a modern OS (ie; Linux, Vista) contain all the best elements that made the Amiga special in its day.  In this light, I see the Amiga as being a contributor to the computer I'm using right now; which means that, in a sense, I am using a modern variation of the Amiga.

I fully agree. I've been using PCs for the last few years because they have become far more in the spirit of what the Amiga was. The Amiga lives probably more so than anything to do with DOS or classic MacOS. I could stick an Amiga sticker on it if I really wanted to, but I'm not really bothered about being loyal to a trademark.

murple wrote:
Without some continuity from the Commodore Amigas either in technology or engineers... I think it'd be an Amiga in name only.

Note that this is just like Mac OS X and Windows.

Things like the Minimig and AOne are cool, but I cant really consider them Amigas.

This seems to me an odd thing to say - do you say the same of modern Macs and Windows PCs (which are far more of a gap than the AmigaOne, where the only difference is a different CPU; Macs have a completely different OS too)?

[mdwh2]

Beast96GT wrote:
The Amiga graphics chips could optimize for Quaternions which are much better than matrices (especially for rotations).  

In what sense "optimised", that isn't already done on modern hardware? Presumably if there was some obvious way to speed things up here, NVIDIA etc would already be doing it.

Quaternions are only a representation of 3x3 matrices for rotations, they still need to be converted to 4x4 matrices to represent general transformations anyway.

[mdwh2]

alexh wrote:

amigaksi wrote:

Do you really think that setting 30 X,Y registers of sprites even on a 7.16Mhz OCS Amiga 1000 can be beat by a standard CPU/Graphics Card doing erasing/repainting of software sprites?

Surely it can? The bandwidth of DDR2 + 16x PCIe + 2.4GHz Core2Duo means the CPU can erase and repaint a 320x240x8 screen many thousands of times per VBL?

Indeed, his claim is ludicrous. Moreover, there's no reason it has to be done in software anyway - on modern hardware, this sort of thing can easily be done in hardware (the sprites are stored in graphics memory, and rendered directly by the graphics hardware). Therefore you don't even have the bottleneck of PCIe, and graphics memory is even faster than DDR2. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_Series , the memory bandwidth on modern graphics cards is ~100GB/s, with 240 processors giving a peak fillrate of about 20 billion pixels per second (which would fill that 320x240 screen about 260,000 times a second). What was that about being able to set a measly 30 registers?

[mdwh2]

amigaksi wrote:
Alex is right in trying to repaint the screen because the ORIGINAL point is showing a screen full of sprites on a system that does not have sprites.

Right, I understand this - and even if you have to repaint every pixel by CPU, this is easily possible on modern hardware.

Moreover, you missed another point-- that you have to use a standard graphics card/CPU not something that works on maybe your system and you are NO LONGER using a system that does NOT support sprites.

What do you mean "works maybe your system"? 3D graphics cards that do texture mapping in hardware have been around for over a decade!

How old is your ATI card exactly?

Software written for graphics cards will work on any make of graphics cards (although there may be some differences, this is in areas that is way beyond what any Amiga chipset ever did) - unlike banging the hardware, which won't work on anything, possibly not even a newer version of that chipset from the same company (consider all the OCS vs ECS vs AGA incompatibilities).

It's NOT 100GB/second from CPU accessible memory to graphics card

If you're rendering from hardware, the CPU doesn't need to do a thing.

I say: system without hardware sprites would have a hard time showing a screen full of sprites in real-time (on a standard CPU/Graphics card).
You say: that's ludicrous, just use the hardware sprites in the graphics card and use the latest and greatest graphics card.

You don't need "sprites", because any bog standard (or even several years old) PC will do it in hardware. You don't need latest and greatest - that was just an example of what modern hardware is like today - a 10 year old Voodoo would do it.

But even if we restrict ourselves to a CPU solution, I don't see why this is not possible. The obvious example would be a software 3D renderer, which has to redraw the entire screen many times a second. That was being done a decade ago with Quake - now computers are doing things like real time raytracing!

Duh! Perhaps, I should put in Video Toaster in my machine and use that to my advantage as well and some other souped up attachment that only works on my Amiga.

Okay, fine - and what will it be able to do better, compared with modern hardware?

[mdwh2]

kolla wrote:
Are you crazy?!

MorphOS would then be in *direct* competition with Windows.. oh, and MacOS! _Noone_ would use it!

Hahahaha....  :-D

Btw, after having read this entire thread - I just realized that it is September again. Is this... :idea:

This is a common anti-x86 argument that I've never understood. By this argument, no one should use MacOS X, because it's now in "direct competition with Windows". Moreover, MorphOS was in "direct competition" with MacOS for years when it used PowerPC.

But none of this is true in any case - platforms are in just as much competition with each other whether or not they use the same CPU.

[mdwh2]

amigaksi wrote:
That's not the argument either. This is a straw man argument. When you emulate accurately some aspect of the system, you have to meet or exceed the requirements; here I PURPOSELY used the words REAL-TIME sprites meaning you have to meet the real-time constraints of the original item you are trying to emulate. So back to the point, if the Amiga 1000 OCS can render 30 sprites in around 40 microseconds, you have to do the same in the new system in 40 microseconds or less.

That's 25 frames per second - which is no trouble on modern hardware. Or old hardware. Or even ancient hardware where you have to do it in the CPU.

Imagine a scenario where besides the 40 microseconds, all the other time is being used to send pulses through the I/O ports or the Amiga is in HALTed state and some other machine is controlling some medical heart/lung machine.

Again no problem - especially given that modern hardware (or even old hardware) is vastly faster than any Amiga CPU.

Does not matter really since it has to work in most PC systems which would require doing it in software not relying on some sort of "sprite" hardware being present.

They do not have "sprite" hardware, they do texture mapping in hardware. The CPU can do exactly the same functionality - albeit slower, though still way faster than any Amiga hardware ever could.

I don't see why "most PC systems" includes "utterly ancient systems" - and wasn't the issue talking about potential new Amiga hardware, in which case, you'd obviously pick some 3D hardware to go with it?

That's wrong. OCS banging works just fine for ECS/AGA as far as I have tried it and thus good for this argument.

It didn't work for many games...

On the contrary, you can't be sure the graphics cards will support certain hardware features that you may be relying on. And some software/OS/drivers may shut down certain hardware features without you knowing it.

Have you done 3D programming on modern hardware? Of course you can check for whether features are supported - not that it matters here, since simple texture mapping is standard on 3D hardware.

And there are more bugs in these software/OS/drivers than in OCS/ECS/AGA compatibility.

Evidence?

Hardware banging is allowed for by Commodore themselves in the Hardware reference manual as I already explained.

And what a poor decision that was - it left us stuck with aging Amiga custom hardware, unable to fully take advantage of newer graphics chipsets.

It's not a standard and some AGP cards do not support hardware sprites.

Which cards?

See now why this is called a straw man's argument.

No, I don't see, as the real time software rendering easily meets the 40ms requirement.

[mdwh2]

downix wrote:
See, here's the confusion.  Mac's might run Intel CPU's, but they are not IBM compatible, missing several key 8-bit components.  Hence why the Hypervisor mode to enable Windows to run, emulating the missing pieces.  But whenever anyone mentions an x86 Amiga, they figure on bog standard boards.  That will not work.  At the minimum we'd need a custom boot loader, Kickstart embedded in the mobo you could say.  

I see nothing in Piru's reply that implies porting to standard PCs - the question was about CPUs. I don't see why adding those things is hard - it's no harder than making your own custom motherboard with any other CPU.

The issue of making your own custom motherboards vs using other companies' motherboards can even apply to other CPUs (e.g., when BeOS wrote their OS to run on PowerMacs for a while). This issue shouldn't be confused with CPU choice.

So basically - yes, I agree that being a software only OS company and writing software to run on other people's hardware is a risk, but using x86 as a CPU whilst producing your own hardware is still an option, as Apple have shown.

[mdwh2]

amigaksi wrote:
  Of course, as far as Amiga sprites go they still won't function in software on modern graphics cards even with the overhead of Amiga API taken into account and even at 320*240 resolution.  Just tried it on NVIDIA GEFORCE 6100, but be my guest to try it on your system.

Do you have a program (and preferably the source code too) for us to test? I'd be curious to see what you are trying to do, and maybe someone can see why it isn't working so well.

[mdwh2]

amigaksi wrote:
>by mdwh2 on 2008/9/4 17:14:49

>>Quote:
>>    amigaksi wrote:
    Of course, as far as Amiga sprites go they still won't function in software on modern graphics cards even with the overhead of Amiga API taken into account and even at 320*240 resolution. Just tried it on NVIDIA GEFORCE 6100, but be my guest to try it on your system.

>Do you have a program (and preferably the source code too) for us to test? I'd be curious to see what you are trying to do, and maybe someone can see why it isn't working so well.

Why don't you just do some random search and get a URL like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_4000 and "PROVE" that there are no sprites on the Amiga 4000 (or similar system) to argue about.  Instead the Amiga 4000 has 48-bit color, 256 Hardware audio channels, ...

I can't see what that has to do with what I wrote?

I tested it with a software sprite engine contained within the Gita CDROM produced by our company (see our website) which has been thoroughly optimized and allows you to select Windows API method of rendering imagery or by writing directly to the video card hardware and also lets you select various VESA modes where supported.  

Do you have any of:

* A description of what it is you are trying to achieve?
* A link to the software you are running?
* Along with source code?

Because then perhaps we can see (a) what it is you are claiming, and (b) why it isn't working. If you are unwilling to do that, then we can't.

You can use about 30 Amiga hardware sprites to cover up almost the entire screen using about 40 microseconds of CPU time. There's no way you can stamp sprites on a background image (320*240 or 640*400) and send the data to the video card in 40 microseconds or less. You'll be counting in milliseconds.

As we've said, the existence of 3D software renderers (which are far more complex than just pasting 2D images) running on PCs over a decade ago at >25FPS shows this claim to be false. Unless we have misunderstood you claim, which is why I asked you above to explain what it is you are after.

Even the Amiga often used "software" sprites (blitter objects) because they were often more flexible.

[mdwh2]

amigaksi wrote:
>I can't see what that has to do with what I wrote?

Just warning you not to quote some random article on web like you did previously as I will accept deductive logic, something I can experiment on, and/or legitimate company document from Intel/Microsoft/etc.

Which link? About the NVIDIA card - are you disputing that it has those capabilities?

Yes, software sprites on a PC at better or equal speed than Amiga 1000 OCS machine.  I spelled it out exactly by stating 30 sprites across the screen in 40 microseconds.

How many sprites does the Amiga allow? I thought it was 8 on OCS?

How are you measuring the speed on the Amiga side? Or indeed, how are you measuring the speed on Windows? The usual way to measure performance on Windows is the fps, which is unlikely to ever be as high as 25,000 - but then I'm not convinced that the Amiga could ever do this either.

Why is the performance of one particular thing important? All that matters is overall framerate, which just needs to be at least as good as the refresh rate of the screen.

Well, whoever that "we" refers to, they have misunderstood.  25 fps is only 40 MILLIseconds not 40 MICROseconds.  You may need to go back and edit your replies.  I am not interested in the frame rate, I am interested in meeting or exceeding the Amiga sprite speed.

Sorry, I misread as at one point you said 40ms, which means milliseconds. Still, the theoretical peak output of the fillrate of modern graphics cards should equal this if not beat it, but measuring it is hard when you usually only look at final FPS.