Amiga vs PC

[psxphill]

But why oh why, if these Pee'Cees and Craple Macs are so good do you run an Amiga emulator on them... :huh:

Nostalgia. It brings back memories of simpler times.
 
The Amiga was very efficient at what it did, but this goes in waves.
Everything started custom. Then there became general purpose CPU's that were fast enough, mass market means cheaper. While the CPU manufacturers get on with the next generation, you can make some custom hardware that outperforms it. This has happened in the PC market as well, early 3d cards that once were highly prized can now be beaten by software rendering.
 
We're so many CPU generations down the line that you can emulate the Amiga on some very cheap hardware. At that point you can't really claim any superiority.
 
The OS hasn't aged particularly well either, while there were good concepts there are too many drawbacks to outweigh the positives.
 
It was good for it's time. I still have my a500, though it's had two replacement motherboards since then, but I'm back on a rev 5 board now so it is original.

[psxphill]

Yes, it's the OS's fault that there was no solution given to run old software that doesn't need any upgrade or newer OS features to run with full functionality. The fact of the matter is, when I benchmark my software on Windows 98SE w/64MB and Windows XP w/1GB RAM, it runs better on Windows 98SE.

16bit support in an x64 os is hard, because the processor can't easily switch between those modes. The only way to run it would be to use an emulator. Microsoft give you a free copy of Windows XP to run in an emulator on Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.
 
I'm sure you'd love Microsoft to spend a load of money on supporting your application, but there is no justification for them to do so.
 
64 bit is better for a number of reasons. I use it wherever I can, unfortunately my netbook only supports 32bits.
 
Maybe it's about time you sold your customers an upgrade.

[psxphill]

FACT Win95+surfing on IE continuously = Reboot city. Trust me I know, it was a major deal breaker for SLA reporting!
 
Win 98 + Netscape + 16mb + Pentium 120 was indeed quite OK. But seeing as that's 4 years after Commodore went bankrupt and ESCOM were nothing more than box shifters for 12 months what do you really expect from Amiga?

All the cool kids were running NT4 back then, yeah you needed more ram. I had 192mb,why anyone would buy a machine with 16mb I have no idea. Bonus points if you could get drivers for all your hardware and find a game that you could actually run (hacked directx from windows 5 beta ftw).
 
Amiga was hard to get online untill Miami etc came out, Windows 3.11 was a bit of a pain to get online too though. Microsoft didn't even think the internet was worth supporting when Windows 95 came out.
 
I still only had an Amiga at home until 2000 though. At some point an 68030 doesn't cut it anymore and faster hardware is too expensive.
 
It's taken Microsoft a long time to get something that is an order of magnitude better than the Amiga. However I don't think Commodore would ever have gotten there. The competition was always going to catch up on their initial head start.

[psxphill]

Yes, I expect Win 3.x to work on modern hardware. That's what compatbility means. I shouldn't have to buy some other emulation scheme (assuming it exists).
 
It's the OSes fault that it's incompatible with previous windows API. I won't even mention I/O ports yet, but suffice to say that up to windows 98SE, they were backward compatible on API level as well as I/O port level. Windows 98SE was the LAST good OS by Microsoft. It allowed direct port I/O and APi access just like Amiga OS.

I think you're in a very small minority. Not being able to access I/O ports from every program is a good thing, I don't want everything to be able to access my hard drive directly. You can access I/O ports on x64 versions of windows, but you have to have a signed driver installed to do it.
 
Also, not everyone wants to pay extra so their hardware will be compatible with windows 3.1.
 
Before Windows 7, every graphics card had to support 256 colour mode X. Which was a clever hack back in 1995, but these days it just adds cost.
 
To run Windows 3.1 you'd need your VGA card to support planar graphics modes, which I have no idea if mine supports. 99.9% of people in the world have no use for them. So if they are sitting there on my graphics card, then I've had to pay for them.
 
If you really want to run 16 bit software, then a 32 bit Windows 7 would be your best bet. I wouldn't use it, because 32bit has more security risks but if you'd rather use Windows 98 then it's going to be better than that.
 
Well written 32 bit software should run without any problems. What you're trying to use is probably just buggy. You can't blame Microsoft for that (although they do go out of their way to make sure big name software works, no matter how badly written it is).