real amiga vs winuae

[Karlos]

Emulation is not the same as using real amiga. I'll leave it at that for now...

Nope, it's a lot cheaper, a lot faster and a lot more convenient most of the time

[Karlos]

Until you can refute the points in the other thread (PC has yet to catch up on certain things), you should stop offering advice here as to not mislead people.

Unless you can demonstrate why using an emulator is less convenient for the average user, you should shut yer cakehole.

How much would a real system with the fastest 060 available, HD, high end RTG, network and 128 MB ram cost you to set up? And it would still be massively slower than UAE on a reasonable PC for everything, with the sole exception, perhaps, of polling the joyport every 500ns, which I'm quite sure most users couldn't give a toss about.

The experience of using a real amiga is, I agree, an entirely unique one. However, it has no bearing whatsoever on the claim that UAE is far more convenient.

How many real amigas can you put to sleep and resume later? How many real amigas are capable of executing 68K code at the sort of speed UAE's JIT achieves on a 2GHz x86? How many real amigas can be pimped to the extent that AmiKit allows and still run like greased lightning?

Not many, that's for sure.

[Karlos]

It is cheaper though it does not prove anything

Have you tried upgrading a real amiga recently? It's hugely expensive.

It might be faster but what for?

Anything you want it to be faster for. Or not, if you prefer. Certainly you feel the difference if, like me, you've used an RTG amiga for many years and are used to high resolutions and colour depths. Simple things like loading images in multiview, playing media etc. On UAE on a fast system, you can almost forget it's an emulation.

Convenient it is... I 've been reporting sound lags on A500 games, on E-UAE, WinUAE or even AmigaForever Player.

I can't say I have any such issues either in WInUAE or EUAE. Or even in WinUAE running under Wine

I mean c'mon! Emulation is always an emulation, pretending to be the real thing.  So if you want the real thing, get yourself one.  And if you need emulation "not real", just use it cheaply, in terms of effects also.  If I was faced with the choice of such, I wouldn't be considering options at all.

Yes, the experience is different. Using my real A1200, though a lot of fun, tends to be grindingly slow after using UAE's JIT. And this is a PPC A1200 complete with all the datatypes and everything else you could offload onto the PPC for speed (Heck, there's even an OS4 beta install on one of the partitions if I feel like going the whole hog).

I'd definitely say emulation is certainly a valid option to consider. Perhaps you have more money than sense and what's more you are already a die hard fanatic. Somebody new to the platform might want to try it, before they buy it.

[Karlos]

Absolutely, I couldn't agree more.

Inflateomates are fun but nothing like the real thing. Just 'cause one is cheaper it doesn't mean it's better.

When talking about an amiga and not your inflatable, "better" may well be subjective. However, on a decent PC, UAE is verifiably

1) Cheaper

This is a given, nobody is arguing the cost of PC ownership.

2) Faster

This is also a given. JIT performance in UAE is a significant percentage of host speed. AHI drivers give you fast, low latency audio, P96 drivers give you 2D RTG acceleration that makes any real amiga graphics card look like a toy. You also get bsdsocket.library emulation which gives you networking support. Again, much faster than any card you are likely to stick in a zorro machine or PCMCIA slot.

3) More convenient

Make as many hardfiles as you want, you even can take your emulated amiga somewhere on a pen drive. Suspend your emulation and restart it where you left off later. Have your amiga on your laptop, your netbook.

4) More compatible

Arguably yes. You can have as many configurations set up as you want, and run just about every classic amigaos / hardware combination you want, including some that never really existed. 8MiB Chip RAM in your emulated amiga versus a destroyed A4000 after somebody tried it for real. Hmm. No one real amiga is anything like as compatible as UAE is these days.

I'm not going to knock the fun of sitting infront of a real amiga and using it, that's a given. I wouldn't get rid of my actual machines. However, as far as I'm concerned UAE is not just "some emulator". It is the definitive classic amiga emulator.

[Karlos]

Are you having a tin bath??  How many PeeCees can boot in 7 seconds??

My laptop takes twice that time just to wake up from its microsoft-induced slumber, and only if it can be arsed!!

That's not actually what I meant. You can save a snapshot of your current WinUAE sesion and reload it later. I've never actually tried it though.

[Karlos]

try convincing Karlos that the amiga boots significantly faster than a PC and that this a useful thing.  But according to Karlos you, like me, are insane or suffer from attention deficit disorder.

I'm sure your amiga boots faster than your PC. Mine does not. Nor do I particularly care since I don't spend all day rebooting either of them for the simplistic joy of it. Jose has been on these boards a lot longer than you have, I don't need to demonstrate my Amiga enthusiast credentials to him.

I really don't know where you popped up from but I honestly thought people as frantically obsessed about boot times and the superiority of 20 year old hardware over all that has come after it had all disappeared long ago :lol:

[Karlos]

Hi, thanks to all, I'm definitely going to try just the pc with Winuae, I think is going to be enough for my usage, and later I'll see. Anyway, I love to tinker with the hard, so I'd love to actually put one of them to work, but I'm afraid I'm going to go bankrupt doing that. :-)

Have UAE and your real machines and enjoy the best of both worlds.

Anyway, I did a mistake, today I took a look again to my collection (I have a lot of stuff stored for the last years, so much in fact I couldn't remember everything) and I found out the Amiga 3000 is not a 3000, but a 2000, and I found out I have other 2 amigas 500, so the complete list of what I have is a Amigas 2000, 1000 and 2 500s, none with hard drive (and 1 powers up but do strange things or crash in less than a minute, many be has damaged memory?).

You should carefully disassemble the machine (all antistatic precautions taken) and reseat any socketed parts, clean the edge connectors of any boards and blow any dust the hell out of there. Check for any leakage from capacitors or batteries. These are old machines, you should expect a few startup foibles.

Is any of this worth of installing a hard drive or putting back to life?

Sure it is. I couldn't use an amiga without a hard disk these days. My days of rolling custom boot floppies are long gone

[Karlos]

@stefcep2

An old-fashioned cassette recorder doesn't even boot. It's even faster for recording 3am riffs. Of course, finding tapes for it is the limit of usefulness there...

[Karlos]

What's with all the c**k swinging lately? What happened to, "You like Amigas? Sweet. Me, too."

Apparently, according to some people, you aren't a real amiga user unless you rate them as superior because they boot quickly than any PC. And if you do have a PC that outperforms an amiga at booting up, it's a obviously a minority uber hacked machine. Heaven forfend if you actually use another platform for anything and recognise that it is better equipped for many tasks than your actual amiga is. If your amiga happens to be remotely expanded and be slower to boot due to loading drivers for RTG, network and all the other things that no real amiga should ever have, it's a Frankenstein monster that doesn't count either.

Conversely, I would suggest that an accelerator equipped amiga as much RAM as is feasible and with some form of graphics card is pretty standard amongst people that actually used their amiga for more than a toy.

[Karlos]

Boo Hoo Hoo Karlos.

If you're satisfied that your quadcore overclocked behemoth- running a customised Linux thats had its guts hacked out and that you NEVER shut down- boots faster than an 15 year old A1200 running a crippled PPC card full of performance bottlenecks and bodged on interfaces proves that the PC has finally matched the Amiga in EVERY respect and no longer plays catch-up then good luck to you.  You've won your argument. I just happen not to agree with you.

Erm, what exactly is customised in my linux? I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit out of the box, with PHP, MySQL, Apache and several other server services installed?

Far from having any "guts ripped out of it", it has extra bloat crammed in.

[Karlos]

Furthermore, I timed my A1 bootup this morning , booting into a fresh, unhacked OS4.0 install.

Despite running "bonafide" AmigaOS and running natively on an 800MHz G4 (compared to a 25MHz 040) and a UDMA6 mode hard disk, it booted in about 15 seconds after the SLB stage. As you can see, the "scalability of boot time" is an entirely worthless metric. Having a 32x increase in clockspeed, 5x increase in bus speed, bigger cache, better pipelined and DMA loading of data, It should have booted in 3% of the time according to your logic.

So, what exactly does that do to your argument?

[Karlos]

Your logic is faulty.  If it's not a real amiga, you can't discuss which is more convenient and cheaper amiga.  It's like I state fake diamond is not the same as real diamond and you stating "this diamond is a lot cheaper and convenient" already presuming it's the same.  And your 500ns polling of joystick is a straw-man argument.  And by the way "convenient" is a subjective term.

Your diamond argument is totally worthless since the context is utterly different. Unless your computer is a fashion accessory (hmm, mac lol), what matters is that you can use it. In use as a computer platform* UAE has all of the advantages I cited. If you already own a PC, the cost of setting up your emulated amiga is, well potentially nothing. Yet it will do pretty much everything you could ever want a genuine hardware amiga to do. 500ns joystick polling aside, maybe.

Your diamond analogy might be better if it were in relation to drilling purposes, but then industrial diamonds are relatively cheap anyway, since they are totally unsuitable for jewellery. What's more, I don't think any normal woman is going to reach for her DeBeers special to wear on a night out on the town when her cheap and cheerful cubic zirconia is just as sparkly in the club and a damn sight less of an issue if lost :lol:

PS, I'm glad you realised your 500ns joyport polling argument (as an example of ways in which the amiga was way ahead of the PC) was, well, a poor one. A more domain specific example you'd be hard pressed to find. Especially given that the old soundcard "joyport" traditionally isn't a standard bit of PC hardware anyway.

You might as well have said the amiga is streets ahead in having a real 68000 based CPU than a PC. I mean it's true, the PC will probably never catch up in having one...


*As a cool looking machine on your desk, I'll certainly agree with you that the classic Amiga wedge is hard to beat. I still think the A500 looks simply beautiful even now. I never liked the A1200 form factor much at the beginning, but it has grown on me since.

[Karlos]

. There are some rarer cases where boot time is critical, I just gave you one. Another one is the settobox market, in an AV system you normally want to sit on the living room turn on our equipment and start watching TV, not wait 30 seconds or more (not that there is any software doing DVB reception which is a shame..).

This is true, but there are already better solutions out there. Embedded devices with static memory are the best suited for such applications. Anything that actually has to "boot" in the conventional sense will produce a delay that many people wouldn't expect from consumer electronics.

[Karlos]

Looking back it seems that you guys are comparing classic Amiga hardware only VS PC, so my settopbox example doesn't apply here...

Nevertheless, as a "boot timing is critical" example, it's the only one I could really support. People don't like delays from appliances.

[Karlos]

My custom computer built around a pic18f processor cold boots in under 70ms and begins displaying the temperatures from single wire thermal sensors distributed around my apartment to a vt220 terminal therefor it's more powerful than any Amiga, PC, Mac, or Ti calculator. I have you all beat.

The two light switches in my hallway act as a 2 input OR gate that has no boot delay at all.

I win.