real amiga vs winuae

[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.

[Karlos]

Ok, With this example Karlos does actually win! He has found the simplest  useful binary computer that we probably all have in our own homes!

Some of you posh house dwelling barstewards might even have a XOR switch on your staircase. It's a common arrangement for such contrivances. Living in a flat, I don't have or require this particular gate.

[Karlos]

I don't think there's much wire length in my hallway OR gate. It's a small hallway. Fabricated using 1m process...

[Karlos]

@Gadget

You probably get more light out of your actual lighting system than you do your display, so in this case I suspect the traditional hardware wins. Although, there's probably less effort required to turn your virual light on and whats more you can take it with you on a notebook PC to demo parties.

Having said that, hardware hits back with a new portable system called "the torch". One of the inputs is a trifle sticky in that it's the end of the tube where you put the battery cells in, but if you loosen it appropriately, you have your 2 input OR again

[Karlos]

This has faster response time than torch, assuming torch is uk dialect for flashlight as we call it in US. (shorter runs)

It is, but you will observe that a lot of new flashlights utilise LED technology to improve their OR gate input to output propagation delay.

[Karlos]

No diamond analogy is relevant.

I'm glad you admit it.

 Even the surface of the fake diamond is different when looked upon closely similarly even the display is fake compared to an overscanned TV monitor or Amiga monitor.

Absolutely. The emulator gives you a nice stable display with your own choice of how to scale it, with or without scanline effects and so on. If you are using an overscanned TV with interlace, have fun. I did that for a time and I absolutely do not miss it.

And you know very well the internals are NOT there--

Not bothered in the slightest. The presence of absence of real hardware internals makes utterly no difference to 99% of my classic software collection.

the timing (558ns and better for software specific to 7.16Mhz PCs or like Bars and Pipes using 3.57Mhz based audio timer), the same frequency refresh rate, etc.)

Since I use OctaMED SS and render complex audio to disk for post production, this makes no difference either. Also, I can run it, with smoothing enabled and emulated audio with more channels and cleaner output than any of my hardware amigas can.

I can say more but I'm logging in from someone else's machine...  Post #23 in this thread is complete bullcrap; there's no way to eliminate the latency completely.

You can never eliminate latency completely from any timed system built using logic gates. If your latency is at least constant, then that's good enough for most purposes.

>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.

I already did but you misunderstood it; that's why I called it "straw-man argument".  You thought I was talking about 500ns sampling of joystick, but no.  I was stating 1Khz sampling of joystick and 558ns accuracy without latency as another argument.  There are more argument but some biased people can't even accept the joystick argument.

If you'd have bothered to make a more relevant argument in the first place I might not have confused them.

I'm not talking about the looks.  Understand the analogy for what it is.

I do. It's grasping at straws. UAE is a perfectly good system for running the majority of 68K based amiga software, you have yet to present one pertinent argument as to why it is not. Im my experience, and the experience of many others, it will run more amiga software than my actual real amiga does, since in my case, my A1200 won't run all pre AGA titles. If it weren't for WHDload installers I'd need a second, older hardware amiga just to run some of the old classics.

[Karlos]

I said, perhaps I need a comma there, "No, diamond analogy is relevant"

>Absolutely. The emulator gives you a nice stable display with your own choice of how to scale it, with or without scanline effects and so on. If you are using an overscanned TV with interlace, have fun. I did that for a time and I absolutely do not miss it.

Unless you are recording the output to the video tape or DVD recorder.

Video tape? Hells teeth man, what century is this? DVD, fine but why would I "record" the output on a dedicated recorder when I can simply dump the entire video stream to disk directly from the emulation and then master it any way I see fit?

>Not bothered in the slightest. The presence of absence of real hardware internals makes utterly no difference to 99% of my classic software collection.

According to your limited observation of course.  But I don't go by that.

Completely strawman. You have absolutely no notion whatsoever of how well software runs on my system, so you are utterly unable to refute me. You don't have to agree, of course, but you have no basis at all.  

>You can never eliminate latency completely from any timed system built using logic gates. If your latency is at least constant, then that's good enough for most purposes.

If you get constant latency every time, that's just as good as no latency since you already know there's that offset time involved.  But you won't find that in any PC timer.

>If you'd have bothered to make a more relevant argument in the first place I might not have confused them.

You failed to understand the argument and you're blaming me.  It's relevant if you are into Amiga gaming.  Although you could read the joystick with 558ns accuracy, that wasn't the argument.  You can deal with any of the custom chip registers with 558ns accuracy and trigger off IRQs from Copper with that accuracy.

No, we've clarified that now. You are talking about polling the joyport at kHz rates and the fact that you can peek/poke the custom hardware space from the copper at 558ns. That I'm happy enough with. However it's of no relevance whatsoever in the argument as to which system is playing "catch up", unfortunately for you. The requirement for cycle exact hardware bashing does not exist on modern machines because people have moved away from metal banging.

You know, I used to do a lot of copper progging back in the day, it was interesting. THe copper, however was a simple beast from an instruction set perspective. Not really a Turing complete processor.

Nowadays, I write code for GPUs, except it's in a C-based language. It's a perfectly logical evolution. I could write in PTX assembler directly but since the underlying hardware is now so much more complicated it would be self defeating to attempt it.

>I do. It's grasping at straws. UAE is a perfectly good system for running the majority of 68K based amiga software, you have yet to present one pertinent argument as to why it is not. Im my experience, and the experience of many others, it will run more amiga software than my actual real amiga does, since in my case, my A1200 won't run all pre AGA titles. If it weren't for WHDload installers I'd need a second, older hardware amiga just to run some of the old classics.

It's not grasping at straws.  The argument is whether it's a real amiga.

It most assuredly is not the argument and never was. The argument is it a viable alternative to a real amiga...

You keep claiming it's better.

I have made no such claim whatsoever. I have stated it's advantages compared to the real thing:

1) Cost
2) Speed
3) Compatibility
4) Convenience

I never said "better", since "better" is subjective. The above are not subjective, they are entirely valid points that can be demonstrated readily.

If it's a real amiga, it should be able to do EXACTLY what a real amiga does.  It doesn't do that regardless if you think it's good enough in someone's limited experience.

No wonder you are so helplessly confused about this. I never claimed it was a real Amiga, not once in this thread or any other. I claimed it is a viable alternative (esp for a someone that already has a machine which can run it) with the advantages outlined above.

It is an emulation. It doesn't need to be able to do "exactly" what a real amiga does, it just needs to provide the same end functionality for the user. If you can't understand this basic point and conflate it with issue of what is a 'real' amiga, then that's your own problem.

[Karlos]

@Karlos

Maybe it's worth to check his posts in the following thread before continuing the discussion with him here...
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36003

Well, unlike Shaun, at least he knows something about the actual hardware

[Karlos]

>Nowadays, I write code for GPUs, except it's in a C-based language. It's a perfectly logical evolution. I could write in PTX assembler directly but since the underlying hardware is now so much more complicated it would be self defeating to attempt it.

You didn't explain how that outdoes the Copper.

As I have said umpteen times, this is a subjective debate. You didn't explain how the Copper outdoes a box of cornflakes. The copper is very poor in comparison to a box of cornflakes at 6am in the morning when I'm hungry and disoriented.

With this necessary understanding of the subjective nature of the debate in mind, I'll give you a suitably subjective answer:

Well, lets look at the Copper. Its a limited state machine that has three instructions: move, wait and skip. It executes in sync with the video hardware. Despite this limited instruction set, the ability to poke hardware registers of other components (eg the blitter) makes it quite versatile (ie you can do more than pretty gradients), agreed?

However, it is not suitable for my applications. I do not require beam sync operations, but I require a "copperlist" that can perform an operation en-masse on a 2 (or 3) dimensional grid of data. I also need a Turing Complete machine to execute it since the operations I want to perform in my "copperlist", per element, may have conditional jumps.

The operations will consist of more than 16-bit word moves, waiting and skipping. I need 32-bit IEEE754 compliant add, subtract, multiply, divide and square root and comparisons. I also need the usual gamut of arithmetic, logic, and bitwise operators for integer types. My dataset(s) will also not be representable using 24-bit addressing as it is several hundred megabytes in size, but that's by the  by.

In short, I need a fully programmable CPU with FPU. However, I need a CPU that can can execute my "copperlist" many times concurrently, each instance operating on a separate element in my data grid.

So, the GPU is significantly better than the copper for my application. Your mileage may vary.

>I never said "better", since "better" is subjective.

Better is not subjective.  It's better to have 7.16Mhz vs. 3.57Mhz timing.

"Better" is most assuredly subjective. What constitutes "better" is context dependent. A kettle is far better than 7.16MHz timing can ever be, when you want to make a cup of tea.

Not confused; but you implied a better amiga they way you posted your replies.

It is better if you want to have an Amiga you can work with on the train home, or if you want an amiga that can process data rapidly (eg Image Processing, Ray Tracing etc), or you want an Amiga that can handle huge RTG resolutions in 32-bit colour without any slowdown, or you want an Amiga that you can reconfigure the hardware without physically opening it, or you want an Amiga with more than 2MB of Chip RAM.

These are all ways in which UAE is better than a real Amiga, but they are all subjective. Not everybody wants to do all of the above things with their Amiga. If you want to use your Amiga to control parallel port hardware and your PC doesn't have one, then again, subjectively, it is worse than a real Amiga.

No, it does NOT provide the same end functionality since that's part of being a real amiga.

In your opinion. As far as the software running on the emulation is concerned, it is a real Amiga.

[Karlos]

When I say "actual" hardware, I mean hardware that actually exists. Shauns bang was Zorro VII, if you recall

[Karlos]

Oh yeah... the bus arch troll... what a freak, PCI-E must make him piss the bed at night

Well, PCIe is only version 2. He must be up to, what, Zorro 15 by now?

[Karlos]

Timers that slow the OS loading down on purpose.  Who in theirr right mind would do that.  You would want to make your OS as fast as possible.

For GUIs this is not a stupid idea at all. Having the UI flash up things as fast as possible and hide them again (eg, rolling over menu options and having the submenu attached flicker in and out of view) is actually a really bad idea for the end user, psychologically speaking.

[Karlos]

One that works exactly like the real thing from all perspectives.

That's a bit of a pointless criterion to pick.

The 060 doesn't support every instruction that the 000-030 used and has to rely on software emulation for the unimplemented instructions. We know your views on emulation, isn't real, it isn't timing precise, etc. So, does your amiga stop being real the moment you put an 060 card in it?

[Karlos]

If there's a REAL Amiga 060 and emulated version is not like it, then it's not as good.  Someone may have exploited the 060 features in his real amiga for his own purposes and if these can't be done on emulated amiga, then it's different.  But in general use (most existing software uses), the core of the Amiga is it's custom chipset (OCS/AGA/ECS) and that involves more than just "looking the same".

You see, if you knew even half as much about the design of the original Amiga hardware as you try to impress upon us in threads like this, you'd know that the 68000 was as integral to the design of the system as any of the custom chips.

The entire DMA subsystem was designed around the fact that the 68000 could not access the chip memory more than once every 2 cycles, nor did it have any cache mechanism that would cause problems with dirty data. This allowed the designers to engineer  a system where the custom hardware and CPU could each access the memory in the most direct and efficient way possible. Priority was given to the custom chips when the amount of data access exceeded half the bandwidth but they did have the foresight to make sure that "Fast" memory could be added to allow the CPU to run at full speed when the custom chips start using more than half the available chip memory bandwidth.

So, to suggest that the 68000 was not an integral part of the overall hardware design, is frankly bollocks.

Faster CPU's only work in there thanks to the Fast RAM side of the design. The moment you put even a 68020 into the original design, without Fast RAM, it is crippled. It doesn't fit into the original one access every 2 cycles design as it is capable of a memory access every cycle and is thus forced to wait. Even with Fast RAM, thanks to the instruction cache, it's also no longer compatible with just "any old" 68000 code. Anything self modifying is doomed to fail spectacularly since the instruction cache is never, ever written to by data writes.

So, by your argument any Amiga that has a 68020+ is not perfectly backwards compatible with the original OCS design and is therefore not a real amiga. The problem just gets worse with every faster 680x0. The 030 even has a data cache. That totally craps on the original DMA system unless you turn it off for the 24-bit DMA region. Which is exactly what they had to do.

With the 040 and especially 060, you even have to start emulating several instructions. Emulation? Surely that's no better than UAE :rolleyes:

In short, all this talk of "doing everything the exact sane way a real amiga does it" is total drivel because most actual physical amigas do things that are completely outside the original 68000/OCS design.

[Karlos]

Even if there's some variance 1/100000000 across machines, it's still considered performing per spec.  They are related-- timing and frequency.

The variance is significantly more than that. The crystals used in the old miggies had tolerances in the tens of ppm.

[Karlos]

WinUAE is good, but not the same.  I keep a real amiga for the same reason I keep a real SNES and a real N64: because they "feel right".

This I can agree with. I have several hardware amigas, one of which cannot currently be emulated by UAE due to having a PPC board.

However, for everyday work, UAE is great. It actually makes the m68k based amiga a viable platform.