Amiga hardware superiority

[Karlos]

The A4000 was towards the very end of the Commodore era when it was clear the company was sinking fast.

If you look earlier than that, it's pretty clear that the A1000 owned anything the competitors had at the time.

Other than the obvious A4000T, the only other machines in that list that interest me are the Falcon and X68030. The NeXT box would be kind of interesting but a bit meh.

[Karlos]

@Gulliver

You missed an important comparison row out on the table: at what rate can the joystick port be polled?

:whack:

[Karlos]

One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware.  In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5

Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?

[Karlos]

Can you explain how a second processor that whilst not a 68K and is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?

A lot of accelerators, mine included, also have a programmable SCSI I/O processor that shares the same memory bus as the 680x0. Are they frankensteins too?

[Karlos]

How it connects is irrelevant.

It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.

The PPC is not a 68K.

It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:

The CPU IS the brain in a computer.  The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system.  Frankenstein all over.

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of  accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.

[Karlos]

The problem is KS 2/3 does not run natively on PPC processors, and to me there never was a PPC Amiga because there was never PPC Kickstart/Workbench.

All the more reason to regard it as a co-processor in a KS2/3 environment, rather than some alien incursion.

[Karlos]

Regarding the akiko, the C2P functions were rather pointless, even moreso in a faster machine. You actually have to write to the device and then read the planar data back and write it to chip ram yourself. On a 28MHz 020 you could have done the conversion in software by then.

The idea was good, it was just badly implemented. It should have been something that wrote the converted data to the allocated bitplanes in chipram without CPU intervention (except for initial setup).

[Karlos]

My PC at the time blew the doors off all of those machines.

/me readies mil-spec tranquillizer gun. One dart already chambered...

[Karlos]

Going back to the OPs original chart...

Wasn't the Falcon priced around the same as an A1200? It seems a little unfair to compare a £350 machine to, in the case of the 4k £1000+ system.

I seem to remember Power Computing selling them for a bit more than a base A1200 around '93. Can't remember the exact prices though, something like £300 for the A1200 and £350 for the Falcon. Don't quote me on those though.