What are the advantages of the present/future Amiga?

[amigaksi]

>by shoggoth on 2008/9/6 11:07:14
>>   amigaksi wrote:
    Do you agree that technically it's more accurate to measure something with a ruler marked with cm rather than inches? If so, then you will also agree that having a timing mechanism to accuracy of 1/3.579545Mhz (Amiga) is more accurate than one at 1/1.19318Mhz (PC). Opinions are only good if you don't have the facts.

>Since when did hardware timer granularity dictate how accurately one machine can emulate another?

I gave you an example of something you would have to emulate using hardware that does not have that accuracy.  If you think drifting timers, audio playback, etc. aren't necessary, well then I disagree.

>words. To what extent have you engaged in emulator programming yourself? Any first hand experience?

I have infinite experience.  How much experience do you have that 2+2=4?  Deductive logic does not depend on experience.

>Realtime in this context is most likely connected to the VBL frequency (or HBL frequency for that matter). Having enough juice to provide a result equal to a machine having hardware sprites while still keeping an equivalent amount of spare CPU time to the application should be enough to qualify as "realtime" in this particular context. And that's not a utopia at all.

In this case real-time is defined as 40 microseconds to display 30 sprites using a standard machine.

>>    You can use about 30 Amiga hardware sprites to cover up almost the entire screen using about 40 microseconds of CPU time.

>No.

What are stating no to-- that you can't display 30 sprites or to the 40 microseconds?

>But put CPU cycles per microseconds into that equation - and add a 2-3x faster CPU. Sure, rendering the sprites constitutes overhead, but you'll still end up with more spare cycles for your application.

Sorry, you don't.  Do the calculations and experiment yourself.

[amigaksi]

>by Hammer on 2008/9/6 11:45:24

>>    It's NOT 100GB/second from CPU accessible memory to graphics card; stop picking up things randomly from the web and trying to argue against a point you don't understand. You don't even understand how amiga sprites work; they can be rendered even on a 640*400 screen at their 320*200 resolution so the worst case is repainting 640*400. It's the Amiga that only has to set 30 registers not the PC; PC has to repaint the area.

>Hint; texture compression. Which part of the "PC"?

A graphics card that handles sprites in hardware is not part of a standard PC.  Let's talk about Amiga/PC not digress to Capcom as I am not familiar with it's timers, sprites, audio sampling rates, etc. nor did I state anything regarding it.

[amigaksi]

>by Hammer on 2008/9/7 2:30:08

>>    But there are a couple of issues you missed: (1) Sure, Amiga is hardware and one can build hardware that is equal to or better than it. However, I picked a standard OCS bare-bone Amiga 1000 when compared to a standard PC whose timers are at 1.19318Mhz as late as the latest one I bought a couple of years ago

>Are you claiming nForce chipset having 80 percent of annual X86 chipset unit sales?

If I write a sprite program on an OCS Amiga 1000, it works on all Amigas; if I write a sprite emulation it should work on most of the PCs.  I don't care what graphics card you have and what it can do.

>Remember, annual sales for X86 PC are numbered into ~200 million i.e. just one month of unit sales exceeds the entire CBM Amiga unit sales. Most of them are based on Intel chipsets e.g. "Centrino" or "VPro" brand.

It's not the number; it's the compatibility.  If I target the best graphics card in the market, the software will fail in most machines.

>>    Ahm, the old PIC is accurate to 838 nanoseconds not microseconds.

>Does it include interrupt service routine? The maximum frequency supported by the standard PIC is 8192 Hz, which would result in interrupts generated each 122 us....

You must be using the Vista HLIs (Hardware Limiting Interface, a.k.a API).  You can get more than 8192Hz interrupts with old PIC.  Even the Atari Disk Drive simulator I wrote uses 63Khz.

>Modern PCs can handle Capcom System 2 in emulation.

Don't see what the point is here unless you are claiming Capcom is better than the Amiga in all respects.

[amigaksi]

>by Hammer on 2008/9/7 3:41:43

>Try ACPI. Windows XP's QueryPerformanceCounter API uses PMT.

>The various release of Windows differ in implementation
>PIT (Win2k),
>PMT (WinXP),
>HPET (Vista).

You know newer PCs don't change as much as they used to-- like going from EGA to VGA or ISA to PCI.   So many people don't upgrade to the latest machine especially if it's just for a timer or some CPU speed.  So just because some new timer standard is available, it does not mean you can assume most of the PC owners will have it.

>High Precision Event Timer (HPET) can be access is via memory-mapped I/O (address indicated by the ACPI HPET table), which takes 0.9 μs.

Well, that seems bad 0.9 us as just the emulation of an instruction like Move.w VHPOSR,D0 would require a higher accuracy.

>>    (2) The timing accuracy is not just for the timer IRQ, the Amiga timing also applies to the audio sampling rate, copper-based register modifications, reading certain registers, etc.

>X86 PC world prefers devices that are not tightly tied together i.e. so the platform can adapt and assimilate newer technologies (e.g. next GPU release in 6 month cycle).

Some people prefer not to throw away their machines as they are good enough for what they are doing.  I don't think they should have to throw them away.  And if the newer machines are not backward compatible, you would have to support the features that are.

[amigaksi]

>>http://www.krishnasoft.com/krsna.htm.

>The link seems to be dead...

Okay, it's without the period at the end:

http://www.krishnasoft.com/krsna.htm   .