State of the Amiga, 2007

[Starrfoxx]

AmigaRises wrote:
@ Starfoxx:

You are obviously no gamer, if you want to run Oblivion on you 5 year old hardware, it wont happen.

Ccccccccccccccyyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! :-D

I didn't give you the specs of my hardware, and most of it is brand new.

And yes, I can run Oblivion just fine, thank you very much.   :lol:

[The_Editor]

Amiga has to get out of here first

[pVC]

@persia

Why can't you? I can take camera and download photos with Amiga easily (done that with about ten cameras and all have worked either with PTP or USB mass storage), I can edit them as I need and I can create web pages either automatically or by hand from batch converted images etc. As you said, basic stuff, which can also be made with Amiga.

TVPaint... uhm.. why should paint program support mp3? And for scanning there's different programs.

For massive pictures, you probably need to take some program which has internal virtual memory system, like ArtEffect.

But anyway, slipping again from the original still not answered question, is there modern equivalent for DPaint, which does easy pixelling? For example for (animated) gifs and other web graphics, icon desingning, game gfx, etc possibly low color and small size pixel editing.

For other uses like photo editing etc there are much better alternatives than DPaint on Amiga too.

[The_Editor]

Brilliance under euae

runs like a snail on my G4 A1 though.

[mrescher]

Nice thread - interesting reading.

Ilwrath wrote:

What the heck kind of logic is that?!  I totally agree, the VM model needs a massive rethink and re-tuning.

Nah the VM is actually a lot more clever than you give it credit for.  What it's doing is using idle cycles to swap out data that may need to be swapped.  This means that should an application need to be swapped out it's already written some or all of it to disk which like you said, is much slower than RAM.

I don't like the way some things have gone in the last 15 years - I'm a programmer and the form-over-function mentality sometimes gives me a headache.  People concern themselves with what it looks like and only when they're happy with the polish do they ask whether it works. What I'd do for the days that us nerds were revered with awe and people regarded what we did as purely magical.  Now people expect overengineered miracles, performed overnight for free. (or at least, cheaply)

That said I think you're undervaluing the leaps and bounds that have been made in this industry and as much as I enjoy my Amiga there is not a single application on it (including DPaint) that hasn't been replaced with something that, in the right hands, is better*. Things really ARE faster.  Sure it may be that you don't use 90% of features in a given application but someone does, and maybe you should learn some of them - remember the day you learned that you could copy and paste text instead of deleting and rewriting paragraphs?  Look, palette shifting is nifty, and certainly was a clever way of simulating animation on limited hardware but I can't honestly think of an application for this that wouldn't be better served by a more dedicated animation program.  I support the  use of the right tool for the job, and that may well be DPaint if that's what you're good at.

I do suspect, however, that if DPaint is the 'right tool for the job', there's someone who can do the job for you faster and/or to a higher standard in Photoshop (or Flash or 3D Studio etc.)  It would have to be a pretty exceptional job for this not to be the case.

My Amiga is great. It truly was the last computer I really had fun with (until I bought an A4000 on ebay, that is :-)) It's a fantastic hobby, but my work demands more than it can give.

* Oh, with the exception of GCC, which is ported from elsewhere anyway.

[Mallette]

"Nah the VM is actually a lot more clever than you give it credit for. What it's doing is using idle cycles to swap out data that may need to be swapped. This means that should an application need to be swapped out it's already written some or all of it to disk which like you said, is much slower than RAM."

Perhaps you missed the point.  There is absolute no need for the VM, period.  I don't want "clever" VM, I don't want VM at all.  Any computer that cannot simply be turned OFF is asking for trouble, and I've had my share.

Dave

[persia]

How would you edit the 8 to 12 MP raw image that most serious photographers use today?

How would you make a Flash presentation?

[uncharted]

@Persia

Why are you so hell-bent on finding things that the Amiga can't do?  We all know just how capable (or not) the Amiga is thank you very much.

persia wrote:

How would you make a Flash presentation?

Why would anyone want to make a presentation in Flash when there are far better options?

[Mallette]

uncharted wrote:
@Persia

Why are you so hell-bent on finding things that the Amiga can't do?  We all know just how capable (or not) the Amiga is thank you very much.

persia wrote:

How would you make a Flash presentation?

Why would anyone want to make a presentation in Flash when there are far better options?

I am another rare bird these days who finds Flash far too limiting to be useful.

Aside from that it brings up a question I've been wondering about.  Does GigaMem or anything similar still exist for the Amiga?  I used it big time in the auld days with no problems.  Of course, things slowed down when you reached end of volatile memory and started out to disk, but that was not so important as the fact you could do it at all.  I remember you could have any program use only RAM, RAM + HDD, HDD, HDD + RAM.  Nothing like that has ever surfaced on the peecee.

Dave

[stopthegop]

How would you edit the 8 to 12 MP raw image that most serious photographers use today?

Good photographers don't "edit" their pictures.  Its cheating.  Besides, really serious photograhers use both analog as well as digital cameras.  For expediency, digital rules.  For artistic perfection, nothing beats a great analog camera.  Or hybrid in this case.  

How would you make a Flash presentation?

Use a peecee.  Assuming, of course, that I wanted to make a Flash Irritation (err, I mean 'presentation').  

 

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:

Perhaps you missed the point.  There is absolute no need for the VM, period.  I don't want "clever" VM, I don't want VM at all.  Any computer that cannot simply be turned OFF is asking for trouble, and I've had my share.

Yeah fair call - no I wasn't responding to your point, I was just pointing out to someone else that the way the VM worked was for a good reason not just dumbly swapping everything.

I don't think VM is to blame for not being able to just turn your machine off - for example you can use a linux "Live CD" with a swapfile or swap partition and suffer no issues if you just flick the switch.  Next time you boot the swap is reinitialized and you're good to go.

The issues all seem to be caused by uncommitted writes in write buffers when the power is pulled - lose the buffers and you lose a lot of performance - or daemons ('services' on Windows) that won't write their final status to disk unless asked to by a shutdown command.

The same is true on an Amiga though, you can really break something if it's writing a file when you turn it off.

I think you're right though - there's no equivalent in today's modern OSes. The closest that spring to mind are the embedded or portable OSes (PalmOS, WinCE), followed by the likes of MacOS that suspend cleanly (yeah, it's a bit like shutting down).  Does anyone else use an OS that you can "just turn off" other than your Amigas?

Does anyone know how AROS handles this?

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I remember you could have any program use only RAM, RAM + HDD, HDD, HDD + RAM. Nothing like that has ever surfaced on the peecee.

There used to be "Ram Doubler" programs on the PC too but all the more modern implementations of OSes have VM built in. It's usually called a pagefile on Windows and swap on Linux, for example.  Linux will let you mess with its swapping strategy (allowing you to do the RAM, RAM+HDD, HDD etc) but you probably don't want to - it turns out that it's much better at memory allocation and optimizing VM usage than I am.

[Mallette]

I don't mean what is now understood as "VM," which is neither virtual nor memory.  I mean VM, as in not distinguishable from RAM.  

GigaMem was totally transparent to the OS.  

[adz]

stopthegop wrote:

How would you edit the 8 to 12 MP raw image that most serious photographers use today?

Good photographers don't "edit" their pictures.  Its cheating.  Besides, really serious photograhers use both analog as well as digital cameras.  For expediency, digital rules.  For artistic perfection, nothing beats a great analog camera.  Or hybrid in this case.

I still use a combination of film and digital, however, with regards to 35mm, it won't be long now before it is completely defunct. I'm not saying that is a good thing, but thats what's happening. I only know a few photogs that still use film, but they are using medium and large formats, something that will thankfully be around for a very long time. On that note, in a digital darkroom (ie. ) what you are doing is no different from what medium and large format photographers do in their darkrooms, difference is you're dealing with a negative thats made up of 1's and 0's.

[mrescher]

Mallette wrote:
I don't mean what is now understood as "VM," which is neither virtual nor memory.  I mean VM, as in not distinguishable from RAM.  

GigaMem was totally transparent to the OS.  

Virtual Memory is memory that's any combination of memory physical, stored on disk etc. that's addressed as though it is all one piece of memory. Programs that run on the OS are not aware if they're being run in physical RAM or off disk.  

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GigaMem was transparent to the OS as it was a method for implementing virtual memory in an operating system (AmigaOS) that didn't already support it.  What I'm saying is that I think existing virtual memory schemes will work better than GigaMem ever could because they do work at the OS level and because the OS is better at slicing up the memory pie than you or I will ever be.

The one thing that I don't think I've seen done as well as on the amiga is the Datatypes.  This was an excellent idea - wherein everything that used datatypes could suddenly load a JPEG by dropping in the JPEG datatype.
I want to know why haven't we seen this type of advance outside the Amiga?  I think a lot of the issues are caused by vendor lock in.

Imagine if Microsoft released the Word datatype, then you could use OpenOffice or whatever you like and it would automatically understand Microsoft's Word format.  You could then choose the application you want on its features, performance or interface instead of having to buy the only one that supports the format your document is in.

The datatypes really were a brilliant invention.  I bought an A4000 on ebay and, as a result of datatypes, it understands PNG - a format that wasn't standardised until after Commodore sold their last Amiga.  That's pretty cool.

[stopthegop]

what you are doing is no different from what medium and large format photographers do in their darkrooms, difference is you're dealing with a negative thats made up of 1's and 0's.

Thats true.  But there's a major skill differential between the dark room editor and his photoshop counterpart. Making a convincing edit in a darkroom is like a Black Art.  IMO, Photographs done this way have intrinsic value because they are "handmade" by someone who is tremendously skilled and  has clearly mastered his craft. Being a skilled darkroom tech was once a fairly exclusive club. Photoshop has bestowed this power to any 3 year old.  Whether thats a good or bad thing is polymical because its not going away.  Don't get me wrong.. I love my digital camera and have lots of fun with editing apps (ImageFX, Photoshop, whatever..). I agree these are very powerful tools.  Still, there's something very alluring about traditional photography that is simply absent with digital media.   I just can't bring myself to call a digital photograph (even a very good one) "Art".