Amiga's place in the modern computing world - 00s

[Sig999]

Problem with one single modern computer configuration is that in a year and a half it won't be modern anymore.

I think that would be a giant leap BACKWARDS into the bad-old days of computing.

As for the Amiga/Vista stuff - I think the only time Amiga would have been mentioned was if a spanish speaking employee was talking about his/her girlfriend.

Amiga was never a blip on MS's radar - they were busy targetting the business market, and the Amiga wasn't a business machine - it was viewed like an Atari console or C64, if as anything at all.

The first time MS took notice of games - or anything gaming - was when it came to their attention that more PC's had DOOM installed on them than Windows 95.

[bloodline]

amigaksi wrote:
>by kolla on 2008/6/9 23:24:10
>
>@amigaksi
>
>What the heck is wrong with you?!

Some guy on an Amiga forum

I guess that would be me :-?

is insulting the Amiga (and myself)

Once I figured you out, I was happy to insult you. I never insulted the Amiga, it is after all my platform... I don't however, have an delusions as to what the Amiga is in the modern computing world -00s

Do you even use the Amiga any more, I mean professionally? I do...

with misinformation and there's something wrong with me if I speak out against him with FACTS?  

I spoke the truth, you were essentially speaking gibberish...

Perhaps, you want to answer as to what exactly you are denying: (1) digital joystick is superior to a USB-based one and USB can be implemented within a joystick port,

You think technology from the early 80's is superior to USB... doesn't that alarm you that something is wrong in your brain?

(2) overscan area inherent to NTSC is not accessible via standard graphics cards or APIs,

Overscan is a totally alien concept in the modern world... meaningless!!! Why keep bringing it up? Perhaps we should be talking about the superiority of the Steam engine over the internal combustion engine?

(3) timers are more accurate on Amiga than on PC.

Given the fact that my PC or Mac have clocks that run at billions of Hz... means they can be far more accurate than a machine that only has a clock of 28MHz at it's fastest... And given that the CPU c]doesn't run that fast means it can't respond to anything at that frequency...

Perhaps, you are denying that API calls are less efficient to use than directly accessing standardized hardware.  

The advantage of Standardised API calls over hitting the Hardware is well proven... the downfall of the Amiga was caused in part by devs hitting the hardware.

Even USB has multiple standards and even if there was only one hardware standard, you still have to go through the API since modern OSes won't allow you to access them directly anyways.

No, EHCI is the standard USB2.0 hardware interface. An OS uses APIs to ensure the best use of the Hardware and allow future compatibility... this is a proven concept... Hitting the hardware means that the Hardware is fixed function forever...

 And even if you can access them directly, you need more instructions to read a joystick than with a digital joystick.  Or are you denying the fact the industries don't always use the latest technologies-- heck, even an Atari 800 with an LDA 54016 instruction is faster than reading a gameport which was developed years later.

-Edit- go on then... run a low latency 24bit Sound card from an Atari 800 joyport... eh? not possible? Ok... how about a mass storage device bulk transfer at 20MB/s?

Oh, one more thing, if you are going to reply leave out cursing me out or cursing the amiga out claiming I don't know modern hardware as these don't constitute rational arguments in the college that I come from.

But after pages and pages of rational posts from myself... I can only conclude you are either 12 years old or retarded, heaven forbid... both...

[amigaksi]

As I said insults don't constitute arguments.  Everything I stated was a FACT; if you can't understand, it's your problem or lack of education.

I guess one point I can TRY again to see if you can understand:

>The advantage of Standardised API calls over hitting the Hardware is well proven... the downfall of the Amiga was caused in part by devs hitting the hardware.

USB has multiple standards-- the most recent may be 2.0.  Previously compaq and others had their own.  If your hardware is standardized, you can access the hardware directly since the ports/Mem locations will remain the same in the future so you avoid the overhead of APIs.  That is the optimal way to use the hardware.  You avoid overhead, and you know EXACTLY how many instructions you used for real-time analsys.  I already gave you example of VGA.  You can still access 1024*768*32 in DOS with A000:0000 only thing that became nonstandard was the VGA Video window port.

[B00tDisk]

pkillo wrote:

So, adding up the viable operating systems, there's UNIX, and Windows.

And yet the choices you arbitrarily rule out still do as much as if not more than the Amiga.  Just off the top of my head, I can tell you straight up they all sport better web-browsers than the best ones for the Amiga.

[bloodline]

amigaksi wrote:
As I said insults don't constitute arguments.  Everything I stated was a FACT; if you can't understand, it's your problem or lack of education.

You ignore rational discourse... and thinking up insults for you is more fun :-)

My Education has never been in question, as pretty much anyone on this forum could probably attest to... though I'm not great at German :-( and this annoys me...

I guess one point I can TRY again to see if you can understand:

>The advantage of Standardised API calls over hitting the Hardware is well proven... the downfall of the Amiga was caused in part by devs hitting the hardware.

USB has multiple standards-- the most recent may be 2.0.  

Err... yes, the hardware gets better... but luckily no apps hit the USB hardware interface and so work perfectly regardless of the hardware revision... score one to the software API...

Previously compaq and others had their own.  

Yeah, go on look up OHCI and UHCI... but it didn't matter that USB1.0 had different hardware standards, the common software interface meant apps didn't have to know what interface was in use... Score two to the  software API...

If your hardware is standardized, you can access the hardware directly since the ports/Mem locations will remain the same in the future so you avoid the overhead of APIs.

As soon as you expose the hardware... it is stuck in time, you can never make it better without breaking all the existing software...

 That is the optimal way to use the hardware.  

No it isn't... its the sure fire way of tying your App to one specific hardware revision... all bugs in that revision have to be carried into future revisions... Score three to the Software API...

You avoid overhead, and you know EXACTLY how many instructions you used for real-time analsys.

Who gives a crap... my nice modern CPu can execute billions of instructions every second... in fact, the device I want to access is probably a million times slower than my CPU... if I had to sit there waiting for the device I'd be wasting CPU cycles.... I'll let the OS worry about handling all that and just pull the data stream as I want it.

 I already gave you example of VGA.  You can still access 1024*768*32 in DOS with A000:0000 only thing that became nonstandard was the VGA Video window port.

You have exposed your ignorance... that Screen mode would be a VESA mode... not VGA... again... you would only use VGA or even VESA if you don't want any hardware acceleration... Remember the mess the PC was in in the days of DOS before standardised software APIs of Windows95... without them the PC would have gone the way of the Amiga....

[bloodline]

B00tDisk wrote:

pkillo wrote:

So, adding up the viable operating systems, there's UNIX, and Windows.

And yet the choices you arbitrarily rule out still do as much as if not more than the Amiga.  Just off the top of my head, I can tell you straight up they all sport better web-browsers than the best ones for the Amiga.

Just off the top of my head I can run Netscape Navigator on a stone age 68k Mac... that's better than the Amiga.. sadly... :-(

@sig999: Not if it's built in a modular fashion. Leave room in the specs for multiple, compatible versions of components that can be upgraded (the cpu fast slot on big box amigas is a good example) and you'll find it would take more than a year and a half for the hardware to reach obsolescence. And if the system is designed to present a clear, concise, and consistent interface to the software, only low-level functions of the operating system would need updating to run on the latest and greatest anyway.

@amigaksi: You can only use the writes to the address you're giving in real mode, at least on the x64 systems I've worked with. As far as I could tell while studying this very problem as an undergraduate, when you enter a 64-bit mode you lose that functionality. At that point you have to copy the VESA BIOS into RAM and set up an entry table for it, and then use its routines instead, iirc. So while you're right that under DOS you can do that, it's not really applicable to problems requiring the full resources of a modern PC.

@B00tDisk: I'd love to consider the two I did rule out, and believe me that I check their websites once in a while in the hopes of finding some more progress made. I would even consider spending some time helping out on one of those projects if I had the time and the right hardware to test against.

The other operating systems, except windows, are all UNIX. I'm not ruling them out, they're the same choice with a different wrapper.

@bloodline: maybe we should be talking about the steam engine! I could burn my trash and old newspapers instead of gasoline at $4.50 a gallon! :lol:

[koaftder]

Wow, theres a lot of crap in this thread. Looks like some folks who don't write software or design hardware have come in to have a thing or two to say about things they don't understand.

[Sig999]

@sig999: Not if it's built in a modular fashion. Leave room in the specs for multiple, compatible versions of components that can be upgraded (the cpu fast slot on big box amigas is a good example) and you'll find it would take more than a year and a half for the hardware to reach obsolescence.

So...kinda like a PC?

I'm just curious , because folks arguments have been so circular in this whole thread.

[Sig999]

koaftder wrote:
Wow, theres a lot of crap in this thread. Looks like some folks who don't write software or design hardware have come in to have a thing or two to say about things they don't understand.

I'm just enjoying the show and waiting for the first 'FIHMA' (fortunately, I had my Amiga) story to bust out

You know the one.... 'Me and Bob here were sitting on the porch waiting for the space shuttle to cross the sky when suddenly we heard one of the dishes had gone bust... well... fortunately I had my Amiga.... So with some wires that Bob stripped from his grandmothers vibrator, and a few arexx scripts we hooked up his TV dish and managed to reestablish coms and save the day...'

Always good for a giggle.


eh there was a point in time when the tall tales, misinformation and boneheadedness used to annoy me - but now I just sit back and let the good times roll.

@sig999: Not like a PC. Think more like a server, just in a friendlier form factor and with the kind of devices home users want attached. My PCs annoy me - never had that happen with a sparcserver [or any other brand of unix server or midrange for that matter]. It's a matter of bringing the kind of engineering that goes into a $20k or even $200k computer to a less expensive platform. Good design doesn't have to be limited to large commercial-grade computers. I'm going to go with a car analogy here: if you've never driven a Ferrari, you don't know what you're missing. Most computer users simply have never had access to the kind of systems I've used and consider well-designed.

[B00tDisk]

Sig999 wrote:
I'm just enjoying the show and waiting for the first 'FIHMA' (fortunately, I had my Amiga) story to bust out

You know the one.... 'Me and Bob here were sitting on the porch waiting for the space shuttle to cross the sky when suddenly we heard one of the dishes had gone bust... well... fortunately I had my Amiga.... So with some wires that Bob stripped from his grandmothers vibrator, and a few arexx scripts we hooked up his TV dish and managed to reestablish coms and save the day...'

Always good for a giggle.

This, FTW.

[Fester]

Sig999 wrote:
I'm just curious , because folks arguments have been so circular in this whole thread.

No, they're elliptical.  :-)

I made it to page 6...something about insults over Vee-Gee As and US Bees and stuff? Did I miss anything? And the price of gas and steam engines? Sorry.

[Roj]

I kind of liken the Amiga to Dale Earnhardt. He's dead now, but at his peak he'd beat the competition even when he had clearly inferior hardware.

Even though he's gone, his fans are still extremely loyal and rabid.

[amigaksi]

>by pkillo on 2008/6/10 20:46:40
>...
>@amigaksi: You can only use the writes to the address you're giving in real mode, at least on the x64 systems I've worked with. As far as I could tell while studying this very problem as an undergraduate, when you enter a 64-bit mode you lose that functionality. At that point you have to copy the VESA BIOS into RAM and set up an entry table for it, and then use its routines instead, iirc. So while you're right that under DOS you can do that, it's not really applicable to problems requiring the full resources of a modern PC.

There's an exported variable in Windows 3.x/'95/'98/'98SE/ME called _A000 that you need to import and that gives you the selector which maps to physical address A000:0000 and you use offsets as normal.  I did this with the multimedia Gita CDROM (shown towards the end at http://www.mpdos.com) and was able to write directly to the VGA memory in protected mode.  As far as setting the mode, you can directly do the IN/OUTs to set the mode to avoid BIOS calls, but higher resolutions of SVGAs don't have standard IN/OUTs so you basically have to code for some of the popular cards or try your chances that at setting the mode via the VESA BIOS.  As long as the routine does not use segments, you can call the routine in VESA BIOS directly from protected mode.  The Gita CD does this as well  and you can compare the frame rate speed of Windows API (SetDIBBitsToDevice) verses VESA modes.  
The Gita CD uses the Windows resources normally for other things like sound, mouse, printing, etc.

[Raffaele]

B00tDisk wrote:

Raffaele wrote:

But it is still true that ONLY THE AMIGA it is the only 20 years old hardware+software system capable (with decent Accelerator, graphic card, and Audio Card [Maybe PCI-BUS based]) to be still productive to write documents, browse internet and get mail and FTP (without be harassed from viruses), and to listen music, and good enough for painting and image retouching too...

I've got a closet full of Mac systems from about 1989 onward that would like to disagree with you.

Macintosh OS upto version 9 it is the most ugly Operating System ever written...

Upto version 7 it is full of bugs and it is heavily hacked by Apple developers to keep all the system up and running.

There is a document somewhere on internet (if the site is still up... I don't know), publishing the true witness of developers of Fusion Mac-Amiga emulator (or èerhaps was it Emplant emulator??? I vaguely remember it).

They disassembled MacOS and found it full of spaghetti code.

And regard any other machine I used at University Macintoshes with PPC 600 MHz CPU and MacOS 9...

And I never seen an OS lesser responsible than Macintosh...

Believe me... It should be a very ugly OS such an OS that makes the PPC CPU to seat down...

In comparison even a 200 MHz ancient Amiga accelerator card gives the same response feeling than a 600 MHz Macintosh...

And it is not a problem of hardware....

Hardware of Macintoshes was almost perfect... It was just all OSs previous than MacOS X hat are bad written and very low performing...

But MacOS X does not enter the competition... It is just FreeBSD (to gain stability, reliability and multitasking) hacked with macintosh interface GUI.