What are the advantages of the present/future Amiga?

[mdwh2]

zylesea wrote:
The issue of going x86 was discussed a zillion times already. the prob is the endianess. either you lose binary compatibilty (like AROS) or you lose cpu cycles (needed to continously swap endianess) - which wouldn't comply with the 'elegance through simplicity' approach.

It wasn't a problem for Apple.

And given that a modern x86 can run rings around the fastest '060, even with the burden of emulation, I'd say that's a far more elegant and simple solution than using outdated and expensive hardware.

DigitalQ wrote:
I consider that all modern computers running a modern OS (ie; Linux, Vista) contain all the best elements that made the Amiga special in its day.  In this light, I see the Amiga as being a contributor to the computer I'm using right now; which means that, in a sense, I am using a modern variation of the Amiga.

I fully agree. I've been using PCs for the last few years because they have become far more in the spirit of what the Amiga was. The Amiga lives probably more so than anything to do with DOS or classic MacOS. I could stick an Amiga sticker on it if I really wanted to, but I'm not really bothered about being loyal to a trademark.

murple wrote:
Without some continuity from the Commodore Amigas either in technology or engineers... I think it'd be an Amiga in name only.

Note that this is just like Mac OS X and Windows.

Things like the Minimig and AOne are cool, but I cant really consider them Amigas.

This seems to me an odd thing to say - do you say the same of modern Macs and Windows PCs (which are far more of a gap than the AmigaOne, where the only difference is a different CPU; Macs have a completely different OS too)?

[alexh]

quarkx wrote:
Why do you even bother with Amiga then if not for the hardware?

Same reason everyone else does. For the games & demos (and perhaps applications) they once used as kids.

quarkx wrote:
Why is the price of all the amiga stuff so expensive, if none of the hardware mattered?

But the price of all Amiga stuff isn't so expensive. You can pick up A500/600/1200 for next to nothing £10-20. The reason certain items are so expensive is because they were the items we coveted as children. The expensive addons we read about in magazines and dreamed of but could never afford. The GVP A530, Blizzard & Cyberstorm PPC, A3000 & A4000.

quarkx wrote:
By your argument, we should all just trash our amigas and run emulators, because the real stuff doesn't matter.

I would say that a great deal of us have done just that. The emulator is just a tool, it's easy to use. Works well (concededly far from perfect) and can perform much faster and to a higher specification than an Amiga we could realistically own.

It's still nostalgic to keep the old hardware. It looks better (or should I say different) on a TV that an emulator on a PC monitor. It sounds different. It feels different. But all these differences do not detract from the fact that it is slow and difficult to use compared to firing up the emulator. Which is why they remain in the cupboards for most of us a great deal of the time.

quarkx wrote:
The hardware is the most important part of any computer system, otherwise, you just have trash.

The software is everything. Today the hardware is nothing.(Although I admit that without the hardware in the first place there would have been no software).

[DavidF215]

@Beast96GT

>The Amiga would need some kind of "niche" to fill that's not being currently exploited.

Every business writing, even the get rich ones, say to find a niche market. I completely agree. My idea of the niche market is an inexpensive computer that is extremely simple and comes (out of the box) with software needed for such market.

>I would like to think that the new Amiga would have an architecture that would not be held back by backward compatibility, as the PC seems to be. Why couldn't backward compatibility be provided in software emulation?

The JIT emulation is find, IMO. A new system needs to be engineered with current new ideas for system architectures. The catch would be a bridge system between current architectures and the future system. I thought Amiga's AmigaOS5 was a good idea until they decided to have it basically like a Java OS atop another OS; then you're competing with Sun--not a good idea, and why would someone buy an OS that requires the extra expense of an underlying OS. It's a bad idea, IMO. AmigaOS5 should have been AmigaOS4 but on x86--or even just on a modern PPC system.

>On more realistic note, however, I think Hyperion has the right idea. An OS would seem to be the most logical way to promote the Amiga despite the hardware it runs on.

I agree. I would like to know the underlying reasons why Amiga canceled the contract. I would also like to know if someone presented investment capital to Amiga to further develop AmigaOS4 if they would be interested. I think Amiga is going down the same deadend path that Be, Inc went when they decided to try the Internet Appliance market; it's the same market, but just named differently now.

>In the end, of course, it's a pipe dream, but it's still fun to discuss. And I think it's good to bring it up, regardless of critics that think it's pointless.

Without the dream though, new technologies and innovations would not be developed. Many new technologies are born atop previous technologies, and Windows is the perfect example--as MS typically copies rather than innovates.

The dream needs a focus and a niche, and, IMO, further AmigaOS4 development on existing modern PPC hardware is the first step with a port to x86 as the step thereafter. Money should be spent on developing (or acquiring) a good software suite for the PPC AOS4 before spending resources on porting.

Along that line, is there even an IDE available for AmigaOS development? Is StormC even still being updated or available? I recall SASC, but is it even still available? Are there any decent development tools for AmigaOS3.9 or 4.0?

[alexh]

DavidF215 wrote:
is there even an IDE available for AmigaOS development?

Cubic IDE

DavidF215 wrote:
Is StormC even still being updated or available? I recall SASC, but is it even still available? Are there any decent development tools for AmigaOS3.9 or 4.0?

There is GCC.

[Beast96GT]

Here are just a few thoughts/ideas if the Amiga WERE to be redesigned, re-introduced hardware and software-wise:

1) The Amiga should be a graphical powerhouse.  It's an old idea, but it's amazing how much attention is paid to the machine with the best graphics--Hell, it's how the Amiga really made a name for itself (among other things, of course).  

Modern graphics cards are designed to be optimal for typical 32-bit floating point (matrices and such) math.  

The Amiga graphics chips (preferably on a card) could optimize for real-time ray-tracing.  It's not a fantasy by any means;  it's already being done on the PC, but it's limited and requires massive hardware.  The Amiga, if designed with the bottlenecks of doing this in mind, could possibly bring this market and exploit it as its own.  

The Amiga graphics chips could optimize for Quaternions which are much better than matrices (especially for rotations).  

It's amazing what graphics will do to get your platform some attention.  Remember the first time you saw the Amiga screenshots of Defender of the Crown?

2) Support your software developers. A good machine has to be supported by good software.  Good software has to be made with by developers and publishers who think they can make a profit.  On a new platform, help from the manufacturer is a must.

Reusable code is in that equation.  It's time to move past assembly code and support a higher level language like C++ with libraries.  This means a real compiler that supports serious debugging and a optimized machine language generation. Professional code-bases are huge, and require easier to read code.  

3) Have a multimedia solution like no other.  The Microsoft Windows PC has come a long way with multimedia integration, but in my mind it has never taken the next step nor done it right.  The Amiga could have additional inputs for things like HDMI and optical audio.  

The Amiga could have DVR and video editing capabilities.  Make people who own a video camera feel they need an Amiga to make (semi-)professional video of their ugly kids.  
 ;-)

4) Provide a modular approach. Being able to upgrade your computer is a good.  Computer manufacturers aren't always keen on this idea--they'd rather you buy a new system.  At least on your higher end system, it's a good thing.  You need to not be limited by your motherboard with what you can do with your system--especially graphics.

Like I stated in a previous post, this is really a pipe dream, but it's fun to ponder what would be if the Amiga has a serious investment.  
 :-D

[quarkx]

alexh wrote:

but the price of all Amiga stuff isn't so expensive. You can pick up A500/600/1200 for next to nothing £10-20. The reason certain items are so expensive is because they were the items we coveted as children. The expensive addons we read about in magazines and dreamed of but could never afford. The GVP A530, Blizzard & Cyberstorm PPC, A3000 & A4000.

Again, you are living in a land where it may just be cheap, other parts of the world, it is VERY expensive. remember the world does not center around the UK, and UK hardware will not necessarily work without modification in other parts of the world. To think otherwise, you are just living in a bubble. An A 500 may be reasonably priced here ($50 +), but thats it. To find an NTSC A500+ or a NTSC A600 is next to impossible without ordering it from halfway around the world and paying hundreds of dollars in shipping (and good luck getting that NTSC).An NTSC 1200 is  also rare, but not as hard to get as a 600.  

Also, the software is worth NOTHING! You can find all of it for free if you look.(mind you it may be pirated) The hardware is worth everything! the hardware will always be the most important thing in any system. It's very hard to pirate Hardware, but software can be gotten anywhere for free (if you want it badly enough). Now, I don't personally condone software piracy or peer to peer networking, but its there and it does make software rather worthless.

[jlariv8957]

Don't agree with you

CPU time spend to convert big endian / little endian just take a look at the cpu utilization: in normal everyday use it isn't more than some % rarely more than ten enough to convert. for cpu intensive programs like audio/video encoding they all have versions compiled for non legacy hardware.

I suggest:

 - a program structure for legacy (68k) sofware that emulate a 68k or convert on the fly little / big endian as the fastest amiga processor is a 68040/60 running at max 75mhz I suppose that even a single processor at 1500Mhz would be many times faster than any real amiga

 - a program structure for new software that use x86 specificity :  the only issue for amiga is that it can live in any everyday PC.


Be realistic amiga has always suffered from it's hardware specifity (even if it was his main advantage too).

Amiga's miracle of the 80's is no more possible: nowadays standard hardware is many times faster that any more or less selfmade hardware.

His only chance is x86 there are many x86 compatible processors, take a look at cpu market these days:

- Power pc : doesnt exist anymore on desktop
- Sparc : incertain future (does sun will continue to develop him ?)
- Mips : the only computers that used them are retired since 2 years
- ARM : Could be a good choice but doesn't exist on desktop.

Think : anybody could make is own amiga from of the shelf hardware just imagine a 250$ amiga ! Who will buy a 600$ (or more) computer that is dead 14 years ago !
 

[Painkiller]

jlariv8957 wrote:

His only chance is x86 there are many x86 compatible processors, take a look at cpu market these days:

- Power pc : doesnt exist anymore on desktop
- Sparc : incertain future (does sun will continue to develop him ?)
- Mips : the only computers that used them are retired since 2 years
- ARM : Could be a good choice but doesn't exist on desktop.
 

I would consider PS3 as a desktop device and it does have a PPC processor. Mighty powerfull one indeed Too bad I haven't seen any efforts from MOS or OS4 team to port their OS to that system. Oh well I just managed to buy a G4 Mac Mini so while waiting for MOS on that platform I can play with OSX and MOS with my Efika.

[amigaksi]

>by alexh on 2008/8/31 13:40:42

>It doesn't matter what hardware it uses. To be honest if you're even THINKING what the underlying hardware is then the OS + applications have not done their job correctly.
...
>You could argue that the spirit and soul of the Amiga was not in the OS level but in the bang the metal programming that grew up around the earlier computer systems. But I doubt very much you are a programmer or know anything about this area. You are just a user. (As am I)

Yeah, so stick to being a user then and stop telling people about what is the right way to program or better programming because your statements reflect your inexperience.  For some tasks you need to know the hardware behind the software.  If someone wrote a medical system to control medical instrumentation or some power plant relying to timing issues, he can't just get a new system that's not backward compatible (on the hardware level).  The Amiga systems retained their hardware register level compatibility, so it's more optimal to use it and NOTHING wrong with it.  Read the PREFACE to Hardware Reference Manual for Amiga and it tells you the same.

[amigaksi]

>The software is everything. Today the hardware is nothing.(Although I admit that without the hardware in the first place there would have been no software).

Wrong.  If software was everything, people would still be using Commodore 64 since when new machines came out, they had very little software and C64 had tons of it.  And you can apply the same principle to any later time a new machine was introduced.  Nobody should have bought the new "Macs" or faster PCs since older PCs already had more software.  Perhaps, if you are running stuff like a Word Processor or some Browser, you don't care about the hardware behind the application, but many tasks require one to know what the target machine (hardware) they are writing their applications for.

[Varthall]

DavidF215 wrote:
Along that line, is there even an IDE available for AmigaOS development? Is StormC even still being updated or available? I recall SASC, but is it even still available? Are there any decent development tools for AmigaOS3.9 or 4.0?

For OS4 there's a forthcoming IDE called CodeBench.

Varthall

[amigaksi]

>by alexh on 2008/8/31 15:09:22

>>Quote:
amigaksi wrote:
PCs are backward compatible for about 30 years; I can still run 8088 code on a Pentium IV.

>No you cannot.

It's my code that I wrote when I was in college and it still runs; here's a sample:

;BX=FLOOR(SQRT(AX))
Sqrt Proc Near
Xor BX,BX
SqrtAX: Sub AX,BX
Inc BX
Sub AX,BX
Jns SqrtAX
Dec BX
RET

The keyboard access to port 60h, timer access to 40..42h, etc. all are still the same.  

>The caches and internal pipeline structure means that a lot of code does not run as it was supposed to. I dont think you were a PC user during the transition to 32-bit x86 architecture and once again to the Pentium architecture. Either that or you've forgotten.

Even the 8088 had various speeds so if you tried to time things with instructions, you probably had problems or with self-modifying code; however, the instructions set was purposely kept backward compatible like it was with 680x0 series (on Macs/Amigas/Atari STs).  That's different from making a new processor and then doing some software emulation where you probably can't even map the timer or other hardware the software accesses.

>>Quote:
amigaksi wrote:
It does not matter the number; in fact, there can even be none-- just theoretically exist (someone may write one) and that would show it's not backward compatible.

>Of course it matters. Creating a system that performs terribly for all applications just to support one or two rogue applications that are very rarely (if never) used (and have working equivalents) is just stupid.

If the application was the only thing one required to get a task done, the numbers don't matter.  It's a rogue application is your opinion especially if the hardware was being kept standard for a bunch of models.  It's always more optimal to go directly to hardware registers if the hardware is standardized and you also know exactly what is happening in your code and how many cycles it will take.

>Like everything in life its a matter of numbers.

That's even more absurd.  It's okay to claim "Not everything is a matter of numbers" as an absolute claim since you only need one item to prove it like "love" or where quality is better than quantity.

>>Quote:
amigaksi wrote:
Well, unless the audio/kb/etc. of the new machine is a superset of the old machine, it would be hard to do any sort of emulation accurately.

>Hard yes, but people have been working on them for decades. They are very good. Certainly good enough for a regular user. Because the MAC used libraries to abstract everything and there was far less "bang the metal" programming a highly accurate and compatible MAC emulator is far easier than say an Amiga emulator.

That's true since Mac has less custom hardware supporting it, it's easier to emulate whereas Amiga is impossible to emulate for certain things on a PC. I would like to know what target machine (spec) you are comparing to since I have seen Macs emulated on Atari ST, Amiga, and various PCs and newer so-called "Macs".  That way we can better tell whether they can be called "Macs".

>>Quote:
amigaksi wrote:
For example, you can't show real-time sprites all over a screen on a machine that does not have sprites.

>Not true. It all depends on how much CPU power per VBL you have, what RAM bandwidth you have, what VBL synchronisation you have.

Do you really think that setting 30 X,Y registers of sprites even on a 7.16Mhz OCS Amiga 1000 can be beat by a standard CPU/Graphics Card doing erasing/repainting of software sprites?  Think again.  It only takes a few microseconds on an Amiga 1000.

>You think high level Amiga games use only hardware sprites? Of course not when the accelerated CPU's could pump 10x of them around in 1/10th the time.

Never said sprites had to be used for games.  What's high level game for you might not be for others.  And doing 10x in 1/10th of the time, first answer the part of doing 1X in the same time or less.

[cicero790]

@jlariv8957

You’ve made several interesting points and suggestions but I don’t fully agree with your last conclusion. Amiga is a brand name. You buy a PC, you buy a Mac, and you buy an Amiga. If it’s powered by an Intel x64 multicore it doesn’t matter. You buy an Amiga that’s capable of running the best and most demanding games and software in the world in an Amiga OS.
 
That’s an Amiga.

That’s what Amiga was 20 years ago, capable of running the best and most demanding games and software in the world.
Amiga today just have to use different parts to accomplish the same thing.

[alexh]

quarkx wrote:
without ordering it from halfway around the world and paying hundreds of dollars in shipping

I buy things from the USA all the time and do not pay lots of money on shipping. Put it on the boat with a 3 week delivery time costs very little!

quarkx wrote:
(and good luck getting that NTSC).An NTSC 1200 is  also rare, but not as hard to get as a 600.

Awe..

quarkx wrote:
Also, the software is worth NOTHING!

Did I say anything about worth? I said it MEANS everything.

quarkx wrote:
It's very hard to pirate Hardware

But as the years go buy it's more and more easy to emulate as the horsepower of the modern computers goes up and so does the number of hours of emulator programming.

amigaksi wrote:
Yeah, so stick to being a user then and stop telling people about what is the right way to program or better programming

Don't see me doing that ever... gimme some links. Answer: You cannot. All I said was you do not need a system with hardware sprites for realtime gfx. And you don't. FACT.

amigaksi wrote:
your statements reflect your inexperience. For some tasks you need to know the hardware behind the software.

Sometimes. Vary rarely at the user OS level.

amigaksi wrote:
If someone wrote a medical system to control medical instrumentation or some power plant relying to timing issues, he can't just get a new system that's not backward compatible (on the hardware level).

They have Amiga's controlling medical systems and power stations?

Yeah, I didn't think so. (AmigaOS is not an RTOS btw)

amigaksi wrote:
The Amiga systems retained their hardware register level compatibility, so it's more optimal to use it and NOTHING wrong with it. Read the PREFACE to Hardware Reference Manual for Amiga and it tells you the same.

Yeah right... not! They tried their best, but anyone who was present during the transition between OCS and ECS and once again between ECS and AGA will think differently. Numerous games failed to work or displayed graphical glitches. Admittedly it was usually the fault of the programmer who had set-bits in reserved fields in registers or used reserved hardware addresses (which were a mirror of another address)to get a few extra cycles of speed. 100% register compatibility... nope, didn't happen!

[amigaksi]

>Don't see me doing that ever... gimme some links. Answer: You cannot.

"To be honest if you're even THINKING what the underlying hardware is then the OS + applications have not done their job correctly." from the very thing you replied to.

>They have Amiga's controlling medical systems and power stations? I didn't think so. AmigaOS is not an RTOS btw.

Don't misquote me; take your time in replying.  I never said there was an Amiga controlling them.

>Admittedly it was usually the fault of the programmer who had set-bits in reserved fields or used invalid address ranges to get a few extra cycles of speed but 100% register compatibility... nope!

The defined bits are 100% backward compatible.  Undefined bits have problems even on the PC parallel port where bit 5 at 37Ah was used for I/O mode on IBM PCs.  But you see the point that some applications are not even possible without going directly to hardware registers; even my floppy simulator does not work if I go through Windows API.

[alexh]

amigaksi wrote:

alexh wrote:
"To be honest if you're even THINKING what the underlying hardware is then the OS + applications have not done their job correctly."

From the very thing you replied to.

But we were talking about from the USER perspective! (OS + applications). The discussion concerned "Was a MAC was really a MAC if it had an INTEL processor?"

amigaksi wrote:
But you see the point that some applications are not even possible without going directly to hardware registers; even my floppy simulator does not work if I go through Windows API.

And you see the point that at the user level no-one cares! And if the OS designers and application programmers have done their jobs properly they do not even notice.

amigaksi wrote:
The defined bits are 100% backward compatible.

True, but the softies never listened.. they never do. Why use extra cycles to mask off those reserved bits when you can just overwrite them and it doesn't do anything :-)