When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?

[amigaksi]

by orb85750 on 2009/5/5 21:00:38

>Have they? OK, yes. However, I find Wintel machines to be very powerful, but very bloated and inefficient too -- the GM Hummers of the computer world.

The way you put it, it looks like you just decided.

They haven't caught up ALL the way.  For most things they have.  They still use inferior joystick interface and programming techniques (non-cycle exact).  Wave the hand and hope it will finish within that time frame.  And given the nonstandard hardware being driven at driver level, it looks like the Amiga style of writing directly to hardware registers and taking over the machine is a retro-machine monopoly.

[persia]

Model T
16 KW engine
Weight 550 Kg
Mileage 9.4 l/100 km
Top Speed 70 Km/hr

Hummer H3
160 KW engine
Weight 2100 Kg
Mileage 14.7 l/100 km
Top Speed 160 Km/hr

Comparing Apples and Oranges pretty much. the Model T doesn't have anti-pollution, air conditioning or a place to plug your iPod into...  The model T can't run at highway speeds and can't pull anything more than itself.

At least the Model T gets better gas mileage, something the Amiga can't claim to do since it uses far more power than a modern Mac or PC...

[save2600]

You just proved a point for many of us. I'd surely rather drive around in a Model T for a multitude of reasons over a Hummer. Status and cool factor being only two of 'em. Hey... those two attributes are not unlike why we're into the Amiga  :-)  

Hummers are for {bleep}s w/ tiny peckers as the Model T is for hobbyists with a greater sensibility of class and awareness.   :-D

[Nostalgiac]

absolutely NOT Windows 95... I had Amiga OS 2.0 at home, using Mac SE/30 with OS 7.5 at work for 'real' work .. and Windows 95 for 'testing' at work.... guess which was the most stable. Easy one,really ... my Ami :-)

At work we had such a laugh with how W95 worked - to bad some of our customers wanted to use it :/

I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !

What really did it was - I left that company and was bereft of my Mac so got my first Intel system :/
- Pentium at 120Mhz
- VGA at 1024x768 in umpteen colours

speed and colours... the A4000 was nowhere near this... and an 060 was insanely expensive ( got one now :p )

Tom UK

[guest3110]

I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !

I got Windows 95 running on my Amiga 2000, once; within Amiga OS. It was SO slowwwwwww, it was totally unusuable.  :lol:

[B00tDisk]

EyeAm wrote:

I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !

I got Windows 95 running on my Amiga 2000, once; within Amiga OS. It was SO slowwwwwww, it was totally unusuable.  :lol:

All that means is that amiga emulation* of a PC was never worth a flip. :-)


*=bridgeboards are SBCs with a custom bridge to the Amiga half of the computer, not emulators...

[ami_junki]

heheh hasn`t happened to me yet, maybe im too simple but i still find my lovely amiga useful to me ... sure i have my mac for some other things but it always feels like the amiga was made to do things the way i wanted them done.

[DamageX]

an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.

What world are you living in? High end CPUs like Core 2 quad will eat over 100W just for the CPU! Likewise for video cards. An A2000 PSU's output would only be considered reasonable for low-end or small-footprint PCs today.

[adz]

DamageX wrote:

an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.

What world are you living in? High end CPUs like Core 2 quad will eat over 100W just for the CPU! Likewise for video cards. An A2000 PSU's output would only be considered reasonable for low-end or small-footprint PCs today.

Actually, my Q6600 based server that's running at 100% 24/7 consumes around 90W.

[Khephren]

Overnight I had a think about this... I bought my A500 because of it's gaming potential, and it'dfantastic hardware.
One of the reasons I was loath to part with Amiga, was no longer the chipset, but the OS. I guess I became an apps user as well as a gamer.

I too thought PC's unusable until windows '95. And over here in Britain, I could'nt afford a PC until they dropped to about £700 (about '96 '97 I think). Even then I still thought windows slow, and a bit of a mess. Although to upgrade the Amiga A1200 cost me more than that, what with CD-rom, HDD accelerator and ram - but I spanned that over seveal years.

And as I was doing a graphic design course, I had a fully fledged Mac (emulated) for a lot less than other people on my course payed for one!

[paolone]

When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?

It was in mid 1994 or so. A friend of mine showed me some sort of voxel environment with texturized mountains scrolling in a fake 3D view, at speeds my Amiga 1200 woudln't ever reach, at 640x480 pixel full screen, on his 486dx2/66 machine. Then he opened in a fraction of second some JPEG images. I realized that PC were the place processor grunt was, and that their nature of modular and customizable machines would be overkill for the average Amiga user.

I bought my first PC then, a 486sx/25 notebook with DOS and Windows 3.1. It wasn't smart as AmigaOS 3.1, but with the help of Sparta (a very cool file manager for Windows), I could immediately recreate the one folder == one directory paradigm, which Windows <95 tried to hide with program groups. That was: I could act on Win31+Sparta as like as I did on AmigaOS when opening drawers. Dozens of little share/free-ware tools I found on the Cica CD-ROMs helped me customizing the GUI with toolbars and other improvements, and with my surprise they didn't affect overall speed. In a nutshell: I needed only a few days to get a better desktop environment than my beloved AmigaOS+MagicWB, and without hassles.

That was a huge hit for my amigism.

Then Commodore went bankruptcy, and Intel launched its Pentium processors. Sorry, it was Game Over for the Amiga, and I bought a Pentium 90 system (yes, the bugged one =)): it was amazingly fast and it could run smoothly all the PC applications I learned to love in the meantime. When I installed Windows 95 I felt immediately at home.

However, I still missed something. Windows (and then Linux) became more bloated, huge and heavy at every release. That's why I enjoyed the AROS project as soon as I saw it: it was aiming to do exactly what I was dreaming about at the time, a cute Operating System on the most powerful and cheapest hardware available... "Mine!". And here I am...

[guest3110]

by B00tDisk:
All that means is that amiga emulation* of a PC was never worth a flip.


*=bridgeboards are SBCs with a custom bridge to the Amiga half of the computer, not emulators...

Oh, it was just software-only.  :-D

[amiga1260]

When I needed a PC to make a Director Animation file before it called Flash animation. That was in 2000.

All my homework I made it on an Amiga. Like learning MS-DOS 6.2, Lotus 1-2-3, Dbase IV. Pascal and C. I use an Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1230 IV and 48 MB RAM. To emulate a PC I use PCtask 4.4.

In 2001 I bought a PC P3 600 MHz and played very much games. After that I bought a P4 2.53 GHz. In 2007 I bought a Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 Ghz with a Nvidia 8800 GTX graphics card to play games on it.

I still use an Amiga to play games or try some old applications. In 2008 I spent almost 400 Euros in Amiga stuff. :-)

[B00tDisk]

Y'know, I would point out that it's still fun to try things (witness my running Quake on Win-UAE) from time to time, other things not so much, on the Amiga much in the same way its fun to tinker with just about any old hardware.  I'd LOVE to have a Xerox STAR, or an Apple Lisa (or IIgs) to mess around with.  Some computer here recently (a line of MSX machines?) actually got a Win95 like GUI based OS written for it - and it was most assuredly an 8 bit rig or 16/8 bit.  I'm sure someone will correct me there.

But the point is, for my day to day computing, the Amiga's no substitute for what I need out of a computer.  When I made the jump I was using Netscape 3.0 before the Amiga had a browser (other than ALynx), Microsoft Office, playing games in a window on the desktop, etc.  It hurt me to see all of that - for years I'd assumed a PC was some DOS prompt only, four color "thing" that went BEEP BEEP BEEP.

But in 1994, my expectations were totally blown away, and I had a machine that was entirely usable, and, I daresay, none too shabby at "doing" multimedia.

[A1260]

For me it was in 1995, and i have never looked back... now days i wait for a proper amiga os that hopefully will mature enough to a stage that it is worth looking into... and faster more mordern hardware that will tun this new amiga os and can compete with pc prices of today. if this will not happen i will never buy the new amiga os or its hw...

[amigaksi]

For those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga, just letting you know you are dead wrong.  In order to come up to that conclusion, you would have to take into account every aspect of computing on Amiga and show that it's doable on PC.  Experimentally, that would take a very long time to prove.  Logically, I already pointed out a few things undoable on modern PC that are doable on Amiga.  So I suggest those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga to retract their remarks unless they were just expressing their opinion or just basing their remarks on "looks" and not anything substantial from the engineering/useage perspective.