PC still playing Amiga catchup

[bloodline]

OctaMED (or CAMD or the interface driver?) doesn't support an external clock? Can it act as a clock source? EDIT: OK, so I guess CAMD just passes along system messages, and it's up to the devices and sequencer to decide how to use and interpret clock messages. There's an old thread here on Amiga.org talking about MED supporting legacy MIDI clock messages but not MIDI timecode. Sounds like Bars 'N Pipes is good to go, though. Wish I still had my AMAS. Just have the DSS8+ now and no MIDI interface. Don't feel like wiring my own (which I'd probably foul up anyway).

Yeah, OctaMED's MIDI support wasn't the most amazing thing ever... I didn't bother messing around, this was 6 years ago... got the job done... haven't worried about it since.

I have a Creative/E-mu 1212m in my PC. It's a decent card, but I'm not very fond of the software interface.

Oh E-mu... how the mighty have fallen... I must get myself an old EMAX-II, some time...

I just bought Logic Express for my MacBook Pro, and I've got my Motif ES8 connected via USB. I've been trying to track down an mLAN interface, but they're no longer in production, and I don't trust eBay for this. :-/ I also need a low latency audio interface for the Mac. Any suggestions? Something that's supported on both Windows and Mac OS would be ideal, but not required. Cost is a factor, but only because I don't plan on using the interface very often; otherwise, I'd probably just buy something nice from MOTU.

If you only need a single audio in, then I recently used a "Blue Icicle" (http://www.equixotic.com/2008/11/07/blue-icicle-xlr-to-usb-mic-converter/) USB interface. The Audio quality is great, low latency (uses core audio) and it provides Phantom power. For a £50 interface, wonderful!

I have had a number of different interface over the years, but whenever I start a new project... I always go back to my Edirol FA-101... I bought it back in September 2004... and it's been my workhorse ever since... Other interfaces have come and gone, but not this one... for both studio and live work, it's built like a tank.

If I were to buy an interface today, it would be a MOTU UltraLite Mk3.

[ElPolloDiabl]

The final curtain:

If Amiga was still alive today it would indistinguishable from a PC. There hardware would have changed/adapted to keep costs down. It would be an X86-64 system. The OS would have to compete against a no doubt more advanced M$ Windows. Amiga OS itself would probably be heavily bloated to cover all the different tasks expected of it. Windows is your Amiga brother from another mother.

[jkirk]

That doesn't prove that serials are preferred over parallel.  They did have both and then they dropped serial before parallel.

roflmao so my machines don't prove anything nor does the the motherboards i linked but your 10-12 do? seriously your idea of proof is lost somewhere.

Hello, AT DIN5 connectors went a long time ago before gameports.

yea because someone cared about keyboard interfaces more. besides ps2 ports were still compatible with AT ports(with a pin adapter) so really all that changed was the packaging.

Sorry, but they made newer joysticks for USB-- they had to substitute with something.

what is that supposed to mean??

[jkirk]

It is efficient-- that's what I meant by taking over the hardware.  So some critical application can write the most optimal game or application.  OS still exists and can do it's own multitasking.  See Amiga computer as an example.

i see so efficiency = hogging the hardware. sorry but in the world of multitasking this don't have a place. the os determines what software gets priority but does not let anything hog the hardware.

We are talking about programmer.

the programmers chose the version of the api they are going to program to. as such if they decide to progran to 9.0c then that is what they state as the required version. microsoft also includes compatibility for all versions in the latest version. well except windows 7. windows 7 comes with directx 11 but dx9 is not included that i can tell but it can be installed seperately tho.

No, IOPM will only protect disk i/o or other things it doesn't want accessed and allow application to go directly to hardware and leave it to application if it wants to crash itself since it won't hurt the OS.

look if the app directly controls the hw. This when this app crashes an os friendly app will try to access the same hw it might lock the os. or if two programs attempt to access the same hw they may cause a crash. instability abounds in this situation.

[stefcep2]

Guys, to be honest some of the technical detail you've gone into is over my head.  You are probably right about how more advanced modern PC operating systems are, in particular how their multitasking systems and memory protection ought to make for a more responsive system.  What i can argue though is what I see in front of me with my machines.

So I got out the 060 A1200 and just had a play with it.  No executive or other speed hacks.  I set up a Real 3D animation render in 640x480 24 bit shadows, reflection, refraction antialias, saving each frame progressively to hard drive, basically all knobs on.  I screen flicked to workbench: it was instantaneous.  On workbech screen (8 colors 640x480 productivity) the mouse pointer moved as smoothly and precisley as if nothing was happening in the background. I double clicked my hard drive partition with 25 drawers, no delay in opening and displaying them in window. I started unarchiving a 10 meg zip file to hard drive with Real 3D still going. I closed the window, the close gadget responded instanteously to my mouse click.  Opened the partition again, no delay.  Opened the games drawer with 28 drawers, no delay in displaying the window contents. Dragged the window, no delay in  redrawing the window.  Right clicked to bring the Workbench menu bar, which has 11 menues, many with submenu. Sliding the mouse pointer along the menu bar, each menu drawn instaneously drawn, no delay, no screen garbage left behind, no overlap of each menu as a new one is erased, no sticking or skipping of the mouse pointer as I slide it down each menu, mouse pointer totally smooth. Don't forget both Real 3D and the archiver are writing periodically to the internal hard drive.

Yes it takes longer to do the render in Real, it takes longer to unarchive the zip, but THE SYSTEM is still very snappy.

Contrast this with Vista on my 2.4 ghhz c2D with 4 gig ram and 7200 rpm hard drive and 256 meg Geforce 9200: The start menu jerks up, especially if I select the orb whenever anything is being read/written to the hard drive. The mouse pointer jerks as well, disappearing and reappearing somewhere unpredictably.  The system cannot highlight each item in the start menu as I move my mouse pointer, so it "jumps", ie it can't keep with the mouse pointer.  I am in Firefox on its menu bar and I move my mouse along the menu bar: I can see momentarily an overlap of the new menu and the previous menu.  Mind you, I have not started any CPU intensive task in the background.  It just feels like the GUI is covered in molasses, a crap user experience. And no its not just MY laptop, I see it on my brothers vista laptop as well. I don't care how many processes it has to do in the bachground that I don't know about, its simply no longer good enough, we should be well and truly past this rubbish with the hardware specs we are running.  So yeah you can argue about all the technical advancements of the modern PC and its modern OS's, at the end of the day, what matters is what I see and feel in front of me.

[Karlos]

Try running your raytracer at priority 20. And in the case that it uses a separate process for rendering, bump that up to 20.

[quarkx]

The final curtain:

If Amiga was still alive today it would indistinguishable from a PC. There hardware would have changed/adapted to keep costs down. It would be an X86-64 system. The OS would have to compete against a no doubt more advanced M$ Windows. Amiga OS itself would probably be heavily bloated to cover all the different tasks expected of it. Windows is your Amiga brother from another mother.

It was stated before and in the book "On the Edge", that the "Next" Amiga's were going to loose the Amiga OS and use Windows NT., So even then, it was know that the Amiga would have been just another Windows box by now.
I mean hey, once you have the software, and it is proven on "generic" hardware, its just a matter of time, before they start slipping Generic hardware under the hood to save costs.

[stefcep2]

Try running your raytracer at priority 20. And in the case that it uses a separate process for rendering, bump that up to 20.

Why?  I want a responsive system, and I have that be default.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Why?  I want a responsive system, and I have that be default.

I agree.

[smerf]

still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.

What about Windows?  Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..

Hi,

When DOS was around there used to be a small program that you could actuate through DOS commands to make a ram disk, I used to use it all the time to make 2K ram disks to put programs or save data into.

Tihs is a tset, if you can raed tihs lnie it maens taht you are one of the few poelpe in the wrold taht prboly fulnekd sepellnig.

smerf

[Damion]

@stefcep2

Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.

[smerf]

What is this "floppy disk" of which you speak? I don't think I've seen one on a modern computer?

Hi,

@juan_fine

The first floppy disk that I can remember was 8 inch by 8 inch square with a rectanular hole usually in the upper left hand corner, this was the top of the floppy disk, the inside of the floppy disk was a thin round piece of magnetic medium that you could actually shake and it would bend or flap thus the term floppy disk. You would take this floppy disk holding the disk so that the notch was on the right hand side and insert it into a floppy drive, now the notch when uncovered would let the disk be written to and I believe the 8 inch floppy disk held a whopping 73 kbytes of data ( I could be wrong, it was a long time ago). Then they invented the 5.25 floppy disk that held a unheard of amount of data 180 kbytes, then they came up with a dual side floppy disk where you could write on both sides that held 360 kbytes of data, life was good, then they came up with a disk that they called a mini floppy disk that was 3.5 inches, why they called it a floppy disk I don't know because the magnetic medium was housed in a hard thin plastic casing, the first mini disk held 720 kbytes and then later on improved to 1.4 mbytes, the one thing I can tell you the 5.25 disks didn't hurt as much as the little plastic mine disks when the wife gets mad at you and starts throwing them at you, I mean those little plastic disks hurt when they bounced off your head.

smerf

[ElPolloDiabl]

@smerf

Thank you, Hewhochonolisestechnology. You know the generations of our ancestors. Cloud God smiles on you this day.

[smerf]

The crux of the matter... There is no area where the PC is playing catch up to the Amiga. The PC learned from the Amiga, equaled the Amiga and then surpassed the Amiga by the mid 90s.

You claim that it is in several areas... Why not bullet point these areas?




Um... The work I do, music production, simply can't be done on older machines, they are just too slow and have no support for the high definition audio interfaces that I use.

What, a few years ago, used to require several rooms of equipment and a large mixing console, can now be done on a £2000 MacBook Pro, a 24bit firewire multichannel audio interface and Logic Studio (plus and other software of your choice)...

Hi,

@bloodline,

excuse me, I will take my 3.1 operating system and load it into my old, slow, obsolete Amiga 4000 faster than you could load your Apple, Linux, or Windows whatever operating system. So there take that, stick that in your floppy disk (oops you don't have one) and smoke it. And I heard your music and don't like it anyway, even if you do have a small recording studio, the Amiga beats you there too, it has big equipment for big good recordings, but then what do you expect out of a Mac except a lot of noise.

smerf

[smerf]

@stefcep2

Try playing an MP3 or stream net radio on your A1200, and simultaneously use a web browser, or do something disk related/open drawers. Anything that requires a large chunk of CPU will slow it right down.

Hi,

@Damion.

I do it every day on my A1200, have no problems at all, As a matter of fact the other day I had my A1200 on playing mp3, was surfing the web and backing up the hard drive using DM2 with lharc and had a window open viewing pictures that I had just taken with my cannon camera.

Do you know how to use a A1200

smerf

[amigaksi]

Not entirely, though. The stability of the 040 system, if allowed to boot up to a full workbench without the 040.library would be seriously compromised. Any code compiled for an FPU will fail the moment it calls any operation the 040 had to emulate.

You never understood my point.  If I take an OCS machine with 68000 and run the program which works fine and now switch to an accelerator 68020/68030/68040/etc., the program should work fine (barring some rare exception).  You keep throwing in FPU/MMU into the picture to confuse things and thus your so-called experiment is a failure.