PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:

I said that criterion a few times already.  You ever heard of autoboot ROMs vs. normal ROMs on SCSI cards on Amiga?  Why the prefix "auto" in autoboot.

[amigaksi]

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while (argumentFails()) {
  mutateArgument();
}

Sounds like what you did with the joystick argument.

[Karlos]

Sounds like what you did with the joystick argument.

Hardly. My argument was consistent all the way through. Modern computers have far exceeded 20 year old ones in performance and capability. You and a couple of other bitter diehards were the ones suggesting you need to use sampling rates of obsolete ports and boot times as significant metrics.

Frankly, I find your entire attempt to justify the premiership of long obsoleted hardware above hardware that what was once inferior but has since evolved beyond recognition hilarious.

Current machines have thousands of times the processing power, hundreds of times the memory and disk space available. You will find for the vast majority of all computer users, professional or otherwise, 20 year old hardware is of no practical use for their day to day needs nor live up to their expectations in terms of basic capability.

20 years is a long time. Simply playing an mp3 track or opening a large jpeg image from a digital camera will bring a classic amiga to its knees, unless a hardware or PPC decoder is used. A 68060 will manage either task more respectibly, but it uses a significant portion of the available CPU time to do so. Meanwhile, the rest of the world have grown used to the expectation that their mobile phone can do these things, let alone their computer.

I'm really sorry that you find yourself so opposed the notion that PC hardware has evolved far beyond the venerable miggy that you find things like emulation in UAE a total anathema. You are missing out on enjoying the using an amiga that has the raw horsepower of a modern machine for the sake of being true to hardware that even Jay Minor and Dave Haynie both expressed doubts about afterwards (As early as 1989, Jay mentioned in hindsight that he'd have opted for chunky rather than planar pixel formats and Dave wanted to use PCI instead of evolving the Zorro standard any further).

Still at the end of the day, your choice, your loss.

[mongo]

But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots).  Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS.  On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.

The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.

I want to write programs in COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2.

[DonnyEMU]

Several things about PC booting with Windows that you folks are probably not aware of:


If you want to see what's taking so long on your PC boot up all you have to do is go down to the RUN Menu and type:

MSCONFIG

Click on the startup tab, all the boxes that are checked on your list are things that run when you start up the pc, if you remove those (most of which Amiga doesn't have available) your PC will boot much much faster though you need to be careful with what you turn off..

There is also a services tab.. Everything there runs in the background and takes up memory unchecking the boxes there will remove these items from startup.


Also there is something called superfetch that runs on startup.. Windows SuperFetch enables programs and files to load much faster than they would on Windows XP–based PCs.

When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using. On Windows XP–based PCs, this can slow progress to a crawl when you attempt to resume work.

SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.

You can disable this also using Tweak VI from TotalIdea Software

http://www.totalidea.com/product.php

I have to say that most of the people who think Windows starts up slowly just aren't aware of just how much work and what the PC is doing for you that doesn't happen on the Amiga when you start up. Yes it starts up quickly, but the Amiga doesn't enhance your experience in the same way..  Though I know a lot of guys who put a LOT of things in their startup-sequences..

If you turned off everything cached and in startup, the PC would boot just as fast as an Amiga, but would you really want that experience considering what it's doing for you??

[Linde]

You missed the point again.  The default compiler settings produced it; it's not on purpose.  It's an observation-- not meant to say that PCs cannot produce optimized code.

So what IS the point? If you can't code or if you can't use a compiler you might make bloated programs? Surprise, surprise.

You missed the point again.  There's no hard drive involved.  The animation boots from floppy and runs.

"Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available."

NEVER said that.  PCs have enough horsepower to run the animation even with the bloat.  Chewbacca defense.

Oh, I'm sorry then. I misread your message.

That's what I stated-- that size matters to affect the speed ON THE AMIGA.  Your blunder that size has no bearing on speed is your problem in understanding.

No, size doesn't necessarily have direct correlation with speed unless you count the loading time from the disk or stream the content.

Complete rubbish.  My boot block stuff runs on all Amigas across the board.  Don't argue against things you don't understand.

I never said your bootblock stuff doesn't, but you'll have a pretty frustrating experience watching OCS and ECS demos or games without soft kicking or using WHDLoad.

Now is that after the OS loads or before.  If  your demo is 1K (as you say) but relies on the OS functions, then you have to wait for OS to load.

That is after the OS loads. Yes, interfacing with "any" soundcard on a PC relies on standard APIs. That's definitely a difference from the "standard" Amiga, but in most regards it's not a short-coming, which is why abstraction layers like RTG and AHI exist.

In 1k?  Bullcrap.

Probably not often in DOS demos, but it's definitely possible to support adlib compatible cards in 1k.

You should really think about it rather than repeating your mistake.  If I move the joystick around while pressing/releasing fire button, the time in state change can be 1 ms or less.

Yes, and a change in sound can happen over an infinitesimal amount of time. It doesn't mean that it's particularily important for our hearing.

I'm recording the state changes and timing the difference between the state change.

How often do you think the game itself is checking the state? Show me a game that utilizes the superior Amiga joystick port to its full potential!

Sorry, don't know of any joystick using PS2 port.

PS2 as in Playstation 2, not PS/2. I have an adapter to connect two PS2 compatible controllers to one USB port.

They are still playing catchup to joystick interface.

No. There is nothing to catch up to. Having a joystick port on a computer is totally redundant when you have universal serial interfaces.

They are still playing catchup to real-time useage of hardware registers (those that you are forced to go through APIs);

No. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years you know that software developers are trying to move further AWAY from the hardware. Transparency, modularity, uniformity, and in the end, system stability, at the expense of exact control. A pretty small price to pay to open up a whole new world of fast hardware development, in my opinion, while a rigid system design like the Amiga won't ever see that.

they are forced in playing catchup to timing things with zero latency.

PC:s may very well be (and are) used in low latency/real-time applications.

It's not the primary case; there are millions  of gameports.  USB joystick requires more cycles to read the joystick port than reading I/O port on Amiga as it is currently-- not the nonexisting ones you are speculating on.

Given the average life length of a typical PC game pad I'm pretty sure that there are more USB sticks in use. "There are millions of game ports"... How many USB ports do you think there are?

First show a joystick that beats the amiga.

The joypads I use have two separate analog joysticks, a directional pad and ten buttons ergonomically laid out. They work as respond as instantly as necessary for fast shooters as well as old platform games, even if my computer might not be able to sample them at 1000Hz (which I don't know since there are no games that do).

There really isn't anything like it for Amiga.

Show me a timer that can do the 558ns accuracy on any PC. Etc.

On some OS:s I'm sure it's possible. If you need to have timing that tight (i e for timing some sort of serial communication) in any of the mainstream general purpose OS:s you can often outsource the time critical stuff to a $1 PIC.

So don't compare apples and oranges then.  Pick a joystick port.

Dedicated interfaces for joysticks are a thing of the past, so there's really nothing else to compare to. Consoles too are moving to better solutions such as USB and Bluetooth.

[GadgetMaster]

Some preliminaries:

1.  Who appointed you to judge whether "the responses from the PC side make perfect sense".  

The same entity that appointed you the saviour of the Amiga.

Give examples of these perfectly-sensible arguments

Take off your rose tinted spectacles and read the thread again. Maybe you missed them.

....that do not centre around the raw processing power of modern hardware, but instead focus on the user-experience.

In particular focus on the 90%+ of PC's in the real world that run on Windows,

Why should I? Does it qualify your argument only when you specify the criteria? That's not what thetitle of this thread states.

You wan't to know about the real world. In the real world people use PCs and MAC. The Amiga need a hell of a lot of catching up to do before it can even be taken as a serious platform at all. How much more real do you want it? Learn to accept reality my friend.

2. The question is not: "Can an Amiga do everything as fast as PC".  Can ...blah.

There was no question. Just an unqualified statement. Read the title again.

It's only zealotry that has led you to conflate this issue into an unrecognisable mess and introduce criteria and questions where there were none.

I ask for clarification and you decide to jump down my throat. You seem awfully twitchy. Step back and take a chill pill. This level of excitement might not do your health much good.

3.  PC =x86 hardware running Windows for anywhere between 90 and 95% of the worlds computers.  Its therefore reasonable to say "PC"= computer that runs Windows.

It seem you still can't make the simple deistinction between hardware and software. :roflmao:

4.  I only need to demonstrate ONE area where the PC is still playing catch-up.

Aww. Why only one? Knock yourself out we're all listening intently. Don't say you are running out of steam already? Oh yes your health. OK step back then.

An A1200 with 8 meg ram and OS 3.1 can be used to write letters, store customer accounts, issue mail shots, print receipts, analyse financial data using spreadsheets.   The software is there, and the hardware is capable.  The basics of business don't change, even if computer hardware and OS's do.  

Back to software are we? The company I work for needs to exchange MS Office ducuments and run a decent web browser as a bare minimum.

I'm sorry sttuffing a load of hobby home computers in our offices is not goung to make us more productive.

We run LAMP servers and can even use basic specced machines for that. Unfortunately a stock AMIGA 1200 just wont cut the mustard there. (You are the one that wants to stick to basics and not use "souped up machines" so you at least use your own criteria in this one.)

Whether people choose to use it or not is a different question. Format your drive with PFS 3 or SFS..... blah blah..  

So you are writing a 10000 word proposal and you hit the off button you won't lose any data on an Amiga? Wow! That's amazing! The business world should really be told about this breakthrough. I don't think you are evangelising it enough. :eek:

Come on. You are clutching at straws here. Not having to shutdown safely is hardly a feature that is going to affect our servers which haven't been shut down for years. We don't miss it one bit.

If your Amiga hardware is flaky then don't blame the system, fix the hardware.  

My A1200 Wedge is fine. Plays a nice game of Cannon Fodder once in a blue Moon.

Mission critical enough?  

No! , I'm afraid not, to be honest.

Secure enough? Amiga will do the job.

Sure not being able to serve DHTML web pages at all is a bit too secure to be useful at all. I could replace the A1200 with a brick instead. That would be just as equally secure. Not a fat lot of use though.

Two current real world examples:  ........................

Good luck to them. Those examples hardly put PCs to shame. I can do more than that on my mobile phone. It doesn't mean the whole world is going to scrap their PCs overnight upon hearing that news.

The Amiga needs billions of dollars of investment to be a serious contender and catch up with to the established platforms. Just face reality for goodness sake.

Oh the linux fan boys:  i can get a responsive fast PC by compiling my own custom kernel, and with 4 cores at 2600 mhz and huge CPU caches and 4 gig RAM running at 1333 mhz and a 640 MB GPU overclocked it can boot a few seconds faster than a 15 year old computer with crippled CPU card.  

:roflmao: I hate using linux.

But it runs the majority of the worlds website including all major Amiga websites. (This one included) so it has it's uses and is far more advanced as a platform than the limited Amiga.

Just because I don't like linux doesnt mean I will deny it's capabilities and usefulness.

Zealotry can turn you blind. It's a pernicious habit you know. You seriously sound like an old style MacLover :rofl:

And now the typical Linux user:  "just bought a PC, booted with  ubuntu/mandriva/fedora/PCLinuxOS 09 blah blah and i get a kernel panic/white screen/vesa only video/no sound/mobile modem not detected/no wireless/doesn't see hard drive.  Search through gazillion forums to find: sorry your chipset/video card/sound/modem/wireless isn't supported, wait for the next kernel in 6 months.  Or follow this obscure guide which doesn't work. oh yeah thats right it doesn't, its out of date, go to this guide..still no luck? wait 6 months..new kernel/distro, Ok i can boot and install but....refresh is funny on my screen/wireless ......blah blah blah.

Funny I had similar problems trying to get one of my A1200s up to scratch.

Amiga: stick workbench floppy in, switch on, follow instructions, boot.  Hardware detected, configured. Done.  Soft reset. Boot off hard rive. Install app software: double click on install icon.  Done.

Send me a ticket please. Cloud cuckoo land sounds like quite an inviting place.

Which user-experience would you prefer?

My current user experience with PCs is fine. It's better and more productive for me than trying to force an ancient (but elegant) Amiga system to try and do it for me.

I don't need to catch up with anything. You might need to catch up with reality though.

1. Boot times:  Amiga's boot faster.  No question.  Even if you allow for the additional processes that the PC has to perform at boot times,  PC hardware resources are many, many factors greater than that available to an Amiga.  Put another way: the Amiga does less at boot time, but has less hardware resources to do it with.  Waiting is waiting, no matter why it happens.  And no hibernating isn't a solution because you can hibernate on PC but you may not awaken from it and its not a HUGELY faster than cold booting anyway.

2.  greater malware prevalance on PC introduces higher risk of data loss, passwords being stolen, identity theft.  Third party security software is mandatory, but that diminishes the responsiveness and therefore the quality of the user experience.

3.  general responsiveness of the GUI fluctuates on Windows PC's far more than Amiga. AmigaOS prioritises user input eg mouse pointer, menu opening when background tasks are running more highly than Windows.  I experience more wait cursors on a Win PC than  i do on Amiga.

Thats enpough for tonight.

Finally you decided to be polite enough and answer my question. All I wanted was a summary to clarify your position.

I didn't want or need sarcastic, acrimonious, patronising, sanctimonious claptrap. But that's what I got so I decided to give as good as I got. I doubt many will hold it against me.


OK. So this is all it boils down to eh? Wow ! I must say.

After all these pages all you say is that the PC needs to catch up with a PC in terms of:

(1) Boot times
(2) Security
(3) Responsiveness

(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:

It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.

(2) Security through obscurity eh?  Sh!t !!! I think we need to make all PCs obscure to CATCH UP with the Amiga. :eek:

Since when has obscurity been a sought after feature? :crazy:

(3) I'm sorry to say that the PCs I use daily are a heck of a lot more responsive and useful to me than my A1200 could ever be. I could use an Amiga to do some of my tasks but I'd probably get fired for taking hours too long on tasks that should really be completed in minutes.

If anyone insisted on using Amigas for the work we do here they would be fired just for being anally retentive masochist anyway.

Look! a tool is a tool alright. Amigas are fun hobby retro machines. I like them I really do. What I don't do is lie to myself that they are the worlds answer to poverty as well as the kitchen sink.

The platform is a RETRO platform to everyone in the world bar a few BAFs. There are website that cater specifically for these types of people. You might want to pay a visit and see if you don't fit right in.

Standards matter in the real world. The PC has compatibility and standards which the Amiga needs to catch up to. It's sad but true.

Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.

[Linde]

But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots).  Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS.  On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.

The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.

Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?

[Linde]

yeah BUT ITS ISN"T AN THEY DON"T.  Imagine if we could get OS 3.1 running natively on quadcore machine.  We can't so we have to deal with reality, not what if fantasy..

By that logic cardboard boxes are also more secure than prisons. No one ever tried breaking out of cardboard boxes! Let's slowly begin putting criminals in boxes instead.

[amigaksi]

Hardly. My argument was consistent all the way through. Modern computers have far exceeded 20 year old ones in performance and capability. You and a couple of other bitter diehards were the ones suggesting you need to use sampling rates of obsolete ports and boot times as significant metrics.

Frankly, I find your entire attempt to justify the premiership of long obsoleted hardware above hardware that what was once inferior but has since evolved beyond recognition hilarious.
...

That's your blind obsession.  You already think it's obsolete if it's old without refuting the legitimate argument.  But that's not how the modern world works.  Some companies produce better machines than others.  It doesn't always go with later machines have better technology. Even during when Gameport was being produced (XP era and prior), it was obsolete compared to Atari/Amiga joysticks.  They just never choose the superior interface.  
 
>Current machines have thousands of times the processing power, hundreds of times the memory and disk space available. You will find for the vast majority of all computer users, professional or otherwise, 20 year old hardware is of no practical use for their day to day needs nor live up to their expectations in terms of basic capability.

That's not relevant to the arguments presented.  Some people HAVE to use the PC becasuse of job/work requirements since that's the PC that happens to be marketed everywhere.

>I'm really sorry that you find yourself so opposed the notion that PC hardware has evolved far beyond the venerable miggy...

I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.

I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do.  Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.

[amigaksi]

Hahaha, yes, just add any arbitrary requirement by calling mutateArgument() until it makes sense. As mongo said, what if I want to use BASIC?

I didn't mutate my stand.  I stated my criterion many times.  This was already refuted when I stated "barring Atari 2600 cartridge type boots".  BASIC is a ROM like cartridges.  It's true, if he only wants to use BASIC, he's fine-- for him it does boot faster.  But in the general case, I know the C64 are loading huge files of the disk drive and there's no boot option for that.

[jkirk]

well you must be the only person on the planet that sees no value in fast booting and shut down.  Go to any Win 7 forum and you'll see boot up and shut down time is a MAJOR concern of many many PC users, so much so that MS has gone out of its way to reduce both of these in Win 7, making sure that people know about this as well.  Unlike you, most people do turn their computers on and off numerous times in a day, maybe to surf a bit, send an email, do some banking, and then live the rest of their lives, only to do boot up a few hours later to do the same, or something completely different.

 quantify most. all you see on forums are a vocal few and not everyone. i for one am betatesting win 7 and have never posted anything. furthermore i don't shut my computer down as a pc really is really not designed to be started and shut down repeatedly.  

Regarding shut down, I don't like to remeber the times I've had to leave the house quickly but have to wait for the PC to shut down, or I leave after shut down, and coming home to find some stupid process has stopped the shut down and the PC's been on for 8 hours.  Never happened with Amiga..

 no the amiga refused to shut down. on my amigas i could never use the menu to shut down workbench. there was always a process running in the background that had to be killed first(usually several.) on my setup i could not find a program to automatically kill those processes. so i just hit the power swich to shut it down. since amigas didn't cache anything this was harmless as long as the hd drive light was not on. but guess what a pc does cache files on the harddrive so trying to hit the power switch can hurt it. this is the only reason you can shut down an amiga faster.  

Application start up time is a real measure of the user experience.  I get on the net on my A1200 68060 far more quickly than my PC.  I have the google home page up faster on ibrowse than i do with Firefox; from the time I launch both browsers  Its a joke that ancient hardware can do this.  Try loading Word 2003 on a PC from 2003 see how fast it loads..and tell me if you enjoy your experience with loading Fireox3 on that as well.

 lol you funny. yes ibrowse would load faster since it is optimized for the basic hardware for amigas. so it stands to reason that an 060 would blow it up quick. now for a something to blow your idea out of the water.  i have used windows xp on a 380mhz pc and had the same experience as my 3ghz athlon ----why you ask? because microsoft has built timers into the os so the feel won't change with succesive hw upgrades. this is an asthetic decision and the delays actually help with compatibility. go and load up a pc version gold box game on a modern computer and you will see what i mean.

[amigaksi]

...
I don't need to catch up with anything. You might need to catch up with reality though.

...

That's subjective.  If you take the objective approach, PCs do in fact need catching up in some areas that make the Amiga unique in those cases.  And this topic was not to fulfill your needs but hope for an objective discussion.

>(1) Oh crap my TV boots up instantly. tell the PC using world that they need to catch up :eek:
>It makes no frigging difference in the Real World. It's how useful it is after boot up that matters to most sane people.

See, now if I make this subjective like you did, I would it makes a HUGE difference in boot-up time because I test low-level drivers which cause frequent crashes in XP.  You decrease your life span by the amount of time you wait for your system to boot.  It all adds up if you have to do it often.

>Wake up and smell the coffee. The world moves on. Accept change or change the world yourself. Don't just sit there miserably lying to yourself that the world is really much more different than it is. That is self delusion and it can lead to irrational behaviour.

Nobody stated PC is inferior.  It's inferior in some aspects; that's a fact.  Even if you use it for hobbies/games, why not use a PC?  

You didn't reply to my message.

[Linde]

I'm not opposed, but pointing out where PC has not caught up.

I find Amiga quite useful for somethings that PCs have problems with doing or can't do.  Not dismissing PCs as being inferior.

Yeah, using Windows for totally elementary stuff like reading the joystick state at 1 kHz without jitter is something we have to look far into the future for. And for me, as a professional switch flipper having computer rebooting as my primary field of interest, light-switch booting speed is a very important factor.

[GadgetMaster]

You didn't reply to my message.

Come on! I was about to reply to you, I just about finished replying to Stefcep2. Phew! :crazy:

I'll probably do it in a bit as I need go somewhere in a few minutes.

Don't worry I won't be too harsh, as your tone was not sarcastic like his/hers?  was.

[koaftder]

You can ask the windows kernel for the value of the game port and it'll return you that value before a stock amiga can stuff a number in one of it's cpu registers.