PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Linde]

Hi,

WOW!!!

What a discussion on which computer is better, this is an Amiga site of course and so by that I declare the Amiga the winner, all you Linux and Windose users are LOSERS just by the fact that you are on an Amiga site.

Greetings to you too! You have to explain your argument a bit closer, because maybe I'm too much of a loser to see how it makes sense logically. I'm not here because I think Amiga is the superior platform, but because I like old computer systems and think the Amiga is particularly interesting. The Amiga sure is an impressive innovation but in a typical home/work environment today it just doesn't cut it for the tasks a user would normally expect a computer to perform.

Lets face it a computer is only as fast as a user can use it. There is no way any of you can type faster than your machine, therefore almost 100% of you are using too much horse power for what you are using it for.

Are you serious?  Then why don't you sit down and decode real time video on paper and just draw it yourself on the screen? Do you decompress zip files by reading the compressed data yourself? Do your drivers print you a message that you have to type in again to pass it to the system? Hell, why not move the laser around over a CD manually if you can do it just as responsively?

A computer is faster at what it does than every potential user, but it doesn't matter because most tasks it performs are tedious and complicated enough for it to be perceived as slow anyway.

Even when you play the most awesome games like fallout 3, crysis, far cry, doom 3, the computers today move much faster than what your senses can see. The only thing you are trying to do is get faster frame rates even though your eyes cannot see them, that is why most TV sets use the 22 fps rate anything above that is quite useless as far as the eye can see.

Judging from your totally misinformed point I take it that you have no knowledge at all about real-time graphics, and if you don't notice the difference between running a game at 60 fps and 22 fps you should probably see a doctor too, because it should be clear to anyone under 80. The reason 22 fps works for movies is because cameras don't really capture discrete moments of time on each frame, but rather pretty much everything between the frame before and the frame after, which introduces a lot of motion blur that conceals the slow frame rate.

Now, doing a similar effect on a computer costs a lot of time, because in the end it means rendering or extrapolating all the significant frames "in-between" too. I guess you could do it by hand pretty fast, though.

And no, TV sets aren't usually locked to 22 fps.

So please tone down the arrogance until you actually know what you're ranting about.

[Karlos]

@Linde

I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help

[Linde]

@Linde

I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help

I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism

[Karlos]

I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism

Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.

Back in the day, I used to hate PC's, Ataris, Macs and pretty much anything that wasn't an Amiga.

Nowadays, I just hate Macs

Seriously though, current generation machines are tools that I use for serious work, high definition gaming and media. I use my Amigas for fun, doing all kinds of ultimately pointless things with them simply because they can be done. I'm not under any illusion that they are suddenly going to make a triumphant comeback into the world. This means I enjoy them all the more as I don't constantly brood over the lack of progress the platform is making. Finally, even though I would sooner spit on one at the time, I'd even have an Atari

[GadgetMaster]

Interesting discussion guys.

It reminds me of the good old days. The only difference is that those days are well and truly over.

Amiga is no longer mainstream and that is for some reasons.

PCs are mainstream and that's for some reasons.

Want to know those reasons.

It's all here:

:lol:



Seriously though, the Amiga is a nice, fun, niche, retro, hobby/home computing platform. Trying to claim it is something other than that is just plain denial.

[TheMagicM]

Hi,

@Stef

How can he see the elephant in the room when he has his head stuck up the elephants a**?

smerf

Its pregant, so I'm helping extract you.  You're somewhere up in there.  LOL!!!

Ok someone ELSE who "just doesn't get it".

I don't use a P3 anymore, silly.  I know that to get a current  MS OS running as opposed to walking you need hardware 5 years ahead of the OS. BUT THE P3 WAS HARDWARE THAT WAS COMMONLY AROUND WHEN XP WAS RELEASED.  THATS WHAT XP WAS MADE TO RUN ON.  Its the hardware advancement 7 years later not the OS that improves the user experience.  You just basically poved you still can't see the elephant in the room..

Call it what you want.  All I know is my system(s) run great.   Enjoy your Windows XPerience!

[Karlos]

@amigaski

You replied to the same message twice; but anyway, my answer is the same as well-- you need to understand what a PC is. I am a low-level programmer; I hardly use the OS for anything. Whatever software I write is what is potentially possible with the PC

As I said in the same post you have just failed to comprehend before replying to, if you don't use the OS and bang the hardware, then WTF is stopping you using the CPU for precision timing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter

Turn off clockspeed altering power saving modes or use the constant TSC if present. Create an asm function for timing. Lock your code to one core (on multicore) and write a busy loop with a suitable instruction to prevent OOO execution and count the bloody ticks until you hit the magic number you've determined based on the reported frequency of your TSC.

Quit your moaning about 850ns resolution hardware clocks. If you are a low level coder then the above tick timer should prove no problem. It should work on pretty much anything since the pentium.

Or, if all that is too much of a PITA, you could, assuming you have a reasonably recent PC, just use HPET

[Linde]

Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.

Of course! I'm not saying anything about the user base overall (which I think is very nice and unpretentious), but my experience tells me that the occasional nutter who still argues that the amiga is a more capable system than PC:s honestly holds that misinformed opinion in most cases.

Though, I must say, my experience should also tell me that reasoning rarely changes their mind, hehe.

[amigaksi]

Yeah, true... And this refusal to see and embrace evolution is what helped to kill the Amiga... People always refused to accept newer technologies. AGA sucks, GfxCard sucks, AHI sucks, paula can do better,... and in the software side: memory protection is performance killing,...
...

It's NOT refusal to see newer technologies, but looking at REALITY as it is.  Just because a few big companies got together and made some superior graphics card and declared the previous standard "obsolete" does not make it obsolete in the REAL WORLD.  Millions of people that still do not have that graphics card still have to be supported.  Not everyone follows (nor should they follow) this vicious cycle of computer technology having to be upgraded every year or so.  So the original point that when AGA came out, people still wrote for OCS/ECS is good and valid.

>And that's why people using an OS and a computer outdated in almost every aspect keep thinking it's better than monsters of technology created today...

It depends on what you want to do with it.  If all I want to do is make some video titles on a video and I have the software on Amiga, there's no reason for me to go buy a PC because they just introduced a new graphics card that does 256MB/second over a new PCI Federal Express overnight delivery.

>Yeah, OS of today are heavier than Exec written 24 years ago... But there's no way Amiga could be used for anything productive. You do not reboot because a program crashed anymore. And guess what ? even Apple is doing multitasking nowadays...

That's your opinion.  You have to maintain PCs as well as Amigas.  In some cases, you better reboot when a program crashes in XP.  But program crashing has nothing to do with hardware; well-behaved applications don't crash on Amiga nor on Windows XP.

>If you ask me, the lack of memory protection is an heavier handicap than having extra processes doing nothing (especially when seeing the power/memory we have today).

Even with memory protection, you still get spyware/viruses/etc.  Misbehaved programs still exist and can be written.

[amigaksi]

There is no fscking "standard joystick gameport" on current PC hardware. Along with the parallel port, it has vanished into the hazy world of yesteryear. Where you live :p  In case you didn't notice, it has all moved to USB in recent years. Now, USB is very slow compared to any internal bus, yes. However that makes absolutely no difference on a system where the communication with the USB device is arbitrated by hardware. My USB device sends a packet, the controller handles it, puts it into memory somewhere and issues an interrupt. Magic. It might not be ideal for your specific polling needs but I think you'll find its ideal for most peripherals.

...

Take it as USB or port I/O, they are both inferior to Amiga reading the joystick I/O port.  Don't get pssed off now by cursing; you underestimated the Amiga; but it's okay, people make mistakes.  You have to live with it.  USB is better for block transfers.  If you do single byte read of the status of a joystick, there's more overhead involved than reading an I/O port location (as is case with Amiga).

>There are people out there with 8-bit home computers still. It doesn't mean they aren't obsolete. A given technology essentially becomes obsolete when it ceases to be manufactured or improved upon.AGP was better than PCI for graphics specific applications, PCIe is better than both, is fully generic and has subsequently rendered them obsolete.

I defined what I meant by obsolete in previous message and in msg #113 which you are replying to.  There are millions of users using AGP so it's not obsolete.  Ideally, you want to support all machines being used, but companies make mistakes-- they can't get it right the first time so they have to keep improving their designs (or perhaps it's a marketing set-up in some cases).

>I'm fully understanding your argument that the Amiga's native hardware is ideal for your purpose of polling the joystick port at a precise interval and that you couldn't, for whatever reason, duplicate this on a PC. It's quite amusing that you assert this as your premier example of the Amiga is still in some way streets ahead of the PC, yet complained that my particle simulation was "too specific" a metric.

It wasn't my prime example; it's just one example that I thought would be easier to understand given Amiga users are familiar with joysticks.  I stated that your particle simulation didn't address the point of joystick I/O (it was unrelated).

[amigaksi]

...
And no, TV sets aren't usually locked to 22 fps.
...

One thing interesting to note is that Amiga did do 30fps/60fps full screen (overscanned) and ran animations loaded from a floppy disk (880K).  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.  I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).

[amigaksi]

...
Nowadays, I just hate Macs
...

Hey we have something in common.  Macs should never have gone to intel processors because now it just boils down to which OS is better.  They gave up that their hardware can compete with PCs.  

>Finally, even though I would sooner spit on one at the time, I'd even have an Atari

Getting an Atari 800 may be an upgrade for you if you want to play games that are cycle exact and easier to control.  By the way, Atari 800 joysticks read two joystick ports with one LDA instruction (LDA 54016) and takes 4 cycles at 1.78979Mhz.  It beats any USB/Game Port joystick out there.

[warpdesign]

It's NOT refusal to see newer technologies, but looking at REALITY as it is. Just because a few big companies got together and made some superior graphics card and declared the previous standard "obsolete" does not make it obsolete in the REAL WORLD. Millions of people that still do not have that graphics card still have to be supported. Not everyone follows (nor should they follow) this vicious cycle of computer technology having to be upgraded every year or so. So the original point that when AGA came out, people still wrote for OCS/ECS is good and valid.

Well, reality is that Commodore may not have been dead if people had bought and developped for (new) AGA machines in mass... But I guess this is also Commodore's fault... They had to convince people, they failed to do so...

Of course it's not valid. When people still wrote 32 colours games, anything concurrent was displaying more colourful pics (be it the PC, SNES,...), and way more powerfull... How could the Amiga be compettitive this way ? Well, it couldn't. And that's what reality is about. This is just market/business. Of course people still used it. And of course people still bought ECS games (for a limited amount of time though). But a market that isn't dynamic is a dead market... Guess that's what happened.

[Karlos]

By the way, Atari 800 joysticks read two joystick ports with one LDA instruction (LDA 54016) and takes 4 cycles at 1.78979Mhz.  It beats any USB/Game Port joystick out there.

My question here is, who other than yourself actually cares about how fast they can read the joyport? This is one thing about your argument I really don't quite understand.

What is it you are doing that requires you to poll the joyport on a precision interval? Are you using some sort of homebrew measuring device on it?

[Karlos]

Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps

At full HD 1080p

, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available.  I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).

Strange, hello world compiles to <5 K here, and that's with all the debugging crap left in.

[stefcep2]

@Linde

 This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Thats not my angle.  I simply believe that relative to the hardware resources modern PC's are inferior to Amiga in responding to user coomands.  Things that should not be slow on a PC are slow.  There's far too much waiting to do simple things than there should be.

Heres another example: I'm on a c2d 2.4 ghz with 4 gig ram 512 gpu laptop.  Vista.  I go to Firefox menu bar and left click and move across the menu bar: there is a delay in the menu being drawn, I can FEEL the pointer sticking as the mneu is drawn, and as I drag the pointer along i can see the new menu being drawn top-down and bits of the previous menu being erased.  This doesn't even happen on a 14 mhz 68020.  Why?  I read an Australian Commodore and Amiga review article circa 1995: Alta Vista ran on 10 CPU DEC alpha machine with total 6 gig ram.   The same DEC alpha takes ten times longer to render a scene in Real 4D than an Athlon X2 2400, which is slower than my C2D.  So I have a PC with hardware that was faster than that used by a THE major web search engine of a decade ago-but I still have to put up with delays in an app menu being drawn..

The lack of progress is just diappointing.

To the guys using 7 year old XP on current hardware: in 5 years time when you have a 16 core CPU running each at 3 ghz and 32 GIG RAM, 10 terrabytes of solid state hard drive space on a GPU with 8 gig video ram, I'm sure you'll think Vista is a speed demon too, except you'll still be seeing the start menu stutter, still have your 2 minute boots, still have your menus open slowly ON THE CURRENT MS OF THE TIME..