PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Karlos]

@ Karlos
@meega.

I see.  The solution to slow boot times is ........don't turn of fthe computer. May be OK for the minority-yes the majority of users power their machines down.  My A1200 hasn't crashed in many months: but then I don't have a Frankenstein hack, I don't use software written by amateurs.

Try running your amiga for several weeks continuously and see how stable it isn't.

When you say slow, you are still talking about a minute at most. Which is only slow if you suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder. If your boot is taking longer than that, perhaps you have a totally clapped out unmaintained heap of scrap for a PC, because it really shouldn't.

So you admit the PC is still playing catchup with the Amiga then.  No amount of work around will change the fact that PC's take a factor of at least 10x longer to boot, despite having clock speeds in every hardware component that are factor of 1000 faster.

Nope. See my earlier post. My PC boots faster than my A1200 running an otherwise base OS3.9. Whereas my A1200 loads a fairly minimal OS3.9 for my needs, my PC loads a full desktop OS and an entire suite of server services. It may be a factor 100x (not 1000) faster by CPU clockspeed, but it does more than 100x the amount of work, every second it is up.

[stefcep2]

I do power down my computer - every time it hibernates it shuts down completely. That's what hibernating is all about.

 On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be.  hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.

[Karlos]

On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be.  hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.

Hmmm, what you want there is a solid state drive :-)

[stefcep2]

Try running your amiga for several weeks continuously and see how stable it isn't.

My A4000 6-7 years ago was a used as a server for 6 months straight without rebooting.

When you say slow, you are still talking about a minute at most. Which is only slow if you suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder. If your boot is taking longer than that, perhaps you have a totally clapped out unmaintained heap of scrap for a PC, because it really shouldn't.

One minute?  We've been down that path with your souped-up, hardware hacked/overclocked, custom_OS running PC that you run 24/7.  You are in the infinitesimal minority of PC users.  Your experience doesn't count.  Further you've resorted to calling me and the millions of Windows users and MS itself, for whom boot times matter, "insane", and we are all "suffering from attention-deficit disorder". Name-calling is the last resort of those who simply can no longer defend their argument.

Nope. See my earlier post. My PC boots faster than my A1200 running an otherwise base OS3.9. Whereas my A1200 loads a fairly minimal OS3.9 for my needs, my PC loads a full desktop OS and an entire suite of server services. It may be a factor 100x (not 1000) faster by CPU clockspeed, but it does more than 100x the amount of work, every second it is up.

We've talked about your frankenstein A1200 before.  It doesn't count.

You have 4 CPU's running at 2,400 mhz. 4x2400 about 10,000.

One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.'  Nuff said.

[meega]

On vista on my laptop thats a few months old, I can resume fairly quickly from sleep, but resume from hibernation is not apprecaiably faster than cold botting: why would it be.  hibernation just saves everything to the hard drive and opens them up again when you resume by reloading from hard drive.

Now who's having the tin bath?

You think restoring the system state by copying a single contiguous file off hard disk back into RAM will not be appreciably faster than starting all the processes one at a time off that same hard disk?

[adz]

One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.'  Nuff said.

And one 0.89MHz MOS 8501 boots faster than your 14MHz 020, 'nuff said

BTW...Still trying to load that 78MP TIFF image :lol:

[stefcep2]

Now who's having the tin bath?

You think restoring the system state by copying a single contiguous file off hard disk back into RAM will not be appreciably faster than starting all the processes one at a time off that same hard disk?

If hibernate powers down the system, then those processes would need to be started up again, no?  Theoretically having everything as one contiguous file rather than having the hard drive seeking for individual files ought to be faster, but in my subjective experience-i haven't timed it yet-it is not signficantly different from just cold booting it up. Consequently the only time I hibernate is when the system forces me into it, due to my battery running out of power.

[stefcep2]

And one 0.89MHz MOS 8501 boots faster than your 14MHz 020, 'nuff said

BTW...Still trying to load that 78MP TIFF image :lol:

How much faster does the MOS 8501 boot?

What use would an average user have for a 78MP TIFF image?  How long will your PC take to finish the calculations that are done by IBM's network of supercomputers in one second?  Pointless argument..

[meega]

Do you even know what hibernate does?

[stefcep2]

Do you even know what hibernate does?

 
i believe so: it copies whatever is in RAm to the hard drive as a file, and then powers down.  Hardware resources still need to be re-initialise when resuming, and yep it generally ought to be faster than a cold boot, but 1. it may not always work at all on all hardware and 2. not all PC's are appreciably faster resuming from hibernate.

[bbond007]

That's one example where it's a breeze to not only read the joystick on Amiga but also read it with high precision timing.  Gaming with joysticks was an afterthought on PCs as even gameport was usually on an add-on board.  Gaming was a central concept on Amiga/Atari machines so more relevant.  It all adds up-- joystick I/O, timer IRQs, etc.  not just for me, for everyone.  Don't worry, "I have not yet begun to fight."   Just going to finish up this point before addressing other points.   A gameport uses analog joysticks and requires 1ms+ worse case read-time to get status of joystick directions.  This at 1 Khz would use up all the CPU time whereas on Amiga, it would hardly effect system performance even if performed with high precision timing.  Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion.  Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.

I though I’d set the record straight on the PC joystick port:

(For some reason this seems to be a big issue in this thread)

The target audience of the IBM PC/AT was never the gaming market…

That being said, the 15pin analog joystick port standard was created:

Reading the button state of the joystick was simple and fast - it simply required one logic operation. This seems rational as the state of the button can only be in the ON or OFF position. The 3rd position is known as "broken".

They (the engineers) should have just expanded on that idea and created a digital joystick – like C=, Atari, etc.

BUT…

Instead, they created an Analog joystick and along the way somebody got a big bonus by saving $0.03 per machine by eliminating hardware. I believe he later went on to design the o-rings for the space shuttle Challenger.

Anyway, to read the joystick the programmer would write some value to port 0x201, run the CPU in a time wasting LOOP and then read back the contents of 0x201, and then work some magic with the values returned to determine the position of the X and Y axis.

If that’s not cheesy enough, you also had to disable the interrupts and poll several times to get an accurate reading.

Finally, as the PCs progressed from 4.7mhz to 33mhz to 66mhz, etc. the CPU cycles that were wasted looping to read the joystick were increasingly more significant.

Lets face it, constantly calibrating the trim on your flight stick just sucked. The part I really personally hated was that if you depressed turbo button (to slow the game play down) Chuck Yeager would typically do an uncontrollable barrel roll right into a barn.

Eventually, PC sound cards came along with MIDI interfaces. The MIDI interface connected to the outside world via the same 15-pin joystick port.

Again, someone probably got huge bonus – but this time they disserved it. The idea was to simply forget about the joystick port and to send the data over MIDI.

Genius!

By the time the Pentium came out, MIDI joystick was the standard until it was later replaced by USB.

Anyway, my main machine is a 2GHZ Mac mini with 9400n GFX, 4GB ram and an XBOX-360 wireless controller.

I have no idea about the technical aspects required to read the numerous axes and buttons on the 360 controllers, or how much CPU overhead is involved. I just know there are too many f’n buttons.

[smerf]

Hi,

@Linde

So what you are really telling me is that you can type faster than your computer can display on the screen, as for working/home environment, I use my Amiga for every day tasks I have even used it in a business environment and found it quite capable for my needs without the worry of picking up virus's or the loss of data, as a matter of fact I still have some of my old data from my business still left on my hard drive from 1996.

Now lets talk about about zipping and unzipping files, the Amiga 4000 backs up my whole hard drive of 2.2 gig in about 10 to 15 minutes using lharc through diskmaster, and while it is doing it I am usually in another window playing a game or listening to some mods or sometimes both.

As for TV's I have repaired them for years, and it has only been a couple of years where they have surpassed the 22 fps rate. yes hilary TV's have finally surpassed that rate because back in the old days they came up with a motion picture standard of 22 fps because the human eye and the brain sensors interpert motion at that speed unless your adrenalin is kicked in, then even at crash speed in a car under survival conditions will the brain kick into gear in order to survive. Also you should try talking to the motion picture society on the 22 fps, its been the standard since TV's first appeared on the market.

And now for the biggie, how do you expect your computer to perform, I expect mine to perform at high speed so that I can play modern day games, I expect excellent graphics performing at high speed (even though my brain can't really interpert it) but the computer at this point feeds me more visual information even though my brain can only pick up a small bit of it thats why I use a PC to play games with, and an Amiga to do my general bookwork, like data processing, word processing, and spreadsheets on. However at that being said I do enjoy using my PC for surfing the web and the instant display that I receive while using my Q6600, with 8 meg of sli ram, and two nvidia 8800 graphic cards, with 2 250 gig sata drives, and one 500 gig sata drive, and one old 40 gig ide drive, with a dual layer dvd burner, which sometime in the near future I hope to upgrade to blue ray. I use all this power to play todays modern games at very high resolutions. Now you are probably from a country probably in Europe where they were far advanced as far a TV are concerned because they use pal at a different freq and frame rate where you are probably correct, but the US who is restricted by US laws which are quite backward and archaic I am sorry to say where stuck at the 22 fps for TV.

Now for my final part, thank you for supporting Amiga, I know it is quite archaic by todays standards but to say a person can't use it today because of its age is quite nonsense, my challenge to you is pick up an old Amiga game like Rolling Thunder and try to beat it, I haven't heard of anyone getting through all its levels as of yet, I sure haven't I have only made it to level 7 and I play that game at least once a week, PC games are made to be beat because that brings more enjoyment to the lazy dopey kids who don't know what the outside is for today, they sit in the house and play stupid computer games, some of them even meet their husbands and wives over the stupid computer today, they look like zombies and act like draculas only up at night to play stupid games over the internet.  I like football, baseball and basketball, did some hockey playing during my younger years, but today I rather be out fishing.

Sorry if I offended you by calling everyone who uses a PC on a Amiga site a Loser, but this is still an Amiga site and we all were losers when Amiga went bankrupt and we had to settle for todays sorry PC's.

smerf

[smerf]

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.

Hi,

@Gadgetmaster,

What do you mean the Amiga isn't mainstream?   Since when?

What do you mean my wife hasn't chucked my Amiga out?
She sure did she chucked out my Amiga 1000 along with my C64 and my 128 & 128D with my big box of over 1000 C64 & 128 programs,` straight in the trash I tell ya, lucy thing my Amiga software was to heavy to pick up or she would of chucked that out too!!!

smerf

[smerf]

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





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

Hi,

@thetexasm

Oh, you texans are so clever and funny

good one

smerf

[bbond007]

Just off the top of my head...

I think film based movies were 24FPS, NTSC is around 30FPS and PAL is like 29FPS.

If you don't believe your EYES can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS, just try and use 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with a 60hz refresh rate. Painful…

[adz]

How much faster does the MOS 8501 boot?

What use would an average user have for a 78MP TIFF image?  How long will your PC take to finish the calculations that are done by IBM's network of supercomputers in one second?  Pointless argument..

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.