Guys, you need to stop perpetuating the "amiga boots faster" argument until you have any idea of what tasks the machines are performing while they're booting.
Again, just going by default compiler settings. Not purposely done. Many people don't bother figuring out what is dead code and how to eliminate it so you end up with EXEs that take up megabytes of memory. Never said PC sucks because it's full of applications that have tons of dead code or redundant code.
... which is why the argument was totally redundant and irrelevant to this discussion. I can make a bloated "Hello world" for Amiga, too, but I wouldn't hold it against the Amiga system.
The example I gave of animations running from floppy, the size of the data files and exes combined mattered. If they weren't compressed and code highly optimized, the frame rate speed would suffer.
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.
Where exactly is the "hard drive storage" on a floppy? This is exactly what you were saying, seemingly unrelated to the floppy example. Concerning the example you gave with the Amiga (play an animation LOADED from floppy), uncompressed images would be faster anyway.
All in all it's a pretty whimsical argument anyhow to say that PC code is usually too "unoptimized" to play full frame rate animation, since pretty much all common media formats used on the PC are compressed and optimized enough to be streamed with low band-width.
Many boot block intros I have seen don't rely on any WHDLoad.
Seeing them run perfectly on any "standard" Amiga is not common, though.
If you write OCS software, it works on all Amigas.
Hahaha, yeah, well in reality most OCS demos are pretty incompatible with anything other than the machine they were coded for (remember, we have to GET REAL). "Optimizing" in the early Amiga days usually meant bypassing standard system functions, controlling the hardware directly and taking full advantage of the exact specifications of the machine. Change the hardware? Stops working. That's how it was for all Amiga models, as is it for all PC models. Even if you used the proper kernel functions on the Amiga old software titles would stop working properly with new ROM revisions and clock speeds.
You show me a demo that uses the audio card; they are all nonstandard.
Since audio cards are all "non-standard" there is a standard API present in any modern PC OS to provide transparent access to the functionality (like AHI on the Amiga), so yes, most PC demos and small intros (both in Linux and Windows) use the sound card. Can't you bother to
look that up yourself? And even in the DOS days before there were standard APIs some demos (and most serious software and games) supported multiple soundcards perfectly anyway.
Here's I wrote my own boot block control code that allows me to control the Amiga from a PC:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320379502506
Pretty damn cool, but hardly relevant to your argument.
I wasn't going by "most". Just like the audio example I gave. One Khz is based on actual recorded joystick data from River-raid as I already mentioned.
Oh, you could probably record ultrasound in the MHz range but that still doesn't mean that it's relevant information to our hearing, much like kHz recording of hand movement isn't relevant to joystick handling (and if this isn't getting obvious to you by now, I don't really know what to tell you).
How exactly were you recording anyhow? Were you just recording the joystick directly, or were you counting how often the game polls for the joystick? In the latter case I would be pretty surprised since River Raid is one of those games where once-per-frame sampling would probably be sufficient.
You can't time a bit to appear to a device at an exact point in time unless you take over the hardware and have the exact spec of the controller.
But you can still have them predictable enough, apparently. My PS2 to USB interface performs great in all games I've tried it with.
But then you mine as well plug the usb card into an Amiga and do the same.
Who's playing catchup again? I'm not saying that the Amiga can't do stuff, my point is that PC:s don't really have anything to catch up to.
And this has nothing to do with joystick I/O.
If USB is the primary interface of your joystick (which probably is the common case), it must have!
Sorry, I don't argue about nonexistent products. If you don't have a joystick port, it's not my problem. Maybe the spec will get dropped and replaced with a different one.
Modern PC:s playing catchup with the Amiga are also non-existent, but we've been arguing religiously about those for the last few pages.
Joystick I/O was a bonus to the joystick interface; first you need to pick the joystick port before talking about I/O. If you switch ports, I'll start talking about the expansion connector.
USB is not analogous to the expansion connector. USB is exactly what it is called - a universal serial bus. The closest thing you'l find in the "standard" Amiga hardware design? Don't know, maybe the clock port?
