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Offline Linde

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #269 on: June 04, 2009, 01:15:32 PM »
Quote from: stefcep2;509134
OK I'll say it again: more than 90% of PC's use Windows.  Some figures say 95%.  An assumption that is correct 95% of the time would be an acceptable one everywhere else except a few anal people on Amiga.org.  Linux has its own special shortcomings from a user perspective which i'll get to in a later post, and Macs are NOT PC's in the context of the original post.

If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").

Quote from: stefcep2;509134

2.  You miss the point:  if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly.  This might result in your losing your life savings.  Its a pretty big risk.  So you HAVE to use your XP PC with your security software..your PC takes a huge performance hit and what does that do to the responsiveness of your PC and the quality of user experience?  I actually have no qualms using my Amiga on the net without any security software.  Could someone hack into it and install malware?  Yep. Will it happen?  Nope.

Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.

Windows XP IS more secure, no matter how much more likely it is some external force will try to attack it. Amiga OS doesn't even have any basic protection from the programs it is running itself.

But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!

And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #270 on: June 04, 2009, 01:54:41 PM »
Quote from: Linde;509132
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.

...

That example was also given.  You can launch applications from AmigaDOS; you can't under Windows XP/Vista which is what most PCs have.  

>... 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.

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.

>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.

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

>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.

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

>Seeing them run perfectly on any "standard" Amiga is not common, though.

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.

>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.

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

>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...

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.

> 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.

In 1k?  Bullcrap.

>Pretty damn cool, but hardly relevant to your argument.

Sure it is.  You asked for small demo; I gave you a full application.

>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).

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.

>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.

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

>But you can still have them predictable enough, apparently. My PS2 to USB interface performs great in all games I've tried it with.

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

>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.

They are still playing catchup to joystick interface.  They are still playing catchup to real-time useage of hardware registers (those that you are forced to go through APIs); they are forced in playing catchup to timing things with zero latency.  I'll sum up later...as this reply times out with Amiga.org for some reason.

>If USB is the primary interface of your joystick (which probably is the common case), it must have!

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.

>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.

First show a joystick that beats the amiga.  Show me a timer that can do the 558ns accuracy on any PC. Etc.

>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?

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

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #271 on: June 04, 2009, 01:55:05 PM »
Quote

2. You miss the point: if you take out third party security software from Win XP you are very likely to get infected with any number of malware very quickly.

Well, since there is no antivirus in Amiga, no protection, no user level (yes, any program will run as root level), how time do you think it would take to just format your harddrive by some virus ?

This argument is void. If Amiga suffered maybe 1/100th of the attacks targeted to Windows, how secure would it be ?
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #272 on: June 04, 2009, 02:00:39 PM »
Quote from: Linde;509138
If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").


Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.

...


You just like comparing nonexistent things.  Compare with reality.  Amiga OS is a minority so it wins since it doesn't need as much security as Windows XP.

>But hey, my C64 is the best system, because unlike both my Amigas and my Windows installs I've never had a virus on it because most were exterminated a decade ago! And it boots faster! Yay!

You missed some posts.  C64 does not have BOOT option.  You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.  

>And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.

I have seen hundreds of users where there system slowed down by general use.  Majority of people are NOT experts at eliminating whatever garbage has gotten into their system.  It's the OS writers fault (who are constantly updating their OSes anyway) to realize this and fix it.  Otherwise, it can be stated that in general Windows XP boots slower than Amiga OS.
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Offline stefcep2

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #273 on: June 04, 2009, 02:10:04 PM »
Quote from: GadgetMaster;509121

I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"

We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.

Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.


Some preliminaries:

1.  Who appointed you to judge whether "the responses from the PC side make perfect sense".  Give examples of these perfectly-sensible arguments 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, most of which are XP machines with single core CPU's with 1 gig or less ram running vital security software that strangles the hardware.  Thats the experience of most users.

2. The question is not: "Can an Amiga do everything as fast as PC".  Can the Amiga open 78 MP pictures, encode DVD/audio as fast as a PC blah blah.  Can your PC do it as fast as IBM supercomputers?  Thats simply new hardware crunching numbers faster than old hardware.  Its a meaningless argument. Take raw processing power out of the equation, what do you have left?  The user experience.

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.

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

Quote from: GadgetMaster;509121


Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?



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.  Whether people choose to use it or not is a different question. Format your drive with PFS 3 or SFS and you won't lose data on your hard drive even if your switch the power off mid-write. You can back it up if you want to CD-RW like we still do at my job on a PC.  You won't lose your data.  If your Amiga hardware is flaky then don't blame the system, fix the hardware.  Mission critical enough?  Secure enough? Amiga will do the job.

Two current real world examples:  My dentist uses Scala on an A1200 with a touch screen to display information in the waiting room.  He scans images with a UMAX scsi scanner, and set it all up himself.  My dentist is also my brother.  An aged-care facility uses an A500 (!!) to display meal times, announcements etc 24/7 to all of the residents room TV's and to TV's throughout the facility, and this is set up by the receptionist!!  It boots off a floppy in 10 second.  A PC can do digital signage as its now called,  but at a cost of many thousands of $ both in hardware, software, professional set up costs.

Quote from: GadgetMaster;509121


Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?


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.  

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 doesn't work/sound is scratchy/ wait 6 months more..yep it works, except for the wireless.  And my printer.  Should have got a HP printer.  But it IS a HP.  Is it a supported model...erm no. Packages are great:  but what i wan't isn't in the repo: tough.  OK I installed something from the repo, it said it needed to download dependencies, so i said yes, and now I can't boot, something about KDE..what did you install? Oh yeah that installs a small library that KDE uses but was updated and KDE will need to be updated and you can do that by cutting and pasting CLI commands..BUT I can't boot.  Sorry boot using your installation CD..blah blah blah.

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.  

Which user-experience would you prefer?

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.
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #274 on: June 04, 2009, 02:18:49 PM »
Quote from: GadgetMaster;509121
Do you think the Amiga can be used in any serious business environment without security software installed and be a mission critical system?

Is that how the Amiga is streets ahead of the PC? Is that what this thread is about? Windows ? not PCs? How come your arguments are not consistent?

I haven't heard a conclusion or summing up of you arguments yet. If you are on the Amiga side of the argument I challenge you to condense all your arguments into one post and conclude why or in what sense you think PC architecture "is still playing Amiga catchup"
...


The problem with writing all the reasons at once is that the thread goes in all different directions.  So gradually different reasons are being mentioned starting with the simplest that the joystick interface on Amiga is much much superior to the PC's joystick interface.  Now, we have got some PC fanatics having problems with this obvious fact so how can someone prepare a list of other things that are more difficult to understand.

>We've had plenty of responses from the PC side that make perfect sense so the ball is in your court. The gauntlet has been thrown at your feet.

Sorry missed those posts that make perfect sense.  Any reference?

>Make coherent finalised argument or else just admit you are trolling for the sake of flames.

Too lazy to read the posts, but yet claim that PC side has made good arguments.  That's kind of hard to do.  Here's summary of what has been stated thus far:

(1) Amiga joystick interface kills PC gameport and even what's available on USB joysticks.
(2) Amiga (in general) boots up faster than PCs (in general).  Barring customized 32/64-bit ROM interfaces/boot setups.
(3) Amiga has a Copper which can allow you to time things to 558ns accuracy without the +/- bullcrap (latency) of modern PCs.  Amiga also has other timing mechanisms like audio timers, processor timing, etc. but those are like PC timers in that there's latency involved.  (4) Amiga allows direct access to hardware registers as well as API function calls.  PCs are stuck with mainly non-standard hardware I/O so you are forced to go through API calls which can take any amount of time (100 cycles to thousands of cycles).  This allows you to write tighter code that guarantee response time in cycles rather than some hodge-podge value.
(5) The above (3) and (4) combine to give a system that's more predictable and thus suited for real-time projects.  Amiga also has a parallel port as well which PCs unfortunately got rid of and thus doing parallel signal processing with exact timing also now favors Amiga more.
There's a few more like sprite engine, audio effects, video beam position reading, etc. that can also in some cases out do the PC.
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Offline stefcep2

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #275 on: June 04, 2009, 02:21:23 PM »
Quote from: Linde;509138
If we are discussing PC:s here, that's still not an assumption we can make as long as anyone uses anything other than Windows. Running Windows or not is totally irrelevant to this topic ("PC still playing Amiga catchup").


Like i said anal people on Amiga.org, but I've dealt with the Linux fan boys as well.

Quote from: Linde;509138

Let's for the sake of the argument assume that Amiga OS is the most popular OS, and Windows XP is in far minority. How quickly do you think the system would be taken down by malware, and how much extra protection would be needed? Any 14 year old could write an Amiga program to fuck the whole system up.


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..


QUOTE=Linde;509138]
And no, an antivirus program is no excuse for a 20 minute boot time. That is more likely the result of an incompetent user. Aside from the built-in firewall I use the free avast antivirus for virus protection, and there's no noticeable slowdown or startup delays.[/QUOTE]
  No.  ALL PC's get slower the more you use them; the registry gets clogged with shit, the hard drive gets badly fragmented and malware does god-knows what.  the Amiga GUI deosn't slow down as it gets used more.
 

Offline persia

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #276 on: June 04, 2009, 02:29:35 PM »
The point is that Amiga virus protection lay really in the miniscule amount of users.  "New Amiga virus released, dozens panic worldwide" is not likely to make Headline News.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

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Offline stefcep2

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #277 on: June 04, 2009, 02:39:08 PM »
Quote from: warpdesign;509141
Well, since there is no antivirus in Amiga, no protection, no user level (yes, any program will run as root level), how time do you think it would take to just format your harddrive by some virus ?

This argument is void. If Amiga suffered maybe 1/100th of the attacks targeted to Windows, how secure would it be ?


But Amiga doesn't, and Windows does.  Thats REALITY.

If as many people used Linux as they do windows, would Linux's argument that its more secure than windows still be valid?
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #278 on: June 04, 2009, 02:54:29 PM »
This is so funny that PC people have to make hypothetical arguments like "In 2 years USB 3.0 will common place", "If Amiga had the majority..", etc. That just proves the point of this topic-- "PC still playing Amiga catchup."
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Offline mongo

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #279 on: June 04, 2009, 03:02:20 PM »
Quote from: amigaksi;509142

You missed some posts.  C64 does not have BOOT option.  You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.  


No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #280 on: June 04, 2009, 03:13:22 PM »
Quote from: mongo;509154
No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.


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.
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Offline koaftder

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #281 on: June 04, 2009, 03:28:20 PM »
Quote from: amigaksi;509155
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.

Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:
 

Offline Karlos

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #282 on: June 04, 2009, 03:31:41 PM »
Quote from: koaftder;509157
Talk about moving the goal post. :rolleyes:



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Offline meega

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #283 on: June 04, 2009, 03:49:35 PM »
Quote from: amigaksi;509155
The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.


The application I choose is Firefox...
:)
 

Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #284 from previous page: June 04, 2009, 04:15:19 PM »
Quote from: koaftder;509157
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.
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