PC still playing Amiga catchup

[the_leander]

He hasn't proven anything about the timing of audio interrupts, CIA interrupts, Copper timing being different or varying over time.

You don't need to reference him; I read his posts.

If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.

You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.

[Karlos]

If there is variance of clock speed (even by a fraction of a second) between two otherwise identicle systems using the same cycle, both cycles will still be identicle, but the timing will be different. This is demonstrable for anyone who owns more then one Amiga, even of the same model.

You're mixing up your definitions again, I personally think deliberately here.

That's why I pointed out timing specifically "in units of time", rather than "in cycles" However, our friend here has been throwing around statements like "558ns with no +/- bullcrap", which is why I felt the need to clarify.

eg:

Depends on the task.  If your real-time task only involves modifying some registers, you can use the Copper and it's guaranteed with accuracy of 558ns (no +/- latency bullcrap).

And we can talk Amiga vs. PC w/o dealing with OSes although with PCs you'll have a hard time finding modern PCs that even maintain compatibility at hardware level.

Absolutely no way can you say you can claim "558ns accuracy" when the clock signal itself is subject to variance. Furthermore, the clock speed is slightly different between NTSC and PAL Amigas. For example, in a base A1200, the CPU is driven from the same clock as the rest of the native hardware and the stated clock speeds are 14.32 MHz for NTSC and 14.18 MHz for PAL.

[amigaksi]

No, it's fairly obvious that it's contact bounce:



1/(0.01ms / 1000) = 100000Hz. This is not joystick input from the user, this is contact bounce/noise. This is not speculation, it's an obvious conclusion based on your own readings. You on the other hand have interpreted this as "holy cow, this is accurate" - while it's actually not accurate at all.

Bullcrap.  You are taking only a small part of the data where fire button and joystick directions are changing.  It's not obvious if you take the data as a whole and see that the sub-millisecond timing only occurs sometimes.  If I stated microsecond changes as "accurate user input", I wouldn't be stating 1Khz.

[GadgetMaster]

No. ONLY YOU.  And an anal one at that.

ONLY an anal cardigan wearing gronk would:

1.  Embark on a grammatical argument about whether the original post is a question or a statement, as if THAT would make one iota of a difference to what replies are posted.

2. Be incapable of understanding that a statement such as "PC=x86 running on 90-95% of the worlds computers run Windows", would also mean most of the world doesn't use an Amiga computer.

3. Want limit the meaning of "PC" to a discussion about x86 hardware, without admitting that without software, hardware is useless.

4. Want to ignore that 95% of PC hardware runs Windows, and ignore the user-experience of THOSE machines but instead focus his argument solely on the few per cent that don't run Windows.

Only a deluded, anal cardigan-wearing gronk would:

5.  Even contemplate the notion that a PC could run AmigaOS natively because not only is there no PC that can run AmigaOS natively, it has virtually zero probability of eventuating in this universe, or at any time in this universe's existence.

Only a stupid, deluded, anal, cardigan wearing gronk would:

6.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up", and then dismiss those reasons because they don't matter to HIM and HIS computer needs, no matter that, for many people, its because of the unique qualities of the Amiga over a PC that they still use Amiga.

7.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up". and then re-state the reply into a statement of belief that not only will Amiga be popular again, that it will be more popular than the PC and even put a dollar value on how much that would cost.

8.  Ask the reasons as to why it is believed that "PC is still playing Amiga catch-up" and then re-state the reply into a statement that, not only can Amiga do EVERYTHING that a modern PC can currently do, but that the Amiga can do it ALL better than the PC.

9. Use emerging technologies (CLOUD COMPUTING FFS), which may or may not gain wider acceptance , as an argument against the capabilities of Amiga compared to PC.

Ooh! I think I touched a raw nerve there. :lol:

You just can't step back and see how ridiculous your whole argument looks can you? Every one of your arguments has been ripped to shreds yet you persevere like an obsessed and possessed fool.

Btw, you also keep repeating the word anal a lot, is there something you want to tell us? Don't be shy. :rofl:

I seriously thought you were just trying to wind us up and by trolling like some others on this thread but by your reaction I can see that this is really quite important to you and you take it quite personally. I think that this puts you right up there in the category of the Bus-Arch Troll and Mil-spec guy if you are not just a sockpuppet of one of them already.

You seriously are quite deluded if you think that the PC needs to catch up to the Amiga nowadays, but I think you are happy in your own little comfort zone of belief so I'll not challenge your faith if it upsets you. Quite pitiful really.

Enjoy yourself in your own little world whilst the rest of us live in the real one.

Peace

Gadget.

[amigaksi]

That's funny

...
But then, PC catched up, and even went beyond, with faster gfx, more colors, even smooth scrollings, etc... Sure, it took time. But meanwhile, Amiga only went from OCS/ECS to weak AGA.
...

I asked you to reply to post #275; you did not but are now expressing your opinion again.

>Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...

The people who don't understand the argument are stupid.  Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB.  Then I gave an example of River raid where 1Khz sampling can be used (and I did use it in a "Replay" mode) and this sampling is UNDOABLE on a gameport.

>That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...

You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.

[amigaksi]

That's true until you sample faster than the switch time of the joystick switches. Then you're recording contact bounce. Which you did.

You should take into account the FACT that pressing fire button or releasing it is INDEPENDENT of joystick direction motion.  You can in fact get an extremely low time reading so just declaring it all noise is your speculation.

[Karlos]

You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.

You should disassemble the game and find its input handling code before claiming it is using 1kHz sampling. As I've pointed out, you can't base this assumption on attempting to see what minimum sampling rate you need to use to replicate it. I can produce a signal on a machine that I need to sample at 44kHz to get it sounding "just right", but this by no way suggests the signal source is operating at a comparable resolution.

[the_leander]

I asked you to reply to post #275; you did not but are now expressing your opinion again.

>Well, arguments as stupid as "you may poll the joystick port 1000 times a second, the PC cannot". Well, it's certainly *true*. But it is so useless that no one in the entire Amiga's existence ever mentionned or used it. No one but you...

The people who don't understand the argument are stupid.  Doing a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 is superior to polling an analog joystick (period) via port 201h or via USB.  Then I gave an example of River raid where 1Khz sampling can be used (and I did use it in a "Replay" mode) and this sampling is UNDOABLE on a gameport.

>That was my two cents. You can keep on posting detailed reports on how you can poll the Amiga joystick port faster than anything else, but this won't change anything to that...

You haven't shown PC doing faster joystick port input so we can move on to the next advantage Amiga has over PC.

You haven't shown that your own code is accurate yet either. But regardless, even if by some miracle it is I do have a question:

How is it in any way an advantage when both the Amigas and PC-USB based control systems are far quicker then human reaction times?

[amigaksi]

We're yet to be convinced that:

1) Any amiga game, other than your code, samples the joyport at this rate.

The one example I can think of where high joystic sampling rates may be used would be the ZXAM tape interface.
...

Given the fact that you can get a millisecond state-change reading from a joystick, it should be clear that sampling at 1Khz is useful.  Just like sampling audio at higher rates is useful although most frequencies are accounted for even if you sample at 30Khz.

>2) That the ability to sample the joystick represents a genuine advantage. Your sample data suggests that you are able to observe the electrical properties of the micro switches as they close and open. I'm certainly not convinced that this resolution is useful unless you intend to produce time a averaged sample of the observed state at a lower resolution. For example, averaging the entire set of samples at 1kHz every frame into a value that you assume is "on" for the frame if more of the samples were in the on state than the off state. I'm not convinced any game does this. It more likely reads a sample once a frame and moves on.

Getting millisecond responses is not necessarily electrical property of micro switches.

>3) You can't really infer what the sample rate of an application is just by attempting to sample the signal yourself and reproduce it the behaviour of the original application from it.

But you know it can be theoretically anything so the higher the sampling rate the better.  Heck, even if you consider it noise, it is actually happening and should be taken into account.

>What you should try is sending simulated pulses at different rates to the joyport from another device from which you can control the pulse of and see wether or not the game is capable of responding to it in a predictable fashion.

It is being sent from a PC to an Amiga/Atari via a PCI parallel port.

[juan_fine]

Hi,

@juan_fine,

Don't really know about that but my modern day computer keeps the fan in the power supply running when it sleeps, it may slow down some but still produces enough noise to bother my wife when she is trying to sleep, so I have gotten used to turning my computer off. By the way this is a totally year old machine built to play the most modern day games at very fast frame rates, equal to maximum pc test point computer. And by the way pretty blue lights still stay on after shutdown, the only way to get rid of them is to hit the main power switch off on the power supply, and yes juan_fine, my computer does have an off switch. Don't have to wait for winblows or linux to shut it down, but this is not advised with these two OS's

smerf

Hey, Smurf;
Really, my desktop is just like my laptop, I put it to sleep and it goes into an almost 0 power sleep. It takes about 5 seconds to shut down, and it's at the log in prompt around 5 seconds after I hit the spacebar. This is with the Windows 7 x64 RC, by the way. Now if I only had a fast joystick port I'd be a happy camper!

[Karlos]

Given the fact that you can get a millisecond state-change reading from a joystick, it should be clear that sampling at 1Khz is useful.  Just like sampling audio at higher rates is useful although most frequencies are accounted for even if you sample at 30Khz.

Sure, I'm not dismissing basic sampling theory here. What I am suggesting is that even if the joystick is capable of producing millisecond changes, are any amiga games applications actually sampling at that resolution? I really dont think it is likely. Most games have a lot more to do than read the joyport a thousand times a second.

Getting millisecond responses is not necessarily electrical property of micro switches.

Not necessarily no, but still more than likely. You then have the problem of figuring out which was a genuine pulse and which was a switch bounce. I don't really see how you can tell the difference, no matter how high a rate you sample at.

>3) You can't really infer what the sample rate of an application is just by attempting to sample the signal yourself and reproduce it the behaviour of the original application from it.

But you know it can be theoretically anything so the higher the sampling rate the better.  Heck, even if you consider it noise, it is actually happening and should be taken into account.

Well, you know it's not likely to be faster than the main loop of the application. Given common programming practises, it's also unlikely to be more than once per frame for most old amiga titles, though there may be examples to the contrary. I'd expect code that reads from the joyport register address once per frame and whatever value was there at that particular instant is taken at face value by the application.

>What you should try is sending simulated pulses at different rates to the joyport from another device from which you can control the pulse of and see wether or not the game is capable of responding to it in a predictable fashion.

It is being sent from a PC to an Amiga/Atari via a PCI parallel port.

Can you elaborate on that?

Look, here's a real experiment that can be attempted and repeated:

Why not try sending completely synthetic 1ms wide pulses once a second for the fire button and seeing how the game responds. If it fires every second then you know the sampling must be high enough (or at least has some clever latching). If, OTOH, it fires only very sporadically, it isn't likely to be sampling at a high rate.

By widening the pulse until you get your 1 fire event per second being registered systematically in your application you will get a better appraisal of what the sampling period is likely to be. It will at least be in the right order of magnitude.

[Linde]

If everyone shared them.  But they don't, there are several versions of each DLL and I have seen when they do use a common directory, they cause conflicts.

And that's a problem totally non-existent on the Amiga...

LOSSLESS compression means no loss in information.  That's what it uses unlike MPEG4.

So you're trying to tell me that decompressing an image and writing it to the frame buffer is faster than directly writing an uncompressed image directly to the buffer. That might be true if you are typing the data down by hand from paper.

Good, so we agree AGA/ECS/OCS are backward compatible and directly accessing OCS hardware registers works on all amigas.

Yes, I can agree with that. But that doesn't mean that all "ocs software" is compatible with any Amiga. There is more to it than the chip set, as I pointed out. I think you understand this as well as I do, but you are playing a fool to be able to dismiss my argument.

You can't do a 1K demo on PC that uses audio card or the advanced features of VGA cards, etc. etc.  since OS first has to be loaded.  Amiga wins here in tight coding due to hardware level compatibility.

Yes you can, if you know the exact hardware configuration.

Not for me.  For me all OSes are the same since I just write kernel mode drivers.

Yes, because the concept of kernel mode drivers exists in every operating system available for the PC...

I dumped the actual data of River Raid in another post.

Data existing is not in itself an indicator that it is important to the end user. As pointed out, the sub-ms state changes are results of switch bouncing. Just because there are millions of magazines in the world doesn't mean that I am missing out stuff that is important to me by not reading them all.

When a human moves and when you redraw are unrelated.

Not in a computer game, when the screen redraw is sometimes the only feedback you get.  

Bullcrap.  The more you sample the joystick, the more accurate the results.

No, it's not bullcrap. YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ME A GAME THAT USES AND BENEFITS FROM 1 kHz JOYSTICK SAMPLING. That's still true, as it has been since I first pointed it out. As far as I know, there are VERY few games in the River Raid era where even the game logic (all the moving, AI decisions, counting of score etc) operates faster than the screen update.

If you read the same analog stick a few times, you will see that it returns different values (testing with gameport).  Thus, it's not as precise as you think and people usually people use range of values to do a particular thing so you already not using full range.

If you'd ever used joysticks for other things than measuring the time between state changes, you'd know that the values that the joysticks are precise enough, and no, while they are not usually exact they give you more precise control over direction than four on/off switches. You'd also know that in most games that utilize the analog sticks, the walking/turning speed/direction correlates exactly enough to the input.

If digital sticks with one button were superior for controllability, their market wouldn't have died out in the early 90s.

You didn't even refute a SINGLE point.  Just claiming it's "absurd" doesn't make it that.

I'm not saying that your argument was absurd. I was saying that it made no sense, and to prove my point I used your logic but applied it to something else. It's a common rhetorical device.

Your claim that people no longer use hardware directly.  They have less standard hardware, but they still use what little of it there is.

No, that was not what I was claiming. I said that developers are trying to move further away from hardware, which is why there are abstractions like drivers and APIs. If you think that the average software developer has as much use of accessing the hardware as before you are wrong.

Amiga can do it in software whereas you want to use additional hardware.  That's not a good comparison.

The Amiga can read four analog values at the same time and digitally convert them without hardware modification? The PC doesn't need any additional hardware besides what's in the joystick.

No, I wanted some kids to play games-- and they preferred Amiga/Atari games over PC games since controls were simple.  They didn't have to think "which of the 10+ buttons do I press."  Given they are kids, I didn't want to teach them:

Eenie meenie minie moe
pick a button to shoot the foe
if it's wrong then let it go
next time try another to blow

No of course, why would you want to teach them anything? Your kids are none like the kids I know. Either way your story is very anecdotal and not enough to support your argument. The truth is that most kids these days handle and enjoy far more advanced games and joy pads.

Sorry, MP3 also appears same as uncompressed audio to most people as analog joystick appears instantaneous like digital joystick.  Yet one is better than the other.

And you think that mp3 vs uncompressed audio is completely analogous to 100 Hz vs 1000 Hz?

[stefcep2]

@GadgetMaster
You really live in alternate reality don't you?  Ignorance is bliss, so they say, and your life must be perfectly blissful.  You make such lengthy posts, and yet have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY. However there is no point having a discussion with retarded clam, so I'll spare you the intellectual challenge of stringing two coherent words together and leave you blissfully ignorant.

[Karlos]

Ignorant bliss is the world in which the sun is always shining, the Amiga is still the most popular home computer in Europe, PC's still have CGA displays, 286 processors, no sound beyond the beeper and nobody minds having to reset their computer, regardless of type, when it has a critical brainfart.

In some ways, I guess I'd really like the world to be like that still, but reality is pretty different. My amiga still brings me the joy of the days when things were that much simpler, however, the days of sneering at PC's is long gone for me. In the end, open hardware specifications and modular design won the day out there in the greater world of computing.

[amigaksi]

You should disassemble the game and find its input handling code before claiming it is using 1kHz sampling. As I've pointed out, you can't base this assumption on attempting to see what minimum sampling rate you need to use to replicate it. I can produce a signal on a machine that I need to sample at 44kHz to get it sounding "just right", but this by no way suggests the signal source is operating at a comparable resolution.

There are plenty of games which do NOT use VBI to read joystick port on Atari and Amiga.  Only when you read the potentiometers, you need to wait for VBI since they are sampled synched up to the video scanlines.  Even in many basic games which I have source code for, they just read joystick and do the appropriate action in main loop.  This can be as fast as machine allows them to do the main loop.  It's more significant to understand that millisecond sampling gives a better state of the joystick reading than 100 ms than to try to play by what SEEMS like good enough.  You don't need examples, but I'll dig up some if you really don't see how it's relevant data at 1 ms sampling.

[Karlos]

I'd prefer to see a controlled experiment of the type I suggested earlier. I'm even thinking to try it myself