PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

To amigaksi:

Would you agree with the statement, "The smaller the number of instructions to complete a task, the faster that procedure will run" ?

With caching and misalignment causing delays, you can have some larger piece of code execute faster than a smaller piece of code.  Also depends on what the instructions are.  One IN on PC is much slower than 100 MOVs if processor is like 1Ghz.

[smerf]

Smerf, I don't often agree with what you write, but every once in a while you'll produce a gem like this and I'm left with my jaw on the floor.

Bravo sir, and may your miggies continue to trundle on far into the future!

Thats actually brightened my day :afro:

Hi,

@the leander,

I am glad I brought some joy into your day, a lot of times I just like to troll, and stir up the pot. Yes I still like the Amiga and still use it daily. but it is very limited in its features today and even though I hate to say this my Amiga is like an old Model T roadster, fun to play with. fun to soup it up and hot rod and fun to see how far I can take it to compete with modern day computers. Lately I have been gathering all my Amiga schematics to see what I can do to bring it up to modern day values, after a year of examining and looking at it, I have decided to take the original block diagram as developed by Mr. Jay Miner and build from there. I have decided to go with an Intel Q6600 processor, and try to develope from there, looks like a lot of work but it might be a challenge. I now have the original block diagram, Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and CD32 schematics. Now I am trying to match modern day tech to the block diagram and make decisions on the type of hardware and coding that I will have to use, my main problem is this house, every time I get started something breaks in the house that I have to fix (usuall a 6 month to a year project) and by the time I get back to the Amiga I forgot where I was at and have to spend another month calculating, and planning which way to go, by this time the technology has advanced and I try to start there. (never ending story)

Glad to see I brought you some joy, but I was getting tired of someone comparing old tech with new tech, sort of like saying a P51 could take on a F18 hornet because it can make the turns tighter.

smerf

[the_leander]

PROVE IT.  I torn to shreds someone's speculation that it's noise.  And NOISE is ALSO REQUIRED to be recorded for a joystick recorded in order to repeat the performance EXACTLY.  Get a brain before you reply.  And you have yet to reply to the LOGICAL facts already posted of why it's NOT noise.

NO U.

I don't do fundie logic. You claim it is superior, it is your task to show evidence to back up your point.

You're right, I've not replied, because others, with greater skill and knowledge than myself have already explained it to you earlier in this thread.

You chose to ignore it and or fallback to fairyland.

>Ahh, back to your make belief world. Sorry, this is the real world, you've had it explained why your make belief world doesn't work at least a dozen times now.

It's not make believe.  Amiga has both hardware compatibility and API.  VGA is also.

No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability. And to get even that level of compatability required the inclusion of some hidious kludges in AGA. VGA is a nice touch for the most primative things within PC's, but even it has been superceeded by XGA now.

>Cheat nothing. I understand fully what you're saying, what you're saying is demonstratably false at every turn you take in order to justify your position.

That's you blurting out blindly whatever comes on the top of your head.  Go prove it for yourself.

It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.

All you have is your BLIND belief.  

No see, only one of us is having to resort to going into a magical fairyland to gain even the slightest amount of traction in this discussion.

You look like your too emotional biased to look at it rationally-- it shows when you start taking people's quotes and modifying them so you don't have to address the points.

No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.

>Dodging the question again eh? Guess that proves that you've no answer.

No, I only use PCs for internet and floppy simulations so that's COMMON application for me.  You dodged the question-- WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE COMMON to be useful?

Since the original point was made with respect to desktop computers (you later went so far as to include windows 98 as an example) I asked the question in the same context. I am not disputing your hard coded programs aren't useful to you, but one would think that you would even by your own admission concede you are not like >90% of computer users out there.

>...common desktop user, yet there have been plenty of examples of where it isn't by other commontators.

I am a common desktop user.

No, you're really not.

[smerf]

It sounds like you don't understand the main point either.

Hi,

@Amigaski,

What exactly is the main point, according to wikipedia API's sound like something brought about in programming. In todays programming environment, code is made up and kept in libraries that anybody can access and use. This cuts down the programming environment and yes if someone does write some bad code for hardware and it isn't caught can trickle into any program developed for it, but on a sad note this can also happen in the Amiga. Now most of the code written for the Amiga was developed 20 years ago and today all the buggy stuff has been found and trashed. So the Amiga has less buggy code than the PC, since new hardware is being developed every day for it. What was new yesterday is old today with the PC, the Amiga on the other hand has very little hardware developed for it, case in point was the buddha ide that I just bought for my Amiga 4000. The new hardware was shipped to me and I had to go to the company to get new software in order to make it work. The software that shipped with it was bad.  OK case in point API's do have faults, but not only for PC's.

Buggy code is prevelent in all computers.

smerf

[amigaksi]

...

You're right, I've not replied, because others, with greater skill and knowledge than myself have already explained it to you earlier in this thread.

They haven't either.

>No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability.

Wrong.  AGA is compatible with OCS.  But again you miss the point that hardware compatibility is better than being forced to go through APIs.  I wasn't talking about what it is now.  Just another case of you twisting things around in an attempt to miss the main point of discussion.

>It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.

I already did.  Logical deduction is superior to experimentation and I gave both.

>No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.

You can't understand is the problem.  Where's the lies?  Go time the joysticks yourself and go see the timing for yourself.  It's not that hard to do.

[the_leander]

Hi,

@the leander,

I am glad I brought some joy into your day, a lot of times I just like to troll, and stir up the pot.

Yes I still like the Amiga and still use it daily. but it is very limited in its features today and even though I hate to say this my Amiga is like an old Model T roadster, fun to play with. fun to soup it up and hot rod and fun to see how far I can take it to compete with modern day computers.

Now that I can fully understand, tweeking and tuning an amiga to do the more then it should on paper be able to do was a source of a stupendous amounts of hours of fun for me. I think in a way my EeePC does the same (for me) in that regard - it's limited hardware but you can really do so much with it.

Lately I have been gathering all my Amiga schematics to see what I can do to bring it up to modern day values, after a year of examining and looking at it, I have decided to take the original block diagram as developed by Mr. Jay Miner and build from there. I have decided to go with an Intel Q6600 processor, and try to develope from there, looks like a lot of work but it might be a challenge. I now have the original block diagram, Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and CD32 schematics. Now I am trying to match modern day tech to the block diagram and make decisions on the type of hardware and coding that I will have to use,

Hey best of luck! Sounds like a cool project.

my main problem is this house, every time I get started something breaks in the house that I have to fix (usuall a 6 month to a year project) and by the time I get back to the Amiga I forgot where I was at and have to spend another month calculating, and planning which way to go, by this time the technology has advanced and I try to start there. (never ending story)

LOL ain't that the truth!

Glad to see I brought you some joy, but I was getting tired of someone comparing old tech with new tech, sort of like saying a P51 could take on a F18 hornet because it can make the turns tighter.

smerf

Hmm, with a bit of cleaning the above would make excellent sig fodder, would you mind? (attribution would be there, obviously)

[amigaksi]

Hi,

@Amigaski,

...it work. The software that shipped with it was bad.  OK case in point API's do have faults, but not only for PC's.

Buggy code is prevelent in all computers.

smerf

I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs.  See post #570.  My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly.  Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."

[the_leander]

They haven't either.

>No, the Amiga has partial hardware compatability.

Wrong.  AGA is compatible with OCS.

No, it isn't. If it were, a sizeable chunk of OCS games would still work on AGA systems without the need for hacks and patches. Again, this is well documented.

But again you miss the point that hardware compatibility is better than being forced to go through APIs.  I wasn't talking about what it is now.  Just another case of you twisting things around in an attempt to miss the main point of discussion.

The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland. When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now. Of PC's of that Vintage, maybe, but in all honesty in terms of capability even by the time the A1200 came out there were better options available, even to Amiga users (third party graphics cards, DSP based soundcards etc).

>It is not the job of others to prove you wrong, which btw is indicative of fundie thinking. It is your job to prove your point correct.

I already did.

No, you supplied data that showed nothing. You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.

>No, you misunderstand, I do that when people start blatantly lying to me, or if I'm bored. Since you're both boring and either wilfully ignorant or just flat out trolling, you get the full service.

You can't understand is the problem.  

I think I understand the problem better then you do.

Where's the lies?  Go time the joysticks yourself and go see the timing for yourself.  It's not that hard to do.

You've been given a way of testing this one way or the other to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Now, if you do that and come back with the results, hell I'll be the first one to say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.

The lies come in when you've had it explained to you where you're going wrong, ignore that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.

[amigaksi]

No, it isn't. If it were, a sizeable chunk of OCS games would still work on AGA systems without the need for hacks and patches. Again, this is well documented.

...

As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines.  Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.

>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.

No, it works right now.  If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program.  You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.

>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.

Straw-man argument.  I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.

>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.

Bullcrap.  Go re-read the data.

>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.

The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer.  Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data.  Your thinking is flawed.  I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).

>I think I understand the problem better then you do.

You think you do.

>...say well played to you, you're right the joystick is capable of responding to hits at X speed quicker then a USB based approach.

That's not even the point.  Joystick on Amiga is faster even if you do one sample every 1/60 second.  And why are you narrowing to just USB; Gameport is also a valid joystick port for millions of PC owners.

>...that and repeat. Lies was perhaps the wrong choice of word, wilful ignorance would probably be a better fit.

You're in ignorance.

[the_leander]

I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs.  See post #570.  My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly.

On a fixed platform be it one that's discontinued (Amiga) or an embedded or industrial controller, having those sorts of options is great and depending on the hardware again, hitting the hardware might be your only way of acomplishing something.

Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."

It's not circular reasoning. With a landscape as diverse as the modern PC desktop market it is the only way to be able to produce applications in a reasonable timeframe to reach a broad audience. Take a look at any medium to large PC venders and, just as a for instance here lets look at Scan.

There are, just for (m)ATX boards 23 different variations. That's even before we look at the offerings from AMD. 23. And it gets worse when you consider that within a year most of those models will be discontinued and replaced with something else. Now with an API, barring serious driver issues, if I write a program for windows/linux/whatever it'll run on all 23 of those motherboards. If I hit the hardware yes, I could potentially get it to run on those 23 motherboards, but by the time I'd worked out each motherboards kinks (actually, probably long before then) and gotten the full performance possible, you would no longer be able to get those motherboards and regardless it would still only constitute a drop in the ocean within the marketplace, probably less then 5% of all PC's currently in operation around the globe.

That is why it is considered that nobody in their right mind would do so.

[the_leander]

As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines.  Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.

I believe this was already responded to as to why you were wrong then too.

>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.

No, it works right now.  If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program.  You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.

Of course dear.

>When you state that the Amiga is superior to the PC, you are talking about now.

Straw-man argument.

Not so. A valid statement of fact.

I stated that because of having hardware compatibility, Amiga will do better in certain real-time programs.

In a tiny, nay, infinatesimal really seriously convoluted tasks, maybe.

>No, you supplied data that showed nothing.

Bullcrap.  Go re-read the data.

Without being able to show that the Amiga can distinguish and react to your output, your data is meaningless.

>You were actually given a suggestion by Karlos on how you could actually test just how sensitive the Amiga was thus proving one way or the other, with no room for doubt if your hypothesis was correct. You chose instead stuck to your flawed data.

The data is REAL data as sampled from REAL joystick used in a REAL game on a REAL computer.  Go learn what a debounce switch is and analyze the data.  Your thinking is flawed.  I did do another test where I just press fire button and let go and there's no multiple hits registered in the recorder (just two states).

Not disputing that the data isn't real, just that it's meaningless unless you can show that the computer can react to the input at those speeds.

>I think I understand the problem better then you do.

You think you do.

Yup.

You're in ignorance.

That is not a sentence.

[LoBai]

Nice thread, lots to read! My only comment would be that I got into the Amiga as a hobby and IMHO it is one of the best Hobbies around.
Anyone can go out and buy a PC and make it scream and we all know that PC won the market war with APPLE almost biting the dust several times. I'm finding it a challenge (At least as a newbie) to go out and find that rare accelerator or Amiga Model you want. I have to say though when I finaly got my A2000 blasting faster than a pissed of trucker it gave me a feeling I never had building my PC or Playing around with my old macs. I fell in love with it and just wish I had the cash back in the day to actually own one when it was top of the line.

Amiga Forever,

[Hammer]

First of all, my application that I used to test several SB cards does not require any drivers, TSRs, or even COMMAND.COM/BIOS/etc.

On modern desktop PC, one needs a memory protected multi-tasking OS. The audio system must share it's resources to multiple applications e.g. Web Browser (with Flash's FLV), WinAMP, PowerDVD, Cakewalk Sonar and "Games For Windows" title(s).

It runs by directly going to the hardware I/O ports, DMA channels, IRQ vectors.

I/O, IRQ and DMA conflicts returns.

 I am not saying *ALL* sound blaster cards are backward compatible.

Most laptops in 2008 are shipped with HDA codec. Good luck with SB compatibility.

Despite it's name, the new soundblaster models are hardware incompatible with legacy Soundblasters. However, they have emulation drivers. This applies for SB128, SB512, SBLive!, SB Audigy, SB Audigy 2 and SB X-Fi.

I was giving an example, that it is possible for sound cards to maintain backward compatibility on the hardware level and the bullcrap about it's too complex nowadays is just that-- bullcrap.

It's easy with XNA. The industry made a good move in removing Creative Lab’s standard.

[smerf]

I was speaking about all APIs not just for PCs.  See post #570.  My main point is that it's better to have compatibility on the hardware level so person has option of going through API or using hardware directly.  Now the circular reasoning presented to me is well "nobody in their right mind would go directly to hardware on modern systems since it may not work on another system."

Hi,

@Amigaski,

Really don't understand the debate here, the application programming interface as I stated before is usually kept in a library so that programmers can use that library to cut down on there programming time, why re-invent the wheel, most of this coding is written by the hardware deveopers to aid programmers in the use of their hardware. Now the Amiga was different since most hardware was kernal controlled and all hardware developers had to follow Commodores instructions on the developement of new hardware, that way when the Amiga was in the startup it would call out who or what is out there, and then the hardware would say I am here waiting your instructions. This way the Amiga knew what it could use and what kernal instructions to use to command the hardware, I could be wrong on this since it has been a while since I read the books on the Amiga, but pretty soon I will be breaking out those books to see exactly what Commodore was doing since I am trying to design a computer similar to the Amiga using an Intel Q6600 (yeh, if I can get my darn house to co-operate with me). I believe that if you use the sysinfo program you will see the kernal in action, the unknown boards will show up because someone broke Commodores instruction base for hardware development or the hardware was made after Commodores downfall. The only difference between Amiga and PC was that Commodore had a Kernal and PC had the command.com for normal hardware, then the PC had config.sys and Amiga had the startup-sequence. Which one did I like better, the Amigas startup instructions, because you could put the device drivers and the libs in their folders and you knew where they went and what they did, while the PC's are scattered through a numerous amount of directories. I don't even think wild bill gates actually knew what was going on in his system.

At this time I don't see any point to this debate because the applicatin programming set is used by both computers, the only difference is that Commodore had a built in Kernal, while the PC had a Command.com for hardware, while the application programming instruction set can also be used also for applications. If anything the Amiga wins this bout just by having its kernal in memory and didn't have to depend on mechanical means (hard drive) to load its instruction set for the normally used hardware, but also by todays modern bios, most instructions are already configured for the hardware in todays PC causing a lot slower boot time due to everything it has to find and control hardware wise, while the Amiga was pretty standard with no new advancements in hardware design.

smerf

[Hammer]

As I said before, I write something using OCS hardware registers and it will work on OCS, ECS, and AGA-- nothing to modify between the machines.  Incompatibilities were not caused by these hardware registers.

Well, Paula didn't change much.

It would be a joke to compared CBM's OCS/ECS/AGA's evolution rate to NVIDIA's NV20/NV30/G70/G80/G200/G300(soon).

>The problem with your point is that it only works in your magical fairyland.

No, it works right now.  If people use hardware standards rather than APi standards, you have better computers to program.  You are in some fairyland because you don't even understand what is being discussed.

You'll get PS3 instead. We all know PS3 was "designed to be hard to program" LOL.

[Hammer]

I don't see the argument why you MUST have an API access only.  

Re-target capability.

And if hardware compatibility can help make things more efficient,

Less efficient when dealing complex abstract objects. In modern game programming, you have middleware vendors to accelerate development. API libraries like PhysX or Havok.

PhysX enabled game can be made to run on
1. CPU e.g. X86 or PPC
2. GPU (CUDA processor)
3. PPU (PhysX Processor Unit)
4. CELL

Your program is simplistic in nature.

 why not spend the time.  I/O has improved but not as much as processor speeds.

Depends on the I/O. Hypertransport is magnitude faster than Amiga's joystick port.
Building a clustered supercomputer based on Amiga’s joystick port would be a joke.

And I gave the example of palette changes which (if you go time them) you will find they are not that much faster than amiga changing palette.  This is just one example.

My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.