PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Karlos]

i have a freeware scheduler "Executive" and i can render an animation in cinema 4d, whilst editing scenes and objects in Cinema 4D, send the resultant pics to Adpro for processing, save the files automatically, do a spot of house keeping with DOpus, paint a texture in Dpaint and the Operating System menues are just as fast as if had nothing loaded- on a 50 mhz machine with 16 meg ram

And you had the audacity to call my A1200 machine a frankenstein?

Executive is a complete hack into exec. A very well written one, I might add and one I was happy to use for many years. However, since we're on the subject, why don't you read the documentation and see where the entire motivation and basis for Executive came from? That's right, Un*x. All linux kernels have such a scheduler and modern ones are significantly improved compared to those around when Executive was written.

[stefcep2]

And you had the audacity to call my A1200 machine a frankenstein?

Man, Karlos I cut you deep with that "Frankenstein" thing back there.  I really am sorry.  Ok. Look you have an "expanded" Amiga.  Better?

Executive is a complete hack into exec. A very well written one, I might add and one I was happy to use for many years. However, since we're on the subject, why don't you read the documentation and see where the entire motivation and basis for Executive came from? That's right, Un*x. All linux kernels have such a scheduler and modern ones are significantly improved compared to those around when Executive was written.

Actually I did read the guide for executive about a decade ago. From memeory, Executive offers more than one unix-like scheduler.  It offers several, some that have nothing to do with Unix. Which you can select and turn off without rebooting.  Can any other PC OS do this?

In any case nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from others.  Hell it worked for Microsoft.  And the scheduler in Linux was a subject of debate about 12-18 months as it was viewed as good server scheduler, but not that good for a desktop.  Hell an mp3 playing back could make GUI stutter.  Things may have improved, don't know, couldn't be bothered fartsing around with it anymore, but I play with linux from time to time.  Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.

What's better about the new schedulers?

[Hammer]

Man, Karlos I cut you deep with that "Frankenstein" thing back there.  I really am sorry.  Ok. Look you have an "expanded" Amiga.  Better?



Actually I did read the guide for executive about a decade ago. From memeory, Executive offers more than one unix-like scheduler.  It offers several, some that have nothing to do with Unix. Which you can select and turn off without rebooting.  Can any other PC OS do this?

In any case nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from others.  Hell it worked for Microsoft.  And the scheduler in Linux was a subject of debate about 12-18 months as it was viewed as good server scheduler, but not that good for a desktop.  Hell an mp3 playing back could make GUI stutter.  Things may have improved, don't know, couldn't be bothered fartsing around with it anymore, but I play with linux from time to time.  Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.

What's better about the new schedulers?

There's AROS X86....

[Speelgoedmannetje]

You have to do many I/O instructions to get the joystick status compared to a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.  As for palette modes, they still have them in Photoshop; the point there was an example where API access would be inferior to the extent that Amiga would out do it.

Duh, if that would be executed at the same speed of nowadays computers, OF COURSE an API between it slow things down.
Have you ever thought of companies not wanting to spend a lot of money to rewrite their code for every stupid little hardware revision? And btw. I tend to write my code as readable as possible, to make it  as maintainable as possible. API's make it easy for programmers to be quickly able to work with the hardware.

Of course it's fun to be hardware banging, to have all the hardware for yourself. In your own time.

[the_leander]

Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.

Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.

What's better about the new schedulers?

Combined with ever increasing levels of optimisation on the various window managers, they seem to make for a more.. Responsive? Free flowing perhaps? user experience. Certainly I've not seen an MP3 stutter type issue for a good many years and even then only on very very overtaxed hardware.

That said, if you used lighter weight window managers such as Enlightenment or IceWM, you tended to be ok even on (relatively) old hardware.

[stefcep2]

There's AROS X86....

You have a choice of schedulers?   That you can change without re-booting?

Well thats good for the large army of PC's with Aros users out there..

[stefcep2]

Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.



Combined with ever increasing levels of optimisation on the various window managers, they seem to make for a more.. Responsive? Free flowing perhaps? user experience. Certainly I've not seen an MP3 stutter type issue for a good many years and even then only on very very overtaxed hardware.

That said, if you used lighter weight window managers such as Enlightenment or IceWM, you tended to be ok even on (relatively) old hardware.

here was an article that I read at the time about the very issue of the multi-tasking abilities of Windows Linux and AmigaOS, by  a kernel developer.  Its an interesting read.  things may have moved on since then, ofcourse.

[koaftder]

You have a choice of schedulers?   That you can change without re-booting?

It's not that it isn't possible, it's that doing so makes for a retarded design.

[EvilGuy]

Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.

Its just a shame that you can't run AmigaOS on some modern hardware and see it really fly.

[koaftder]

Its just a shame that you can't run AmigaOS on some modern hardware and see it really fly.

You can, with UAE. You can have the Amiga setup you could never afford, for free at that.

[alexatkin]

My dual core 2.2 Ghz CPU eats around 35Watts.

My dual core 2.1Ghz laptop eats around 35W.  However my dual core 2.0Ghz PC eats nearer 150W, due to the GPU, HDD, CPU, having higher consumption.

The point I was trying to make is that you are never going to a get a general purpose PC down to the same power levels as a custom board, and the custom board will do the job better for these silly high-polling, hardware banging tasks that are being argued about in this thread.

Sure you CAN build fairly low power PCs, I in fact own a MiniITX touchscreen PC (board built into monitor) and am planning to upgrade it with lower power parts.  However you are pretty much talking custom boards then.  MiniITX boards often have hardware your average PC does not (watchdog timer, special digital connections for custom hardware) which is the point - the PC market has custom boards for this purpose as your average PC does not need the extra cost of including this stuff.

Your average PC is designed for Windows and does not expect hardware banging from anything but Windows and its drivers.  That is also why hardware does not bother to be backwards compatible, its not needed for the software 99.9% if people are running.  And the other 0.01%, can buy custom hardware to do what they want as they will also need custom software, so its well out of the scope of a common PC.

[EvilGuy]

true.  but as it stands as of this moment, i have a greater chance of suffering from malware on a  fresh out of the box windows install than I do on a fresh amiga os 3.1 install.  The why's, buts, ifs don't matter, thems the facts.

rotfl; what sort of Internet can a fresh install AOS3.1 reach anyway? Dodging malware because your computer is so ancient isn't a benefit for your system. Otherwise clearly the C64 is much better then an Amiga system because it can't get any malware at all.

[EvilGuy]

You can, with UAE. You can have the Amiga setup you could never afford, for free at that.

Okay, I forgot to add *natively*.

[jkirk]

OS does retain control of the hardware but it application can also use it directly-- the way it's set up in Amiga.  APIs will always be worse than direct control from efficiency point of view and knowing exactly what is happening in the system.

no if you access the hardware directly you are doing an end run around the os. this introduces the potential for failure on future(or even current) hardware.

[the_leander]

You're on an obscure forum about a commercially dead computer platform espousing the virtues of an even more esoteric OS like BeOS, you are a tinkerer my friend a computer hobbyist.  No shame in that.  But representative of the 1 billion PC users out there you are not.

A long time ago maybe, that BeOS server was an experiment that I found useful and sucessful enough to leave in an operational state. I've not tinkered with any OS or piece of hardware like that since. Nor have I actually touched that system in a while thinking about it.

Indeed my current system is a laptop - bought for a variety of reasons, not least was me not having to tinker.

Does the word "sarcasm" mean anything to you?   I was being sarcastic that a quadcore with 4 gig ram and 600+ mb graphics card was considered "an average PC".  I wasn't really apologizing to you.  Sorry.......err not really, sarcasm again.

You might want to work on that then, it came across as pure condescension.

But interesting point you make.  Once you've set up your Amiga environment, its pretty much done.  Not sure about BeOS, but remind me again what is the experience of the other 99 % of PC users..

Varies depending on their system, many folks these days have vender supplied rescue disks they can lob in to restore in the event of a cataclysm, which not only restores the OS, but the applications. Others, perhaps those who bought their systems from smaller outlets might have an OEM disk and effectively have to reinstall their apps all over again. And then of course there are those that build their own.

Good we agree that Linux and BeOS have hardware support troubles.  

My point was that Linux's support is (and likely was at the time of BeOS) far greater. To say it is an issue that particularly afflicts Linux is misleading.

So lets get on the Windows bandwagon coz it doesn't..but over at MS Land we have that damn pesky registry, where all the malware hides (we think, no-one can be REALLY sure whats meant to be there or not)

Given the vast amount of options Windows supports, what would you propose as a replacement of the registry database? Remembering that both BeOS and Linux have similar systems built into them.

You have a TCP stack in OS 3.5 and Os 3.9.  DOpus 4 is free, it does the job.

The stack that came with 3.5 and 3.9 didn't work with my ISP. Dopus 4 was too limited for me. Either way, functionality that I expected, nay, demanded had to be added into the base install.

Absolutely expectations change.  But there still a few little things or not so little things the PC could learn from the Amiga concept.

In many ways I feel things like the EeePC and Ebox are pretty much there in terms of concept. Macs possibly more so.

I also feel that those small cheep computers will likely pave the way for more appliance like devices that offer base office and web functionality.

[EvilGuy]

People have problems in this thread sticking to the example.  I can also switch entire frames by changing a video memory ptr on Amiga.  But that isn't the point.

Modern hardware is so powerful that swapping an entire scene out using the GPU can be done so much faster compared to an Amiga swapping two colours around. Legacy Amiga hardware is old and slow.

PC still playing catchup? Sure, if digital, 9pin joysticks are your thing. But the rest of the world has moved on to big and better things.