PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

Incidentally, when I say "custom hardware" I was not referring to a PC addon card.  I was referring to embedded designs such as Minimig, that would be a completely dedicated, custom board, designed to do something far more efficiently than a PC can.

Programmable micro-controllers are so cheap these days, people are using them for everything.

I mean, does it really make sense to boot our PCs just to do a sum?  No, we still have pocket calculators (though mostly likely probably use our mobile phones).

Granted custom boards can do better than Copper chip but those won't count in comparing PCs vs. Amiga.

[koaftder]

It's not trolling.  PC I/Os aren't that fast.  Anything requiring multiple I/Os becomes comparable on Amiga using a single I/O.  And in some cases, Amiga surpasses PC.  I compared with USB and Gameport.  Floppy disks aren't obsolete if that's all you need to play games or write your software.  Burning CDs is usually slower than copying a file to/from floppy and floppies work with older machines that don't have Flash drive capability or drivers (like Win98SE).  Hey, why don't you just give up on the joysticks and do research on palette index data swapping.  I prefer programs on older machines that are highly optimized and work flawlessly at 60Hz.  If it gets the job done, why label it obsolete.

I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.

Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.

Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.

[amigaksi]

Hi,

@Amigaski & Stefcep2,

Speaking of Amiga joysticks my joystick broke for my Amiga 4000 today so off I went to Wally world to get a new one and you know what I couldn't find one darned 9 pin joystick in the whole darned place, so that makes my joystick port mighty slow as a matter of fact not really moving.
...

As I stated before, might does not make right.  Just because market is flooded with analog joysticks, that does not necessarily make them better.  I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).  

>...frequency. Which means as far as graphics go my ppc is sitting there waiting for a reply from my AGA chipset and it is doing absolutely nothing. So as you can see one of the main problems of the Amiga was that you could increase the speed of the CPU but you still had the problem of all the rest of the board moving S L O W L Y.

That's similar to I/O and memory on PC.  They don't work at the clock speed of processor.

[amigaksi]

I/O is not slow on the PC, and polling legacy I/O ports on the PC isn't slow with even antiquated operating systems. You haven't been making the case for using older hardware, you've been arguing that old Amiga hardware is superior to modern PC hardware.

Floppy disks are obsolete, and I still use them, mainly because it's the easiest way to run my own hobby software on the PC. (none of my PC's support booting from USB pen, even though I boot from USB floppy). It is antiquated, nobody uses it for anything. Floppies, especially the ones made in the past 15 years are awful! The quality is way worse today then it was in the past.

Anything that falls out of common use is antiquated.

I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior.  I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware.  In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times.  So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there.  If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.

Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.

[koaftder]

I once hooked up a PC analog joystick to Amiga and found out it's doesn't give the full range (0..255) on the potentiometers because it uses lower resistance POTs (100K rather than 1000K).  

Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.

[amigaksi]

Now this is the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. You're obviously not a hardware guy. Do you really expect the scaling for a legacy PC joy port ADC to be the same as an Amiga joy port ADC? C'mon man. No wonder you argue in favor of reading gobs of contact switch signal bounce.

It works fine.  You just read a smaller range.  I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances.  You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.

I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)".  But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games.  I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.

[koaftder]

I have been arguing that in certain realtime cases, Amiga hardware is superior.  I never said as a blanket statement that amiga hardware is superior modern PC hardware.  In real-time cases, you need to know best/worst case times.  So using API makes things worse since drivers/OS calls vary from system to system and you don't know the code for all the systems out there.  If it was direct to hardware, you can better estimate best/worst case scenarios.

Yeah, it's true-- floppy disks I tried today are lower quality than older ones.

You need to step back and look at the bigger picture. An algorithm written in asm for 68k will vary across the different 68k processor models just like it does across the various IA32 model processors. There are real time operating systems for both families but they're not called AmigaOS or Windows. Keep in mind that real time os's also make use of APIs to abstract from the hardware. Take a look at QNX for example. Where people demand the most performance, disk and graphics, you can't get away from abstraction. Nobody in their right mind would want apps writing directly to disk interface and people expect applications to play nice with the windowing environment.

These days people expect to be able to play World of Warcraft in a window and be able to see what's going on in yahoo instant messenger and occasionally check out what new messages are floating in on their facebook page.... on the same screen at the same time. You can't get this kind of functionality by allowing software to bang directly on the hardware.

[koaftder]

It works fine.  You just read a smaller range.  I hope you know that some PC joysticks also did that purposely to decrease time to read them on the gameport since polling takes longer for bigger resistances.  You can stop with the signal bounce until you refute my previous remarks regarding it.

I also hooked up PC joystick on Atari as well, and you can read it via "? PADDLE(0)".  But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games.  I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.

Are you familiar at all with analog circuit design?

[Jakodemus]

 But as I stated analog joysticks are just too flimsy for games.  I prefer the digital Atari joystick that automatically stays in center position.

I guess you prefer to play flight simulators(eg. Falcon 4.0) on digital joysticks too? It's pointless to compare analog joysticks to digitals. They are meant to be used in totally diffirent purposes.

PS. Analog mouse is just too flimsy for Workbench use. I prefer Amiga+cursor key for everyday use.

[paolone]

1. You can speculate all you want.  He's claiming "IN AL,DX" is not present.  It is present on all the PCs I have used and I gave two examples.  

2. You misunderstood it.  Why don't you reply to my refutation rather than twist things.  USB is faster than Gameport, but it's still slower than Amiga's move instruction.  I didn't say it was same speed as Gameport which has problems reaching 1khz sampling.

3. >You are incredible: "there sare billions of gameports out there". There aren't ANY.

Liar.  This is easily disproveable.  I have two in front me right now and I know Dell and Compaq have sold similar models with gameports on them.

4. Look at what's out there not what's being produced right now.  When you right some software you have to consider what's out there-- not which machine you have because you keep ugrading every few months.

5. Speak for yourself.  Many people agree with me.

1. It might be, but the question still remain the same: who cares?

2. And you're twisting YOURS. You started this silly argument saying that Amiga game port can poll joysticks 1000 times every second (be aware you haven't yet proved it), thus making the (classic) Amiga platform "more suitable for games".

I won't laugh at this statement, since the gaming market has slightly evolved from the 16-bit age, and I won't even try to count how many times modern games are visually better and more sophisticated than old 2D platforms and shooters, even if they rely on APIs and 3D hardware drivers, but in the following pages you lost the point of your initial statement, which is:

"faster joystick polling ---> more suitable for games"

The more people answered to you, the more you introduced captions to your arguments, and the gameport vs USB one is one of them. Sorry, the PC has ABANDONED gameports. The use USB for game controllers, so if you want to do a fair comparison, you have to deal with USB and FORGET gameports. You said "Amiga gameport can handle 1KHz", I answered "ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.

3. and 4. The installed park has nothing to do with this discussion. There are plenty of 486 and Pentium - Pentium III machines out there, but they aren't anymore reliable for gaming. That's evolution, a word that the Amiga community didn't know until it killed us all. PC market constantly evolves and newer machines replace older ones, which get used for other purposes or dismissed/trashed. Newer machines haven't gameports and, if they have them, they get unused since you can't buy new game devices using it. And that's a fact.

5. Ok, here you have touched the sum of ridiculous. I can start ignoring you.

[EvilGuy]

The more people answered to you, the more you introduced captions to your arguments, and the gameport vs USB one is one of them. Sorry, the PC has ABANDONED gameports. The use USB for game controllers, so if you want to do a fair comparison, you have to deal with USB and FORGET gameports. You said "Amiga gameport can handle 1KHz", I answered "ANY USB port can handle 1 KHz as well, even more", and this ends up the argument. YOU decided to complicate it introducing "hardware banging" and assembly lines. And here started bullcrap.

Sounds like a better test; compare some digital USB joysticks on the Amiga vs the PC.

[Daedalus]

I'm a huge fan of analogue joysticks - I had a PC one attached to my Amiga for years. Hell, I even made an adaptor circuit for it and mounted it inside my case so I could just plug it into the PC-style gameport on the back. I even used the analogue joystick to play Geoff Crammond's F1GP because it was so nasty to play with a digital joystick and one button. It's pretty much essential for any decent flight sim too.

Incidentally, the whole thing with a PC analogue joystick not giving a full deflection on the Amiga is a limitation of how the Amiga treats the paddle inputs, not because of a poorly designed joystick. It's well documented that some modifications are needed to improve its action on the Amiga, hence the adaptor circuit I build for my A1200 tower.

[Daedalus]

LOL, just noticed the tags at the bottom of the thread... Quite appropriate IMO!

amiga , anal retentive , catchup , circle jerking , cloud cuckoo land , complete bollocks , delusional fanaticism , denial , fantasy , flamefest , loljoystick , perpetuum argumentum , playing , sit on the joystick , troll , uninformed  

[alexatkin]

And also...

I've seen better physics simulations from Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner compared to the CGI in Mr. Spielbergs War of the Worlds.

I hate to say it, but CGI in most movies is nonsense because they don't properly calculate the physic, light distortion, light scattering etc.

Too true.  I find in many ways it looks a lot worse than when it used to be done raytracing on an Amiga as they seemed to pay more attention to detail when it comes to those things.  But then, isn't that what raytracing was all about?

[jkirk]

Must be a billion gameports out there-- perhaps a few million trashed.  So it's hard to make a statement-- it's unused.

i have seen very few joyports on motherboards and the lack of joyport joysticks are deafening. in the past joyports were mounted on sound cards and not the motherboard. and those ports were most often used as midi ports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port

The 15-pin game port is no longer provided on presently manufactured PCs, though adapters exist that allow older joysticks and controllers to connect via USB. However, Microsoft's Vista operating system natively lacks all game port support, even for USB adapters.

Perhaps, you don't use the gameport.  And my motherboard has a parallel port and PS/2 connectors -- no serial port.  So your speculation serial ports are still around is just your experience.  I see more desktops with parallel ports.

a few serial port mobos
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135063
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131288
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130095

and even if they don't have one on board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=serial+port&x=0&y=0

By the way, Microsoft must have done some gaming research to come up with XBOX joysticks.

i would assume so. if they didn't then they are crazy.

[GadgetMaster]

As this thread just refuses to die I thought "What the heck! let me just throw some more fuel on this fire".

Anyway does any Bus Arch 'expert' want to explain how these darn things work?

USB to Gameport Converter

I'm just a little confuzzled about all the polling malarky.

:roflmao: