real amiga vs winuae

[GadgetMaster]

It's not about settle time of the circuit... Boot time only really needs to account for the time taken to reset, and be ready to accept user input... Karlos's Example has the fastest boot time...

Ah! to sort of get the thread back on topic, if a light switch simulation was written, which would be better? The real light switch array or the virtual one running on a blazingly fast computer?

[paolone]

@paolone

You're wrong. It all depends on the application, what will the machine be doing. There are some rarer cases where boot time is critical, I just gave you one.

Nope. You just gave us an example of what you feel critical. There is a little difference.

Another one is the settobox market, in an AV system you normally want to sit on the living room turn on the equipment and start watching TV, not wait 30 seconds or more (not that there is any Amiga software doing DVB reception which is a shame..).
By the way, there is an attitute towards technology, oposite to the one you describe, that is not very smart either, which is to buy the latest super duper hardware to do things that don't need it. It's like buying a Ferrari to go buy bread at the supermarket.

That's why I prefer a separate TV tuner from appliances I use to play movies and media files/supports: TV must turn on instantly, for the other things I can wait.

The low memory footprint and multitasking speed and efficiency of the AmigaOS architecture could find market niches, there's just not anyone marketing any product with it.

That's what I actually hope for Icaros Desktop...

[Karlos]

@Gadget

You probably get more light out of your actual lighting system than you do your display, so in this case I suspect the traditional hardware wins. Although, there's probably less effort required to turn your virual light on and whats more you can take it with you on a notebook PC to demo parties.

Having said that, hardware hits back with a new portable system called "the torch". One of the inputs is a trifle sticky in that it's the end of the tube where you put the battery cells in, but if you loosen it appropriately, you have your 2 input OR again

[GadgetMaster]

@Gadget

You probably get more light out of your actual lighting system than you do your display, so in this case I suspect the traditional hardware wins. Although, there's probably less effort required to turn your virual light on and whats more you can take it with you on a notebook PC to demo parties.

Having said that, hardware hits back with a new portable system called "the torch". One of the inputs is a trifle sticky in that it's the end of the tube where you put the battery cells in, but if you loosen it appropriately, you have your 2 input OR again

 But if you leave the batteries in for too long they leak and ruin a perfectly good motherb......torch....

..... uhm.. what was I talking about again..:confused:

[koaftder]

This has faster response time than torch, assuming torch is uk dialect for flashlight as we call it in US. (shorter runs)

[Karlos]

This has faster response time than torch, assuming torch is uk dialect for flashlight as we call it in US. (shorter runs)

It is, but you will observe that a lot of new flashlights utilise LED technology to improve their OR gate input to output propagation delay.

[bloodline]

Ah! to sort of get the thread back on topic, if a light switch simulation was written, which would be better? The real light switch array or the virtual one running on a blazingly fast computer?

Depends what I want to use it for of course... If I want the experience of a light switch array (perhaps to see how it works or show friends and family), without having to rewire my house, buy all the tools and materials... not to mention worry about the safety aspects of wiring up to a 240Volt, 13amp ring main... then I'd go with the simulation...

[koaftder]

Ok, I just thought of something. Something that beats it all. A piece of glass with uranium oxide diffused in it and check this, in outer space, with sunlight shining on it at all time. Blam, no startup time. Always on, for billions of years. It fluoresces as UV photons hit the uranium oxide molecules. Faster than the Amiga, PC, Mac, Ti calc and my pic18f. Never needs a reset. Top that.

[GadgetMaster]

Ok, I just thought of something. Something that beats it all. A piece of glass with uranium oxide diffused in it and check this, in outer space, with sunlight shining on it at all time. Blam, no startup time. Always on, for billions of years. It fluoresces as UV photons hit the uranium oxide molecules. Faster than the Amiga, PC, Mac, Ti calc and my pic18f. Never needs a reset. Top that.

That may be so, but getting it into orbit consumes way too much energy. It's all about green computing nowadays. :smack:

[amigaksi]

Your diamond argument is totally worthless since the context is utterly different. Unless your computer is a fashion accessory (hmm, mac lol), what matters is that you can use it. In use as a computer platform* UAE has all of the advantages I cited. If you already own a PC, the cost of setting up your emulated amiga is, well potentially nothing. Yet it will do pretty much everything you could ever want a genuine hardware amiga to do. 500ns joystick polling aside, maybe.
...

No diamond analogy is relevant.  Even the surface of the fake diamond is different when looked upon closely similarly even the display is fake compared to an overscanned TV monitor or Amiga monitor.  And you know very well the internals are NOT there-- the timing (558ns and better for software specific to 7.16Mhz PCs or like Bars and Pipes using 3.57Mhz based audio timer), the same frequency refresh rate, etc.)  I can say more but I'm logging in from someone else's machine...  Post #23 in this thread is complete bullcrap; there's no way to eliminate the latency completely.  

>PS, I'm glad you realised your 500ns joyport polling argument (as an example of ways in which the amiga was way ahead of the PC) was, well, a poor one. A more domain specific example you'd be hard pressed to find. Especially given that the old soundcard "joyport" traditionally isn't a standard bit of PC hardware anyway.

I already did but you misunderstood it; that's why I called it "straw-man argument".  You thought I was talking about 500ns sampling of joystick, but no.  I was stating 1Khz sampling of joystick and 558ns accuracy without latency as another argument.  There are more argument but some biased people can't even accept the joystick argument.

I'm not talking about the looks.  Understand the analogy for what it is.

[koaftder]

Fake diamonds throw off more colors than real ones. Kind of how I can play Faery Tale Adventure on UAE with the floppy drive sped up instead of waiting 3 seconds every time bad guys pop up in the field while I'm hoofing it through the map. The game accesses disk every time it decides to throw baddies, maybe to load sprites? It's imperceptable on UAE. Emulation in this case is better than the real hardware.

[smerf]

This is 2009, Virtual is the new Reality!

@persia

Hey I know virgil and he is not real in any manner shape or form, and what does 2009 have to do with it unless you are waiting for 2012 where the my in end of the world comes into effect. Come to think about it that is only about 3 years away. Go to go and stock up on my beer now so I will be ready don't you know.

smerf
:laughing:

[amigaksi]

Fake diamonds throw off more colors than real ones. Kind of how I can play Faery Tale Adventure on UAE with the floppy drive sped up instead of waiting 3 seconds every time bad guys pop up in the field while I'm hoofing it through the map. The game accesses disk every time it decides to throw baddies, maybe to load sprites? It's imperceptable on UAE. Emulation in this case is better than the real hardware.

So you are admitting they are fake diamonds or just claiming it's better to have a faster disk drive rather than a disk drive that works at exact timinig as original?  How does a faster disk drive make the emulation of the Amiga machine better?  How does playing some game allow you to draw the conclusion in general about emulation?  How do you know even that very game has glitches that you did not observe?  

Does one observation of a person having blue eyes allow me to conclude that everyone has blue eyes?

I think it takes more than that to make such a general conclusion.

[amigaksi]

People reporting sound lag in WinUAE: you have NOT followed latest progress. Toni has implemented Portaudio with ASIO support for NO DELAY AT ALL, even for professional musicians (look at EAB threads about betas and portaudio).

Chipset audio/video can be PERFECT is you DO configure WinUAE right: you can set 50HZ modes with perfect audio/video sync, smoth scroll in games WITHOUT ANY OCASSIONAL SYNC LOSS. I have tested that with Toni, you can read more in EAB.
Of course, you need a clean system (no lame A/V software or memory/CPU stealing processes in the background) and custom-defined video modes beyond the scope of this post.

So, YES, if correctly configured, WinUAE is just perfect and impossible to tell from a real Amiga. Those not knowing that fact just haven't configured it well.
The only bad part of WinUAE is being Windows based and no ports to Linux/MAC OSX for custom kernels on the host system that would allow almost instant boot-up.
Oh, and remember that you CAN load savestates on lauch, so you can totally skip loading times for ADF of WHDLoad games

Did you like forget to mention what the hardware requirements are?  Or that doesn't matter-- just keep configuring until you get it right?  Sounds like some lame excuse or sales pitch.  It's complete rubbish that it's impossible to tell from a real amiga.  Perhaps from looking at screen shots, but not from functionality.  So if I start writing to audio registers in the copper list, it will show up in real-time to through the PC's audio card?

First of all, unless you completely take over the VGA card, Timer hardware, Audio card, and other things and have specific minimum requirements for these, it's impossible to claim what you say.

[Trev]

Did you like forget to mention what the hardware requirements are?  Or that doesn't matter-- just keep configuring until you get it right?

No, you just select "A500" from the drop-down list, and you get Kickstart 1.3 (you need a ROM image, of course), 512KB chip, 512KB slow, a PAL chipset, and a single low-density floppy drive. The display is set to 720x568 and output is interpolated based on rendering settings. I think the default is nearest neighbor or something similar.

So if I start writing to audio registers in the copper list, it will show up in real-time to through the PC's audio card?

Sort of, but you can't throw around the word "real-time" like that. It's an emulator, not a real-time simulator, so at best, you'll get an approximation. The emulation itself is cycle-exact, but there are no deadline guarantees. Depending on the host system, the emulation may lag. On most modern systems, though, that's not a problem.

First of all, unless you completely take over the VGA card, Timer hardware, Audio card, and other things and have specific minimum requirements for these, it's impossible to claim what you say.

Nothing's impossible. You can access hardware directly from kernel code in Windows, and in some cases, this is what WinUAE does; however, video and audio devices are accessed using standard APIs and driver-supported low-latency access methods.

[stefcep2]

@paolone

"Jose has made a post that just brought here another questionable attitude with technology we can agree with or not. Jose has all the rights to decide that the best feature for a music recording equipment is a fast boot time, but if I had to record music I have in my head, I would be happier to wait 2 more seconds to do that on modern applications for MacOS X and, why not, Windows, which maybe will provide more processing options, memory and CPU power to do all."

Hey I didn't say I used it to do music production but even then it's perfectly doable, PC/Mac is better for production didn't arg against that...

"As I have already said, I consider all this "my computer boots before yours" total crap, something that a serious user should never even think for an architecture comparison. First of all, 'cos boot time depends on too many factors, and all over because in the real world (the one where normal people with normal attitudes live) it doesn't matter how many seconds you need to boot a system, but instead the time (hours, days, maybe months and years) that the same system can stay turned on, without a shutdown or a reboot (we call it "uptime"). Are our Amigas enough stable to outperform Windows, Linux or MacOS X uptimes?""

You're wrong. It all depends on the application, what will the machine be doing. There are some rarer cases where boot time is critical, I just gave you one. Another one is the settobox market, in an AV system you normally want to sit on the living room turn on the equipment and start watching TV, not wait 30 seconds or more (not that there is any Amiga software doing DVB reception which is a shame..).
By the way, there is an attitute towards technology, oposite to the one you describe, that is not very smart either, which is to buy the latest super duper hardware to do things that don't need it. It's like buying a Ferrari to go buy bread at the supermarket.
The low memory footprint and multitasking speed and efficiency of the AmigaOS architecture could find market niches, there's just not anyone marketing any product with it.

Well said Jose.

I can hear the oppositions saying: "you can just put your PC to sleep".  Why?, when you can just turn on the Amiga with the flick of a switch and be ready to go in 5 seconds. "But you can use DAT, but you need the tapes and the deck".  Why , when you can just turn on the Amiga with the flick of a switch and be ready to go in 5 seconds.

The DTV example I agree with 100%:  I can do DTV, I can do PVR, and DVD burning on a PC running media centre or media portal  But then i have to boot Vista everytime I want to watch TV.  But I can do it faster, more reliably, with my Twin HD tuner Panasonic DVDR/HDR.  I agree with you totally: there is a genuine need for fast booting, low RAM, mutitasking OS's, and an OS running on a PC is not it.