real amiga vs winuae

[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.

[stefcep2]

My custom computer built around a pic18f processor cold boots in under 70ms and begins displaying the temperatures from single wire thermal sensors distributed around my apartment to a vt220 terminal therefor it's more powerful than any Amiga, PC, Mac, or Ti calculator. I have you all beat.

No-one asked "Is PC more powerful than Amiga".  An no-one concluded because the Amiga boots faster it is therefore more powerful than a PC.l

[Einstein]

@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:

Will a shapeshifting Gargamel hit the town then ? :biglaugh:

[Karlos]

No diamond analogy is relevant.

I'm glad you admit it.

 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.

Absolutely. The emulator gives you a nice stable display with your own choice of how to scale it, with or without scanline effects and so on. If you are using an overscanned TV with interlace, have fun. I did that for a time and I absolutely do not miss it.

And you know very well the internals are NOT there--

Not bothered in the slightest. The presence of absence of real hardware internals makes utterly no difference to 99% of my classic software collection.

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.)

Since I use OctaMED SS and render complex audio to disk for post production, this makes no difference either. Also, I can run it, with smoothing enabled and emulated audio with more channels and cleaner output than any of my hardware amigas can.

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.

You can never eliminate latency completely from any timed system built using logic gates. If your latency is at least constant, then that's good enough for most purposes.

>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.

If you'd have bothered to make a more relevant argument in the first place I might not have confused them.

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

I do. It's grasping at straws. UAE is a perfectly good system for running the majority of 68K based amiga software, you have yet to present one pertinent argument as to why it is not. Im my experience, and the experience of many others, it will run more amiga software than my actual real amiga does, since in my case, my A1200 won't run all pre AGA titles. If it weren't for WHDload installers I'd need a second, older hardware amiga just to run some of the old classics.

[Hammer]

Hi,

@danybebe,

Depends how much you are willing to spend, I have an Amiga 4000 and an Amiga 3000, to play a lot of the games you have to look to see if it is pal or ntsc, then you have to look at what kind of graphics it uses, aga or occ or ecc, then you have to decide wheter or not it needs the program degrader, keep a pen handy so that you can mark all your disks with what it took to start up that software on the Amiga you decide to use.

Now the Emulator, I use AF2008, on a Quad Core, it is super fast, the music rarely slows it down but does not give the same sound quality as the original Amiga, the graphics are a little blocky compared to the original Amiga (i will probably get flamed for this but i will try to explain) the pc uses square pixels while the Amiga used round pixels the round pixels seem to blend better than the square pixels on the PC you can especilly see this in some old Amiga demos, while they looked good on the orginal Amigas they look squared out on the PC emulation. I use Amiga forever with Amikit, and am completely happy, but once again getting your software there and running is sometimes a pain, you have to try to convert it over with WHD or something like that. I can't remember the program since I bought a CD off ebay with something like 3500 games on it in this format, with AF 2008 it loads it right in off the CD.

smerf

I use to have an Amiga 3000/030@25Mhz connected to a PC SVGA monitor and the pixels are not rounded.

[amigaksi]

...
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.
...

Thanks for summing it up.  It's cycle-exact, but no deadline guarantees.  It's an approximation, but real Amiga is real-time.  However, the word "may" in "may lag" seems incorrect.  It has to lag if it's building up a frame ahead of time while user input happens in real-time.

>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.

So it accesses hardware directly except for video/audio which is significant for Amiga.
There are some things that are impossible-- for example: if you try to time things more accurate than 840ns on PC using 1.19318Mhz timer, it's impossible.

[amigaksi]

I'm glad you admit it.
...

I said, perhaps I need a comma there, "No, diamond analogy is relevant"

>Absolutely. The emulator gives you a nice stable display with your own choice of how to scale it, with or without scanline effects and so on. If you are using an overscanned TV with interlace, have fun. I did that for a time and I absolutely do not miss it.

Unless you are recording the output to the video tape or DVD recorder.

>Not bothered in the slightest. The presence of absence of real hardware internals makes utterly no difference to 99% of my classic software collection.

According to your limited observation of course.  But I don't go by that.  

>You can never eliminate latency completely from any timed system built using logic gates. If your latency is at least constant, then that's good enough for most purposes.

If you get constant latency every time, that's just as good as no latency since you already know there's that offset time involved.  But you won't find that in any PC timer.

>If you'd have bothered to make a more relevant argument in the first place I might not have confused them.

You failed to understand the argument and you're blaming me.  It's relevant if you are into Amiga gaming.  Although you could read the joystick with 558ns accuracy, that wasn't the argument.  You can deal with any of the custom chip registers with 558ns accuracy and trigger off IRQs from Copper with that accuracy.

>I do. It's grasping at straws. UAE is a perfectly good system for running the majority of 68K based amiga software, you have yet to present one pertinent argument as to why it is not. Im my experience, and the experience of many others, it will run more amiga software than my actual real amiga does, since in my case, my A1200 won't run all pre AGA titles. If it weren't for WHDload installers I'd need a second, older hardware amiga just to run some of the old classics.

It's not grasping at straws.  The argument is whether it's a real amiga.  You keep claiming it's better.  If it's a real amiga, it should be able to do EXACTLY what a real amiga does.  It doesn't do that regardless if you think it's good enough in someone's limited experience.

[persia]

Just saw this joystick.  Looks like it would be neat to use with UAE.

http://www.thumbsupuk.com/products/USB-Classic-Joystick.htm?id=3&subid=&prodid=562&cc=

[Karlos]

I said, perhaps I need a comma there, "No, diamond analogy is relevant"

>Absolutely. The emulator gives you a nice stable display with your own choice of how to scale it, with or without scanline effects and so on. If you are using an overscanned TV with interlace, have fun. I did that for a time and I absolutely do not miss it.

Unless you are recording the output to the video tape or DVD recorder.

Video tape? Hells teeth man, what century is this? DVD, fine but why would I "record" the output on a dedicated recorder when I can simply dump the entire video stream to disk directly from the emulation and then master it any way I see fit?

>Not bothered in the slightest. The presence of absence of real hardware internals makes utterly no difference to 99% of my classic software collection.

According to your limited observation of course.  But I don't go by that.

Completely strawman. You have absolutely no notion whatsoever of how well software runs on my system, so you are utterly unable to refute me. You don't have to agree, of course, but you have no basis at all.  

>You can never eliminate latency completely from any timed system built using logic gates. If your latency is at least constant, then that's good enough for most purposes.

If you get constant latency every time, that's just as good as no latency since you already know there's that offset time involved.  But you won't find that in any PC timer.

>If you'd have bothered to make a more relevant argument in the first place I might not have confused them.

You failed to understand the argument and you're blaming me.  It's relevant if you are into Amiga gaming.  Although you could read the joystick with 558ns accuracy, that wasn't the argument.  You can deal with any of the custom chip registers with 558ns accuracy and trigger off IRQs from Copper with that accuracy.

No, we've clarified that now. You are talking about polling the joyport at kHz rates and the fact that you can peek/poke the custom hardware space from the copper at 558ns. That I'm happy enough with. However it's of no relevance whatsoever in the argument as to which system is playing "catch up", unfortunately for you. The requirement for cycle exact hardware bashing does not exist on modern machines because people have moved away from metal banging.

You know, I used to do a lot of copper progging back in the day, it was interesting. THe copper, however was a simple beast from an instruction set perspective. Not really a Turing complete processor.

Nowadays, I write code for GPUs, except it's in a C-based language. It's a perfectly logical evolution. I could write in PTX assembler directly but since the underlying hardware is now so much more complicated it would be self defeating to attempt it.

>I do. It's grasping at straws. UAE is a perfectly good system for running the majority of 68K based amiga software, you have yet to present one pertinent argument as to why it is not. Im my experience, and the experience of many others, it will run more amiga software than my actual real amiga does, since in my case, my A1200 won't run all pre AGA titles. If it weren't for WHDload installers I'd need a second, older hardware amiga just to run some of the old classics.

It's not grasping at straws.  The argument is whether it's a real amiga.

It most assuredly is not the argument and never was. The argument is it a viable alternative to a real amiga...

You keep claiming it's better.

I have made no such claim whatsoever. I have stated it's advantages compared to the real thing:

1) Cost
2) Speed
3) Compatibility
4) Convenience

I never said "better", since "better" is subjective. The above are not subjective, they are entirely valid points that can be demonstrated readily.

If it's a real amiga, it should be able to do EXACTLY what a real amiga does.  It doesn't do that regardless if you think it's good enough in someone's limited experience.

No wonder you are so helplessly confused about this. I never claimed it was a real Amiga, not once in this thread or any other. I claimed it is a viable alternative (esp for a someone that already has a machine which can run it) with the advantages outlined above.

It is an emulation. It doesn't need to be able to do "exactly" what a real amiga does, it just needs to provide the same end functionality for the user. If you can't understand this basic point and conflate it with issue of what is a 'real' amiga, then that's your own problem.

[DonnyEMU]

Heaven forbid they'd even try my system.. Where I run Windows 7 x64), Windows XP (256MB RAM), WinUAE, AROS, and UBUNTO Linux  all at the same time and on the same screen.. With 6 gigs of RAM I hardly notice any slowdown at all running all of these retro 32bit OSes at the same time in different Windows..

http://www.donburnett.com/Amiganess.jpg

[AmiKit]

@Karlos

Maybe it's worth to check his posts in the following thread before continuing the discussion with him here...
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36003

[amigaksi]

Video tape? Hells teeth man, what century is this? DVD, fine but why would I "record" the output on a dedicated recorder when I can simply dump the entire video stream to disk directly from the emulation and then master it any way I see fit?

...

I prefer videos-- they don't scratch easily and ruin the entire video.  

>Completely strawman. You have absolutely no notion whatsoever of how well software runs on my system, so you are utterly unable to refute me. You don't have to agree, of course, but you have no basis at all.  

It's not strawman-- it's your limited subjective experience.  I can PROVE it's not doing the real amiga does and it MAKES a difference for my applications.

>No, we've clarified that now. You are talking about polling the joyport at kHz rates and the fact that you can peek/poke the custom hardware space from the copper at 558ns. That I'm happy enough with. However it's of no relevance whatsoever in the argument as to which system is playing "catch up", unfortunately for you.

It's playing catch-up since it requires precise timing which is NONEXISTENT in your PC what to speak of an emulation running on top of a PC.

>The requirement for cycle exact hardware bashing does not exist on modern machines because people have moved away from metal banging.

That's too bad.  

>Nowadays, I write code for GPUs, except it's in a C-based language. It's a perfectly logical evolution. I could write in PTX assembler directly but since the underlying hardware is now so much more complicated it would be self defeating to attempt it.

You didn't explain how that outdoes the Copper.

>It most assuredly is not the argument and never was. The argument is it a viable alternative to a real amiga...

Okay, great.  Some others are claiming it's good as amiga or better.

>I never said "better", since "better" is subjective.

Better is not subjective.  It's better to have 7.16Mhz vs. 3.57Mhz timing.

>The above are not subjective, they are entirely valid points that can be demonstrated readily.

Okay, as long as they are not the real amiga.

>No wonder you are so helplessly confused about this. I never claimed it was a real Amiga, not once in this thread or any other. I claimed it is a viable alternative (esp for a someone that already has a machine which can run it) with the advantages outlined above.

Not confused; but you implied a better amiga they way you posted your replies.

>It is an emulation. It doesn't need to be able to do "exactly" what a real amiga does, it just needs to provide the same end functionality for the user. If you can't understand this basic point and conflate it with issue of what is a 'real' amiga, then that's your own problem.

No, it does NOT provide the same end functionality since that's part of being a real amiga.

[Karlos]

@Karlos

Maybe it's worth to check his posts in the following thread before continuing the discussion with him here...
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36003

Well, unlike Shaun, at least he knows something about the actual hardware

[GadgetMaster]

Well, unlike Shaun, at least he knows something about the actual hardware

Maybe Shaun decided to take up reading.

[Karlos]

>Nowadays, I write code for GPUs, except it's in a C-based language. It's a perfectly logical evolution. I could write in PTX assembler directly but since the underlying hardware is now so much more complicated it would be self defeating to attempt it.

You didn't explain how that outdoes the Copper.

As I have said umpteen times, this is a subjective debate. You didn't explain how the Copper outdoes a box of cornflakes. The copper is very poor in comparison to a box of cornflakes at 6am in the morning when I'm hungry and disoriented.

With this necessary understanding of the subjective nature of the debate in mind, I'll give you a suitably subjective answer:

Well, lets look at the Copper. Its a limited state machine that has three instructions: move, wait and skip. It executes in sync with the video hardware. Despite this limited instruction set, the ability to poke hardware registers of other components (eg the blitter) makes it quite versatile (ie you can do more than pretty gradients), agreed?

However, it is not suitable for my applications. I do not require beam sync operations, but I require a "copperlist" that can perform an operation en-masse on a 2 (or 3) dimensional grid of data. I also need a Turing Complete machine to execute it since the operations I want to perform in my "copperlist", per element, may have conditional jumps.

The operations will consist of more than 16-bit word moves, waiting and skipping. I need 32-bit IEEE754 compliant add, subtract, multiply, divide and square root and comparisons. I also need the usual gamut of arithmetic, logic, and bitwise operators for integer types. My dataset(s) will also not be representable using 24-bit addressing as it is several hundred megabytes in size, but that's by the  by.

In short, I need a fully programmable CPU with FPU. However, I need a CPU that can can execute my "copperlist" many times concurrently, each instance operating on a separate element in my data grid.

So, the GPU is significantly better than the copper for my application. Your mileage may vary.

>I never said "better", since "better" is subjective.

Better is not subjective.  It's better to have 7.16Mhz vs. 3.57Mhz timing.

"Better" is most assuredly subjective. What constitutes "better" is context dependent. A kettle is far better than 7.16MHz timing can ever be, when you want to make a cup of tea.

Not confused; but you implied a better amiga they way you posted your replies.

It is better if you want to have an Amiga you can work with on the train home, or if you want an amiga that can process data rapidly (eg Image Processing, Ray Tracing etc), or you want an Amiga that can handle huge RTG resolutions in 32-bit colour without any slowdown, or you want an Amiga that you can reconfigure the hardware without physically opening it, or you want an Amiga with more than 2MB of Chip RAM.

These are all ways in which UAE is better than a real Amiga, but they are all subjective. Not everybody wants to do all of the above things with their Amiga. If you want to use your Amiga to control parallel port hardware and your PC doesn't have one, then again, subjectively, it is worse than a real Amiga.

No, it does NOT provide the same end functionality since that's part of being a real amiga.

In your opinion. As far as the software running on the emulation is concerned, it is a real Amiga.

[smerf]

Hi,

I had my Amiga attached to a Panasonic monitor and te pixels were rounded.

smerf