Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[Karlos]

I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista.

It's horses for courses, really. I have Vista x64 simply to provide a DX10 gaming environment. It does that job very well indeed.

[Raffaele]

HAHA No, not at all, no.

Oh dear...

People disinformed of their own platforms and adoption of its technology into other platforms...

What sobbying pitiful people...

http://retiary.org/ls/writings/alg_comp_patents.html

I took a break and checked my email.

Todor Fay, who is listed as the inventor on the Microsoft patent, had written me back most positively as follows:

>Would you or others in the composer community be interested in
>DirectMusic? It's far more extensible and pluggable than Bars&Pipes,* and it
>ships as part of the Windows OS. There's a pluggable authoring tool as well,
>so you can create music technologies and create the tools to edit the
>technologies hand in hand. One big objective is to make it easier to
>innovate.
>
>Developing this beast has been an incredibly gratifying experience for me.
>I'm very lucky to have this opportunity.
>
>Todor

Have I been overly cynical, thinking in general terms as though trying to formulate a rational policy based on general principles, from fear of loss of freedom?

[*Bars&Pipes was a patchable modular music architecture which Todor Fay wrote for the Amiga in the late 1980s and which he and his wife Melissa Grey published independently under their company name "Blue Ribbon Bakery".]

http://www.newbluefx.com/background.html

Founders Todor Fay and Melissa Jordan Grey launched NewBlue in 2001 to create innovative, expressive technologies. With a combined 45 years of experience in interactive multimedia technologies, they have spearheaded the development of myriad pioneering technologies, and have collaborated on the design and publishing of more than 55 hardware and software products on multiple computer platforms.
In 1988, Fay and Grey founded The Blue Ribbon SoundWorks, Ltd, an interactive audio software firm that designed music and audio software for musicians, composers, animators, and video production artists.
Among their notable projects was the development of the multimedia controller and musical soundtrack for Atlanta’s successful bid for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. The company was well-known for its Bars&Pipes line of music composition software which still boasts a following today.

In addition, they created AudioActive, the interactive audio engine that won Best of COMDEX for Multimedia in 1995. The pair collectively authored 22 audio-related technology patents. In 1995 the company was sold to Microsoft Corporation, where both principals held senior-level positions overseeing technology teams and drove the development of key products, including DirectMusic, the Interactive Music Architecture featured on MSN and other digital media products and technologies.

The duo has appeared as expert speakers, presenters and co-chairs on interactive audio at a range of professional forums, including the Game Developers Conference, Meltdown, WinHEC, XFest, Interactive Audio Special Interest Group and the MIDI Manufacturer's Association. You'll find NewBlue co-founder Todor Fay's DirectX Audio Exposed at fine bookstores worldwide.

http://www.amazon.com/DirectX-Audio-Exposed-Interactive-Development/dp/1556222882

DirectX® 9 Audio Exposed: Interactive Audio Development features a look into the most advanced interactive music and audio development system in history. DirectX Audio, a suite of tools and technologies developed by Microsoft, provides software engineers and content creators the ability to create interactive, adaptive, and dynamic audio content for use in host applications and stand-alone playback. In addition to providing a comprehensive tutorial-style look at the inner workings of the DirectX Audio libraries, this book includes discussions about the process of creating music and sound effects for games such as Halo and No One Lives Forever and explores the use of interactive music on the web and the future of DirectMusic.

Contributing authors include audio project managers Jason Booth and Marty O’Donnell, sound designer Jay Weinland, and interactive composers Tobin Buttram, Bjorn Lynne, Scott Morgan, Ciaran Walsh, and Guy Whitmore.

The companion CD contains the DirectX 9 SDK and the projects discussed in the book, including support materials and sample media.

About the Author
Todd M. Fay (aka LAX) is a business and production consultant working in and around the game, music, and television industries. His passion for music and interactive entertainment brought together the best of the best in the world of cutting-edge audio in DirectX 9 Audio Exposed.

Todor J. Fay (no relation to Todd Fay) drove the vision and design of DirectMusic at Microsoft and ultimately managed DirectX Audio API development. An industry expert, Todor is passionately dedicated to bridging the worlds of art and technology. After leaving Microsoft, Todor co-founded NewBlue Inc., an interactive technologies developer and consultancy.

Scott Selfon is the Xbox audio content consultant and has assisted with nearly 100 individual games. He was previously the DirectMusic Producer and DirectX Audio Scripting test lead, and has also worked on interactive web site sonification projects.

Other Patents by Todor Fay

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090048698

If you are unaware of, FYI Todor is the maker of Bars&Pipes, ask him about DirectX audio subsystem...

http://www.newbluefx.com/contact-us.html

[persia]

But can it sample a joystick at 1 KHz?

It's horses for courses, really. I have Vista x64 simply to provide a DX10 gaming environment. It does that job very well indeed.

[minator]

The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga.  Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU.  A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.

The Amiga did it the other way around, putting operations into hardware.

In some respects the PC approach did make sense, as processors got more and more powerful there was no need for custom hardware for everything.

However the custom approach does have the advantage of efficiency, something that is becoming more and more important these days.

The Amiga philosophy is however alive and well, the chip in your mobile phone likely has multiple cores, many of these are custom designs.  There's the a psuedo-custom approach which uses the increased performance of processors, rather than custom hardware they use a dedicated CPU.


The Amiga was the first computer to put things like a GUI, a real OS (with things like multi-tasking), and hardware acceleration all in one package.  Now all computers are like this.

[blakespot]

The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga.  Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU.  A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.

I disagree.

The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage.  Also an extremely fast bus.

One could say this follows the Amiga model.  Or it just follows what makes sense.  Not sure on that one.

Very Amiga-like, I'd say.





blakespot

[alx]

The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga.  Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU.  A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.

I dunno - I'm no hardware expert* so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the average PC these days does at least as much to offload stuff from the main CPU.  The Copper might have been revolutionary for its time, but don't forget that it had three instructions - all it could really do was poke values into the custom chip registers at a given point on the screen.  You could do amazing effects with the Copper but (I'd imagine - I've never programmed to the metal on an Amiga) you cannot do complex stuff like writing a value to a register conditional on the value of something else, without the CPU getting involved at some point.  At any rate, the GPU in my x86 system does much more as a co-processor - the instruction set on a modern GPU, while being highly specialised for graphics, is capable of doing all the sorts of operations a CPU is and applying them to graphics.

Then there's sound: As far as I'm aware, Paula just grabs samples from the chip RAM through DMA and plays them out of the audio channels (taking into consideration the registers for stuff like channel volume) - she's not a processor.  The EMU10k1 in my ageing SB Live card is a full-on DSP that can be programmed to run arbitrary effects on the audio stream.  From what I understand that'd eat up CPU time on an Amiga (although Commodore were moving in this direction with their plans for a DSP on the A4000).  You can even get physics processors now that run little programs to deal with stuff like object interactions in 3D space (the Amiga may have had collision detection between sprites, but a physics engine can then go on and determine what to do with the objects that collided, without having to ask the CPU at all!)

All-in-all, I'd say that the modern PC delegates tasks to other processors that the Amiga didn't.  Not that this diminishes the Amiga whatsoever, given it was one of the first architectures to do this to any great extent


* Final warning: I'm really not a hardware guy but I think most of what I've said is kinda accurate:lol:

[the_leander]

The Amiga was the first computer to put things like a GUI, a real OS (with things like multi-tasking), and hardware acceleration all in one package.  Now all computers are like this.

Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA and ANTIC. But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).

None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.

[the_leander]

I disagree.

The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage.  Also an extremely fast bus.

One could say this follows the Amiga model.  Or it just follows what makes sense.  Not sure on that one.

Very Amiga-like, I'd say.

Not really. The chipset of the Amiga is an intergrated system, it's not designed to sit on a bus like PCI or zorro. For the PC, everything is sat on a general purpose bus (be it ISA, VESA, PCI, PCIE etc etc etc). Everything within the PC arch is modular in a way that the Amigas OCS, ECS and AGA sets simply never were.

It made for a great revolution at the time, but it simply could not maintain pace with the evolutionary process that the PC used.

The concepts of offloading things from the CPU were well understood by other companies then C= at the time of the Amiga. By the time of the A4000 however these concepts were being used far more effectively by other companies. Even within the Amiga world third party Zorro cards offered far greater performance then any C= chip.

[shoggoth]

Oh dear...

People disinformed of their own platforms and adoption of its technology into other platforms...

What sobbying pitiful people...

What a sad case of wanting to believe.

What you claimed was (I quote): "Audio section of DirectX engine in Windows was taken directly by Bars&Pipes Amiga software technology.".

This is funny, because Bars and Pipes does not even have an audio engine (MIDI != audio). It's a MIDI sequencer, and unlike e.g. Cubase/Logic etc. it's MIDI only, i.e. the audio engine you refer to doesn't even exist.

(btw - the patents (and the other stuff) you referred to is related to Algorithmic Composing, which is not the same thing as an audio engine at all. It's a fact that Blue Ribbon and their patents were purchased by Microsoft, but that's about it).

[Nostalgiac]

Oooh troll thread ahead!

But well, to be seriously, not really.
Though, custom chipsets, and an OS which takes full advantage of the hardware, and both being designed for nowadays purposes, is something desireable IMHO.

you mean.. like the Xbox , the Weee, the playstation... etc etc

so on the one hand I do agree, on the other hand.... I'm pretty happy with my macbook pro and my core2duo general purpose box and don't see the point of any new amiga-like architecture

Tom UK

[Speelgoedmannetje]

you mean.. like the Xbox , the Weee, the playstation... etc etc

Well, kind of, but all these console OS'es are severely slimmed down in useability, and AmigaOS isn't, au contraire.

so on the one hand I do agree, on the other hand.... I'm pretty happy with my macbook pro and my core2duo general purpose box and don't see the point of any new amiga-like architecture

Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA and ANTIC. But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).

None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.

His point was that all these aspects were put together.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.

No, but if the Amiga people back then thought making a computer wouldn't make any difference in the back then computing landscape, they certainly wouldn't have made a difference indeed.
Today needs todays revolutions, not todays bugfixes.

[hayashi]

Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?

My A1200's boot speed is unrivalled by any of my other computers! Chalk one point up for the Amiga.

ok sure modern operating systems do far more than the Amiga does while booting up, but 1) a lot of that is useless to me anyway, and 2) shh =P

[Nostalgiac]

Well, kind of, but all these console OS'es are severely slimmed down in useability, and AmigaOS isn't, au contraire.
Also not when your OS is ready immediately when you turn on your computer?

oh well ... be honest ... "useability" ... modern stuff offers just much more.

and "ready immediately" ? sure you're right... but using my boxes in stand-by mode.. 5 secs max ? preparing coffee or tea isn't as fast as that

I still like my migi for "old" stuff :-) no mistake there !

Tom UK

[shoggoth]

But can it sample a joystick at 1 KHz?

LOL * 65536! Oh noes, the horror, why did you do that!!!