Amiga vs PC

[Franko]

And the fact there are many that don't equally proves otherwise.

I haven't found one yet, that without a bit of hacking, or using degraders or WHDload slaves that don't work with AGA.

But then again Im not a big demo fan, but the ones that I considered to be good enough to run on AGA were worth going to the bother of making them work...

[amigaksi]

in regards to the original post, if the Amiga is so great it should be able to stand toe to toe with anything modern computing throws at it, and it should just be so easy and simple to get it to that competitive state.

It doesn't have the music setup I am looking for, so that means it can't.  
...

That's subjective.  There are certain things where Amiga excels at even without having been upgraded all these years.  So it's not like the rotary phone->touch tone phone analogy which is an enhancement in all respects.

[Karlos]

I haven't found one yet, that without a bit of hacking, or using degraders or WHDload slaves that don't work with AGA.

That's the point though. Without hacking or degrading, such examples just don't work, which is the only proof you need that hacking hardware directly is not a good idea if compatibility is important to you.

[Franko]

That's the point though. Without hacking or degrading, such examples just don't work, which is the only proof you need that hacking hardware directly is not a good idea if compatibility is important to you.

I accept your point Karlos, but for me one of the most enjoyable things about using the Amiga is the challenge in making something work on it that really shouldn't...

[Free2Nukeu]

Well, first let me say sorry for making a post that obviously caused so much fuss, second while we went off topic in places the question I was originally asking was what would it take if the money was endless to make a super amiga? I was thinking that a motherboard with pci express or agp express would be a start, this would give the graphics a leap start, second a new processor, not an intel or an amd but something new, the amiga was good because it didnt depend on one huge processor to do all the work but instead shared the work load through various chips. add to that solid state hdds to keep size and sound and costs down and a nice new OS with inbuild touch screen technology support and its the foundation of a new amiga? no?

[the_leander]

A PC of the same era wouldn't even find enough resources to move the mouse pointer, if you actually managed to load the browser.

Windows 3.11 + IE4 on a 8 Meg 486 was more capable and standards compliant than AOS was up until the relatively recent release of webkit based browsers.

I've done internet on an 8Meg Amiga, there are a lot of words one could use to describe the experience, fun doesn't feature among them however.

Every single website loading up was a concern - would this one take up too much ram to display and knock out the system?

The only really safe way to do it was to disable image loading and run one application at a time if you were going anywhere near the internet.

[the_leander]

That's subjective.  There are certain things where Amiga excels at even without having been upgraded all these years.  So it's not like the rotary phone->touch tone phone analogy which is an enhancement in all respects.

No, it's completely objective Mr Joystick bounce. Seriously, stop using words you don't understand.

He requires X capabilities to be able to do his job. These capabilities are offered in product A more or less out of the box, but product B doesn't offer these capabilities either at all or without a huge amount of hard work on his part.

Product A therefore gets the sale.

[Karlos]

No, it doesn't.  That it's do-able is the point.  You can directly go to the hardware and still have it work across the board on all Amigas.  There's a lot of API-based software that no longer works on modern PCs.  See my other post.

By your own (flawed) reasoning the fact that API-based software still does work on modern PC's demonstrates that it is doable, and thus proves that API based systems are the way forward.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it. Hardware banging, in the modern age, is for embedded projects and the like. it has _no_ place whatsoever on modern desktop machines except for the implementation of hardware drivers.

Recent GPU's have billions of transistors crammed onto their dies dedicated to the job at hand. How far do you think they would actually have gotten if they had to waste precious silicon to appease people that insist on total hardware backwards compatibility with 20-year old designs? Apply the same observation to every other component in your machine.

As for not being able to run old software thanks to hardware changes, I take it you forgot about features like hardware virtualisation or even emulation? After all, there's not much you could do in DOS on a 286 that you couldn't comfortably emulate today if you really wanted to.

Hardware banging and ignoring the OS was never truly encouraged on the Amiga (at least by the people that designed the hardware and software), you are lucky that anything worked from ECS to AGA. And, given that post AGA was set to go in wildly different directions, you'd be even luckier if anything worked beyond that.

You can assume all sorts of utterly ridiculous nonsense if, as an application developer, you view your machine as hardware up rather than software down. For example, the VBR on the 68000 was at a fixed location starting at address 0. From your standpoint, it's t thus perfectly fine when taking over the machine to put your own handlers in that first 1K of memory. And some obviously did, which is why when 68010+ based systems started appearing and the OS got the opportunity to relocate the VBR to somewhere helpful, like fast ram, their code failed miserably. And that's just from "hardware banging" the CPU, let alone assuming other facets of the system architecture would never change.

Frankly I'm glad that not too many people thought your way about development or there's no way we'd ever be using 68060, RTG or AHI. You might find it comfortable in 68000/OCS-only land, but don't assume everybody else did.

[the_leander]

Careful Karlos, you carry on like that and he'll start accusing you of being biased

[koaftder]

lol, stubby fingers.  You sure are a riot.



Don't look stubby to me.  

and yes that's a mickey table cloth, and no I don't give a rats ass if someone thinks its homo.


PS: Already relieved myself.  played some Elvira, if yknow what im sayin.

avatar makes sense now (;

[koaftder]

WOAAAHH, now before everyone jumps on me and pummels me into the ground i have to ask this question. but before I do here is my background. I started with a vic 20 then went to the Commodore 64 later i bought an amiga 500, then a 1200 then was given another 1200 and used an amiga 2000 before buying my own amiga4000 030 which if you look at my other posts you can see is now a 060 cyberstorm 200mhzppc with picaso iv and paloma module and a zoro iii expansion board with more ram than i thought possible on an amiga? over 104,000,000bytes? all my cards are maxed out is what im trying to say. now i use a 6400 amd dualcore pc with 4gb ram and a 8800gtx 768mb graphic card. now i loved my 4000 and is why im trying to make it work again but just how far behind is an amiga to a pc in real terms? i left the community then amiga format left us and didnt bother with the amigaone and dont know anything about the amiga since then. just what would an amiga have to improve to be on equal (or even) better than a pc in todays speed vs software world? again i always preffered my amigas than pcs but eventually had to goto the dark side.

Lucky bastard. Vic 20 was my first machine, then c64, a1k and pc after that. Folks moved to NC and I never saw an amiga in the wild after 1989. Used that a1k until like 95 though.

[smerf]

Hi,

@ElpolloDiabl,

Did I hear you right, "Screw Amiga"

What in the hello are you doing here?

This is an Amiga Channel, if you like PC's that much go to a PC channel if you can find one that doesn't charge you bucks (thats all PC people are looking for).

smerf

[Franko]

Hi,

@ElpolloDiabl,

Did I hear you right, "Screw Amiga"

What in the hello are you doing here?

This is an Amiga Channel, if you like PC's that much go to a PC channel if you can find one that doesn't charge you bucks (thats all PC people are looking for).

smerf

You tell em smerf... :biglaugh:

Starting to wonder why this site has AMIGA in it's title... :p

Even a certain moderator, who shall remain nameless (Karlos !!!! :lol:) seem to be pushing the pc side a bit far... :roflmao:

(wonder if I can have them, under the Trades Description Act...) :biglaugh::biglaugh::biglaugh:

[amigaksi]

That's the point though. Without hacking or degrading, such examples just don't work, which is the only proof you need that hacking hardware directly is not a good idea if compatibility is important to you.

They work without hacking or degrading.  You are mixing up OCS/ECS/AGA registers with OS calls and memory differences.  The AGA chipset was purposely made to be backward compatible and register compatible.  Have you narrowed it down to the registers-- no.  You just assumed it.

[amigaksi]

By your own (flawed) reasoning the fact that API-based software still does work on modern PC's demonstrates that it is doable, and thus proves that API based systems are the way forward.
...

You are misunderstanding and mixing things up.  I never said that API doesn't work.  I said I can find API examples that don't work just like you can find some OCS-based software that doesn't work on AGA machines.  According to your FAULTY logic, no one should use APIs because it can cause trouble.  But the fact that it's do-able means there's nothing wrong with it.  Similarly, just because you can have some software that abused OCS registers beyond their definition, that doesn't mean that you should stop going direct to hardware.  Can you ban Leander from this topic-- that's one troll that wasted my time previously and I won't deal with her side-kick bullcrap.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it. Hardware banging, in the modern age, is for embedded projects and the like. it has _no_ place whatsoever on modern desktop machines except for the implementation of hardware drivers.

Hey even for embedded stuff and hardware drivers, you have inferiority to Amiga since you have to write drivers for every graphics device, audio device, etc.

As for not being able to run old software thanks to hardware changes, I take it you forgot about features like hardware virtualisation or even emulation? After all, there's not much you could do in DOS on a 286 that you couldn't comfortably emulate today if you really wanted to.

I think there's DOSBOX, but it doesn't run Windows 3.1 and it has its limits unlike running it in native mode.  Hey, if they can run Windows 3.1 in Windows XP and 98, they should be able to do it in 64-bit OSes.

Hardware banging and ignoring the OS was never truly encouraged on the Amiga (at least by the people that designed the hardware and software), you are lucky that anything worked from ECS to AGA. And, given that post AGA was set to go in wildly different directions, you'd be even luckier if anything worked beyond that.

It's a science-- nothing hodge podge like you are making it out to be.  From what I have debugged, only OCS stuff not working on AGA was API-related-- making calls to wrong areas of older OSes or mixing up different memories-- fast memory, chip memory, and 16-bit/32-bit whatever.

You can assume all sorts of utterly ridiculous nonsense if, as an application developer, you view your machine as hardware up rather than software down. For example, the VBR on the 68000 was at a fixed location starting at address 0. From your standpoint, it's t thus perfectly fine when taking over the machine to put your own handlers in that first 1K of memory. And some obviously did, which is why when 68010+ based systems started appearing and the OS got the opportunity to relocate the VBR to somewhere helpful, like fast ram, their code failed miserably. And that's just from "hardware banging" the CPU, let alone assuming other facets of the system architecture would never change.

Frankly I'm glad that not too many people thought your way about development or there's no way we'd ever be using 68060, RTG or AHI. You might find it comfortable in 68000/OCS-only land, but don't assume everybody else did.

I'm so sorry you missed the point entirely.  There's nothing wrong with having APi standard and hardware level compatibility.  I'm glad many people banged the hardware as that's the really cool software that now exists on Amiga and is more efficient and faster than API-based stuff.  Yeah, I agree processors did change but even in that case if many people utilized features that weren't doable on 68020 or later-- they would made the chip more compatible.

[amigaksi]

Well, first let me say sorry for making a post that obviously caused so much fuss, second while we went off topic in places the question I was originally asking was what would it take if the money was endless to make a super amiga? I was thinking that a motherboard with pci express or agp express would be a start, this would give the graphics a leap start, second a new processor, not an intel or an amd but something new, the amiga was good because it didnt depend on one huge processor to do all the work but instead shared the work load through various chips. add to that solid state hdds to keep size and sound and costs down and a nice new OS with inbuild touch screen technology support and its the foundation of a new amiga? no?

I think there's some natami forum for the next generation amiga.