Amiga vs PC

[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.

[amigaksi]

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...

The OCS registers work 100% on ECS and AGA.  It's not a big challenge to make OCS stuff work on AGA.  Just have to avoid assuming 7.16Mhz 68000 and few other details.  The OCS stuff that doesn't work with AGA isn't just using OCS registers-- the problems are mostly caused by other factors.

[TheGoose]

avatar makes sense now (;

And my avatar looks like his reality :lol:

[stefcep2]

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.

Bullshit.

[DavidF215]

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 have noticed that rabbit chasing occurs frequently around here. As amigasi mentioned, the Natami project desires to simply upgrade the Amiga chipset hardware and keep going.

PCI express would probably be the better starting point as AGP is old school now. ARM is a possible contender, and there is a rumor that AmigaOS4 will be ported to it.

Amiga needs more software now than anything else.

Need some popcorn reading about the API vs. direct access discussion. Would an API that maintains an optimized, hardware banging code base adequately satisfy?

[DavidF215]

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.

Or Product B gets the sale because Manager Z read an article, written by a journalist instead of a technician, in a magazine and decided Product B would be better because everybody else uses it.

[koaftder]

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

<3 By the looks of things, natami will come out sooner than the a1x1k, cost a hell of a lot less and deliver more fun. <3 <3 <3

[amigadave]

I have noticed that rabbit chasing occurs frequently around here. ........

Amiga needs more software now than anything else.

This thread is getting really ....... boring I guess is the best description as it goes down hill into name calling and "yes it is" - "no it isn't" arguments.

I will agree that the Amiga needs more software, or more accurately, it needs new software, as the archives of old software are really quite impressive.  We need users that can show other computer users the FUN of using an Amiga and all of its variants and encourage more bedroom programmers to write code, or join with others writing code and porting existing apps and games to the Amiga, AOS4.x, MorphOS2.x & AROS.  Ports from other platforms are not a bad thing, but original software would be a great thing to have as well.

[Karlos]

Bullshit.

Is that your qualified opinion? Browsing on my old A1200 with 040/16MB fast (when the 040 card works, but that's a different story) on AGA is not a lot of fun, either. It starts off fine but sooner or later (depending on how many image intensive pages I've visited), I'm down to my last MB of memory and my 040 feels more like an 020 until I either flush the images or turn them off. That's with a minimal installation of OS3.5 and the usual 040 speedup patches installed (RemApollo, 040 ieee math libraries etc).

It's not just a case of misremembering either. This behaviour was observed recently, during the development of the old browser proxy for iBrowse/Aweb.

[Karlos]

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.

On software that shuts down the OS and takes over the hardware, you can only blame the OS for instability so far.

The point is that making assumptions about the hardware configuration is not sensible. To claim otherwise is to ignore the advice of the people that actually designed and built it and I'm sure they were better qualified than you to make that call.

[amigadave]

Is that your qualified opinion? Browsing on my old A1200 with 040/16MB fast (when the 040 card works, but that's a different story) on AGA is not a lot of fun, either. It starts off fine but sooner or later (depending on how many image intensive pages I've visited), I'm down to my last MB of memory and my 040 feels more like an 020 until I either flush the images or turn them off. That's with a minimal installation of OS3.5 and the usual 040 speedup patches installed (RemApollo, 040 ieee math libraries etc).

It's not just a case of misremembering either. This behaviour was observed recently, during the development of the old browser proxy for iBrowse/Aweb.

I don't know why anyone would argue with you and claim that it is any fun trying to use the Internet on an Amiga today.  I have my A1200 w/256mb RAM & 060/50mhz w/Indivision and it is not a pleasant experience.  Sure it can be done, but it does not compare to using the Internet on any Mac or PC.  I have been using Amigas since 1986 and even back in 1990 when I first started using the Internet on a regular basis, I would do it from my Bridgeboard in my A2000/030, or while running Shapeshifter and MacOS7.6 and Netscape most of the time as it was a better experience than my registered version of AWeb2 or IBrowse.  Maybe others had better luck with their Amiga browsers on more powerful Amigas than what I owned at the time, and maybe some are just too biased to admit that by the time the A3000 was released the Amiga was already falling behind the PC in many areas.  Not that I wanted to switch at that time because I still preferred the AmigaOS's responsive behavior, but I could tell then that being an Amiga user meant that I was going to miss out on certain hardware advances and lots of software that was being written (hence my purchase of the Vortex GG Bridgeboard)

[stefcep2]

Is that your qualified opinion? Browsing on my old A1200 with 040/16MB fast (when the 040 card works, but that's a different story) on AGA is not a lot of fun, either. It starts off fine but sooner or later (depending on how many image intensive pages I've visited), I'm down to my last MB of memory and my 040 feels more like an 020 until I either flush the images or turn them off. That's with a minimal installation of OS3.5 and the usual 040 speedup patches installed (RemApollo, 040 ieee math libraries etc).

When?  In the Win 3.1 days or today?  

It's not just a case of misremembering either. This behaviour was observed recently, during the development of the old browser proxy for iBrowse/Aweb.

Aah so its today. You want to view the bloated mess thats the web today on a 40 mhz cpu with 32 Mb ram.  Sheesh.

FYI  I used the same spec A1200 in 64 colors dblscan(fblit and Ftext) till about 2002 with Aweb/Ibrowse.  Sure over the years, it got slower as web pages became bloated with more and more useless banners and images.  Being on dial up didn't help matters so i switched off images.  I also ran netscape 4 communicator under shapeshifter with Mac SO 7.5.5 and the savage driver in 640x480 256 colors (the screen was in fast ram mapped with the MMU). The Aweb/Ibrowse set up was faster. The speed  advantage of YAM over communicator was even more stark.

Eventually i went to the A4000/68060/CV64 running Ibrowse 2, on dial up till 2007 or so, and never experienced this BULLSHIT about worrying if the next web page would crash the system!

With some of posts some "Amigans" here make, you'd think their machines did nothing but crashed at the first single mouse pointer movement after booting.  All the software on aminet must have been created with amiga's in an alternate reality, as according to Leander, the Amiga was one useless, perpetually crashing mess.  For him NOTHING worked.

[dammy]

PCI express would probably be the better starting point as AGP is old school now. ARM is a possible contender, and there is a rumor that AmigaOS4 will be ported to it.

I agree that AGP is too out of date.  As far as ARM is concerned, AROS is currently being ported to ARM by Dr. Schulz.  IMO, OS4's fate should remained locked to PPC.  With AROS being x86 and soon ARM, it would be a waste of Hyperion's limited resources to support anything but PPC.

[Karlos]

When?  In the Win 3.1 days or today?  



Aah so its today. You want to view the bloated mess thats the web today on a 40 mhz cpu with 32 Mb ram.  Sheesh.

It was 16MB and 25MHz. So I guess you feel even more let off the hook. FYI, the proxied version of amiga.org has considerably less "bloat", especially while it was in early development, so comparable to the good old days. The first version was somewhat overzealous in what it stripped out, the resulting pages could hardly be described as bloated.

FYI  I used the same spec A1200 in 64 colors dblscan(fblit and Ftext) till about 2002 with Aweb/Ibrowse.  Sure over the years, it got slower as web pages became bloated with more and more useless banners and images.  Being on dial up didn't help matters so i switched off images.  I also ran netscape 4 communicator under shapeshifter with Mac SO 7.5.5 and the savage driver in 640x480 256 colors (the screen was in fast ram mapped with the MMU). The Aweb/Ibrowse set up was faster. The speed  advantage of YAM over communicator was even more stark.

Eventually i went to the A4000/68060/CV64 running Ibrowse 2, on dial up till 2007 or so, and never experienced this BULLSHIT about worrying if the next web page would crash the system!

I'm also guessing your 060 had more than 16MB?

With some of posts some "Amigans" here make, you'd think their machines did nothing but crashed at the first single mouse pointer movement after booting.  All the software on aminet must have been created with amiga's in an alternate reality, as according to Leander, the Amiga was one useless, perpetually crashing mess.  For him NOTHING worked.

That's not true, his needs simply exceeded what his machine was capable of. It happens to most people.

[stefcep2]

It was 16MB and 25MHz. So I guess you feel even more let off the hook. FYI, the proxied version of amiga.org has considerably less "bloat", especially while it was in early development, so comparable to the good old days. The first version was somewhat overzealous in what it stripped out, the resulting pages could hardly be described as bloated

Be that as it may, I was viewing this site's pages under a different user name from about 1998.  I never experienced this event that you and Leander describe.  NEVER.  Sounds like the lack the of protected memory argument: yeah you could crash your amiga, yeah you could lose data, yet gigabytes of software, pics, songs were created by users anyway.

I'm also guessing your 060 had more than 16MB?

 128 MB.  But I don't think I got less than 112 MB free.  Unlike what's been said here I don't recall accessing sites I needed to being unusually difficult, although I did need to install some encryption update to do my banking.  To have hardware built in 1992 still function like that is remarkable.

That's not true, his needs simply exceeded what his machine was capable of . It happens to most people.

No issue with people buying whatever meets their needs.  Its the incessant revisionist negativity that is tiresome.

[gertsy]

An Amiga's gotta know its limitations.. The upper boundary of those was ruled off in 1994.
Why try to prove something that has no worth.  Use your PC, Mac or Linux box for browsing and use your Amiga for what it's good at.: Being an Amiga.  That should be enough.

Unless of course you have a need to pit your stock Edsel in a current day Saloon car race.

You don't want it to be the same...trust me..  

Vive la difference.....!