If C= had produced an Amiga incompatible wonder computer would you have bought it?

[Franko]

@ LordSpunky

Right on Brother...

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

[LordSpunky]

@ LordSpunky

Right on Brother...

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

:laughing: Thats the way! I feel the need for some power cuts!!! WHOOP!!!!

Anyway, I do digress, what was it I was dribbling on about?

[Motormouth]

What about the sharp X68000 series, they even blew away even the amiga's graphics

Too bad they were only sold in Japan.

[Digiman]

What about the sharp X68000 series, they even blew away even the amiga's graphics

Too bad they were only sold in Japan.

Sharp x68000 was nice but technically limiting. It was basically designed to do games like SF2, Ghouls n Ghosts and Gradius specifically.

Oh and Amiga Space Harrier and Outrun should have been pretty much arcade perfect but for some real sloppy conversion work and minimum improvement on Atari source code.

[Iggy]

Sharp x68000 was nice but technically limiting. It was basically designed to do games like SF2, Ghouls n Ghosts and Gradius specifically.

Oh and Amiga Space Harrier and Outrun should have been pretty much arcade perfect but for some real sloppy conversion work and minimum improvement on Atari source code.

 technically limiting?

Not really. The system was clearly superior to the Amiga. They're hard to find, but would make a neat system to port AROS to.

[B00tDisk]

The hell with that. If you only view increasing hardware specs as an excuse for code to get sloppier, what the hell good is it? All you're doing is wasting what should be a mind-boggling bounty.

Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me.  That's a drop in the bucket.  That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there.  It doesn't mean jack.

I'm really sorry that technology has scaled.  I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.

:/

[runequester]

well, on one hand, its nice to have more capabilities available.

On the other hand, I do think there's something to be said for efficient software. With mobile devices, that's becoming more of a factor at least.

If you don't believe me, try installing Windows Vista on a netbook

[B00tDisk]

1984 Mac OS was barely more sophisticated than C64's GEOS + 1351 mouse and was silent and colourless so 128k was enough for that singletasking Apple fashionista £2500 wank. The 520ST ass raped the original Mac on every level possible (price/performance/speed,colour/OS,max res, appearace) within months...total wipeout....and STs 8mhz CPU is the only aspect it exceeds Amiga.

Oh please.  Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers.  The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people.  If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.

Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.

And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.

It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer".  At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now.  Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.

[B00tDisk]

well, on one hand, its nice to have more capabilities available.

On the other hand, I do think there's something to be said for efficient software. With mobile devices, that's becoming more of a factor at least.

If you don't believe me, try installing Windows Vista on a netbook

I have a buddy who bought one with 7 preinstalled.  I'll ask him what model it is.  (No, Aero isn't/can't be turned on )

[commodorejohn]

Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me.  That's a drop in the bucket.  That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there.  It doesn't mean jack.

I'm really sorry that technology has scaled.  I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.

See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!? Yes, it's true that 20GB out of 2TB (or even a more common setup of 600GB) is a small percentage - it's still 8-12 times what a Windows XP install might take, and it damn well doesn't provide even five times the functionality.

This attitude of "oh, who cares, I have lots of space to blow" is reminiscent of someone who's just won the lottery and has no actual frame of reference for money in the amounts they now possess - even relatively small wastes can add up into large losses. Waste is waste and shoddiness is shoddiness, whether it amounts to a major problem or not. No amount of hardware capability is a sufficient excuse for sloppiness of that magnitude.

[Merax]

See, I get the desire for more capacity and CPU horsepower. Really, I do. What I don't get is how you can understand that software used to be coded efficiently so as to run at all on far less powerful hardware, and yet think that not only is it acceptable that it's now sloppy and bloated, but it doesn't matter!?

He's right though, in most cases it doesn't matter.  Time to completion and minimizing bugs is more important.  

As a developer, I love small efficient systems and fast, elegant code.  In fact I spend more time on that than I should in my hobby projects.  However, at work, getting things done in a reasonable amount of time means I'm going to be using high level languages, abstraction layers, APIs, and bloated third party libraries in order to get a complex product done in a reasonable amount of time.   All that stuff takes space on your hard drive

My boss and customers don't care if the resulting .exe file is 8 MB instead of 800 KB or if it takes 10 ms instead of 1 ms to finish an operation.  It's not worth doubling or tripling the development time for that.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.

[Franko]

@ Merax

You like Bootdisk have missed the whole point here...

This is the AMIGA we're talking about not a business computer, doubt there are very few (if anyone) still left who use an Amiga to run a business these days...

All the bloated OS's and massive HDs etc... might be fine in the business world where time is money but we're talking about a home computer here that's basically 25 years old and is only really used these days by fans & hobbyists...

You say time to completion and minimising bugs is more important, then don't write such bloated code and you cut down on both, it's that simple...

"I'm going to be using high level languages, abstraction layers, APIs, and bloated third party libraries", therein lye's your problem if you were able to code in efficient  assembler language for your machine you wouldn't have to bother with most of that stuff you mention and save a hell of a lot of HD space (Hmm... thought that HD space didn't matter)...

Your boss and customers may not care but then it's obvious from that statement that it's PCs you talking about and most PC users don't have a scooby doo about such things and wouldn't know the meaning of efficiency or elegance of an operation system if you slapped them in the face with one. They just want to point and click then sit there cursing and swearing when the thing doesn't work and then have to use a call centre or pay someone to tell them how to get the thing to work...

At the end of it all nothing can be said that will change the fact that the Amiga way of things was and is superior to the way modern day PCs are programmed and this crazy attitude PC users have of "but it doesn't matter I've got tons of HD space and CPU power" will ever allow you to change the fact that in comparison to an Amiga a PC and it's OS are bloated and a waste of resources...

[Merax]

Yeah, certainly there are practical considerations - it's just the notion of "oh, good coding and optimization mean absolutely nothing now that we have fast CPUs and lots of RAM" that irks me.

Same here, emotionally it seems like a waste.  Maybe someday in the future when the exponential increases stop and software becomes more mature then the next best way to improve it will again be to optimize for speed, memory, and disk usage.

Franko - I agree with you, the extreme frugality when using computer resources was/is necessary on older systems like the Amiga.  I was just trying to defend my profession a bit to say that modern bloat isn't necessarily sloppiness but rather the result of shifting priorities that resulted from the faster hardware being available.

If the software industry had held on to the "Amiga way", we may have slightly snappier OS's and more free hard drive space now,  but there would be whole classes of applications that people currently enjoy that wouldn't be possible to write like that.  Ironically, modern 3D games would be one of those.

[Franko]

@ Merax

I understand where you're coming from with the business side of things but like I say, to me no matter how good modern day computers are when it comes to the OS and software they don't seem to be as efficient and therefore less resource hungry as they could be if more time was taken in the thought & creation of the OS and software...

PS: As modern 3D games is one of things I hate most about computers these days, I'll just not comment on that (I don't wanna start one of me rants)...

[Digiman]

Oh please.  Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers.  The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people.  If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.

Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.

And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.

It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer".  At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now.  Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.

Well clearly I would love to hear about this personal/home computer better than Amiga 1000 between 84 and 87....go ahead Mr expert :roflmao: Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94

Sorry but I will take the opinion of a real expert of the time like Guy Kewney of PCW Magazine, he used and reviewed just about every machine made in the 80s and 90s.

Apple is only around today thanks to massive cash injection in shares from Gates due to potential court case over Win95....that and iBollox range.

Morgan UK still make their low tech/excessive profit/style over substance cars independently, doesn't mean they made better cars than their rivals in the 80s. Same deal with retro computer companies.