@Deniil715

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The only thing beneficial in a PC is the strangely high speed they have managed to make that insane hack of a CPU family to perform at.

Modern X86 CPUs translates (amounts to hardware accelerated emulator) X86 ISA to RISC instructions. The performance comes from its multi-billion dollar RISC core design.

_________________
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Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Wol

Quote:

Wol wrote: @resle Hmmm, A properly syncronised system running Amiga OS At the moment only a Classic Amiga can do this! So called modern systems cannot do this, eg graphics cards can not be syncronised with other hardware or software. No matter 86 or PPC based ( PC design ) will never fully capture that Amiga feeling......ever, well not ever; perhaps when they get to 100GHZ cores....... Most game consoles can do this, perhaps Amiga OS on one of them, they have similar hardware design and function.. Wol.

For what purpose?

Refer to http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
"Radeon 4800 supports a 100% ray-traced pipeline".

"Urbach told us that ray-tracing in real time became a reality with the Radeon 2900XT – which was used for a series of trailers for last summer's hit-move Transformers".

I remember back in one of AmigaFormat's articles about Lightwave being accelerated by ScreamerNet (clustered raytacing on MIPS or Alpha based workstations).

Last edited by Hammer on 11-Sep-2008 at 02:52 PM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
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Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Hypex

Quote:

Oh BTW, about using the CPU to render all lines of a screen, what do you think made UAE so slow? Yep, it had to render every line. Definitely not as neat as the original hardware. Doing it by brute force. Only now are machines really fast enough to emulate an Amiga fully working the hardware.

Similarly to emulate C64 properly you need really fast Amiga. You can not map C64 sprites to Amiga sprites, if you want accurate sound you can not use Paula DMA to play C64 sounds, you can not really use any advanced Amiga capabilities to emulate C64. Everything must be done in the software if you want proper emulation.

And C64 was only a machine with 1MHz 8bit CPU with 320x200 graphics at 16 colours and three channel sound.

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That was my point, for hi colours doing all the drawing is fine, as the card is faster at a 24-bit screen than a native Amiga 8-bit screen. But for a native screen mode, the copper should have been used, it would have rendered the gradient in an instant the way it should be done in the hardware.

Maybe. I stopped using AGA in 1998.

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So what? Who wants to play games on the Workbench anyway? No point playing a game if the WB is four colours and the sprites are 16. Most WB games were cards or asteroids. Boring!

Ah, true. Didnt remember that WB was limited to four colours at that time :) With 2.0 you could use more colours but games could run out of free pens etc.

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Yes they did! Which is what this was about, using sprites in multitasking. I can site MegaBall, a popular game of it's time. This also works on OS4! Does it work in MOS? Remember Drip!? Likewise. I'm sure there were others that used the OS to open a screen with sprites and use them to succession.

I dont know those games. If they are at Aminet I might give them a try.

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In Amiga terminology this would be called a BOB, a Blitter OBject. Similar to the old days with it similar restrictions but of course does move faster. Although the OS4 SDL library proves otherwise!

SDL is simple DirectX ripoff and most SDL games are coded poorly by poor coders. But there is also that MorphOS and OS4 lack HW acceleration for certain operations but are emulated in the software. Not to mention a design flaw in SDL which forces SDL to swap bytes when you have 16LE hicolour mode in BE machine (very unfortunate if you want a HW surface for 16bit mode).

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Speaking of MorphOS, from before, remember the ABox? I was really excited at that hardware prospect. But I was disappointed when nothing became of it, and it instead ended up as the name of some sandbox within MorphOS. I had hoped the Pegasos would have included the original ABox idea.

You probably mean A\BOX. Then Amiga market went down and Phase5 with it. Suggested retail price (DM 3.995, is that 12000e?) looks insane and it was just another PPC board. Nothing special there. I never got excited about it and I dont know why anyone should.

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The hardware that ended up in the AmigaOne was just as exciting.

=P

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Did the PC have a copper in the early days too?

I dont know but copper could mean anything.

Last edited by itix on 11-Sep-2008 at 03:44 PM.

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Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

The problem is how to bring the Amiga platform back from the dead.

Core to the problem is that no one can agree on what an Amiga is?
Being so versatile, the Amiga did so many things for different people that everyone has a different slant on its features.

If you can't agree on the platform, you can't move the community in significant numbers to participate in bringing the platform forward. You can't reach the critical mass required to create a somewhat viable software market.

Further, even if such criterion could be definitiveily agreed apon and even met, nobody could ever further the platform for fear of breaking them and splintering the community once more.

It sounds odd, but the most stifling problem is the community's mindset, or more to the point, the Amiga fanboy. The community's greatest strength is it's biggest weakness.

Finally, it would seem, that the Mac PPC fanboys have gotten over themselves and swallowed their pride, as the Apple platform goes from strength to strength. They were so use to fighting the x86ers, it would have been hard, but their disdain is a blip in the Mac market.
Of course the fanboy to general user ratio in the Mac community would be somwhat lower, than the predominantly fanboy userbase of the Amiga.

So fanboys!! It is time to get over yourselves.

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."

@Hammer

Quote:

Modern X86 CPUs translates (amounts to hardware accelerated emulator) X86 ISA to RISC instructions. The performance comes from its multi-billion dollar RISC core design.

And who designed this RISC core? It certainly made an insult on the PowerPC. Rip the main core out of a supercomputers CPU, strip it down for the desktop, and make sure it is groung breaking and compared to everything else practically a new CPU design with no legacy baggage. Nup, not gonna work, it still gets beat by a PC CPU with a ten year older design. So, I wonder, what's the point of that exercise?

History proves you may as well drag old around designs around and keep legacy baggage whilst hacking on modern features because it's going to end up running faster, cooler and cheaper than a groung breaking new design. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Well that's the reality of the computer world. The boring PCs have won and turned all computers into the same one boring hardware.

What I wonder is why they bothered with PowerPC at all? Why didn't Motorola just copy Intel and hack the 68K so it went as fast and ran the same code? After all both were RISC CPU's. Has anyone made a 68K compatible CPU with a PC RISC core? That would rock. But, why didn't any company make a PowerPC that dumped the original design, and just used a PPC to x86 RISC core translator? Then it could compete. I think the way the PPC handles it's short cache by comparison is complete crap. It doesn't win any speed favours.

Who made the first CPU? Was in Intel? (I hope not.) If it was it's no wonder they are just about the last CPU maker left. I used to think Motorola were the best, but look what happened after 68K. If Intel was first and is going to be left last then obviously they know what they are doing. Perhaps Motorola should have employed Intel hardware engineers? LOL! :

@itix

One DM was about half an EUR. So 2000 EUR.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@itix

Copper is a short form of Co-Processor. Nothing magical about it.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Quote:

One DM was about half an EUR. So 2000 EUR.

Oops. I accidentally converted DM to Finnish Marks which would be make it cost about 12000 FIM (2000 EUR). Nevertheless overly overpriced and these are prices 10 years ago.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

Quote:

No matter 86 or PPC based ( PC design ) will never fully capture that Amiga feeling......ever, well not ever; perhaps when they get to 100GHZ cores.......

That's funny... knowing that today consoles are nothing more than simple PC with somewhat custom gfx boards/cpu... I really doubt there is a difference of feeling between an XB360+Linux and Any PC/Mac with Linux...

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Nevertheless overly overpriced and these are prices 10 years ago.

Not that overriced (in terms of "Amiga" hardware at least), seeing how much money people were ready to spend on outdated and slow blizzard/cybppc boards... Which were just *CPU* boards...

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Who made the first CPU? Was in Intel? (I hope not.)

What would it change ?

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If it was it's no wonder they are just about the last CPU maker left. I used to think Motorola were the best, but look what happened after 68K.

Maybe it wasn't that good if they decided to dump it for PPC...

_________________
http://www.warpdesign.fr/

Amiga is a girl where as Amigo is a boy!

I think at this point it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Its meaning has changed over time too. In the 80's it was a OS and Hardware combination that provided the performance that was well beyond it's time. Now with hardware being so fast, all I am looking for in an Amiga is the smoothness of operation of the original Amiga. I still think PC's have sort of a studdery feel to them and to be honest, Linux feels unfinished and is cluncky in a different way. OS4 and Amiga 1 seems to do the job.

I think that it has been the lack of true direction that has made the definition of what is an Amiga very cloudy. The community has been torn between AROS, OS4, Morphos, UAE and even Amiga-Anywhere.

I don't feel that something that runs on top of another OS can be considered. UAE is great, but it feels more like a PC than an Amiga. Amiga-Anywhere, I have not tried it and probably won't unless it gets ported to an actual Amiga. OS5 is as far as I can tell doesn't exist so there is no reference to compare it.

@olegil

Quote:

Copper is a short form of Co-Processor. Nothing magical about it.

At it's basic level it only had three instructions and mostly all it did was wait and then do some moves. Rockin' baby!

So it wan't that magical really, but it was the timing, that made magic out of it. Being able to poke hardware registers mid-screen made all the difference. Even to this say I wonder how they figured out to run a program syncronised to the beam counters and waiting for a certain position.

I just think that to run alongside the beam would need a really fast CPU but maybe it wasn't that fast and quite easy to do?

@Leo

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What would it change ?

Well, nothing. At this point I am interested in the history of MPU's and CPU's in gerneral.

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Maybe it wasn't that good if they decided to dump it for PPC...

I think it was perfectly fine back then! The 68040 was like a 80486. And the 68060 could go upto 75Mhz, so wasn't far behind. Wasn't the 68k a better CPU?

@Hypex

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And the 68060 could go upto 75Mhz, so wasn't far behind.

One year behind Pentium...

@Hypex

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And who designed this RISC core?

Ex-DEC Alpha and Ex-PA-RISC engineers. Like K7 Athlon's and Alpha's EV6, AMD's Hypertransport technology is based on Alpha's EV7. Both Intel and AMD inherited various DEC Alpha engineering teams.

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Rip the main core out of a supercomputers CPU, strip it down for the desktop, and make sure it is groung breaking and compared to everything else practically a new CPU design with no legacy baggage. Nup, not gonna work, it still gets beat by a PC CPU with a ten year older design. So, I wonder, what's the point of that exercise?

PowerPC teams are competing against "old school" RISC teams.

Quote:

Motorola should have employed Intel hardware engineers?

It should be DEC's Alpha or HP PA-RISC engineers.

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Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@itix

Quote:

Similarly to emulate C64 properly you need really fast Amiga. You can not map C64 sprites to Amiga sprites, if you want accurate sound you can not use Paula DMA to play C64 sounds, you can not really use any advanced Amiga capabilities to emulate C64. Everything must be done in the software if you want proper emulation.

That's the because the majority of C64 emulators were line emulators just like UAE. They were slow on the Amiga, especially in native chipset modes, because they used to render each line into a chunky buffer then do a chunky to planar conversion! On only 2d graphics!!

I believe the emulation could have been applied differently. Why could not the sprites been mapped? Why could not the AM and FM modes be used to emulate SID and ADSR waveforms? Sure only two channels could be done this way but was it ever tried?

I also think the copper and blitter could have been used to emulate text modes and set character block colours. Bitmaps would need byte remapping in hires planar mode and multicolor mode was chunky but still I think it could have been possible.

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And C64 was only a machine with 1MHz 8bit CPU with 320x200 graphics at 16 colours and three channel sound.

Sure! And don't forget that little endian CPU. That might have slowed it down the most!

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Maybe. I stopped using AGA in 1998.

I stopped in 2004.

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Ah, true. Didnt remember that WB was limited to four colours at that time :) With 2.0 you could use more colours but games could run out of free pens etc.

WB1.3 was four colours. WB2+ had a four colour WB palette. But if the WB was on a low colour screen it restricted the game. The only thing you could really count on was hires. And even that was changeable.

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I dont know those games. If they are at Aminet I might give them a try.

Megaball, yes. Drip? "Ha!" Yes, found it.

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SDL is simple DirectX ripoff and most SDL games are coded poorly by poor coders. But there is also that MorphOS and OS4 lack HW acceleration for certain operations but are emulated in the software. Not to mention a design flaw in SDL which forces SDL to swap bytes when you have 16LE hicolour mode in BE machine (very unfortunate if you want a HW surface for 16bit mode).

Does that mean it's fastest on Windows? The problem with SDL is it tries to emulate hardware like that in the Amiga using VGA chips. So HW acceleration would make it more efficient. However, all the sprites are soft sprites and playfields can easily be made by copying the frambuffer from an offset. Even one playfield scrollling should be possible with just setting the framebuffer pointer.

OS4 does a good job of re-implementing the sprite graphics.library functions in software. One can use the APIs and the program will run as if on an original Amiga with the chipset. One example of this is Megaball. Test it on MorphOS. The AGA version runs fine on OS4.

Quote:

You probably mean A\BOX. Then Amiga market went down and Phase5 with it. Suggested retail price (DM 3.995, is that 12000e?) looks insane and it was just another PPC board. Nothing special there. I never got excited about it and I dont know why anyone should.

Yes I mean the A\BOX. Although that article concentrates on the Pre\box which looks plain by comparison.

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/aboxspec.html

Perhaps not so exciting now, but I was excited about it back then! Oh and surely it was a bit more than just another PPC board? Aside from the CPU, the specs of the hardware blow my plain AmigaOne away!!

@Hammer




For what purpose?


Well I used to do a lot of multimedia stuff back in the day ( Scala MM 300.....400),
I got used to super smoooooth animations locked to the frame rate of the monitor,
sound also synched up.

This also genlocked over live video ,live MIDI etc.

Now with todays stuff (granted higher resolutions and color depth) I cannot
obtain smooth animations , multimedia on a PC is a total joke, jerky joke.
The display's updated halfway thro the monitors display, also iratic frame rates.

Does make me laugh when I see a so called modern multimedia display chugging
jerkely thro it's program.(Powerpoint what a total desaster)



Wol...

_________________
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.~Albert Einstein

@Hypex

Quote:

That's the because the majority of C64 emulators were line emulators just like UAE. They were slow on the Amiga, especially in native chipset modes, because they used to render each line into a chunky buffer then do a chunky to planar conversion! On only 2d graphics!!

Line emulators are in fact faster than "real" cycle exact emulators. Frodo and MagiC64 are line emulators and hence faster than VICE which is cycle exact emulator.

Quote:

I believe the emulation could have been applied differently. Why could not the sprites been mapped?

Amiga sprites are too narrow and have too few colours and you can not scale sprites. On Amiga you can reuse sprites but IIRC they can not be on the same scanline. In other words hardware is not flexible enough to emulate other hardware no matter how advanced it is.

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Why could not the AM and FM modes be used to emulate SID and ADSR waveforms? Sure only two channels could be done this way but was it ever tried?

How? Paula does not have registers what SID has. They have nothing in common. PlaySID emulated SID by defining bunch of samples which were played at different periods. It did its job quite well but it could not emulate method how samples are played on real SID.

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I also think the copper and blitter could have been used to emulate text modes and set character block colours. Bitmaps would need byte remapping in hires planar mode and multicolor mode was chunky but still I think it could have been possible.

Hmm... copper could have been used to do some tricks maybe. But blitter requires that data is in the chip ram. And would it be any help when you must take into account modifications during that frame...

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Does that mean it's fastest on Windows? The problem with SDL is it tries to emulate hardware like that in the Amiga using VGA chips.

Not necessarily. At least DosBox is not any faster on laptop than it is on my Pegasos.

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So HW acceleration would make it more efficient. However, all the sprites are soft sprites and playfields can easily be made by copying the frambuffer from an offset. Even one playfield scrollling should be possible with just setting the framebuffer pointer.

There is HW acceleration as long as implementation and the operating system permits. You can also accelerate graphics using AltiVec. In the end it depends on what BltBitMap() can do and how efficiently.

OpenTTD is nifty in 8bit screenmodes because it uses classic colour cycling for animations. It is much slower if you use hi/truecolour mode for OpenTTD. If they opted for modern 16/32bit graphics it would not be possible. Then there are games which are slow in 320x200 and crash after 5 minutes.

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OS4 does a good job of re-implementing the sprite graphics.library functions in software. One can use the APIs and the program will run as if on an original Amiga with the chipset. One example of this is Megaball. Test it on MorphOS. The AGA version runs fine on OS4.

Downloaded MegaBall and it appears to work. I dont have any game controller so couldnt try it out by playing but I got ingame graphics at least. I also noticed that MegaBall does not work with 3D layers in MorphOS (half of ingame gfx is missing) but works just fine with old layers. Is it the same in OS4?

Drip appears to kill my mouse (maybe because it is USB one? no idea) and I am not sure if all ingame gfx were drawn. Not sure because without game controller I am not sure.

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Perhaps not so exciting now, but I was excited about it back then! Oh and surely it was a bit more than just another PPC board? Aside from the CPU, the specs of the hardware blow my plain AmigaOne away!!

I am not so sure. Announced gfx support does not cut it anymore (1600x1200, pffft, useful for minimonitors maybe :)) and SCSI is completely out of date today. My Efika has better specs than that. Except for IDE, thanks to incompetent Freescale engineers.

Compared to my A1200 at that time it does not sound very exciting either. I was quite happy with my A1200 in those day (BPPC+BVision). In fact I could not understand interest on Mediator expansion cards either... just having some newer gfx card didnt justify it, in my opinion... but then it was just my opinion :)

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

Quote:

Wol wrote: @Hammer For what purpose? Well I used to do a lot of multimedia stuff back in the day ( Scala MM 300.....400), I got used to super smoooooth animations locked to the frame rate of the monitor, sound also synched up.

In PC gaming world, that’s a VSync issue. Run Scala MM 300 in WinUAE in NTSC mode (60hz) with VSync mode enabled. PC monitor/card must be set for 60hz or 120hz (most laptop flat panels supports 60hz).

Quote:

This also genlocked over live video ,live MIDI etc. Now with todays stuff (granted higher resolutions and color depth) I cannot obtain smooth animations , multimedia on a PC is a total joke, jerky joke. The display's updated halfway thro the monitors display, also iratic frame rates. Does make me laugh when I see a so called modern multimedia display chugging jerkely thro it's program.(Powerpoint what a total desaster)

Some real time presentations uses 3D gaming such as Unreal 2 and Unreal 3 engine.

With Direct3D(and suitable video card), VSync can be applied. For PowerPoint based presentations, one can use "Office FX" (an example) for Direct3D based PowerPoint.

For MS PowerPoint and Windows, Direct3D (real time 3D) transition plug-ins examples
http://www.crystalgraphics.com/presentations/transitions.main.asp

http://www.instanteffects.com/presenter.html

For Windows and real time 3D presentations,
http://www.dxstudio.com/features.aspx

http://darim.tv/products/elearning/vpr.html

http://www.ventuz.com/index.aspx

For MacOS X and real time 3D presentations,
http://www.kinemac.com/products/kinemac/index.html

Last edited by Hammer on 14-Sep-2008 at 02:32 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Sep-2008 at 02:28 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Sep-2008 at 02:21 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Sep-2008 at 02:09 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Sep-2008 at 12:49 AM.

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Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Quote:

I am not so sure. Announced gfx support does not cut it anymore (1600x1200, pffft, useful for minimonitors maybe :)) and SCSI is completely out of date today. My Efika has better specs than that. Except for IDE, thanks to incompetent Freescale engineers.

What's wrong with IDE ?

_________________
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@Leo

There is some issue in the core. I dont remember details anymore.

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Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook