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Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

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Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#91

Post by spacedcowboy »

pjmlp wrote: post #75
spacedcowboy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…

To match the Amiga in gaming, only from STE improvements onwards. At least when the Amiga crashed it got to do some meditation. :)

ST crashes, meanwhile were “da bomb”

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#92

Post by vintermann »

sehugg wrote: post #86
amiga386 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders! This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen. The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers trigger…

Windows 95 was hamstrung by DOS compatibility. If you installed OS/2, you could have butter-smooth mouse cursor movement even while formatting a floppy disk and running a DOS (or even Windows!) VM in another window. And if you had a XGA card (which no one did) you had a hardware mouse cursor sprite, just like the Amiga (except only one boring sprite and no cool audio/video tricks)

DOS was only about 3 years older than Workbench, and OS/2 was about 8 years younger.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#93

Post by amiga386 »

kamma4434 wrote: post #88
amiga386 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders! This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen. The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers trigger…

The mouse pointer on Amiga was a sprite. So it flies above the bitmaps below, thence the 50fps frame rate.

If the Amiga's mouse-pointer sprite was removed and the pointer was rendered onto a bitmap, it would still be 50Hz. There is more than enough time to do that.

The flawless refresh rate comes from the fact the update is executed as part of a level 3 priority CPU interrupt triggered by the vblank refresh. Interrupt code reads the hardware register of a dedicated chip that has been measuring the mouse's potentiometers this whole time, to see how much they've moved. The mouse itself is a passive device.

It then sends a input event to Intuition, whose priority 20 input.device task (the highest priority task in any normal Amiga system) processes the event and updates the hardware sprite coordinates, but could equally write it onto the bitmap. It has the time to do that because everything else in the system waits for it.

Compared to a modern PC, which also uses a hardware cursor... the mouse is an active device and sends its own potentiometer readings as USB input events, which arrive to be processed by an independent USB subsystem in the kernel and is bundled with all the other USB traffic from devices attached on the same bus. A vblank interrupt couldn't get the mouse coordinates even if it wanted to.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#95

Post by detritus »

vidarh wrote: post #30
Annatar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all have our delusions.

The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.

It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was.

I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.

Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#96

Post by smallstepforman »

pjmlp wrote: post #73
flohofwoe wrote: post #37

For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical use…

It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS. Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.

BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#97

Post by johnyzee »

SwellJoe wrote: post #11

The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system)…

Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#98

Post by vintermann »

mmustapic wrote: post #26
doener wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.

No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.

In theory it had memory protection. Processes were reasonably protected from accidentally stepping on each other's tires, but the OS was not. Any app that tried to be clever (which there were plenty of understandable reasons for) or was actively malicious could mess with absolutely everything.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#99

Post by krs_ »

anthk wrote: post #42
mickelsen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and…

A millenial there; I could emualte it with ease under UAE and floppies and multiple guides in early 00's.

I recall also getting it working around that time. I gotta admit though that being used to the very straightforward NES, SNES etc emulators Amiga emulation was pretty confusing with all the different models and kickstarts and workbenches.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#100

Post by smallstepforman »

vidarh wrote: post #85
smallstepforman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.

The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree. Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases. I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that i…

With mmu, every app has its own 32bit address space, and the mmu “maps” the app space to physical space. Legacy apps get shared address space, while newer apps get isolated space. To port apps, its only the messaging system that needs rework, and if the system does its magic with same API, transition is invisible. At the end of the day, only the message address space needs to be shared. Sendmessage() behind the scenes remaps mmu addresses. Not impossible, just requires the will to do it.
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