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Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
171–180 of 181 posts
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The keyword being latency. Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does. It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).
AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS. It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling tha…
>For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process.
This is, by the way, equivalent to SCHED_FIFO on Linux.
There are very legitimate reasons a hard realtime task may need to be non-interruptable.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS. It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling tha…
There was a Shareware tool called Executive that would manipulate task priorities to, amongst other things, prioritize the active application.
That particular tool's purpose was actually to shift the Amiga's very simple RTOS-like static priority scheduler more towards a more complex fairness-based scheduler like Linux/Windows currently has, making it less real-time than before. Yes, you could make rules that could elevate certain tasks by name matching automatically, giving you more control and predictability, but that's not something you couldn't already do.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I should correct myself here and say it's not potentiometers, but that the mouse has vertical/horizontal wheels that let infrared light through to detectors, and the hardware is counting a quadrature-encoded pair of pulse trains, so it can tell how many steps back/forward each axis has moved.
Nice article about it: https://www.markwrobel.dk/post/amiga-machine-code-letter11/
It also estimates that, if the hardware counters are sampled every vblank, it's accurate (no missed wraparound) for the mouse moving at up to 3km/h! But it's still possible to whip the mouse around faster than that, so action games might like to sample the mouse more often than once per frame.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#175The 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)…
I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days.
I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days. I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running…
I had an A3000 as my last Amiga. It was my favorite machine growing up as a teen and I still regret selling it.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#177I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems. Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison. It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God the…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor la…
Floppy based Amigas were incredibly clunky. Each file shown in the Workbench GUI has its own icon file (".info" file) which is loaded separately, resulting in additional time for each file in a "drawer" (Amiga folder.)
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#178I own The Amiga /AmigaOne /HombreOne . I open source it. Proof ask Gensia they just didnt want to hurt anybodies feelings.. f it. Im RHRH Constantine XII -Amigaman. Base it off of Aros or something. Amigaone model name will be x86 compatible. Hombre will be RISC/ARM compatible. Proof .. how in the heck do u think u got all the Amiga OS on aminet ,and avaibole to u. Plus to boot the hardware that is open to u now. I know Dave and Karl. I know them ALL. People, should check instead of beLIVING liars illumanti stool pidgins like rj and david pleansance, bill, coloanto, so called commodore, and any other so called amiga company. So contact I if u want to see and get that Open source Amiga that u really have.. search my name.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ar…
The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo, the total package was extremely good. After the Amiga died I moved on into a Mac running OSX, and later Apple Silicon, when you combine the MacOS with Apple Silicon, it feels very similar to the Commodore Amiga in short, the total package of hardware and software made by one company, provided a level of integration that Microsoft Windows still can’t equal even…
> The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo [...]
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
#18010 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
This is actually wrong because most of the A1000s were bundled with an RGB monitor and an optional composite out. The system wouldn't be really connected to a shitty TV until the budget models were released well after OS 1.X color scheme was established.
As far as I can tell the blue/orange scheme was instead aimed at monochromatic monitors.