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Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 4.1 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Steve Koren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: OS features
Date: 31 Dec 1995 13:03:52 -0700
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In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 29 Dec 1995 16:22:05 GMT
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[e-mail] (gcaine) wrote:

> If programs that didn't follow the rules break, so what? They are mostly
> games anyway. I'll admit that games are a big part of the market, but
> most of them broke on each OS revision anyway.

Yep.  Off hand, I can't think of *any* commercial games that will run on
my machine as it stands today.  Those that aren't killed by the 040
(hardly a new processor) or OS 3.0 (hardly a new OS) don't understand
the display database, and assume NTSC refresh rates.  My monitor is a
standard SVGA multisync and won't go that low, so the games don't work.

I think AT can safely ignore the games market - its hopelessly broken
anyway.  Maybe someday the games programmers will write things correctly.
Until then, I gotta use my PC for games (sigh), where at least they know
how to take advantage of the HW you've got.

> >Let's be honest here.  Steve Koren, the poster that you reply

> This confuses me, I am pretty sure I didn't reply to him. Did he say
> that we were all using 500's with WB1.1, and that we should let the

Nope, that was somebody else who said that.

> More powerful CPU's are great, but if you need them just so that the
> OS will function, you've lost the real reason for the better CPU,
> (faster processing for your apps).

Agreed 100%.  But I think that both VM and memory protection can be done
in a way that avoids that problem.  Certainly, in general, adding
features to your OS makes it bigger, but AmigaOS is remarkably tiny for
what it does now.  It may be that the next generation which includes
things like VMM and memory protection squeezes out the very bottom end
of the hardware out there now (512Kb 68000 machines), but shucks, I
think that the other side of the coin here is that people have to be
willing to give up 10 year old hardware if they want to run the latest
OSes.  There's a fine line between being effecient, and being held back
by hopelessly ancient hardware.  One way to look at it is that even
fairly "high end" Amiga hardware is fairly "low end" by modern PC
standards.  I can remember when it was the other way around :(.

> wouldn't want more than 16 megs of memory. I don't want to see the
> OS "require" it though.

Neither do I, although I don't think it would be unreasonable to up the
minimum supported system a bit.  For all the problems of the PC world,
one thing it has going for it is that the current "minimum defult
system" (i.e, the previous generations's) is basically a 486 with at
least 800x600x8-plane graphics.  In a year, it'll be a Pentium/100 with
PCI graphics cards.  True, they have horrible OS bloat, but you can't
get around the fact that you can do things on a Pentium/100 (even with a
terrible OS) that you just can't do on a basic 68000 with 512K and slow
graphics with limited colors and tiny resolutions.  Having a bloated OS
is bad.  Having major, butt-kicking hardware is good :-).

I'd really like to see the minimum "productivity" Amiga be something
like an 040/33 (arguably akin to a midrange 486) with a graphics card,
OS 3.x, and CyberGfx, with a move to PowerAmigas ASAP.  The OS should
run on lower spec machines (maybe down to 68020s) for game machines, but
IMHO we need to get a decent market of reasonably modern machines out
there in order for the application base to reflect what a modern Amiga
can really do.  We're suffering now from not having any development of
the machine for years.

  - steve