NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/programmer/328

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 6.9 KB

Path: alpha.isc.rit.edu!MJP3783
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: >>>>>>> The Future: Amiga goes P
Date: 6 Jan 1996 16:49:48 GMT
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <4cm97c$[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]>,<4cdu3u$[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
NNTP-Posting-Host: alpha.isc.rit.edu

In article <4cdu3u$[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Stephan Schaem) writes:
>John Hendrikx ([e-mail]) wrote:
>: In a message of 22 Dec 95 Th.huber wrote to All:
>
>:  >> don't use these are likely to break on 68020+ machines with VBR!=$0
>:  >> anyway so they weren't really 680x0 compatible in the first place.  I
>:  >> haven't encountered a single commercial game which doesn't crash with
>:  >> VBR!=$0.
>
>:  Th> VBR is known to most dirty c0ders since the 68010 came out.
>
>: Known, maybe, but nobody seems to USE it.  Why don't they save themselves the
>: trouble and use SetIntVector() instead...
>
> trouble? nha its no trouble to now the VBR adr.

But it is not forward compatible - PPC's, for example, don't have one. All you
are doing is making more work for yourself when it comes to porting yourr
existing code to the PPC.

>:  >> Th> Game programmers would be happy with a hardwarestandard on future
>:  >> Yeah, sure, so they can bash it some more and kill this new line of
>:  >> Amiga's as well.
>
>:  Th> It`s not hardware-c0derz, that ruin the amiga, the amiga ruins itsself
>:  Th> by expanding the system:
>
>: Hardware-banging ruins the Amiga, period.
>
> You mean the amiga would have been better off without games like turrican?
> The demo scene? The toaster?
> Bull, the amiga would have died before the A3000 would have been on the
> drawing board.
> But its stupid to say that the amiga ruin itself by expanding ... crazy
> The amiga stay stagnant for way too long, and lost its edge HW wise &
> kept a high price.
> So Its demo like 9 fingers, games like turrican, development like BSD
> , the toaster that ruin the amiga image?

While it is true that almost all games and demos could not have been written to
be anything close to what we saw without direct hardware access, think about
this - the hardware advancement of the Amiga has come to a grinding halt
because of the direct hardware hitting. It is very difficult to make newer and
more advanced chips to begin with. It is many more orders of magnitude
difficult to make more advanced chips that are register compatible with the
oldest chips. This is (I think) why AGA and AAA took so long and so much $$$ to
produce. If C= engineers had been able, for example, to slap an SVGA board in
the A4000 and let the software engineers write some simple P2C stuff, the 3000
could have easily been the 4000 and the 4000 could be something much better.
The mistake, I feel, is that there was never provided a low level interface. If
there was a way to get to the hardware through the OS in a lower level manner
(something like Gamesmith, for example), then more people might have used it.

>
> If AT dont realease low level info on their new model I will really think
> about upgrading... I wonder how BSD or linux will be ported if they
> shutdown such vital information.

I think that AT needs to make this information available. I also think that
they need to warn people of this: "We make no promises as to the validity of
this information for any future models. We reserve the right to change any/all
machine specific information in this package as of the next release." If you
want to produce a product that will only run on one machine(maybe), fine. I
think that C= should have done that, too. C= spent way too much time (IMNSHO)
making sure that as little software as possible broke under the newer revisions
(2.04, 3.0). If they had released 2.04 in ~1989, and 3.0 in ~1991, I think that
more people would obey the rules. We need to make a distinction - long use apps
vs short use apps. Long use apps, like Word processors, DTP, spreadsheets, etc.
are purchased for monthes/years of use. Games/demos are boughts/downloaded for
weeks/monthes of use. LTA (long term app) programmers _NEED_ to write their
stuff using the OS and all of the rules to ensure that they will run under
future OS revisions. STA coders can go outside the rules because most people
won't even remember their product by the time the new OS/HW revision comes out.



>
> All this is crazy...
>
>:  Th> (gfx-cards: goodbye PAL, welcome to the horror of WBemulations.)
>
>: In is only horror because WB was never meant to work with TrueColor screens.
>: Also games don't work on gfx-cards, if they followed the OS rules (although I
>: have to admit this is hard in the current OS if you want to do a decent game)
>: everything would run quite nicely on a gfx-card.
>
> Ok for PC type games , but console type game have a VERY hard time
> living in an OS env. You loose your sprite, copper, playfeild, blitter
> .. what your gonna do? write a doom clone or a sim city 4000?

Get real, here. The OS doesn't provide the greatest facilities for this stuff,
but do you mean to tell me that an 020/AGA machine can't beat a SNES? I find
that real tough to believe.

>:  Th> I changed my mind in this point. As the there`s no perspective of a
>:  Th> mindblasting new Amigahardware, it`s probably the best to make the OS
>:  Th> portable, so I can still use it on PCs.
>
>: At the moment we can't expect to see new mindblasting Amiga Hardware, but give
>: the PowerAmiga's some time to become common in the Amiga world and AT might
>: have the resources to give us something cool later after Amiga is back on its
>: feet again.
>
> I wish AT would introduce a NEW multimedia machine 'based' on the Amiga OS
> with tomrrow HW(waiting a year to have a year back apple HW is silly, no?).
> Something in the range of the new upcoming SGI lowend  but with an
> affordable price tag. They can keep making A4000, A1200 for all I care but
> if they want to recapture the amiga spirite they better go forward
> and not look backward to create a new machine.
> I can wait 2 year for something radical, been waiting since the A3000 came
> out :)
>
> Stephan

OS's have a traditional tradeoff - service provision vs performance. Some os's
(NExT, for example, from what I have heard) provide almost all of the services
you need to build your app, but suffer in terms of performance, resources
required, and ability to get to the hardware to increase those things. Other
os's (C=64, for example) provide you with minimal help, but allow you to do as
you please. In general, with hw performance vs price flying out of control,
people are tending to move toward os's that give you more services and less
performance because 25% speed decreases on a new processor that is 5X faster
than your old one is not a big deal, compared to the programmer costs to
develop all of the apps that you need for a minimalist OS.