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On 21/03/2013 10:13 AM, scott wrote:
>> And there's the rub. It's got to be modern and powerful for anyone to be
>> interesting. But if it's modern and powerful, it's going to be far too
>> complex to tinker with at the level you would with the C64. If you have
>> a C64, it's *feasible* to write a short machine code routine which
>> performs a key-scan and pokes the video hardware in response to
>> different key presses. You could, given a month of Sundays,
>> realistically build your own micro-OS.
>>
>> *Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something
>> as complex as Linux to power it.
>
> Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or
> multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC
> interpreter.
It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more
complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the
C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change
video mode, before you even *draw* anything...
> Also the whole GUI is
> ridiculously fast and responsive as it was originally designed for ARM
> processors under 50 MHz (the web browser is way faster than whatever the
> one included in raspbian, although not as feature-rich).
I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was
flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the
system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes*
for GNOME to load!! o_O
>> Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the
>> screen turn green or hear a sound play or something.
>
> You can issue poke commands from BASIC directly in RiscOS - IIRC ?<addr>
> is a variable you can use to read or write a byte to that address, or
> !<addr> to read/write a 4-byte word in one go. RiscOS BASIC also allows
> you to drop into the assembler very simply and then obviously reading
> and writing to memory is easily possible. The assembly language is
> pretty easy to learn.
The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small
graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a
twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.
> AFAIK they haven't managed to get GPU access in RiscOS yet. If you
> wanted to do GPU stuff then you'd be better off with Linux, for example
> I use mine mainly with xbmc as a media centre, plays 1080p videos fine
> from an external drive through HDMI to a TV, so the GPU must be involved
> somewhere.
By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)
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>> The GPU on the
>> Raspberry Pi are closed-source; you need to sign an NDA just to see what
>> registers it has! Nobody is going to be experimenting with that anytime
>> soon.
> The GPU itself is closed source just as the GPU in your PC is.
That is correct. But my PC wasn't designed to be hacked on by hobby
programmers. It was designed to get real work done.
> Well, the Linux API is open so you do have a way to poke it and also the
> framebuffer is available for bare metal programmers, AKAIK.
I'll bet it's a tad more complex than "if you poke a 1 at this address,
then this pixel changes colour" though.
> Does your PC have GPIO pins that you can access by simply writing '1' or '0' to
> a file? I thought not. The Pi is the cheapest and easiest way to do physical
> computing.
Yeah, I have no idea what GPIO is, nor what it might be useful for. Does
it just mean that you can change the logic level of the pin by writing
some bytes to memory? What are the voltage levels? Presumably you can
*read* from these pins as well?
It sounds sort-of interesting, but I'm not sure what you could
realistically use it for. The best I can come up with is putting the Pi
in a box and connecting the GPIO pins to some buttons so you can control
the device while it does... whatever the hell it does.
On an unrelated note... I have a small graphing calculator at home. It's
powered by a Z80, and has a low-res LCD and a bazillion buttons. You can
"program" it in that you can store small datasets on it, and you can
make it walk through menu screens in a defined order. Now, if that puppy
were actually programmable for real... OK, actually nobody else but me
would care, I guess. :-P
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:29:42 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> (For reasons unknown, a bazillion SSH *clients* for Windows exist, but
>>> not one single *server* that doesn't cost £££.)
>>
>> Wrong. Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.
>
> It seems rather silly to install an entire Unix emulator just to run one
> tiny application... but sure, I guess that works.
You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin
DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).
>>>> Media centers seems fairly popular as well.
>>>
>>> I must admit, I have no idea what that actually means.
>>
>> A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.
>
> Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do
> this?"
Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
your TV?
Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format so
you can access them all without having to take them out of the case? (I
know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to MP3s
- some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn through use).
> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy "digital
> picture frames"...
I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that
deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're
displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)
Jim
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Like, under AmigaOS the
> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
> responsiveness.
That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at least
a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
memory speed, HD speed...)
The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.
--
- Warp
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:57:35 -0400, Warp wrote:
> The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.
Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy
loops.
(Mostly joking)
Jim
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>>> Wrong. Cygwin comes with sshd based on openssh, and it costs nothing.
>>
>> It seems rather silly to install an entire Unix emulator just to run one
>> tiny application... but sure, I guess that works.
>
> You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin
> DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).
Presumably I still have to create a folder called "etc" containing a
folder named "sshd" containing a file named "sshd.conf" though. (?) And
somehow tell Cygwin where the hell that folder is...
>>> A PC that's hooked up to a TV to play audio/video.
>>
>> Perhaps the part I don't understand is "why would you ever want to do
>> this?"
>
> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
> your TV?
Where would you get these files from?
> Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format so
> you can access them all without having to take them out of the case? (I
> know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to MP3s
> - some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn through use).
This is the only source I can think of - and I'm the sort of person who
would play the actual physical disks rather than the lower-quality
recompressed versions.
Besides, aren't all DVDs copy-protected anyway?
>> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy "digital
>> picture frames"...
>
> I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that
> deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're
> displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)
I guess it's more that I'm the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't
actually have any pictures I want to look at. (Apart from the Zazzle
posters covering every inch of my walls...)
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> > The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> > some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.
> Just launch Microsoft Office - that'll add the requisite number of busy
> loops.
> (Mostly joking)
I don't own it, but I'm pretty certain that if I launched MS Office,
I would not notice any slowdown anywhere.
Andrew's problem is that he's saying "I run program A on the Amiga and
program B on the PC, and the former is more responsive than the latter."
So what? That's like saying that rendering one frame of some CGI movie
on a 1000-computer renderfarm using Maya takes 48 hours, while rendering
some scene with POV-Ray on a 80486 takes 5 minutes. Does that mean that
the 80486 or POV-Ray are faster than Maya on the 1000-computer renderfarm?
If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
things.
For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
and let's compare it to a PC.
--
- Warp
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>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>> responsiveness.
>
> That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at least
> a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
> memory speed, HD speed...)
>
> The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.
To be clear: The P4 obviously wipes the floor with the Amiga if you ask
it to do something that's actually compute-bound, like running POV-Ray.
(IIRC, Skyvase.pov takes about 2 *hours* on a stock Amiga 1200. Even a
P4 can polish it off faster than that.) I'm talking specifically about
GUI responsiveness.
It's perfectly possible for a PC running Windows to perform far, far
slower than an Amiga. Consider the following factors:
* Virtual memory paging. (Apparently 128MB RAM just isn't enough for
Windows NT, never mind Windows XP. The Amiga's piffling 2MB is
apparently *plenty* for the native AmigaOS - rather unsurprisingly.)
* Network lag. (Remember, if you browse to a network share, the entire
GUI freezes while Windows waits for a reply. Multi-threading? What's that?)
* Video drivers. (If you don't install the drivers for your graphics
card, at least under Windows NT, the system performs *laughably* slowly.
I mean a C64 could out-run this! Never mind an actual Amiga... If you
*do* install the drivers but they're just a bit crap, expect poor
performance.)
* Antivirus software. (Even when my Amiga was running such, it never
seemed to have any measurably performance impact. Ever tried installing
Norton System Works? It's *notorious* for slowing PCs down to the point
of near unusability.)
So yes, a P4 is *vastly* superior to the Amiga's 68020 in terms of
compute power. (A fact easily verified by comparing Debian 68k agains
Debian i386.) But compute performance is *not* the only metric of
importance when considering apparent user responsiveness.
Having said all that, in the main PC hardware seems to have finally
reached the point where an expensive PC is as fast as my 20-year old
Amiga in terms of visible responsiveness.
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On 21/03/2013 09:16 PM, Warp wrote:
> If we are comparing, we should compare the *same thing*, not different
> things.
>
> For instance, let's see how fast the Amiga opens a 2048x1536 full color
> PNG image, applies some gaussian filter to it, and saves it back to PNG,
> and let's compare it to a PC.
Thing is, your typical user cares about "I click on this folder, and it
takes 15 seconds to open" verses "I click on this folder and the window
opens in under 200ms". To a user, that *is* "the same thing".
Yes, *clearly* a modern OS is doing way more work than AmigaOS was ever
capable of. But in terms if *visible responsiveness*, the Amiga was much
better than PCs of the time.
As I say, if you run a copy of Windows 7 on a decent spec PC today, it's
usually fast enough now. Back in the days of the Pentium 4, this was
usually not the case.
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On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:09:41 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> You don't need to install the whole thing, installing sshd + the cygwin
>> DLLs is sufficient (the installation is quite granular).
>
> Presumably I still have to create a folder called "etc" containing a
> folder named "sshd" containing a file named "sshd.conf" though. (?) And
> somehow tell Cygwin where the hell that folder is...
You've never actually used Cygwin before, have you? Because if you had,
you wouldn't have to ask that question.
>> Because you have a collection of video files that you want to watch on
>> your TV?
>
> Where would you get these files from?
Rip DVDs, free videos from the 'net - plenty of sources.
>> Because maybe you want to rip your DVD collection to a digital format
>> so you can access them all without having to take them out of the case?
>> (I know people who do that - it's the same reason one might rip a CD to
>> MP3s - some do it so the original media won't be damaged or worn
>> through use).
>
> This is the only source I can think of - and I'm the sort of person who
> would play the actual physical disks rather than the lower-quality
> recompressed versions.
Presuming you created lower-quality recompressed versions (which isn't
necessarily the only way to rip DVDs).
> Besides, aren't all DVDs copy-protected anyway?
Only to keep honest people honest. And some honest people still will rip
their DVDs.
>>> Then again, I also don't understand why anybody would ever buy
>>> "digital picture frames"...
>>
>> I guess you're just old-fashioned and would prefer paper that
>> deteriorates over time, or if you want to change a picture you're
>> displaying, take it out and put another one in. ;)
>
> I guess it's more that I'm the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't
> actually have any pictures I want to look at. (Apart from the Zazzle
> posters covering every inch of my walls...)
I want to get a digital frame to sync up the Astronomy Picture of the Day
to.
Jim
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