An early Power Macintosh commercial showing the competition between Power PC and Intel chips
the 4096 color thing was about HAM mode. HAM is slow, even on AGA it’s slow. There were a few video games that used HAM however. Also, once you got up to OS3, I believe it handled 256 unless you go over to RTS mode. Actually, I have my my A4000 and one of the two A1200s using a G-Rex PCI bus board and Voodoo5 video card on the 4000 and a Voodoo4 on the 1200. The desktop and most apps run 24bit color. The only thing it doesn’t do is play AGA games on those video cards.
Not realtime, more like nothing slowed it down. Tripos in all its forms, not just amiga os, can shift data a but better than the contermpories.
I know the maiga chips were pretty special too. Thing is, the os never used them to the potentional it should have. 4096 colours? no, 4 for you! AGA is worse with this, as they didn’t even ship them with monitor drivers for all of its screenmodes. 1024×768 is possible (I use it), but they pretended it wasn’t.
At any rate, my point is this: the kernel was made for realtime processing, the kernels of other OSes weren’t. This allowed for more number crunching in real time for the speed of the chip. But beyond NASA’s reasoning, the moment you dismiss the performance increases given by the chipset is the moment you’ve failed to comprehend what made the Amiga the best machine of its time. Yes, the OS was cut down, I admit that, but the specialized chips played a very significant role in the performance too
When I asked an engineer back in the 90s, the Amigas were used because their kernel allowed for faster real time processing of data… He also said that they “didn’t trust anything else with human lives”. I can kind of see an 8086 being used on the shuttles… Intel *does* have a reputation for making chips that can withstand more interference. But, I’ve also noticed my Amigas tend to have a very high resistance to interference as well.
You must have low standards if 15fps is playable to you. I remember a solid 25fps on a 486 we pulled out of a skip.
And I know all about the NASA amigas. they never went anywhere near the space shuttles, they were simply used for recording of data from whatever was floating in space at the time, be it the space shuttle (which wasn’t what the amigas spent most of their time on) or the many different rockets. Anything more than an 8086 would be too buggy in space to be safely relied on.
On the contrary, 15fps might not be the fastest thing around, but consider that’s roughly the same framerate a 486 of the same speed. My threshhold is 12.5fps for a game. This is because older movies used roughly that framerate as a lower threshhold. Also, the Amiga was used to monitor systems during the launch of the Space Shuttle. Seriously, look it up. Don’t take my word for it, look it up, heck email NASA and ask if I’m right and if so, ask why they used them.
My reference to the lack of CDROM support was not an example of something directly effecting speed. It was however, an example of the amigas operating system doing nothing.
The CD32 doesn’t really count as a computer, as it needs weird expansions it was never designed for to function as one. The akiko chip should have been standard AGA functionality anyway.
Also, 15fps is about half the speed of a playable game, unless you want to be sick.
And the space shuttle has used 8086s since the 80s.
Infact, that 33mhz one runs Doom at full resolution and 15fps despite having to do chunky to planar conversion. This is attributable to the kernel’s design for real time processing. Of course you don’t have to take my word for THAT… Ask the people who chose the Amiga for the Space Shuttle back in the day. THEY are the REAL experts about why the shuttles’ Amigas only got decomissioned in the last decade, not you or I.
However, your original statement that the lack of native CDROM support is inherent to the superior speed is bogus. There are a number of Amigas that included native CDROM support, the two more notable ones being CD32 and CDTV. Frankly I couldn’t care less about the CDTV. Anyway, the CD32 is easily one of the fastest out of the box (if least modifiable) in the product line. The nearly stock A1200 I have (33mhz 030 card with 16megs of ram added) easily performs as well as a Pentium 150mhz
I won’t deny that Classact and MUI (which I happen to have a full license key to MUI for) have a major speed hit. Even on my highly modified a1200, there’s a marked drop in performance for programs that use either vs straight Intuition. The problem is, however, that Intuition does infact use the coprocessors. MUI and ClassAct do not hit the hardware so directly as Intuition. If they did, they’d probably run much faster.
I was refering to “workbench” as the entire os, as is a common name for it. None of my amiga disks before the ESCOM era called it “amiga os”.
Speaking of intuition specifically, I can safely say that that does nothing either, if you want software developed after about 1995 you have to install Classact or reaction, as well as MUI. Basic toolkits that should have been there from the start. That gaping lack of features is a huge speed boost.
Here, you have exhibited the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I happen to have a room full of working Amigas from across the decades. At least one of each model except CDTV. This includes a CD-32 which uses WB3 and handles CDROM natively. So, before you go telling me how well Intuition performs, keep in mind that I’m intimately familiar with it. By the way, that’s the name of Amiga’s GUI is “Intuition” not Workbench. Workbench is just the file manager. It’s like Explorer to Windows or Finder to Mac.
Uh actually Mac OS has ALWAYS used icons for file browsing, since about 1983, before they even finished development. And, it’s always saved icon position too. and it’s actually co-op multitasked just fine since about system 3.
Workbench is an incredibly primitive gui. that’s the true reason it’s so fast, because when you want features like “1024×768″ and “icons with more than 4 colours” you have to start piling on weird shit from the internet. thats all OS 3.5 and 3.9 ever were.
On the contrary, the OS only had a few non-resident functions that operated on the CPU, the rest of everything else was on the chipset, such as Intuition. In addition, it was the only OS at the time that allowed you to save icon positions, so you can hardly fault it for that. Go back to the other OSs of the time, MacOS6 (which did not multitask) and Windows 3.x (which only cooperatively multitasked). Neither had icon based file browsing. Windows had progman, but that wasn’t a file browser.
Sure, the chipset was great. But the OS never used it, you can install an rtg card and soundcard and pop the chipset out the sockets on the logic board, it’ll boot up just fine. In fact a couple of 68060 clones never had the chipset.
The OS was lacking a lot of features. For example, you had to manually save icon positions and also manually update file browser windows, as well as the fact you couldn’t even click a titlebar to bring the window to the front ( a real pain in the ass).
Plus, Commodore never added native support. They went defunct before even Microsoft had native support in Windows. Still, you’re missing the point. The Amiga did *more* than other machines of it’s time and was *still* faster. Those 9 coprocesors (in the case of an AGA machine, fewer but still a lot of coprocessors for ECS and OCS Amigas) really added up quickly.
CDROM was not wide spread in 1992. You have to remember that. When I say that WB3.0 predates it, I mean it predates the widespread adoption. Windows couldn’t handle CDROM drives on its own at that time either. It needed mscdex in autoexec.bat and some other file I forget what in config.sys. Also, it was typically up to the CDROM drive manufacturers back then to provide their own driver support, and they did, even on Amiga. Native CDROM support does not constitute a performance decrease.
3.0 wasn’t before cdrom, it was 1992. Before C= got of their lazy asses and added cdrom, maybe.
And the os not running on the CPU? What kind of magic os is this? amigaos can run with the chipset removed, so logically you’re saying that it runs on imagination?
The OS did nothing at all. It provided multitasking, then went for a walk while third party devs had to nail UI toolsets together out of bits of old wood they found on the streets.
You’re only half right. The reason WB3.0 didn’t support CDROM out of the box was because it predated CDROM. You an hardly fault it for that. As for why it was so fast, it wasn’t because the OS did nothing, it’s because the CPU did nothing. The OS ran on the coprocessors, not the CPU. So the CPU idled… a lot… The result was that it had a lot more power to spare. As for why NASA used Amiga, it’s because the kernel was designed for realtime processing. Other systems weren’t.
@luccaskunk The amiga was faster because it’s operating system did literally nothing at all. I think 3.0 had a patch that added support for… what was it… cdrom. Damn, that shit is basic.
Yes! Guess what Apple uses now… Intel. This commercial must haunt the day lights out of the person who got the idea for this commercial!
Before it was faster… But yeah you guys say the irony… true true, but times have changed!
Oh the irony
@MLeyden91 The ad was made around-about 15 or more years ago. I think that suffice to say companies are allowed to change. Also, it was true at the time that Intel’s chips in PCs had worse performance than PowerPC chips in competing classes of Macs.
The reason for the switch to Intel wasn’t a question of performance. It was a question of power-savings, and delivering the highest end processors to the notebook Macs. The PPC G5 never made it into a single portable Mac, it was so power hungry.
Oh dear. And what does Mac run on now? Intel
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