Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[Thomas Richter]

Yes, and your point is?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Yes, and your point is?

oh, my point is that probably there is some miscommunication in this thread - all your points are valid but only to HW of one vendor where other vendor may implement particular functionality or not at all or in other way.
so doing some generalization on SVGA may be not the best as they are unique from vendor to vendor and can't be considered as some common denominator for offered functionality - they offered commonly frame buffer with particular organization located trough some window in address space with lot of x86 limitations and lot of workarounds for those x86 limitations.
Saying that some chip offered capability to switch video mode within single line or other similar to Amiga functionality is meaningless for this discussion as it was not standard and usually not used.

btw auto-scroll or virtual desktop was supported by ATI drivers if i recall correctly

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

What I miss on windows is not screen dragging (I rarely need that), I miss panning aka "autoscroll". Something all VGA chips also support with ease, just window does not expose it. But, that is only me.

It surprise me someone can miss this feature because I tried it once on the Amiga and it gave me the nausea, literally, after a few minutes.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

No, and this just shows you lack knowledge. Graphics cards like the Cirrus5446 or the S3Virge (or even the S3Trio64V+) can mix different modes together

Even ones as old as the Cirrus or S3 can do it.

So please, get your history right. What the Amiga chipset offered back then was later on available on contemporary VGA chips as well

Thanks for that. I read the data sheet of one Cirrus Logic chip and nothing was mentioned about this feature as far as I could tell. I didn't study it very closely though. I had an RTG card back in the day and it did do limited 'screen dragging', but I guess that was just a driver limitation, right?

So all I can say is that this 100% Amiga compatible screen dragging ability of PC graphics chips 'back in the day' (1990's) was unknown to me.

However I did some research and found out that (according to the AROS team) screen dragging was actually patented by Commodore, so anyone else who implemented it without permission would be violating that patent.

BTW all those cards you mention were introduced in 1995 or later, so at the time Hombre was developed it was more advanced than PC VGA cards, most (all?) of which did not have the hardware to do proper screen dragging.

The "shortcoming" is that the average PC "window manager" does not support the metaphor of "screens", but the hardware easily could. It is just not requested much and thus not implemented. It is a pure software restriction and a pure matter of user demand.

Pity. Of course there is no demand for screen dragging today because why would you want something you don't know about?

My Linux machine has 'workspaces' which are described as 'virtual desktops'. They are not very useful because you can only work in one 'desktop' at a time.

But today, it makes no sense to restrict "screen movement" to vertical only. Instead, you call them windows, and you can drag them wherever you want, and whatever colors or resolutions you want.

Windows are not screens. Arranging them can be frustrating. I tend to run apps in maximized windows so I don't have to fiddle with them, but then to see two windows at once I have to change them back to sizable, then resize and move them to where I can see a part of both. It's a slow and frustrating way to do what the Amiga does naturally.

Restricting movement to vertical is better because then you don't have to worry about horizontal mouse movement - just grab and drag knowing it will go up and down perfectly vertical without wobbling around.

But of course you will just say that for wanting that I am a 'very funny man' with peculiar desires that nobody else has. You see, if a modern PC doesn't do something you want, that's your fault for not accepting the wisdom of the OS gods when they say 'it makes no sense'.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Wrong. The S3 stream processor (also in the S3Trio64V+) can do that with ease. The P-IV Cirrus can do it with ease, no CPU power required.

That's quite surprising.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

That is just a matter of software, user interface and what you are used to.

Nowadays I'm more used to Windows than AmigaOS, but screen swapping is something that would be nice (being able to swap full screen windows, not just cycle through all windows).

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

What I miss on windows is not screen dragging

That's more useful on Amiga hardware and certainly not needed anymore.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Something all VGA chips also support with ease, just window does not expose it.

On current and recent hardware you'd just use the GPU for that.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

BTW all those cards you mention were introduced in 1995 or later, so at the time Hombre was developed it was more advanced than PC VGA cards, most (all?) of which did not have the hardware to do proper screen dragging.

No. The cards I mention support mode mixing. For screen dragging of screens of the same mode, you do not need such features. You only need the "line compare register", which is a standard VGA register all VGA cards support (and which is made use of by P96, obviously). That goes probably back to CGA or EGA even.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

My Linux machine has 'workspaces' which are described as 'virtual desktops'. They are not very useful because you can only work in one 'desktop' at a time.

I'm not sure what you mean. You can certainly work in multiple desktops at a time, and on my linux machine, you can also drag windows between the workspaces. You cannot drag workspaces, if this is what you mean.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Restricting movement to vertical is better because then you don't have to worry about horizontal mouse movement - just grab and drag knowing it will go up and down perfectly vertical without wobbling around.

How a restriction can be an advantage is beyond me. What you probably want is a better visual cue or a better window manager. But that's just the matter of getting used to it. You are used to screens, which is fine, but the average Linux or windows user is not. Freely movable "window containers" (aka screens) would probably be a nice GUI element, though it does not take special hardware (anymore) to do that. It is just a matter of software.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But of course you will just say that for wanting that I am a 'very funny man' with peculiar desires that nobody else has. You see, if a modern PC doesn't do something you want, that's your fault for not accepting the wisdom of the OS gods when they say 'it makes no sense'.

Actually, the problem is that you are so "tight" into Amiga space, you probably do not notice that most other people do not care about your experiences anymore. Most people do not care about screens or dragging, it is an obsolete concept that does not make sense anymore, so you are pretty much alone with your demands. People today assume that computers work like smartphones (or I must assume so, given the look of the gnome desktop). Not that I personally like that, but I am probably in the minority.

[grond]

I find virtual desktops much more useful than draggable screens. I never liked paging through a lot of screens which all but the Workbench screen usually only had one program running. That made them full-screen windows. Also, if you dragged down a screen half-way and then clicked through the screens, that screen would stay pulled-down making it awkward to handle. Thus, I would only pull-down screens to see something on another screen and then drag the screen back up.

Of course, screen dragging was a great feature at the time. There was little display real estate and there had to be a way to handle the outputs of multiple programs in a multitasking OS. The hardware wasn't powerful enough to move that much graphical content which is why the copper was such a useful coprocessor. However, with all that in mind with a modern monitor that easily lets me arrange multiple windows next to each other I find virtual desktops more useful than draggable screens. Hence, I never missed the feature when I got a PC (running linux with fvwm2 and beyond which all had virtual screens).

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Windows are not screens. Arranging them can be frustrating. I tend to run apps in maximized windows so I don't have to fiddle with them, but then to see two windows at once I have to change them back to sizable, then resize and move them to where I can see a part of both. It's a slow and frustrating way to do what the Amiga does naturally.

In Windows you just hover over the maximize button of one of the apps, select which window arrangement you want (it shows various 2,3 or 4 window arrangements depending on your overall screen size) and then pick which other windows you want to see. Much, much easier than screen dragging and considerably more flexible. You can also do similar things by dragging a window up against the screen edges/corners or use virtual desktops if you as re so inclined.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

People today assume that computers work like smartphones

It seems people don't know there's no difference between the two for some reason.

Originally Posted by grond

I never liked paging through a lot of screens which all but the Workbench screen usually only had one program running.

I'm the opposite and find screen cycling awesome

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

No. The cards I mention support mode mixing. For screen dragging of screens of the same mode, you do not need such features. You only need the "line compare register", which is a standard VGA register all VGA cards support (and which is made use of by P96, obviously). That goes probably back to CGA or EGA even.

Splitscreen in EGA is somehow corrupted and in VGA it may work OK but as you pointed both screens need to be same videomode so it is not substantially different than other techniques (for example bitblit in SW or HW).
Of course screen dragging is useful if graphic pipelines similar to Amiga where you can mix video modes mostly to conserve memory.
But this is same story as with windowing (virtual screen, autoscroll etc) - even plain VGA can do this but anyway it was rarely used, even rarely exposed to user so preventing to be used.

[MigaTech]

DP is just like all of us, a passionate person over Amiga.

You can all rave on about what graphics cards and computers can do today. It still isn't going to change the fact that for a while, Personal Computers, struggled to replicate what the A1000 could do, on just 16 Bit and 512KB RAM.

It was once stated that the A2000 was so well designed, that it would not become obsolete, until well after the turn of the century.

IMHO, Amiga computers will never be obsolete and/or superseded!

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

DP is just like all of us, a passionate person over Amiga.

You can all rave on about what graphics cards and computers can do today. It still isn't going to change the fact that for a while, Personal Computers, struggled to replicate what the A1000 could do, on just 16 Bit and 512KB RAM.

It was once stated that the A2000 was so well designed, that it would not become obsolete, until well after the turn of the century.

IMHO, Amiga computers will never be obsolete and/or superseded!

I agree, that's why DeluxePaint should have used an Amiga at some point.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Technically all chips mentioned by you are or first or second generation of SVGA chip-sets (so they are not so old) where VGA legacy core existed almost in parallel to SVGA (and mostly undocumented).
Also there is no standard methods to access this functionality (even VESA standard was quite limited introducing VESA VBE and VESA AF quite late...).
VGA chips was usually quite limited in terms of flexibility so if we limit to VGA then all vendor unique functionality mentioned by you is not present.

C='s Amiga AGA unit sales didn't even reach 1 million units.

"Screen dragging" functionality can be enabled for PC SVGA when hardware function is available and if it's a "killer app" then the PC market will gravitate towards it.

Examples of the PC market gravitating toward a particular vendor
1. NVIDIA's RT is a "killer app" that resulted in NVIDIA's discrete PC GPU dominance.

2. NVIDIA's GeForce's T&L (DirectX 6.1, DirectX7, Quake 3's NV15 map) feature was the "killer app" that killed 3DFX. NVIDIA directly wreaked 3DFX and SGI both in the market space and NV's counter-legal battles.

GeForce's hardware T&L was useful in pro-3D apps that stepped on SGI's core market.

3. NVIDIA's TNT/TNT2 32bit 3D render vs 3DFX's 16bit 3D render. The loser is 3DFX. ATI's graphics products are just commodity OEM shippers.

4. The gaming market was biased towards fake 3D around the late 1993 Doom era. X86 CPU cloners focused on good integer performance until 1996 Quake forced Pentium FPU issue on X86 CPU cloners.

Before NVIDIA TNT, my SVGA card is S3 Trio 64UV PCI.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by pandy71

oh, my point is that probably there is some miscommunication in this thread - all your points are valid but only to HW of one vendor where other vendor may implement particular functionality or not at all or in other way.
so doing some generalization on SVGA may be not the best as they are unique from vendor to vendor and can't be considered as some common denominator for offered functionality - they offered commonly frame buffer with particular organization located trough some window in address space with lot of x86 limitations and lot of workarounds for those x86 limitations.
Saying that some chip offered capability to switch video mode within single line or other similar to Amiga functionality is meaningless for this discussion as it was not standard and usually not used.

btw auto-scroll or virtual desktop was supported by ATI drivers if i recall correctly

PC's recent ReBar improvements removed the 256 MB memory address window.

Amiga's 24-bit memory address range from 68EC020 and 68000 has its own limitations and issues e.g. PCMCIA memory range conflicts.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 (mobile Pentium IV + GeForce FX 5200 64 MB) with 2GB RAM and a PCMCIA slot, the PCMCIA prism2 wifi card just works. I was using an older PC for flash ROM update prism2 WiFI card with WPA/WP2.

A 32-bit X86 allows 3GB system memory (asymmetric dual channel mode) and 1 GB address space for I/O and add-on devices. I tested this configuration on an ASUS W3J laptop with 32 bit Core Duo CPU.

AmigaOS's 32-bit memory model has 2GB of system memory and it has issues with PiStorm-Emu68 Pi 4B with 4GB RAM.

[K1200RS21]

my good old a2000 manages to work miracles with his picasso 4 from 1996

https://youtube.com/shorts/m9loS6l85y0?feature=share

my graphics card is limited in zorro 2 but its still axeptable in use

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Splitscreen in EGA is somehow corrupted and in VGA it may work OK but as you pointed both screens need to be same videomode so it is not substantially different than other techniques (for example bitblit in SW or HW).

The substantially different thing is that you do not need to move graphics around, which is quite an advantage on slow machines or slow graphics cards. Nowadays, of course, this makes no difference and no sense anymore. You can realize screen dragging just as compositing effect with the GPU. In fact, this is how it works on AmigaOs 4. There, a screen is just a moving raster where the GPU moves graphics data around.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

The substantially different thing is that you do not need to move graphics around, which is quite an advantage on slow machines or slow graphics cards. Nowadays, of course, this makes no difference and no sense anymore. You can realize screen dragging just as compositing effect with the GPU. In fact, this is how it works on AmigaOs 4. There, a screen is just a moving raster where the GPU moves graphics data around.

Yes, but this was advantage of Amiga HW (capability to display various screen modes) and it was used by Amiga OS contrary to PC OS's - i don't recall single PC app using splitscreen (beside some video test running in DOS) and perhaps i was able to use single app using windowing (not sure but it could be graphic viewer QPV in DOS). Nowadays usually you have graphic compositor where multiple layers of graphics (with different organization, bitdepth etc) is combined, frequently with freely definable alpha etc and everything in HW.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

C='s Amiga AGA unit sales didn't even reach 1 million units.

"Screen dragging" functionality can be enabled for PC SVGA when hardware function is available and if it's a "killer app" then the PC market will gravitate towards it.

Examples of the PC market gravitating toward a particular vendor
1. NVIDIA's RT is a "killer app" that resulted in NVIDIA's discrete PC GPU dominance.

2. NVIDIA's GeForce's T&L (DirectX 6.1, DirectX7, Quake 3's NV15 map) feature was the "killer app" that killed 3DFX. NVIDIA directly wreaked 3DFX and SGI both in the market space and NV's counter-legal battles.

GeForce's hardware T&L was useful in pro-3D apps that stepped on SGI's core market.

3. NVIDIA's TNT/TNT2 32bit 3D render vs 3DFX's 16bit 3D render. The loser is 3DFX. ATI's graphics products are just commodity OEM shippers.

4. The gaming market was biased towards fake 3D around the late 1993 Doom era. X86 CPU cloners focused on good integer performance until 1996 Quake forced Pentium FPU issue on X86 CPU cloners.

Before NVIDIA TNT, my SVGA card is S3 Trio 64UV PCI.

Originally Posted by hammer

PC's recent ReBar improvements removed the 256 MB memory address window.

Amiga's 24-bit memory address range from 68EC020 and 68000 has its own limitations and issues e.g. PCMCIA memory range conflicts.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 (mobile Pentium IV + GeForce FX 5200 64 MB) with 2GB RAM and a PCMCIA slot, the PCMCIA prism2 wifi card just works. I was using an older PC for flash ROM update prism2 WiFI card with WPA/WP2.

A 32-bit X86 allows 3GB system memory (asymmetric dual channel mode) and 1 GB address space for I/O and add-on devices. I tested this configuration on an ASUS W3J laptop with 32 bit Core Duo CPU.

AmigaOS's 32-bit memory model has 2GB of system memory and it has issues with PiStorm-Emu68 Pi 4B with 4GB RAM.

Once again - in Amiga times even 64MiB of RAM was huge amount of memory - you are referring to technology created 10..20 years after Amiga (Commodore) bankruptcy. It is quite obvious that technology progressed significantly since AGA times.
Amiga OS memory limitation is not substantially different than other 32 bit OS's from beginning of 90's.
Even NT was severely limited in terms of addressable memory despite being oriented toward professional use cases.
I recall many statements around 80/90 that 32 bit address space is huge and RAM size will be NEVER able to achieve 32 bit address limit (physical limitation).

Btw - if you willing to check conflicts in 24 bit address space you should definitely get more familiar with PC XT/AT limitations...
PCMCIA is not conflicting - simply this address is shared - you could at least in theory use FC lines to isolate PCMCIA from general memory range thus avoid conflicts - there is multiple if then but this was never big problem as rarely amount of RAM in A600/A1200 in 24 bit space exceeded 4MiB (and it was never issue in 32 bit space).

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

I agree, that's why DeluxePaint should have used an Amiga at some point.

You missed the abbreviation DP was meant for David pleasance.

[pandy71]

It is only me having strange feeling of reading some synthetic text generated by some ChatGPT?