BBC Micro Live (1985) - Commodore Amiga Debut

Fred Harris looks at the cutting edge Amiga computer.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• commodore
• amiga
• A1000
• 1000
• computer
• micro
• live
• pc
• retro
• vintage
• eighties
• 80's
• graphics
• apple
• mac
• atari
• st

[RPKGameVids]

Heavy man!

[AdamPDresch]

Wow, people sure do get worked up over videos, lol.

[Scalibq]

@videofreakcologne Indeed. The instructionset and registers supported 32-bit, but the 68000 itself still had a 16-bit data bus. The custom chips were also 16-bit.

I guess you could see it as 32-bit if you're optimistic. Same as the Intel 386SX, it was a 32-bit system in the sense that it could run 32-bit software. Or the 8088 which ran 16-bit software, while it was partly 8-bit.

[doritostheking]

@vapourmile Which is interesting because you've seen none of it. Don't you have some violent threats? Want my address so you can beat me up like you asked for the other day? You used the PM system too, like a pussy.

[vapourmile]

@doritostheking You know the only thing these arguments are convincing me of? That you've wasted your whole life.

[doritostheking]

@vapourmile Ahaha "The truth of the amiga's failure" was that some CGI programs were a bit duff?

Here's me thinking it's because they lost nearly 400 mil because of a ballsup near the 93 holiday season, as well as a change in management that decided to take four years of R&D effort across three product lines and shitcan it.

[vapourmile]

@LordRenegrade So, yeah, I think I'm creating a tautology here but I'm arguing "Yeah, but having a linear address space is a Bad thing because programmers will use it, for reasons of intellectual manageability, but end up writing worse algorithms". Usually once you've finished with an item of data, although it's next-door neighbour is the easiest place to visit next, it often isn't the best. Sometimes it's so hard to know where to go next, such as with Intel's i860, it destroys the platform.

[vapourmile]

@LordRenegrade ...and I can certainly think of example I have seen where programmers have treated the X and Y axes each a one straight line and could have improved their program by dividing the screen into rectangular chunks to better take advantage of all-round spacial adjacency. Even a linear data set, say a sound file, would usually be split up today because of DSP matters that give way to Vector/SIMD/Parallel processing.

[vapourmile]

@LordRenegrade So in effect what I'm saying is that although there are those who claim to prefer a linear address space, there are arguments in the details of pipeline optimisation which show it is unwise to traverse your data set that way. The benefits of a linear address is normally a matter of convenience rather than good algorithm design.

[vapourmile]

@LordRenegrade No problem, congrats on moving. Yeah that's right, they do have linear access, I mean they have it and they still address memory in small rectangular tiles because it's faster that to do way. So even given linear addressing, today it's thought of as better Not to do it that way. And actually I thought you might just like those CGI examples, it wasn't really part of the point except those examples Use tile rendering, and still intentionally avoid linear addressing.

[LordRenegrade]

@vapourmile - which programs are we talking about? I hope we're not comparing 2011 programs against 1985 ones. I'd imagine even if they're 1995 ones, they're running in 386 protected mode, granting linear memory access. Or possibly even long mode if they're from 2011.

sorry for the delay in response, was moving.