3 ms·

I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines? What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got beh

by Lio 4y ago

I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines? What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I always wondered if it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes[1], the first computer with an Arm processor[2]. It had 256 colour chunky pixels, 8-channel stereo sound and a, for the time, very fast processor. Would a game like that have tipped the market in its favour if it had been there at launch? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes 2. Not counting the development board for the BBC Micro.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
There was a port of it to the Archimedes.
- Lio 4y ago
  Yes that’s true but not in 1987 on the original Arm 2 Archimedes.
alexisread 4y ago
You can get a measure of the performance from doom2 on an a4000 https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc 12mhz arm2 on a vga monitor (so slower fps than composite). Some other impressive feats are tomb raider and quake on the GBA (16mhz arm7tdmi), halflife on the Falcon, and Dread on the St and Amiga. https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk https://youtu.be/WpwlZgQPCpk https://youtu.be/WpwlZgQPCpk https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo
Symbiote 4y ago
Doom on an overclocked ARM250 from 1992, the first ARM system-on-a-chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8301IoVqv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8301IoVqv4 7 MIPS at 12MHz rather than the ARM2's 4 MIPS at 8MHz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors Lemmings was released for the Archimedes in 1991: https://forums.jaspp.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=736&hilit=F10227#p736 https://forums.jaspp.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=736&hilit=...
rbanffy 4y ago
> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC. > What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix workstation. At the time, it was unclear whether Unix and its descendants would be the winner of the OS wars, but it would have been wonderful if the Amiga was launched with the same OS Commodore ported to their never launched Commodore 900 workstation. > it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes I bet there is a port for it. The first benchmarks indicated the plain Archimedes had higher FP throughput than a 16MHz 386 with a 387. > Would a game like that have tipped the market in its favour if it had been there at launch? I don't think I ever saw an Archimedes being sold outside the UK. I only heard of them because BYTE magazine had excellent coverage of interesting machines available abroad. I wish they would be more available in the Americas (back then I lived in Brazil)
- dhosek 4y ago
  I still wish VMS had managed to survive the 90s. I still think its CLI has not been excelled (and there’s something to be said for requiring commands to be registered rather than just treating any executable on the path as a command).
  - dhosek 4y ago
    And yes, I know about OpenVMS, but it’s not really a player in any meaningful way.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      And a bit of VMS lives on in its bastard child, Windows NT.
- StillBored 4y ago
  > The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. I mean you make this statement like its some kind of technical roadblock. Which might have seemed appropriate in the early 1980's but with a bit of digging would have been understood to be false. There have been various proposals for 32-bit 65816's, and it wouldn't have been any different than any of the other architectural extensions done to other processors (never mind the conversion from 6502->65816). Modal decoders (ex: Arm), prefix bytes (ex: amd64), virtual execution modes (ex: vm86/i386), etc all provide a method for building a new architecture while maintaining backwards compatibility with the old. This stuff is an economic or business decision. At Apple apparently it was a political/business decision, rather than anything technical. They could have (as the IIGS proved) just have created an mac like experience on the apple ][ line, while maintaining software compatibility. None of it would have been "pretty", but that is almost always the costs associated with evolving a technology stack. It took roughly a decade to evolve linux from a UP kernel to a SMP one without the BKL. In that time, and some of the results weren't what anyone would call pretty.

by Lio 4y ago

Gordonjcp 4y ago

There was a port of it to the Archimedes.

Lio 4y ago
Yes that’s true but not in 1987 on the original Arm 2 Archimedes.

alexisread 4y ago

You can get a measure of the performance from doom2 on an a4000 https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc 12mhz arm2 on a vga monitor (so slower fps than composite). Some other impressive feats are tomb raider and quake on the GBA (16mhz arm7tdmi), halflife on the Falcon, and Dread on the St and Amiga. https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/_GVSLcqGP7g https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk https://youtu.be/R43k-p9XdIk https://youtu.be/WpwlZgQPCpk https://youtu.be/WpwlZgQPCpk https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo https://youtu.be/vj-GVCcd4yo

Symbiote 4y ago

Doom on an overclocked ARM250 from 1992, the first ARM system-on-a-chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8301IoVqv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8301IoVqv4 7 MIPS at 12MHz rather than the ARM2's 4 MIPS at 8MHz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors Lemmings was released for the Archimedes in 1991: https://forums.jaspp.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=736&hilit=F10227#p736 https://forums.jaspp.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=736&hilit=...

rbanffy 4y ago

> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC. > What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix workstation. At the time, it was unclear whether Unix and its descendants would be the winner of the OS wars, but it would have been wonderful if the Amiga was launched with the same OS Commodore ported to their never launched Commodore 900 workstation. > it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes I bet there is a port for it. The first benchmarks indicated the plain Archimedes had higher FP throughput than a 16MHz 386 with a 387. > Would a game like that have tipped the market in its favour if it had been there at launch? I don't think I ever saw an Archimedes being sold outside the UK. I only heard of them because BYTE magazine had excellent coverage of interesting machines available abroad. I wish they would be more available in the Americas (back then I lived in Brazil)

dhosek 4y ago
I still wish VMS had managed to survive the 90s. I still think its CLI has not been excelled (and there’s something to be said for requiring commands to be registered rather than just treating any executable on the path as a command).
- dhosek 4y ago
  And yes, I know about OpenVMS, but it’s not really a player in any meaningful way.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    And a bit of VMS lives on in its bastard child, Windows NT.
StillBored 4y ago
> The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. I mean you make this statement like its some kind of technical roadblock. Which might have seemed appropriate in the early 1980's but with a bit of digging would have been understood to be false. There have been various proposals for 32-bit 65816's, and it wouldn't have been any different than any of the other architectural extensions done to other processors (never mind the conversion from 6502->65816). Modal decoders (ex: Arm), prefix bytes (ex: amd64), virtual execution modes (ex: vm86/i386), etc all provide a method for building a new architecture while maintaining backwards compatibility with the old. This stuff is an economic or business decision. At Apple apparently it was a political/business decision, rather than anything technical. They could have (as the IIGS proved) just have created an mac like experience on the apple ][ line, while maintaining software compatibility. None of it would have been "pretty", but that is almost always the costs associated with evolving a technology stack. It took roughly a decade to evolve linux from a UP kernel to a SMP one without the BKL. In that time, and some of the results weren't what anyone would call pretty.