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My Amiga 1000 ran rings around the Macintosh with the same CPU, because it had custom co-processors that speed things up and worked as a team. You can still ha

My Amiga 1000 ran rings around the Macintosh with the same CPU, because it had custom co-processors that speed things up and worked as a team. You can still have that Amiga feeling on old PCs by using AROS: https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/

Findecanor 1y ago
I think that it also having preemptive multitasking also made a huge difference to make the system responsive and feel fast. The GUI, with its windows and gadgets (= "widgets"/"controls") ran in Intuition's task. The mouse pointer was moved by a vblank interrupt and could thus never lag. On Macintosh, the whole GUI ran practically in the active app's event loop. The whole system could be held up by an app waiting for something. Microsoft made the mistake of copying Apple when they designed MS-Windows. Even this day, on the latest Windows, which although it has had preemptive multitasking since 1995, a slow app can still effectively hold up the user interface thus preventing you from doing anything but wait for it. When Apple in the late '80s wanted to make their OS have preemptive multitasking, they hired the guy who had written Amiga's "exec" kernel: Carl Sassenrath.
- jchw 1y ago
  > Even this day, on the latest Windows, which although it has had preemptive multitasking since 1995, a slow app can still effectively hold up the user interface thus preventing you from doing anything but wait for it. Could you explain what you mean here? If you were to make your event loop or wndprocs hang indefinitely it would not hang the Windows interface for the rest of the machine, it would just cause ANR behavior and prompt you to kill the program. As far as I can remember it's been that way since at least Windows 2000.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    I think what OP's saying is that on the Amiga it was idiomatic to let the UI be handled by a dedicated thread/task. That was also the norm on other notable systems such as BeOS. It's still a good guideline today but not so easy to apply.
  - Findecanor 1y ago
    I mean the windows. An app can open a window and hold it there, and meanwhile you can't move the window, you can't move it to the back and you can't minimise it.
    - jchw 1y ago
      Oh I see. I'm not familiar with the model used by Workbench and how it differs exactly. (edit: and to be clear, I did read the article and see what it said, but without more detail I'm not 100% sure what it really looks like in practice, and why it would be less likely for applications to have situations where they become unresponsive.)
      - orionblastar 1y ago
        Amiga computers are expensive these days, you are better off with an Amiga Emulator like Amiga Forever. I remember the Amiga had the checkered beach ball bouncing demo and others copied it, then on the Amiga they opened up several copies of the demo all multitasking and bouncing at the same time. The only downside of the Amiga was the dreaded Guru Meditation Errors when memory went corrupt or something. IIRC AmigaDOS/Workbench had no protected memory features.
        zozbot234 1y ago
        > IIRC AmigaDOS/Workbench had no protected memory features. This was a limitation of the original MC68k CPU architecture. Though the Amiga operating system was indeed designed to leverage a single address space throughout, which made it significantly harder to retrofit memory protection after the fact.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    An example I run into almost each day: run a non-trivial build in Visual Studio which consumes all available CPU cores. Now try to use the trackpad to scroll some random window content, it just doesn't work, at best you get a UI view that jumps around instead of smooth scrolling. AFAIK Windows is supposed to boost the CPU priority of the UI during user input, but apparently that doesn't work. AmigaOS also boosted the CPU priority of the UI during mouse movement, except it actually worked. PS: and instead of fixing the issue from the ground up in the OS (which admittedly is probably impossible) the VS team instead added a feature called 'Low Priority Builds': [1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Limit-CPU-usage-of-Visual-Studio-during/436208 https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Limit-CPU-usag...) [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msbuild-low-priority-builds-in-visual-studio/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msbuild-low-priority-...
detourdog 1y ago
I always thought even though the Mac was black & white the screen resolution was much nicer than the Amiga.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  Unlike the Amiga, it's high resolution, has square pixels, and is never interlaced.
- leptons 1y ago
  The original Macintosh had a resolution of 512 x 342 pixels. The Amiga 1000 had several resolutions up to 640 x 400 @ 16 colors, and could utilize 4096 colors in lower resolutions. The reality distortion field seems to still be working, I guess. The Amiga was better in every way practical way.
  - detourdog 1y ago
    I think you are missing the point. I was an actual user of both and preferred the macintosh. The Amiga graphics were color but underwhelming in resolution.
    - leptons 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - icedchai 1y ago
        The Mac’s screen was flicker free. Almost nobody used any Amiga any higher than 640x200 (640x256 PAL) unless they had special hardware (“flicker fixer”.) That being said I preferred the Amiga.
        leptons 1y ago
        A "flicker fixer" cost $100. A macintosh with 2-bit lower resolution graphics cost $1000 more than the Amiga. The Amiga was a bargain. And I don't remember interlace modes being that bad, honestly.
zozbot234 1y ago
> My Amiga 1000 ran rings around the Macintosh with the same CPU, because it had custom co-processors And the earliest ARM machines ran rings around the Amiga because they had a custom-designed RISC CPU, so they could dispense with the custom co-processors. (They still cost a lot more than the Amiga, since they targeted the expensive education sector. Later on ARM also got used for videogame arcades with the 3DO.)
bitwize 1y ago
Want to give an Amiga user an orgasm? Fuck them gently and at the right moment, nibble their ear and whisper the words "custom chips" into it. By contrast, there's a story about some Microsoft engineers taking a look at the Macintosh and asking the Apple engineers what kind of custom hardware they needed to pull off that kind of interface. The Apple guys responded, "What are you talking about? We did this all with just the CPU." Minds blown. The designers of the Mac (and the Atari ST) deserve mad credit for achieving a lot with very little. Even though, yes, the Amiga was way cooler in the late 80s.
- fractallyte 1y ago
  And the Amiga was faster than the Mac when emulating a Mac. I know this first hand, because I got my first email address with CompuServe, running their software under emulation, while using my Amiga's dial-up modem. (I had to sneak the Mac ROM images from the computers at school...)
  - krige 1y ago
    In one amusing juncture of really bad port and emulation/hardware speed, Sim City 2000 was reported to run better as Shapeshifter-emulated Mac version, than the Amiga native version, as long as you could meet the hardware requirements. This was due to several factors, chief of which was that the SC2000 Amiga port was made under extreme time pressure and, probably, very low budget. Later patches alleviated that to some degree, but patching your game in 1993? Who did that? What you got on your floppies was usually what you were stuck with barring some extreme cases of negligence.

Findecanor 1y ago

I think that it also having preemptive multitasking also made a huge difference to make the system responsive and feel fast. The GUI, with its windows and gadgets (= "widgets"/"controls") ran in Intuition's task. The mouse pointer was moved by a vblank interrupt and could thus never lag. On Macintosh, the whole GUI ran practically in the active app's event loop. The whole system could be held up by an app waiting for something. Microsoft made the mistake of copying Apple when they designed MS-Windows. Even this day, on the latest Windows, which although it has had preemptive multitasking since 1995, a slow app can still effectively hold up the user interface thus preventing you from doing anything but wait for it. When Apple in the late '80s wanted to make their OS have preemptive multitasking, they hired the guy who had written Amiga's "exec" kernel: Carl Sassenrath.

jchw 1y ago
> Even this day, on the latest Windows, which although it has had preemptive multitasking since 1995, a slow app can still effectively hold up the user interface thus preventing you from doing anything but wait for it. Could you explain what you mean here? If you were to make your event loop or wndprocs hang indefinitely it would not hang the Windows interface for the rest of the machine, it would just cause ANR behavior and prompt you to kill the program. As far as I can remember it's been that way since at least Windows 2000.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  I think what OP's saying is that on the Amiga it was idiomatic to let the UI be handled by a dedicated thread/task. That was also the norm on other notable systems such as BeOS. It's still a good guideline today but not so easy to apply.
- Findecanor 1y ago
  I mean the windows. An app can open a window and hold it there, and meanwhile you can't move the window, you can't move it to the back and you can't minimise it.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Oh I see. I'm not familiar with the model used by Workbench and how it differs exactly. (edit: and to be clear, I did read the article and see what it said, but without more detail I'm not 100% sure what it really looks like in practice, and why it would be less likely for applications to have situations where they become unresponsive.)
    - orionblastar 1y ago
      Amiga computers are expensive these days, you are better off with an Amiga Emulator like Amiga Forever. I remember the Amiga had the checkered beach ball bouncing demo and others copied it, then on the Amiga they opened up several copies of the demo all multitasking and bouncing at the same time. The only downside of the Amiga was the dreaded Guru Meditation Errors when memory went corrupt or something. IIRC AmigaDOS/Workbench had no protected memory features.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        > IIRC AmigaDOS/Workbench had no protected memory features. This was a limitation of the original MC68k CPU architecture. Though the Amiga operating system was indeed designed to leverage a single address space throughout, which made it significantly harder to retrofit memory protection after the fact.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  An example I run into almost each day: run a non-trivial build in Visual Studio which consumes all available CPU cores. Now try to use the trackpad to scroll some random window content, it just doesn't work, at best you get a UI view that jumps around instead of smooth scrolling. AFAIK Windows is supposed to boost the CPU priority of the UI during user input, but apparently that doesn't work. AmigaOS also boosted the CPU priority of the UI during mouse movement, except it actually worked. PS: and instead of fixing the issue from the ground up in the OS (which admittedly is probably impossible) the VS team instead added a feature called 'Low Priority Builds': [1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Limit-CPU-usage-of-Visual-Studio-during/436208 https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Limit-CPU-usag...) [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msbuild-low-priority-builds-in-visual-studio/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msbuild-low-priority-...

detourdog 1y ago

I always thought even though the Mac was black & white the screen resolution was much nicer than the Amiga.

badc0ffee 1y ago
Unlike the Amiga, it's high resolution, has square pixels, and is never interlaced.
leptons 1y ago
The original Macintosh had a resolution of 512 x 342 pixels. The Amiga 1000 had several resolutions up to 640 x 400 @ 16 colors, and could utilize 4096 colors in lower resolutions. The reality distortion field seems to still be working, I guess. The Amiga was better in every way practical way.
- detourdog 1y ago
  I think you are missing the point. I was an actual user of both and preferred the macintosh. The Amiga graphics were color but underwhelming in resolution.
  - leptons 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - icedchai 1y ago
      The Mac’s screen was flicker free. Almost nobody used any Amiga any higher than 640x200 (640x256 PAL) unless they had special hardware (“flicker fixer”.) That being said I preferred the Amiga.
      - leptons 1y ago
        A "flicker fixer" cost $100. A macintosh with 2-bit lower resolution graphics cost $1000 more than the Amiga. The Amiga was a bargain. And I don't remember interlace modes being that bad, honestly.

zozbot234 1y ago

> My Amiga 1000 ran rings around the Macintosh with the same CPU, because it had custom co-processors And the earliest ARM machines ran rings around the Amiga because they had a custom-designed RISC CPU, so they could dispense with the custom co-processors. (They still cost a lot more than the Amiga, since they targeted the expensive education sector. Later on ARM also got used for videogame arcades with the 3DO.)

bitwize 1y ago

Want to give an Amiga user an orgasm? Fuck them gently and at the right moment, nibble their ear and whisper the words "custom chips" into it. By contrast, there's a story about some Microsoft engineers taking a look at the Macintosh and asking the Apple engineers what kind of custom hardware they needed to pull off that kind of interface. The Apple guys responded, "What are you talking about? We did this all with just the CPU." Minds blown. The designers of the Mac (and the Atari ST) deserve mad credit for achieving a lot with very little. Even though, yes, the Amiga was way cooler in the late 80s.

fractallyte 1y ago
And the Amiga was faster than the Mac when emulating a Mac. I know this first hand, because I got my first email address with CompuServe, running their software under emulation, while using my Amiga's dial-up modem. (I had to sneak the Mac ROM images from the computers at school...)
- krige 1y ago
  In one amusing juncture of really bad port and emulation/hardware speed, Sim City 2000 was reported to run better as Shapeshifter-emulated Mac version, than the Amiga native version, as long as you could meet the hardware requirements. This was due to several factors, chief of which was that the SC2000 Amiga port was made under extreme time pressure and, probably, very low budget. Later patches alleviated that to some degree, but patching your game in 1993? Who did that? What you got on your floppies was usually what you were stuck with barring some extreme cases of negligence.