Chris Wiles, said..
> As the NG Amiga will support industry standards such as 'OpenGL' and QNX
> is Linux compatible (afaik), porting games such as Quake III should be
> relatively easy.
Ports of anything popular can only help, but so often ports are rather
inferior copies, making no use of available hardware, coded in a hurry
just to cash in on a secondary market. I remember the 8-bit days
(hey, showing my age here :) ) when there was a port of some arcade
machine every other day of the week. They were nearly all naff. This
may be one of the reasons ClickBoom got so narked at the piracy of
Quake (I bought mine, before you ask!!), quite apart from the obvious
loss of revenue, they did actually try very hard to make a very good
port rewritten, almost, from the ground up. What thanks did they get?
A bad port of an old game is worth almost nothing. A good, even
improved, version of a current game is worth doing.
> Games are essential for the initial NG Amiga. As it will be aimed at home
You couldn't be more right. I really do hope Amiga understand this in
their hearts, not just spouting PR stuff. The Playstation took the
world by storm, much to many people's surprise, ONLY because it had
lots of very good original and very impressive games availaible when
it was launched. (OK, and a huge marketing effort :) ) Asking people
to buy a computer which doesn't have the software or, possibly worse,
inferior software at its launch will not compete in todays market.
And no, I'm not a big games player myself, but games do sell computers
like hot cakes.
> As for backwards compatibility, if this Amiga is as fast as Amiga claim it
> will be, running old/current Amiga software, under UAE (which now has AGA
> support and is pretty cool btw), should be as fast or maybe a little faster
> than an 060.
>
> Emulating a PC/Mac would also be possible, and rather fast too :)
I'm afraid here I become skeptical. I have heard much about emulation
of old Amiga software lately, first on the PPC and then on the NG. It
is one of the points that has sounded most like hype and the least
credible of all. Emulation takes a LOT of cpu power. Multimedia
extensions, mpeg decoders, 3d gfx cards etc do not make for
significantly faster emulation; cpu power is the thing. Combine this
with the fact that the art of assembly language programming will go
out the window on the NG, everything will be in 100% ANSI compliant
portable C++ and will run about 1/4 the speed it might otherwise.
The result is that you'll be very lucky to get a 200MHzPPC to do much
better than a slow '040 (despite claims of '060 speeds) and even the
latest 1GHz stuff on a fast bus might just crawl up to the '060s
fairly respectable 80MIPS+. And I hope they don't use UAE, which is
even more slow and inefficient than that.
ie: There is a price to pay for hardware independence,
retargetability, etc. and that is inefficiency. One of my major fears
for the NG Amiga is that it will bog down in its own features list
never letting the true power of all this hush-hush hardware to show
itself. (Rather like a PC at the moment - Word 7 runs just as slowly
on a P3 as Word4 did on a 486..) The current Amiga OS is lean and
efficient for a number of reasons and I really do hope QNX can follow
suit.
Thats all very negative :( I don't mean to be. I sincerely want the
Amiga to succeed. But I want it to because I get intensely frustrated
every time I use a PC at the slow, unresponsive, buggy, etc etc
systems you have to put up with, and the way ppl just accept it. If
the Amiga goes this way too, and it will be a sad day, I'll simply
find another platform that does have an attitude of making stuff which
is worth using....
Regards,
Ian
===
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