While you're not incorrect that happened and it's not something we should forget, you also can't deny the 80 years of culture shift that have happened since then.
History repeats. We are on the verge of WW3. If you care to look, you can see the signs already. Human nature never changes. Fundamentally, nothing has changed in 80 years. You are a linear thinker, you should try and learn about the cyclical nature of the world.
People like you never learn from history, that's why history repeats. You can learn a lot by looking at what happened during Ancient Roman times. Nothing has changed in 2000 years.
while mstaoru is over-generalizing[1], North America has always been much more of a melting pot compared to some East Asia countries, despite the right wing ideology shift in recent times.
also you are being hostile. Everyone knows about the Japanese internment camp - we are just not sure where it fits in this discourse. Might as well just say 'tribalism is part of us. no need to discuss further. ignore all progress.'
[1] in taiwan, singapore, malaysia and etc, while they might refer to western folks as laowai or angmoh, there's usually little negative connotation attached to it.
It would be like telling the computer to compress a music file containing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and getting back a file that contains Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. Maybe you don't care, but I do.
You are talking about AI outright failing to get anything remotely close to the correct result. That's a completely different argument and has nothing to do with non-determinism. Things can be deterministically wrong too.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
> And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
The Amiga also struggles with frame rates, with most games running at 30hz/25hz. There are quite a few games that have better gameplay on the Commodore 64 port than the Amiga port.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
Despite its obviously far lower MIPS rating the 6502 could just get more "video game" type work done in a clock cycle than a 68000. 68000 interrupt responsiveness was also pretty terrible.
Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.
But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.
The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.
I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
> Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.
> So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.
It's both. Programmers' visions for their games either had to be scaled back because the 68000 just wasn't fast enough, or they implemented what they wanted and it tanked the framerate. Sometimes they met in the middle because the programmers thought 25/30Hz was good enough. Sometimes even the finest programmers, with the most optimised code, ended up with a 25Hz game because what they wanted the game to be demanded it.
Of course, some programmers said "this entire game has to run in 1 frame" and made of sure that. Sometimes it's the same programmers, e.g. Sensible Soccer is typically 1 frame, but Cannon Fodder is often not. Uridium 2 is typically 1 frame but Fire & Ice is often not.
The Amiga 1200 opened up new games possibilities, not just because of its added bitplanes allowing 256 colours, but also because having 2MB of Chip RAM instead of 512KB, and a CPU roughly double the speed, made more games viable.
> We clearly had very different experiences
It will depend on the games you played. Something you can try as a challenge: complete the first level of Magic Pockets on an unmodified Amiga 500 (or an emulation of one at its normal speed). Feel how laggy and awkward it is. Even a video doesn't give you that understanding. Then try the first level of Superfrog.
68020 and onwards could also get substantially more work done in a cycle than a 68000. So Amiga 1200 or Atari Falcon not only had substantially higher bus speeds they were just ... better... at the CPU level in terms of how much work could be done.
> This is why the default Workbench screen is 4-colour hires. It's hires to look nice and professional like an IBM, and not like a kid's toy like the Atari ST's default lowres GEM interface
The Atari ST had a professional resolution of 640x400 monochrome with a 70hz refresh rate. The Amiga had a 640x200 resolution non-interlaced, or a 640x400 interlaced which was basically a kid's toy.
It was nice of the ST to offer a special black and white screen mode on a custom monitor. The Amiga had the memory bandwidth to offer the same, but chose to only offer PAL/NTSC and no other custom video signals at launch, probably to avoid making its display chip even more complicated.
The Amiga had a "professional" resolution of 1008x1024 PAL or 1008x800 NTSC, 4-colour greyscale with a 15Hz refresh rate via its A2024 monitor (which effectively sampled 4 screens worth of video output and stitched them together).
You could also buy a "flicker fixer" (later included internally in the A3000) which gave you full colour 640x512 at 25Hz or 640x400 at 30Hz if you didn't like interlace.
But different strokes for different folks. The Amiga distinguished itself by being easily genlockable to video and having a 4096 colour palette and 21kHz 4-channel 8-bit sampled sound replay in 1985. The ST distinguished itself by having MIDI ports and a choice of either monochrome monitor, or the TV (or a colour monitor based on NTSC/PAL) if you wanted to do anything in colour. It found its niche in controlling other musical devices.
But the ST did have a garish green low-res desktop by default.
I never knew anyone who used the ECS "productivity" modes. That would've required an expensive multisync monitor since other Amiga stuff would still need the 15 kHz support. The only useful feature of ECS, as far as I can recall, was support for additional chip RAM.
Later Amigas also supported VGA monitors with 31kHz horizontal refresh rate, with just a passive adaptor.
I used a VGA monitor with my Amiga 1200 up until I switched to PC, and a tweaked video mode with 704×520 pixels.
If you wanted to play games on an Amiga or an Atari ST you needed to use a TV-signal compatible 15kHz monitor or a Multisync monitor.
I ran desktop programs in 640×200 mode with four colours on both my ST and my Amiga 500 before I upgraded.
There were also "flicker fixer" add-ons for the Amiga, converting the interlaced modes to VGA signals: one was built into the Amiga 3000.
During WW2, the US government put Japanese people who were born in the US into concentration camps. So your statement is false.
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