So? If someone wanted a console that ran Linux, they didn't buy an Xbox 360 and they didn't buy a Nintendo Wii; those they clearly didn't have this features. Playstation 3 on the other hand did advertise it, people bought the console, and...then it was removed. Bait and switch?
And now USB peripherals will be disabled too? Well, forgive a poor consumer if they are annoyed by Sony!
3) Updates are not forced. If you wish to use every service available on the PS3 that worked before the last update, you can. It is only if you want the new features, the new games, and the new services on PSN that you have to upgrade.
No you can't! It's not just "new services on PSN" that requires an upgrade. PSN itself requires it! Without upgrade, bye-bye PSN, yes, even for your old game you used to play on PSN before. Goodbye! Or upgrade. Seems totally unforced to you?
4) The Other OS was only taken down AFTER someone started bragging about the ability to copy $60 PS3 games and play them. Until then, people could play emulators, PS1 games, PS2 games, n64, etc. Only 5-6 assholes who are too cheap to afford new games but feel deserving of free stuff ruined it for the rest of us. Or did you want Sony to let this turn out like the PSP, which is so hacked that almost no new games get released for it? They tried to open their system, and they got slapped for it.
No one bragged about an ability to copy PS3 games via OtherOS, because no one could copy PS3 games via OtherOS! Sony used the hypervisor hack as an easy excuse to remove a feature they no longer cared about. Remember, it was removed from the Slim a long time before any hack!
Sorry, you can get back on your high horse about how evil Sony is. Just wanted to point out that out of all the evil companies out there, Sony is the only one letting you use generic parts and share purchases. Ooo, scary.
Sony consoles are also the only one to lose features over time.
The original Amiga 1000 didn't have ROM. Kickstart had to be loaded into RAM from floppy disk when the system first booted. Right there is the reason why it moved to ROM: loading was slow. When the early frequent updates were no longer prevalent, the OS moved to ROM for fast permanent storage.
Well, a 1/4 vs a 1/2 ratio would of course mean that even more DMA time would be available, but what I wrote was pretty much straight out of the "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual". Yeah, I had to dig it out because I didn't remember whether the CPU used odd or even cycles
"The 68000 uses only the even-numbered memory access cycles. The 68000 spends about half of a complete processor instruction time doing internal operations and the other half accessing memory. Therefore, the allocation of alternate memory cycles to the 68000 makes it appear to the 68000 that it has the memory all of the time, and it will run at full speed."
Well, the Amiga was doing 3D in hardware since 1985. Flat-shaded, texture-less polygons only, but still...
I think you might misremember a little bit.
The 68k CPU was a CISC design using microcode, which meant that one instruction took multiple clock-cycles to execute (minimum of 4 cycles). Basically, it spent one clock cycle accessing memory and one clock cycle for internal processing.
The designer's exploited this by having DMA during the memory on odd cycles when the bus was free. Audio DMA had four statically allocated DMA slots per raster line, which did not interfere with the CPU, meaning that even if you turned off all audio DMA, the CPU wouldn't run any faster, because it didn't use those slots anyway (of course, the copper or blitter could make use of them if needed though!)
Where it got interesting was with bitplane DMA, because there wasn't enough bandwidth to sustain both display and CPU at full speed if more than four bitplanes were enabled (lores), and then cycle stealing started. Turn on high res and four bitplanes and the bitplane DMA consumed all memory slots except during v-sync and h-sync!!
On top of that, the copper and the blitter also competed for the same cycles as the CPU. The "CPU danger bit" that you remember was actually the "blitter nasty" flag, which gave the blitter ultimate priority over the 68k.
The copper always had priority over both the blitter and the 68000 and would steal as many cycles as it needed, potentially every one.
AAA was never released because it was too expensive and already getting old. AGA was maybe a stripped down version of AAA graphics system.
Anyway, the so-called "Hombre" architecture would have been interesting, had not just been a pipe-dream. Then I would certainly admit revolutionary again: 100MHz 64-bit RISC processor and 3D hardware!
Really? The A1200 was kind of...meh. Seriously, the Amiga 1000 was revolutionary when it came out in 1985! The Amiga 500 was revolutionary when it came out in 1987 because it made the Amiga affordable. After that? Nothing much. The Amiga 1200 came out in fall of 1992 and what kind of specs did it have?
Sure, the 68EC020 at 14MHz was of course an improvement over the 68000 at 7MHz, but c'mon! It's five years since Amiga 500!
Only 2MiB of chip RAM (and no fast RAM) - once again, it's been five years!
Graphics were kind of braindead, just adding two bitplanes and making a total mess of the color registers. Could have gone with a chunky mode instead.
Blitter is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000 for goodness sake!
Sound is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000...
Remember that in 1994, the Playstation came out. Compared to Amiga (and especially CD32 which came out a year earlier) now that is revolutionary again!
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy. Luckily, it wore off (even though I still actually have two A1200 and one A600 in my closet somewhere); for some people, it's chronic. Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
