Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!midway!msuinfo!convex.cl.msu.edu!jap From: jap@convex.cl.msu.edu (Joe Porkka) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: 2.0 Compatibility Message-ID: <1991Apr30.133904.12649@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> Date: 30 Apr 91 13:39:04 GMT References: Sender: news@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu Organization: Michigan State University Lines: 42 mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) writes: >I'm posting this with no intention of starting a flame war... Nor do I intend to. I'm not trying to flame you, just a difference of opinion here - take no offence please. >The Macintosh family of computers has been successful because Apple has >forced people to adhere strictly to the use of the OS for even the most How can Apple force people to do anything? I'll tell you, read on... >primitive operations. Unfortunately, the Amiga OS is designed to allow >multiple applications to share and directly manipulate the hardware. It Actually, it provides support so most applications do not need to acess the hardware directly. It does supply a means to get at the hardware in an OS friendly way should you need to. >is quite common on the Amiga for an application to bypass the graphics ^^^^^^^^^^^ you must mean game. >library and use the blitter (directly) or the cpu to render directly into >bitplanes. All these applications won't work on a radically different >display device (such as the lowell one). Hm, Apple developers have only been forced to play by the rules because of the variety of AppleOS's and hardware in use. I suspect the same to happen with the Amiga. If a program has played by the rules, it will work on a A3000 with 2.0. Up until the A3000 there really wasn't any different Amiga hardware, From a programs point of view, the A1000, A500, A2000 are 99% identical. Some hardware change has already happened. Remeber how many programs (games and applications alike) broke when people started adding non-CHIP expansion memory? 1meg chip memory? HardDrives also caused (and still are) compatibility problems. So the lesson is, the more diverse the Amiga hardware in use, the better quality the software will *have* to be in order to function on all the machines. This means that programmers will have to follow the rules in the RKMs more closely. Do you have the gam MindWalker? It was written for AmigaDOS 1.0!, and yet it actually runs on a A3000, not perfectly, but it does not crash. Whoever wrote that game followed the rules, as well as they where defined in 1.0 days, and so the program still works many years later.