Pros and Cons of Amithlon type systems

[Heiroglyph]

I'm on the AROS mailing list and have source code access, but this is my fun project for after work and for some reason working on AROS just isn't interesting to me.

I've even made donations because I believe in it, but it just doesn't pique my interest.

[LaserBack]

I remember Amithlon before the licensing problems, running on (if memory serves) a 750mHz x86 machine. Display was a 38 inch (yes, that's right) monitor, & it was streaming & playing four videos (using Frogger) from the same HD at the same time. Awesome !

.

running 4 videos at the same time is not a miracle
in fact winuae can did it before amithlon
check this screenshot on aminet
http://aminet.net/package/pix/wb/WinUAEs1
according to readme file it was on a simple duron 750mhz and was in 2001
readme file says moovid instead frogger

[XDelusion]

@B00tDisk:
If I remember correctly, there were native versions of ImageFX, Aladdin 4D and a few other Amiga apps, but not a lot of new ports.

@XDelusion:
I agree that Aros has been going pretty slow, but you have to give the guys a LOT of credit for starting from nothing.

Toni and Jason get a lot of credit recently for giving the Amiga version a huge boost, but they all deserve a lot of recognition.

I agree, they've done a LOT, but having followed it since the beginning, I'm starting to feel like their priorities misplaced. I.E. I was psyched to see integrated emulation, but sadly the OS the emu runs upon is itself FAR from stable and highly unpredictable. Maybe I'll have a change of heart when I buy my Aspire One

[EDanaII]

@ Heiroglyph:

The things I'm still weighing out are how much to emulate vs. pass through to the Amiga side (all PCI? SCSI? USB?) and which OS to use as a base.

Well, speaking from my perspective, since you're gaging interest, I would lean towards whichever makes it more flexible for expansion. The thing I liked best about the original Amithlon was that it did represent a way to move things forward.

Bernie was already rethinking how devices were handled for v2 and seemed to be going more emulated to increase compatibility. (No special Amiga side drivers to write)

Personally, I think compatibility is one of the things that is holding back  Amiga derived systems. IMHO, AROS is stuck without MP, SMP and useful drivers because it aims at 3.1 compatibility. I feel OS 4.1 and MorphOS are similarly stuck because of PPC compatibility.

That's why, for example, I had no issues with Bernie when he lost the custom chipset compatibility. It just made better sense to do so with all the more modern and powerful graphics cards available at that time.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with 68k compatibility, but not so that it holds you back from moving forward. Naturally a balance should be struck.

Once again, my two cents, if it's really even worth that.

[B00tDisk]

Of course, thinking on it, part of the problem is that Amithlon was started in 2001 - when the core of Amiga OS was 7 years stale already (I don't consider two shareware bundles "service packs").  The difficulties involving bringing the Amiga back into a modern realm was merely "almost completely" insurmountable.  In three more years, Amiga OS - the 3.1 branch - will be twenty years dead.  The problems now are not "almost completely" insurmountable, they're entirely insurmountable.

It goes beyond mere hardware support, too.  You can write drivers until your fingers fall off to support every video card, every motherboard chipset, and so on, in the book and it doesn't change the fact that your target is possibly 2000 users.  Rare and weird strains of Linux have larger dev groups than that, forget user base sizes.  Then there's the issue of applications - once you have Amithlon updated to run on new hardware, once you get there, what do you do?  Run Aweb?  Ibrowse?  Or start scratch developing apps or porting apps from scratch from the x86 side?  Taking how long with the abovementioned tiny developer's side?

Don't get me wrong: I think Amithlon is neat.  Hell, I think the Amiga is neat.  I think its awesome that AOS 3.x has USB2 support, that someone can tweak out an A600 to perform like a mid 90's m68k mac (and in fact run MacOS 8.1).  When someone shows that their Bodega Bay chassis is still kicking over and they've got a video card, USB controller, CD-ROM etc. etc. that's awesome.  Likewise running AIBB on Amithlon and watching that red indicator blast up past the fastest pure 68k (and PPC!) systems just brings a smile to my face.

In a perfect world I'd wake up tomorrow and fire up this PC running Amithlon and type in replies on a ported and running emulated or native and running through an x86 interpretive layer version of Firefox, while the underlying host bits of Amithlon did cool stuff like handled multi-user, MP and VM, sandboxing the parts of AmigaOS 3.1 that would have a fit over such behavior.  But this is a far from perfect world.  And anyway, what I just described sorta-kinda already exists in having WinUAE - except there's the chipset support if I needed it.

[Heiroglyph]

Personally, I think compatibility is one of the things that is holding back  Amiga derived systems. IMHO, AROS is stuck without MP, SMP and useful drivers because it aims at 3.1 compatibility. I feel OS 4.1 and MorphOS are similarly stuck because of PPC compatibility.

I didn't make it clear, but I meant better hardware compatibility, not software compatibility.  Beyond OS legal apps isn't something I'm interested in, that's what full system emulators like UAE are for and they are beyond reasonably complete.

I agree with both you and B00tDisk, 3.1 was great 20 years ago, but there needs to be forward momentum. I think the lack of forward progress is one of the things I disliked when I was working on AROS, I felt like I was reinventing a wheel rather than adding value to something.

[XDelusion]

I'm bi-polar in that respect. I'm very hungry for the Natami, was sad to see the Coldfire never worked out their compatibility issues, and at the same time am loving MorphOS and have always got my eyes on the other variants. I'll take one of each if they all work well!

As for that additional CPU in the X1000, I'm REALLY curious how that might help OS4.x's compatibility with classic, hardware dependant apps. Very Curious indeed!

[EDanaII]

I didn't make it clear, but I meant better hardware compatibility, not software compatibility.  Beyond OS legal apps isn't something I'm interested in, that's what full system emulators like UAE are for and they are beyond reasonably complete.

Awesome. Then you definitely have my interest.

I'm gathering, though, that this is to be a private/personal project rather than an open-sourced one. If it is, you might wanna consider the open-source option, since it there would be less risk what happened to Amithlon happening again. Obviously, you could also recruit some help and engage others in the best way to attack the problems that arise.

What are we up to now? Six cents?

Best of luck, nonetheless, on whatever you decide.

[nicholas]

My thoughts on what needs to be done.

1) Remove OS3.9 from Amithlon and replace it with 68k AROS parts.
2) Re-Compile the various parts of AROS in a piecemeal fashion using the 686-BE compiler, until there is little to none 68k code left.
3) Convince Bernie to release the code to Amithlon/Umilator or write a clone from scratch.
4) The community profits!

[nicholas]

Linux is a proven host but isn't interesting IMHO.  The big benefit there is that Bernie already patched the kernel so that you could get a lot of the memory mapped to the correct locations for a speed increase, but is that even needed with multi-core computers with memory faster than the CPU's Amithlon was designed to run on?

There are just a lot of variables to take into account before I decide to commit to it so I thought I'd gauge interest.

The Haiku kernel could make an interesting base.

[_ThEcRoW]

For those still interested in amithlon, you could join the yahoo groups amithlon open mailing list, as they often post there new kernels and drivers for more gfx chipsets and better compatibility.

[rdolores]

I used Amithlon quite extensively several years before moving to AROS.  It's pretty slick.  I got it to work on several PIII machines from 800 MHz to 1 GHz.  Got the video, audio, NIC and even USB working.  My old Amiga Productivity Tools worked well, like ProWrite.  And I was able to connect it to my home network which was cool.  However, I gave up on it because at the time it had issues with P4 CPU's.  Perhaps the new Kernal will fix that.  Will have to try that.

I like AROS, because the install is very easy compared to Amithlon.  Also, lately there has been a lot of development going on with it.  Haiku hasn't had an update since May 10, 2010.  AROS has several since that time.  It also had multiple distributions, Icaros Desktop and Broadway.  I've got it working on a Dell GX280 3.2 GHz HT CPU.

I have a spare Amithlon machine that I would like to give away to anyone who can pick it up.  I'm in the Washington, DC area.  It's dual boot with Windows XP.  In XP mode, its a dog.  But booting it into Amithlon, it flies.  It's good for fooling around with.

[nicholas]

I used Amithlon quite extensively several years before moving to AROS.  It's pretty slick.  I got it to work on several PIII machines from 800 MHz to 1 GHz.  Got the video, audio, NIC and even USB working.  My old Amiga Productivity Tools worked well, like ProWrite.  And I was able to connect it to my home network which was cool.  However, I gave up on it because at the time it had issues with P4 CPU's.  Perhaps the new Kernal will fix that.  Will have to try that.

I like AROS, because the install is very easy compared to Amithlon.  Also, lately there has been a lot of development going on with it.  Haiku hasn't had an update since May 10, 2010.  AROS has several since that time.

Nightly builds of Haiku can be found here: http://haiku-files.org/

[rdolores]

Nightly builds of Haiku can be found here: http://haiku-files.org/

Thanks for the correction.  Looks pretty neat.  Do they have any packaged distributions like Icaros or Broadway.

[Franko]

My thoughts on what needs to be done.

1) Remove OS3.9 from Amithlon and replace it with 68k AROS parts.
2) Re-Compile the various parts of AROS in a piecemeal fashion using the 686-BE compiler, until there is little to none 68k code left.
3) Convince Bernie to release the code to Amithlon/Umilator or write a clone from scratch.
4) The community profits!

:eek: that's one of the very things that has made me very interested and change my view of Amithlon I had at the beginning of this thread, that fact that it runs on OS3.9...

It would be crazy to get rid of it for something that's not even finished yet...

[Minuous]

@BootDisk:

Not this old crap again about OS3.5/3.9 not being proper upgrades. It's rubbish and you know it, or should do by now. Workbench ARexx port, GlowIcons support, various enhancements and bugfixes to core APIs etc. The fact that some previously 3rd-party apps (eg. ReAction) were also integrated into the package doesn't negate this.