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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: on November 13, 2002, 07:25:29 PM

Title: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: on November 13, 2002, 07:25:29 PM
Hi all,

I'm a newbie to Amiga.org, but I've looked around and can't find an answer to this so here goes...

What is the status of firewire support on the AmigaOne and OS4? There's no mention of IEEE1394 in the hardware spec, but with PCI slots and vague talk of "multimedia IO" support in OS4, perhaps all that is missing is adding a cheap OHCI-compliant card (for under $50 CDN). Will there be any OS4 driver support for OS4, or are any third-parties HW or SW developers planning this?

I'm ready to buy a shipping A1/OS4 combo, but there has to be some provision for the only audio/video IO option that is a) really good  b) cheap c) widely supported (i.e. firewire).  Without firewire support, there's no hope for even simplistic NLE development for the platform....

Any real news/rumours/revelations welcome.

Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: The_Editor on November 13, 2002, 07:28:47 PM
Welcome to Amiga.Org   Filmamigo.

If YOU hear of anything ......

Let us ALL know !!      :-o

 :-D
Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: on November 13, 2002, 07:37:44 PM
Hmmm...some display adapters have Firewire builtin too...It's the driver thing that counts!
Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: pjhutch on November 13, 2002, 07:42:23 PM
If I remember correctly on an early interview, that Firewire was a 'low priority', USB is much more widely used.

I suspect Firewire has not be ruled out, they have just decided it wasn't sufficiently important to include it 'now'.
Firewire will appear, its just a case of 'when' and by 'whom'.

Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: The_Editor on November 13, 2002, 07:44:17 PM
If i knew how to code ......

[color=FF6633]ME  !![/color][/b]      :-o
Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: on November 13, 2002, 09:11:25 PM
Quote
If I remember correctly on an early interview, that Firewire was a 'low priority', USB is much more widely used.

Hmmm...not to mention USB2 which is quite fast too!  :-)
Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: strobe on November 13, 2002, 09:20:17 PM
In my experience built-in firewire is faster than PCI adaptor cards. barefeats.com has benchmarks to that effect IIRC.

FYI USB2 is only fast on paper. In reality it's horrible.
Title: Re: Firewire for A1/OS4
Post by: Crumb on November 15, 2002, 08:30:48 PM
You may fit a firewire card in the 66Mhz slot to get extra speed. If drivers for Radeon AIW are released you may use the included firewire in the AGP slot, it should be faster.

But I think that it's like the problem of the chiken and the egg: no drivers appear because there's no soft that uses it and no new apps appear because there's no hardware they can use.

Although BT878/848 are not very useful for video editing, if a new video app is released it should start supporting VHI drivers, then if the software is good enough firewire drivers will be released by somebody because there will be potential users.

On the other hand the first drivers that may appear would be for hard drives etc... so people wouldn't have to wait until video soft is released.

Writing a stack for firewire that works like poseidon with usb is not an easy task...