Wii already running GC homebrew via Action Replay

[AJCopland]

Yeah the Wii is basically an overclocked gamecube from a hardware standpoint, i dont mean that insultingly the GC was a nice little bit of kit so a new one that runs twice as fast is nice to have around.

As for the auxilary ram, it is nice and quick and there's more of it, but it appears to be very slow for random access so it's better to use it for large datasets like models, textures and the like whihc is what i'd assume they had in mind.

Last time i checked into GC modding people were having trouble getting full access to the gfx chip did that ever get sorted out? (yeah i know i could go googling for it but im at work :-D)

THe whole X86 vs PPC argument again? Why? yes look at x86 it's cheap and powerful woo! And people want to run PPC apps/games/whatever on PPC. Or maybe they just feel the love for the PPC because it's warm and fluffy and inhabits their dream. I DONT CARE! Just let 'em, it's a goddamn near-religious argument that's be waging since 1995!

Besides which, we don't have access to the Xbox360 yet and the PS3 Linux initiative currently lacks access to the RSX. Whereas potentially there's an entire GC/Wii available with libs.

Andy

[AJCopland]

As far as i know there's absolutely no changes been made to the CPU, it's purely a die shrink and speed ramp. So it has exactly the same instruction as the Gekko. This is all from the doc's that IBM released a little while back that were discussed over at Ars-Technica and what people have been posting about it since getting a hold of them.

It makes sense from the big N's point of view, it means they can maintain totally compatibility with the back catalogue and not lose a moments sleep worrying about it because from an instruction point of view nothing has changed.

Andy

[AJCopland]

Whislt i like the idea of AROS/MorphOS or indeed any Amiga/AmigaLike OS running on the Wii there are some points i've gotta disagree with.

Firstly the Gekko was based on the G3, and whilst it does have some SIMD style instructions they're massively different to Altivec. If anything they're more like the PSPs vfpu instruction/unit in that they're highly specialised just for matrix<>matrix, matrix<>vector and vector<>vector operations.

Next; the G4 is dead? Hardly, the G4s used by Apple/A1 etc were all chips based on the e600 core and varied wildly in the performance of those implementations. The 8641D which they're just making available as engineering samples is a fairly high performing version of the e600 core (two of them in fact) with an intergrated DDR2 memory controller and Altivec. So the G4 series of chips is hardly dead.

Also the 750CL is just as i described. It's a die-shrink with a higher clock speed, double i think. Oh and the ram isn't 1T-SRAM, it's GDDR3. Main memory doesn't seem to have changed at all.

Lets make something clear, I think that it'd make another great target for things like AROS and the other to run on. But dont over sell it, it's not as great a CPU as it could have been and the GX doesn't even have shaders like a £20 modern graphics card or run as fast, also the amount of memory is a bit pants.
However it's going to be a very cheap and incredibly popular piece of hardware that everyone and there pet is going to own :-D

Andy

[AJCopland]

@lou_dias
Good points however the GX is the name of the GPU "hollywood" was its development name. I think that the better lighting effects etc are mostly likely ot do with the extra ram and higher clock speed allowing for better effects though.

Still as you say there's nothing really to go on and i still agree that it'd be an interesting thing for AROS to target.

Along with PS3 of course

Andy