Aros has a new trick Video, don't miss it :-)

[Karlos]

It does but OS4.0 even on a Blizzard060/PPC @ 60/240Mhz is like running an Amiga with only chipram...

Sorry, Franko, but I'm going to have to call BS here. I did use 4.0 for some time without RTG and it was in no way, shape or form, comparable to a "chip ram only" amiga.

For a start, screen dragging on AGA always worked just fine and uses the native chipset to do it in exactly the same way as all previous versions of the OS did, as you can see from these two screen grabs (right down to the number of ISD scanlines)








Above images (click for gallery entry) were taken from the days when I was beta testing and represents a quite early stage OS4. WB was 16-colour PAL Interlaced (externally flickerfixed) and DPaint HAM8 PAL Interlaced. Performance was absolutely fine on both.

Feel free to jump on the "OS4 is shite" bandwagon, but unless you applied precisely the same common sense approach to screen resolution/depth that you do on 3.x, you can't blame OS4 itself for AGA being a let down.

[Karlos]

@Karlos
It doesnt look so fine as you say, I wouldnt call Franko´s statement BS.
But then I use a gfx card on my miggy.

Just watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DHpRYQj1hg&feature=related

No, my point still stands. That video clearly shows AGA struggling to do on PPC what it could not do any better on 68K. So, how about using a sensible number of colours and turning off solid window dragging for starters? If you are using AGA, you have to compromise on these things. After all, how many people are using 256 colour 640x512 or higher AGA screenmodes with solid window dragging/resizing on 3.x on the same hardware?

You can't magically expect OS4 to make your chip ram and blitter "go faster". What's more, the PPC can't read from or write to chip ram any faster than the 68K could.

For me, OS4.0 on AGA using a 16 colour workbench with outline dragging/resizing all worked perfectly well. Next up, replacing the icon set with something designed for a low colour (non RGB) display helps enormously. Even things like using non antialiased fonts makes a difference. This is all just common sense if you are used to 3.x already (you wouldn't try to run things like powericons on AGA and expect it to be quick). These features are intended for use on an RTG display with proper chunky RGB modes, not a planar display on 18 year old hardware.

[Karlos]

@Karlos
Well, I see your point now, but to tell you the truth, I was expecting a bit more (not a whole lot more) from OS4 for Classics, thinking it was running on the PPC side of a CyberPPC/BPPC.

I think it was a common expectation, but the PPC really can't do a lot for AGA. In fact, I seem to recall testing read/write access to Chip RAM in 3.x/WOS and observing it was actually slower (not by much) than the 040 was on the same card. Now, theoretically, there should be a bit more bandwidth for PPC if the 68K is not performing bus accesses, but even so, the Chip RAM access is cripplingly slow for PPC. When you think about how many instructions it could execute in the time it takes to read just 1 longword from a chip ram address, you'll understand.

[Karlos]

Franko! Your Mac is a PC, but that just means it can run Aros! Aros is made by Amigans, for Amigans! If we want a feature added to it, we add it ourselves.

I think Franko's Mac is a G4 model rather than an x86 one. I know AROS PPC runs on the Sam, but does it support PPC Mac?

[Karlos]

@ Karlos
Sorry but with OS4.0 on my main Amiga I'll have to disagree with you big time on this one. Although I've set up a whole 250Gb partition and can easily boot straight into it, on my Amiga it's just way too slow to be usable for me. I only use it on an 640 x 512, 32 Colour screen, you can't really go down to 640 x 256 on it as most of the progs written for it tend to have been written for larger screen sizes than this.

At the risk of remaining off topic (sorry Stephen), just using 32 colours isn't enough. The gradients and 32-bit icons are no sinecure for AGA.

As I said, I used it with a basic 640x512x16 (more with overscan) display, turned off solid window sizing/moving, replaced the icons with palette based ones, used only simple fonts (not the anti-aliased ones) and turned down the shading and other visual effects and the display was just as snappy as it was on the 68K/3.x at the same resolution. Beyond that, almost everything else was faster (especially having converted the filesystem from FFS to SFS). My blizzard, like yours, has a 240MHz CPU, so it seems reasonable to assume that whatever it is that's making your installation run like treacle isn't necessarily representative.

[Karlos]

What use does it have on classic Amiga systems? There's your answer

On CRT, I always preferred it to flipping screens as it didn't switch sync if the revealed screen was not in the same resolution as the foremost one.

[Karlos]

I finally watched the video all the way through and Stephen's closing "this is what made me fall in love with the Amiga in the first place" remark reminds me of the first time I demonstrated it to a friend that at the time had a 386SX :-)