ADOOM on A600 running 22-35 FPS

[Linde]

Total Chaos AGA needs 128MB minimum.
Total Chaos P96 / CGX needs 1024MB to 2048MB.

OK. I have not played it and now I know that I can't.

Ibrowse needs 2048MB

No.

All web browsers need 2048MB

No.

All gfx softwares need 2048MB

No. Are you familiar with the Amiga range of computers?

Professional Audio softwares need 2048MB

Be more specific. There is professional audio software that does not need 2048MB RAM.

I agree it is a bit silly to make a superduper CPU and then just waste all its power with a tiny bit of fastram.

It's silly to make a game for Amiga that uses 2048MB RAM.

[Linde]

You are doing it wrong.

What am I doing wrong? I think that you are doing something wrong if you meant for this post to be interesting or a valid response to anything that I said.

[Linde]

Well, lack of RAM is one of the major reasons why we lack a modern featured web browser for AmigaOS3 - modern browsers need more RAM, web pages today are resource hungry, number of open tabs alone is meaningless, try doing some work in them too! Working with gfx requires RAM too - I have done my share of animation on Amiga and know very well how limiting 128MB or even 256MB of RAM can be, and ditto if you do audio work, paging to disk is very annoying and also requires MMU features in the softcore to work - much easier to just have more *real* RAM.

There is always some specialist use case that can benefit from more RAM. I do data processing work that requires RAM in the tens and twenties of gigabytes. I browse the web with many tabs open. The question is, then, is the additional RAM worth more than the additional cost in development time, component price and board design? Is there software that will significantly benefit from it (Total Chaos and other specialist cases aside)? Would the relatively slow CPU, although fast in the 68k Amiga world, be sufficient for a modern featured web browser? Is being able to work actively in 50 tabs important enough to enough people to warrant the additional complexity?

The web browser problem is such a horribly ill-defined one as well. Tab usage seems to scale with RAM availability, and you can always make the argument that you *need* more RAM to support the weird habits you have acquired by being spoiled by a more modern, relevant and powerful architecture. Web page complexity tendencies also scale with ubiquitous RAM and CPU availability, and a lot of websites seem to operate on the assumption that I can dedicate a lot of my CPU time to rendering their Javascript animations. Animated GIFs? Outdated technology that, instead of benefitting from hi-color graphics and modern encoding technology, encodes 8-bit frames with run length compression, which with the dithering required to make most of them look somewhat acceptable, turns into huge files.

The basis of this sad development is the assumption of increasingly ubiquitous computing power, which happens at a much faster rate than the development of the 68k Amiga, and the Amiga will never catch up. The fact remains that you don't need 2 GB of RAM to surf the web.

[Linde]

it depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to use it for professional work and to browse the web including Youtube and so on 128 MB are of course not enough. If you want to run the newest ego-shooter 128 MB would not be enough either. If you want to beat standard PCs 128 MB are not enough either.

If you want to play the newest ego-shooter or watch youtube, 68K Amiga just isn't a viable alternative. I don't really mind people wanting this, but ChaosLord makes things up ("you need 2 GB to use IBrowse") and uses that as a basis to call the project "silly", and kolla outright calls the people that disagree with ChaosLord "dumbasses". That strikes me as damn rude, and there is an egotistical quality to ChaosLord's requests for more RAM. The project *needs* more RAM for what? To support his game (how does it even spend all that RAM?)? To support his obscure needs in general? That strikes me as silly, if anything.

[Linde]

The Raspberry Pi is $50 because it is an ASIC and not an fpga.

The Raspberry Pi is cheap because it is based on an existing cheap SoC that could realistically be produced in quantities of millions of units for less esoteric purposes than as a replacement for a legacy CPU.

[Linde]

My ASIC plan is more feasible than your radical FPGA ISA. An ASIC isn't that expensive and raising money for what people want and like is a lot easier than trying to sell them what they don't want.

One of these "plans" is an already implemented and working solution that seems to give its users the fastest 68k alternative available. No need to consider feasibility at that stage.

An Amiga Cherry Pi (I like cherry better) would have to be a SoC ASIC to be close to as cheap as the Raspberry Pi. It would be difficult to compete with the Raspberry Pi in price and energy efficiency. I would rather target a DVD (optionally Blu-ray DVD) player box kind of like the old PS2 (which is way better than a cheap CD32) but with a removable DVD drive and more expandable (usb, ethernet, wifi, etc,). I think an ASIC enchanced 68k could play HD movies no problem. I would include an FPGA like a Cyclone V which could be used for emulation, acceleration of some tasks, and for embedded uses. It would eventually be able to emulate whatever gaming CD is placed in the drive up to a PS2. Keep everything open so people can use an internet browser (which still can't be done on the PS3). Using the AmigaOS or AROS 68k, 1GB of memory should be plenty. I would aim for a price of $100-200. We would probably need to sell 40k units. I wonder if there were that many people on the Natami forum in it's prime when it generated 300,000+ hits in one thread.

Cool. Wake me up from my cryo-sleep when you have a prototype ready! I'm sure people would have been interested in that DVD drive 15 years ago.