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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Events => Topic started by: number6 on October 13, 2015, 11:25:16 PM
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@all
AmiWest presenters:
Ron Nicholson - A1000 hardware designer
Dan Shallock - Take 2 animation software for Amiga
Alan Swithenbank - FORTRAN for Amiga
Bill Borsari - current Amiga games, for sale and free
Trevor Dickinson - new A-EON developments
Steve Solie - Hyperion, AmigaOS next steps
Paul Sadlik & Alex Carmona - Amiga Users and Apps demo
Alex Perez - Inertial Computing, Amiga classic tech updated
Brian Deneen - Infocessories, REBOL MAKEDOC demo
AmiWest exhibitors:
Amigakit - Amiga hardware and software dealer for Amiga classic and emerging Amiga platforms
Jeri Ellsworth - CastAR-virtual reality game platform
Dave Morris & Paul Rezendes - MorphOS
Sacramento Amiga Computer Club - Show sponsor, founder, and maintainer of the Jay Miner memorial software library
AMUC - Amiga Users of Calgary
AmiWest broadcast - Broadcasting Amiga shows for over 17 years
Intuitionbase - Eldee Stephens
Any non-listed presenter/exhibitor wishing to be added to this list please post in this thread or PM me
on AW and I will update this posting.
(1)Questions gathered from this thread will be sorted by presenter/exhibitor. A list will be printed out for
AmiWest staff to use during question and answer sessions following the presentations.
(2)Questions for booth exhibitors might be handled through a 3rd party, as different recording equipment
may be used for A/V at the booths.
(3)The way you can best support your people, companies, and representatives at the show starts with you.
Please put some thought and some time into your wording and ask questions in a serious manner.
(4)Please post your questions in the format:
@[name of presenter or exhibitor]
[question]
Thank you.
#6
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@number6
great idea! thanks for spearheading this here and on AWN. since it looks like my post (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=797381&postcount=77) in the tabor thread got drowned out in the noise, i'll repeat my questions here.
@TrevorD
- can you give us the background as to why the P1022 was chosen for the tabor board rather than, say, one of the T1 series?
- is tabor primarily aimed at amigans, or also for embedded clients, as with acube boards in the past?
@ssolie
- how will hyperion be dealing with the e500v2 FPU in the P1022 on the tabor board? what are the estimated performance impacts?
- was hyperion consulted on the processor during the board's design?
-- eliyahu
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One here for Steve Solie.
Seeing as Timberwolf has lain dormant for years now, and people paid a lot of money for the bounty, why isn't the source just released into the public domain so anyone with the time can work on?
Some for Trevor.
Is there aditional video hardware onboard or is it limited to the basic hardware built into the P1022?
Does some kind of laptop or portable hardware anywhere feature anywhere in A-EON's roadmap?
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@ Trevor
What are the specs on the "Close Encounter System"?
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I guess it would just be obnoxious to ask @Trevor when is the Prisma Megamix going to be available (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=795804&postcount=295), wouldn't it? ;)
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@Ron Nicholson:
Why does the Copper run only odd cycles? Would have killed for full speed...
Did you ever consider giving the Copper a burst/block move ability like 68000 MOVEM instruction? Lots of empty top bits in the Copper "move" instruction that could have held a count value.
Was the "Copper danger" bit for Copper blits something that was controversial/a source of discussion in the design team since the Copper can't wait for two different events at once?
Did you ever discuss changing the Copper or perhaps cloning it to add a "Blipper" to basically be a list processor for blitter setup that could be queued up and run async of anything else? (As per what the AAA chipset wanted to add as "Copper interrupts".)
Did you consider adding an MFM decoding option for the floppy controller in hw? From my limited hw knowledge that should be not many gates.
Did you ever discuss a DMA fed interface for the serial port, or at least a deeper transfer buffer than 1 byte? Were you not shooting for higher serial speeds than 16 colours hires could allow?
Was the hw sprite design all you wanted it to be? Re-using and animating sprites means updating the pixel data with the Blitter: Wouldn't it have been more in the spirit to have the hw sprite dma data be a pure list with a pointer to the pixels instead of mixing meta-data and pixel-data? (Though it would cost two extra word accesses and so require two scanlines between each re-use.)
Did you look at ways to have the blitter generate the mask for a cookie-cut from just the bob data itself? So you could preserve more of the precious memory it eats (and perhaps cycles too)?
Were you thinking of interleaved bitplanes from the beginning or did you always imagine doing one blit for each bitplane?
Watching your Amiga30 presentation made me wonder a bit about your design goals for audio: You had "this and that" idea about how to make graphics work with only 32K ram, but audio would easily eat all that and more given half the chance. What were your visions for audio in very little ram? Did you ever look at alternative solutions like something like an added POKEY?
Did you ever look into adding functionality to "wrap"(split) the display horisontally? Games slike Defender would have liked that, and you could already use the copper to do it vertically by just setting new addresses. I would imagine one or two registers similar to DDFSTOP and two registers like the modulo registers would be all that was needed. It would also have been nice to have to keep memory use constant and static.
Can you talk a bit more about how the number of pins were a limit to your design? Was it an absolute limit, or did more pins just cost too much? Was it something you saw changing as your design progressed?
Did you ever look at your creation and think that it should have been 32-bit as that is really all that ever gets shuffled around when it comes to pointers?
Did you consider using the 68010 instead of the 68000? The 68020 shipped while you were working, did that change anything for you?
I'd like to hear about the choices for ram chips and their use. Were there ever discussions about shipping with fastram when it was no longer a console? Did you design the chips around what memory speed was available, or did you design the chips and say "we need memory at _this_ speed" and then assume that would become available? (Badly worded jargon coming up: ) (AFAIK) all ram accesses are of the type "initialize ram row/column and wait until stable, do access, release and wait until stable"; did you ever look into doing multiple accesses in success (like AGA did with 'double CAS')?
In recent times we have seen a number of pre-1000 prototypes and developer models pop up: Could you talk about how the design work went and what bugs you found and corrected between the different chip spins? Why did they change the chip numbers before production?
Big thanks to you and the rest of the team.
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@Trevor
When will "Tabor" be available for purchase?
Thanks!
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@Trevor
When will "Tabor" be available for purchase?
Thanks!
@Everblue
Hopefully soon! And then let's play a cooperative Miggy game "Cross Atlantic!" in real time on our new speedy Amiga's! Ha! I don't care what anyone says about Amiga... we will be as well known as the Sphinx 4000 years from now! :)
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@thread
Thank you for all the questions posted so far. Keep them coming!
I will be collecting any additional questions, processing, and sending them off to AmiWest participants tomorrow:
Friday - 7:00 p.m. EDT, which is Midnight GMT.
Again, thank you.
#6
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For SSolie or any other Hyperion representatives, please tell us the launch date for the Apple G4 laptop port of OS4 and any other info you are allowed to make public about this port.
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For anyone related to OS drivers/support: Any chance of supporting a chosen Power8/9 motherboard/CPU combo ? At least when the OS is more mature we'd be back on the front on the hardware side...
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@thread
Website question collecting for AmiWest 2015 participants is now over.
There is an irc channel set up for the show.
server: irc.amigaworld.net
channel: #amiwest
Please keep discussion on topic for AmiWest 2015.
We 'might" use this channel for questions on Saturday and Sunday during the show.
Be aware though that the show gets busy and this may prevent the channel from being monitored for questions.
Thank you again.
#6