Why has that factor not been made crystal clear before now?
Who would want a system that just doesn't respond well, merely due to installing a PCI soundcard!
Beat's me, but other PCI cards don't exhibit this problem or behaviour. It must be something specific to the SOLO-1 chipset(s). It works. On A1200 and A4000. But I personally still prefer to use Paula. Others may not.
If I remember correctly, the SOLO soundcard was released when 486 PC systems were still available, Microsoft Windows 95 & NT, so it would have been a card that worked in a slower PC system, and even now it can't be made to work invisibly/unnoticeably &/or better and faster in a more multi-tasking operating environment with a faster PPC CPU. Something seems not quite right there.
No idea, I didn't write the driver. Considerable time was spent to try to optimize it with limited success. Anyway, it does work and produce 16-bit sound. Processing sound even on the fastest 060 Amiga system has always been CPU-intensive. This is nothing new.
I had Paula when I had no choice and before the Mediator came along, but now I should revert back to it, because there's basically no soundcard support, DUH!!
Well up to you, but I personally have always liked the sound Paula has generated, especially when hooked up to good speakers. To me it sounds great.
Wow, that's great, but what about the recording facilities that a soundcard offers that the basic Paula chip doesn't offer?
I've personally never had a requirement/need for recording.
It's like making excuses because the underlying kernel doesn't work to accomodate the Classic hardware to allow a hybrid form of DMA that most PCI cards seem to need.
DMA is not going to buy you much. I've already demonstrated marginal if any performance difference between a RTL 8029 and RTL8139 card. Paula sound works great, the Solo-1 card works. You re not going to get much better with a SB128 (which I've also demonstrated you can use...)
The Mediator was around long before any Classic OS4.x was released. So it's not like its method of operating was not known about as Elbox are on the betatesters list with Hyperion, so that 'hack' could have been incorporated/modified to make it system legal, and blend into the OS, or a workaround implemented and supported, if that's possible, so that Elbox could offer more PCI support to Hyperion for use with Classic OS4.x.
I don't know why you keep harping on this. The DMA hack is not going to be implemented by Hyperion, period. ELbox is working on their own drivers that are sort of working now, with their version 10 pci.library. It may be that you can get your DMA hack, but it will come with a cost of losing access to the full memory of the Radeon and also 3D and hardware compositing support (unless Elbox implements that)...
That's the power of PCI in a Classic Amiga system, not this barely supported piece of software called Classic OS4.1, that doesn't support even the basics of PCI hardware - SOUND.
Solo-1 works, SB128 can be used to route sound for a single card solution. Paula works...
But hey, guess what, if you spend £100 you can upgrade to what appears to be the very first backward stepped Amiga OS, brilliant .... NOT
Who's spending 100 pounds? Certainly not you so why are you complaining? You spent money on AmigaOS 4.0 Classic and if you didn't like it why didn't you ask for a refund?
I appreciate you being helpful with all the support you've given to the latest Classic OS4.1, and I really mean that. I also am grateful for you being honest about the hardware, and its limitations, but frankly this is not a good feature of the somewhat limited or as I like to call it a non-Operating system.
You can call it whatever you want. I don't agree with most of what you complain about. For me I like AmigaOS 4.1 Classic, I use it every day, and it works for what it is. It's the best version of the OS for me to use on my Classics. Yes, I still dual boot with AmigaOS 3.9, but for me AmigaOS 4.1 Classic is way better out of the box, supports all the PCI cards I use and performs good enough all things considered. I am happy with it and content in the fact it will be supported in future AmigaOS updates.
You aren't happy and that's your call.
I've already asked them, in this thread, and via their own website support forum, and email/contacts, but I haven't had a reply from them as yet.
Will be interesting to know if you do or not...
I've already got one, or maybe even 2 or 4 of those Sapphire 9250 cards, but I'm hoping my Radeon 9200 256MB card will work, as it is one of the older versions of those cards, so from what you've said I'm optimistic - but I haven't committed to Classic OS4.1 as yet, as I'm still not convinced it's worth it.
The Sapphire Radeon cards will work. That has already been verified.
Unless the hardware (Mediator PCI) gets better supported under Classic OS4.1 I'll be staying with OS3.9, as it seems it will support much more functionality than I'd ever get with Classic OS4.1 as it stands at present.
At least from Hyperion you aren't going to get the DMA hack as there is not enough justification to do it. You may get it anyway with Elbox drivers at a cost as I outlined above.
I'm having to write this message via my Windows XP PC, as IBrowse, my favourite Amiga browser has not been updated, as I'd hoped it would, and so the display under Classic browsers is not so well presented with modern web systems. So I use Firefox, which is the next best browser IMHO, well in fact it may even be a lot better than IBrowse overall, seeing as development with IBrowse has been inactive for sometime now, and to all intents and purposes seems to have been abandoned.
For IBrowse 2.5 beta, you have to ask the Author/owner of the software if that will ever come out...
Even then my Windows system cost me £20 for the OS (XP Pro), and £10 for the Motherboard, and £5 for the CPU, with some RAM already on board (1GB). In total my PC setup cost me about half the cost of what Amiga Classic OS4.1 would cost me if I was to pay for it, but it's not got the functionality I need, it's as simple as that - the figures just don't add up to make it economical or ergonomical for me to take the plunge and buy Classic OS4.1.
This statement is true for the Amiga in general. It is not specific to AmigaOS 4.1 Classic. Amiga has never been cheap, especially the add-on hardware accelerators.
I really dislike the idea of not buying Classic OS4.x for the Amiga, but I just don't see any benefit at this stage.
Well then don't buy it. No one is forcing you.
OK that's understood, but that's another factor not to buy Classic OS4.1 - no Blizzard SCSI support.
We had one developer volunteer to do it, but it's volunteering so we have to be patient.
That's something I'm still not sure is usable in Classic OS4.1 - can the RAM on board the Radeon be mapped into the system FastRAM, as it can be using OS3.9 and Elbox's pci.library? So a Blizzard with a fully populated RAM of 256MB, can add some or most of the RAM to make it up to virtually 1/2GB of FastRAM under Classic OS4.1.
It would be too slow to be usable. We tested the ZorRAM in this capacity and it is up to 10X slower than Blizzard or Cyberstorm PPC ram and slows down the PPC too much.
So tell me, what fundamentally has changed in Classic OS4.1 compared to Classic OS4.0?
There is lots of information on this on the web, I need not go into it here, but just to name a few things all you have to do is go to the AmigaOS 4 wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#AmigaOS_4.1For AmigaOS 4.1 Classic you add:
Improved bootloader with large table MMU support
Updated kernel offering increased stability in low memory conditions
Support for virtual memory via harddisk paging
ZororRAM and DKB 3128 support as memory pagers
Improved Mediator support with Radeon 9200 and 9250 using up to 256MB of video memory (correct voltage graphics card required)
Support for PCI sound card (ESS SOLO-1 based cards);
Warp3D hardware acceleration support for Radeon, Voodoo 3/4/5 and Cybervision / Blizzardvision PPC (stable beta version for Permedia2-based cards)
DDC automatic monitor detection for Radeon and Voodoo 3
Hardware compositing engine (Radeon only) with software fall-back
Native FastATA driver support
Native SATA hard disk support via Silicon Image chipsets
Because, quite frankly I still see it as an update, an extensive one for the graphics system, but I don't see what other hardware has really been supported, apart from SATA cards, and there seem to be a few workarounds that have to be manually altered by the user once the OS has been installed, such as for the Deneb/Poseidon.
I see it as a totally new OS.
