potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[bloodline]

If you can put linux on it, you can put AOS 4.
 

How have you made that connection?

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lou_dias wrote:
maybe imagine is the better word but it would be Hyperion who would do the thinking...

Or just port AROS... :-)

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And if you read the article it can go to 200+. Also, that extra 16MB bank of 'slow' (SDRAM, which is what the XBOX and A1 use) can be directly accessed by the sound processor independently of the CPU, it's got it's own bus to it. Yes, the GC like the Amiga has 2 buses...who would have thunk it.
 

Shawn? Shawn! Are you there Shawn?

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My key point is that OS4 is ALREADY a PPC OS so porting it to the GC should only require a rewrite of the HAL (licensing issues included). Going to x86 is a much bigger issue. Also, I like the fact that consoles are better for games. The heart of the Amiga is a games machine. The A1 is a PC design and has the same inefficencies as a PC (x86)...it's single shared system bus architeture. Much of the Amiga's multi-tasking capabilities came from the fact that the custom chips could access memory on there own while the cpu was doing other things. The GC is also built that way. It's truly very Amiga-like from a hardware point of view.

The Above quote is meaningless...

I think you study PC architecture before you post crap and prove that you are an idiot.

You are so far behind the tech curve you can't see how wrong you are... even busses in the traditional sense have been superceded by point-to-point packet based transport layers... Do the words Hypertransport and PCI-express mean nothing to you?

If I look at the PC sitting next to me, The CPU has three independant busses; a dual channel RAM interface (that means 2 separate busses dedicated to memory access) and a single hypertransport link.

The Hypertransport link connects to the PCIe (PCI-express) tunnel and to the PCI bridge.

On my PCIe bus I have a Graphics card, which I shall come to later, and some integrated system features like SATA, Gigabit-Lan, USB2, Firewire etc...

On the PCI bus, I have some standard southbridge features, IDE, FDC, BIOS, RTC, PS/2 ports, Serial etc... and I have a sound card and a TV card plugged in there too.

Ok back to the Graphics card; This is a separate Processor (aka the GPU) dedicated to graphics generation, it also has its own memory, 128megs on a dedicated bus that has nothing to do with anything else in the computer.

Ok, lets count up those busses! I counted 6, not counting the USB2 (With my digital camera, keyboard, mouse etc...) or the Firewire with my Edirol FA-101 audio module.

Now what were you saying about single busses? oh years that's right the amiga has a single bus...

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lou_dias wrote:

jarrody2k wrote:

And if you read  http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/gamecube.htm , you will see that a GC is designed like an Amiga.  A true gaming machine unlike those PC's (PS2/XBOX) posing as game machines.

Hold on, I need to vomit...

.. right.  PS2 is like a PC?  I write software on the PS2 for a living and nothing is further from the truth.  More research, less zeal, buddy.

Jarrod

Sony calls it "Playstation 2 COMPUTER Entertainment System".  It has an archetecture just like a PC bus uses a different processor.  Just like the A1 uses a PPC and an 'IBM PC-compatible' computer uses in intel chip.

Now go call Sony a liar and make them stop calling it a 'computer entertainment system'.

I'll ignore your pointless response to my post... and focus on the fact that the PS2 is nothing like a PC in anyway...

Look here: Arstechnica

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LOL, 'very' indeed... You are a comedian now? Overlays?! Wow, you would think overlays are some secret feature of the OCS/ECS/AGA and can never be done again by any other GPU... Again, for details get a GC developer's kit.
 

The Amiga never had Overlay support.

Well, the GC is cetainly not a single-bus machine. That's one of it's pluses. There are pluses and minuses to syncronizized operation as well as asyncronous. We need not discuss them. Arguments there go both ways.

what are you trying to say here, because I am unable to parse it.

As Waccoon correctly pointed out, a Games console will probably use a simple unified memory architeture for simplicity and cost reasons. Such an architecture is useless for a General purpose (read desktop) machine, but perfectly acceptable for a Games machine.

The amiga (with FastRam) used a unified memory architecture... And you'll notice that an Amiga without fast ram is generally only good for games...

I answered this at the beginning. Again...why don't I have to recompile A500 software to run it on an A1200. You must have forgotten that I've owned Amigas and would know this.

The AGA chipset supported all the OCS/ECS chipset registers, that meant that any software which poked values directly into the chipset would still work fine regarless of the chipset available... Commodore tried to discourage such practice as it halted the ability to introduce advanced new features into the chipset in a clean way.

yes but I'm sure you refer to it as 'your MAC' not 'your PC' on this forum...

You're not making sense again...

What rubbish. I swear, with every post it seems your IQ goes down. You are going to tell me the a PPC cpu is not a PPC cpu. Gekko is a PPC cpu. This one has a faster bus speed and some Altivec instructions thrown in. It's a better/newer core than the Apple G4 (oh wait, according to your logic the Apple G4 must not be a PPC cpu) and has some Altivec capabilities to boot (which is the only reason to want a G4 over a G3 at the same clock speed)

You critisize me for insulting you, which I accept was wrong, and now you do the same to Waccoon...

Gekko may well use a PPC core, but it is no more a PPC than a Mac is an Amiga (they share a CPU design, but are still incompatible).

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ottomobiehl wrote:
@ lou

I really love your idea and I think that it would be a cool if it were implemented.  Also, I think I know what you are trying to say.  If OS4 "could" get ported over to piece of hardware like the GC then we would have a "cheap" alternative to the A1 motherboard.  (Personally I think AROS ported to the GC would make more sense anyway)


I have no doubt that you have some knowledge about this stuff too.

But...

If I have learned anything by being a member of Amiga.org it is that members like Bloodline, Wacoon, Billt and a plethora of others really, really know what they are talking about as far as the technical underlayings of computers and there OS's go.

I think I would have asked more about the feasability of a project like OS4 (or AROS) on the GC and taken advantage of the vast knowledge of the members of Amiga.org who know such things rather than get in a heated argument about it.

That being said, I still think Amiga.org needs the dreamers like you to spout off ideas and maybe we could stumble on to something that is eventually worth doing because I think the survival of the Amiga as we know and love is going to come from the community and not the companies in charge.

Anyway, I hope you can see what I'm trying to say.

Thanks (in advance) for listening with an open mind.

Dan

Because Dan's post just put me in a good mood, I'm gonna be a bit more positive in this post.

Ok Lou, this is the deal... OS4 on a GC is not going to happen, it would cost too much money and require licences, technical documents and a ton of devs to work on the project.

But, the ray of sunshine is that the GC can run Linux... if it also has an X Server, then there is no reason why you couldn't get AROS Hosted* to run on it... That would treat Linux as a HAL and allow you to run Amiga apps, since the AROS and OS4 APIs are so similar (ie from a common root), it wopuldn't take much to implement an OS4Emu (as itix did for MOS), and AROS PPC "should" be binary compatible with MOS on the PPC too.

*Of course we still have to get the varargs issue sorted out with AROS-PPC-Linux Hosted, but it's comming.

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Karlos wrote:

Given how few tools are available, and the fact that OS3 doesn't have proper resource tracking or memory protection, it's fair to say OS3 is more of an application launcher rather than an OS... at least by modern standards. The apps do everything and the OS does hardly anything, much like old Macs. If that's your expectation of a modern OS, well, you can really use anything.

AmigaOS kernel is *nothing at all* like the old macos. It may not have memory protection, but that does not disqualify it from being an OS.

As for resource tracking, there are some, albeit for very low level stuff. For example memory pools mean I don't have to actually track specific memory allocation. I can release the entire pool in one go.

-edit-

Comparing it to classic 68K mac OS suggests some lack of understanding of both systems.

Since when on amigaos did you ever need to specify the amount of heap for a program? Since when did any amigaos task have to relinquish the CPU to allow another one to run? The 'cooperative multitasking' model employed in macos simply isn't multitasking at all, whereas the amiga always had a preemptive model.

Don't forget that MacOS 68k, actually used 68k exceptions to implement system calls :-o

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MskoDestny wrote:
Don't most operating systems use an exception/software interrupt for OS calls? How does Amiga OS do it? Short of everything running in supervisor mode I don't see any way around it.

In AmigaOS system calls are simple jumps to an address... alomst everthing is run in User Mode, AFAIK Supervisor Mode is only used for context switching, and most often that is caused by an interupt (which runs in Superviosr Mode anyway)

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koaftder wrote:

Amiga wont live unless it opens up, and thats not likely to happen. Aros is going about things the wrong way by staying in the stonage.

Suck my what?

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koaftder wrote:

bloodline wrote:

koaftder wrote:

Amiga wont live unless it opens up, and thats not likely to happen. Aros is going about things the wrong way by staying in the stonage.

Suck my what?

I'll take it your commenting about the aros statement.

I like aros, now that gcc runs on it, it's been much much more useable for what i do.

My gripe with aros is the lack of memory protection and other things. I really would like to see aros on the L4 kernel.

As Staf has already ponted out that adding MP to AROS would break the API... AmigaOS was simply never designed to support it...

I would also like to see AROS on L4... but only because I rather like the L4 kernel design... a bit like Plan9 and Mach!

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MskoDestny wrote:
I think the best solution at this point would be to write new system calls that are MP safe and then use the MMU to catch direct writes and translate them into the newer system calls. It would be kind of slow, but given the kind of hardware older Amiga programs were designed to run on, I don't see this being a big problem.

It would be a lot work, but it's the only way AROS can have it's cake and eat it too.

The best solution is to run nonMP safe apps in a sandbox. Then Expose an new API... (L4?) for modern apps.

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uncharted wrote:

As Staf has already ponted out that adding MP to AROS would break the API... AmigaOS was simply never designed to support it...

Then what does the R stand for in AROS?

I wonder what the point of it is sometimes.  Sure adding MP would break the API, but when you're not running old applications (because you can't) what does it matter?  In order for something to run on AROS you need the source code anyway, why not try to be a bit more adventurous?

The AmigaOS API was actually broken (rather the designers made a trade off) by design. Adding MP doesn't simply mean a recompile... it means rewriting the app.

In 2005(nearly 2006!) what does AROS actually bring to the table?  Will AROS end up being remembered soley as that project that got rid of dithering in the colourwheel.gadget?

It brings to the table, the option to add a feature like MP to AmigaOS, you have the source code, it's there, it's free... do with it whatever you like. If someone shoehorns MP into it and it works really well... then it will be accepted. All AROS gives you is options, something that as Amiga users we are not really used too.

Amiga-like and Modern OS needn't be mutually exclusive.

hmmm... Amiga-Like is not the same as AmigaOS :-)

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lou_dias wrote:
The OS - no.  Workbench - yes.  But now you can build a better gui.

Ahhh yes the holy grail of PC design... lets build a better gui... so easy.