Haynie's Garage Sale

[matthey]

@matthey
HAM10 is most likely better than 16 bit chunky because it's  pallete based AFAIK. 16bit is not.
In practice HAM10 would eliminate HAM artifacts almost completely (it already got better with HAM8).

I think HAM10 would be able to display a nicer static picture than 16 bit chunky with dithering but 16 bit chunky is easier to work with. HAM10 probably would have made sense at the time of AAA though as memory was still expensive. Memory display bandwidth was still very expensive then also and HAM10 would have used substantially less bandwidth than 24 bit "Hybrid" mode which itself was probably created to save bandwidth over a 32 bit chunky mode. There is a good proportion of people who want Natami to have HAM10 and >8 bit planar but I think it's a waste of resources. Yea, it would be neat to see more AAA modes but it's more important to get the planned hardware 3D support for example. Another disadvantage is that all the new display formats will have to be supported in the operating system.

[magnetic]

WTF are you guys smoking that you think this board will sell for more than 5k?

[tone007]

If there are people willing to pay $3000 for an Amiga system that there's supposed to be thousands of, chances are there's someone willing to pay twice that for a real piece of Amiga history, working or not.  Really, how well could the X1000 work anyway?

[magnetic]

Tone

Umm.. first x1000 isnt even for sale yet!  Second, its a WORKING machine..Its funny i've actually played with a working AAA box back in St Louis in 97.

[tone007]

Umm.. first x1000 isnt even for sale yet!

Right, and people are lining up to pay $3000 for one.  I personally feel a non-working AAA prototype board is worth more than an X1000.

[Iggy]

Right, and people are lining up to pay $3000 for one.  I personally feel a non-working AAA prototype board is worth more than an X1000.

Maybe you do Tone, but are you buying it?
Personally, if I had the money, I'd be placing it on the operational hardware.

[tone007]

I bid on it, though I stopped far short of the current bid.

However, if I was offered either the prototype or an X1000, I'd go for the prototype.  X1000s, should they ever come out, will be far easier to come by.

[Iggy]

I bid on it, though I stopped far short of the current bid.

However, if I was offered either the prototype or an X1000, I'd go for the prototype.  X1000s, should they ever come out, will be far easier to come by.

The biggest problem with the X1000 is that production will be limited to whatever PA6T processors A-eon has already secured (as the processor is out of production).

[magnetic]

I have a feeling that X1000 is only getting 1 run.. and users wont even get hands on the board until next year. or maybe holidays 2011.  You notice there hasnt been 1 posted screenshot or shot of a working system in months?

[Nlandas]

Yeah.. eBay changed their API some time ago, but I haven't updated. In fact, that whole Frog Pond Media site could use a serious update.

   Wow, some really neat pieces of history there Dave. So where's the folder with the AGA custom chip schematics. ;^D I think some of the FPGA projects could really benefit from that one. 8^D

[Iggy]

I have a feeling that X1000 is only getting 1 run.. and users wont even get hands on the board until next year. or maybe holidays 2011.  You notice there hasnt been 1 posted screenshot or shot of a working system in months?

Whether its one run or a few small ones, its still limited to the chips they have on hand.
Maybe now that they've assembled the first five boards (on what should be the final design) maybe we'll see a few more shots of these things running.
Still, this isn't the design that's going to re-invigorate the PPC Amiga market.

At this rate, Amiga is likely to be associated with X86 machines in the future.

[hazydave]

It will likely include the 3x8 chunky "Hybrid" mode, 8 bit LUT "Half-Chunky", a much faster and more flexible blitter, improved copper, 16 bit audio, built in networking (Gigabit ethernet) and many other suggestions from AAA. Some people are wanting the HAM10 mode too but I think it's outdated with fast 16 bit chunky (hopefully with HW dithering), 24 bit 3x8 "Hybrid" and 32 bit chunky. Dave, you made a great look into the future with AAA! I hope we can interest you in a working Natami to replace your NYX when it's done . Thanks for your interesting writeups and good luck with your garage sale.

Actually, of all the recent hardware things I've seen in the post-Amiga world, this is the only one I see as being of much value. Or, in my usual terms, "It's cool".  

For one, you can claim real Amiga cred there -- doing things the Amiga way.  You're not just a PC with a PowerPC CPU and some VGA chip trying to make the claim of being an Amiga. I was a little skeptical when I first heard about it, but I'm totally convinced at this point: if you want a new Amiga, this is the true way.

It's also sustainable... you can make as many of these as there's demand for. If this X1000 thing was the second coming of the A1000 (it's not, and honestly, not that interesting), it has a built-in limit, since the CPU is already discontinued.

And add to that the FPGA basis... there's some serious hacking potential there, I think. Particularly if they're not full yet :-)  This isn't going to replace everyone's need for a fast PC, but then again, running original AmigaOS, you don't really need to be. As long as the cost stays in reach of the hobbyist, this could do well.

[hazydave]

hmmm cool but without the chipset...Please Dave, give us the "AAA" chipset!

You don't want it. You can of course read the specs up on http://www.thule.no/haynie. But it was never finished. We did get it doing some stuff, producing video, etc. The LUT was messed up, so you had to translate RGB colors into this weirdly random bit pattern, but that did work. The output buffers on the Andrea chip didn't tri-state properly, so we were very limited in the functions the other chips could do -- no reading is a bug problem. I had one board hacked with Quickswitch parts in an attempt to fix this, but Commodore in 1993/94 wasn't spending the kind of money to even do this right, much less fix the chips. There was also a memory bug... we had two Andreas FIBed (focused ion beam used to actually change the chip design), one fixed at DRAM, one fixed to use VRAM.

It sounds like you'll see a good deal of the AAA fun in Natami. Not sure about HAM10 or chunky HAM8. And being a video guy, I'd like to see some YUV modes....

[hazydave]

Whether its one run or a few small ones, its still limited to the chips they have on hand.

Yup. The only PPCs you'll ever be able to get are optimized for network switches, the sort of stuff that Motorola puts out.

Now, if someone made a complete PPC "Amiga" system, complete with AmigaOS 4.x or whatever, and sold it for $300-$400, I don't think anyone could complain too much that it doesn't meet the performance specs of a $200 x86-based Netbook (which it won't). And it doesn't really have to for hacking fun. Once you get Windows out of there, things get fast. I recently bought an Android tablet... really quick for a system with a dual core 1GHz ARM Cortex A9. But netbooks with twice the performance drag under Windows.

The one exception is the traditional Amiga pro-market stuff: graphics and video. You need all the CPU cycles you can get for that. My main machine at home is a six core AMD 1090T running at 3.2GHz. I ran an HD video render last night, something like six hours on that machine. That's probably over a week on a typical netbook, could run into many weeks for the typical embedded networking PPC chip.

Maybe now that they've assembled the first five boards (on what should be the final design) maybe we'll see a few more shots of these things running.
Still, this isn't the design that's going to re-invigorate the PPC Amiga market.

To quote Dave Grohl, "Ain't no way, D. O. A.".  That's the whole problem with PPC in competition with x86. I've been shouting this from my soapbox ever since Apple stopped allowing Mac compatibles in 1997. That was the point at which the PPC was no longer viable. It's a little ironic maybe that it was actually Apple, directly that killed this off, but exactly what you'd expect. Why do they want to supply chips to any potential competitor?

[hazydave]

WTF are you guys smoking that you think this board will sell for more than 5k?

Honestly, I figured the AAA board could do ok. I really didn't expect the response I've seen, it's great. And it definitely validates my decision to make this stuff available to collectors.

[Zac67]

I'm pretty sure the Nyx will go for more than 3k. After all, it's pretty much one-of-a-kind (well, very close to) and the Amiga hardware legend.

Re Natami: it'll surely need YUV and hardware overlay support (for DVD & HD video) - maybe not in the first version but soon after.