Good News Is Here (OS 4.1&SAM440 amigakit.com)

[Hans_]

On OS 4.x it's called MiniGL, but yes, it is a subset of OpenGL. A full MESA port is planned that will support the latest OpenGL specification. However, that's going to take time. Nevertheless, MiniGL is more than good enough for a whole series of OpenGL apps/games.

Hans

[Hans_]

Gebrochen wrote:
@ Hans:
What type of games we talking about here for example? PC?
 :-D

Quake III. You can find most MiniGL apps on os4depot by doing an advanced search with MiniGL in the requirements field. A few screenshots are available here. There is also more coming...

Hans

[Hans_]

Gebrochen wrote:
@ Hans:

Das ist ja schön

OK, So what or which Quake III do I need to get, one specifically for os4.1??

ANd, is there another listing of games that have been ported?

Curious about it!

 :-o
Are all these for free??

All of the screenshots that I linked to are for open-source games/apps. There is no master list of games that have been ported. I suggest that you check out os4depot to see what kind of stuff is freely available.

Hans

[Hans_]

Lorraine wrote:
Hmm..

To be honest I'm more worried about Samantha's raw performance.

The low power-consumption is good, but what about the board in general - is it any good? Has anyone done enough tests (Linux, AOS4.1) to say?

I said this earlier in this thread, but to save you from having to scan through all 232 posts, here it is again.

In terms of raw CPU power, my A1-XE G4 beats the SAM hands down. At present DVDs can be played back in reasonable quality, but it will skip frames (barely noticeable I've been told). Stephen Fellner, the author of DvPlayer, says that he might be able to optimize MPEG-2 decoding for the PowerPC 440 chip, assuming that there are enough users to warrant it.

However, the SAM 440 has DDR RAM and a memory controller without performance limiting bugs. So, for memory bandwidth limited tasks, the SAM 440 will be faster than my A1. I've been told that things load slightly faster on the SAM 440 and that it feels just as responsive as the A1 version.

Hans

[Hans_]

Gebrochen wrote:
@ All: (Im tired right now)

Does anyone know if it is possible to hook up an external(or internal) amiga floppy drive onto the amiga SAM440ep?

Sam does not have a floppy drive connector. You might be able to find a USB floppy drive, but I don't know if OS4 has a driver. IIRC, there is a project on the internet somewhere to allow PC's to turn Amiga disks into ADFs. If you have a classic Amiga, it would be a good idea to use that in order to convert all your disks to ADF format.

Also, I assume it may be an idea for me to get a minimig, and use it through the FPGA Lattice XP with 80 pin I/O expansion connector on the sam 440ep board??

How would that work? The Minimig is a standalone device that doesn't need any extra hardware. Do you mean trying to program SAM's FPGA with the Minimig design? That would require changing the design to fit. Also, some have suggested that the Lattice XP FPGA would be too small to fit the Minimig design inside.

Hans

[Hans_]

@Gebrochen

I believe it should work, as usb printers, etc also are supposed to work with os4.1. Apparently a lot of changes since os4.0 with devices that are accepted.

Just because USB printers are supported doesn't mean that a USB floppy drive is. It may be, but I've never tried it.

You mean to use my pc to convert to adf, & then use the amiga - pc connection to relay them to the amiga

No. You would use your real Amiga to create the adf files (you need a machine that can read Amiga floppies) and then you copy them onto an SD card for use by the Minimig.

So if I got the minimig, I could plug it onto the sam's usb device, & also upload all the games??

The Minimig has no USB anything; you do not plug it into any other computer. You store the adf files on an SD-card which you then insert into the Minimig's SD-card slot.

Hans

[Hans_]

@gregthecanuck

gregthecanuck wrote:
@hans

Stephen Fellner, the author of DvPlayer, says that he might be able to optimize MPEG-2 decoding for the PowerPC 440 chip, assuming that there are enough users to warrant it.

In addition, many if not all recent video cards include logic to help accelerate DVD playback. It would take a coordinated effort between video driver developers to create a standard "video acceleration" library. This would then be available to developers of software such as DVPlayer. Or does this need to be built into each driver? I'm not sure.

Hint.   ;-)

Someone just needs to convince AMD to give us the required documentation, and it could be done. Well, they've given us the 2D & 3D docs (ok, the 3D docs are incomplete at this point, but they're coming) so it could happen.

Hans