Was PCI for Amiga a good choice?

[Cosmos]

PCI is fantastic with the amiga, I have the mediator lt4 it has given my amiga a new lease of life

Yes, Mediator is very good for us...

Sadly the 3dfx driver is a bit buggy for me : watch the little demo W3DStarShip with only 170 triangles running at only 300 fps...

170 triangles are nothing for a 3dfx GPU clocked at 166 Mhz... We can reach about 2000 fps with a bugfree driver I guess...

Or maybe the bugs are somewhere in Warp3D, I don't know exactly...

I feel bugs in the Voodoo.card, hope Elbox will have a look...

[Thorham]

I don't like it one bit, because it turns awesome Amigas into nothing but glue logic. I don't have an Amiga for that.

[matthey]

I don't like it one bit, because it turns awesome Amigas into nothing but glue logic. I don't have an Amiga for that.

ECS is definitely *not* awesome. AGA is *not* awesome either when my glue, some patches and a 20 year old PC gfx card are 118 times the graphics performance of AGA. This is even with a bottle necked slow gfx bus at a fraction of the performance potential of old legacy PCI. It should be possible to create new classic hardware with integrated graphics, avoiding the glue and bottle necks, which is 300-500 times the gfx performance of the old Amigas. Compatibility with ECS/AGA could be much better than an RTG system while providing up to 32 bit depth chunky through a single DVI/HDMI output and possibly 3D support. My high end system and the Natami prototype boards are fast enough to show that the extra graphics (and CPU) performance do not cause major problems for the Amiga. I want a modern Amiga without the "glue"!

[klx300r]

PCI is fantastic with the amiga, I have the mediator lt4 it has given my amiga a new lease of life

+1

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

My high end system and the Natami prototype boards are fast enough to show that the extra graphics (and CPU) performance do not cause major problems for the Amiga. I want a modern Amiga without the "glue"!

It is a god****** shame that the rest of us cannot also own a Natami.  I would buy that over the "Reloaded" or any other "modern classic" hardware.  Put it in a Kickstarter and I would contribute $1000+ today.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  *sigh*

[agami]

The Mediator and other such expansions were/are a bit kludgy, but it's a safe assertion to make that if Commodore/Amiga persisted into the late '90s they would have adopted industry standard busses and edge connector profiles such as PCI.

[slaapliedje]

It is a god****** shame that the rest of us cannot also own a Natami.  I would buy that over the "Reloaded" or any other "modern classic" hardware.  Put it in a Kickstarter and I would contribute $1000+ today.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  *sigh*

I'd most certainly buy one.  I was drooling after the Natami for quite some time, and wish it'd still surface in a purchasable form.

Seriously, why hasn't there been a kick starter for it?

slaapliedje

[Thorham]

ECS is definitely *not* awesome. AGA is *not* awesome either

No, Amigas are awesome :p Best retro hardware ever :p If I was stinkin' filthy rich I'd buy Amiga and produce new A1200s without improving the chipset :p

which is 300-500 times the gfx performance of the old Amigas.

I have a peecee for that :p

I want a modern Amiga without the "glue"!

Amiga won't become contemporary again, especially not through an FPGA computer like Natami :p

[psxphill]

The Mediator and other such expansions were/are a bit kludgy, but it's a safe assertion to make that if Commodore/Amiga persisted into the late '90s they would have adopted industry standard busses and edge connector profiles such as PCI.

It's possible that next gen Alice would have been able to output video over the PCI bus into graphics memory. What they would do in the low end machines and quite how TV out would work is another matter.

I personally would prefer a new AGA that was faster and had texture mapping etc built in though. It's a pity that RTG ever became necessary.

[trekiej]

I believe PCI was good because it gave the Amiga a lot of expansion cards. I do believe PCI-E could be better.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Amiga won't become contemporary again, especially not through an FPGA computer like Natami :p

I don't think anyone outside of fantasy-land thinks Amiga could be "contemporary" again.  But it would be nice to have an evolutionary step to the "high end classic 3.9 machine" that doesn't involve cobbled together parts of dubious age and vintage, haha.  

[Iggy]

I don't like it one bit, because it turns awesome Amigas into nothing but glue logic. I don't have an Amiga for that.

Damn, Amiga purists can be such flat earthers.
I doubt if Jay had lived longer that he would have agreed with such sentiment.

[billt]

... but it's a safe assertion to make that if Commodore/Amiga persisted into the late '90s they would have adopted industry standard busses and edge connector profiles such as PCI.

Per Dave Haynie:

http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html

But then a funny thing happened: PCI came out. PCI was designed to solve the very same problem, and by the time Intel kicked it out to the PCI SIG and they improved it, it was way better than the AMI bus at a bunch of things. And also, it was likely to be this huge standard. That’s a good thing....

See, there’s this misconception about C=/Amiga engineering and standards. We LOVED to use standards – any standard – as long as they did not suck. So you see all these proprietary buses and such around the Amiga, and figure, these guys hate standards. Not at all. We liked the good ones. PCI was a very good one, even then.

So, with all of that said, the next generation Amiga would have had a PCI bus. Also, probably, a PCI to Zorro III bridge. Graphics would have been on PCI. I had speced out PCI interface chips for AA and AAA subsystems, so the graphics could go on a card. Not at all cloning The PC; but the functionality is correct, to make these pieces modular if possible. I’ll let you say I’m copying the Apple ][ here is you like – after all, that’s what IBM did anyway.

http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1996/960925-haynie.html

AB - Can you tell us some hardware specifications of your new machine?

We're using PowerPC, naturally. The first systems, OEMed, are based on the PPC604 and PPC604e. We expect to have some PPC603ev systems later on, also OEMed. The PIOS ONE will also use the PPC603 family, at least that's the plan -- as with Amigas, we expect a fairly reasonable way to change the CPU. We're also endorsing the PCI bus as the primary expansion bus in these systems.

[psxphill]

Damn, Amiga purists can be such flat earthers.
I doubt if Jay had lived longer that he would have agreed with such sentiment.

Ranger already did it but commodore wouldn't release it.

[B00tDisk]

Who was it, DCE that had a PPC card for the A3000 that was directly connected via cable to the PCI backplane?  Rather than go through the system bus, that's the better way - let the card draw power from the system, do the data transfer directly with the CPU, and use the host system for native chipset, etc. (if we're talking about upgrading old gear).

[Thorham]

Damn, Amiga purists can be such flat earthers.

Really? Then tell me, what's the point of an Amiga with a graphics card, sound card and PPC cpu? Where's the Amiga in that?

Want a practical machine? Use a peece, it's the only thing that makes sense. Amigas need to retain their retro value, and they don't retain that if you start using them as glue logic.

So, yes, I like to use the old chipset in the old computer I like. When I need something more powerful, I'll use my peecee.