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Operating System Specific Discussions => Amiga OS => Amiga OS -- Development => Topic started by: Atheist on February 12, 2003, 04:03:18 AM
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A new custom Amiga with AAA could be made.
When AInc, sell enough A1s, all they need to do is make a custom high speed PCI audio/video display card with AAA capabilities, backward compatable to AGA and OCS/ECS. It would have to be a multiple of 7.12 and not make a 320.4MHz, 356 MHz, and 384.48MHz model, but only 1 type to maintain a common standard for games and demos to work on.
Amiga! We need standards.
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Why would you want AAA when you could have a brand spanking new video and sound card?
AAA would have been nice back in 93 and 94, but a bit out of date now ;-) .
Cheers
:pint: :pint:
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Bodie wrote:
Why would you want AAA when you could have a brand spanking new video and sound card?
AAA would have been nice back in 93 and 94, but a bit out of date now ;-) .
Cheers
:pint: :pint:
Well... yes and no. AAA does have some advantages in design, and could actually be brought up to spec nowadays. Fortinately, it was designed using an HDL, which means you can update the design far easier than the classical schematic approach. Replace that VRAM with DDR-II RAM, increase the clock, you've got options.
However, it is still a 2D chipset. Sound support kicks anything Creative Labs has in the teeth (99.6khz audio here guys) and with the higher-speed, it would actually not be too difficult to modify the disk controller to Serial ATA support.
But, it's 2D... unless you pull what Commodore was attempting with Hombre. Integrate a high-end processor into the chipset to act as a 3D accelerator, add in a texture pipeline, etc. But then, you're talking a whole-scale re-design which would take 12-14 months to accomplish, providing you use an odd-the-shelf processor core. (I could recommend a few)
So, a year+, we'd end up with a very programmable chipset that would be able to compete with the big boys in a real way. Maybe not on polygon count, but definately in programmability and quality of output.
Pity Amiga, Inc is only interested in software.
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Pity Amiga, Inc is only interested in software.
Not even that, but only interested in DE...
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Not even that, but only interested in DE
DE on PocketPC?
:-?
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IF only ever they finish DE or anything else for the matter..
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Hi there - this is my first post so be gentle with me... might as well dive right in ... :-P .... what are you guys thinking???
The graphics card market is so cut-throat and rapidly evolving who would want to waste their time developing a custom graphics chip set? This kind of R&D money is better spent developing abstractions for off-the-shelf cards. Way, way cheaper and a better end-result.
Same idea goes for sound cards. Creative's newest Audigy 2 has pretty good specs (192Khz, 24bit) and even supports 5.1/6.1 sound. Also includes a built-in firewire port - all for 100 bucks on eBay.
Custom hardware is dead, dead, dead.
The better path is to take the best hardware out there and do a great job making it all work together.
OK, flame away - I can't wait for my first flame.... ;-)
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OK, Here's a thought ;-)
Lets create a virtual custom chipset for the forthcoming A1/Pegasos. It could comprise a 2D/3D pixel-shader GPU, complete with its own small instruction set, running on top of existing hardware. Use a similar approach for a virtual audio processor.
Whatever isn't directly hardware supported would have to be software emulated by the virtual chipset. That would suck up all the spare cpu cycles and give meaningful constraints to those who relish coding within hardware/speed limitations...
BTW, I'm not totally serious :lol:
Still, it could be a fun project just to create the thing in the first place.
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@ Greg the Canuck
Hi, nice day eh? Tuesday morning, anyhow.
What they should do is make a card with multiple chips on it, then just pick (in SW) the one you want to use.
Put the Fatter Agnus (make a 32 or 64 or 128 meg chip ram version), and AGA (32 chip+) on there for absolute backwards compatability. Then, make a custom, or select a current, maybe the Ti4600, for 3d. But, whatever they choose as the 3d chip. Make a commitment to ONLY USE IT for 3 or 4 years, not keep using a different one every 4 or 5 months. Then, software that is written will run, just about identically, on any Amiga.
BTW: Same goes for sound.
Amiga! We need a standard, so we should use the best one, AOS 4.0!
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And why would it be better than using of the shelf hardware :-?.
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In a time when CommodoreUK was potential buyer of CBM International, there was an idea (don`t know who`s) about creating a PC graphics card based on AAA chipset. I have to say that I`ve never seen better video output (color quality, image sharpness), than AGA`s and I`ll miss AGA in AmigaONE.
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Erm, I'm confused. After abandoning much of the legacy that would hold Amiga hardware development back, why would we want it back later? So we can play Stunt Car Racer in hardware instead of perfectly feasable software emulation?
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@ kengur
In a time when CommodoreUK was potential buyer of CBM International, there was an idea (don`t know who`s) about creating a PC graphics card based on AAA chipset. I have to say that I`ve never seen better video output (color quality, image sharpness), than AGA`s and I`ll miss AGA in AmigaONE.
What?!? Have you ever cleaned the 6 inches of dust off the monitor of the PC to check your theory?
You must have used some of the worst PC graphics cards ever made. Every Matrox card I've used has excellent 2D output, the Creative GeForce 4's 2D output quality is as good as Matrox's... I can't say I've noted the colour quality or sharpness of AGA chipset output as particularly great compared to the competition I've seen it against, although that is unfair as the first time I saw AGA was around 1997, at which time PC graphics cards were waaaaay ahead.
If you stand by what you're saying, you seriously need your eyes tested, or need to use some decent PC kit :-)
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gregthecanuck wrote:
Hi there - this is my first post so be gentle with me... might as well dive right in ... :-P .... what are you guys thinking???
The graphics card market is so cut-throat and rapidly evolving who would want to waste their time developing a custom graphics chip set? This kind of R&D money is better spent developing abstractions for off-the-shelf cards. Way, way cheaper and a better end-result.
Same idea goes for sound cards. Creative's newest Audigy 2 has pretty good specs (192Khz, 24bit) and even supports 5.1/6.1 sound. Also includes a built-in firewire port - all for 100 bucks on eBay.
Custom hardware is dead, dead, dead.
The better path is to take the best hardware out there and do a great job making it all work together.
OK, flame away - I can't wait for my first flame.... ;-)
You say custom hardware is dead... then go on to mention custom hardware as an alternative. Can you please explain this to me?
The Audigy2 is such a custom chip solution.
"But I can buy it off the shelf, or on eBay."
So? Doesn't mean that it was not custom-designed by Creative Labs.
Custom chips are designed and sold everyday. In fact, they out-weigh non-custom designs by an order of magnitude. ATI, nVidia, even Intel and AMD make a living designing their own lineup of custom designed chips.
Now, if you ment "a chipset custom-made for the Amiga market" then I might agree with you, that it might be a bad option, unless you can guarantee a competitive edge that way.
See, hardware has an absurd amount of overhead nowadays. Do you honestly think that a G4 costs $200+ to make out of a $45 wafer and $10 per chip fabbing cost? If you custom design a solution to eliminate the high-overhead components in a system, you can actually make a competitive solution. The game console makers do this all of the time. What prevents a PS2 from becoming a desktop computer? The software.
So, someone could make a custom solution that could actually deliver something of an edge to the Amiga market. Note, I said could. Will it occur, not likely.
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Sorry, I forgot to mention that I was saying about TV output. I work on a small TV station which used to use Amigas for output before PCs with ATI cards came here. The point is that ATI just can not match AGA`s image quality. Maybe Amiga`s TV modulator is better than one in ATI`s card. Or maybe Win2000 can`t make the most out of ATI.
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@ kengur
Oh, fair enough. AFAIK you don't get decent TV output from a PC unless you go into super-duper high cost hardware :-)
I doubt the TV modulator on its own is the key with the Amiga's TV output, all its graphics capabilities were geared round the fact that it was mainly used to plug into televisions, but what do I know, I'm just an ignorant fisherman :-)
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Yes we want a computer with proper TVout not converted VGA crap.
In reasonable pricerange not SGI millon and a half.
And as often seen on TV MACs don´t have tvout neither
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Hi Downix -
YES - I meant custom-designed and fabricated chip sets.
Anything you custom-design for the small Amiga market will probably be eclipsed within 6 months to 1 year. Got a few millions to tens-of-millions to throw out the window?
Microsoft supports new hardware features by continually updating the feature-set supported by their Direct-X system. In fact some of their latest software specs for Direct-X are pushing the graphics card manufacturers into developing certain features. Yup, software is driving the hardware. Funny, eh? :)
You seemed to forget that most/all game consoles are a money-losing proposition. Microsoft's X-Box is still not profitable. Only Bill Gates ego is keeping it alive. They have the billions in the bank to wait it out. Most companies don't.
The best Amiga can do is something like Direct-X but with as few layers of "crap" between the software and the hardware.
Greg
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@ Atheist
Hello there! :-D
There shouldn't be any custom graphic or sound cards developed unless there is a very compelling reason (i.e. a customer says "develop _this_ and I will take 1 million units").
If someone wants AGA then write a chipset emulator in software. Way cheaper and easy bug fixes. Isn't UAE getting close to that stage anyway? This shows it is entirely possible. In fact UAE appears to be a reasonable way to support hardware-banging applications (usually games?) on a new PPC platform.
Greg
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That being said..
[/fluffy unrealistic dream mode on]
It would be nice to have some kind of on board chipset that would enable screen dragging and other "Amigaish" functions but (and here's the trick) does not rule out the use of modern graphics cards. Or in other words a chipset that would keep all of the functions of the graphics card which one chooses to use but adds the functions of the on board chipset .
[fluffy unrealistic dream mode/]
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Well Eric_Z, you are thinking more like me. But then there is the problem of where does it fit in? On the system board, a PCI card, or ??? And how much additional cost would it add to the system?
It would be cool to put a modern version of AAA into a new package that could be added in at will. Then you would truely have things like screen dragging in hardware, but at the same time get the 3D and other stuff from your Radeon, etc. I wouldn't want to see the system OS dependent upon it, but to use it if available would be great.
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gregthecanuck wrote:
If someone wants AGA then write a chipset emulator in software. Way cheaper and easy bug fixes. Isn't UAE getting close to that stage anyway? This shows it is entirely possible. In fact UAE appears to be a reasonable way to support hardware-banging applications (usually games?) on a new PPC platform.
Greg
You still can't emulate AGA in UAE. It doesn't work. Oh yes, it pretends to work. But it doesn't.
Timing is out (which causes problems in games or apps which rely on exact chipset timing and with certain copperlists), update is jerky rather than smooth (You don't get 50/60Hz silky-smooth scrolling like on a real Amiga) and colours are not the same. And in fullscreen mode the emulated AGA screen never seems to fit the screen properly, even after mucking about with the display settings for ages. Theres other problems too....
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Anything you custom-design for the small Amiga market will probably be eclipsed within 6 months to 1 year. Got a few millions to tens-of-millions to throw out the window?
It doesn't matter if it's eclipsed. I mean, PS2 was eclipsed by XBox and GameCube a year ago - did every Playstation2 user immediately ditch their PS2 and get a GC or XBox? Nope instead its still outselling them both and accounting for 28% of the Games Software market compared to XBox's 4% and GameCube's 2 or 3%. And Sony are sticking with PS2 for another 3 years at least. Imagine how outdated PS2 will be by then!
Being technically inferior doesn't automatically mean you're going to lose - just look at the success of the IBM PC!
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AGA has the best TV output I've seen on any PC. People don't get this cause they use compositte, but use an RGB connection and you'll see the difference, it's completely sharp without color bluring.
Advantages?! Well, I'm not an enginneer but if it can be updated like some of you guys mentioned so be it!! This is why I think it'd be worthy:
AAA would maintain the scena alive, and allow some functions like the so much appreciated screen dragging function.
Also it comes to a point where the hardware already does almost everything you need.
I can see the other point of view, but will the scene continue without those hardware banging cool copper lists, that some coders like so much ?
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Have you ever actually designed chips? 10 million to design a chipset, are you kidding? Any engineer worth his mettle can make re-usable modular components that can be re-implimented in 6 months to a new process and gain the full performance improvement. Even the initial design wouldn't cost beyond $400k unless you're being robbed blind.
Not saying Amiga should, but saying that it is possible and there are advantages to it that are more than off-set, including being able to branch out into new markets, thereby growing the Amiga community.
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Hi downix,
How about re-programable EEprom, or FPGA, or what I'm trying to get at is, aren't there chips you can "flash" information to , that can emulate custom chips? I believe, if they exist, they are slower, but 2 or four in a multi-processor array? On a PCI card, of course.
Amiga! True flexibility is the source of it's power!
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Hmmm, Having thought about this for a while, I thought I might chip in my personal solution;
Buy the right to use an existing GPU, Nvidia Geforce or ATI radeon (it doesn't really matter which).
Then design you own board, this is important, as you need to select a powerful DSP and give it access to the GPU's registers, also give the DSP some memory of it's own (2Meg anyone?). In that memory map an emulation of the AGA registers. Now let the DSP run an AGA Emulation controling the GPU.
This way you have full access to the modern GPU, but also all the features of AGA in hardware (which can be updated via a FlashROM on the card).
Other than the Copper (which I miss), I'm not really sure what features of AGA are usefull in a modern world. The DSP's main function would be very similar to the Copper in the AGA chipset.
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I thought the whole problem was down to the fact that the designs for the AGA chipset had been lost and would have to reverse engineer the chip.
This is why no one has come out with a AGA solution for the new A1 or for the pc
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Actually AAA allows just such an arrangement. Remember, modern 3D gfx chips, as a rule, do *not* output to the screen. They need an intermediate, called a RAMDAC, to do this. AAA could act as this RAMDAC, allowing new functions and ability to be inserted *into* the final framebuffer.
Just a small note of possibilities with alternative arrangements with AAA. Could even make a 3D-only chip, allowing for good specialization, rather than the 3D/2D split-mode chips availible today. Then when you don't need 3D, turn the chip off for maximum power savings.
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@JJ
Untrue, I can name 4 people with access to the designs. I can even name 2 with access to the AAA and Hombre designs. The issue is IP rights to these designs, and Amiga's unwillingness to license them to 3rd parties.
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@Athiest
Of course there are. AGA and even AAA could be put into FPGA quite easily nowadays and not got an arm and a leg. I've got a trio of Xilinx FPGA's sitting here emulating components of my own chipset (which is larger than AAA, would need larger FPGA's than I have today in order to impliment fully) so I know that they can get the speed needed if you're willing to pay for it.
A smarter idea, of course, is to mask-form a chip using ASIC techniques. Get the low volume production cost savings of FPGA, but the lower cost per-chip of a custom chip.
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I know a lot of you want a new AGA or AAA chipset but it just doesn't make sense and isn't cost effective.
Even if there were AGA or AAA modified to run faster they couldn't compare to a modern graphics chip. Nothing even supports AAA, not even the current OS!!! Why in the heck would you want that?
Who cares if emulation doesn't run all the old games! There are only a handfull that I'd still play anyway and many of them already work on UAE. And UAE will continue to improve. Sorry, nastalgia isn't a good enough reason to want AGA IMHO.
There are fairly fast (performance like GForce II) 3D graphics chips with built in featurs that stomp on those old chipsets (Transform & Lighting, DVD support...) going for $15 in quantity. The brand new 3D chips should be under $50 by 2005 and they render photo realistic images in real time!
And while I'm at it... sound? Uh, CD quality 24 bit 3D 6.1 channel sound chip around $15.
It's $30 for near state of the art vs Jurassic Park... sorry but dinasaurs are dead and buried and should only be seen in a museum.
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The average cost of doing a full custom design with the latest technology is on average $14 million IIRC (read it on EETimes a while back).
At 0.13um the mask alone costs $2 million and you need some *very* expensive development tools and simulators because at that price you have to get it right first time.
Very few companies are now developing custom chips at this level and the ones left are dropping out like flies. Unless you know you are going to sell millions of them (think CPUs), or make a huge profit on each one (think high end graphics chips) there is simply no point.
A factory (FAB) to make these things in will run you about $2 Billion (Commodore used to have it's own FAB).
FPGAs are a much lower cost route and these days and if implemented I would guess every bit as fast - if not faster - than the real AAA.
If you want AAA get an FPGA, read up on VHDL or Verilog and get coding :-)
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A fab will run you about $250 million for one "good enough" for what we're talking about here.
And the cost for a mask is not $2 million. That's the cost of a whole assembly. The mask itself is only $400k or so.
But, let's address the situation. We don't *need* 0.13u processes here. Hell, the Alpha was kicking everyones posterior and taking names using a process 4 years old.... namely dirt-cheap to get chips made at. Let's use 0.18u or even 0.20u here, suddenly the cost for a whole assembly is under $150k.
You're suddenly in a price-affordable range and the technology is in-reach of the big-boys.
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Don't have time to be here now but I just remembered something. AInc. might not even have the rights to AAA anymore! Remember that they didn't bought all IP. :-(
Another thing. I'm not into electronics at all, but fFrom what I've read the thing would be too costy, and unperformant when compared to todays standards. It'd be only for having those features like screendragging, multiple screens at different resolutions, and of course for the sceners.
As for the price it'd be only a matter of estimating the price cost, then have preorders made (BUT ONLY ACTIVE WHEN THE THING WAS ACTUALLY DONE!). When enouph people preordered some company could do it if they wanted to take the risk. .
There are some Amiga users that would like to see it happening.
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Well, let's go into detail here, if you'd like Jose:
roughly 2.5 million transistors total for the design as/is. Design done in a HDL called "M", no longer in major use it seems. However, Mentor has conversion tools to render these to Verilog in short order, so $120k for the tools needed.
now, 2.5 million transistors comes down to roughly 500k gates, depending on register handling, any SRAM included, etc, so 500k is a good estimate. half of the gates are in 1 chip, Andrew. The other half are split among the remaining 3 chips. Now, need to double 2 of the chips, to get the 64-bit configuration.
So, we need a single 250k gate FPGA's and 5 50k gate FPGA's.
Altera has several FPGA's that fit the bill. For the 5 smaller ones, I'd recommend Flex10k's. For Andrea, use an Apex20KC, and throw in a DDR-RAM or sDRAM controller to replace the legacy model as well as a PCI bridge over the off-chip logic that's there now, effectively for free.
Total cost for the chips in bulk: $18.
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How much is "bulk"?
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@alx
Sorry about that, I tend to forget not everyone knows my habits.
I always go on price for 1000 units when pricing out any solution. if I price it out differently, I always let people know.
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Wow :-o
Surely you're not saying that if A inc sold 1000 custom chipsets at $18 each then they would cover costs? If that was the case (and even if it was for 10000 or more units at $100), they could put them on PCI cards and sell them for use in the A1 or PCs (for emulators etc). Now that would be good!
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With the price current classic Amiga hardware sells 18$ is ridiculously nothing. I bet some people would give more than 100$ for it.
But I remember AAA wasn't finished yet.
If it was finished and you're completely sure of what you're saying this could really happen. I'd buy it. At this price many people would buy it for nostalgia alone.
Is EVERTHING included in the estimation you made? Like you forgot the D/A converters or something?
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Jose wrote:
With the price current classic Amiga hardware sells 18$ is ridiculously nothing. I bet some people would give more than 100$ for it.
But I remember AAA wasn't finished yet.
If it was finished and you're completely sure of what you're saying this could really happen. I'd buy it. At this price many people would buy it for nostalgia alone.
Is EVERTHING included in the estimation you made? Like you forgot the D/A converters or something?
Also, that $18 was for just the chips. I also mentioned the cost of the software needed at just under $200k. As for work left, nobody can be sure how much is left to do so it is impossible to estimate. Dave Haynie claims one value, but he's also not a chip designer.
Also, I was including the DAC's and PLD's needed, as with modern technology in FPGA's you'd no longer need these supprting chips.