Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: arnljot on August 10, 2008, 08:21:22 PM
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PIPE DREAM MODE ON:
The Sonnet PCI PPC Card is now in stock: see here (http://store1.sonnettech.com/product_info.php?cPath=22_92&products_id=254) at about $60 for a 400mhz G4
If one had the skills. What licenses are needed (WarpUp) to make a driver?
Or would one have to do it by rev engeneering the current WarpUp release? Or are there WarpUp docs available which says how to make a new PPC HAL for WarpUp?
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I think you'll find they are not technically compatible with any PCI controller (G-Rex, Prometheus, Mediator).
This product was to be the Shark PPC from Elbox (rebranded by Elbox of course) that in the end never came out, almost certainly because of a technical limitation they could not overcome.
I am surprised they are back in stock, last time this subject was brought up, some Amiga user bought Sonnet's entire back stock!
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@alexh
I know about the sonnet + shark relations. Thats how I first noticed the card as someone pointed out that they are twins, infact spitting images of eachother. Maybe it was you :)
So now I have two questions:
1) What can make the card incompatible with Classic amiga PCI boards
2) (Still) What resources and legal stuff is needed to make a WarpUp HAL for such a card, granted that a hardware superhero looked at it :)
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plug one of these into a Power Macintosh® 7200, 7215, 8200 then grab the Moana ISO and run os4.1
EASY LIFE!!! :lol:
PS. If I could sell my entire back stock to Amiga users, then I would restock and sell some more :-P
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@ddniUK
LOL, I know I invited to "Pipe dream mode", but that just... hehe
@alexh
I would guest that for os3.9 they hit legal issues. Maybe no license for the WarpUp HAL.
If it was for OS4, then surely it was legal and not technical. The technical issues must have been related to a coldfire versions 68k handling, no?
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The first resource I as a programmer would need is the technical docs (registers, memory map layout, any other info on PCI transactions, etc.) of the Sonnet card. That will be absolutely necessary to get it up and running.
I personally doubt AlexH is right on this one (although he usually is on technical matters), because if the card is a PCI compliant card and the Amiga PCI boards are PCI compliant (how can they not be, they are PCI bus boards afterall), I can't see a physical/electronic reason it wouldn't work. It [the reason] must all in the software and documentation.
A possibility is also that Sonnet supplied a binary-only library that Mac programmers had to use to access the card. If that library doesn't abide by any ABI [Application Binary Interface](other than Mac), then you're in a world of hell.
Want to start something? Talk to Sonnet, ask them for developer documentation. See if they have any NDA or libraries that you have to use. NEVER mention Amiga, but say it's needed for custom embedded systems that are themselves under NDA and you can't talk to them about it :-)
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arnljot wrote:
1) What can make the card incompatible with Classic amiga PCI boards
I am making an assumption that there was a technical problem Elbox couldn't overcome without a new Mediator. The economics if they could have made it work speak for themselves, the markup was to have been from $59 to $400! It would have been enormous for Elbox, they will have done everything they could to make it work!
I am not 100% "au fait de" with PCI topology, but I think the Mediator is a Zorro III to PCI bridge and in order for there to be another CPU on a PCI bridge, the Mediator has to be a Zorro III DMA master to allow the PPC to be able to initiate access to Amiga RAM. I am 99% sure that no Amiga PCI bridge cards are DMA masters. Even if they were I doubt very much if the PPC could access anything else other than RAM, I doubt it could access the registers in the custom chips for example.
But why would this matter? Surely it could work the other way around? The PPC could run happily just transferring data between other PCI cards? I can see that might work. But to interact with the host Amiga it would need some shared memory in the PPC's PCI space that the 680x0 could post to, to give commands etc.
Well I bet such a scenario, while perhaps possible under the PCI specification, was never tried before Elbox released Mediator. Asynchronous DMA transfers between two PCI "masters"? Maybe that did not work? Collisions etc.
All pure speculation, unless we get someone in Elbox to talk to us... just pure speculation, and probably bad technology on my part.
Michael Boehmer of E3B would be the best man to consult, he knows this stuff inside out having played with both Zorro III DMA and the Prometheus DMA.
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@da9000 & alexh
Very interesting. I see what kind of limitations one could have like alexh points out. But like he also says, one could invert the roles, so that the 68k moves data for processing on the sonnet. This to overcome an assumed limitation where the G4 on the sonnet doesn´t have direct access to amiga hardware registers.
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What I am prepared to bring to the table:
1) Contact Sonnet and see what support can be gotten from them.
2) Contact Elbox directly and simply ask.
3) Offer a bounty:
- I have a spare Amiga4000D whith a 060@50mhz holding a 180mhz 604e ppc. I would outfit this with a PCI graphics card, mediator and sonnet g4 card to anyone who has the skills, time and motivation to attempt this.
The bounty will be offered if we can first establish that this might be done. If #1 or #2 fails. Then the endevaour is over.
Id like to hear what bloodline, hans, alexh and piru thinks about this. Platon42, mboehmer, da9000 and other of the old boys too of course! :)
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da9000 wrote:
because if the the Amiga PCI boards are PCI compliant (how can they not be, they are PCI bus boards afterall)
But that is just it, I doubt they were fully tested to the ends of the PCI spec. They worked with the cards that they needed to. Lets ship it. I mean look at Prometheus PCI bridge. It turned out that it didn't work with the vast majority of sound cards because of some unimplemented portion of the PCI specification.
da9000 wrote:
A possibility is also that Sonnet supplied a binary-only library that Mac programmers had to use to access the card. If that library doesn't abide by any ABI [Application Binary Interface](other than Mac), then you're in a world of hell.
Do you not think that if they had dangled money (or at least the promise of money) on a stick Sonnet would have not supplied the source code if they could? Especially so many years after the "end of life" of this product? An opportunity for them to shift all their unsold stock and make a healthy profit?
The licensing issue is a possibility, after all Amiga Inc. initially wanted to sell AmigaOnes. But after the death of the AmigaOne, Hyperion needed as many PPC enabled Amiga platforms as they could to help boost AOS4 sales, you'd think they'd have done everything in their power to help Elbox... no?
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@alexh
I was thinking about the AInc vs. HVOF case, not realising that it´s only from april 2007.
Maybe it was like you first said. That the DMA issues and a rework of the DMA card wasn´t doable cost wise, and that they neither could defend a $400 markup.
I remember once reading that the SharkPPC needed a hardware upgrade to the Mediator. But can¨t seem to find the source now. Also, I think that the Shark PPC was a OS4 only product, maybe they didn´t see it viable to market it for Classic WarpUP customers.
That´s my angle. I want to find out if there is something the os 3.x community can do here.
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arnljot wrote:
I remember once reading that the SharkPPC needed a hardware upgrade to the Mediator. But can¨t seem to find the source now.
I cannot say I ever remember seeing that.
arnljot wrote:
Also, I think that the Shark PPC was a OS4 only product, maybe they didn´t see it viable to market it for Classic WarpUP customers.
I did read that Elbox said they did not want to release the Shark PPC until OS4 was shipping. But when I read that... I immediately thought "they cannot get it to work". Otherwise why hold off? It's not like they were manufacturing them.
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@AlexH:
You raise some good points about DMA mastering and I didn't know (as I've not owned a PCI bus board) that none could do DMA mastering. And I didn't see any "bad technology speak" on your part. I'd agree that it'd be nice to hear from Michael Boehmer on this matter.
Also the economics speculations make sense (needing a new Mediator, etc.)
I can also believe the possibility that they just wanted to ship without being fully compliant, due to the limited set of hardware that was supported (and apparently, would be supported), thus not being 100% PCI compliant.
As for dangling money infront of Sonnet, I believe that they probably didn't have enough to get Sonnet moved by it. Rememeber that in the big old organizations (well, I guess Sonnet ain't that big, but bigger than Elbox or Matay) it's more of a chore to do something than not to(*), unless they make a certain large percentage of money. So my guess is that yeah, Sonnet would give away source etc., if they had huge stock and they'd think it'd be worth it. Of course, anyone outside A.org and the Amiga scene knows the Amiga is "dead tech", therefore their immediate answer would be "no, it's dead tech".
As for licencing and stuff, not sure what the relationship is between Hyperion and Elbox. It seems that they're not good because if I was in their shoes (few and dying companies in a dying land), I'd consolidate or cooperate immediately.
* To add to this, it's like having a choice between 1 engineer going through old backups to find the Sonnet PPC source code, vs. fixing bugs in their newer products. Assuming this engineer is being paid a measly $80k, then they'd have to wager how many hours it would take him (more like days) to get this stuff together and update any docs needed, etc., etc., and any support, vs. who much value they'd be getting by making their latest accelerators better and faster for the hundreds of thousands of installed Mac G4s and G5s. If I was a decisionmaker at Sonnet, I'd say: work on new code. It's the only logical way, unfortunately.
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Hmm
This from the dragon FAQ might give a hint:
Dragon FAQ (http://www.elbox.com/faq_dragon.html) wrote:
Q: Will using SharkPPC card be possible with DRAGON?
A: Yes. SharkPPC can be used in the PCI slot of the DRAGON board as well as in the PCI slot of the MEDIATOR board. What's more, due to the enhanced DRAGON's DMA capabilities, the SharkPPC card in the DRAGON PCI slot has direct access to all resources of the Amiga 1200 motherboard as well as to DRAGON's DDR memory and all cards in the DRAGON's AGP and PCI slots.
As we informed many times, SharkPPC production will not start before the final version of AmigaOS4.0 is released.
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Interesting stuff.
The Dragon is another thing where I am sure Elbox just couldn't get the technology right. Again pure speculation, but you just get they feel that it was a product that the masses would have wanted and would have paid for. The only reason not to release must have been the performance of the coldfire (with it's associated emulation) being well below that of a 50MHz 060 for unmodified code and so it was not worth going into production (also I think the particular coldfire chip they chose for the prototype went out of production before they could start!)
Again pure speculation, but I do remember Elbox posting performance stats which were considerably less than stellar.
When you consider how much money they must have invested in that program, something very strange must have happened.
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@alexh
Do you think we can find a capable programmer who would be interessted in the bounty I suggested?
I think that if such a person could get it to work under 3.9, then perhaps some of the experiences could be passed on to 4.x
It´t not a big thing if it could be pulled off. Just a nice little extension to the Amiga :)
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I doubt it very much. Just look at what has happened to OpenPCI.
Porting open source linux drivers to AmigaOS for hardware we know works (to an extent) should be easier than something like this and yet the project lies stagnating :-(
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@alexh
I´m not familiar with that, what happened?
EDIT: oh, you must have edited :D
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Not much, it was a very interesting project at the start, lots of interest, several drivers written... and then the support dried up and the core author seems to have got a bit bored too.
http://bvernoux.free.fr/DevPCI.php
Only four or five drivers were ever written for this interesting core library.
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@alexh
Yes I see what you mean. Though I hope that these point´s make a difference
2005 vs. 2008: Realism. Back in 2005 there was still hope :) Today efforts put into Amiga development is for the enthusiasts. Not for great masses, or even thousand of Amiga users, only the few. So things will move slowly, and things will be hard. But:
Sonnet: We might get the datasheet for the card from them.
Bounty: It´s not to entice the greed geene in a coder, but just practicality. There might be a sufficiently skilled Amiga coder out there who might not have the kit needed to look into this. The bounty seeks to cure this.
What I´m aiming for here is cynical optimism. How am I doing so far? :-D
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@arnljot:
The unfortunate truth is that it's going to be very hard to get anybody to work on it. It's not easy work and requires a lot of hours. Most good developers/programmers/coders are already "taken" and you'd need a lot of money to convince them to spend the time. My belief is that it has to be a self-started project, and a project of love, much like Dennis' MiniMig.
What I *do* know for a fact is that to start a project you need to have access to certain things. For doing any kind of "driver work", that means docs to the hardware. For example, back in the Linux days I had found the register docs for the SiS6326 (or something like that - yes, very crappy) card, and because it was one of the few that I had the docs for, I decided to write my own driver for it (destined for DRI, but that's another LONG tale). If you or someone else can get the dev docs (and possibly tools, or source) from Sonnet, then you just made the possibility of that one person who'll make it their self-started project all of a sudden almost 100% reality (I personally think it'll be a matter of time - someone will start working on it).
Now if that self-starter doesn't have access to the docs and has to mess with "company politics" and such and such, guess what: they aren't likely to do it. They want to code, not deal with red tape.
PS. The FSF and FOSS communities (read: Linux) are very good at extracting documentation because they're very big, and I'm sure they'd have interest in supporting as much Mac hardware as possible, so it might be worth it to look in there for possible efforts to contact Sonnet and possible availability of the docs.
Lastly, some companies will sell you the documentation/tools, so it might be interesting to see if Sonnet is willing to sell and how much. Then the first "bounty" can go into getting those docs.
Sorry for the "negativity", but it's the reality and the way things are, unfortunately :-(
The only way to move forward is to realize these and try to find sensible solutions around them.
PS. Just read your last post: you're doing well with cynical optimism! :-) And I think your bounty is a great offer for which there's need. I've been personally trying to get any PPC hardware for my Amiga to do some PPC coding, but haven't had any success, so I'm sure there are plenty of other coders in similar situations.
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First of all, my old blog entry:
cheap ppc alternative (http://msaros.blogspot.com/2006/02/cheap-ppc-alternative.html)
da9000 wrote:
The first resource I as a programmer would need is the technical docs (registers, memory map layout, any other info on PCI transactions, etc.) of the Sonnet card. That will be absolutely necessary to get it up and running.
Ask them. Last time I spoke with the main engineer of Sonnet card he was very happy to answer my questions.
The Sonnet card based on the MPC106 CPU bridge, widely known in Amiga community due to the Troika project - their first approach was based on the Tundra Tsi106 northbridge - the very same as MPC106 (Tundra acquired the MPC106 and 107 from Freescale long time ago).
The Sonnet card is an awfully simple design. The MPC106 serves as the CPU to PCI and Memory to PCI bridge. All information you need is in Freescale/Tundra docs. Including the doorbell register which is used to trigger interrupt on the Sonnet card.
A possibility is also that Sonnet supplied a binary-only library that Mac programmers had to use to access the card.
That was only your speculation, wasn't it? Mac programmers did not need any library to use the sonnet card. The card took almost whole hardware over and the onboard CPU was not seen by software anymore. It was only used to bypass the interrupts up to the sonnet card (using the doorbell register)
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@mschulz
You wrote: (http://msaros.blogspot.com/2006/02/cheap-ppc-alternative.html)
Let's go dual CPU, let's go Bi-Endian :)
I like that one!
Btw, good work on AROS. Do you need a new labour of love any time soon? ;-)
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@da9000
I´ve just committed the cyberstorm ppc to a bounty for the sonnet card now :) But if it doesn´t happen. Ask in a while for a csppc in amibay, and I will sell it to you for a good price if you are a os 3.x ppc utility coder. Doesn´t have to be big things, just have a pulse as a os3.x coder ;-). It will not be the extortinate ebay prices, I don´t need the money - I need Amiga PPC coders :-D
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Good luck with your project. Why dont you try other avenues tho. Classic Amigas are drying up as time goes by. More will will fail and more will be butchered on mod {bleep}ups. If you can find a coder get them to code OS3-4 to work on other ppc mainboards. Efika is a good start but its short on power. Amiga users will always be crippled due to lack of coders and lack of hardware. The hardware which is available is also limited in power which i believe puts coders off.
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@mschulz:
I will ignore the apparent attitude in your reply because it seems you know more about this stuff, and it's smarter for me to learn.
So to briefly address your points:
mschulz wrote:
Ask them. Last time I spoke with the main engineer of Sonnet card he was very happy to answer my questions.
Since I'm not the one looking at starting this project, I've had no desire to contact them. However I'm glad to hear that they were friendly and reachable (how did you get access to said engineer, if I may ask?)
mschulz wrote:
The Sonnet card is an awfully simple design. The MPC106 serves as the CPU to PCI and Memory to PCI bridge. All information you need is in Freescale/Tundra docs. Including the doorbell register which is used to trigger interrupt on the Sonnet card.
I've never been involved in those failed projects so I didn't know. Glad to know though. Could you provide pointers to the Freescale/Tundra docs?
Furthermore, if said information is all that's needed, what are you speculations as to why nobody has jumped the gun already? I'm very curious to know, since you seem to have followed these projects and know of the simple design of the Sonnet card.
mschulz wrote:
That was only your speculation, wasn't it? Mac programmers did not need any library to use the sonnet card. The card took almost whole hardware over and the onboard CPU was not seen by software anymore. It was only used to bypass the interrupts up to the sonnet card (using the doorbell register)
Yes, I don't believe I stated that it wasn't speculation. As I've not worked with this particular hardware (or related ones) and thus I wouldn't know and wouldn't insinuate otherwise.
PS. I'm pretty sure I've read your blog post before, but it's been a while. I'll re-read it again - I'm sure you cover some of those points. Please shed as much knowledge on this subject as you can, and I'd be curious to hear your responses to AlexH's speculations. Because if there's something to learn, it's to see what went wrong with Elbox's project and try to avoid it next time (for whoever may wish to pursue such a project)
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@arnljot:
I thank you for your suggestion and might take you up on it if I feel I have time to do anything. That's unfortunately one thing that can't be easily bought or had :-(
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@jimmyboy:
I think a point that you and many others are missing (and you're not to be blamed for it, you're just different), is that certain people (like me) like the old form factor. We want to keep the Amiga looking like an Amiga. A PC box with a Ghz fast G4 running even AmigaOS4 doesn't "feel" like an Amiga to some of us. Perhaps that's a problem with us. I don't know. Perhaps it's our inner most psyche saying to us: look, it's OVER man. GAME OVER. The Amiga will never become a mainstream platform again, in which case we settle with what we've got (our old skool form factor) and try to squeeze the juice out of it. I don't know what's right or wrong, but I know that's how it is sometimes.
However, what I also know is that BOTH worlds can co-exist: you can have a PC-boxed new age Amiga, but if someone as clever as Phase5/DCE/Sonnet comes along and makes a nice pluggable expansion card for desktop Amigas, then maybe they too can enjoy some of that sheer Ghz power.
Of course the problem is always numbers... and unfortunately for the Amiga case, it's numbers of both classic Amigans and "modern" Amigans. We've got neither :-(
DAMN YOU COMMODORE! Maybe you burn in hell!
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Is there a large PPC software base out there ..? (as opposed the m68k)
@alexh:
"Prometheus PCI bridge. It turned out that it didn't work with the vast majority of sound cards because of some unimplemented portion of the PCI specification.", do you remember which part? (useful for future soundcard programming :) ).
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Well, the shark ppc would probably be a modified version of the sonnet thingie based on the same probably patented principle, why they are delaying i is beyond me, perhaps to get the ppc chips cheaper and or a faster models. Who'd pay 449 euros for a 400 mhz ppc card today?
Im quite sure they'd have to add some sort of chip that speaks to the mediator pci to get things working correctly. Then again perhaps not. Since the "Shark PPC" seems pretty much identical to the sonnet
Wouldnt a classic amiga with this card still be a classic amiga? Perhaps we could see os4.1 running on classic amigas with this card. That would probably be our only chance of getting 4.1 fully featured.
But we would have nothing to loose trying.
Another thought that struck me was that freescale might not consider them a big enough costumer, or isnt this an issue with ppc?
It must be something else thats stopping them, look at the crazy prices for the Cyberstorm, people are going nuts over os4, having it on the classic is half the fun! I share the opinion about amgia one's not feeling like an amiga, it doesnt even have the amiga keys!
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mike- wrote:
Who'd pay 449 euros for a 400 mhz ppc card today?
Probably the same people who are prepared to prepared to pay €1000 for a 233MHz card...
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moto
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Yes and there appears to be alot of them
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freqmax wrote:
do you remember which part? (useful for future soundcard programming :)
Fraid not. I am sure it had something to do with DMA transfers and bus mastering but exactly what... dunno. Michael Boehmer of E3B will know as he reportedly came up with a firmware fix that was never released.
Might be worth checking here:
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/Amiga-Prometheus
I also read that the G-Rex PCI had a bug in it too
pega-1 wrote:
Unfortunately, USB PCI card drivers only have limited use with G-REX. This is basically due to a bug in the CSPPC/BPPC DMA interface which fails on small data transfers (which are required for certain kind of usb transfers). I have a fixed CSPPC which has an updated firmware that fixes this bug but this version never made it into public and would require an in-circuit reprogramming of some components. DCE bought out phase5's CSPCC/BPPC business and they stopped supporting any Amiga stuff quite a while a go afaik, so there is not even a chance to get boards updated. So to make a long story short: USB PCI card drivers won't work with G-REX.
How accurate this is, again I dunno.
But I believe it shows how mature & compatible (or rather incompatible) the Amiga PCI solutions really were and what Elbox were facing with a SharkPPC.
Take a look here:
http://www.acube-systems.biz/compatibility/
ACube wrote:
A1200 turbo cards do not allow DMA to their memory from the CPU expansion slot.
So no access to FastRAM from PCI on A1200 that is going to be quite a limitation. Perhaps not in the case of using a SharkPPC but certainly for overall Mediator1200 compatibility! Cannot support PCI SCSI cards, USB cards, Most PCI sound cards and RTL8139 PCI network card.
However some of this seems contradictory. The Mediator compatibility says that USB and RTL8139 was supported under OS3.x! Perhaps switching off the 680x0 in OS4 lowers compatibility? Or maybe the OS4 compatibility list is bollox and what they really meant was "couldnt be arsed to port driver!"
http://www.elbox.com/mdg.html#FASTETHERNET
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btw
(*) Production of SharkPPC+ cards will start as soon as the final version of AmigaOS4.0 for A1 is released.
That would be riiiight about (http://blog.longnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/now_watch.jpg)
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My memory is not the best, But I am pretty sure that the sonnet cards are electrically incompatible with the old mediators. Thats why I think elbox recently released the new version of the mediator. Something to do with a missing voltage on the older mediators I belive.
Somebody correct me If I am wrong here, but it sounds familiar in my head at least. :-)
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JJ wrote:
My memory is not the best, But I am pretty sure that the sonnet cards are electrically incompatible with the old mediators.
In particular, the Sonnet needs 3.3V on PCI bus for operation of its bridge. With 3.3V supplied it was possible to initiate the PCI booting sequence of the PPC on a modified Prometheus board, but due to lack of software (which is needed to startup the Sonnet) I stopped my tests here.
As long as direct PCI-to-Amiga DMA does not work on PCI boards it doesn't make any sense to work with the Sonnet, as all motherboard and Zorro resources are not useable (so you could setup a second independent PCI computer system based on the Sonnet, but no more).
Michael
Michael
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da9000 wrote:
@mschulz:
I will ignore the apparent attitude in your reply
Sorry for that, I was in a really bad mood.
(how did you get access to said engineer, if I may ask?)
I have sent an email addressed at their support team. Since the support person was not able to answer my questions, he was so kind to forward my email to the screcendo/7200 engineer.
I've never been involved in those failed projects so I didn't know. Glad to know though. Could you provide pointers to the Freescale/Tundra docs?
They are *almost* in a non existing state anymore. The Freescale website forwards to the tundra.com. But there are no manuals for Tsi106 there anymore. I have found the MPC106UM file on some archive: link (http://www.datasheetarchive.com/preview/2446646.html)
Furthermore, if said information is all that's needed, what are you speculations as to why nobody has jumped the gun already?
because it would be pointless? First of all, you need a special sequence to start the CPU on the crescendo card. At least You need to feed the card with startup code and issue a #RESET signal on the PCI bus. The second, crescendo will see only the PCI bus. There would be no way to access all the Amiga hardware directly. It means, no direct input from kbd and mouse, no direct access to the Gfx chipset, no direct access to harddrive and floppy on the motherboard... Only the PCI bus. Moreover, indirect access to this hardware would be quite complex, like eg.:
1. The software on crescendo prepares some kind of request to the main CPU in it's own memory
2. The software on crescendo issues the interrupt on PCI bus
3. The main CPU (eg. the old mc68020) receves an interrupt and checks the crescendo's memory for request
4. The main CPU performs request (it may be slow since the snail CPU)
5. Upon completion of the request CPU sends a report to crescendo's main memory and issues interrupt on it by means of the doorbell register
6. The crescendo CPU analyses the mc68020's response....
...
n. The whole story begins again.
In short: it would be pain in ass. As someone said in this thread already, you could build a complete PCI system with crescendo... On x86 architecture life would be easier to some degree since almost any peripherial there is a PCI-compilant device visible on the PCI bus.
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Maybe this link is of some use?
Tundra Tsi107 with 106/107 device difference doc. (http://www.tundra.com/products/host-bridges/tsi107/resources)
The 106 was retired, replaced with the 107?
You have to register to get the docs though.
Plaz
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May be this is of no relevance but there is a Sonnet link on this page (http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/accel.shtml)
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Which is dead.
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It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.
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I really think you should check with reagrds to these sonnet cards and if they they are electrically comptaible with the vast majority of the mediators out there.
Cause if they are not, then this idea is even more dead ( if thats actually possible) than it already is
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tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.
I tried on a modified Prometheus with 3.3V supply on PCI slots.
Without 3.3V you can't do anything.
With 3.3V supplied and the correct initialization steps on the PCI bus done you can get the PPC starting to fetch its boot strap from some PCI memory (like the gfx card).
As someone else here explained in rather nice detail (seems to have also played with :-) ) it doesn't make real sense, as you can't get over the PCI bus to the Classic hardware at all, and even if you try it will be a pain.
The bridge used (at least on my Sonnets) is a Tsi107.
Michael
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@mboehmer
Any update on the Prometheus firmware upgrade? I take it that is the modification you reference??
Even assuming the Sonnet could not recognize the rest of the classic hardware; it would presumably work with the other pci cards on the bus. Therefore, this would make for an interesting bridge system, similar to putting one of those stand alone x86 cpu cards in one of the Amiga's ISA slots. The Sonnet+Prometheus would potentially anyway allow users to boot into their classics for nostalgia, etc. sake or choosing to boot from the Sonnet and into OS4.0+ (assuming some form of special UBoot was made for it).
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I've been following this thread now and read with interest what mboehmer_e3b and mschulz have written.
To mee it seems like the case against a Sonnet card on the classic amiga is 100% water tight...
But I can't that it can be electrical limitations on the Mediator boards (might be for others), but rather with DMA and what else it can access of the classic hardware.
I'm a bit stumped that it really can be so, but I'm no hardware man, and must trust what the forementioned gentlemen have said, including also alexh.
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@Argus
or choosing to boot from the Sonnet and into OS4.0+ (assuming some form of special UBoot was made for it).
Since there is no way to access the amiga HW from the Sonnet and OS4 shuts down the 680x0 CPU, there is no way it could work. No UBoot can fix this.
The only option would be to have special build of OS4 that would not access amiga HW at all (no one really wants to use this 680x0 bridging stuff, it would be too painful).
Regardless, the Elbox claim that "SharkPPC" (read: sonnet crescendo 7200) would have worked out of the box with the Classic OS4 is clearly a lie. Basically it was used as a marketing ploy: Sell new "SharkPPC" compatible Mediator boards, with "SharkPPC" becoming available "as soon as OS4 is ready".
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I know Tony (of WinUAE) doesn't like PPC amigas... but Imagine if UAE could wrap this card and present it to the emulated amiga as a Blizzard or Cyberstorm. That would be a little fun...
But the most use we could have for it seems to be as a "extra CPU" for a x86 AROS or Morphos machine.
It could perhaps even accellerate a SAM440 or Efika?
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@arnljot
Imagine if UAE could wrap this card and present it to the emulated amiga as a Blizzard or Cyberstorm.
It would be a total nightmare to interface some totally independently running HW to some software emulation. PPC with software emulation is actually easier and more likely to happen.
It could perhaps even accellerate a SAM440 or Efika?
No it couldn't. Not in any way that would make any sense (not to mention the limitation of single PCI slot in Efika... well ok you can run Efika headless using Linux, but frankly, if you use linux and need speed, use something else than Efika).
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tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.
I was watching this conversation and i know there is a guy from Amigahellas.gr who ordered a Sonnet G3 card and tried it on the mediator of his 1200. As far as i can remember, it was tested firstly without an accelerator and provided the message "not enough memory" and then a "return code 20" , later it was attempted with acceleration 68040 and he got the message that Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod cannot be opened or something like that. And the stopped the attempts as far as i can tell.
(attempted only with Amigaos 4)
I am no expert on such things, a programmer might understand better what those things mean. I can point to this user this thread as he might give you more info on the errors he received which errors may help understand more on this issue.
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@Aminik
It is 100% pointless to even try. There is no way it could work.
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Aminik wrote:
tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.
I was watching this conversation and i know there is a guy from Amigahellas.gr who ordered a Sonnet G3 card and tried it on the mediator of his 1200. As far as i can remember, it was tested firstly without an accelerator and provided the message "not enough memory" and then a "return code 20" , later it was attempted with acceleration 68040 and he got the message that Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod cannot be opened or something like that. And the stopped the attempts as far as i can tell.
Given that Amiga OS 4 for classic Amiga hardware was written for the Phase 5 accelerators, and not a Sonnet card, it's not going to work. The boot code won't even be looking for a PowerPC card. A special version would have to be written. From what others have said, it sounds like it would be a nightmare to do.
Hans
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@Piru
Probably it is pointless, but i understand him, he just have to try it to see it for himself, to see the errors feedback, it is useful to know. I would have done the same thing if i owned a mediator.
@Hans. I do not know if it is a nightmare or not, but if Elbox had abandoned this project surely something serious had happened.
Only consider that if it was successful , IF, it would have been the cheapest way ever to equip an A1200 or A4000 with a PPC card! AmigaOs 4 would have rocketed in terms of sales!! Thats a big IF...
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@Aminik
tell him to comment out the kernel module in the kicklayout file and try again, its already loaded some modules, guess they might be 68k tho, but then he "only" has to write a new kernel module for the sonnet card and pray os4 is "naive" enough to boot.
EDIT: actually it looks like it might have loaded a few ppc modules MODULE Kickstart/intuition.library.kmod is way down on the list, im only guessing tho.
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@mike-
Oh come on. OS4 never even finds the Sonnet card, regardless of what you attempt to do with the kicklayout file.
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@Piru
It's worth doing, though. Even if it does not work :) If it doesn't, then it might be said that the attempts had been made ;)
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Wouldnt it be easier to put one in a X86 mobo. Program the first part of the boot to disable the X86 cpu and use just the sonnet card. Maybe have the X86 run a basic prog to run the sonnet card in the background of the OS. Just like the 680*0 cpu gets disabled on boot or something simalar. Then you would have 3.3v and use of more common hardware.
Ok grill me Piru.....im off to hide....
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In the end you can buy an old G4 power Mac for less and have a complete system. This would only make sense if you could run OS4 on it. But in the end it would be better to get OS4 on PPC Macs which have an almost unlimited supply...
(http://msn.mess.be/data/thumbnails/48/chelsea_2.jpg)
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Heck its worth a look isnt it?
My best suggestion would be messing with both the a1 version and the classic
Im quite sure i've seen a driver for the shark in the mediator drivers, if its there it might reveal some clues
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Heck its worth a look isnt it?
No, in this case it really isn't. There is absolutely no way it could work.
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I totally get your point, the kernel itself untouched would have no clue where to go, and the mentioned incompatibilities, but it looks like it loaded some ppc native modules to me and that's got me a bit puzzled and i would look into that.
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but it looks like it loaded some ppc native modules
Even if it did (it reported error after all), there would be no way to execute them, so it did not run any PPC code.
With PUP OSes the bootstrap is m68k, so obviously it runs somewhat.
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So what do we do then?
Start a bounty to pay everyone off so we can get the ultimate classic amiga? To me it looks like it might be now or never, with regards to the sharks.
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Im quite sure i've seen a driver for the shark in the mediator drivers, if its there it might reveal some clues
I think I've seen it too, if I remember correctly it was in the same directory as the Dragon driver? Or the eflash1200 software? Maybe it was also the MPEG-2/DVD PCI card driver directory? The name of the directory was "Vapour", I guess...
Face it: from a technical point of view it doesn't make any sense to operate the Sonnect card on a PCI bus board, even if it had the required 3.3V power supply rail installed as requested by the PCI spec, unless you have true PCI-Amiga DMA cycle conversion to allow clean and performant accesses to the classic Amiga mainboard.
Did I note that the Sonnect needs +5V DIMMs, which are *really* hard to get?
Michael
P.S.: if you find any sarcasm here, just keep it.
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I see that the Sonnet PCI case is a bit of a taboo topic here :), or it has been discussed so much in the last years and came to so many empty speculation that no one wants to hear about a possibility on this project!
Anyway i believe that, after seeing the Natami specifications, which includes 2 pci slots and a cpu expansion probably for ppc, then maybe the Natami team would implement the idea of the Sonnet card because i think they are also enhancing the kickstart.
Or another idea, what if we start a machine with a 040 accelerator for example and amigaos 3.9 installed and see how the os3.9 will react to this card....
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@Aminik
It has nothing to do with being taboo. It's just that it's not technically feasible.
Anyway i believe that, after seeing the Natami specifications, which includes 2 pci slots and a cpu expansion probably for ppc, then maybe the Natami team would implement the idea of the Sonnet card because i think they are also enhancing the kickstart.
I've yet to see any of their grand plans actually work. Most of the enchancement talk seems to come people who have little understanding on how it would be done, or how hard it would be. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Or another idea, what if we start a machine with a 040 accelerator for example and amigaos 3.9 installed and see how the os3.9 will react to this card....
No need to. It completely ignores the card.
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Or another idea, what if we start a machine with a 040 accelerator for example and amigaos 3.9 installed and see how the os3.9 will react to this card....
No need to. It completely ignores the card.
That's not entirely true is it? Amiga OS 3.9 will recognize that there is a PCI card with vendor and device IDs matching the Sonnet card, then, and only then, will it ignore the card. :-P
Hans
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Apparently the card's CPU needs some kind of activation sequence. In (wild) theory, this could also work in an Amiga:
- PCI video/sound cards are no problem if slot-to-slot DMA works.
- Acessing the legacy adress space would be pretty tricky: you'd need to set up the MMU to trap the access, generate the appropriate 68k code and let that run instead. :lol: This could actually work even though it'd probably be pretty slow.
BTW: anyone got 5V DIMMs he's willing to part with ??
I've got a PowerMac 9500 here, souped up with a G4/1000(!), but only 64 MB inside.
I've tried using old Compaq server DIMMs, but they seem to be 3V and OS X keeps crashing on installation. OS9 seems to work OK, but the NIC refuses to receive data - very strange actually.
The best deal I could find was on macsales.com - $19 for 128 MB. Not bad, but shipping to Germany is >=$29...
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@Hans_
That's not entirely true is it? Amiga OS 3.9 will recognize that there is a PCI card with vendor and device IDs matching the Sonnet card, then, and only then, will it ignore the card.
Sure, but since we're splitting hair, strictly speaking the pci subsystem is not part of the AmigaOS 3.9, it's always a third party thing. :-)
That is, if you boot a vanilla 3.9 installation it will 100% ignore the PCI subsystem and the card.
Anyway, the vendor PCI ID would be 0x16b8, at least for the sonnet card. However, elbox would have probably "done the Spider" and changed the PCI ID number to prevent people from using the cheap original cards. See elboxdecrypt (http://www.iki.fi/sintonen/elboxdecrypt/).
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5v DIMMS?
What pinout? 168-pin?
What technology? DDR SDRAM, SDR SDRAM, FPM or EDO?
I am 80% sure you need 168-pin 5v FPM DIMM for Sonnet Crescendo/7200 (though EDO might work)
I got some 168-pin EDO DIMM's from a Dell PowerEdge server here somewhere... dunno if they are 5v
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Yes, 168 pin, FPM or EDO.
5V have the middle notch slightly to the left (towards the other notch), the notch on 3.3V ones is centered between the contacts.
As DRAMs are rather tolerant towards higher voltage, I've 'modified' the Compaq DIMMs with a cutter, which somewhat works. The original sticks have 74FCT162244 buffers while the 3Vs are 163244 - couldn't find any exact specs, but that's probably the only thing 3V on them since the RAMs themselves are 5V types...
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Status update:
After having read throught this thread it seems that most, if not all people agree that using the Sonnet PCI card is impossible on the Mediator. DMA is the reason, also 3.3v vs. 5v seems to be an issue.
Also, I emailed Elbox the 13th of August, asking them on this issue. Some have reported to at least get the answer which is in their FAQ, which is "when OS 4 is out".
The subject of my email to them was "Information about your mediator product and related", it contained four questions presented in a civil and polite manner.
Due to this I don't see any point in offering a bounty for this to be developed.
Thus, I join the ranks of the cynic disillusioned and blasé :crazy:
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@arnljot
After having read throught this thread it seems that most, if not all people agree that using the Sonnet PCI card is impossible on the Mediator. DMA is the reason, also 3.3v vs. 5v seems to be an issue.
DMA works on PCI-PCI transfers and there is no need for DMA PCI-Amiga motherboard memory transers, if OS4 is running on the SharkPPC, because you'll be moving the video and audio onto the PCI bus anyway.
The A1200 motherboard will merely be a dongle to get around the restrictive 2001 agreement.
Also, I emailed Elbox the 13th of August, asking them on this issue. Some have reported to at least get the answer which is in their FAQ, which is "when OS 4 is out".
The subject of my email to them was "Information about your mediator product and related", it contained four questions presented in a civil and polite manner.
Try using the the default subjects from the Elbox website rather than your own, e.g. Sales request: when using sales@elbox.com
I made a support enquiry with them recently, and got some answers to questions I'd slipped in about the SharkPPC and Dragon.
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@mboehmer_e3b
The name of the directory was "Vapour", I guess...
Yes that's the one...I could swear i saw something somewhere tho it might have been my wet day dream.
Btw, sadly, from what i heard they're not gonna release it. So i guess you were right mr e3b , now how about a usb ppc dongle :lol: