Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: utri007 on February 20, 2009, 07:05:35 AM
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http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15522
This would be nice to have for our beloved amigas
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It's for the Falcon with 100MHz 68060 accelerator and it is getting only a few fps.
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they have lots of cool stuff, don't they??
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yssing wrote:
they have lots of cool stuff, don't they??
actually no. I used to have a 83mhz 060 falcon. there was simply no software or fan support. if you think amiga has no usable software nowdays try the atari side... :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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atari don't seem to have too much cool stuff.
while the 100Mhz 060 is drool worthy, i think the USB project died a death, or if it hasn't i've missed a trick as i haven't heard anything about it since the initial announcement and proof of concept kinda stuff,
and i think the 3D accelerator project just ended up being vapour.
hmmm, as the binareys are 68020, maybe someone could emulate? :lol:
how about a recompile for PPC amigas with warp3D?
something interesting for radeon based OS4 machines perhaps?
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you might be right.. did not think about that, I only noticed the 100 mhz 060.. I would not mind that in my a1200..
But true, we have PPC, they don't..
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Went to Atari's webpage and was not impressed with the games they sell, maybe 50 or so games, including a retro classics CD. But at least they're doing something, unlike Amiga Inc. Anybody go to Atari Live in London?
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atari are atari purely in name these days it seems.
they are only a game publishing company and as such can be disconnected from atari "classic" hardware and games so to speak, (such as this resident evil port to falcon hardware). all you'll find on their current website is regergitated fodder for the current crop of gaming machines. nothing really inovative or worthy of note that i've seen. i'm not sure they've even got an arcade presence these days.
however, as long as they exist, and in whatever form, blade runner may come true! :lol:
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Yes I noticed that it is for 100mhz 060, BUT it uses software opengl and I cant see any reasons why to do that?
Resident Evil has a static background ja only few polygon objects, it shoul work just fine with 030
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Yeah, you get the feeling Atari is just hanging on in the 21st Century but that it just doesn't quite belong here. I'm not a gamer and I don't know what's currently happening in the gaming scene but everything for sale on the Atari site looks a bit old and sad.
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persia wrote:
...but everything for sale on the Atari site looks a bit old and sad.
They don't happen to sell a "SnowMan" simulator for cell phones on their site do they? Heck I'd even settle for something to calculate my tips on my phone.
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darksun9210 wrote:
and i think the 3D accelerator project just ended up being vapour.
If you're referring to the SuperVIDEL project, it's definitely alive. I saw the hardware myself a few weeks ago. The CTPCI project is alive as well; I tried it myself on a ColdFire evaluation board.
hmmm, as the binareys are 68020, maybe someone could emulate? :lol:
Provided that the binaries only use basic OS functions, it should be fairly easy to implement some kind of OS wrapper functionality on the Amiga. Once you go GUI, or rely on unix functionality, it's a lot more difficult. This in turn generally means applications which tend to bang the hardware directly, which makes it downright impossible to emulate at sensible speeds.
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yssing wrote:
But true, we have PPC, they don't..
I always preferred 68k over PPC anyways.
We have Coldfire in the works.
;)
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iconoclaST wrote:
I always preferred 68k over PPC anyways.
We have Coldfire in the works.
;)
well I got some bad news for you then. we had a fabled coldfire board (http://www.elbox.com/news_04_12_17.html) in the works too, but in the end it turned out coldfire is not fully 68k compatible and the software layer which translates 68k to coldfire code dropped the performance to sinilar level to our 50 MHz 060 boards. Elbox canceled the project completely. I'm sure your 100MHz CT63 boards would kick the hell out of any coldfire board.
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countzero wrote:
well I got some bad news for you then. we had a fabled coldfire board (http://www.elbox.com/news_04_12_17.html) in the works too, but in the end it turned out coldfire is not fully 68k compatible and the software layer which translates 68k to coldfire code dropped the performance to sinilar level to our 50 MHz 060 boards. Elbox canceled the project completely. I'm sure your 100MHz CT63 boards would kick the hell out of any coldfire board.
I've done some research on this topic on "that other 68k" platform. Basically, one has to deal with three cases.
A: applications which are inherently incompatible with the CF and need to be patched
B: applications which are compatible enough (emulation by means of trapped emulation of missing instructions)
C: applications which works out of the box.
Case C is rare, case B is not completely uncommon, and A has to be handled through user land emulation. All these cases has to be catered for by the OS, which means you either have to patch your OS completely or get access to the source code.
Supervisor mode can be dealt with (at least on the platform I'm referring to). I've worked on case A (user land emulation). Performance suffer greatly for those apps, but since you don't emulate hardware nor OS functions, it isn't that obvious to the user for everyday apps. An interesting approach would be JIT emulation - HP did an experiment once, where they used some form av JIT emulation where the host architecture was identical to the guest architecture. The interesting part is that in some cases, the JIT emulated environment ran faster than the "real" conterpart, due to the fact that the JIT compiler could eliminate unneeded checks in the code (branches etc) since it had enough runtime information to completely rule out certain execution paths. If this was possible on the CF (I don't know if it is), case A could be pretty fast too.
All this means that CF incompatibilites can't be solved by nifty hardware solutions; it can only be solved on the OS level.
I don't know how well all this applies to the Amiga though. Why ColdFire? Personally I like 68k coding, but I want new hardware.
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There are other reasons the Amiga coldfire boards were cancelled.
The chip package type they chose was obsoleted before the board was launched.
The compatibility was low.
The speed when running compatibility emulation was very low. (Lower than existing boards)
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So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60? That thing would blow the doors off of even the fastest Blizzard/Cyberstorm.
Oh right, those stupid PDS slot connectors.
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Computolio wrote:
So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60? That thing would blow the doors off of even the fastest Blizzard/Cyberstorm.
Oh right, those stupid PDS slot connectors.
And besides that money, will and the right people that can actually achieve such a project.
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Shoggoth did pen the following...
If you're referring to the SuperVIDEL project, it's definitely alive. I saw the hardware myself a few weeks ago. The CTPCI project is alive as well; I tried it myself on a ColdFire evaluation board.
Sweet! :-D
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darksun9210 wrote:
Shoggoth did pen the following...
If you're referring to the SuperVIDEL project, it's definitely alive. I saw the hardware myself a few weeks ago. The CTPCI project is alive as well; I tried it myself on a ColdFire evaluation board.
Sweet! :-D
The SuperVIDEL concept is really neat. The CT60 is designed to allow expansion boards to replace legacy hardware registers. In the case of the SuperVIDEL, this means it's compatible "out of the box", even without drivers. It's also capable of snooping accesses to ST-ram (i.e. chipram) to provide support for apps that aren't SuperVIDEL-aware.
A really nice solution imo, can't wait to try it out. Just like the Amiga, these machines suffer from poor video ram bandwidth (and planar graphics in <=8bpp), which means a lot of CPU cycles are wasted just for C2P conversion and copying to video ram. I predict approx 2x speed increase for some of my projects, perhaps even more since I won't have to buffer & convert stuff.
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now that sounds like the daddy. able to redirect low level hardware calls to modern chippery. dayum. cutting out CP2, would boost not just speed, but what i can only liken as user interface smoothness. like when i first got a graphics card going in an A4000, window movement, and scrolling of web pages was oh so nice. even at 24/32bit depth. i imagine the same sort of thing.
i'm glad Atari "classic" aren't pushing up daisies either.
:-)
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Computolio wrote:
So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60?
1) It is closed source
2) The A1200 Trapdoor and A3000/A4000 CPU Slot connectors are not made anymore (and you cannot use old ones due to them not meeting RoHS).
3) The MC68060RC50 E41J chip is no longer manufactured and not available in large quantities at a reasonable price.
4) Demand. There are clearly lots of Amiga 060 accelerators already out there which makes a small market even smaller.