Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Amiga_Nut on November 17, 2010, 12:29:48 PM
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I was looking around the net for info on a coldfire project for Amiga, and I found the following website...
http://www.cdtv.org.uk/coldfire/
However the last update on there is for 2004...it's 2010!! So what happened? Did they give up on it 6 years ago?
Coldfire V4 is an interesting CPU, at 266mhz it runs at a nice and efficient 400 MIPS.
Anyone have any news to shed light on this sad state of affairs? It's not a solution to a next generation Amiga without someone tooling up to put AGA chipset on motherboards I know but it is an interesting CPU and accelerator route, and given Coldfire CPUs cost bugger all it's a shame this went a bit quiet half a decade ago.
(I am not interested in what people think of Coldfire as a solution (or any other CPU you believe is personally better), only information regarding the project being abandoned or another group taking over this task in some small way)
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He explains what happened here:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=55590
Andy
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Thanks for the link. I totally understand though, working full-time to cover your life expenses leaves very little time/energy for doing stuff like this.
If I won the lottery I would put up a £200,000 bounty to finish this.
(£200k is including combining hardware design with a Kickstart work around compatible with the v4 Coldfire CPU)
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Thanks for the link. I totally understand though, working full-time to cover your life expenses leaves very little time/energy for doing stuff like this.
If I won the lottery I would put up a £200,000 bounty to finish this.
(£200k is including combining hardware design with a Kickstart work around compatible with the v4 Coldfire CPU)
Get a scratch card if you win a tenner, I'm still gonna hold you to the above statement ;)
Also, the 68k AROS project will go a long way to solving the kickstart issue... The Amiga software issue aside...
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Also I believe that trapping 68k instructions (and the differently behavioured MUL instruction) made said 266MHz Coldfire perform like a 40MHz 68040.
As for using it for AROS ... I think I'd prefer a dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex A9 based system...
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Coldfire V4 is an interesting CPU, at 266mhz it runs at a nice and efficient 400 MIPS.
...running coldfire code. It won't be anywhere near that when running typical 68k code. Instruction emulation is possible of course, but it introduces huge performance penalty due to exception processing. Even then there are certain opcodes that are incompatible with the 68k, and cannot be patched on the fly. If you instead go for JIT route then why bother with coldfire in the first place, just use faster and cheaper solutions instead.
As far as I can remember Elbox went as far as to actually build a working prototype only to kill the project. I would guess the reasons were performance and compatibility issues.
Of course anyone who actually read the coldfire documentation could easily see that and predict this result.
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@Piru
One argument for JIT on coldfire would be that you could probably get away with something very lightweight and quick since your JIT will spend most of it's time simply copying the existing opcodes, without transformation, to the translation cache. You might even be able to create something along the lines of HP's Dynamo, which had the amusing property of being able to run code faster than the same CPU it was running on (due to runtime optimised code folding).
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...running coldfire code. It won't be anywhere near that when running typical 68k code. Instruction emulation is possible of course, but it introduces huge performance penalty due to exception processing. Even then there are certain opcodes that are incompatible with the 68k, and cannot be patched on the fly. If you instead go for JIT route then why bother with coldfire in the first place, just use faster and cheaper solutions instead.
As far as I can remember Elbox went as far as to actually build a working prototype only to kill the project. I would guess the reasons were performance and compatibility issues.
Of course anyone who actually read the coldfire documentation could easily see that and predict this result.
So how does one explain this then?
http://acp.atari.org
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...running coldfire code. It won't be anywhere near that when running typical 68k code.
If I remember correctly, if at least the exec library was compiled for coldfire (which is now possible thanks to the kickstart bounties) emulation would be faster (and if the whole kickstart is recompiled it should be even faster).
But I agree that nowadays an ARM cpu (with built in opengl es 2) would be a far better choice, even if it does not emulates the 680x0 in hardware, it is cheaper and faster. IMO a winning combination would be a board w/ARM cpu plus a FPGA that fully emulates any 68k.
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It used to be the case that coldfire was just not compatible enough with M68K object code, not so much because of missing opcodes (which can always be trapped, even if it means a hit) but that there were cases where instructions behaved differently without generating a trap. They were the real killers, since they'd introduce behaviour that would be unexpected and also impossible to work around. As far as I know, these compatibility issues have been mitigated in more recent cores since, though I don't know the technical details as I've not been keeping up.
However, assuming you can make m68k object code run, one oft-cited objection towards coldfire is that for full M68K compatibility you are potentially looking at a big performance hit relative to "native" coldfire code due to whatever emulation work is required to achieve compatibility.
However, how bad is that worst-case performance compared to say 030, which seems to be all that's presently on offer for new accelerator cards?
If it turns out that worst trap-and-emulate required m68k code runs at speeds comparable to a fast 030, or higher, then it is almost a bit of a no-brainer. Not all m68k object code you throw at it is going to be riddled with unimplemented operations and addressing modes.
When the 060 came out for amiga, trap-and-emulate caused a lot of performance issues, but things like CyberPatcher and OxyPatcher demonstrated there are faster solutions than naive trap/emulate.
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If it was combined with a Kickstart work around project it would be great and a re-compile of Workbench (Amiga Inc being contacted for a licence I guess) then there is no reason you couldn't go native with a Coldfire V4 setup...and V5 when it is produced in the future. And let's face it not much software outside games requires a 100% 68k inefficient mode anyway.
Remember I am talking about a plug-in board that doesn't cost a fortune like current PPC boards for classic Amigas on ebay.
I didn't want to get into the alternatives debate but we only have 4 CPU choices left.
ARM = total rewrite of everything from scratch.
X86 = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a million drivers for all x86 hardware combos
PPC = hugely expensive hardware so no sale to people with £50/100 machines
Coldfire = not a simple transition but maybe the simplest of the 4 in reality?
400 MIPS is a lot of performance, in the short term it's not possible to use all that performance sure. But it is CHEAP technology, and cheap = economically viable business = profits plowed back into using more features of the actual Coldfire architecture via modifications to KS/WB. Coldfire is also being actively developed unlike PPC which is the only other CPU remotely compatible with 68k systems in any way.
Maybe a future solution would be 266mhz Coldfire v4 + Minimig style FPGA for OCS/AGA chipset combined in a single desktop machine. But only after upgrade cards for 500/1000, 1500/2000, 1200 and 3000/4000 models were released. This would cater for a new bread of Amigans who never lived the time of Amiga.
All I was interested in was an alternative to £700 PPC cards on ebay that don't run classic Workbench 1.3/Lotus 2/Rocket Ranger natively anyway and sit there like expensive co-processors. Even if it runs as 'badly' as a 68060 clocked @ 66mhz who cares in the short term anyway if it costs less than a 060 card for 2000/4000/1200s?
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Get a scratch card if you win a tenner, I'm still gonna hold you to the above statement ;)
Also, the 68k AROS project will go a long way to solving the kickstart issue... The Amiga software issue aside...
I will put up the same 20% as a bounty from my winnings, so that's £2 :p
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So how does one explain this then?
http://acp.atari.org
Explain what in particular?
Reading that page gives no indication that this board actually has the 68k emulation implemented, or how fast it would be in real life. All it says that such emulation it would be 680x0 compatible, and that the emulation will be added later. Of course they're wrong here, even with the emulation there still are instructions that won't work correctly.
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Explain what in particular?
Sorry, I was on my mobile at the time and it's too fiddly to type on it.
The Atari Coldfire team have managed to create a Coldfire based motherboard that runs 68k Atari binaries with no apparent loss of performance or compatibility.
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Sorry, I was on my mobile at the time and it's too fiddly to type on it.
The Atari Coldfire team have managed to create a Coldfire based motherboard that runs 68k Atari binaries with no apparent loss of performance or compatibility.
Well...EmuTOS...
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Well...EmuTOS...
EmuTOS is compiled as native-Coldfire code AFAIK, it's the old 68k binaries that are interesting.
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The Atari Coldfire team have managed to create a Coldfire based motherboard that runs 68k Atari binaries with no apparent loss of performance or compatibility.
Well, nothing on that page indicates that. Care to point out any benchmark results in running some actual 68k code?
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Well, nothing on that page indicates that. Care to point out any benchmark results in running some actual 68k code?
I'm waiting for an email reply. As I said "apparently", not definitely.
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EmuTOS.....that's no small achievement in itself though given that the original TOS wasn't anything other than 68000 compatible, no other 68K CPU could run the ATARI ST OS at all (which is why the fastest STs ever were 16mhz 68000 systems).
I'm sure if £200,000 was on the table as a bounty then it would not be impossible to get Amiga Coldfire into reality...that's like 10 years of a very decent salary (salary left after taxes that is) or 20 years of your typical salary to be honest ;)
Of course I would retain all the rights and lock it up in my castle I have built with my lottery millions
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Well, nothing on that page indicates that. Care to point out any benchmark results in running some actual 68k code?
Have a look at the ST/TT section's Firebee thread on atariage.com/forums/
Might be someone with technical info or some more leads to other sites there.
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I'm waiting for an email reply. As I said "apparently", not definitely.
Well, you could as well just ask them how they're going to handle any code that depends on:
- 68020 multiply/divide instructions behaving like they do on 68k
- MULU and MULS setting the overflow bit
- ASL and ASR setting the overflow bit
- MOVE.B ,-(A7) and MOVE.B (A7)+, changing ea by 2
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Well, you could as well just ask them how they're going to handle any code that depends on:
- 68020 multiply/divide instructions behaving like they do on 68k
- MULU and MULS setting the overflow bit
- ASL and ASR setting the overflow bit
- MOVE.B ,-(A7) and MOVE.B (A7)+, changing ea by 2
Will do! :)
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Have a look at the ST/TT section's Firebee thread on atariage.com/forums/
Might be someone with technical info or some more leads to other sites there.
I am not that interested. Now, if someone can find the actual 68k emulation performance claims/data I can comment on those.
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£200,000 is like 10 years of a very decent salary (salary left after taxes that is) or 20 years of your typical salary to be honest ;)
You still have to pay tax on bounties. More like 5 yrs of an average software engineer's salary both before tax. Either way, not a good enough incentive.
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You still have to pay tax on bounties.
Only if you declare it. lol
I think my own account in the Iranian Tax Free Zone of Kish is safe the from the greedy mitts of the Inland Revenue. ;)
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Only if you declare it. lol
I think my own account in the Iranian Tax Free Zone of Kish is safe the from the greedy mitts of the Inland Revenue. ;)
Given how disgusting I think it is that Guidian Osbourne and Vodaphone are for avoiding their due taxes, I'm not impressed by tax avoidance... But I'm not going to be drawn into a poetical debate in the middle of a fun topic about computer hardware.
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Given how disgusting I think it is that Guidian Osbourne and Vodaphone are for avoiding their due taxes, I'm not impressed by tax avoidance... But I'm not going to be drawn into a poetical debate in the middle of a fun topic about computer hardware.
Sorry to butt in but...
are poets and politicians the same thing, or are yo a wee bit dislexic erm.. dysslax... oh cobblers, never mind...
Butting out now... :)
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Given how disgusting I think it is that Guidian Osbourne and Vodaphone are for avoiding their due taxes, I'm not impressed by tax avoidance... But I'm not going to be drawn into a poetical debate in the middle of a fun topic about computer hardware.
40% Income Tax for 13 years and then no help whatsoever when you have to stop work to look after your severely disabled wife?
They can feck right off if their having another penny out of me.
[/rant]
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Sorry to butt in but...
are poets and politicians the same thing, or are yo a wee bit dislexic erm.. dysslax... oh cobblers, never mind...
Butting out now... :)
Hahahhaha, that is the beauty of then iPhone autocorrect... :roll:
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Hahahhaha, that is the beauty of then iPhone autocorrect... :roll:
haha,... gotta love a comment on autocorrect that has a demonstration of the downside of autocorrect in it :)
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Of course, the apple implementation will always choose "poetical" over "political" since it's a word that your average mac user, being a "creative" type is more likely to use :p
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I'm a mac user
not a pc abuser
but I'm not creative
just a silly scots native...
:lol:
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PPC = hugely expensive hardware so no sale to people with £50/100 machines
PPC = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all ppc boards/chipsets
ARM = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all arm boards/chipsets
I really don't see the difference with x86...
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PPC = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all ppc boards/chipsets
ARM = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all arm boards/chipsets
I really don't see the difference with x86...
ARM and x86 are cheap and plentiful compared to PPC.
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ARM and x86 are cheap and plentiful compared to PPC.
True. What I mean is that in free cases it's a complete rewrite... And in all cases you don't have to support all motherboards. Just like you decide to support two/three ppc boards, you may support two/three x86 or arm boards.
So yes, it's a huge work, but surely no less than PPC...
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True. What I mean is that in free cases it's a complete rewrite... And in all cases you don't have to support all motherboards. Just like you decide to support two/three ppc boards, you may support two/three x86 or arm boards.
So yes, it's a huge work, but surely no less than PPC...
Hardly a rewrite! A compiler switch and a bit work on the CPU specific parts of AROS... Easy ;)
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ARM and x86 are cheap and plentiful compared to PPC.
Yes, both are cheap and plentiful. However, both require a total rewrite of the OS.
PPC s are already supported by two OS' and there is a small, but growing, library of software.
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ARM and x86 are cheap and plentiful compared to PPC.
ARM is cheaper and consumes less electricity than x64 (why bother with the klunky 32bit mess?). x64 is faster but tied to the desktop that is bound to go the way of the mainframe.
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Yes, both are cheap and plentiful. However, both require a total rewrite of the OS.
Hardly a rewrite! A compiler switch and a bit work on the CPU specific parts of AROS... Easy :)
Is there an echo in here?
PPC s are already supported by two OS' and there is a small, but growing, library of software.
Err, it's supported by the three AmigaOS clones... But that is neither here nor there... PPC's are a dead end for us as users.
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Hardly a rewrite! A compiler switch and a bit work on the CPU specific parts of AROS... Easy ;)
Why does nobody just do this?
To hell with the copyright!
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Why does nobody just do this?
To hell with the copyright!
Erm, they have. AROS runs on more than just x86.
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Why does nobody just do this?
To hell with the copyright!
AROS currently runs on:
x86 - Stable, binaries and complete distributions available.
x86-64 - Stable and binaries available.
PPC - Stable and binaries available for specific PPC hardware.
68K - Unstable alpha and binaries available (1meg ROM version only at the moment)
ARM - Beta, binaries unavailable (ask Pavel Fedin or Michal Shultz if you really want).
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Hahahhaha, that is the beauty of then iPhone autocorrect... :roll:
My worst iPhone autoINcorrect was after a particularly nasty argument with my wife, I took my laptop to 'Carrows', a 24 hour restaurant, figuring since it was the middle of the night, and I wasn't going to be sleeping anyway, I might as well get some work done.
When she text messaged me asking where I was, int the response, the iPhone did me the fine favor of replacing 'Carrows' with 'Carol', the name of the neighbor that wanted to get down my pants.
It is a good thing my wife isn't the "make a bonfire in the front yard with all of his belongings" type.
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AROS currently runs on:
x86 - Stable, binaries and complete distributions available.
x86-64 - Stable and binaries available.
PPC - Stable and binaries available for specific PPC hardware.
68K - Unstable alpha and binaries available (1meg ROM version only at the moment)
ARM - Beta, binaries unavailable (ask Pavel Fedin or Michal Shultz if you really want).
Once the 68k port is in a semi usable state i'm going to splice it together with Amithlon to replace 3.9.
Then I might see about asking Bernd and the other fella(Sorry I forget your name) to release their code under the APL. :)
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Why not build hardware-based dynamic recompilation (or translation) into the execution pipeline, i.e. an MC68000 compatible ISA that translates only the necessary bits to the ColdFire ISA (the "microcode," so to speak). Could such a solution be faster than a complete recreation of the MC68000 ISA in an FPGA? Or could a solution that translates from one ISA to another, e.g. MC68000 to ARM, be just as fast or faster?
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Why not build hardware-based dynamic recompilation (or translation) into the execution pipeline, i.e. an MC68000 compatible ISA that translates only the necessary bits to the ColdFire ISA (the "microcode," so to speak).
Sound simple enough! Let us know when you're done.
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Why not build hardware-based dynamic recompilation (or translation) into the execution pipeline, i.e. an MC68000 compatible ISA that translates only the necessary bits to the ColdFire ISA (the "microcode," so to speak). Could such a solution be faster than a complete recreation of the MC68000 ISA in an FPGA? Or could a solution that translates from one ISA to another, e.g. MC68000 to ARM, be just as fast or faster?
FPGA-based solutions seems to be the best if one insists on 68K compatibility., look at the NATAMI/Minimig/ActionReplay boards.
See the long thread regarding Minimig-AGA core performance relative to a classic Amiga.
Natami in particular already has a cached memory interface that uses DDR2 in burst mode all the time. This will allow Natami's blitter to be 100x faster than a classic. Switching back away from cpu blitting will be necessary since accelerated Amigas' cpu could blit faster than the stock blitter chip. This will not be the case with Natami. The goal for Natami cpu is in the 100-150Mhz range however the memory interface will make it seem even faster.
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I don't even know if it's feasible but the best (?) classic Amiga accelerator card would be one based on an intel Atom or AMD Geode running an emulation of a 68k processor. Not quite whole system emulation, just CPU emulation, in JIT mode.
But again, I don't know if that's even feasible.
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@Piru
The sarcasm, it stings! It stings! ;-)
@lou_dias
FPGA-based solutions seems to be the best if one insists on 68K compatibility., look at the NATAMI/Minimig/ActionReplay boards.
That wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking more or smallish FPGA or some other piece of hardware that looks like a 680x0 but actually functions as a memory controller, instruction cache, translator, etc. It's probably easier to just wait for a faster FPGA solution and use an existing core.
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@Piru
The sarcasm, it stings! It stings! ;-)
@lou_dias
That wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking more or smallish FPGA or some other piece of hardware that looks like a 680x0 but actually functions as a memory controller, instruction cache, translator, etc. It's probably easier to just wait for a faster FPGA solution and use an existing core.
I'm not sure it's as simple as a chip in the middle to translate instructions on the fly, which sounds sortof like a hardware JIT recompiler. If you only convert an instruction at a time, how does it know if the host CPU is doing a "native" memory access or a "translated" memory access? Or would you not have such a thing as native code running, only translated code? If both are running, you need to know which is which, as native code can go direct to the given address, but translated code may need to go to translated addresses. I think some intelligence would be required to keep track of things. But others may know better.
An example of a software-only thing that only emulates 68K CPU, for ARM host, is Cyclone.
http://notaz.gp2x.de/cyclone.php
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Erm, they have. AROS runs on more than just x86.
Sorry, you misunderstood me.
I was talking about converting AmigaOS to x86
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Sorry, you misunderstood me.
I was talking about converting AmigaOS to x86
Waste of time, just use AROS :)
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Waste of time, just use AROS :)
How very droll.
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I like Bloodlines answer. :D
Is it possible to make an installer that will scan the application being installed and replace the code? Maybe it can scan it after installation and then replace it.
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@ Bloodline & Trekiej
From yesterday:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=592136&postcount=11
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@ Bloodline & Trekiej
From yesterday:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=592136&postcount=11
Good God! Are we back to Octamed again? Nicholas claims it run on a Pegasos under Amiga OS 4.1.
So, at least for your use, a PPC based system makes sense.
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I still long for the day when OctaMED S.S. works on my MorphOS machine.
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good god! Are we back to octamed again? Nicholas claims it run on a pegasos under amiga os 4.1.
So, at least for your use, a ppc based system makes sense.
58 goto 52
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58 goto 52
Amiga.org the new infinite loop.
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Well, you could as well just ask them how they're going to handle any code that depends on:
- 68020 multiply/divide instructions behaving like they do on 68k
- MULU and MULS setting the overflow bit
- ASL and ASR setting the overflow bit
- MOVE.B ,-(A7) and MOVE.B (A7)+, changing ea by 2
As far as Atari TOS goes you only deal with pure 68000 and nothing ese. Even 68010s will crash GEM/TOS btw.
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As far as Atari TOS goes you only deal with pure 68000 and nothing ese. Even 68010s will crash GEM/TOS btw.
Carl Sassenrath discusses this in one of the Amiwest videos IIRC.
Unbelievable!
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PPC = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all ppc boards/chipsets
ARM = total rewrite of everything from scratch + a driver for all arm boards/chipsets
I really don't see the difference with x86...
Because there are millions of motherboard/graphics/audio/hdd controller/network card combinations even in just the last 5 years. And that doesn't include all the laptop models. The mind boggles!
PPC via stuff like Warp OS is much further. ARM has 100s of combinations at best and PPC not much more either.
This is why Windows is such bloatware probably. But Windows has 70% drivers from previous releases completed anyway most of the time.
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Why not build hardware-based dynamic recompilation (or translation) into the execution pipeline, i.e. an MC68000 compatible ISA that translates only the necessary bits to the ColdFire ISA (the "microcode," so to speak). Could such a solution be faster than a complete recreation of the MC68000 ISA in an FPGA? Or could a solution that translates from one ISA to another, e.g. MC68000 to ARM, be just as fast or faster?
The inefficiency issue still gives you 060 performance whilst KIS.
I was really wanting just classic OS ie WB 1.3/2/3 I don't want it for OS4/MOS/AROS. An 060 used for an A1200 costs what £300 used? And 060 speeds on A500/1000 are not available full stop.
This is all I want.....
Load OCS/AGA game and play it without chipset emulation
Load Dpaint and speed up the calculations
Give me max ram specific version of OS allows.
Coldfire is cheap tech and has some semblence of 68k compatibility. As stage 2 by all means recompile KS/WB 1.3/2/3 to run in native Coldfire v4 at 400 MIPS.
As for £200,000 reward I offered hypothetically not being enough, I am not hiring anyone or paying you to do a project. I am stating merely if anyone can provide me with a working Coldfire accelerator and suitable OS patches for an A500/1000/2000/4000/1200 I will purchase them ALL for a one off fee of 200k. As a condition of the sale I wish to have the IP transferred to me for free.
So all I have bought is 5 Amiga accelerator cards for the princely sum of 40k each and the taxman can sit on his finger and swivel, nothing to do with him just like if I bought 100000 modified 75mhz 060 accelerator cards off you second hand. The IP transfer is to ensure my purchase is unique as far as the taxman is concerned. If I then choose to employ you in a business venture using my newly acquired IP and patents etc only after this point is there any income tax surely, not from the sale of the fruits of some hobby activity I found interesting enough to purchase exclusively for a large sum of money. If you had a McLaren F1 super car I would purchase that too from you lol, this is no different.
Besides half of the UK IT professionals are on the dole in the UK thanks to two successive idiot governments running the country into the ground without remorse ;)
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Carl Sassenrath discusses this in one of the Amiwest videos IIRC.
Unbelievable!
I am surprised the Falcon runs any ST programs at all, games or serious software. But as far as I recall ST GEM and TOS where pretty much rushed and GEM was a hack from x86 DR DOS version source to 68k in record time.
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@ Amiga_nut
you have a very apt handle
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Because there are millions of motherboard/graphics/audio/hdd controller/network card combinations even in just the last 5 years. And that doesn't include all the laptop models. The mind boggles!
PPC via stuff like Warp OS is much further. ARM has 100s of combinations at best and PPC not much more either.
This is why Windows is such bloatware probably. But Windows has 70% drivers from previous releases completed anyway most of the time.
This train of thought always baffles me.
Those same nic/gfx/sound/scsi/sata/etc. cards are also options for other architectures. The only thing that's specific to an architecture (besides the arch itself) is core logic (and even that isnt arch dependant all the time). AROS has done fine over the years on multiple north/south bridge combos without needing specific support for them (as is the case with modern computing), why would it be different for any other OS ? If x86 isnt an option due to the sheer volume of options then either is arm, ppc, 68k, etc systems with agp/pci/usb/etc... too many options ;)
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As far as Atari TOS goes you only deal with pure 68000 and nothing ese. Even 68010s will crash GEM/TOS btw.
I'm wondering how does the Falcon work then ;)
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I'm wondering how does the Falcon work then ;)
Or even the TT's ? :)
Having said that I dont know a lot about the ST range of machines, I mostly just remember adverts in magazines from when I was a teenager. Is the ST restricted to any specific version of TOS ? (ie. is there infact a hardware restriction that keeps ST owners updating ?)
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This train of thought always baffles me.
Those same nic/gfx/sound/scsi/sata/etc. cards are also options for other architectures. The only thing that's specific to an architecture (besides the arch itself) is core logic (and even that isnt arch dependant all the time). AROS has done fine over the years on multiple north/south bridge combos without needing specific support for them (as is the case with modern computing), why would it be different for any other OS ? If x86 isnt an option due to the sheer volume of options then either is arm, ppc, 68k, etc systems with agp/pci/usb/etc... too many options ;)
PPC laptops don't exist, maybe there are 3 different ARM mobile motherboards and a handful of hobbyist ARM motherboards with no sound/video/network card on PCI/AGP.
How many actual drivers are there for PPC boards with PCI or AGP? Nobody will be buying anything like all of the 1000s of different video cards that may physically slot into a PPC board if there is no OS4 driver really.
Think of the Mac, the largest group of PPC users in the past, yeah sure they had AGP or PCI slots in their machine but very few cards had OS9 or OS X drivers for them in the box so Mac users didn't buy them and so the subset is tiny, and sound/network/motherboard is locked per generation of CPU pretty much. Only PCs can have 100s of motherboards with 1000s of graphics cards 100s of network cards and 100s more sound cards plugged into them and then you have totally bespoke laptop hardware...a particular Toshiba XP CD has drivers that the Dell XP CD does not. And the retail copy of XP would have drivers for neither. I have lived this nightmare for a decade and I know it only too well trust me ;)
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I'm wondering how does the Falcon work then ;)
I'm not sure how many ST games (ie not GEM based application software) work on the Falcon, but TOS on the ST is just CP/M written specifically for 68000 CPU which is probably why it won't work with 020and up. And CP/M is from Commodore PET times and the port is very rough and ready for 68k.
ST+TT+Falcon all have GEM on top, but I think it is completely different OS underneath on Falcon and TT ie not CP/M 68k.
TT runs bugger all ST stuff except GEM based apps if I remember correctly and you couldn't burn a ROM using the Falcon/TT equivalent of TOS and place it in an ST as it wouldn't work (and they probably aren't small enough to fit in the ST's memory map probably...~160kb IIRC).
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Guys... The falcon used MultiTOS and later MiNT...
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PPC laptops don't exist
???
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How many actual drivers are there for PPC boards with PCI or AGP? Nobody will be buying anything like all of the 1000s of different video cards that may physically slot into a PPC board if there is no OS4 driver really.
Now that's actually pretty close to my point. Why would this fact change just because the cpu type is different? There's thousands of options for any machine that has even a few industry standard connection types. If a person is interested in something they'll buy what works (as per your os4 example). There's simply no need to support everything. This doesnt limit you to only a few motherboards either, and doesnt need as much maintainance as a lot of people seem to think. ich7 based boards have been in existance for about 3 years now for example and Ive used a few different chipsets on a few different motherboards to update my aros machine in that time without issues. I beleive AROS also supports ich8/ich9 as well, but Ive never bought one. Anyway, this is slightly off topic, but just an example.
At the end of the day I simply dont buy into x86's potential options being a show stopper, or even really an obstacle. Having said this though Im perfectly happy for things to stay as they are with each platform having it's own reasons to be happy about how things are going at the moment.
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???
I was wondering about this as well. I am sure all the pre intel mac laptop users are actually using then ?
Guessing he meant currently manufactured laptops. And even then I am pretty sure there are still PPC laptops being made.
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PPC laptops don't exist
Are you mad?
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Guys... The falcon used MultiTOS and later MiNT...
I just couldn't use an OS called "TOS"... :lol:
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I just couldn't use an OS called "TOS"... :lol:
To be fair on Atari, MiNT (MiNT Is Not TOS) was actually a pretty good OS... And the Falcon was far better than the A1200 (and the A4000 IMHO)... Had they not cancelled it in favour of the Jaguar it might have run! :-o
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PPC laptops don't exist
[youtube]V89YwHFoXyw[/youtube]
[youtube]tYeZCsKvjSg[/youtube]
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@Piru
It's Photoshopped, look! :lol:
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To be fair on Atari, MiNT (MiNT Is Not TOS) was actually a pretty good OS... And the Falcon was far better than the A1200 (and the A4000 IMHO)... Had they not cancelled it in favour of the Jaguar it might have run! :-o
Actually, I have to disagree. The principal things the Falcon had going for it were the DSP and chunky/RGB graphics support, both of which were very nice. Unfortunately, the 16MHz 68030 it came with (considered a selling point over the A1200's 14MHz 020) was rather crippled considering it was wired into the rest of the entire system, RAM included, by a 16-bit data bus.
Having said that, a Falcon with one of those CT60 boards is a proposition :)
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Actually, I have to disagree. The principal things the Falcon had going for it were the DSP and chunky/RGB graphics support, both of which were very nice. Unfortunately, the 16MHz 68030 it came with (considered a selling point over the A1200's 14MHz 020) was rather crippled considering it was wired into the rest of the entire system, RAM included, by a 16-bit data bus.
Having said that, a Falcon with one of those CT60 boards is a proposition :)
You forgot the proper 16bit audio of the falcon too... Yeah, the killer was the 16bit bus... But come on, while that is a limitation, it is a VERY easy fix for a future hardware revision... The rest of the falcon hardware was an order of magnitude superior to AGA...
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The rest of the falcon hardware was an order of magnitude superior to AGA...
I hope you're wearing your flame-proof jacket!
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I hope you're wearing your flame-proof jacket!
I have always made it clear that I feel the AGA chip set should have been released in 1988 or 1989 at the very latest... IIRC the C= engineers had this in mind but engineering management said "no new chips"... That day, the Amiga was doomed.
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You forgot the proper 16bit audio of the falcon too...
I didn't forget, I just regarded it as a subset of the DSP feature. Of course the DAC was a separate component, but it was the DSP that gave it the capability to do multichannel audio playback at CD quality.
Yeah, the killer was the 16bit bus... But come on, while that is a limitation, it is a VERY easy fix for a future hardware revision... The rest of the falcon hardware was an order of magnitude superior to AGA...
Not sure it was that easy to fix, it can't have been a decision their hardware designers were thrilled about releasing it in that configuration in the first place.
By the same token, the shortcomings of the A1200 were easily remedied by 3rd party expansions. It's all a question of how much you're prepared to pay for it. I'd but an 060+PCI (RTG, soundcard) A1200 up against an equivalently clocked 060 Falcon with it's out-of-the-box hardware any day.
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I didn't forget, I just regarded it as a subset of the DSP feature. Of course the DAC was a separate component, but it was the DSP that gave it the capability to do multichannel audio playback at CD quality.
You know better than most that the DSP was useful for more than just Audio, and given the fact that the A1200 had nothing like a DSP an was stuck with 8bit audio... It is worth mentioning :)
Not sure it was that easy to fix, it can't have been a decision their hardware designers were thrilled about releasing it in that configuration in the first place.
If wikipedia is to be believed then the 16bit was was simply to ensure better compatibilty with the ST... Suggesting this hardware revision was a transitional machine. Seinberg's Falcon clone didn't use a 16Bit bus IIRC...
By the same token, the shortcomings of the A1200 were easily remedied by 3rd party expansions. It's all a question of how much you're prepared to pay for it. I'd but an 060+PCI (RTG, soundcard) A1200 up against an equivalently clocked 060 Falcon with it's out-of-the-box hardware any day.
Yeah, but A1200 RTG boards came about quite a bit later than 1992, which is the time period I'm talking about here... And also we are taking about base spec machines... Damn... We need to compare a standard Flacon running AROS with a standard A1200 running AROS to really see how the two machines compare :)
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Some Apple Notebooks running MoS
If I meant Mac I would have said Mac, I meant PPC as in OS4 compatible or any embedded controller type setup people might want to make useable with OS4/AROS/MoS ie non-Apple Mac hardware.
But even if you include Apple notebooks, compared to the entire range of x86 Windows targeted notebooks during the lifespan of 680x0 and PPC based Mac notebooks it is still a tiny drop in the ocean in combination of hardware drivers required to work so a rewrite of KS/Wb 1.3/2/3 is not feasible AND anyway MoS on Macbook won't play Rocket Ranger natively as there are no AGA/OCS chipsets in PPC Macs so it fails the requirement :)
Like I said I am only talking about a Coldfire accelerator card solution and modified KS/Wb on classic ie real Amigas from Commodore not all this OS4/MoS stuff on Apple or other PPC hardware with no actual Agnus/Paula/Denise in sight on the m/b and no way to load up original floppies.
If I am wrong then I suspect you are 90% complete with an x86 version of MoS and native drivers for every notebook and PC ever sold from 1999 to 2010? lol
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@Bloodline
Indeed, DSPs helped that crappy 3mhz Super Nintendo CPU to do games like Star Fox/Pilot Wings or even the 68000 in Sega's consoles do Virtua Racing.
Never mind A1200 the bloody A4000 should have had a DSP as standard given the price of the machines IMO.
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You know better than most that the DSP was useful for more than just Audio, and given the fact that the A1200 had nothing like a DSP an was stuck with 8bit audio... It is worth mentioning :)
Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist :) I'm not knocking the Falcon. Of course the DSP is certainly useful for more than just audio, but since we're talking about the time it was first released, there wasn't a lot (IIRC) that used the DSP for non-audio purposes. Just as much later, the A1200 found new capabilities through third party expansions, so people also found new uses for the Falcon's DSP.
If wikipedia is to be believed then the 16bit was was simply to ensure better compatibilty with the ST... Suggesting this hardware revision was a transitional machine. Seinberg's Falcon clone didn't use a 16Bit bus IIRC...
Not sure how much I believe that. Since we're comparing same era hardware here, AGA managed to retain a respectable degree of backwards compatibility without resorting to using a 16-bit data bus between the CPU/custom chips and certainly not for it's interface to normal (fast) RAM.
Yeah, but A1200 RTG boards came about quite a bit later than 1992, which is the time period I'm talking about here... And also we are taking about base spec machines... Damn... We need to compare a standard Flacon running AROS with a standard A1200 running AROS to really see how the two machines compare :)
Sure, I acknowledge the time gap, but since we are now in the present, we can compare what the machines have become since. I stand by the observation that you can now build a significantly more powerful A1200 than you can a Falcon, with the exception of which has the fastest 68K processor; there's just nothing comparable to the CT60 board in the Amiga scene. I'd love to see something similar :D
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Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist :) I'm not knocking the Falcon. Of course the DSP is certainly useful for more than just audio, but since we're talking about the time it was first released, there wasn't a lot (IIRC) that used the DSP for non-audio purposes. Just as much later, the A1200 found new capabilities through third party expansions, so people also found new uses for the Falcon's DSP.
Hmmm... Not sure of your train of thought here... Third party expansion is quite different to finding new uses for already existing hardware... I would agree with you if someone had managed to figure out how to do double precision floating point math with the copper (to the non technical: you can't, don't try ;)).
Not sure how much I believe that. Since we're comparing same era hardware here, AGA managed to retain a respectable degree of backwards compatibility without resorting to using a 16-bit data bus between the CPU/custom chips and certainly not for it's interface to normal (fast) RAM.
I'm not sure either here, but I don't know anything about the ST or the Falcon's schematics so I can't. Say anything for sure... But (basically) doubling the number of traces on a circuit board is more of a cost issue than a technical one.
Sure, I acknowledge the time gap, but since we are now in the present, we can compare what the machines have become since. I stand by the observation that you can now build a significantly more powerful A1200 than you can a Falcon, with the exception of which has the fastest 68K processor; there's just nothing comparable to the CT60 board in the Amiga scene. I'd love to see something similar :D
Careful not to confuse the issue though! My assertion was that the Atari Falcon's hardware was an order of magnitude better than the A1200... I think that point still stands.
Put more simply, had commodore realeased both the A1200 and the falcon (running AmigaOS of course, possibly with a cost option for ECS compatibility)... I would have opted for the Falcon... How about you?
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Put more simply, had commodore realeased both the A1200 and the falcon (running AmigaOS of course, possibly with a cost option for ECS compatibility)... I would have opted for the Falcon... How about you?
Well, I nearly bought a Falcon instead of my first accelerator card, so I guess I was always a bit on the fence. I'd have absolutely no qualms with an AROS based Falcon / CT060 :D
All things being equal, if we're talking ideals here, I would have preferred an A1200 with at least a SIMM slot on the motherboard, even if it only took a maximum 4MB (for PCMCIA friendliness) with the 020 clocked directly from the motherboard's 28MHz signal, rather than 14. Of course, that might actually have made it a bit faster than some of their big box 030/25MHz machines. It would have been nice if it had some chunky support, even if it was just hardware C2P and not a framebuffer.
Speaking of which, the Akiko's C2P was another massive let-down. Instead of writing 8 32-bit words of chunky data to it and reading it back as 8 32-bit words of planar data then pushing that to your Chip RAM, it should have had 8 address registers that you set up to point to your planes and then write to it and it writes the planar data to those addresses (incrementing as it goes). At worst, you'd need to reset the pointers once per scanline, or more likely once per frame. You might have some wait states whilst it's busy but a properly constructed loop could always find some other useful stuff to do whilst the hardware was converting/writing.
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It wasn't until very recently that (I think) Piru explained how Akiko worked to me... I was horrified... It is a total waste of time, clearly they had a bit of space left on the CD controller silicon and squeezed it in :(
I had thought it was (at least) more like a blotter that performed the bit translation on the fly...
Yeah, had the A1200 had fast ram as standard the CPU performance would have pissed on the Falcon base model... But we are dreaming again :(
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If I meant Mac I would have said Mac, I meant PPC as in OS4 compatible or any embedded controller type setup people might want to make useable with OS4/AROS/MoS ie non-Apple Mac hardware.
You're right, there's no such hardware if you exclude Apple. But I wonder why you would do that?
Apple PowerPC hardware is still the best there is, and it has great support and repair services. Why go for some rare (tiny production runs), prohibitively expensive custom HW with substandard support when there are better options around?
Try to get support, spare parts and/or repairs for AmigaONE SE/XE or Micro-A1 today and you get the idea.
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But we are dreaming again :(
Considering we were just talking about the "AmigaOS running Falcon", I thought that was the point :)
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It wasn't until very recently that (I think) Piru explained how Akiko worked to me... I was horrified... It is a total waste of time, clearly they had a bit of space left on the CD controller silicon and squeezed it in :(
I had thought it was (at least) more like a blotter that performed the bit translation on the fly...
Yeah, had the A1200 had fast ram as standard the CPU performance would have pissed on the Falcon base model... But we are dreaming again :(
@Piro/Bloodline
How does Akiko work? I take it you mean C2P conversion. I never bothered to find out before.
Andy
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I meant PPC as in OS4 compatible or any embedded controller type setup people might want to make useable with OS4/AROS/MoS ie non-Apple Mac hardware.
PPC that is OS4 compatible only excludes Apple because someone says so. Why should it not be in the list? Because someone already said so? They're the only PPC laptops worth mentioning. (I'm not excited about that low-end CherryPal thing).
I think it's very disappointing that whoever decided Apple PPC won't be supported by OS4. Be it in an unchangabe contract or whatever that is now, I really wish it was not that way, as Apple PC is really the most sensible way to get an "Amiga" laptop at this point. Believe you me, making a new PPC laptop to satisfy those who make the rules is no easy task, I've been pondering that conundrum for 6 or 8 years and have nothing more than ideas to show for it, and I am an engineer.
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@Piro/Bloodline
How does Akiko work? I take it you mean C2P conversion. I never bothered to find out before.
Andy
Read Karlos's post :)
You write chunky pixel data, read back planar...
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@Piro/Bloodline
How does Akiko work? I take it you mean C2P conversion.
There's a single 32bit register. In order to convert 32 pixels you write 8 32-bit (4 byte) chunky pixels. Then reading back the 32bit register 8 times you get the planar data out. IIRC you get the least significant bits out first so that you can omit reading some planes if you use say 128 or 64 colours.
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There's a single 32bit register. In order to convert 32 pixels you write 8 32-bit (4 byte) chunky pixels. Then reading back the 32bit register 8 times you get the planar data out. IIRC you get the least significant bits out first so that you can omit reading some planes if you use say 128 or 64 colours.
That's not quite how I remembered it (I thought there were actually 8 registers), but your recollection is probably better than mine. Either way, it was a write and read back mechanism that meant you still had to push the data back to the bitplanes yourself.
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That's not quite how I remembered it (I thought there were actually 8 registers), but your recollection is probably better than mine. Either way, it was a write and read back mechanism that meant you still had to push the data back to the bitplanes yourself.
Well either way, it sucks the same :)
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Well either way, it sucks the same :)
Amen to that, was such a waste. Just being able to write to the chip ram by itself would have made it so much more useful. After all, if you are doing software texture-mapped 3D type stuff, you are going to want to have your accumulation buffer in fast ram. You might just get away with reading that to a set of registers once per frame. However, the amount of shuffling you actually had to do with akiko rendered it all but pointless.
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Holy crap... :eek:
Sorry for butting in here, but I'm totally amazed, I've got this old G5 up and running and it's wireless, I've even seen moving pictures on You Tube (not slide shows that I was getting on the G4) you can even scroll the window while a videos playing and Im sitting here in my kitchen on the internet...
Wow never knew you could do such things on a computer, aren't these new fangled computers amazing... :)
Well Im off to see what other amazing things this can do... :)
Sorry, but I just had to tell someone... :D
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Holy crap... :eek:
Well Im off to see what other amazing things this can do... :)
Sorry, but I just had to tell someone... :D
Just wait until you try an intel Mac... I guess you'll get one next boring Sunday :)
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Holy crap... :eek:
Sorry for butting in here, but I'm totally amazed, I've got this old G5 up and running and it's wireless, I've even seen moving pictures on You Tube (not slide shows that I was getting on the G4) you can even scroll the window while a videos playing and Im sitting here in my kitchen on the internet...
Wow never knew you could do such things on a computer, aren't these new fangled computers amazing... :)
Well Im off to see what other amazing things this can do... :)
Sorry, but I just had to tell someone... :D
Glad to hear that the G5 turned out to be a worthwhile purchase. It is amazing what a reasonably powerful computer can do, isn't it?
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Glad to hear that the G5 turned out to be a worthwhile purchase. It is amazing what a reasonably powerful computer can do, isn't it?
What is amazing is that a 500Mhz PC from 6 years ago can run youtube fine, but a G4 mac mini chokes to death on youtube.
Fanbois of the world unite.
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What is amazing is that a 500Mhz PC from 6 years ago can run youtube fine, but a G4 mac mini chokes to death on youtube.
Well it's no secret that windoze flash is better accelerated.
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Amen to that, was such a waste. Just being able to write to the chip ram by itself would have made it so much more useful. After all, if you are doing software texture-mapped 3D type stuff, you are going to want to have your accumulation buffer in fast ram. You might just get away with reading that to a set of registers once per frame. However, the amount of shuffling you actually had to do with akiko rendered it all but pointless.
I think the point of Akiko was for reading bitmaps from disk to facilitate ports.
For instance, Doesn't Wing Commander contain PC graphics?
So now when you load a bitmap, you push it thru Akiko, now its in Amiga planar format and now you do whatever you want with it. There is no point in keeping it in chunky format and constantly converting it in real time.
I don't think it was meant for any realtime use.
So let me be clear:
A game typically has most of it's graphics in RAM.
The graphics are on disk in chunky format initially.
The game initialized it's 'level' and begins loading all the images it needs.
Each image it read and processed to planar and stored in RAM.
Now your game engine has all the planar graphics it needs to run, start the level.
So, no, Wing Commander was not doing C2P on the fly to my knowledge but only when intializing a level.
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I think the point of Akiko was for reading bitmaps from disk to facilitate ports.
That makes no sense either though. Why put a format on the CD that you need to convert when loading? It takes longer to load and you can't control / customise the bitmaps for the platform.
Typically if you need to convert a format you do that offline, check it to see if it's good enough, and re-author the asset specifically for the target platform if it isn't good enough.
Since it was Wing Commander that'd be a one off quality control pass for a single artist and a batch file.
No the more I read about Akiko it sounds more and more like it was an idea that someone just managed to wedge into some spare space. Perhaps it was meant to be something more but got pulled back into an almost pointless feature. Happens all the time.
Andy
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I think the point of Akiko was for reading bitmaps from disk to facilitate ports.
Rendering dynamic graphics in planar is way too slow, especially if you need to do transparency. Also, blitter is really slow in 256 color mode. Such rendering is done in chunky mode and then the framebuffer is converted to planar with c2p conversion graphics.library/WriteChunkyPixels. This function was added specifically to AmigaOS 3.1 and uses Akiko chip when available. With Akiko the otherwise underpowered CD32 was able to have games that would have been otherwise impossible.
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Wow never knew you could do such things on a computer, aren't these new fangled computers amazing... :)
Uh oh, sounds like the Amigas in Scotland are slightly less shiny today!
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With Akiko the otherwise underpowered CD32 was able to have games that would have been otherwise impossible.
[citation needed]
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[citation needed]
If the word of Harry Sintonen isn't good enough for you I don't know whose is!
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[citation needed]
I doubt Microcosm would be possible without Akiko.
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If the word of Harry Sintonen isn't good enough for you I don't know whose is!
Seconded. :cool:
Akikio is nothing but a few mixing registers. You write 32 chunky pixels to the registers and read back / copy to ChipRAM 8 words of planar data (32 bit).
Working with planar graphics directly is - as Piru stated - much slower. In 3D you can't just move/copy bitmaps but you render each pixel individually. Obviously the read-modify-write back for planar (several words!) takes much longer than just writing one chunky byte.
With a fast CPU and FastRAM (and caches!) you can rather quickly convert your chunky buffer to planar but the CD32 has neither, so the 'we have a few spare gates on Akiko, why don't we use them to speed up graphics somehow' approach suggested itself.
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Well it's no secret that windoze flash is better accelerated.
That's it, and newer versions of Flash have ended up even slower on PPC Macs. And the sad thing is, the actual video itself would be perfectly playable most of the time on either PPC Mac or 500MHz PC if it weren't for the Flash overheads.
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That's it, and newer versions of Flash have ended up even slower on PPC Macs. And the sad thing is, the actual video itself would be perfectly playable most of the time on either PPC Mac or 500MHz PC if it weren't for the Flash overheads.
Flash overhead does not appear to be the problem. OSX overhead would appear to be the problem.
When I try to view a Flash file under OSX on my 933Mhz Powermac its dead slow. The same file when viewed with Mplayer under MorphOS works fine.
The only problem using MorphOS to view Flash files is the the primary browser (OWB) has very poor Flash support and the author (Fab) has stated he doesn't intend to improve it (prefering to focus on html5).
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Flash overhead does not appear to be the problem. OSX overhead would appear to be the problem.
When I try to view a Flash file under OSX on my 933Mhz Powermac its dead slow. The same file when viewed with Mplayer under MorphOS works fine.
The only problem using MorphOS to view Flash files is the the primary browser (OWB) has very poor Flash support and the author (Fab) has stated he doesn't intend to improve it (prefering to focus on html5).
Have you tried the Flashplayer "Square" Beta? It's much better on an intel mac than the older versions, I assume the same would be true for PPC Macs.
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer_square_p2_32bit_mac_092710.dmg
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Flash overhead does not appear to be the problem. OSX overhead would appear to be the problem.
When I try to view a Flash file under OSX on my 933Mhz Powermac its dead slow. The same file when viewed with Mplayer under MorphOS works fine.
The only problem using MorphOS to view Flash files is the the primary browser (OWB) has very poor Flash support and the author (Fab) has stated he doesn't intend to improve it (prefering to focus on html5).
Stop bashing OS X, please read:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/14/chronicles-of-conflict-the-history-of-adobe-vs-apple/
It's not Jobs fault that Adobe laughed at his PPC/OSX, when Apple struggled to get back to mainstream with this new platform.
And, maybe play the same file with Mplayer under OS X. Ever tried?
As much as I am Amiga/68k fanboy, can't stand bashing mac os x without reason :-).
Regards, ppascal
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Thanks Nicholas, even though I don't use OSX that often I'll look into.
BTW - The Black Book you're referencing is pretty cool.
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@Iggy
Well, the reason I suspect Flash is that I can play and edit full PAL video at 720x576 on my G4 Mac in a variety of formats without it breaking a sweat, yet it struggles to play a 360p Youtube clip. The same clip in any other format would surely play easily as well as e.g. ripped DVDs, Divx etc.
Bottom line is that the G4@1.33GHz has plenty of horsepower to decode video in any format other than Flash, so I have to conclude that Flash is the issue. It's well known that for a long time Flash was hobbled on the Apple because of restrictions imposed by Apple themselves regarding acceleration, and only the extra power of the G5 and Core 2 chips made it usable.
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Stop bashing OS X, please read:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/14/chronicles-of-conflict-the-history-of-adobe-vs-apple/
It's not Jobs fault that Adobe laughed at his PPC/OSX, when Apple struggled to get back to mainstream with this new platform.
And, maybe play the same file with Mplayer under OS X. Ever tried?
As much as I am Amiga/68k fanboy, can't stand bashing mac os x without reason :-).
Regards, ppascal
Sorry ppascal,
That article is written in a most annoying style (let there be light - and then there was Apple - and it was good).
Its also clearly biased toward Apple (and I am NOT an Apple fan).
Jobs has always been a control freak (whether its his IP or not to control).
And Apple is not alone in this regard, Microsoft is just as guilty of trying to control all aspects of its OS (what work or doesn't - what is compatible or isn't).
Not that I don't favor a more open solution (like html5), but what we're seeing isn't as much Apple bashing as it is Adobe bashing.
We'd both admit that it should be possible to view Flash files on a PPC system, but I'm not sure that that failure rests soley at Adobe's feet.
@ Daedalus
That is close to how I'd view the problem (Apple limiting acceleration). But why do other video formats (still w/o acceleration) work?
I know people that are viewing 720p video files on G4s running MorphOS. So why is Flash a problem and why is it only some programs that can display Flash (not all of them)?
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You're right, there's no such hardware if you exclude Apple. But I wonder why you would do that?
Apple PowerPC hardware is still the best there is, and it has great support and repair services. Why go for some rare (tiny production runs), prohibitively expensive custom HW with substandard support when there are better options around?
Try to get support, spare parts and/or repairs for AmigaONE SE/XE or Micro-A1 today and you get the idea.
I excluded them because classic original workbench isn't being ported to Macbooks or iMacs, ie Workbench 1.3/2.1/3.0 and you can't plug them into an A500 as an accelerator card.
I started the thread to try and find out if/when Amiga Coldfire project died and we all got sidetracked on to the age old "I want OS4 for X86" or "I want PPC OS for Amiga" debate but all I was pointing out was that x86 is no standard at all due to millions of component combinations/options so if you are porting an OS AND writing the drivers for everything defined as either PPC or x86 then PPC is a smaller mountain to climb really even with Mac PPC hardware. Anyway ARM or x86 accelerator for classic Amiga is even more impossible than Coldfire at the moment :)
But as I stated I am only really interested in this potentially cheap tech to accelerate actual original Amigas not replace OS4/MOS motherboard projects like SAM. The dream is you plug in a card that costs less than an 060 and gives you at worst 060 performance inside real Amiga like 500/1000/2000 and 1200/4000. You can't even get 060s for A500/1000 and 2000 cards must be incredibly rare.
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PPC that is OS4 compatible only excludes Apple because someone says so. Why should it not be in the list? Because someone already said so? They're the only PPC laptops worth mentioning. (I'm not excited about that low-end CherryPal thing).
I think it's very disappointing that whoever decided Apple PPC won't be supported by OS4. Be it in an unchangabe contract or whatever that is now, I really wish it was not that way, as Apple PC is really the most sensible way to get an "Amiga" laptop at this point. Believe you me, making a new PPC laptop to satisfy those who make the rules is no easy task, I've been pondering that conundrum for 6 or 8 years and have nothing more than ideas to show for it, and I am an engineer.
My only point was that writing OS4 to support every single x86 laptop launched in the last 10 years say would be a bigger driver programming project than doing the same for Apple laptops too.
As stated above I'm not even interested in OS4 any more, that boat has sailed for me, I don't want SAM and I don't want x1000 to drain my finances either, not value for money. Neither do anything for me now and I have completely lost interest and decided if there isn't a Paula chip on the motherboard it ain't an Amiga to me anyway :)
But I do agree with a lot of people who were pissed off about not getting OS4 onto PPC Mac minis, it was halfway there anyway wasn't it?
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My only point was that writing OS4 to support every single x86 laptop launched in the last 10 years say would be a bigger driver programming project than doing the same for Apple laptops too.
As stated above I'm not even interested in OS4 any more, that boat has sailed for me, I don't want SAM and I don't want x1000 to drain my finances either, not value for money. Neither do anything for me now and I have completely lost interest and decided if there isn't a Paula chip on the motherboard it ain't an Amiga to me anyway :)
But I do agree with a lot of people who were pissed off about not getting OS4 onto PPC Mac minis, it was halfway there anyway wasn't it?
Absolutely valid point about X86. What hardware do you support? Obviously, it would be nearly impossible to support all X86 hardware. Then there's the time lag in getting the port done. All the while the OS is becoming less relevant.
And who know why OS4 support for the Mac Min i was never released? Maybe Hyperion figured there was more money in selling hardware and software together? But that doesn't make sense since to number of copies of their OS sold would be lower than if it ran on a low cost system.
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I have always made it clear that I feel the AGA chip set should have been released in 1988 or 1989 at the very latest... IIRC the C= engineers had this in mind but engineering management said "no new chips"... That day, the Amiga was doomed.
Jay Miner signed off on the VRAM based megapixel 128 colour screen mode Ranger chipset in 1988 so that was there. Don't know if they had anything else....except the 320x200 in 256/4096 colour screen mode for the Commodore C65 prototype (canned in 1990/91 so still before AGA too and probably chunky not planar mode!)
I totally agree with you, what the hell was the A500 plus and A600 all about, a complete load of bollox really.....I was reading Amiga Format today and it was a preview of the A600 and they were mildly optimistic @ £400 retail! Whooper do I can load workbench in 4 colours at 1280x256 and write games for it that run @ 5fps in 2D wooooooo smart move @ C= there, SEGA/Nintendo must have pissed themselves all the way to the bank over the ECS 'improvements'.
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Amiga Coldfire project dead?
Yes.
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I didn't forget, I just regarded it as a subset of the DSP feature. Of course the DAC was a separate component, but it was the DSP that gave it the capability to do multichannel audio playback at CD quality.
Not sure it was that easy to fix, it can't have been a decision their hardware designers were thrilled about releasing it in that configuration in the first place.
By the same token, the shortcomings of the A1200 were easily remedied by 3rd party expansions. It's all a question of how much you're prepared to pay for it. I'd but an 060+PCI (RTG, soundcard) A1200 up against an equivalently clocked 060 Falcon with it's out-of-the-box hardware any day.
And you would be in the minority and C= would still be going bankrupt in 1994. Point is such an A1200 would have cost more than a faster PC, which would have had a decent web browser and TCP/IP stack via Windows too and 24bit colour, lightning fast (for 3D games) Pentium and 16bit stereo sound. People never get their money back on add-ons...not alloy wheels for cars or accelerator cards for Amiga. Bad bad business plan, I actually refused to buy a PPC card for my A4000 for this reason in the end. If Commodore wouldn't build a PPC Amiga to hold its value I wasn't going to tank my last grant check on a 604 PPC card to try and match a Pentium system costing less than the PPC card.
Commodore should have designed the 4000/1200 to outperform the low end and high end PC on every level and still be cheaper. ie do what the A1000 did all over again, but this time actually try selling it to people rather than leaving it to rot while the pathetic and technically identical A/V chipset of A500/A2000 was brought to market 12 months late ;)
By early 90s Commodore's competition was no longer Atari/Apple it was PCs, they didn't realise it and so went under (and so did Atari, Apple surviving because it was the only alternative left and sold despite ridiculous prices).
You know what the sad thing is? The A1400 or A1800 whatever it was called was a completed prototype being tested at Commodore. It had AGA, 2mb Chip+ 2mb Fast ram, 28mhz 020, AKIKO, CD-ROM, classy 3 box design not all in one like A1200 and priced between OTT 4000/030 and A1200 base model. No money to put it into production. If they hadn't pissed it all away on the F&%£$^ING CD32 delusional battle plan against N/SEGA that is. The only machine that could have saved Commodore had they built that instead of CD32 not hoped to release it Xmas 1994
Speaking of CD-ROM they also launched the A570 just as they were replacing the A500 with A600 which couldn't even use the A570! I'm surprised it wasn't before 1994 C= went under really.
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SEGA/Nintendo must have pissed themselves all the way to the bank over the ECS 'improvements'.
I liked the billboard outside Sega HQ which said "Amiga CD32 - To be this good will take Sega Ages"
Excellent play on words there! Im sure there's gotta be a pic of it somewhere!
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You know better than most that the DSP was useful for more than just Audio, and given the fact that the A1200 had nothing like a DSP an was stuck with 8bit audio... It is worth mentioning :)
If wikipedia is to be believed then the 16bit was was simply to ensure better compatibilty with the ST... Suggesting this hardware revision was a transitional machine. Seinberg's Falcon clone didn't use a 16Bit bus IIRC...
Yeah, but A1200 RTG boards came about quite a bit later than 1992, which is the time period I'm talking about here... And also we are taking about base spec machines... Damn... We need to compare a standard Flacon running AROS with a standard A1200 running AROS to really see how the two machines compare :)
Falcon had to be ST compatible to some extent, Atari had nothing else to fall back on really so yes this is why it has a 16bit bus and a 32bit CPU (although @ 16mhz there is bugger all difference between an 020 and an 030 anyway)
There was an 040 board for a later revision of the Falcon, I will see if I can dig up the page with the case design and details of the 040 Falcon (in a 3 box design like the Mega ST/TT)
And the only RTG boards I know for A1200 are Bvision modules. Avideo24 plugged into Denise and so I don't think it worked on AGA machines. Works in an A1000 or A500 though as well as A2000 :)
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I liked the billboard outside Sega HQ which said "Amiga CD32 - To be this good will take Sega Ages"
Excellent play on words there! Im sure there's gotta be a pic of it somewhere!
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/adverts/cd32_bb.jpg
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I liked the billboard outside Sega HQ which said "Amiga CD32 - To be this good will take Sega Ages"
Excellent play on words there! Im sure there's gotta be a pic of it somewhere!
Yeah I remember that, but the truth is apart from total colours on screen and CDXL 2 vs Mega-CD FMV the CD32 is vastly inferior to the 1989 Sega Genesis/Megadrive motherboard. And the Mega-CD had some very complex hardware scaling and rotation of sprites too, just check out Thunderhawk on Mega-CD vs same for CD32.
A crippled 020 with just chip ram can not make up for all the sexy hardware sprites and superior parallax of the Megadrive, let alone the sprite scaling and rotating custom chips in the Mega CD. Gauntlet IV on Sega or Gauntlet II on Amiga sir? LOL
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Amen to that, was such a waste. Just being able to write to the chip ram by itself would have made it so much more useful. After all, if you are doing software texture-mapped 3D type stuff, you are going to want to have your accumulation buffer in fast ram. You might just get away with reading that to a set of registers once per frame. However, the amount of shuffling you actually had to do with akiko rendered it all but pointless.
Is this why Alien Breed 3D on CD32 runs the same speed as AB 3D on stock A1200 (ie 14mhz and 2mb chip ram too) ??
Or is the AB 3D engine just the same on both and not even bothering to try using AKIKO?
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As funny as that billboard is, it's horrible marketing.
All you see at any distance is a console and the word Sega in big letters.
Amiga and CD32 are in tiny little letters that aren't readable in the photo.
Also, I wonder how much it cost them in extra legal mumbo-jumbo to see if they would be sued for doing a stunt that nobody really cared about and didn't increase sales?
It's amazing Commodore survived into the 90's at all.
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Or is the AB 3D engine just the same on both and not even bothering to try using AKIKO?
^ this.
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That's it, and newer versions of Flash have ended up even slower on PPC Macs. And the sad thing is, the actual video itself would be perfectly playable most of the time on either PPC Mac or 500MHz PC if it weren't for the Flash overheads.
DIVX, therefore streaming DIVX works fine on 266Mhz Pentium 2 mobile CPUs from laptops for 300-400% higher quality than the average 360p rubbish on youtube. When Stage6.divx site died so did my interest in streaming video.
Flash is the biggest pile of shit going, I have a 266 Celeron PC the size of a Nintendo DS with a 2.35:1 screen and it plays DIVX 700mb rips perfectly...point it at youtube and it can't play a flash video in a quarter of the quality at more than 5fps.
Flash solves a problem that doesn't exist any more, Universal studios just screwed us all by blackmailing DIVX through the courts until Stage6 was shut down. The 15mb or so you save in your average 5 minute video when using FLV over streaming DIVX is not even an issue any more given terrabyte drives and 10s of megabit broadband everywhere.
Short version:Flash video can F&%K off ;)
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As funny as that billboard is, it's horrible marketing.
All you see at any distance is a console and the word Sega in big letters.
Amiga and CD32 are in tiny little letters that aren't readable in the photo.
Also, I wonder how much it cost them in extra legal mumbo-jumbo to see if they would be sued for doing a stunt that nobody really cared about and didn't increase sales?
It's amazing Commodore survived into the 90's at all.
The real issue is that CD32 probably couldn't even manage Gauntlet IV from a Megadrive in even 128 colours despite being 13 years newer design! And then there is the issue of proper parallax scrollng on Sega and the still crap 16+16 colours on AGA for dual playfield. Also if you factor in the actual Mega-CD dedicated sprite scaling and rotating hardware a la Sega System 16 style techniques then forget it, a crippled 14mhz 020 (crippled as no way to add fast ram except £200 SX32 etc) can not compete. And AGA was a kludge of too little too late.
Check out Thunderhawk on Mega-CD vs Amiga AGA heli/flight sims and let me know which ones have textured ground? Only thing CD32 did better was FMV and total colours on screeen/palette. Everything else was inferior to Sega....the bits that are important for a console ;)
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The real issue is that CD32 probably couldn't even manage Gauntlet IV from a Megadrive in even 128 colours despite being 13 years newer design! And then there is the issue of proper parallax scrollng on Sega and the still crap 16+16 colours on AGA for dual playfield. Also if you factor in the actual Mega-CD dedicated sprite scaling and rotating hardware a la Sega System 16 style techniques then forget it, a crippled 14mhz 020 (crippled as no way to add fast ram except £200 SX32 etc) can not compete. And AGA was a kludge of too little too late.
Check out Thunderhawk on Mega-CD vs Amiga AGA heli/flight sims and let me know which ones have textured ground? Only thing CD32 did better was FMV and total colours on screeen/palette. Everything else was inferior to Sega....the bits that are important for a console ;)
13 years?
Also, i doubt you could call AGA a kludge lol.
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13 years?
Also, i doubt you could call AGA a kludge lol.
AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually). You read too much ass licking reviews in Amiga Format perhaps about how amazing AGA is ;)
And yes the Sega Megadrive was out in 89/90 in Japan and CD32 1993.
And actually the CD32 is an even bigger kludge than A4000/1200, it should have had 1mb chip 1mb fast ram if they couldn't be bothered to put a SIMM socket on it for 50 pence as it cripples the CPU to 50% max speed!
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AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually). You read too much ass licking reviews in Amiga Format perhaps about how amazing AGA is ;)
And yes the Sega Megadrive was out in 89/90 in Japan and CD32 1993.
And actually the CD32 is an even bigger kludge than A4000/1200, it should have had 1mb chip 1mb fast ram if they couldn't be bothered to put a SIMM socket on it for 50 pence as it cripples the CPU to 50% max speed!
And indeed only an idiot would calculate that 1993-1990=13 ;)
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AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually). You read too much ass licking reviews in Amiga Format perhaps about how amazing AGA is ;)
And yes the Sega Megadrive was out in 89/90 in Japan and CD32 1993.
And actually the CD32 is an even bigger kludge than A4000/1200, it should have had 1mb chip 1mb fast ram if they couldn't be bothered to put a SIMM socket on it for 50 pence as it cripples the CPU to 50% max speed!
On a more serious note, I always thought that AGA was a different architecture than OCS/ECS, and thus, I cant see how it could be called a Kludge.
Perhaps ECS was a kludge...
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The real issue is that CD32 probably couldn't even manage Gauntlet IV from a Megadrive in even 128 colours despite being 13 years newer design!
You mean this? http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/gauntlet-iv/screenshots/gameShotId,314532/
An 8MHz 68000 versus a 14MHz 68020 - easy win for the CD32 in terms of performance.
Graphics - 64 colours on the Megadrive (16 colours per 8x8 tile), so easy to replicate, and 64 colours on AGA was quick enough. The CD32 could do overscan too, no fixed 320x240 resolutions here.
I think 2MB RAM beats 64KB too ... it was a while before Megadrive games were coming on 16 mbit cartridges.
Dedicated graphics hardware on the Megadrive did help a lot - mostly with the tiled graphics modes and sprites...
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On a more serious note, I always thought that AGA was a different architecture than OCS/ECS, and thus, I cant see how it could be called a Kludge.
Perhaps ECS was a kludge...
AGA was a kludge... A few extra fetch modes and a few extra biplanes and a few extra DMA channels... Nothing really exciting at all :(
-edit- to be fair to the commodore engineers, they did the best they could given the lack of resources :(
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And indeed only an idiot would calculate that 1993-1990=13 ;)
Haha yes 3 (or 4) depending on if you are talking A1200/4000 or CD32.
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You mean this? http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/gauntlet-iv/screenshots/gameShotId,314532/
An 8MHz 68000 versus a 14MHz 68020 - easy win for the CD32 in terms of performance.
Graphics - 64 colours on the Megadrive (16 colours per 8x8 tile), so easy to replicate, and 64 colours on AGA was quick enough. The CD32 could do overscan too, no fixed 320x240 resolutions here.
I think 2MB RAM beats 64KB too ... it was a while before Megadrive games were coming on 16 mbit cartridges.
Dedicated graphics hardware on the Megadrive did help a lot - mostly with the tiled graphics modes and sprites...
Play the game don't look at rubbish screenshots ;)
Firstly the Megadrive has a Z80 co-processor at something like 4mhz. Also the 020 @ 14mhz in CD32 is stuck at 50% max speed due to there being no fast ram only chip ram on the board. So CPU wise C= already screwed up, like I said either stick a damned £1 SIMM socket on the board or make it 1mb chip/1mb fast.
Secondly the Megadrive has far superior sprite hardware, hardware more superior than what OCS/ECS manages with the blitter in 320x200x32 colour mode which is faster than 128 colour mode in AGA (because it is the same blitter not a 32bit blitter as some magazines said).
Lastly the Megadrive has 10 channel audio, AGA still had the same 4 channels as the A1000.
Like bloodline and Piru have said the AGA is slow in 256 colour mode (probably slower than OCS in 64 colour mode actually from experience) and this explains why games like Fightin' Spirit are not actually 256 colours even when sold as AGA versions.
Proof is in the pudding, the Megadrive had superior 2D games graphically speaking except for available colour palette. The sound is an acquired taste perhaps.
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AGA was a kludge... A few extra fetch modes and a few extra biplanes and a few extra DMA channels... Nothing really exciting at all :(
-edit- to be fair to the commodore engineers, they did the best they could given the lack of resources :(
Kludge as in it is a 256 colour chipset that retains excellent backward compatibility, which is fair enough for A1200, but in CD32 the performance loss due to compatible design is wasted as it is a CD console. But if they really were going to do a games console they should have learned from the mistakes they made with the C64 games console...you can't compete with dedicated consoles if you don't come up with real improvements that match the competing console hardware specs :)
Throwing away 50% CPU power to make sure CD32 and A1200 could use identical games code was a silly mistake though. Even 1.5mb chip/512kb Fast ram would have been good enough.
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like I said either stick a damned £1 SIMM socket on the board or make it 1mb chip/1mb fast.
Is it really that simple or would extra chips be needed to interface the RAM to the CD32?
If so, why the hell didn't they do it? Even the N64 had upgradable memory!
I do like the CD32 though... What a bloody shame they couldn't get them into America near the end over some stupid royalties issue. It really could have given Commodore a last chance at stardom :(
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Actually there's a side of 2d that AGA completely blitzed the megadrive/mega cd and that's bitmap handling. For pure arcade style gaming the megadrive is easier to get good results with, but that doesnt mean the amiga isnt capable of it too as was occasionally demonstrated (albiet too infrequently). You cant compare based soley on paper type specs, anyone who knows the amiga hardware knows that what it's capable of isnt reflected on paper. In the case of the cd32 I do agree though. An additional meg fast ram wouldve been a much better idea than akiko. The extra speed added via fast ram wouldve done just as good a job in reagrds to 3d, but it could also be used elsewhere as well and benefitted the system.
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Actually there's a side of 2d that AGA completely blitzed the megadrive/mega cd and that's bitmap handling. For pure arcade style gaming the megadrive is easier to get good results with, but that doesnt mean the amiga isnt capable of it too as was occasionally demonstrated (albiet too infrequently). You cant compare based soley on paper type specs, anyone who knows the amiga hardware knows that what it's capable of isnt reflected on paper. In the case of the cd32 I do agree though. An additional meg fast ram wouldve been a much better idea than akiko. The extra speed added via fast ram wouldve done just as good a job in reagrds to 3d, but it could also be used elsewhere as well and benefitted the system.
I totally agree that in the right hands the Amiga was a powerful machine, look at Shadow of the Beast on every other format for a good example of when a game is designed for Amiga it is graphically at the top of the pile (and sonically too thanks to David Whittaker's tunes).
@Tension, they probably should have designed it from scratch with 0.5mb Fast and 1.5mb chip anyway really. Problem was if people were just going to dump A1200 game code + CD soundtrack out there then it is no advantage anyway with examples like Alien Breed 3D not using AKIKO at all and just using A1200 code.
The sad thing is there was a machine in development, similar in design/form factor to the A3000 series with a 28mhz 020, 2mb Chip+2mb fast, CD-Rom, Akiko, and in a price between A4000/030 and A1200 (didn't have zorro slots but who cares) and this machine not the CD32 is what they should have pushed for.
The console market takes no prisoners really, silly little mistakes are magnified for you a million fold by the big players, who know exactly what people want usually. CDTV and C64GS should have been warnings not to develop the CD32, it did some things well but some things terribly badly. Atari made the same mistake too, starving the Falcon dev team to get the badly designed Jaguar console out the door to 'save them' too ;).
The A1200 was being sold for what £299 or less for a basic package by CD32 time? Surely the thing to do was put a CD-ROM device packaged with an A1200 with 2mb fast ram after C= doing an exclusive deal and launch it for £450? The cheapest 16/25mhz 386 Multimedia system was around £800 with CD and sound card at the time wasn't it still?
It's a good thing there's nothing left to talk about Coldfire upgrades for classic Amigas really as the thread would be long since dead haha
edit: I should point out that personally I think the problem was more to do with how Ocean/US Gold fleeced us with badly programmed games and ST port-overs for years and years. In Japan lazy greedy little software house's are not in their culture and they do things as well as they can so the SNES and Megadrive had an instant advantage from a coding point of view as they actually bothered to do it.
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I agree that the CD32 should have had 1MB chip + 1MB fast, just to de-cripple the CPU, and for a console reducing chip ram for CPU speed is an good trade-off. The cost issue is always a factor, having 4MB RAM wasn't an option in 1993.
The A1200 should have had a SIMM slot for a 32-bit SIMM accessible via a separate trap-door, so people could add memory without buying a whole memory expansion for the trapdoor. However I think C= thought that people would buy PCMCIA memory expansions!
AGA clearly should have had a chunky graphics mode, nothing fancy - maybe just the hardware interpreting bitplane data differently - a 1280-wide 2-bitplane display could have been interpreted as a 320-wide chunky (but not quite linear) display. AB3D could have used a 1280-wide 1-bitplane display for a 160 pixel-wide linear chunky display...
Edit: Yes, the A1200 was £299 by that time, I remember buying mine for that price. I agree that a simple spec boost could have been done by C= to boost sales - a 4MB A1200 as a standard option for £399 would have been a good start in 1993. Then again I still think the A600 should have had a 14MHz 68000. Stupid C= cost cutters.
Edit: Mods - should the CD32/AGA stuff be split out into its own thread?
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Uh oh, sounds like the Amigas in Scotland are slightly less shiny today!
Naw, the awe & wonder with moving pictures only lasted till about 8pm last night, then it was time for the Amiga to shine brightly once again here in this gloomy little corner of Scotland... :)
(I hear a rumour of something called "talkies" moving pictures with sound but, that's a wee bit too far fetched even for me... :))
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AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually).
Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.
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Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.
Yeah I have to also note that the A1200 vs the Archimedies A3020 (I think, it was the last desktop wedge they did), the Amiga was just generally faster and I'm not sure why as the Archi was higher spec'd very weird :-/
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@Karlos
So your saying that your 1998 aftermarket addon CPU-card managed to outperform the 1987 (?) stock A3000 (A as Archimedes here) ?
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The RiscPC was actually released about '96ish :) it was Acorn's last machine
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Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.
To be fair the A3000 series used an 8MHz ARM2 processor, which was far faster than a 68000, but certainly couldn't compete with a 25MHz '040 ... maybe a 20MHz 68030...
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The RiscPC was actually released about '96ish :) it was Acorn's last machine
The BBC A3000 with 1 MB RAM came out in May 1989 for £799.
The Acorn A3010 with 1 MB RAM came out in September 1992 for £499.
The A1200 with 2MB RAM and about half the CPU power came out at the same time for £399, and soon reduced to £299. I guess CPU power was the tradeoff you got for the cheaper price.
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To be fair the A3000 series used an 8MHz ARM2 processor, which was far faster than a 68000, but certainly couldn't compete with a 25MHz '040 ... maybe a 20MHz 68030...
Karlos is referring to the "RiscPC", not the Archimedies... I appreciate those who didn't grow up with these machines might find this all quite confusing :)
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The BBC A3000 with 1 MB RAM came out in May 1989 for £799.
The Acorn A3010 with 1 MB RAM came out in September 1992 for £499.
The A1200 with 2MB RAM and about half the CPU power came out at the same time for £399, and soon reduced to £299. I guess CPU power was the tradeoff you got for the cheaper price.
Actually I think the Archimedes used a 12Mhz CPU... But I was comparing my A1200 sock with the stock A3020 and noting that the A1200 was generally faster in pretty much all areas I tried... The Acorn was just clunky :(
Karlos was comparing the RiscPC with is accelerated Amiga, so his comparison was quite valid.
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@Karlos
So your saying that your 1998 aftermarket addon CPU-card managed to outperform the 1987 (?) stock A3000 (A as Archimedes here) ?
Oh, my 1995 Apollo 1240 turbo totally wiped the floor with the Archimedes A3000 ;) By late 1998 I was getting my BlizzardPPC, if I recall correctly.
However, it also outperformed the Acorn RiscPC, which is the machine I was actually talking about. The example below shows the case stacking, my friends system was just the lower slice.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Acorn_Risc_PC_600.jpg/800px-Acorn_Risc_PC_600.jpg)
I suspect it might be that the ARM processor in said model had no floating point support though I doubt the 040 jpeg codec I was using at the time used FPU either.
One of the coolest add-ons in my friend's RiscPC was a 486 board for PC compatibility. It integrated rather well with the host system, which provided the emulated display within a window on the RISCOS desktop as well as the disk IO and everything else. Seeing it run Windows 95 was quite amusing :)
I think the machine was a 33MHz ARM 610. I could be wrong.
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Karlos is referring to the "RiscPC", not the Archimedies... I appreciate those who didn't grow up with these machines might find this all quite confusing :)
Ah yes, I missed that, I just saw the A3000 stuff. And yes, the 1992 were 12MHz, and thus the CPU should have performed like a 25MHz 68030 ... but I don't think coders ever hit the peaks on this hardware.
RiscOS had some shortcomings (co-op multitasking, for example) which must have affected things. Also I don't think the graphics chip was up to much in terms of neat features apart from a funky 256 colour mode despite only having 16 colour registers, so simple things like scrolling would have been very CPU intensive.
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Ah yes, I missed that, I just saw the A3000 stuff. And yes, the 1992 were 12MHz, and thus the CPU should have performed like a 25MHz 68030 ... but I don't think coders ever hit the peaks on this hardware.
RiscOS had some shortcomings (co-op multitasking, for example) which must have affected things. Also I don't think the graphics chip was up to much in terms of neat features apart from a funky 256 colour mode despite only having 16 colour registers, so simple things like scrolling would have been very CPU intensive.
Sounds about right to me! I suspect the Amiga's more mature and more elegant DMA based gfx/audio architecture took a lot of pressure off the CPU... I think an A1200 with an ARM (in 1992) would have been a VERY nice beast!! :)
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Sounds about right to me! I suspect the Amiga's more mature and more elegant DMA based gfx/audio architecture took a lot of pressure off the CPU... I think an A1200 with an ARM (in 1992) would have been a VERY nice beast!! :)
It would have been. The closest we'll know what it would have been like is the 3D0 console.
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I bought my A1200 on the day of release for £399 from Dixons.
No software with it whatsoever apart from the Workbench 3.0 disks and a voucher for a game from Ocean.
@Matt
Do you still have an Archie? If so, perhaps you could send it to Pavel or Michal and see whether AROS performs better than RISCOS on it? :)
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Ok, so if the AROS devs can get M68K AROS working on the Atari Falcon and ARM AROS working on RiscPC I can see I am going to have to make room for even more old hardware :lol:
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I'm a mac user
not a pc abuser
but I'm not creative
just a silly scots native...
:lol:
In Scotland was a Commodore User,
Who someone proclaimed was a loser.
He objected, of course,
From his lofty high-horse
Then all had an alcoholic infuser.
Meh, I do not always work well under pressure. (Obviously a joke on a joke about a joke.)
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I bought my A1200 on the day of release for £399 from Dixons.
No software with it whatsoever apart from the Workbench 3.0 disks and a voucher for a game from Ocean.
@Matt
Do you still have an Archie? If so, perhaps you could send it to Pavel or Michal and see whether AROS performs better than RISCOS on it? :)
Nope, I never had one... Though I do have RedSquirrel emulator on a hard drive somewhere :)
@Karlos... It would be a bit weird... All the old 80s/early 90s machines running an AmigaOS clone... One OS to rule them all!!! :-o
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I bought my A1200 on the day of release for £399 from Dixons.
No software with it whatsoever apart from the Workbench 3.0 disks and a voucher for a game from Ocean.
@Matt
Do you still have an Archie? If so, perhaps you could send it to Pavel or Michal and see whether AROS performs better than RISCOS on it? :)
Bought my from currys few months after it came out. I had the sleepwalker pack
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@Karlos... It would be a bit weird... All the old 80s/early 90s machines running an AmigaOS clone... One OS to rule them all!!! :-o
Let's face it, the best OS to rule them all :)
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Nope, I never had one... Though I do have RedSquirrel emulator on a hard drive somewhere :)
@Karlos... It would be a bit weird... All the old 80s/early 90s machines running an AmigaOS clone... One OS to rule them all!!! :-o
Back like Lazarus! :D
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Nope, I never had one... Though I do have RedSquirrel emulator on a hard drive somewhere :)
@Karlos... It would be a bit weird... All the old 80s/early 90s machines running an AmigaOS clone... One OS to rule them all!!! :-o
Back like Lazarus! :D
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One OS to rule them all,
One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all
And in it's Amiganess bind them!
In the land of AROS where the miggy's lie.
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One OS to rule them all,
One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all
And in it's Amiganess bind them!
In the land of AROS where the miggy's lie.
I like that, very nicely done... :)
But as you've changed MORDOR for AROS dose that make AROS the baddie ruled over by the evil Lord Sauron... ;)
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Has anyone ever told you people that you're intensely strange?
I grew up with Star Trek geeks.
Watched most of my adult life as they contested with Star Wars geeks.
And since before I was born, there's always been Lord of the Rings geeks (at least they read).
So how many of those three categories do each of you fit into?
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"I am but geeky north northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know an Amiga from a Black and Decker."
Now that I've paraphrased Shakespeare, does that make me a Shakespeare Geek?
Or does it mean I was using Shakespeare in a somewhat cheeky fashion?
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"I am but geeky north northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know an Amiga from a Black and Decker."
Now that I've paraphrased Shakespeare, does that make me a Shakespeare Geek?
Or does it mean I was using Shakespeare in a somewhat cheeky fashion?
No...that's pretty cool actually. Although it probably throws you in the last catagory (since you obviously do read).
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I'm not a geek, I'm a cool dude.
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I'm not a geek, I'm a cool dude.
Sorry, amend the term 'geek' to 'fan'.
Although ever since the Big Lebowski, I'm not too sure about the use of the term 'dude'.
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I dunno... I suspect that you'll find many Amigan's here are well read intelligent people. There will be exceptions, of course, but I think that's a fair assessment of most.
On the flip side, if I were to pick a negative for this community, it has always seemed to me that a majority of Amigans are dreamers. I.e. think about lots but do very little. I certainly _can_ fall in that category.
To be clear: dreaming is good, doing is better, but if all one does is dream, one does nothing. :)
Anywho... gettin' a little off topic here.
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@ Franko:
But as you've changed MORDOR for AROS dose that make AROS the baddie ruled over by the evil Lord Sauron...
I suppose it does if you tend to think of that poem as the ultimate evil. But I prefer to think of it as the ultimate in Amiganess. ;)
(Of course, there was I time I applied it to M$ and our Dark Lord Gates.)