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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Roj on September 16, 2012, 03:48:59 PM
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Confessions of a CSPPC Owner
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I managed to get my hands on a Cyberstorm PPC 233 accelerator for my A4000. At the time, it was such a breath of fresh air. My Amiga 4000 was now as fast, if not faster than the mid-range Windows PC that sat next to it. And whether or not it was actually faster, it didn't matter. It felt faster. It was much more comfortable to use in ways that are still difficult to explain.
I have to admit that having the CSPPC as early as I did has turned out to be a tremendous disadvantage. I see Windows for what it is: a machine that started with bad architecture and a disjointed user interface. It was an interface which lacked a focus of design, and was instead an incoherent conglomeration of ideas from people who couldn't agree on anything, and instead implemented their own parts of the interface "their way," completely disregarding what came before them and with little concern with what could come after them.
Those that haven't experienced the speed and fluidity that a CSPPC brought to an Amiga will likely never understand the conflict that I deal with every time I use Microsoft or Apple products today. I know how it could work. I've seen how it should work. But alas, Amigas are somewhat rare, and Amigas with CSPPCs are extremely rare. And the vision that comes from having gained familiarity with an Amiga with a CSPPC is virtually impossible to pass on to others. And others who actually are willing to listen to and understand that vision exist only in a fairy-tale world.
Call me crazy. Call me a Grade-A Moron. That is the curse of a CSPPC owner.
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Those that haven't experienced the speed and fluidity that a CSPPC brought to an Amiga will likely never understand the conflict that I deal with every time I use Microsoft or Apple products today. I know how it could work. I've seen how it should work. But alas, Amigas are somewhat rare, and Amigas with CSPPCs are extremely rare. And the vision that comes from having gained familiarity with an Amiga with a CSPPC is virtually impossible to pass on to others. And others who actually are willing to listen to and understand that vision exist only in a fairy-tale world.
Call me crazy. Call me a Grade-A Moron. That is the curse of a CSPPC owner.
Have you tried any of the "next gen" derivatives? We might fight like rabid animals over which to use and why, but there's a reason we do it; that... essence you are trying to describe is the one thing they all have in common, at least to many an Amiga fan. Of course, there are puritans that insist only on genuine original Amiga hardware (I'm kinda 50/50 on that front, they'll have to prize my BPPC based A1200 from my cold, dead hands).
Trying out AROS will literally cost you nothing. Trying out MorphOS will cost you next to nothing. Trying out OS4 will, sadly, cost you an arm and a leg on "new" hardware, but if you can find a second-hand machine for sale, there's no real need to re-mortgage the house.
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I sort of get that feeling with MOS, but you are completely right. There's an intangible "something". It's like porn but without the goats and gimp masks.
Everybody knows it when they see it, but you can't quite put words to it.
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I'm realy surprised that we're still here and that if anything the NG OS' appear to be gaining momentum.
Its nice to have something that boots in about half a minute, that isn't a power hungry resource hog.
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The only thing closest to a PPC Amiga feel is my MorphOS on a MDD G4 Mac. I was not ready to pour $800+ on a piece of hardware that can die any day. MDD was about $90 and already had 2gb ram, 1.42ghz cpu, 250gb hard drive, and a radeon 9000 video card. Slap on MorphOS and you're ready to rock.
I must admit I used to be a die-hard Amiga fan and would reject anything else trying to be Amiga, but MorphOS was a damn good experience of what Amiga should be like.
*Not to be taken personally*
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Confessions of a CSPPC Owner
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I managed to get my hands on a Cyberstorm PPC 233 accelerator for my A4000. At the time, it was such a breath of fresh air. My Amiga 4000 was now as fast, if not faster than the mid-range Windows PC that sat next to it. And whether or not it was actually faster, it didn't matter. It felt faster. It was much more comfortable to use in ways that are still difficult to explain.
I have to admit that having the CSPPC as early as I did has turned out to be a tremendous disadvantage. I see Windows for what it is: a machine that started with bad architecture and a disjointed user interface. It was an interface which lacked a focus of design, and was instead an incoherent conglomeration of ideas from people who couldn't agree on anything, and instead implemented their own parts of the interface "their way," completely disregarding what came before them and with little concern with what could come after them.
Those that haven't experienced the speed and fluidity that a CSPPC brought to an Amiga will likely never understand the conflict that I deal with every time I use Microsoft or Apple products today. I know how it could work. I've seen how it should work. But alas, Amigas are somewhat rare, and Amigas with CSPPCs are extremely rare. And the vision that comes from having gained familiarity with an Amiga with a CSPPC is virtually impossible to pass on to others. And others who actually are willing to listen to and understand that vision exist only in a fairy-tale world.
Call me crazy. Call me a Grade-A Moron. That is the curse of a CSPPC owner.
Finally someone puts some of my thoughts to words that i couldn't. The csppc made life good on amiga.
I have to fully agree. The csppc was one of the finest amiga add-ons ever. The UWscsi seemed blistering fast(and still holds its own well). The built in features to use a cdrom without installing a bunch of stuff,and other nice features really make it a one of a kind card. It sped up everything incredibly back in the day and the ppc side made playing mp3's,reading pdf's and editing big res pix a pleasure. The csppc blows the Bppc out of the water in performance on scsi alone as well as the ppc side addressing the ram in 64bit.Also a 604e vs the 603.
You haven't lived until you had one. The newer ppc boards and os's on mac may work fine and be faster but they lack the "class" of a csppc i guess.
mech
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I had the flagship BlizzardPPC 240/060/50. I ended up selling it over 10 years ago.
The nicest thing about it was the ability to add Bvision and later g-rexx.
The whole PowerUP vs WarpOS thing was really was really big fiasco, and the PPC was not a huge speedup over the 060. Using the PPC bins always seemed to make the amiga more prone to random crashes...
For me it was just an expensive MP3 player. I guess now you have OS 4.1 classic that I did not have back then...
The biggest letdown was FusionPPC never working on Blizzard.
That is why this time around I went for the 1260.
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Pssh. The best Amiga I ever had was when I blew 200$ on Amithlon. Now *THAT* was an "Amiga....."
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I bought my CS-PPC for £900 when it was new. It was the top of the range (then) 200MHz one, and naturally has an early serial number.
My A1 running OS4 is great - my Sam 440ep is a lovely machine - but the A4000 is the one I'm most attached to.
Right now I'm playing Ultima VII on it via PC-Task, using the 68060.
It's still an awesome machine, and no NG Amiga or Mac will take that away from it - there's just something about it being an actual Amiga in hardware as well as software that makes it really special.
I was paying off what I borrowed for it for a year but I've never regretted it at all.
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That is the curse of a CSPPC owner.
Cursed indeed, hard to forget all those broken and disappearing CSPPC cards! :P
I'd rather have a good '060-only board any day, but that's just MHO.
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I sort of get that feeling with MOS, but you are completely right. There's an intangible "something". It's like porn but without the goats and gimp masks.
Everybody knows it when they see it, but you can't quite put words to it.
Just like this on jimmy kimmel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4
That intangible "something" is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
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Have you tried any of the "next gen" derivatives? Trying out OS4 will, sadly, cost you an arm and a leg on "new" hardware, but if you can find a second-hand machine for sale, there's no real need to re-mortgage the house. [Edited for brevity]
"Next Gen" Amiga's run OS 4.1, as does an A4000 w/ a CSPPC. A 4000 with a CSPPC runs OS 4.1 natively without any extra hardware (well a HDD and CDROM do help). The OS is somewhat higher than Windows 7, but when was the last time a Windows Developer answered you forum posts?
Extra costs for the A4000+CSPPC owner? A PCI solution helps, but OS 4.1 doesn't care really which, as Hyperion wrote their own drivers and support the inexpensive PCI cards and a dozen Zorro RTG's. USB will cost you if you don't already have a Subway or Deneb. A Radeon 92XX or Voodoo3 3000? Less than 100 USD. DMA is an issue with OS 4.1, as they only allow one device (the CSPPC's), but I keep waiting to see if the paradigm shifts.
I installed MOS 3.1 on a Mac Mini in a dual boot with OS X (some cat) and to me MorphOS feels more like a MAC than an Amiga. AmigaOS 4.1 may have a Unix structure to it's development, but the under belly of the beast is that full feeling of being in control of your own operating system. I too bought a CSPPC in 1992 (and another last year for my backup A4000T); I never got the value out of the investment until I put OS 4.1 on it and dug into the system. Can it keep up with my office PC? It doesn't have to; they are two different beasts, used for different purposes. I built my first PC in 1988, and more-or-less stay 2 Moore's Cycles behind the forefront. That's a lot of PC parts in storage bins (a least I give them to charities when I can). Can't say that about my Amiga's; they stay is service and get refined as able.
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I installed MOS 3.1 on a Mac Mini in a dual boot with OS X (some cat) and to me MorphOS feels more like a MAC than an Amiga....
careful now Grandma might put this line in his signature:p
cue the blue artillary...pull:swords::idea::destroy:
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Just like this on jimmy kimmel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4
That intangible "something" is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
Interesting article, thanks!
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I had the flagship BlizzardPPC 240/060/50. I ended up selling it over 10 years ago.
The nicest thing about it was the ability to add Bvision and later g-rexx.
The whole PowerUP vs WarpOS thing was really was really big fiasco, and the PPC was not a huge speedup over the 060. Using the PPC bins always seemed to make the amiga more prone to random crashes...
For me it was just an expensive MP3 player. I guess now you have OS 4.1 classic that I did not have back then...
The biggest letdown was FusionPPC never working on Blizzard.
That is why this time around I went for the 1260.
I agree, wish they'd just stuck with 060's (eventually got them up to a reliable 100Mhz) with tons of RAM and fast on-board SCSI. Couple that kind of CPU card with a decent 3D PC graphics card and you'd have had a very respectable system for most of the 90's.
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CSPPC was pretty cool piece of hardware but its price/performance ratio was somewhat poor due to lack of PPC software.
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Could it be that software is written better for PowerPC? PowerPC systems seemed faster, but that was before all the software crud of the late 90's and 00's starts getting added. (Mandatory on Windows, optional on Amiga).
The machine (PC or Amiga) will slow down when a piece of software tries to overtax one of the components... CPU, memory or graphics.
If the OS is well tuned and there is no buggy software you will have a nice running machine. Trying to tune a modern OS would be a mammoth task and take several years to learn.
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No, it was just that there was no operating system for PPC. PowerUp/WarpUp were only kernels making it possible write PPC software but in practice PPC was not more than a co-processor. With more development, time and money it could have been better but it was little too late for that.
There were weird software issues, too. At least when using WarpUp kernel mouse pointer occasionally froze for few moments when running demanding PPC software.
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I had a blizzPPC-060@50/PPC@240 in the day, and with a graphics card in a tower, it did feel screaming fast.
Agreed that the PPC side was frustrating because you had to search for bits and pieces of drivers and such to make something like ImageFX use PPC handlers and the like.
I was always more of a command line person on the amiga, and if you did take the time to compile binaries for PPC for your often used tools like lha, zip, and several other cmds, you could achieve a very responsive and productive system with it.
It was a shame that the hybrid system couldn't have been unified a little better.
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Also, I held my system at 3.1 during that time even though 3.5 was coming out simply because I wanted it to remain as fast as it could be. Besides many patches and enhancements were available for 3.1. In retrospect, my overall view of that setup of 3.1 + 060/PPC was that it was just a "no bullshxt" system that truly did nearly everything a mid range PC could do at the time. True it was not state-of-the-art fast, but it allowed me to seriously use an amiga for real work a little longer.
Today, for me, Amigas are just for fun and I don't kid myself that (even the new incarnations) can be used for serious work anymore... (that's my view, my opinion, yours may differ).
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I agree, wish they'd just stuck with 060's (eventually got them up to a reliable 100Mhz) with tons of RAM and fast on-board SCSI. Couple that kind of CPU card with a decent 3D PC graphics card and you'd have had a very respectable system for most of the 90's.
There were no decent 3d graphics cards until the mid 90's, by the time they came then even a 100mhz 68060 was woefully inadequate.
The time when Amiga lost traction was the beginning of the 90's. When the a500 plus came out the market was in decline and the 3d consoles were coming.
The playstation didn't have a very fast processor, but it had a 3d maths coprocessor and a texture mapping gpu, the motion jpec decoder was slightly less important but it added a bit of bling to the games. Sony won the games market in the mid 90's with cheap custom hardware & it was more successful than the Amiga ever was. If commodore had vision then they would have made something similar.
In 1991 an amiga based on 68000 + paula + CD + 3d maths coprocessor + texture mapper would have saved them from bankruptcy. Instead they just milked the amiga for a couple more years where they came out with AGA, which was an evolutionary rather than revolutionary upgrade. It was better than what we had before & I still used an A1200 in 2001 when XP came out & I finally jumped ship. They would have needed to switch to another processor in the mid 90's, but with the money they made they could have funded that.
However, with all the what if's, even Jack Tramiel didn't get it right. The jaguar wasn't good enough when it came out and either needed to be better or come out a couple of years earlier. If the jaguar had supported TOS and come with a CD player in 1991 then Atari would have survived until the next round.
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The csppc made life good on a The csppc blows the Bppc out of the water in performance on scsi alone as well as the ppc side addressing the ram in 64bit.Also a 604e vs the 603.
mech
This is true for a standard blizzard card,but you have not seen nothing yet.
it's here and its being on my Blizzard card for at least a year and its working,someone got to do some rewriting to do, in-order for it to take full advantage of whats on my card.
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The csppc blows the Bppc out of the water in performance on scsi alone as well as the ppc side addressing the ram in 64bit.Also a 604e vs the 603.
mech
Standard blizzard card: correct
Modified blizzard card: ???? . Let's put it this way,I was surprised that OS4.0 at the time almost booted on classic PPC 7xx. not sure yet but I think I may have found the problem.
PPC 7xx to be continued.
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Confessions of a CSPPC Owner
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I managed to get my hands on a Cyberstorm PPC 233 accelerator for my A4000. At the time, it was such a breath of fresh air. My Amiga 4000 was now as fast, if not faster than the mid-range Windows PC that sat next to it. And whether or not it was actually faster, it didn't matter. It felt faster. It was much more comfortable to use in ways that are still difficult to explain.
That`s totally true : I got myself a CSPPC 060/233 for a couple of weeks upgrading from a standard 030@25. This was a huge difference, which was percieved as an ultra fast setup. Unfortunately, the board was faulty and I had to return it to its owner, so I got back to the old config with the 030.
It felt like stuck in the swamp, paused! So the "positive illusion" was not just an illusion, I was really frustrated after having experienced the sweetness of the most responsive system I ever had.
Regarding the various problems, I never had any major of them probably because of the S/W & H/W combination : WB3.9 & A4000. Nice and transparent PPC binaries integration, stability due to case space , no heating problems.
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Maybe it was just the 060 that made your Amiga feel fast?
They could just as well put a P2 CPU on the board, think about the posibilities of that.
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Maybe it was just the 060 that made your Amiga feel fast?
They could just as well put a P2 CPU on the board, think about the posibilities of that.
Boot the machine, launch a JIT emulation of a 68k processor and hand everything the Amiga has to do over to that, watch it flyyyyyyyyy :)
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Boot the machine, launch a JIT emulation of a 68k processor and hand everything the Amiga has to do over to that, watch it flyyyyyyyyy :)
If you want rtg graphics workbench and more power then any Amiga has seen, run UAE on a 2GHz+ x86 system. Only trouble is, I don't have any software that can use that power.
I should have kept some of my productivity programs (from AGA era) it would have been nice to see them running with 3Ghz of power. If I could be bothered I might download some mp3/video programs from aminet and try them on WinUAE.
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If you want rtg graphics workbench and more power then any Amiga has seen, run UAE on a 2GHz+ x86 system. Only trouble is, I don't have any software that can use that power.
I should have kept some of my productivity programs (from AGA era) it would have been nice to see them running with 3Ghz of power. If I could be bothered I might download some mp3/video programs from aminet and try them on WinUAE.
A few years ago I played GLQuake through beginning to end on WinUAE on a single-core Athlon system, in 1024x768 (uaegfx under P96). I don't think it ever dipped below 30fps (I kept a counter up). :) It was sweet!
My someday experiment will be to run PCTask or PC-x under WinUAE on this new system and see how that works.
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I was a CSPPC owner and it's actually a bitter experience for me. I had one in my A4000D and it ended up dieing. I sent it off to DCE to get fixed in the late 90s to never hear or see it again. $900 gone just like that. It was a nice card while I had it though!! But I do not ever foresee buying anther one again.