Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Marketplace => Topic started by: bceverly on May 19, 2015, 06:25:18 PM
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Don't know if anyone saw this. It is not my auction but I ran across it on eBay yesterday:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-A2410-University-of-Lowell-High-Resolution-Graphics-Display-Card-Zorro-II-/191582786778?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c9b3954da
Might make a nice A3000ux system complete for someone on here.
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Thank you, I have a 3000UX! I'll give it a shot but I bet it goes for crazy money.
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Thank you, I have a 3000UX! I'll give it a shot but I bet it goes for crazy money.
Not everything rare specs out really well...
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Not everything rare specs out really well...
You sound so negative...
Actually, I'd like to add some negative remarks concerning the A2410 under Amiga Unix on the A3000UX.
Be advised that the only way to make this card work under Amiga Unix is to use the special X11R4 version which shipped with A2410 support. You cannot open a plain terminal console on the A2410.
The X11R4 version in question suffers from memory leaks problems, so this won't run well for long.
If anything, the A2410 is for the completist, who already has an A3000UX and all the other supported hardware (A2024, A2232, A2065).
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I see it going for $500 USD. You've always got that one person out there who wants a "complete" A3000UX, and has more money than sense. ;)
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Not me !! $499 is my limit :roflmao:
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Not me !! $499 is my limit :roflmao:
I predict a bidding war between you and @danbeaver (http://www.amiga.org/forums/member.php?u=10003). :lol:
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I wouldn't pay that much for a ver 1.2N Picasso IV.
The Lowell card has no great advantage over any other ZORRO-2, 2 MB graphics card out there.
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@Danbeaver, clearly your facts are spot on.
I actually have my A3000UX running with a Picasso II+. I wrote the tutorial on the Amix web site about how to set the Picasso drivers a few years ago.
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:lol:
Eh no, I got exactly 0 bids on that :)
But whoever gets that card might be interested in buying my http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1296
:laughing:
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There are AMIX drivers for the Picasso II, and that one's probably a much better card.
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There are AMIX drivers for the Picasso II, and that one's probably a much better card.
I don't think it's so clear cut. Both cards are products of their times.
The A2410 uses the Texas Instruments TIGA graphics architecture, which meant that you told the card through a hardware interface what to render, and how. This required less bandwidth than a "dumb framebuffer" card, and worked sufficiently fast even on a Zorro II card, on a slow machine. The A2410 would use a co-processor to speed up graphics operations. Does this sound familiar? The original Amiga chip set did exactly that, and what the A2410 could do was in a way a step beyond what the Amiga chip set represented.
The Picasso II is a comparatively simpler solution, which combined a frame buffer with programmable resolution and colour options with basic hardware acceleration (an on-board blitter). It was built around a mass-produced SVGA chip made by Cirrus Logic, which accounted for the much lower price you'd have to pay for the end product back in 1993/1994, as compared to the A2410, which was never cheap.
The flexibility, the software support, the robustness of the driver software and in particular how well-integrated the two cards were with Amiga Unix were worlds apart, though. In this respect the Picasso II was the better choice.
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But whoever gets that card might be interested in buying my http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1296
(http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/display_photos/a3070inside1.jpg)
Good lord, what is that monster, about 2' long? :lol:
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MmmM about same length as the 3000 case if I remember right :)
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(http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/display_photos/a3070inside1.jpg)
Good lord, what is that monster, about 2' long? :lol:
You won't be able to fully appreciate the true majesty of this contraption until you've installed Amiga Unix with it and have suffered through the prolonged and loud copying process, capped by the loud and lengthy rewind operation.
Fun fact: the installation process was hardwired to work only with the A3070, and it would fail if you used a different type of tape drive. Very narrow driver tolerances :-(
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AMIX was a curiosity, luckily there was NetBSD and Linux very soon after, with much wider hardware support.
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AMIX was a curiosity, luckily there was NetBSD and Linux very soon after, with much wider hardware support.
It took 3-4 years for NetBSD to appear for the Amiga, which at the time seemed like an eternity :(
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DAAAAAAAMN. I called my guess for how high this would go at $500. Looks like I should've guessed higher.
Or as my gf said, Amiga folks are crazy. :lol:
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DAAAAAAAMN. I called my guess for how high this would go at $500. Looks like I should've guessed higher.
Or as my gf said, Amiga folks are crazy. :lol:
N n n n n no! We're n n n n not!
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Speaking of oddball *ix implementations, anyone remember AmiNIX?
http://www.amigareport.com/ar302/news.html
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Speaking of oddball *ix implementations, anyone remember AmiNIX?
http://www.amigareport.com/ar302/news.html
Not much to remember there, is it? It's not enough to have a kernel, the thing has to be bootstrapped, with the system and userland software to match. This is what Markus Wild did with ixemul.library, which was used as a springboard to build the Amiga NetBSD port.
Fun fact, there was a port of the MACH kernel (I forget which version; this was back in 1992-1992) for the Amiga which actually booted. It didn't fly, because there was no terminal output (you had to restart your Amiga and use a hex editor to find the terminal output in RAM), and the kernel didn't manage to enter the init process that would have launched the system and userland services. It didn't have a file system to boot from, and no binaries either...
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Wow 560$! I hope it went to someone who actually knows how to use it and needs it, not some fleabay scumbag trying to speculate on ultrarare hardware.
Mach on Amiga (as on everything else bar NeXTSTEP and OSF/1 / Digital TruUNIX64) was a complete waste of time... Look at the Hurd, it only managed to get a pseudo working release with Debian userland this year. Linux and *BSD was the only rational way to go to have a free *nix system on the Amiga, shame it took so long.
Anyone have Motif for AMIX? It's one of those missing pieces...
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Mach on Amiga (as on everything else bar NeXTSTEP and OSF/1 / Digital TruUNIX64) was a complete waste of time... Look at the Hurd, it only managed to get a pseudo working release with Debian userland this year. Linux and *BSD was the only rational way to go to have a free *nix system on the Amiga, shame it took so long.
Back in the day it was hard to predict what was going to work. Commercial Unix versions were still very competetive, and the legal case AT&T had brought against BSD had not played out yet. Free alternatives were few, and who could have predicted that Linux would emerge as the winner? It could have been MACH, although its BSD-derived userland/system binaries were as problematic as BSD itself at the time.
Anyone have Motif for AMIX? It's one of those missing pieces...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this never shipped as part of Amiga Unix, only as part of a third party graphics solution (DMI resolver?).
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Back in the day it was hard to predict what was going to work. Commercial Unix versions were still very competetive, and the legal case AT&T had brought against BSD had not played out yet. Free alternatives were few, and who could have predicted that Linux would emerge as the winner? It could have been MACH, although its BSD-derived userland/system binaries were as problematic as BSD itself at the time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this never shipped as part of Amiga Unix, only as part of a third party graphics solution (DMI resolver?).
That's all I've been able to dig up too ... Was with the DMI Resolver for some reason. Shame, as even Atari SVR4 has Motif, which gives them NCSA Mosaic. Still, that requires an Atari TT and that's pretty damn rare compared to the A3000.
I agree that around 92 it was still very hard to tell what was going to win even 5 years later, but the time spent by the GNU people by then, with very little to show for it, on HURD was a good sign that Mach wasn't going to take over, especially as the it's disadvantages by then (speed between servers, etc) were well known. And hardware was moving or had moved to RISC for all the major players in the UNIX world.
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N n n n n no! We're n n n n not!
Absol..f'ing...lutely. Crazy and cursed.
But its been fun!