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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Pentad on February 15, 2017, 04:50:39 PM
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Please forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I have been following the recovery of the Mac emulator for the Next computer called Daydream. I did not even know there was such an emulator for the NeXT computer and to be honest I was surprised given the bad blood between Apple and the founding members of Next. (Though this was a 3rd party product)
DayDream was very much like Amax on the Amiga as you had a box with Mac roms attached to the computer (in this case the DSP port) so the emulator could be legal.
What I found most interesting was that it took over the entire computer. I would have thought they could run a Mac emulator concurrently with NextStep given the power of the NeXT computer and the multitasking ability of the Unix based OS.
You can read more here (and download the manual!):
http://www.osnews.com/comments/29661
I believe the article (or someone) claims this is the first Mac emulator which I believe is wrong. I think the first is MagicSac for the ST. However, given the power of Amax, Emplant and ShapShifter (through some dubious code) the Amiga's emulation ability really puts Daydream to shame.
I loved Emplant and used it all time when I was in college. People were shocked that I could run a Macintosh right alongside my Amiga at speeds better than the Mac!
There are videos of it booting and running. Also, you can grab a copy that does not require the external rom box so you can use it on the Next emulator Previous.
Pretty interesting,
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http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340 (http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340)
AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?
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http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340 (http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340)
AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?
I got one of those Amax units. Friend gave it to me for free but I never used it. I should probably dig it up from storage somewhere.
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I believe the article (or someone) claims this is the first Mac emulator which I believe is wrong. I think the first is MagicSac for the ST. However, given the power of Amax, Emplant and ShapShifter (through some dubious code) the Amiga's emulation ability really puts Daydream to shame.
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Actually article on OSNews says this DayDream emulator is de-facto first Mac Clone, not first "emulated" Macintosh.
Also short original article on Flickr talks about there was sort of "official" support to MacOS 7.5.
For a certain period in the nineties (1995-1997) Apple licensed its system to third party manufacturers whom started producing Mac Clones.
In the end Apple decided that Macintosh market should not became as PC World of IBM Clones (maybe clones were better then official Macs, or perhaps Clones manufacturers granted bad support to customers and thus damaging Apple in various ways), so Apple withdrew any licences.
I think this was the legal situation of Daydream.
On the other hand AMAX and Emplant were "NO OFFICIAL" clones and their boards sure could mount Mac ROMS but these ROMS should be purchased directly from Apple, that in parallel with withdrawing licenses also stopped selling official ROMS replacements.
I strongly suspect they made this move right just for the fact Amiga emulation ran better than original Macintosh machines ;-) plus it multitasked with Amiga side, making Amiga equipped with Emplant boards sort of supercomputers! :-D
[EDIT]
It was Steve Jobs returning at Apple in 1997 that stopped selling licenses to third parties.
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http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340 (http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=340)
AMax has 1989 Copyright stamped on its PCB which is way earlier. Amiga and ST weren't real computers though, didn't you know?
I could not find a release date for MagicSac/Spectrum on the Atari ST but I know they did create a Macintosh emulator for the ST first. Amiga folks may not know this but it is one of the reasons we got A-Max.
The programmers who did MagicSac/Spectrum on the Atari tried to port it to the Amiga and failed. They basically got a very slow, limited memory (64k?) emulator that on ran in Chip Memory. They announced (via Usenet I think) that they had given up and said the Amiga was not capable of having an emulator given its OS, custom chips, and memory configuration.
Simon Douglas thought this was crap and decided to write one himself. Over a weekend, he had the Macintosh boot screen up and running. It took longer for the other drivers and polish but he ended up creating A-max.
You purchased A-max, a set of Mac roms, installed them in the external box, and plugged it in. Poof! A working Mac emulator (you could even allocate the 256k Kickstart memory!)
It was also incredibly easy to dump the roms to a file, load them into the correct memory location, and then patch A-max. A full Mac emulator on one floppy disk. :-)
I was able to talk with Simon Douglas at an Amiga show -a long time ago- and he spoke in great detail about the development of A-max.
Emplant took up the mantle from A-max and did a multitasking Mac emulator.
Not to be outdone, Amax IV was released with very similar features.
Both great products and great designs. Though I bought and used Emplant for college so I do not know very much about Amax IV. However, I wish I knew what happened to Simon Douglas...seems like he fell off the planet.
Jim Drew has written much about Emplant, UU, and showing his product off to Apple. It was pretty cool to show people your Mac emulator running right along side your Amiga back in the day. Good times!
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I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.
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I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.
I had wondered that too. The 040 Macs where emulated pretty well. Previous works pretty well on the PC/Mac, I wonder if it would be hard to port to the Amiga? I think it is based off of Hatari which is using SDL.
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I had wondered that too. The 040 Macs where emulated pretty well. Previous works pretty well on the PC/Mac, I wonder if it would be hard to port to the Amiga? I think it is based off of Hatari which is using SDL.
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NeXTStep is a fantastic OS even today and, I will just say this flat out, better than AmigaOS of the same vintage. Getting it to run on Amigas powerful enough to do it would be quite a feat.
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I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.
MacOS was quite a simple operating system & loading and patching the rom was all you really had to do.
NextStep is much more complex. A better option would be to start with an Amiga port of BSD 4.3 and use the Next binaries
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Please forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I have been following the recovery of the Mac emulator for the Next computer called Daydream. I did not even know there was such an emulator for the NeXT computer and to be honest I was surprised given the bad blood between Apple and the founding members of Next. (Though this was a 3rd party product)
DayDream was very much like Amax on the Amiga as you had a box with Mac roms attached to the computer (in this case the DSP port) so the emulator could be legal.
I actually have this in storage, along with the hardware it attaches to.
At the time when this hit the market, it must have been the highest-resolution (black & white) Macintosh display that you could want to use, although shelling out for a NeXT cube or NeXTstation would have been quite an investment. But then again, some DTP users were willing to go that far. The NeXT megapixel display was quite good at its time in terms of resolution, sharpness and contrast.
I do wonder if this solution qualified as an emulator. It took over the display hardware and the CPU, but the Macintosh hard disk contents were still stored on the NeXT hard disk as a file. So supposedly a layer to manage the hard disk access would have had to be part of this solution.
DayDream shipped with a System 7 setup, and (funny enough) because you could not upgrade it much, it started to suffer from Mac OS 68k Y2K bugs. It still works, but everything connected to time keeping and the current date is wonky.
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MacOS was quite a simple operating system & loading and patching the rom was all you really had to do.
NextStep is much more complex. A better option would be to start with an Amiga port of BSD 4.3 and use the Next binaries
If I remember correctly, the BSD kernel API and userland code grafted onto the MACH kernel used in NeXTstep is significantly older than 4.3BSD, somewhere in the ballpark of 4.2-Net/2 release. Also, you'd have to find a Mach-o binary loader to match it. Doable, but probably not a lot of fun in the long run.
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If I remember correctly, the BSD kernel API and userland code grafted onto the MACH kernel used in NeXTstep is significantly older than 4.3BSD, somewhere in the ballpark of 4.2-Net/2 release. Also, you'd have to find a Mach-o binary loader to match it. Doable, but probably not a lot of fun in the long run.
I don't know, blame wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix
I have no idea how fun it would be to run NeXTSTEP. Although you could probably find out by running the x86 version on a PC, 3.1+ or OpenStep.
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This works on virtual box with a bit of fiddling.
https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/4x
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I was just watching a youtube video about NeXTStep OS. The default windows manager kind of reminders me of WindowMaker which was my preferred windows manager for Xwindows when I was big into Un*x and XFCE wasn't around. .
was just thinking it has 68k code, hmm running on an Amiga possible ? I know we have NetBSD.. (I love OpenBSD btw)
Edit - opps Ive caught up on the discussions above.. too much work to port :P
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I don't know, blame wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix
I have no idea how fun it would be to run NeXTSTEP. Although you could probably find out by running the x86 version on a PC, 3.1+ or OpenStep.
I actually did a few experiments in this area recently (OpenStep), and some 15 years ago (NeXTSTEP).
You can install OpenStep for Intel in a virtual machine and give it a spin. You are limited to the very basic graphics hardware support offered by the installation disks, which takes a lot of fun out of using the system (it's greyscale 640x480 VGA). OpenStep and its precursors were intended to be used with a high resolution display, and without it, things become very uncomfortable very quickly.
Both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are now so old that it is next to impossible to build or install any contemporary software on them. Say, you wanted to play MP3-encoded files or use SSH either as a client or a server application.
Today such software expects a POSIX-ish host, and both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are far removed from that. These operating systems sit among the branches of the original Unix tree, with distant cousins such as HP-UX, IRIX or SunOS on other branches. Portable Unix software had to account for the minor and major differences between these platforms that shared common ancestors, but were at times so different that it took extra effort to port the code to those platforms.
Because NeXTSTEP is an "exotic" Unix, building client software required the respective project's "configure" script to run and produce useful results, which in turn would permit the code to be built. This step almost always ran into trouble, because either the respective script supposedly supported some version of NeXTSTEP, but that was not the version I was using, or the NeXTSTEP support was by now incomplete and untested. Tinkering with the script sometimes allowed for it to produce some useful build files, but once the compiler and linker got to work, the code failed to compile or link because it had never been ported or tested on NeXTSTEP.
I tried this with OpenSSH and LAME, but both failed in the early stages of the build process. That was in 2001. For OpenSSH one of the obstacles was in building the crypto libraries it needed, and that failed, too. One could, given enough time and patience, port such software properly, but this seems like a really tall order. Even the 'C' compiler is so old that you would have to port a more recent version first.
Long story short: in my opinion you can have a lot more fun with your Amiga than with the NeXTEP or OpenStep platforms today, and that used to be true even 15 years ago :)
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I was just watching a youtube video about NeXTStep OS. The default windows manager kind of reminders me of WindowMaker which was my preferred windows manager for Xwindows when I was big into Un*x and XFCE wasn't around. .
Guess which one came first ;)
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This works on virtual box with a bit of fiddling.
It is very fiddly indeed, and the result leaves a less than charming impression of the system and its power. It's like running AmigaOS 3.1 on an early version of UAE and drawing conclusions from what you see...
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Guess which one came first ;)
ha looks like NeXTstep, and windowmaker replicated its feel.. according to wikipedia..
I had no idea.. :P I loved Windowmaker for yep its elegant feel & look.
actually IM surprised last stable release of Windowmaker is August 2015 :P
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NeXT very interesting in terms of computing history.
When I was at Purdue, the university purchase gobs of NeXT Cubes. We had computer rooms full of them and many of the Mac departments (think DTP stuff) were ready to move over to them. However, the software never came and it ended up being a joke on campus.
I remember my advanced physics professor ranting about how Jobs said the price would be around $3k for each workstation since that was the feedback NeXT had received about price points from scholars. It shipped at over twice that for a basic unit which my professor said would doom the machine. True to his word, the physics department never bought a single machine and the machines failed in the marketplace.
For me, this video is a perfect example of not only why NeXT failed but the insanity of Jobs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNeXlJW70KQ
I remember seeing this as a kid (I was 14 in ’85) and thinking how great this company was and how amazing Jobs was as a leader.
Flash forward today and this is an insane timetable. I mean they are talking about building and shipping a new computer in 18 months! If one of my staff gave a timetable like this I would fire them on the spot.
I understand that Jobs is in his own reality but you have people like George Crow, Dan’l Lewin and Bud Tribble in this room and the fact they went along with this is stunning. You do see some pushback from Joanna Hoffman (very sharp) and years later she said the film crew edited out a lot of her pushback to make Jobs seem more glorious as a leader. It was one of the reasons she left NeXT (the insane timetables not the film editing).
We know of course they weren’t even close on their schedule or price. It must of been hell working with Jobs and trying to put together real forecasts and realistic schedules. I can’t begin to imagine the stress.
Many years later I worked at Navistar in their advanced technology group (bringing cutting edge technology into the company) and the CIO decided to bet against Windows (Navistar was pretty dumb when I was there). We began rolling out OpenStep on new workstations. It was still pretty new and Next released a new video driver which ended up wiping the workstations. The CIO lost everything he had been working on and that was the end of our pilot program with OpenStep.
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While I don't disagree with much of what you've said about Jobs and the issues around NeXT, I think it would be unfair to characterize NeXT as a failure. It definitely was a transformative machine and influenced much that came later on. Mac OS X is basically the latest version of NeXT which is highly used OS. The "World Wide Web" was built on the NeXTStep because it was easy to build such software on this platform. I'll admit I'm a Next fanboy but not so much to deny the problems NeXT had. (Seriously magnesium infused cases?)
That video you linked to was very interesting. I have a copy of that booklet Paul Rand pulled out in the video. It's a pretty cool document about the logo's evolution.
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The "World Wide Web" was built on the NeXTStep because it was easy to build such software on this platform.
"World Wide Web" (later Nexus) was the first browser, but it wasn't very good for a long time, never really popular & then Mosaic came along and people started using that instead.
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I remember my advanced physics professor ranting about how Jobs said the price would be around $3k for each workstation since that was the feedback NeXT had received about price points from scholars. It shipped at over twice that for a basic unit which my professor said would doom the machine. True to his word, the physics department never bought a single machine and the machines failed in the marketplace.
I have a SGI O2, would be around mid 90's release. haha lookup the original RRP price I think it was around the $10,000 mark back in the day.
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ha looks like NeXTstep, and windowmaker replicated its feel.. according to wikipedia..
I had no idea.. :P I loved Windowmaker for yep its elegant feel & look.
actually IM surprised last stable release of Windowmaker is August 2015 :P
I still use GNUStep/WindowMaker on my little quadcore atom Transformer with 2GB of soldered ram. I love it. :)
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I still use GNUStep/WindowMaker on my little quadcore atom Transformer with 2GB of soldered ram. I love it. :)
for some reason I stopped using Un*x for workstation purposes. I didnt like Linux due to dependency hell and love BSD with ports style packages but theres more compatibility and mainstream projects for linux. Still use it for server side tasks.
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"World Wide Web" (later Nexus) was the first browser, but it wasn't very good for a long time, never really popular & then Mosaic came along and people started using that instead.
The HTML standard and approach to the web was invented on the NeXT. The browser wasn't the point the creation of the approach was and the NeXT platform helped enable that representation. Previous to this change we had text based representations like gopher. I loved gopher but the HTML approach was in the end more popular.
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I just wanted to post a quick thanks to Pentad for posting the original thread. Got a chance to check out the work that's been done and it is really neat. Can't wait to try it out on some of my NeXT hardware.
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I just wanted to post a quick thanks to Pentad for posting the original thread. Got a chance to check out the work that's been done and it is really neat. Can't wait to try it out on some of my NeXT hardware.
I'm really glad you enjoyed it! When I stumble across stuff like this I like to share it because I find it interesting but I'm always worried that nobody else will. :-)
That video really hit me hard because I had seen it as a kid but I had no idea about how anything of this worked. I mean I knew who Susan Kare, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, and Bud Tribble were (and of course Jobs) so it seems pretty amazing they could create something like this so fast.
Flash forward 25 years, I stumble across it again and it is shocking that people would agree to 18 months to build a brand new computer (hardware), create a new OS, write all the software and ship it in 18 months. Like, it's just insane. I have often wished I could talk with Bud Tribble and George Crow and ask them what they were thinking?
If it sounded like I was completely bashing NeXT that was not my intent. In fact, in the "Steve Jobs History" I find NeXT to be probably the most interesting part. I still think NeXT was a failure in the marketplace (as a hardware product and then as a software product). However, I do agree that some great technology came out of it. Jobs was lucky that Apple didn't go with BeOS and that Gassée was a terrible negotiator.
I think one of the best technologies to come out of NeXT was making GUI applications easier to program. Here is a great video of NeXT vs SUN back in 1991 with Jobs talking about the future of programming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg
Cheers!
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I would say Apple is very lucky they went with NeXT and not with BeOS and that's coming from a guy who loved BeOS (I've got a BeBox to prove it!).
In many ways it was Apple being bought by NeXT not the other way around. I wasn't really an Apple person until Mac OS X (basically because I was such a fan of NeXT). I've been willing to pay the ridiculous apple tax just to use the OS. Fortunately my job has provided many of the machines I use so I've not had to pay that tax often.
I can't agree more with you in regard to the timeline. Jobs was insane about it but to be honest he did have some valid points in the video. They should have taken some of this into consideration before forming the company though so ultimately the unrealistic deadline was his own fault. I've always felt like he targeted the higher ed community because they frankly were not too savvy at the time. His heart wasn't in that space it was just an open market for them to exploit.
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I would say Apple is very lucky they went with NeXT and not with BeOS and that's coming from a guy who loved BeOS (I've got a BeBox to prove it!).
In many ways it was Apple being bought by NeXT not the other way around. I wasn't really an Apple person until Mac OS X (basically because I was such a fan of NeXT). I've been willing to pay the ridiculous apple tax just to use the OS. Fortunately my job has provided many of the machines I use so I've not had to pay that tax often.
I thought BeOS was pretty amazing for the time. I had it on Intel and compared to Windows at the time, it was simply mind blowing. Really, it was very much like the Amiga in 1985.
I too enjoy macOS and Apple hardware. I really like the MBP and have purchased a new one every year since the MBP introduction. I make my money from my MBP so I just can't be down. Apple hardware is step above the rest and something I can depend on.
However, the last two years I have been disappointed. I felt the 2015 MBP was over priced for the hardware it had. I spent $4500 on a 2016 MBP and ended up returning it. I just thought it was too much for the hardware it offered. I like Tim Cook but I don't think their computer line is something he cares about.
I get it. I know they make their money on iOS but sometimes I miss Apple Computer, Inc. They had cutting edge computers and really pushed the industry. With Apple, Inc., their computer line seems more like an afterthought.
For a company with the kind of money they have, you would their computer line wouldn't fall stagnant.
I apologize for the rant. :-)
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for some reason I stopped using Un*x for workstation purposes. I didnt like Linux due to dependency hell and love BSD with ports style packages but theres more compatibility and mainstream projects for linux. Still use it for server side tasks.
Not sure what Linux has to do with this but what is this "dependency hell" you speak of?
GNUStep and Windowmaker are both available for the multiple forks of BSD btw.
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I wonder if an 040 powered Amiga could make a good go at emulating a similar flavor of NeXT machine.
Couple problems with that - one is the lack of a DSP. 3120 murders an 040 on FPU calculation. Admitedly the NXT implementation can't do a lot else, but on its own it's a game changer.
Another issue is that there are still quite a few Amiga apps and utils that won't run on an 040, which itself murders the 68882 chip for FPU calculation.
I guess if you could somehow bodge an 882 replacement that was like 50 times faster, it would give you similar level of performance, Amiga to NXT. An extremely difficult hack to implement.
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Couple problems with that - one is the lack of a DSP. 3120 murders an 040 on FPU calculation.
For balance, programming the Motorola DSP56001 (not to be mixed up with the AT&T 3120) will probably melt your brain unless you take great care, so I'd rather stick with the '040 FPU, given the option ;)
We covered the DSP56001 in more detail than I found comfortable while I was at unversity, in the lecture on computer architecture and parallel data processing.
If I remember correctly, the DSP56001 did not see much use in the "normal" NeXTSTEP operating system and application software context. One notable exception was the Mandelbrot set renderer application which demonstrated how much faster the DSP56001 floating point operations would be than the '040 FPU's capabilities. However, the GCC version which shipped with system only supported the FPU, but not the DSP56001...
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Once upon a time (1995-1996) the idea for OS4 was shaped around that model of NeXTSTEP:
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=204&pictureid=1251)
That didn't happen, and interestingly, the year after, Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and here we are... :hammer:
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For balance, programming the Motorola DSP56001 (not to be mixed up with the AT&T 3120) will probably melt your brain unless you take great care, so I'd rather stick with the '040 FPU, given the option ;)
We covered the DSP56001 in more detail than I found comfortable while I was at unversity, in the lecture on computer architecture and parallel data processing.
If I remember correctly, the DSP56001 did not see much use in the "normal" NeXTSTEP operating system and application software context. One notable exception was the Mandelbrot set renderer application which demonstrated how much faster the DSP56001 floating point operations would be than the '040 FPU's capabilities. However, the GCC version which shipped with system only supported the FPU, but not the DSP56001...
First, my mistake, it was 3210. Which wasn't built in to many computers.
Being the first 32 bit FP DSP, it has obviously been outclassed by later releases. It was noted at the time that Macs could not natively support it without using Unix (only Quadras aimed at FMV editing had them built in).
What made them popular for some applications was their robustness - 2,000V was what they were rated at. Also, comparing the datasheets from the time, it was approved for 4 different government/military applications. Other DSPs might be approved for one, rarely 2 applications. Timex DSPS generally die at 10 V or so.
Currently I'm studying Aries DSP architecture - awesome ideas spookily close to the Amiga.
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Once upon a time (1995-1996) the idea for OS4 was shaped around that model of NeXTSTEP:
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=204&pictureid=1251)
That didn't happen, and interestingly, the year after, Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and here we are... :hammer:
Indeed. If you study closely the HP PA-RISC releases from the same period, you will appreciate they are basically Hombre without the Amiga chipset nailed on to them. Who made Lisa? Oh yes, HP... Guess they didn't get paid for the chips, like a lot of other companies that did business for Commodore.
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If you study closely the HP PA-RISC releases from the same period, you will appreciate they are basically Hombre without the Amiga chipset nailed on to them.
What do you mean?
Once upon a time (1995-1996) the idea for OS4 was shaped around that model of NeXTSTEP:
That was an unworkable mess.
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What do you mean?
I mean that basically HP did Hombre anyway, but without the Amiga or Commodore being involved. Which in hindsight was probably a very sensible thing, from HP's point of view.
CBM wanted a games capable machine, HP wanted high end 3D Workstation and server performance. Commodore wanted 10 million customers, HP were delighted with more than 100,000.
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(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=204&pictureid=1251)
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What if we change Mach3 with BeOS Haiku...
Or perhaps not BeOS but MorphOS Quark Microkernel (just imagining MorphOS Team licensing it to a Consortium of A-Eon + Hyperion?)
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Once upon a time (1995-1996) the idea for OS4 was shaped around that model of NeXTSTEP:
(http://www.amiga.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=204&pictureid=1251)
That didn't happen, and interestingly, the year after, Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and here we are... :hammer:
That doesn't look too dissimilar to the morphos architecture.