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Author Topic: Excitement about NatAmi  (Read 112827 times)

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Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« on: November 29, 2010, 01:15:04 PM »
Quote from: lou_dias;595246

No one wants to buy a computer today that can't get online out of the box...the Natami team included.


Well, it would be useful if there was an Amiga App Store style thing (e.g., to download games from the various Amiga freeware/abandonware game sites; access aminet; etc). If GigE is pennies more than 100mbit then it sounds like there's a purpose to it.

In the end it depends on the cost of the final board. I think there's room for both an FPGAArcade and a Natami (later on, when it's complete) in my life though.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2010, 02:36:49 PM »
Quote from: persia;595258
Feature creep is the grim reaper of the IT world....


At least using FPGAs these days lets you get something out of the door before the feature creep takes over a project...
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #2 on: November 29, 2010, 06:27:35 PM »
At least the MiniMig with AGA work has resulted in (so far) an open-source 68000 core that operates at 28MHz (in the FPGAArcade) and performs like a 56MHz 68030, with more enhancements to come.

I look forward to the Natami 68050 as it does sound very excellent, but a fully working standalone board could be quite a way from being complete and ready to buy. And I will buy it when it comes out.

But Natami is a far more ambitious project - not only doing their own Amiga hardware implementation from scratch, but also a full, advanced 68k core.

Minimig was announced a very long time ago now - time passes quickly :-( - so patience is what is required.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #3 on: November 29, 2010, 06:34:00 PM »
Quote from: Piru;595319
Assuming there are no bugs in the ever more complicated HW. I don't see much feature creep dragging his project.

Especially when your goal posts keep moving constantly.

Lack of resources. For instance USB support adds insane amount of extra work. Why? Just because you don't want to use PS/2 like the other projects?


How much effort is adding a PCI USB controller to a board when you've already designed the PCI bus interface? The same goes for ethernet. It's hardly "insane" in my opinion.

And Natami without USB would be a strange beast given that it's meant to be a more up to date classic Amiga, and USB stacks exist for the Amiga already, and most peripherals are USB connected?

I think that the Natami people have realised about feature creep, although they did get carried away in the past with things like that 3D core. They cut back the 68070 initial plans to the 68050 too, which shows the ability to cut back to more attainable targets.

And bugs? It's an FPGA, they can get these sorted out down the line when they turn up. As long as the first release can run Aros 68k, AmigaOS 3.x, DPaint and many (if not all) AGA games and OCS/ECS games that great.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #4 on: November 29, 2010, 06:35:43 PM »
Quote from: persia;595325
@Darrin

Specs like "a PCI slot(s)" don't build much confidence in the idea that they are anywhere near completion or that even the specs are agreed upon, so they had to stick an optional plural in, just in case....


There's a riser card to turn 1 PCI slot into multiple slots - a common feature back in the day of PCI if you are inclined to think this is a hack of any sort.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #5 on: December 01, 2010, 11:10:39 AM »
The NatAmi folks have said that the blitter will be 100x faster.

I presume that they have proved this to themselves on the prototype board they did, so it's not just a theoretical and mathematical figure based upon memory bandwidth.

When the Natami comes out we will see how it performs. I think there's a bit too much trolling in this thread currently. It's not like the Natami people have been posting promises here to deserve the comments being made, which make me wonder why I bother with posting here and following stuff in the Amiga community still.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #6 on: December 01, 2010, 02:54:11 PM »
Nobody is saying it couldn't run on the Wii.

They're wondering what the point is!

Firstly, this is completely off-topic to this thread.

Second, why not use a PS3 or XBox360 instead - more memory, both jailbroken. Supports higher resolutions than ~800x480.

Thirdly, who is going to fund such a port of the OS to jailbroken hardware? Who is going to take the legal liability when Nintendo Sony or Microsoft say that the software is encouraging piracy, jailbreaking and other bad things, and drags you through the courts at great expense? At least Sony did support it in the past, so that's a lower risk.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #7 on: December 01, 2010, 03:01:47 PM »
Quote from: Karlos;596018
There's more to amiga blitting than just moving data, even with a mask. The amiga's blitter could combine up to 3 sources using a user-specific boolean function and write the result to a destination. IIRC, the any combination source(s) and destination could be the same. As such, it's fair to say there's rather more sophistication in there than your typical graphic's card blitter which tend to be optimized memory copy units only.


How the blitter works isn't in question, it's not a mystery, Minimig has an equivalent blitter and that was years ago. It's not hard to see that creating a full 32-bit blitter that runs a lot faster would end up being significantly more impressive than the ~4MHz blitter in an Amiga. Even if it only ran at ~40MHz in the FPGA it could blit 20x faster (memory bandwidth allowing, lou's point is that the memory bandwidth is not going to be an issue here). Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #8 on: December 01, 2010, 03:42:11 PM »
Quote from: lou_dias;596047

OT: People like to poop on the Wii but it is my primary Netflix streamer/viewer and it does so in full DVD quality.


Yeah, I use it for iPlayer. Mainly because iPlayer on the PS3 doesn't disable the screen dimming the PS3 does in its UI... I'd rather have blocky SD video I can view than SD video that goes dark, and doing *anything* on the remote skips back to the iPlayer interface with a tiny video in the middle.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #9 on: December 01, 2010, 03:42:52 PM »
Quote from: commodorejohn;596051
I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.


This is a good point. Anyone from Natami care to comment?
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #10 on: December 01, 2010, 04:36:29 PM »
Opera on the Wii is enough for YouTube, although the on-screen keyboard is a PITA (but that's down to the Wii, and you can plug in a keyboard). It's the same on the PS3, the browser is just a PITA, it's not the technology, it's the console UI.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #11 on: December 01, 2010, 04:45:58 PM »
Quote from: Franko;596097
Wow... what game on a classic need's 128Mb, I'd love to see that one... :)


Settlers on a planet-sized map?
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #12 on: December 02, 2010, 11:08:48 AM »
Quote from: the_leander;596318
Citation needed muppet.


Your posts in this thread have been abrasive already, but now you're just being rude and obnoxious.

I hope a mod bans you for a while to teach you a lesson.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #13 on: December 02, 2010, 11:24:06 AM »
Quote from: the_leander;596318
The point you keep failing to take on board is that doing a straight calculation only works if you're talking about the two blitters being functionally identical and no different in terms of how they do their job.

His point is very clear, and is based upon simple assumptions:

1) The NatAmi blitter is backwards compatible - it's not much of an Amiga hardware re-implementation if it isn't

2) The NatAmi blitter works (I mean, seriously, you have issues regarding this when the hardware is FPGA and can easily be updated if there are latent bugs?)

The maximum amount of data that can be blitted is limited by the memory bandwidth. It is further limited by how fast the blitter runs, but I think we can safely assume that it will be running faster than on the original hardware.

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The moment you start throwing in buffers, 32bit blitting etc. All bets are off.


Buffers (for DDR2 memory bursts) - speed up the blitter
32-bit blitting - speed up the blitter

These are both arguments in favour of Lou's assertions, and I presume these are also factored in to the NatAmi team's projections. It's not like 100x faster blitter is some unattainable magical thing - the AGA blitter was appalling anyway, apparently a 4x speedup would have been trivial if it had supported 32-bit and page mode on the memory! That's before you try running it faster than ~4MHz...

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This is of course assuming that the blitter on the natami actually works as advertised and doesn't have some hitherto unknown bug etc.

This is not a valid argument. If the blitter doesn't work, no-one will buy a NatAmi. It's not like they didn't show early prototypes running on the C-One and the other evaluation board is it? And being an FPGA, rare occurrence bugs can be fixed when they're noticed.

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(rudeness removed) Without benchmarks on real (or as real as an fpga powered platform can be) hardware, you cannot prove your case.

Ah, the FPGA isn't hardware argument. Sheesh.

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As another in the thread said - what you're doing is speculating. Only you're claiming it as "fact", which is dishonest.

At least he has made an effort to back up his claims.

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I can challenge anyone's claims at any time as can anyone else on this public forum. Those who actively refuse to provide evidence and are, time and again spanked for talking rubbish.

You can argue like an adult, or just call people names. You call people names. Grow up.

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Ah, run out of arguments so you attack the person asking you for proof.

You appear to have projection issues.

*more personal attacks removed*

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Coming from you, that means absolutely nothing, mr gamecube. You were running around the forums talking about porting to the gamecube first, later the wii, without even the slightest thought as to how wise a choice that would be. As JJ said, rouge said it to get you to shut up.

I think I get it. You don't care what Lou is saying, you just want Lou to shut up because he is Lou. That's very personal. Why are you dredging up something that apparently is YEARS OLD? I guess you have a personal vendetta. Take it away from this forum please.
« Last Edit: December 02, 2010, 11:26:20 AM by Hattig »
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Excitement about NatAmi
« Reply #14 on: December 02, 2010, 01:18:43 PM »
Quote from: the_leander;596341
Which he claims as fact. Do try to keep up.


You have an attitude problem. You showed it in your early responses to lou's post - e.g., "I'd owe you sweet FA chum." - a very aggressive phrasing in English, it's effectively one step before someone glasses someone in the face in a pub.

When someone writes "100x faster blitter" they're not being 100% pedantically accurate. In English it it understood as "around 100x faster" to "a boat load faster". He then went on to mention that FPGAArcade is getting 40x faster blits (although he could have cited that, but again, the forums on Amiga.org aren't wikipedia, they're chatty forums), that NatAmi's specs are even higher, so it isn't an unreasonable expectation.

There's nothing wrong with Lou stating what the NatAmi team have stated as their aims. You should be asking for evidence from SamuraiCrow or other NatAmi people as to the speed and status of NatAmi - however to their credit they have said that they'd rather work on NatAmi right now than give continuous updates.

It is interesting to note that you jumped on Lou's 100MHz 68060 comment very quickly, and that in the next comment SamuraiCrow said that it was actually a 99MHz 68060, but that the 68050 core would be over 100MHz.

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My problem isn't with the assumption as such (though given the proposed updates in the rest of the enhanced AGA being proposed by the Natami team I think a simple maths equation just won't cut it), but with the fact that he states it as fact and then gets angry when asked to provide evidence.


He tried to show you why he thought that, basically faster FPGA than FPGAArcade, a faster memory bus, etc.

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All I did was ask for evidence "Citation needed". Apparently these days that's abrasive, rude and obnoxious. Fair enough.
Still failing. Read above.


No, that's not what is abrasive, rude and obnoxious. It's what and how you are writing it that that is.

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My reason for "dredging up" the past was to point out that far from some pedestal occupying god, to be gazed at in wonder but not to be questioned that he'd apparently like to be treated as. He is in fact only a hair's breadth from being Atheist2. Honestly I don't know or really care about him, in fact the word "muppet" pretty much sums up my feelings toward him in their totality.


So he had some fancy ideas in the past that might have been based entirely upon the Gamecube/Wii having a PowerPC processor.

Instead of responding to him if you hold him in low regard, why not just ignore him? Or accept that some people might have less technical knowledge, and that their desire is to have a friendly discussion in an online forum in a similar way to having a friendly chat down the pub. It's meant to be fun. He's not advocating genocide for MorphOS users or something! It's been pointed out loads of time in this thread that we'll find out in due course what NatAmi is like, we're all working from what has been written on the NatAmi website, said in the NatAmi forums and said by NatAmi members here and elsewhere.

As for me, a 100x faster blitter sounds great, but I won't cry if it's only 50x faster in the end due to the FPGA, the design, the memory speed or the weather in Iceland on that day. The same goes for the 68050 design they're working on. I wish them the best of luck but we'll see if it will clock at 133MHz, or 66MHz. If they know it will, they could throw us a tidbit of information now, but until then we're taking their word for it in order to have a fun chat about this project.