ACube Systems

[Louis Dias]

GPU?  How will it handle a GPU and sound card?  Will is support PCI & AGP or PCIe?

Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

[Louis Dias]

Poster: AmiKit  Posted: 2007/1/11 7:22:53

Quote:
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Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

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OS4 on Gamecube?

The announcement said nothing of OS4.  For a standalone compiled application, no OS involved, I could get as much or more processing power out of a Gamecube running a homebrew app vs. the same for this ACube.  So if it costs anything over $200 with memory included, it's not worth it.

[Louis Dias]

http://www.gcdev.com/smf/
www.gc-linux.org

It doesn't matter what Nintendo "lets" you run on it.  You run what you want to run on it.

There is a 3rd party "Nintendo"-approved keyboard for Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2, also ps/2 adapters are available for the controller ports.  SD card adapters for the memory card ports.

There are already libraries that expose the entirety of the GC hardware for programming software...including an SDL library and using a filesystem from the DVD drive or SD card(FAT32).

Oh and with a $12 drive-chip you can boot straight from disc with no other additional hardware.  So for $12, an AROS Live CD could be booted.  A Wii version of the same chip is supposedly in development.

Homebrew GC software is already running on the Wii via Action Replay and an SD card adapter.

[Louis Dias]

Don't just look at clock speed.  The GC's main memory is accessed much faster and has programmable cache and a fair amount of it.  I also don't know the architectual differences between the IBM Gecko and the Freescale chip.  The Freescale being an embedded chip, I'd give the internal cpu architecture edge to the GC as well.

As for gpu's, we know the GC had done 15 million polygons/second in real time (Star Wars:RG2) and can do 8 texture operations per pass.  For 480p resolutions, it can hold it's own.

It's just a stepping stone to running on Wii hardware which offers a 50%-100% processing advantage to the GC.

[Louis Dias]

I don't get it. Why should I be excited about this news? What's the Amiga angle?

Yeah I don't get it either especially when a 2001 Gamecube is just as capable and available since ... 2001.

Instead I'll just stick it.
What a great community.

Then people wonder why Amiga, Inc. doesn't communicate with it anymore.

Retards.

Atleast AJ knows what he's talking about.  That being said, the Wii is still overall more capable and this ACube will never be a good desktop PC so again, what's the point?  This thing won't run OS4 and I never mentioned the GC or Wii running OS4.  However they can run AROS for less $$$.

In the end, it's another platform that even on the AROS front, will divert developers' time writing drivers and/or segmenting this (and I use the term loosely here) "community" further.

[Louis Dias]

And you have to hack your console even to run it and thus breaking the law in some countries and it is also about to get completely discontinued. would even make more sense to port it to the ps2!

LOL, so now who will pay to port PPC code the the PS2's CPU?  Apart from converting UBOOT into a Gamecube executable (.DOL) and then drivers for the HAL, their isn't much else to port for the GC.

Anyway, this ACube doesn't currently have a license for OS4, so all this whining is moot.  In effect, the Gamecube is currently more useful than the ACube because in the end, it still plays great games and the ACube has ZERO support.

Also, if any of you actually bothered to look into the GC homebrew/modding scene, you'd realize that "hacking" it is trivial and certainly easily done by any member of this forum...and more than a few already have...

Also, using a console hack for piracy is illegal, but there is nothing illegal about hacking a console to run a free OS and free software.

[Louis Dias]

I'm sorry, I saw embedded PPC and automatically associated Freescale.

Anyway, as a further contrast, the GC/Wii have the SPI interface and everything else integrated into the gpu where this SoC is on the cpu.

As for the performance of the ATI mobility gpu, mobile chips always lagged behind in laptops.  40 million polygons, is there a real game where this was achieved or is it a test like MS's claim that the original XBOX could do 130 million but in-game was only 18 million at best.

Well, it's nice to see another PPC maker enter the market.  But they are clearly not targeting the desktop market.  This board is something you have running a robot in a hot factory that can provide you with a descent user-interface.

At work we used "manufacturing PCs" but they cost ~$2000 because of the rack form factor and the extra fans, etc...  So if this board is targeted at that market, then I see where they are going...

But when you or I want to play the latest games, or even games on par with PC games of 2001, this system will not provide the muscle (neither will a GC).  Memory requirements alone for textures on anything over 800x600 will eat up that shared ram.

Let me say this about the GC's architecture.  The GPU has it's own bank of 16MB of memory and a 3MB internal texture cache and direct access to the disc drive, so it could be streaming audio and graphics data from disc INDEPENDENTLY of the cpu.  The GC's cpu had more cache (and programmable at that) than either the Xbox or PS2 which is why when games were made specifically (as opposed to quick cross-platform ports) for the GC it was easily on par with the best the Xbox could do.

I know people just want to run OS4 even if it's on a 200MHz PPC on a BVision...  Hyperion says maybe this quarter for the classic port.  I just think we need to aim higher.

Between this, ACK, Efika, the A1 and the CyberStorm/BVision stuff, the Amiga hardware market is going to be extremely segmented.

The A1 market is dead already, what's out there is what's out there and it was outdate even when it was designed.  The rest aren't even as powerful.  So we are going backwards now.

I want to go forward.