The natami looks very close to completion.

[Louis Dias]

This for a lot of reasons, including the fact they've had quite headstart over the X1000.
Unless of course the Natami crew took out a million dollar loan with Atari and it's due to be repaid.

The original board was delivered in Sept.  There was a problem and they change the memory and memory controller and that was finished in Dec, irc.  So, once the board became functional again, then the individual component implementation and testing began.

So it's natural to see more progress since January.  This is to be a 68K machine as is not in competition with the X1000.  It's also not designed to be more of an emulation platform like the Replay/FPGArcade board.  This board is design to be an A5000+.  Evolutionary, not revolutionary.

As you have seen from the Replay board, faster memory access can make the system perform better and with DDR2 burst mode fully implemented as well as double the cache of previous 68K cpus before it, it will be quite responsive.

If you still think it's vapor, then by all means don't click the link posted above, lest you want your propaganda be quelled.

[Louis Dias]

I think Thomas felt that the MiniMig forced his hand. He'd been working on what became the NatAmi for a while already when Dennis announced the MiniMig and so he felt, much like Jens with the CloneA, that he had to say something about the project existing. I think that the plan had otherwise been to do what Dennis did, just several years later

BoXer comparisons are far I guess, but we're not commercial and each of the project members has access to a lot of the software and N68050 fpga work already done. So that won't be lost.

The hardware and SuperAGA? Well it could happen I suppose, the NatAmi team that deals with the N68050, 3DCore (tami) etc don't have access too the hardware. We're all clustered around Thomas's private project and respect that so whilst Gunnar (and a couple of others) might have access to Thomas's hardware the rest of us are a separate team.

Andy

Seems like yarube should be pulled in since he has an AGA implementation going already.

[Louis Dias]

I imagine the next step is AGA demos.

Did anyone notice how fast those jpegs were decoded in full color and the resolution?
I'm sure it's child's play to the Minimig... O_o

Natami will enable back-porting from AROSx86 back to 68k for things that current 68k
Amigas lack due to graphical processing power and memory thru-put.  Think SDL...OpenGL1.x ...etc... (OWB 68K port...etc...)

This is for hobbyists and demo-coders at first...and the developer boards will be expensive as they have announced since the beginning.  The consumer boards will be cheaper.

Funny how critics are silent now that a proper video is shown...

[Louis Dias]

I don't think I am.


I was obviously talking about Mac Mini. While there are no warranty repairs, the spare parts to Mini are dirt cheap. Heck you can buy several Mac Minis for the price of other "custom" PPC HW. You can find very good repair service for the Macs still. Try that with your custom PPC HW after 5 years...


Nonsense. There are millions of PPC Macs around still.


It is far more sensible to port to these easy targets than to spend years working on x86/amd64 port with no releases at all in the meanwhile. This really is the best option for now.

Obviously eventually we will need to re-evaluate the situation, but the Mac systems won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

MorphOS needs a Wii port!  Then I will finally try it.  Now that is good cheap hardware with millions around.  Until the hardware gets that current, a MacMini is still a timebomb.  Bounty anyone?

[Louis Dias]

What's so good about the Wii? Less than 1GHz of customised PPC, less than 128MB main memory, proprietary graphics hardware that needs driver support etc.

Sounds like a royal pain in the rear to me. If MOS wants to stay PPC for the time being, they are being sensible in going after old mac hardware.

The cpu is downclocked to 729MHz, it could be upclocked in software.  They chose that speed for maxmimum backwards compatibility with GC mode.

The graphics are well known in the hombrew community so porting libraries is trivial.  There are SDL ports already.  It already has SDHC and USB 2.0 support.

It's also widely available and cheap.
This would be a way to spread the MorphOS 'word'.  If an Amiga-like OS can't run on 64MB  of main ram + 24MB of video then shame on it.

[Louis Dias]

Aw come on guys, you make it sound as if 576i isn't the pinnacle of display resolutions...

You guys seem to miss the point.
It's not to make a Wii a productive MOS machine, but to put MOS infront of people to generate interest.

@Piru,
Sure, I'll forget it completely, along with ever trying it out.  AROS keeps excelling and OS4 will have superior hardware this summer(in theory).

I guess I'll have to be content with: http://dl.qj.net/wii/homebrew/uae-wii-v5.html
...toodles!

[Louis Dias]

Wings of Fury.

That wasn't me that crashed the plane!  Honest

Looks like Jetstrike-CD32 on steroids...