Sonnet crescendo 7200 and OS4.1

[Louis Dias]

Wouldn't porting OS4's bootloader to WiiU custom firmware be simpler?

https://hackinformer.com/2016/12/12/wiiu-rednand-cfw-tutorial/

[Louis Dias]

You still trying to flog that dead horse after all these years?

Does the truth hurt to hear?
I guess I'll have to be content with Linux...
https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu#wii-u-linux

[Louis Dias]

If the OS4, AROS or MorphOS devs were interested in porting to the Wii they'd have already done it.

If you want it so bad then put your money where your mouth is and pay for the development costs.

Oh ... are you one of those people that thinks the WiiU is the Wii with a new controller?

[Louis Dias]

Are you going to pay for this port that you so desperately want?
Supply and demand.
There's no demand.

Are you talking to me or the OP?   HA!

20 Million WiiU's running a triple-core PPC @ 1.24 Ghz for about $150 or you can spend hundreds of dollars on a card that's not much more powerful than a Gamecube...  Makes sense.

By the way, there isn't much in the way of porting needing to be done.  Mostly just UBOOT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot
...much like MONA very little work would be required.  "Drivers" amount to calling the libraries that already exist within the machine's ROM.

I know Amigans aren't used to getting alot of feature for little money and when you do, you make sure that you complain heavily (ie.. Vampire2)...

You know what I'm wrong.  I don't want:
2GB of RAM
Out-of-order execution PowerPC based cores
45 nanometer process technology
IBM silicon on insulator (SOI) technology
Three cores at 1.243125 GHz
Symmetric multiprocessing with MESI/MERSI support
Each core can output up to 4 instructions per clock using superscalar parallelism.
32-bit integer unit
64-bit floating-point (or 2× 32-bit SIMD, often found under the denomination "paired singles")
A total of 3 MB of Level 2 cache in an unusual configuration.[16]
Core 0: 512 KB, core 1: 2 MB, core 2: 512 KB
4 stage pipeline
7 stage pipeline - FP
6 Execution Units per core (18 EUs total)
Die size: 4.74 mm × 5.85 mm = 27.73 mm^2
4 USB ports, 802.11N wifi, bluetooth... dual-layer BluRay drive...
...and I surely don't want a 550Mhz core Radeon Latte GPU...

I don't want any of that for less than $5000!!!!
How dare that be available for <$200!!!  What a travesty!

[Louis Dias]

personally I wanted PS3 support, until I found out how little ram it had.

Yes Kronos, I wanted our developers to eat up time supporting something about as powerful as the backup system I bought from redrumloa last year (not)!

That's ironic when the WiiU is 50% more powerful than the PS3 with 4X(or 8X if you exclude video ram) the RAM...

[Louis Dias]

rotflmao!!!!!

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/IOS
This isn't much different than an Amiga in the sense that some work is off-loaded to "custom chips".  An ARM chip handles all external I/O and launches PPC code.  The PPC code can then request I/O from the ARM-based microkernel, this way PPC cpu cycles aren't being consumed with low level I/O drivers per se and there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  They already exist in the microkernel (IOS).

[Louis Dias]

What is ironic is that you would make that claim.
The WiiU does have the advantage of being an out of order processor, but I've thoroughly examined the Cell BE and Xenon (the latter having six threads to you WiiU's three) and the additional clock speed easily makes up for any disadvantages of an in order execution unit.

It took Nintendo an extra generation, and they still fell short, primarily due to all that concern over backward compatibility.

Next thing you know you're going to be repeating that tripe they tried to claim about the WiiU's cpu being somehow related to Watson and other modern IBM endeavors.

Its simple, its pretty much an ordinary 32 bit PPC.
Oh, and about the lack of a storage drive...

Finally, if you haven't got the note, most of the new systems we've adopted are 64bit.

You should get your facts straight.  Each core had 6 execution units.
https://fail0verflow.com/media/files/ppc_750cl.pdf
What the 360 cpu had was 3.2Ghz clockspeed.  For the same clockspeed, it was an inferior cpu to the WiiU's Expresso cpu.

Regardless, my post was about comparing a WiiU to this Cressendo card which is just the cpu of a Gamecube (single core and about 500Mhz).

[Louis Dias]

Oh, my bad,thanks for the documentation (if you're even pointing to the correct product), that processor would only be capable of handling two simultaneous threads, not three.
So now the count would be WiiU two, XBOX360 six. And still 1.26 GHz vs. 3.2.

So again, outside of an out of order execution unit and a fair amount of RAM (but limited VRAM), and no hard drive for storage, the WiiU still loses.

And comparing a legacy Amiga equipped with a third party PCI expansion bus and a PPC accelerator card intended for a 68K Mac with a later PPC game machine is an apples and oranges comparison.
So my comparison of the WiiU to an XBOX360 is certainly more valid.

Then there is the consideration that any re-engineered G4 PCI accelerator card would be likely to use an 800 or 1000 MHz cpu (the fastest compatible version from Sonnet ran at 800 MHz). Almost as fast as the WiiU's cpu, but tied to an expansion bus you can add cards  to.

Look, it's 2018, not 2005. The WiiU is only available used (unless you know of a NOS inventory somewhere), and oddly enough the G4 cpus are still available, if not recommended for new projects.

Also, if I were to support porting to used hardware, I'd be rooting for the 11,2 G5 PowerMac which is quite a bit faster than a WiiU, expandable, and appears the be able to handle video cards up to at least those based on AMD's GCN Gen1 gpus.

Aiming lower with targets like the WiiU for the used market or Tabor for the new market doesn't make sense to me.
In the long run I'd be unhappy with the compromises presented by those platforms.

BUT, since I have some G5 support under MorphOS, and I am willing to pay the price for an X5000 (which supports both NG PPC OS'), I'll leave the arguments about the low end hardware to you and the A1222 supporters.

The A1222 supporters that WILL be getting support for that platform.
And you, one of the remaining WiiU supporters that WON'T be getting support for your platform of choice.

Either way, I'm happy, and you're still pounding sand.

Here's the bottom line.  If I can't install a PPC OS into hardware I already own, I'm not installing it.  There is NO PPC Amiga market worth speaking of.  An A1222-based system will still cost $1000.  That's a pretty expensive office decoration.  If it was smaller, it would be a paperweight.  People spend less on their phones ... but their phones are more powerful and get used everyday.

[Louis Dias]

https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu

Not sure if you'll find this useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usD0EPAmicA

I owned a Raspberry 3b for a while.  Amazing device for $35.  I looking into installing AROS on it but I was told I'd have to make a donation to get access to a build of it for ARM...  This is not how you grow a market.  :/

If MOS or Hyperion had any brains, they'd port to that, 3D-print a nice case, etc... and call it the future...

Meanwhile the 3b+ was recently released (still $35):
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-3-model-bplus-sale-now-35/

[Louis Dias]

When an ISA shift was first proposed, I was one of the people promoting ARM for MorphOS.
But the development team went with X64.

Not quite as cheap, but still commodity hardware.

The Pi 3B+ is pretty impressive for a low cost device.

The 3B was my web server and I had a hard time installing a mail server on it so I went with a Win10 machine running hMailserver.  That's when I looked into AROS on the Pi.  Apparently the Efika [ARM] "port" is closely guarded.

...in fact - if I didn't know any better, I'd say the Efika is running an older version of the Pi...

[Louis Dias]

You are aware that white ones only have 8GB internal storage compared to the 32GB of the black "deluxe" version?

No idea wether that matters for Linux or if it runs 100% from SD card anyways.

I was able to find a 512GB SDHC card for $40 on ebay.  It totally came from Taiwan but hey, it's working just fine in my Nintendo Switch...which is also hackable and running Linux...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBCkpEdvqDo

[Louis Dias]

Oh the joys of a not completely open project, eh?
The PPC port appears to be dated too.

But even with these challenges, it still isn't as insurmountable as beating your head against a wall over OS4 or MorphOS support.

I took a look at the Linux port you pointed to, its actually a good candidate for AROS, maybe better than as a Linux platform alone.
Currently it only supports one core, and it looks like that might be single threaded (although I'm unsure about that).
Its video driver is only a framebuffer at this point (no acceleration), but that could change, and its a start (that's usually the first step with any OS4 or MorphOS video driver).
And the fpu of the WiiU's cpu actually looks pretty good (better than Tabor's anyway).

I'm buying a white WiiU as soon as I finish paying off my tuition charges for this Spring.

Then I'll try to get that to run the Linux distro, and after get is setup and running GCC 3.4.3.

One of the WiiU cores has 2MB of cache, the other two have 512k each (P1022 has 256k per core).  I believe the core with 2MB cache is used to synchronize the cache between all 3 cores...  It'll be one of those learn as you go things...

Since the clock speed is software-selectable, if you wanna take it apart and give it a better cooler, you may be able to get it to run much faster.  It already does this when going to vWii mode (Wii emulation)...though in the other direction...however I believe the bus speed is increased slightly in vWii mode.

An olde article: https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/espresso/
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-wii-u-graphics-power-finally-revealed

https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/List_of_WiiU_homebrew_applications

[Louis Dias]

After my checking PM's on another forum, I believe I was lookng for an ARM port and was referred to
https://aeros-os.org/styled-11/index.html

This really wasn't meant to start another battle.  As a casual user, I just wanted to try it out and that's what I was pointed at by a user in a private message.
When I post, I talk generally.  People really jump too much to argue over specific details.  Well, that's the internet for you I guess...

[Louis Dias]

That's AEROS not AROS.

A commercial distro running on top of Linux.

Yes, I corrected myself and edited my post after checking PM's...

[Louis Dias]

@Iggy
This is great progress/news.

Also, that WiiU Linux port doesn't use SMP but...
The Expresso cpu has Symmetric Multiprocessing to connect all three cores, MESI/MERSI protocol for CPU Cache's to not cause invalidation's between all three core's when using the Cache and other implementations that were needed.  It is the best 750XX PPC cpu around .
Each core is capable of 4.9 Gflops...so a theoretical 14.8Gflops.  This puts it in league with AMD - Phenom X3 8450 / A4 5000 and Intel - i5 480M / Pentium E5800.

Again, the clock multiplier is only 5x.  It downclocks to 3x for vWii mode.  Those same commands can upclock it but you'd need better cooling...this is why I say take it apart.

Clock is set via EEPROM
http://wiiubrew.org/wiki/Hardware/SEEPROM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJC-rh3oLMk

SMP doesn't really benefit AROS [yet].  Though the x64 version has it...ABIv1?