potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[MskoDestny]

The extra 16MB of RAM is not directly accessible by the CPU. You can only access it through DMA. This makes it okay for swap space or disk cache, but useless for general purpose memory. You're pretty much stuck with just the main 24MB.

On my windows machine, Firefox uses about 26MB of RAM to view the front page of Ars Technica. Sites that use more flash or more images will likely consume more RAM. I believe even Minimo (the Firefox for portables project) is targeted at devices with at least 32MB of RAM.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
Well, not every web page contains Flash, Javascript, VBscript, streaming media, etc...  There's nothing wrong with plain HTML.  Multiview can display plain HTML with the html.datatype.  For a semi-portable system like I envision, it's enough.

Well if all you want is to run an antiquated browser under AROS or UAE I don't think anyone will argue with it being possible.

You guys are trying to acheive a monumental step forward.  Even OS 4 is not on par with XP or OS X.  So there is no need for that comparison.  The most appealing feature of OS 4 is that it uses a much faster cpu than classic Amigas but isn't bloated like "current" OSes.  So it retains that Amiga "response".

Why bring OS4 into the argument. It won't run on the Gamecube. It uses more than 24MB of RAM, Hyperion isn't going to port it, and you probably can't legally run the current version on the GC even if you could get it to work.

Amiga OS is a fast single-user OS.  I don't need all the features of os 'xxx'.  I just need to run what I tell it to and do it quickly.  The beauty of the GC is it's very portable.  With an SD card, you can take your OS and apps on the road without worrying about heads hitting platters on a hard drive.

Or you could just get an old laptop and stick a flash drive in place of the hard drive.

Right, but it is directly accessible by the DSP because that's what it was designed for.  So you can store sound data there and play it without taking away from the 24MB or cpu power.

That's great for games, but it's useless for running normal software like web-browsers and the like. They're all programmed to load sound data into main memory because that's the way it works on most computers (Amiga software might load it into chip memory, but since there's not a 1:1 correlation between chipmem and the GC's DSP RAM, you can't take advantage of it).

So to say it's unusable isn't accurate.

I didn't say it was unusable. I said it was useless as general purpose RAM.

Again, developers have used it as a ramdisk...

Which gives you a really fast fixed disk, but not more RAM for the CPU to use.

Data from the highspeed parrallel port can go directly there.

Which is great for improving I/O performance, but still does nothing to solve the limitations of having only 24MB of main memory.

[MskoDestny]

Looks like it's using a lot more than 8MB to me that is unless your assertion that the 64MB of graphics memory really does come out of main memory is indeed true (which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, if it's just main memory you might as well make all of it chipmem). However, if that was the case, he could have no more than 201,326,592 bytes free when he has over 205,000,000. I suppose some odd number of MB could be allocated to graphics memory, but it seems somewhat suspicous to me.

Even if I give you that, once he has too relatively simple applications open (WookieChat and Jaberwocky) he's already using 24.5MB by your metric.

24MB is a huge limitation for OS4.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
Now picture this.  If every member of this site who already owned a GC spent < $180 on the necessary equipment to do this and convinced Hyperion to make a port.

I really doubt many would do this. So far you're pretty much the only one excited about running OS4 on a Gamecube.

How many copies of OS 4 could they sell now?

Not enough to make the porting effort worthwhile.

I just want to see this platform wake from the dead and move forward instead of deeper into the ground.

I don't see how this is going to accomplish that. OS4 doesn't bring anything to the table that other operating systems don't (well except for compatability with some old software). There are a bunch of lightweight graphical operating systems with more modern software than OS4 does. Some of them are even free.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
http://devkitpro.sourceforge.net/devkitProWiki/libogc/a00144.html

That's a link that describes the aram.h header file for accessing the 'Cube's 16MB of audio RAM.  Yes, that is the hoop you jump through to access it.  As anyone with basic understanding of programming can see, a simple function call can copy data from memory there or copy data there to memory just by specifying the 2 address ranges and a direction.

very unusable indeed

You still can't use it for general purpose RAM. You could use it for swap space, a RAM disk or a buffer/cache for some of the supporting hardware but that's about it.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
but that's what I've always said

once however amount of information you want is swapped in, it's useable

it's easy to swap

It's easy to swap to and from a hard disk too, but that doesn't mean that having a 120GB hard disk gives you 120GB of general purpose RAM.

The closest you could get is to use it as really fast (compared to a hard drive anyway) swap space. Unfortunately, page swapping is a rather expensive operation even with a RAM based swap. A program tries to access memory that's not paged in which causes an exception. The OS then has to decide what chunk of memory hasn't been used recently and then triggers a DMA operation to copy the area that is being paged out to ARAM. Once this is done it triggers another DMA operation to copy the data from ARAM to main memory. Then it has to rewrite the MMU table so that the area that was paged out is now invalid and that the are that was paged in is now valid.

Normal memory access is nothing like that. The program just looks for the data at the appropriate address and it gets it. No exceptions, no DMA, no rewriting of the MMU table.

Since a single application like a webbrowser could easily use more than 24MB of RAM (particularly once you take out a chunk for the OS) it's conceivable that you would end up swapping almost constantly which would really kill performance.

RAM is for storage with fast access.

In a general sense that is true. Hard drives have RAM for cache, video cards have RAM, etc.

Cache is what is getting executed.

Cache is storage that tries to mask the slowness of some other storage whether it be a disk or even main RAM (in the case of the CPU cache).

If you have an extra 16MB that's quick to access, why wouldn't you use it?

Because apart from using it as cache or swap as I described above you can't use it without specifically writing software to use it.

[MskoDestny]

I think the best solution at this point would be to write new system calls that are MP safe and then use the MMU to catch direct writes and translate them into the newer system calls. It would be kind of slow, but given the kind of hardware older Amiga programs were designed to run on, I don't see this being a big problem.

It would be a lot work, but it's the only way AROS can have it's cake and eat it too.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
They claim that with the extra cache, clock speed and bus speed that exaclty 2x realworld performance is possible.

So much for that whole 3-5x powerful bit eh? I guess their original statement of 2-3x more powerful may have been correct after all.

Really, graphics whores and speed freaks can diss it all they want but Revolution is going to be the easiest to hack

I don't see how you come to this conclusion. There were PS2 and XBox modchips long before there were any for the Gamecube and if I were Nintendo I would make sure to tweak the authentication enough to make sure the current mod chips don't work.

and also the easiest for real developers to code for.

Easiest to use to it's full potential perhaps, but if the recent rumors are true then you don't have to use the 360 or PS3 to their full potential to get better performance than the Revolution. All the extra complexity from writing games on the 360 is from the multiple cores, but even using a single core the 360 is more powerful than the Revolution as described in the recent rumors.

I bet the GPU comes with a PPU instead of a DSP built-in and 32MB of ARAM instead of 16MB.

Well the recent rumors suggest that the ARAM will stay at 16MB and unless they do throw in some crazy physics processor there's really no good reason for them to increase it.

That PPU will be used for AI and physics letting the rest of the system do other things.

PPUs aren't terribly useful for AI. As the name would suggest they're pretty much there exclusively to do physics.

In the end, Revolution will still have that awesome controller to reel in the masses.  And I believe they will come.

The controller uses a cool concept, but the execution screams compromise. It's attempts to be simple and approachable are undermined by its efforts to be good for the current game market (analog dongle and shell) and its efforts to be a good retro platform (turn it sidewise for NES, add the shell for everything else). In my mind these compromises defeat the purpose of having so few buttons and a remote-control like layout in the first place. If it wasn't button-sparse and remote control shaped it would be better for the other two purposes. The result is that its suboptimal for both.

The unwashed non-gamer and casual gamer masses is going to be hard to capture. These are people that don't buy game consoles. If anything they play games on their PC (because they already have it) or buy those little joysticks with built-in games that you plug into your TV. That's not to say that Nintendo can't capture that market, but it's hardly a slam dunk at this point.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
Well, a single 360 core was said to be barely 2x more powerful than the Xbox's cpu.  So if developers are saying the benchmark is 2.5x more powerful than the GC,

A single PPE core on the 360 is said to have about the same performance as a 1.7GHz P3 on unoptimized code. The XBox CPU ran at about 733 MHz and had less cache than a proper P3. The 360 also has 4x the memory of the Revolution and will probably have a more powerful GPU as well.

then I would say that Revolution can handle anything that's on the 360 today.

I doubt it could handle PGR3, but that uses more than one core. The others are debateable I suppose, but that doesn't make the Revolution easier to develop for. Equal for a given graphical quality level, but not easier.

[MskoDestny]

JLF65 wrote:
Yes, you can occasionally get older iMacs off eBay for under $200. I've seen the original 233MHz iMac for as low as $75. That is certainly the way to go if you just want a plain PPC system. I've got linux and AROS running on my iMac DV+, and do plan to work on native AROS for the iMac.

But $150 for a 486MHz G3 with 24M of fast SRAM is still very cheap. It's also easier to find a GC system for that price than an iMac for less than $200. Most used iMacs go for $300 to $400 depending on the amount of memory and size of the harddrive. It's rare to see better than the original 233MHz iMac with 32M of 66MHz SDRAM for less than $200.

If you are looking to run linux or OSX, go with the best iMac you can find on eBay.

Powermac G3s go for less than $100 on eBay. No need to look at an iMac. The Powermac has more expansion possibilities and will likely cost less to ship. No need to wait around either, there are plenty that are under $100 in auctions that are about to end within hours. Old iMacs might be hard to find on the cheap but old Powermacs are not.

As for the game machine part, certainly the Gamecube is a better games machine than the Mac, but I would argue that the Amiga was more readily equiped as a computer for it's time than the Gamecube. Not that I'm trying to dissuade you from doing the port. I like to see funky operating systems running on funky game consoles myself.