whoosh777 wrote:
@bloodline,
I spent several hours yesterday looking at Comet, Staples and PC World,
If it's your first PC it *might* be an idea to get a prebuilt system. But if you are going to do that, then still avoid the high streets. If you really must go the high street route, then use something like "Time Computers"... but if possible go to specialist dealer.
You say you want to avoid M$ Windows. I say that it makes sense to at least have a copy of 2000 or XP on your machine so you can run the lastest games, and/or any important apps you might need.
Always get as much RAM and Hard drive capacity as you can afford. Buying RAM and Hard drives from a specilist dealer (
www.dabs.com are great) will always be at least 50% cheaper than the High street stores.
Fast SCSI-2 interface for external drives is 29.95 from PCWorld,
looking at real machines made me realise what an achievement it is
to get AROS to boot directly on PCs,
SCSI is pointless for any home user. Any modern drive (Like the Western Digital's with thier 8meg caches) will be much cheaper and offer similar performance. S-ATA is the new way to go so look for that if you can.
Don't forget that UAS2 and Firewire offer good Hard drive suppoer too, though both are pricey.
Yes, It is testiment to Michal Shultz, Johan Grip et al, hard work getting AROS booting the PC hardware. Though the fact that PCs have a standard BIOS does help.
/*
Yes, when you think of AROS Hosted, think of Linux as a Hardware abstraction layer.
Running AROS on Linux can be thought of as the same as running AOS3.1 in UAE.
While AROS is running on Linux one can work out all the bugs and issues.
Then you can add the Firmware boot code and boot AROS on it's own.
*/
ok thats good, it means indirectly they are working on a direct boot,
Bug fixes on any version of AROS directly improves all other versions. As I said AROS shares 99.999% of it's code across all ports.
/*
When choosing hardware you must first consider what your requirements are,
then choose what is useful and at the cheapest price. Ignore religious/political
issues like "brand" and "make", these things are unimportant when it comes to
technology.
*/
I am upset though that something so horrible as MS has a stranglehold,
why cant we have a quality monopoly,
M$ Windows simply offers a standard way for software to talk to both the user and the hardware. It does that job very well. I it a shame hadware manufactures often only provide Windows drivers, and never any source code. but Since windows *is* the standard this is little we can do about it, unless we offer a viable alternative for the user.
/*
Yes, just download the AROS CD image, burn that to a CD-ROM,
then put that in the CD drive, turn the PC on...
AROS will boot and run by itself.
*/
sounds painless, so in theory I dont need MS?
now could I do this via the PCs hard disk instead of via CD-ROM?
ie if I download to the hard disk could I boot from that instead?
or if I download to an external SCSI hard drive on the Amiga and
then connect this to the PC via the interface I mentioned,
or is it only possible via CD?
Wndows provides internet access and CD burning software, that alone makes it useful.
To run AROS it needs to be either on a CD or on a floppy. From the CD you can install it onto a hard drive and once there it can boot without a Flopyp or CD
AROS needs to be running in order to install itself on to a hard drive.
To put the AROS boot image onto a Floppy you will need a high density drive. To put the AROS boot iamge on a CD you will need a CD burner.
I recommend you get a CD burner with your PC.
/*
I would build the machine myself. There are plenty of shorps that sell PC parts
for good prices. http://www.dabs.com is a great UK website selling top
quality parts for a low price.
Don't forget that Black Troll sell complete PC's with AROS already
installed for around £160 or so (depending upon the exchange rate).
High Street stores will rip you off.
*/
I will look into these then,
I read this after making yesterdays visit to those shops,
£160 is almost half the price of what I saw,
will the £160 PC come with MS OS or MS s/w or is MS completely absent?
what sort of graphics card?
do you think the shop bundles are there to catch ignorant first timers??
The Black Troll machine is an AROS system, it does not come with Windows. It might not be ideal for your needs.
The shop bundles do catch the first timers, but then they do make things very painless for the first timer too.
/*
30% is far too much. When running AROS on a 3.066Ghz CPU, are you
really happy to write off nearly a whole 1Ghz (919.8Mhz) of performance?
*/
it may depend on your upbringing, I was trained to never put speed as the
top priority, ie robustness + portability + compatibility etc are
higher up the ladder than speed
eg a formula 1 car is very fast but I dont see many people driving them
on the roads!
But a 3Ghz PC is not the F1 of the PC world, it's the standard. Anyway I think a computer runing at 2/3s it's actaull speed is not a good trade off so you can run an old Application that is probably far behind in features than a freeware Windows version.
when you could go the integrated UAE route and run that same app on a system running at full speed.
The Compatibility desire is what held the PC and Windows back. That is why I used to hate them. Amiga Users should not become stuck in that mind set also.
/*
You could build a Big Endien AROS for the x86 but that would be incompatible
with the faster Little Endian one.
*/
effectively it would be AROS on a different platform,
it would be very interesting to see what exactly the slow down is,
you believe its 30% but as it hasnt been done we dont know for sure
It would be a different AROS platform, in the same way the PPC verison of AROS is.
Tests have confirmed that the slow down would be significant.
Amithlon has the advantage that even the lowest spec PC taking a 30% speed hit is still 10 times faster than the fastest real Amiga. As Amithlon runs software meant for a real Amiga it's no great loss.
But how would you feel if you wrote a program and compiled it for Linux, Windows and AROS. And the AROS version was 30% slower than the Windows and Linux versions on the same machine? that sux, no one would bother with the AROS version because it is crippled. No speed penalty is worth it.
Also if the 68k was "inline" then the AROS would be less stable, as bugs in old programs would be allowed to creep in and take down the OS. If we run them in UAE, when they die, you can simily restart them. The OS remains uncrashed.
/*
The Idea for the integrated UAE is so that the 68k and the x86 do not share
Data structures.
But instead allow the two system to synchronise their data.
*/
ok, you've gone down that path,
its going to be much more work,
I suppose if you redirect each 68k jump vector to also call the
corresponding x86 jump vector or something,
will each x86 API call have to synchronise the 68k data structures?
It would be up to the 68k verison working with UAE to make sure it knows what the x86 OS is doing.
If you call a function in a library on the 68k side that function will then call the coresponding function on the x86 side performaing any byte order conversions if needed.
/*
This will allow 68k programs to run in the same environment as the x86 programs.
The only down side is that 68k programs will not be able to call x86
functions and vice versa. This could be possible, but probably not worth it.
The UAE Emulator will be running a 68k version of AROS (specially designed to
synchronise with the x86 version).
*/
I suppose the open nature of AROS means someone else could
create their own variant of AROS some other way, (I'm not volunteering just yet!)
whereas with AmigaOS we would all be stuck with the company's decision,
You could, if you want, right now get the AROS sources and add in your own "inline" 68k emulator and make a big endian verison of the x86 AROS. The devs would even help you as best they can. That is the beauty of Open source software.
/*/*
everyone says its not a big deal that Eyetech created the A1,
I wondered whether they could prove this by doing their own one,
*/*/
/*
Anyone is able to sell Terrons.
I could put a little sticker on it if you like and sell it to you.
*/
see you are telling me its not a big deal,
how much would you sell it for?
It was a brave market decision to push a PPC platform at that price, but I guess Eyetech knew people would buy anything with an Amgia Sticker on it.
Sure I'll sell you one, hmmm how does $14 billion sound?
/*/*
computer 3D always sucks because you can literally see the computer slow down
and wince whenever something computationally complex happens,
*/*/
/*
I've guess you've not used a new 3D card then. I have yet to write a program
that causes my Radeon 9000 to slow down even with over 10000 objects
(using the DX7 interface).
*/
but as you throw more and more objects it must eventually slow down?
ie
for( i = 1 ; ; i++ ){ introduce_1000_objects() ; }
must eventually catch up with your CPU power,
how about 10000 explosions?
A Modern graphics card has a GPU (a dedicated Processor) that is as powerfull as super computers were 10 years ago. When programming 3D with a modern Graphics Card (using DirectX or OpenGL, whatever) you left the GPU do all the hard stuff and left the CPU worry about the game logic.
You will have to see the performance to believe it.
/*
No. Both Amiga.org and Amigaworld.net use xoops which is a great example of
opensource software. Aros-Exec.org also uses xoops.
*/
xoops is opensource but presumably the specific configuration is closed source??
the configuraton has nothing to do with the source.
/*
We need the 68k AROS for the integrated UAE Emulator idea.
I also want to run AROS on my A1200. We do have a working 68k AROS,
but it needs to be adapted to boot the Amgia Hardwre.
At the moment it only boots the Palm PDA.
*/
reimplementing AmigaOS via the same custom chips!
you may need to study UAE to understand the custom chips!
(a bit like studying AROS to understand AmigaOS),
I hope you fix some of the existing bugs eg
AGA SetRGB32CM doesnt set the lower 4 bits of the blue component,
also blitter OS calls can fail horribly on bitmaps exceeding
1024 pixels width even though the h/w can cope with huge bitmaps,
according to the autodocs someone forget to set an AGNES big blit flag
they knew that in 1992 and havent yet fixed the bug!
Booting UAE would be much easier than a Rael Amiga, since one could bypass the hardware bootstrap. Using UAE one might be able to figure out how the hardware is initilised at power on.
In the 68k version of AROS, one would not have the same bugs as AmigaOS, unless there is specific reason to copy that bug.
/*
AROS is covered by the APL, which is similar to LGPL. IF you use AROS source only
the code that you use must remain Opensource. The rest of your program is yours.
Licence issues are very complex.
*/
sounds a good license, some licenses are quite tight fisted!
A licence is there to allow the user to use the softwre while at the same time protecting the author of the software.
If it fails to do either of these things, the Licence is bad.
