potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[Hammer]

What's the XBOX's?

64MB of 6.4GB/s RAM via Dual MCH. Rated ~5 ns.

GPU support memory bandwidth savings tricks such as early Z test, S3TC/5 DXTC texture compression (e.g. 6:1 ratio) methods and compressed Z-buffer.

GPU's vertex shader program resources (as per DX8 specs).
Input registers: 16
Constant registers: 96
Temp registers: 12
Address register(s): 1
Max instruction count: 128

NV2A has two vertex shader units.

[Hammer]

Now you are getting a bit personal. That is immature considering you know nothing about me. If I do qualify as a Nintendo "fanboy" as you put it, it is because Nintendo has won me over as a high quality and reputable producer of both consoles and very entertaining software. I was not an NES fan in my youth and resented it for displacing the Atari 2600/5200/7800 as king of that generation. I was a Sega Genesis(Masterdrive) fan over the SNES. Yes I did not like Nintendo at all. The N64 was impressive but not enough for me to go and buy one (I liked the Sega Saturn but we know where that went). I have an N64 emulator now on my PC. The Gamecube however has completely won me over as the highest quality system of the big 3...and the company itself has won me over. Looking back, my reasons for resenting the company were childish (I'm in my 30's now) and just plain prejudiced at times. I've grown up. You should too.

Being a fan is one thing, but to implement such a plan is a different matter altogether. Be realistic with your expectations.

Every critisism I've heard about the GC not being a good platform for an OS can also be said of any pre-OS 4 Amiga. In the end, the GC is a tightly intergrated - hence efficient - system extactly like your beloved classic Amigas. Citisize it and you critisize your own past.

IF GC documents are so easy to find why there are some difficulties in creating a full Game Cube emulator (1)(2)?  

Notes;
1. Dolwin 0.10, Open source; bugs heaven. Runs only a few demos.  
2. Dolphin, Close source; able run a *very few* commercial games with tons of bugs.
3. Ninphin, Close source; Runs only a few demos.
4. WhineCube, Close source; Runs only a few demos.

If you know more about GC please contribute to
http://dolwin.emulation64.com/
Dolwin uses documentation from http://www.gc-linux.org/docs/yagcd.html
Dolwin’s status indicates the incomplete nature of publicly available GC documentation.
Open source group has access to SoftPear/PearPC’s own efforts (includes system programmers who can write JIT-CPU emulator).  

If Nintendo bought Amiga, you'd have real games again. You'd have your PPC cpu, you'd have your ATI graphics, your stability.

What kind of PowerPC "G3" are we talking about?  
ArtX stuff is not quite related to ATI's Radeon.

[Hammer]

According to Nintendo's own pages here the Nintendo is capable of 1125 MDhrystone 2.1. My P2-400mhz doorstop pulls 841. These are hardly impressive numbers. For comparison, my current desktop (P4HT 3.0ghz) pulls 5133 in single-thread mode (and averages 4200 each in SMP-2 mode, as HyperThread isn't symetrical).

Just to add...

Athlon 64 3400+ (ASUS K8N-E Deluxe, 1GB PC3200, X64, gcc3.4 -O6 -m64) scored ~7840M Dhrystone 2.

Xeon EM64T (3600Mhz, HP xw8200, FC-2, -O6 -m64) ~7173M Dhrystone 2.

X-BOX PIII-Kitbash @733Mhz scored ~1507.9M.

[Hammer]

Who is talking about emulating a GC? And obviously somebody found something out something to be able to run some commercial games

Very few and buggy.

In the end, if you want to know how to program a GC you need to become a licensed developer and get the kit.

Do they give you the documentation to "hit the metal"?

Programming via APIs pretty much shields the programmer from the underlaying hardware (abstruction).

You are just proposing some sort of AmigaDE style player i.e. middleware ecosystem player(minus the vCPU abstractions). AROS-Linux hosted edition could work...

It's a well known fact that the GC uses the G3 750 series 'Gekko'

Is the 750FX *100 percent* compatible with 750GX?

(hints: look in AW.net OS4 issues)

PS; PPC32 is not an analogue to IA-32 when it comes to freezing the ISA standard.

OS 4 is already a PPC OS.

Being PPC OS doesn't guarantee straight compatibility; refer to PowerPC e500 core vs 750xx.

[Hammer]

What is DOPUS?

Glorified file manager.

Isn't a GUI an application?

For AOS's case; it's the "Intuition".

Workbench

Yet another file manager.

[Hammer]

Also, who said Flipper is related to Radeon? I said ATI is incoporating Flipper technology into FUTURE Radeons but even this statement is from 2001 so we already may have a Radeon with incorporated Flipper features (primarily large high bandwidth on-die texture cache).

So did NVIDIA i.e. its call "Turbo Cache" e.g. Geforce 6200. ATI's version is called "Hyper Memory" e.g. Radeon X300. It doesn't mean they are both the same in terms of ISA.

The issue is with Flipper's programming modelling (if any).  

[Hammer]

@lou_dias

Theoretical vs Theoretical

Refer to
http://www.nintendo.com.au/gamecube/system/index.php
10.5 GFLOPS.

http://nvidia.com/page/console.html
80 GLOPS from NV2A

In terms being a calculator; NVIDIA’s NV2A kills the whole Nintendo Game Cube. GC can’t match a massively parallelled SIMD GPU.

[Hammer]

billt wrote:
Ack, just realized how old the post I replied to was, that was probably beaten to death since then.

Convince Foxconn(WinFast graphic card fame)(ODM of Apple’s Mac-Mini) and ASUS(everybody should already know this ODM)(ODM of Apple’s Powerbook) to release bare bone PPC based products.

[Hammer]

lou_dias wrote:

Hammer wrote:
@lou_dias

Theoretical vs Theoretical

Refer to
http://www.nintendo.com.au/gamecube/system/index.php
10.5 GFLOPS.

http://nvidia.com/page/console.html
80 GLOPS from NV2A

In terms being a calculator; NVIDIA’s NV2A kills the whole Nintendo Game Cube. GC can’t match a massively parallelled SIMD GPU.

Somehow I don't think the XBOX is the Cray supercomputer that this page you linked makes it seem to be.

Which Cray computer?

  Also the 10.5 Gflops you quoted is:
Floating-point Arithmetic Capability 10.5 GFLOPS (Peak) for the GC's processor not GPU.  What's the the Celeron in the XBox's FPU Arithmetic Capability?  Let's compare apples to apples here.

10.5 GFLOPS (Peak) refers to MPU(CPU), Geometry Engine, HW Lighting.

[Hammer]

Isn't "hitting the metal" what API's do? Why would you want re-invent the wheel. "Hitting the metal" is what made A500 games incompatible with later Amiga machines. Why go back down that road?(SNIP)

Would you like reduce AOS4 like DE?

Also, the GC has no BIOS.

GC would have it's own boot strap code.  

So that is one less layer of R&D that is needed. Everything is in the Dev kit and loaded from the game disc. The GC's drive has a really low average seek time and that's why alot of software loads quickly on the system versus the others. When loading alot of smaller files, the GC will outperform a PS2 or XBOX in loading times.

The amount of data in XBOX is greater than GC i.e. it has enough performance to run Doom3** and FarCry**.  

**Cut down from PC ports.

[Hammer]

lou_dias wrote:

I already know C and C++.  Guess what - C/C++ sucks ass.  

C/C++ has it's place i.e. especially in performance sensitive code (without going to assembler programming).

If you want C/C++ performance with near VB.NET, why not try Delphi?

[Hammer]

@lou_dias

As a 13 year-old, your mom would not buy you a new PC and let you do whatever you want to it

Depends on  demographics e.g. kids in private schools with laptop PCs.