To buy or not to buy...

[motorollin]

Now I'm only in Uni 3 days a week instead of 4, it's cheaper for me to buy tickets each day than the season ticket I bought in September. I've worked out that if I surrender the season ticket I'll save the best part of a £1000. So now I'm thinking of two options: put it in the bank for a rainy day, or spend a fair chunk of it on a CSPPC (if I can find one) so I can actually run the copy of OS4 I've got coming my way.

Any opinions on how good OS4 actually is on a classic Amiga (compared to OS3.9), and whether it's worth doing this, would be very much appreciated. Also, I have no idea how much CSPPCs are going for these days, so some guide price would be good.

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moto

[motorollin]

@spihunter
Oh yeah, I forgot I would have a MKIII to sell :lol: A £150 difference sounds like more of an upgrade and less of a massive investment.

@HammerD
Yes I do like the classic hardware. But if OS4 was able to run on non-Amiga hardware, I would still do that as a reliable, modern OS4 machine and keep my MKIII A4000 for classic usage.

A couple of questions which will sway my decision. Is OS4 100% backwards compatible? Put simply, if I run a 68k WHDLoad game from OS4 classic, will it work?

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moto

[motorollin]

I'm guessing Petunia is the OS4 68k emulator? How does it perform compared to a real 060/50? And I'm also assuming that blacklisting it will make it run using the real 68k CPU instead of the emulated one? Are there any issues with custom chip access from OS4?

If someone with OS4 classic could try a WHDLoad game and report back it would be great.

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moto

[motorollin]

@bloodline
Why shouldn't it? OS3.x is a 68k OS and can access a real PPC processor, so why shouldn't a PPC OS be able to access the real 68k processor?

@Akiko
Hmmm, that may affect my decision about whether to upgrade, since I use my Amiga mainly as a classic games machine.

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moto

[motorollin]

Maybe common knowledge, but I didn't know :-) So how does Petunia compare with an 060/50?

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moto

[motorollin]

Heh, that's kind but my knowledge is tiny compared to some people's here :-)

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moto

[motorollin]

bloodline wrote:
Actually OS3.x can't access the PPC, which is why you need to have another kernel running in parallel, i.e. PowerUP or WarpOS.

Ahhh I see. For some reason I always thought that PUP/WOS were optional extras. I understand your point now. By that reasoning, could a 68k kernel run alongside OS4 to allow access to the real 68k processor?

bloodline wrote:
If I were to be mainly using my machine for games... I'd not bother with either a PPC or an OS upgrade...

I know you're probably right. But I want OS4. I don't know why - I just do :lol:

bloodline wrote:
it yould be more fun to get a couple of second hand A500's instead and run all the machines at the same time :-D

At the same time, you say? :crazy:

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moto

[motorollin]

@Steve
My thoughts exactly. Maybe it's to try to encourage coders to either modify their code to be compatible with OS4's emulation or port them to PPC, with a view to move away from 68k architecture entirely.

[EDIT]
Thread is teh b0rked...
[/EDIT]

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moto

[motorollin]

It doesn't stop the developer maintaining a 3.9 compatible version. The way I look at it is this: Where would Apple be if they had clung to ancient architectures? Certainly not the success story they are today. There comes a time when the OS has to move on, otherwise it becomes bloated (Windows) or antiquated (AmigaOS). And lets face it, computers are so fast now that if you really want to run classic apps there is always emulation.

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moto

[motorollin]

bloodline wrote:

motorollin wrote:
could a 68k kernel run alongside OS4 to allow access to the real 68k processor?

That depends upon how OS4 is designed... but any solution like that will cause all the same problems that WOS and PUP had... Running 603 and a 68k on the same bus and trying to get them to communicate is just a nightmare! They can't really run at the same time...

Fair enough. Looks like the developers made a good call disabling it.

bloodline wrote:
To be fair I can't really justify keeping my PPC Amiga set up any more :-(

You don't have to - you've already got it. I'm trying to justify buying one :-)

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moto

[motorollin]

@-D-
Starstruck run perfectly on my A4000 (see sig) - no stutter at all.

@Fixer
The prospect of dual-booting isn't ideal. It would basically mean I would boot in to OS4, look at it and think "that's nice" then boot back in to 3.9 to play some games :roll:

What do existing OS4 users use their OS4 installation for?

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moto

[motorollin]

Difference between cost of season ticket and daily train fare > credit card balance + iPhone
Monthly saving of credit card payments > iPhone contract

Hmmmm.....


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moto

[motorollin]

It's the thing that gives me unlimited data :-)

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moto

[motorollin]

So it looks like I have 2 options:

1. Get a CSPPC
a. Use OS4 for whatever people use OS4 for
b. Use OS3.9 for games

2. Keep my MKIII
a. Miss out on whatever people use OS4 for
b. Use OS3.9 for games
c. Get an iPhone :-D


So really what I would like to know is this: OS4 users, what do you actually do in OS4? What tasks do you perform in OS4 that you can't do in OS3.9, or perform significantly better in OS4 than they do in OS3.9?

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moto

[motorollin]

What, the answer to "what do people do in OS4"? Is it "not much"? ;-)

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moto