bloodline wrote:
No. I quite agree here. NATAMI is a brilliant hobby research project for the people involved and would be happy to read about it and see it in action... it's the motivations/long term goals that is suspect!
Yeah the long term dreaming is what I'm reading a lot of but honestly I don't think it's from the developers too much. Occassionally Gunnar goes off on one but if he wasn't having those flights of fancy in public then he'd be having them in private :-D how can you resist dreaming about "what-could-be" when you're helping to make something.
Come come now!!! You and I both know the GB is a totally bad example! That is a product for which software development never stopped and had a massive installed user base which needed to maintain backward compatibility with old software... The market for which the GB served was never overtaken by other systems, the technology for mobile devices has only in the past few years really started to catch up with desktop...
The Amiga, perhaps 10 years ago, would have had some software that other systems couldn't really match... but now, the very concept of Amiga software for anything other than a small group of hobbyists is laughable.
The GB is not a good argument for "SuperAGA".
Ah ha not so fast, GB->GBA is a marvellous argument (
or we wouldn't be having on :lol:) because I don't care about the actual success of the platform only the hardware differences :-P
You see we're discussing really two overlapping things, the market for something with the hardware and design of something.
If we compare the GB to the A500, the GBA to the A1200 then think of the Natami as the DS-that-never-was. That's all that some of us fanboys want really to see a sort of what-could-have-been, a continuiation of the series...
..maybe that's a better analogy actually, think of it like a TV series that gets cut halfway through, its still got a fanbase so after a few years another production company picks up the right and they make the rest of them. Now they can either keep the original staff that everyones familiar with (Natami-MiniMig-CloneA) or they can hire new actors to play the same roles :-o
Errr.. well, ok... but the PSone is, what, 14 years old... And the NATAMI would be expensive, limited and buggy compared to a cheap off the shelf GFX chip...
Yeah actually I'd like it if they DID put in an extra off-the-shelf GFX chip on there too. My point about the PSone was that its a reasonable benchmark to surpass. Slow 33Mhz CPU, weak 3D chip (
by todays standards) but a potent machine when used right. Even an A1200 with a 3D chip would have given it a PSone a run for it's money at the time if commodore had ANY idea that 3D was coming.
See below...
If they did go for a ColdFire based option then it'd be up within the speed range of a PSP/PS2.
I'm not really sure how you are making this comparison... I simply don't know where the information for such a conclusion could have come from?
I code for the PSP and PS2 so know them fairly well. The PS2 would be harder to surpass but the PSP would be relatively trivial for a CF based machine at 300Mhz to 400Mhz.
Thing is even a 68060 60Mhz based machine with good memory access (
something that particularly hobbles the PSP) would get close to PSP standards if they'd give it a basic 3D GFX chip, leave the 2d stuff to the AGA/SuperAGA side. They'd only have to give it something with multi-texturing support to improve on the performance of the PSP rendering.
Hmm gone off on a tangent, damn, was beta for our game today so just got home :-D
All of the above is trying to say that you don't have to do much to get a hobby platform upto older-gen's console power and that's only been the Natami's stated goal, to give the Amiga (AGA) chipset a bit of a boost up whilst maintaining as much compatibility as possible.
Which is what the NATAMI is interesting for! I don't understand, why people want to big it up into something it isn't... when it already has a decent reason.
Agreed, what they're saying though for the NatAmi with 68060 isn't that it's going to be the greatest thing ever.
Hell even getting the Natami upto even the level of the PSone would be an upgrade, after all 14 year old technology is better than 16 year old (A1200==1992!) technology :-D
Andy
PS: sorry I'm knackered so the above is all confused, I'm gonna go watch anime and get some sleep!