Amiga Coldfire project dead?

[Amiga_Nut]

You're right, there's no such hardware if you exclude Apple. But I wonder why you would do that?

Apple PowerPC hardware is still the best there is, and it has great support and repair services. Why go for some rare (tiny production runs), prohibitively expensive custom HW with substandard support when there are better options around?

Try to get support, spare parts and/or repairs for AmigaONE SE/XE or Micro-A1 today and you get the idea.

I excluded them because classic original workbench isn't being ported to Macbooks or iMacs, ie Workbench 1.3/2.1/3.0 and you can't plug them into an A500 as an accelerator card.

I started the thread to try and find out if/when Amiga Coldfire project died and we all got sidetracked on to the age old "I want OS4 for X86"  or "I want PPC OS for Amiga" debate but all I was pointing out was that x86 is no standard at all due to millions of component combinations/options so if you are porting an OS AND writing the drivers for everything defined as either PPC or x86 then PPC is a smaller mountain to climb really even with Mac PPC hardware. Anyway ARM or x86 accelerator for classic Amiga is even more impossible than Coldfire at the moment

But as I stated I am only really interested in this potentially cheap tech to accelerate actual original Amigas not replace OS4/MOS motherboard projects like SAM. The dream is you plug in a card that costs less than an 060 and gives you at worst 060 performance inside real Amiga  like 500/1000/2000 and 1200/4000. You can't even get 060s for A500/1000 and 2000 cards must be incredibly rare.

[Amiga_Nut]

PPC that is OS4 compatible only excludes Apple because someone says so. Why should it not be in the list? Because someone already said so? They're the only PPC laptops worth mentioning. (I'm not excited about that low-end CherryPal thing).

I think it's very disappointing that whoever decided Apple PPC won't be supported by OS4. Be it in an unchangabe contract or whatever that is now, I really wish it was not that way, as Apple PC is really the most sensible way to get an "Amiga" laptop at this point. Believe you me, making a new PPC laptop to satisfy those who make the rules is no easy task, I've been pondering that conundrum for 6 or 8 years and have nothing more than ideas to show for it, and I am an engineer.

My only point was that writing OS4 to support every single x86 laptop launched in the last 10 years say would be a bigger driver programming project than doing the same for Apple laptops too.

As stated above I'm not even interested in OS4 any more, that boat has sailed for me, I don't want SAM and I don't want x1000 to drain my finances either, not value for money. Neither do anything for me now and I have completely lost interest and decided if there isn't a Paula chip on the motherboard it ain't an Amiga to me anyway

But I do agree with a lot of people who were pissed off about not getting OS4 onto PPC Mac minis, it was halfway there anyway wasn't it?

[Amiga_Nut]

I have always made it clear that I feel the AGA chip set should have been released in 1988 or 1989 at the very latest... IIRC the C= engineers had this in mind but engineering management said "no new chips"... That day, the Amiga was doomed.

Jay Miner signed off on the VRAM based megapixel 128 colour screen mode Ranger chipset in 1988 so that was there. Don't know if they had anything else....except the 320x200 in 256/4096 colour screen mode for the Commodore C65 prototype (canned in 1990/91 so still before AGA too and probably chunky not planar mode!)

I totally agree with you, what the hell was the A500 plus and A600 all about, a complete load of bollox really.....I was reading Amiga Format today and it was a preview of the A600 and they were mildly optimistic @ £400 retail! Whooper do I can load workbench in 4 colours at 1280x256 and write games for it that run @ 5fps in 2D wooooooo smart move @ C= there, SEGA/Nintendo must have pissed themselves all the way to the bank over the ECS 'improvements'.

[Amiga_Nut]

I didn't forget, I just regarded it as a subset of the DSP feature. Of course the DAC was a separate component, but it was the DSP that gave it the capability to do multichannel audio playback at CD quality.



Not sure it was that easy to fix, it can't have been a decision their hardware designers were thrilled about releasing it in that configuration in the first place.

By the same token, the shortcomings of the A1200 were easily remedied by 3rd party expansions. It's all a question of how much you're prepared to pay for it. I'd but an 060+PCI (RTG, soundcard) A1200 up against an equivalently clocked 060 Falcon with it's out-of-the-box hardware any day.

And you would be in the minority and C= would still be going bankrupt in 1994. Point is such an A1200 would have cost more than a faster PC, which would have had a decent web browser and TCP/IP stack via Windows too and 24bit colour, lightning fast (for 3D games) Pentium and 16bit stereo sound. People never get their money back on add-ons...not alloy wheels for cars or accelerator cards for Amiga. Bad bad business plan, I actually refused to buy a PPC card for my A4000 for this reason in the end. If Commodore wouldn't build a PPC Amiga to hold its value I wasn't going to tank my last grant check on a 604 PPC card to try and match a Pentium system costing less than the PPC card.

Commodore should have designed the 4000/1200 to outperform the low end and high end PC on every level and still be cheaper. ie do what the A1000 did all over again, but this time actually try selling it to people rather than leaving it to rot while the pathetic and technically identical A/V chipset of A500/A2000 was brought to market 12 months late

By early 90s Commodore's competition was no longer Atari/Apple it was PCs, they didn't realise it and so went under (and so did Atari, Apple surviving because it was the only alternative left and sold despite ridiculous prices).

You know what the sad thing is? The A1400 or A1800 whatever it was called was a completed prototype being tested at Commodore. It had AGA, 2mb Chip+ 2mb Fast ram, 28mhz 020, AKIKO, CD-ROM, classy 3 box design not all in one like A1200 and priced between OTT 4000/030 and A1200 base model. No money to put it into production. If they hadn't pissed it all away on the F&%£$^ING CD32 delusional battle plan against N/SEGA that is. The only machine that could have saved Commodore had they built that instead of CD32 not hoped to release it Xmas 1994

Speaking of CD-ROM they also launched the A570 just as they were replacing the A500 with A600 which couldn't even use the A570! I'm surprised it wasn't before 1994 C= went under really.

[Amiga_Nut]

You know better than most that the DSP was useful for more than just Audio, and given the fact that the A1200 had nothing like a DSP an was stuck with 8bit audio... It is worth mentioning

If wikipedia is to be believed then the 16bit was was simply to ensure better compatibilty with the ST... Suggesting this hardware revision was a transitional machine. Seinberg's Falcon clone didn't use a 16Bit bus IIRC...


Yeah, but A1200 RTG boards came about quite a bit later than 1992, which is the time period I'm talking about here... And also we are taking about base spec machines... Damn... We need to compare a standard Flacon running AROS with a standard A1200 running AROS to really see how the two machines compare

Falcon had to be ST compatible to some extent, Atari had nothing else to fall back on really so yes this is why it has a 16bit bus and a 32bit CPU (although @ 16mhz there is bugger all difference between an 020 and an 030 anyway)

There was an 040 board for a later revision of the Falcon, I will see if I can dig up the page with the case design and details of the 040 Falcon (in a 3 box design like the Mega ST/TT)

And the only RTG boards I know for A1200 are Bvision modules. Avideo24 plugged into Denise and so I don't think it worked on AGA machines. Works in an A1000 or A500 though as well as A2000

[Amiga_Nut]

I liked the billboard outside Sega HQ which said "Amiga CD32 - To be this good will take Sega Ages"

Excellent play on words there!  Im sure there's gotta be a pic of it somewhere!

Yeah I remember that, but the truth is apart from total colours on screen and CDXL 2 vs Mega-CD FMV the CD32 is vastly inferior to the 1989 Sega Genesis/Megadrive motherboard. And the Mega-CD had some very complex hardware scaling and rotation of sprites too, just check out Thunderhawk on Mega-CD vs same for CD32.

A crippled 020 with just chip ram can not make up for all the sexy hardware sprites and superior parallax of the Megadrive, let alone the sprite scaling and rotating custom chips in the Mega CD. Gauntlet IV on Sega or Gauntlet II on Amiga sir? LOL

[Amiga_Nut]

Amen to that, was such a waste. Just being able to write to the chip ram by itself would have made it so much more useful. After all, if you are doing software texture-mapped 3D type stuff, you are going to want to have your accumulation buffer in fast ram. You might just get away with reading that to a set of registers once per frame. However, the amount of shuffling you actually had to do with akiko rendered it all but pointless.

Is this why Alien Breed 3D on CD32 runs the same speed as AB 3D on stock A1200 (ie 14mhz and 2mb chip ram too) ??

Or is the AB 3D engine just the same on both and not even bothering to try using AKIKO?

[Amiga_Nut]

That's it, and newer versions of Flash have ended up even slower on PPC Macs. And the sad thing is, the actual video itself would be perfectly playable most of the time on either PPC Mac or 500MHz PC if it weren't for the Flash overheads.

DIVX, therefore streaming DIVX works fine on 266Mhz Pentium 2 mobile CPUs from laptops for 300-400% higher quality than the average 360p rubbish on youtube. When Stage6.divx site died so did my interest in streaming video.

Flash is the biggest pile of shit going, I have a 266 Celeron PC the size of a Nintendo DS with a 2.35:1 screen and it plays DIVX 700mb rips perfectly...point it at youtube and it can't play a flash video in a quarter of the quality at more than 5fps.

Flash solves a problem that doesn't exist any more, Universal studios just screwed us all by blackmailing DIVX through the courts until Stage6 was shut down. The 15mb or so you save in your average 5 minute video when using FLV over streaming DIVX is not even an issue any more given terrabyte drives and 10s of megabit broadband everywhere.

Short version:Flash video can F&%K off

[Amiga_Nut]

As funny as that billboard is, it's horrible marketing.

All you see at any distance is a console and the word Sega in big letters.

Amiga and CD32 are in tiny little letters that aren't readable in the photo.

Also, I wonder how much it cost them in extra legal mumbo-jumbo to see if they would be sued for doing a stunt that nobody really cared about and didn't increase sales?

It's amazing Commodore survived into the 90's at all.

The real issue is that CD32 probably couldn't even manage Gauntlet IV from a Megadrive in even 128 colours despite being 13 years newer design! And then there is the issue of proper parallax scrollng on Sega and the still crap 16+16 colours on AGA for dual playfield. Also if you factor in the actual Mega-CD dedicated sprite scaling and rotating hardware a la Sega System 16 style techniques then forget it, a crippled 14mhz 020 (crippled as no way to add fast ram except £200 SX32 etc) can not compete. And AGA was a kludge of too little too late.

Check out Thunderhawk on Mega-CD vs Amiga AGA heli/flight sims and let me know which ones have textured ground? Only thing CD32 did better was FMV and total colours on screeen/palette. Everything else was inferior to Sega....the bits that are important for a console

[Amiga_Nut]

13 years?

Also, i doubt you could call AGA a kludge lol.

AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually). You read too much ass licking reviews in Amiga Format perhaps about how amazing AGA is

And yes the Sega Megadrive was out in 89/90 in Japan and CD32 1993.

And actually the CD32 is an even bigger kludge than A4000/1200, it should have had 1mb chip 1mb fast ram if they couldn't be bothered to put a SIMM socket on it for 50 pence as it cripples the CPU to 50% max speed!

[Amiga_Nut]

And indeed only an idiot would calculate that 1993-1990=13  

Haha yes 3 (or 4) depending on if you are talking A1200/4000 or CD32.

[Amiga_Nut]

You mean this? http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/gauntlet-iv/screenshots/gameShotId,314532/

An 8MHz 68000 versus a 14MHz 68020 - easy win for the CD32 in terms of performance.

Graphics - 64 colours on the Megadrive (16 colours per 8x8 tile), so easy to replicate, and 64 colours on AGA was quick enough. The CD32 could do overscan too, no fixed 320x240 resolutions here.

I think 2MB RAM beats 64KB too ... it was a while before Megadrive games were coming on 16 mbit cartridges.

Dedicated graphics hardware on the Megadrive did help a lot - mostly with the tiled graphics modes and sprites...

Play the game don't look at rubbish screenshots

Firstly the Megadrive has a Z80 co-processor at something like 4mhz. Also the 020 @ 14mhz in CD32 is stuck at 50% max speed due to there being no fast ram only chip ram on the board. So CPU wise C= already screwed up, like I said either stick a damned £1 SIMM socket on the board or make it 1mb chip/1mb fast.

Secondly the Megadrive has far superior sprite hardware, hardware more superior than what OCS/ECS manages with the blitter in 320x200x32 colour mode which is faster than 128 colour mode in AGA (because it is the same blitter not a 32bit blitter as some magazines said).

Lastly the Megadrive has 10 channel audio, AGA still had the same 4 channels as the A1000.

Like bloodline and Piru have said the AGA is slow in 256 colour mode (probably slower than OCS in 64 colour mode actually from experience) and this explains why games like Fightin' Spirit are not actually 256 colours even when sold as AGA versions.

Proof is in the pudding, the Megadrive had superior 2D games graphically speaking except for available colour palette. The sound is an acquired taste perhaps.

[Amiga_Nut]

AGA was a kludge... A few extra fetch modes and a few extra biplanes and a few extra DMA channels... Nothing really exciting at all

-edit- to be fair to the commodore engineers, they did the best they could given the lack of resources

Kludge as in it is a 256 colour chipset that retains excellent backward compatibility, which is fair enough for A1200, but in CD32 the performance loss due to compatible design is wasted as it is a CD console. But if they really were going to do a games console they should have learned from the mistakes they made with the C64 games console...you can't compete with dedicated consoles if you don't come up with real improvements that match the competing console hardware specs

Throwing away 50% CPU power to make sure CD32 and A1200 could use identical games code was a silly mistake though. Even 1.5mb chip/512kb Fast ram would have been good enough.

[Amiga_Nut]

Actually there's a side of 2d that AGA completely blitzed the megadrive/mega cd and that's bitmap handling. For pure arcade style gaming the megadrive is easier to get good results with, but that doesnt mean the amiga isnt capable of it too as was occasionally demonstrated (albiet too infrequently). You cant compare based soley on paper type specs, anyone who knows the amiga hardware knows that what it's capable of isnt reflected on paper. In the case of the cd32 I do agree though. An additional meg fast ram wouldve been a much better idea than akiko. The extra speed added via fast ram wouldve done just as good a job in reagrds to 3d, but it could also be used elsewhere as well and benefitted the system.

I totally agree that in the right hands the Amiga was a powerful machine, look at Shadow of the Beast on every other format for a good example of when a game is designed for Amiga it is graphically at the top of the pile (and sonically too thanks to David Whittaker's tunes).

@Tension, they probably should have designed it from scratch with 0.5mb Fast and 1.5mb chip anyway really. Problem was if people were just going to dump A1200 game code + CD soundtrack out there then it is no advantage anyway with examples like Alien Breed 3D not using AKIKO at all and just using A1200 code.

The sad thing is there was a machine in development, similar in design/form factor to the A3000 series with a 28mhz 020, 2mb Chip+2mb fast, CD-Rom, Akiko, and in a price between A4000/030 and A1200 (didn't have zorro slots but who cares) and this machine not the CD32 is what they should have pushed for.

The console market takes no prisoners really, silly little mistakes are magnified for you a million fold by the big players, who know exactly what people want usually. CDTV and C64GS should have been warnings not to develop the CD32, it did some things well but some things terribly badly. Atari made the same mistake too, starving the Falcon dev team to get the badly designed Jaguar console out the door to 'save them' too .

The A1200 was being sold for what £299 or less for a basic package by CD32 time? Surely the thing to do was put a CD-ROM device packaged with an A1200 with 2mb fast ram after C= doing an exclusive deal and launch it for £450? The cheapest 16/25mhz 386 Multimedia system was around £800 with CD and sound card at the time wasn't it still?

It's a good thing there's nothing left to talk about Coldfire upgrades for classic Amigas really as the thread would be long since dead haha

edit: I should point out that personally I think the problem was more to do with how Ocean/US Gold fleeced us with badly programmed games and ST port-overs for years and years. In Japan lazy greedy little software house's are not in their culture and they do things as well as they can so the SNES and Megadrive had an instant advantage from a coding point of view as they actually bothered to do it.