Looking for W3D_Picasso96MU.library v4.2 (17 Feb 2002)

[matthey]

After the Warp3D 68k v4.2a, a new 4.2b was released : http://www.elbox.com/downloads_mediator.html

In this new version, the W3D_Picasso96MU.library v4.2 (5 Feb 2002) is updated to the v4.2 (17 Feb 2002)

I emailed Elbox about this new release, but no answer...

Anyone could check his version installed with a "version full Sys:Libs/Warp3D/HWDrivers/W3D_Picasso96MU.library" and see if it's the rare 4.2 (17 Feb 2002) I'm looking for ?

I didn't find it here. I only have older MediatorUP archives and they do not have Warp3D in them. There is an archive which is referred to and I can get a download from Elbox for it.

http://www.elbox.com/download/Warp3D_for_Mediator.lha

This archive has W3D_Picasso96M.library 4.2 (02/17/02) so perhaps their listing has an error and there is no new version of W3D_Picasso96MU.library?

Maybe you could ask A-Eon about it since they are the new owner of W3D?

still no warp3d for Mediator and Radeon 9250 users:confused:

Matthew at A-Eon would also like Radeon support in Warp3D for the classic AmigaOS (he has an Amiga 1200 with Radeon). Seeing how much of a priority the classic Amiga is to A-Eon, I would expect Radeon W3D support right after the Prisma Megamix Music Card comes out for the classic. You can enjoy an A-Eon Boing Ball Mouse for the classic while you wait though. A-Eon should hire me to promote their products .

[matthey]

Individual initiative is the future of the Amiga.

No, dividing in to secretive camps with fortifications protecting the antiquated Amiga technology from each other seems to be the Amiga way. This doesn't mean I agree with Cosmo's attitude even though I understand his feeling of the Amiga being held hostage. Honey catches more flies than vinegar. Hopefully, eventually. Amiga teaches us patience. We must meditate and focus on what was good about the Amiga. Where did my fricking Guru Meditation Joyboard go now?

[matthey]

Later. We are in the hurry now. New cards take too much time and too much money to develop...

Not necessarily. The old cards could have legal problems attached which can take much longer than development time as we know from the C= bankruptcy years. Some chips would likely not be available anymore so the board layout would have to be changed and replacement chips or FPGAs used. The Phase 5 accelerator boards are likely expensive boards to produce in low quantities and more expensive yet on a tight schedule. Using a modern FPGA makes a lot of sense as it could simplify the design and cost. An FPGA with memory controller for modern memory (cheaper and more reliable to have soldered on the card) and high speed transceivers (SerDes) for SATA/PCIe is still affordable and reduces chip counts. Ethernet and HDMI/DVI can be directly controlled from the FPGA. The FPGA needs a little support for flash, debugging, etc. and it may be easier to leave USB as a custom chip but I hope you can see that the chip count and board layout size, complexity and cost could be significantly reduced. Development could be greatly increased with a little investment. Majsta is affordable because of the country he lives in although the corruption there has already slowed him down at times (mail bribes). Thomas Hirsch has a working work of art in the Natami which is wasting away but could be rejuvenated with investment. IMO, these would be better investments than trying to bring back the P5 hardware. I'm not sure production would be feasible even if the P5 designs were open sourced.

if you are interested in warpos (im not) then strim is developing an open source compatible solution based on mediator and sonnet card. it is working already to certain extent and rather fast. csppc and bppc will not happen and it is not amigakit fault. the rights and documentation ist with a former amiga repair company in germany, probably lost. anyway they could not be produced again because of the lack of parts and because of rohs as far as it gas been discussed on a1k.

The Sonnet is no longer in production (partially because PPC is dying), the classic Amiga needs a bottle-necked PCI solution for PCI and it is not optimum to go through PCI for all I/O. At least faster PPC processors are available in the Sonnet but I don't like the economics of the project and Elbox decided likewise.

It would be easier to get that 040s from old Macs or accelerators
for them but then it would solve all need for most lucrative market
so it's kinda problematic and there is a good explanation but it's
kinda ungrateful to be so demanding and ACA1220 is all you need
anyway and people should be lucky that those are still in production.

There is currently no shortage of affordable full 68060s except the rev 6 68060 which can be overclocked to 100MHz. The price and availability may change if thousands of the FPGA Arcade 68060 expansion are sold. An FPGA accelerator or board probably makes more sense. Even the FPGA Arcade and Mist FPGA performance should be able to exceed a 68040 with less heat. A larger and better performance FPGA (but still affordable) and/or a better designed FPGA core will probably be able to exceed 68060 performance.

We can not blame the current holders of the Amiga to not want to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors (simultaneously produce and sell two competing architectures).

I'm not so sure that selling both the Amiga and a PC were a mistake, especially early on. The C= PC was sold into professional and business markets where Amiga didn't have the software. This allowed C= to offer a wider spectrum of products. PCs had good margins before competition saturated the market. The Carly Fiorina purchase of Compaq by HP has been recently criticized by some people also. Notice that she defended her performance at HP by giving the top line revenue and cash flow gains while she was in charge. I want to hear about the bottom line when buying a lower margin business. It's still debatable if the deal was bad as their were likely some advantages from synergies and reduced competition. I think it would be an exaggeration to call the buy of Compaq a disaster but HP probably would have been better off focusing on their higher margin printers.

We can not blame them for having abandoned the 68k platform. Business is business. But we could blame them for not facilitating the further development by one third partie.

There was no way forward for the 68k and the PPC was promising and big endian. Now, the PPC route is not only less compatible but very expensive and it is possible to go back to the 68k because of modern FPGA technology. The big questions:

Is Amiga performance or hardware cost more important?

performance->PPC, hardware cost->68k

Is Amiga performance or compatibility more important?

performance->PPC, compatibility->68k

I believe PPC CPU performance/price ratio has reached its peak and will start declining in the next 10 years (PPC CPU costs will increase and availability will decline because of supply and demand). Developing the 68k could be done cheaply with relatively low performance (68040-68060 performance level) but performance would scale nicely to more powerful FPGAs (constantly getting cheaper and availability is excellent) with custom ASICs as an option if sales grew high enough to support them. The 68k option is more scalable and flexible where a business could have complete control of their destiny and products while the PPC is controlled by market forces with strong head winds against it. The other option would be to port the AmigaOS to ARM or x86_64 but this would take a long time, the Amiga loses its uniqueness (valuable!) and compatibility. AROS has so far failed to create a market large enough to attract major software developers on these other processors after many years.

[matthey]

this is the closest i can find for you. i am sure i have this mmcd update ..somewhere.?
i will keep looking.

W3D_Picasso96M.library    4.2    17 lutego 2002    Libs:Warp3D/GFXdrivers

This W3D archive listing at your link shows a W3D_Picasso96M.library with the new date but no W3D_Picasso96MU.library with a new date. This looks like more evidence that the updated library does not exist and the information on Elbox's web site is incorrect. IMO, the chances of the Elbox web site being wrong is greater than the chance that updated W3D archives were sent out missing this updated library. It may be that a bug or problem was found in the library and it was removed from the archive but the listing was never updated.

It was not just to sell two competing platforms problematic. It was to manufacture AND sell them.

Once again, there are synergies and economies of scale if properly managed. More of the same cases and power supplies with different stickers could have been used, a few of the same chips and screws could have been bought in larger quantity for both, larger manufacturers can negotiate better prices even if the products vary, etc. Did C= take advantage? Well, it looks like management is where they failed. I expect the PC manufacturing changed a lot over the years from doing a lot of in house production to contracting most of the work to Asia which is how it is done today (and with razor thin margins).

Reducing a problem to one or two questions can sometimes be dangerous.
We should begin by defining compatibility type:
hardware or software (well, okay, here, there are only two questions)?
In general, compatibility and performance should not exclude each other, I would say they are complementary.

 

Compatibility and improved performance are possible at the same time but rarely complimentary in my experience. Compatibility depends on what technology is used to improve performance. Replacing a CISC CPU (the brain of the computer) with a RISC CPU is not exactly a minor transplant and is bound to have compatibility issues even if it is also big endian. Removing the custom chips also unnecessarily decreases compatibility considering their minor cost in modern hardware.

And yes, yesterday the 68k was condemned to disappear, mainly because of technological limitations. But is it still valid?

The 68k disappeared for management and marketing reasons and not technological limitations. The 68060 overcame every 68k obstacle. It became RISC internally with a modern instruction pipeline. Instruction decoding was improved so that it was no longer a bottleneck but, rather, the naturally compact code became an asset saving caches and memory. The 68k has most of the advantages of the x86 except the code is simpler to decode, the code is more compact, the CPU has more mostly general purpose registers and it is easier to program and debug. The older x86 proved to be adequately powerful and the 68k is a more modern and logical design. The industry keeps ignoring the advantages of CISC while RISC designs like SPARC, MIPS and PPC (ARMv8 to be determined) never live up to expectations. IMO, the 68k has great potential.

[matthey]

Natami would have been very expensive in fact, you would have get a very good equipped PC for that (part prices without soldering) so I do not think that the market would have been very big. Some would have bought it of course. A standalone device would be nice in future and is one of the future ideas for the apollo project. But first they should get the accellerators out.

Thomas was making the Natami with the high quality and many features he wanted. Yes, it would have been expensive in small quantity orders that were expected but cheap compared to AmigaOS 4 hardware. No pre-order numbers for production boards were gathered that I know of but I believe the interest was under estimated. The Natami MX bringup thread has 729k reads!

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=33366

If everyone looked at the thread 100 times, there would be 7296 interested people with no advertising! Natami cost estimates were likely conservative and based on small quantities. The Natami value is highly dependent on the performance of the CPU and the FPGA CPUs at that time were not as mature or fast (a real 68060 was much more cost). The price of FPGAs has dropped significantly since then. It may be affordable to use an FPGA with SerDes now for SATA/PCIe which may allow the board to be smaller and cheaper. It may be possible for the ethernet chip to be removed and driven by the FPGA directly as planned for the Apollo sandwich accelerator. The board would probably need at least a partial redesign depending on availability and price of parts like DDR2 to DDR3. The Natami, like the original Amiga, was ahead of its time but it would be easier to offer more value today.

http://www.natami.net/gfx/NatAmi64_MX/natamipinout.png

Weren't the Natami problems cache coherency problems? I had the impression that Thomas was trying to speed up the custom chips to what the hardware is capable of. Even the gfx speed up of the FPGA Arcade or Mist over AGA is huge and more would likely be possible in a higher spec Natami.

[matthey]

Not really RAM timing, but the problem was to pipeline the blitter *and* stay compatible with the original. The current FPGA implementation does not really use the full power of the FPGA for blitter emulation, it is more a step-by-step implementation. It could be made much faster by bundling the RAM accesses and fetch several words at once, similar to bursting (as far as I understand it).

The problem is that this also limits compatibility. With the original blitter, you can in principle configure your output register (channel D) such that it writes "in front of" the input registers (A,B,C), i.e. the input channels can see what the output writes, *if* you know the exact timing of the blitter, and which channel allocates which DMA time slot.

With any type of pipelining in place, this type of "trick" no longer works. The input registers would have their input already buffered since a long time before the buffered output ever appears on the bus, and hence blitter functionality would then be different.

...

Having a blitter is probably a "must have", but do we really need to emulate every nonsense that was done back then in the early days? *That* is the big question.

I don't see this is a show stopper at all. I would leave a compatible hardware blitter, perhaps with a global turbo mode bit which can be set for some speedup with less compatibility. Add an SIMD to the 68k and patch/change the AmigaOS and blit functions to use it for new software. The hardware blitter takes minimal logic so there is minimal waste. Gunnar has suggested adding an SIMD and using it to replace the blitter. From his forum posts, it sounded like he had even suggested it to ThomasH. Supposedly, they worked out an agreement for SAGA and CPU technology sharing so maybe the idea was well received.

Well, that's probably a bit harsh. "Nobody" is surely not correct (I would have wanted one), and I wouldn't have been afraid of a bit of blitter incompatibility as long as the os level routines still work fine (which is surely true if you don't try stupid things). At least it would have made the blitter "useful" again, in the sense of "the blitter is faster than the CPU".    It's not about games. At least not for me. It's about having a 256 color workbench that renders at acceptable speed without depending on the full patch-o-rama an RTG system is.  

The classic AmigaOS needs to go back into development. Better compatibility between AmigaOS 4.x and classic would make developing for a larger user base much easier. FPGA technology may allow the larger classic user base to expand quicker also. AmigaOS 4.x has an updated graphics.library supporting RTG now. Standards would also be helpful so we don't have a bunch of incompatible patched up classics. A-Eon could make it happen, and act half way interested, but the classic does not seem to be a priority.