[Vampire] The AMIGA Future Is NOW! AROS!

[wawrzon]

@psxphill

i cannot judge this, as im not familiar with the lowlevel hardware subjects. in fact tonis patch fixed ide behaviour on two different a4000 models i tried this with (no ide doubles) and didnt negatively affected a1200 (tested).

i passed your comments over to toni. but considering your insight maybe it would be better if you talked to him directly about such matters. you could join in aros dev ml, if only to see whats been posted and eventually comment on it.

the problem booting vampire is still unsolved and vampire related code starts to be poured in. i think it would be valuable to have competent people review and discuss it.

[wawrzon]

from toni:

Do I really need to explain this when it should have been obvious by
actually looking at the code?

AltStatus is by design not used with A600/A1200/A4000 IDE because it is
practically guaranteed there are Gayle/A4000 IDE based IDE designs that
don't implement altstatus (or devcon) at all or have some weird internal
IDE doubler hardware because Commodore A600/A1200/A4000 IDE driver never
used either registers.

altstatus read gets automatically redirected to normal status read if
altio is not set which caused the original problem because this code was
also waiting for interrupt at the same time. It was obvious bug and
obvious fix, driver is designed to support non-AltIO mode but didn't
check it properly here.

Setting it to FF is just not to cause compiler warnings and also set it
to impossible value, anyone who reads the log should also know what it
can mean.

please, dont shoot the messanger;)

[wawrzon]

FWIW it looks like whoever wrote https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Developer/Docs/Devices/ATA knew about the issues too.

must be jason, the other aros68k developer, who is now gone inactive. as you see he didnt get past this point, which is now fixed by toni.

[wawrzon]

"because it is
practically guaranteed there are Gayle/A4000 IDE based IDE designs that
don't implement altstatus (or devcon) at all"

I disagree with "practically guaranteed", the registers are in the drive & All gayle/a4000 IDE designs support reading the registers or you wouldn't be able to fit a 4 port ide adapter in the first place. It's only the ide doubler that affects it & in your test sample then none of them had one. However I'd argue against using alt status apart from logging and not to read it at all when it's impossible to read it, which in this case is what toni did. However there are still a load of cases where it reads the alt status, some in DEBUG code and some are always read which he hasn't done anything about. Which leaves race conditions waiting to happen. I am perfectly happy to leave him to it.

look: discussing it with me doesnt make any sense. you are on eab. if you dont want to register on aros ml, yo might still open a thread there and post your considerations and proposals, toni might or might not comment upon. thats how things may be trated constructive rather than only talking without any consequences.

what concerns c++ classes and stuff, bebbos amiga-m68k gcc6.3.0 patches will probably find their way on aros. toni expressed interest and bebbo has joined the list. he even started experimenting with compiling aros with his compiler but he is now silent for a while, both on eab as on aros ml. hope this will not fall asleep.

[wawrzon]

@kolla
im simply not aware of these issues. let alone aros team is. can you get serial log in case it doesnt boot?

[wawrzon]

I can give it a try when I finally get home... :p

Anyways, it may be faster to just contact Chaos, a developer of the Minimig core for the MiST and also the original Minimig, he is well aware about this problem.

http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/#comment-3192

sorry. on the site you linked to i dont see how i can contact him direcly to make him aware. either you supply me with contact details via pm or you might want to contact him yourself. keep in mind its convenient to keep people working on something offloaded rather than forward everything up to them. they are too few. at least thats what im trying to do myself. an effort like that to be succesful needs to be distributed.

[wawrzon]

Why is AROS on Vampire (future standalone or existing one) better thing than AROS on x64 hardware?

What are the advantages?

-Dooz

its like asking in what amiga is better than a current pc.
it isnt better, its just another platform, except that you can run all the amiga software natively. that extends the available propsal enormously.

btw, a bit offtopic, but heres aros running a warpos demo on my 150mhz cyberstormppc:

https://ibb.co/k0Kt3F

[wawrzon]

So in AROS 68k I can run AmigaOS3 68k applications directly without recompile at the same speed like Vampire card that we have today?

without recompile. aros supports ks1.x-3.x apps. which doesnt mean that just everything will run fine as of today. but this is aimed at. what concerns speed, the os itself isnt as fast as the genuine one yet, but we are getting there. many things like larger png icons are slowing down the experience initially, but running a binary is at the same or close to the same speed as on the original os.

 Also I can use RTG or SAGA chipset like real AGA? Also with improved AGA in the future?

yes.

On the other hand what happens when I start AOS3 68k application under AROS x86? I guess it is emulated with 68k software emulator under x86 AROS or application must be recompiled?
-Dooz

i never attempted that. to be honest i dont know if and how to run 68k binary under aros x86. there have been at least some une implementation ready or underway and i guess distributions provide that. other than that the app needs to be recompiled to run native on the target platform.

[wawrzon]

its simply a matter of interest and contribution. if there were people actually willing to make it happen, one could at least fork aros if not branch it out withing its own source tree. same for support for ppc platforms. whoever wants may step in and update these targets. this thread should be about currently available constructive options and how to help with these.

[wawrzon]

@Acill
there is olafs distribution (aros vision) but it is very huge (about 1 gb) and includes a lot of contributions, which makes it probably to heavy a starting point for amiga hardware. also it is not up to date, and latest changes have fixed a number of amiga hardware issues ans well as sped up aros on amigas. id advise to start with a4000, except you have 040 or 060 in your a1200.

download amiga-m68k-bootiso here:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/de/nightly1.php
decompress it to a bootable amiga partition.
then you have to do two changes:
edit your s-s adding this line at the beginning of it:

boot/amiga/AROSBootstrap ROM boot/amiga/aros.hunk.gz

it will softkick aros from your amiga rom. optionally you can add p96 driver files in the same line as arosbootstrap to activate your rtg card, like that for instance:

boot/amiga/AROSBootstrap ROM boot/amiga/aros.hunk.gz boot/amiga/PicassoIV.card boot/amiga/CirrusGD5446.chip

the other thing, not necessary but advisable is to delete prefs/env/sys/theme.var to get rid of decoration. it will be too heavy on aga for now due to alphablending and such. it can be turned on again later. ah and disable the window and desktop backgrounds in wanderer prefs, they take ages to load.

ill try to put up together a simple out of the box distribution next days if people are interested, i just dont have any server at hand.

[wawrzon]

If I had the time, I'd try to resurrect the PPC port.

yet you have time to engage in flamewars on forums. sam ppc target has built last time 26.02.15. it shouldnt be that hard to "resurrect", but if you ask me, i dont care.

But neither AROS variant was originally focused on 68K applications.

Once up and running, the real work would have to commence.

majority of amiga applications i tried work with aros anyway. so what is this comment supposed to mean?

[wawrzon]

you can still run 68k emu within 32bit aros target platform, like i386. at least the pointers are the same size for first, solution for 64bit can be then postponed.

but it turns again in highly theoretical utopic discussion. please stick to goals within reach for the time being. which is aros-m68k on vampire or stuff like that.

currently some support for the most active developer might be appropriate:
http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=10523&forum=4&post_id=104849#forumpost104849

he delivered essential sppedups last weeks which also essentially affects m68k platforms.

[wawrzon]

one can optimise the OS for Vampire specific features.

we can optimize os as a whole. since nick last commits after wider aros/vampire discussion aros is actually usable on my a4000/060 and bearable with 040.

[wawrzon]

Hopefully more interest in AROS 68k will continue that to the point where it's usable on even an 020. I'm not sure that 68k compilers have had much love in a long time.

probably best amiga crosscompiler in a while and aros 68k backend candidate:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1163255&highlight=gcc6#post1163255

(available as source, so after its been tested changes can be merged into the 6.3.x diff, it can then even be built native for 68k, as aros compilers do)