Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Hombre docs on Aminet  (Read 2309 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline psxphill

Re: Hombre docs on Aminet
« on: July 18, 2017, 01:58:35 PM »
Quote from: goldfish;828359
Hardware sounds good but what OS would it have been running is there any version of Amiga OS for the prototype ?

Part of the reason for picking HP PA-RISC is that it was supported by Windows NT. However for the low end systems it's unclear what they would have used, if they'd ever gotten that far.

It maybe would just have been a boot loader in rom with the games linked to libraries that hit the hardware directly.

Of course they wanted it to use AmigaOS, but a lot of it was written in assembler and they didn't have time to do anything. They may as well have wanted a unicorn.
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Hombre docs on Aminet
« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2017, 05:33:09 PM »
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;828369
I thought that was interesting, too.  Wonder if the folks doing the presenting had any inkling of what was to come?  I mean, they had to have, right?


They knew exactly what was coming. They were trying to attract buyers.
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Hombre docs on Aminet
« Reply #2 on: July 18, 2017, 07:25:59 PM »
Quote from: Whaka;828372
they talk about unix too in the documentation.
we can also imagine a kind of AmigaOSX :lol:

You may as well imagine it, because they were. The PlayStation was already well known in the industry and development kits were in the hands of game developers.

They talk about unix and Windows NT because HP were talking about it, not because they had any practical means to deliver it.

The way the PlayStation chips were developed was very similar, Sony chose their technology partner (LSI) because they could integrate everything into two chips. LSI had made a MIPS R3000 compatible soft core and had a library of other cores (jpeg decoding, serial ports etc) that they had already written that could be tweaked to fit in the space available and meet the requirements. It's unfortunate that the HDL hasn't turned up, someone actually got hold of the N64 HDL.

I like the PlayStation. In the HP PA RISC vs Sparc vs MIPS part of the presentation, they seem to have purposefully used un-optimised MIPS code. The biggest problem in the PS1 is the instruction cache is too small, the memory is too slow and while rendering it can suffer from bus contention similar to the amiga when running out of chip ram and the blitter is busy. But it's likely Hombre would be as bad or worse, as they were going to execute from graphics memory. At least on the PlayStation the texture ram/frame buffer was separate from main memory. So once your textures were uploaded then it's just fetching the draw list that will be slow down the CPU.

FWIW according to the presentation, Hombre used the same non perspective corrected texturing as the PlayStation. So it would have had the same distortion problems. The Saturn was worse, the N64 was better.
« Last Edit: July 18, 2017, 07:47:32 PM by psxphill »