in case you are interested to test new fpga accelerators for a600/a500

[kolla]

MacOS in emulation on Phoenix/Apollo, it's like Schrödinger's cat it seems. I'd love to see examples of applications that truly benefit from a fast CPU used with Phoenix, applications like Lightwave 3D, DPaint, Brilliance, Imagine, World Constction Set etc. I seriously do not care about Doom clones _at all_, nor do I care about WHDLoad of games that already work perfectly fine on unexpanded A500. There is one video on Youtube showing X-DVE on Vampire600, and it is totally unimpressive.

[kolla]

A little confusing about all the plans for boards.

In order of time, we should see (but read carefully, because this is part of the plan to confuse the enemy):

1) A developer board with the Arrow Be Micro. It has HDMI, Ethernet, but only 25.000 L.E. This board seemed adequate only one month ago, but the core is grown too much. These boards are almost ready, are few, so they will be used for testing purpose

2) The Vampire 500. It has 40.000 LE, hdmi, ide... seems to me that Igor already purchased the PCB and it is on the way

3) The Vampire 600b. It is the old vampire "upgraded".
At beginning, igor has planned to have 10.000 LE, but later he decided to switch 40.000 LE so it is delayed. No HDMI.

4)  A new board from Christoph Hoehne. It should be the developer board with some upgrades and a new design to fit also in the a600 (with a different connector).

5) A new PCI board with the FPGA, to speedup Winuae.

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=2742&x=2&z=aIEhYP

My biggest question though, is: who is "the enemy"?

[kolla]

And yeah, pretty weird that it's impossible to get a straight answer to a bolean question; will MacOS work under emulation on Phoenix?

[kolla]

Yeah, I am the one who brought up Mac emulation, both because it is an excellent compatibility test, and because it is usefull as old MacOS still has plenty of software that is unmatched on AmigaOS.

As of right now though, more pressing issue is that reaction applications in OS3.9 apparently do not run on Phoenix yet, so no Prefs. I am curious if latest workbench.library (which is 020+) works.

The FPU is (or rather, is planned to be) from what I understand, not compatible with existing FPUs, so no benefit for old FPU intensive software like Lightwave 3D, Imagine etc.

No MMU, just talks about some sort of new MMU that Thomas for sure will fix OS support for with his libraries, same Thomas who is highly critical about a lot of the design decissions and who has clearly stated he is not interested in supporting new instrictions. Old software requiring MMU, from debuggers to VMM and whatever, will not work.

No backend support in any compilers, I am curious what plans OlafS3 plans to support the new instructions etc with AROS/m68k when he has no gcc that support it.

Talks about how Phoenix will be so fast that compatibility with existing software is of no concern, which begs the question - why not just use ARM or some other more relevant architecture instead?

Talks about "killer apps" and "modern browsers", yet boards crippled with only 128MB of RAM, a lot of unecessary incompatibility, shunning off OS developers as well as compilator developers.

Talks about "an enemy", whoever that may be.

Lack of openness, lack of documentation and design route that seems totally ad-hoc, and attitudes that have shunned away other developers for years already. All this is main reason why Natami never really happened in the first place.

Conclusion? Gunnar seems hellbent on creating his own dream CPU, which is fine. Less fine is that he also seems hellbent on luring the entire Amiga 68k community into his proprietary trap. Yeah right, good luck with that.

So, I'd love to see more open and colaborative people to do a more usefull and compatible m68k softcore. Which brings me back to - who is this enemy the Apollo team is talking of?

[kolla]

Yeah, I am the one who brought up Mac emulation, both because it is an excellent compatibility test, and because it is usefull as old MacOS still has plenty of software that is unmatched on AmigaOS.

As of right now though, more pressing issue is that reaction applications in OS3.9 apparently do not run on Phoenix yet, so no Prefs. I am curious if latest workbench.library (which is 020+) works.

The FPU is (or rather, is planned to be) from what I understand, not compatible with existing FPUs, so no benefit for old FPU intensive software like Lightwave 3D, Imagine etc.

No MMU, just talks about some sort of new MMU that Thomas for sure will fix OS support for with his libraries, same Thomas who is highly critical about a lot of the design decissions and who has clearly stated he is not interested in supporting new instrictions. Old software requiring MMU, from debuggers to VMM and whatever, will not work.

No backend support in any compilers, I am curious what plans OlafS3 plans to support the new instructions etc with AROS/m68k when he has no gcc that support it.

Talks about how Phoenix will be so fast that compatibility with existing software is of no concern, which begs the question - why not just use ARM or some other more relevant architecture instead?

Talks about "killer apps" and "modern browsers", yet boards crippled with only 128MB of RAM, a lot of unecessary incompatibility, shunning off OS developers as well as compilator developers.

Talks about "an enemy", whoever that may be.

Lack of openness, lack of documentation and design route that seems totally ad-hoc, and attitudes that have shunned away other developers for years already. All this is main reason why Natami never really happened in the first place.

Conclusion? Gunnar seems hellbent on creating his own dream CPU, which is fine. Less fine is that he also seems hellbent on luring the entire Amiga 68k community into his proprietary trap. Yeah right, good luck with that.

So, I'd love to see more open and colaborative people to do a more usefull and compatible m68k softcore. Which brings me back to - who is this enemy the Apollo team is talking of?

[kolla]

You mean TG68 core from Tobi, the Minimig core is the chipset, not CPU. The Apollo team is nowhere near anything else but talks when it comes to chipset implimentation, talks about SuperAGA/SAGA when they have not been able to show anything working at all yet.

[kolla]

And WHDLoad runs fine on Phoenix - but WHDLoad and the games it supports also run fine on any Amiga with a bit of RAM already, none of the old games have any use for an improved 68k CPU.

[kolla]

Funny how anyone who tries to work with Gunnar on this end up having personal issues with him, don't you think? And regarding MacOS, several people have pointed out compatibility issues, but Gunnar says it is all lies. Yet he has yet to prove it by showing MacOS actually running on the core, which should be fairly easy.

I believe this will sort out by itself as people get their hands on the boards and realize how little difference it really makes - you still have a system that needs heaploads of patched, even more old software will not work, you will spend time switching back and forth different accelerators for compatibility, the lack of applications to benefit from Phoenix will be minimal. I kinda suspect that "the enemy" they talk of is Individual Computers.

[kolla]

And btw, since Thomas is the guy who wrote PhoenixInit which the Phoenix core relies on for running AmigaOS at all, I suspect he may already have a board capable of running the Phoenix core. I know he has stated that he has a Natami developer board too. I would say it well worth to note that a person who has been responsible of updating core components of AmigaOS for a very long period of time, who has been involved in Natami development, who Gunnar himself says will take care of MMU issues in Apollo/Phoenix with his library pack... this same Thomas you claim have personal issues? Oh I don't know, I really just see a guy who keeps calling all critics "liars", but who refuse to disprove the lies, and instead just keeps pushing away those who could actually make his solution profitable for everyone.

[kolla]

What is your problem? On the holy crusade against Gunnar? You do not need to buy it and you do not need to use it.

I am not on any crusade against Gunnar, all I did was asking a simple question - will MacOS run under emulation on the Phoenix? That is really a question that can be answered with either "yes" or "no". A whole lot of indicators suggest "no", but Gunnar call those "lies". Promises are worthless in Amigaland, and Natami was a project flooded with promises. And fact is Gunnar has not promised _anything_, but people like you and certain others, keep posting on forums how this and that is promised. I really wish you could stop posting on behalf of people you do not represent. Gunnar has not promised _anything_, and in any case, promises are worthless - only running software has any true value here.

Curious - have you seen AROS running on Phoenix yet?

[kolla]

Here's an idea.  Be a beta tester and see for yourself if MacOS will run on it or not!

If someone could provide information about the time frame, I may very well do that. However, it seems like the developer boards are already have FPGAs too limited to hold the just now recently decides minimum requirements, so I don't know if it is worth it, looks like waiting for the next batch is better option for me. Currently I'm not home anyways, and wont be for another 5 months.

[kolla]

What are you up now? What is your problem?

My problem is obviously getting simple answers to simple questions - you are sn AROS/m68k user and distro maintainer - and you are eagerly involved in Apollo/Phoenix - there are plenty of people with Vampire600 and other boards that run Phoenix, you communicate with Gunnar and the Apollo team on their forum, people who should have no problem whatsoever to try out AROS on their hardware - have you ever seen AROS run on the Phoenix core? The answer is either "yes" or "no".

[kolla]

XboxOwn: hey there, are you trolling too now?

I ask because the RAM limitation with these boards were discussed a couple of months ago, as normal here, it ended up in a hilarious "discussion" about what constitutes a 32bit computer. Hence I find it very amusing that you bring that up again.

[kolla]

Yes Thomas has been helpful is the past.

But I have to admit that I find this open ranting quite surprising.
If a friend is concerned about some details
 then I would have expected some email or phone call to talk about it
 not getting such a call but getting started the discussion with public critised is a bit funny.

I am totally outside of the project and only know Thomas from postings here on amiga.org, and I am not at all surprised that he has concerns, so how you of all people can be surprised is beyond me. I am quite sure he has raised his concerns to you earlier, as has Matthey. I recall when Matthey released his 68k roadmap and found it an odd thing to do, but now I totally understand where it came from.

A lot of misunformation was posted here.
People like Kolla seem totally confused now.

Actually I am not confused at all, I am just disappointed by so many factors of this project. It's kinda like Natami all over again.

Frankly I can absolutely not follow Thomas logic.
On the one hand side he is afraid that new instructions would kill split the community
and that this would kill AMIGA - on the other hand Thomas did ask for special instruciton to decode JPEG faster.
I really do not get why the one is *evil* but the other one would be a god sent.

Look, I am not a hardware engineer or software developer, but even I understand what he says - which is to keep the CPU clean and compatible, and put all "extra fun" in dedicated units.

I am all for MikeJ's approach - make damn sure you have pretty much 100% working and compatible 68020 core, _then_ tweak it for speed, piece by piece, so if something breaks, it is easy to pinpoint why, and fix/backtrack. When this stabilizes, by all means - make coprocessors all you like, but keep the 68020 CPU core untouched and as clean as possible. What you seem to be doing is tweaking the CPU before almost before anything at all is running, which in my view will result in a whole lot of unecessary bugs all over the place. But maybe I am jusy stupid and you really are a genious. Time will show.

[kolla]

Oh God I hope not!! That is not my intention honestly. I will be quite to avoid unintentional trolling

Allright I was very tempted to to answer you that you sadly have to wait for Gunnar's promised 64bit addressing mode, which btw is something he may do on a whim any day now, so that you can even have 4GB and beyond. But that would have been trollish of me

[kolla]

If people working on Gunnar's project are so unprofessional as to quit like cry-babies because of MY posts, then Gunnar and the rest of us really are better off without them!

Have you printed out his avatar photo and framed it above your bed already?