FPGA Amiga

[kolla]

Brit Elite, while I find most of what you write very reasonable, I don't understand why it disturbs you that the Apollo Core has some features the 060 does not have. You can safely ignore their presence.

Who is disturbed? That is what he said he does, as do almost all coders and developers, they ignore the Apollo Core features. Nothing disturbing about that, is there? :hammer:

[kolla]

A serious company will probably get much more hardware developers interested and more software developers interested too. That in the end means more users and more people interested in what it offers, unlike the current state of the Apollo core.

Not to mention, a roadmap one can relate to, proper documentation and support in toolchains.

People have paid good money for 68k support in glibc and gcc before (not even so long ago, I think it was 7 years ago that CodeSourcery, now Mentor Graphics, owned by Siemens, updated the kernel and the GNU toolchain for Linux/m68k with threaded library support).

[kolla]

Oh, and yes, it is not a company doing this so expecting the project to be run like Motorola would have done it is a bit silly.

Exactly, so maybe it is also incorrect to speculate that the 68080 is what Motorola would have done if they had continued with 68k? It just happens that we *know* what Motorola would have done, had they continued with 68k - ColdFire.

Anyways, this "what if" was not directed at you, but at IanP, so no reason for you to feel all wounded and heart broken.

[kolla]

Gunnar and team have managed a full HW FPU solution on the current vampires in the latest beta builds of their core

So now it is full HW FPU on gold 2.7 too? No software emulation taking place? You know this for a fact? Or is it just the usual spin? Because the hearsay was exactly same thing a year ago.

Cost $320 dollars for a V2 Vampire is not that much really, vs what a thousand or two dollars for an old 68060 card that may be in good enough shape to run properly?

I have systems with Vampire cards and I have systems with 030 cards and I have systems with 060 cards, and CSPPC, and I have MiST, Minimig, MiSTer and soon FleaFPGA... which of all those do you think gets used _least_?

NG systems are way out of my price range.

For USD 320 you can get a damn nice AROS system, brand new.

[kolla]

Was confirmed the other day on IRC and the forum

Experience tells me that such confirmations are pretty worthless.

Lets see the one that is made by a team you have a predisposed hatred for?

I have zero hate here, what you are seeing is disappointment and eye-rolling over a project that initially was cool, but then turned out to be something else.

And no, i don't use the Vampire systems much. Most of the software I want to use on them does not run on them, and the software that does run, runs just as well and even better elsewhere. My most used system is hands down the MiST, which is a fraction as fast as the Vampire, but can pretty much run the same software, and with AGA it can even run a lot of software that the Vampire systems cannot run currently. Maybe with Gold core 2.7 and 3 they will see more usage, but I kinda doubt it.

Okay sure, but it doesn't boost my classic hardware.

So? You said "NG is too expensive", neither MorphOS nor OS4 boost your classic hardware either.

I suggest you buy Vampire card, now, at once, while you can. Wait for V4? There are no guarantees that there will be a V4.

[kolla]

PPC being joint design of Apple and Motorola with Apple effectively locking everyone else out of using it on the desktop.

It was AIM - Apple, IBM and Motorola. Apple at the time was willing to license out their OS for other PPC systems than their own. There was PREP, there was CHRP. There were several operating systems targeting the PowerPC, not just IBM's AIX and Apple's MacOS. IBM also had OS/2. Even Microsoft was developing WindowsNT for PowerPC, and there was plans for a PowerPC 615 with integrated x86 execution to help Microsoft on the way. What pulled the feet under PowerPC on the desktop was Apple pulling their license program, while IBM had already given up on OS/2. Microsoft was more than happy to just stay on x86.

With the ColdFire cutting a lot out of the 68k line, and making it a less than ideal replacement, Apple essentially dealt death blows to the Amiga, The ST and Sharp's X68000 simultaneously.

That is such nonsense - what killed the Amiga, besides Commodore screwing up - was the INTERNET. Networking the Amiga was cumbersome at best, all the software was geared towards BBS and dial-up use. Ethernet solutions were rare and expensive, the TCP stacks (AS-225/Inet-225 and AmiTCP) were not exactly top notch, bug ridden and limited. Not to mention incompatible with each other, and incompatible with Envoy - the networking stack for SOHO Amiga LAN networks. There was zero protection. This was before smart firewalls, even NAT was not common. MuFS was created in sort of desperation. AMIX was there, GNU was there, BSD and Linux came along. A whole lot of Amiga developers moved to BSD and Linux and did well developing on those platforms, most even did it on 68k hardware to begin with - and still do! Porting all this new *ix software to Amiga was sometimes trivial, but most often hard. Fred Fish tried hard. IXemul was born, GeekGadgets, ADE. There was AmiNIX, a BSD kernel running on top of AmigaOS.

But it all boiled down to one single thing - AmigaOS was doomed due to its design, due to one single shared memory space, due to lack of _any_ kind of security. It was obvious that if you put your computer online, you _need_ protection, and Amiga just didn't have that, and hence developers did not see any future in it. Security through obscurity is no good business model.

[kolla]

Well that and there are a ton of videos out there from Devs testing that core.

Testing seems to be limited to running demos?

Serious?, you're relentless on multiple forums.

So are many others, don't confuse enthusiasm with hate.

MiST is only realy good if you only just want to do WHDLoad or classic things. My MiST has literally been a Paper Weight even before getting my Vampire(s).

Right "or classic things" - I am in it for the "classic things". When I use Vampire systems, it's like using a broken UAE setup, there is speed, but software often crash in obscure ways and behave weirdly. And the speed is not really _that_ great either. On the MiST, with a few exceptions, things work consistently, and as expected.

Never said they did, still they're expensive.

But AROS isn't, and AROS is also "NG".

Already have two of them, looking forward the V4, but don't really have an interest in the stand-alone version as I'm a fan of using the classic hardware.

When you have a V4 inside the Amiga, with Gold Core 3, your "classic hardware" is reduced to a glorified keyboard, mouse and joystick extension of the V4.

[kolla]

I doubt it, since it is not related to one system or one power supply.

[kolla]

68k was continued, it was called ColdFire, I'm sure many of us had a ColdFire card at some point. If AmigaOS was a relevant operating system with responsible owners, they could have made a transition to some other architecture. But it wasn't. Commodore engineers knew that both the hardware _and_ the operating system had little to offer for the future, hence they were working with other ideas and plans. PA-RISC, Hombre etc, and from what I have heard... Windows NT, for the next "Amiga".

Anyways... back on the topic - FleaFPGA boards are shipping!

[kolla]

I'd blame Apple first for possibly wanting to handicap the Amiga and Atari by abandoning the 68k knowing it might effectively kill it.

Here's another theory - Apple tried to stay relevant on the desktop by moving to an architecture with a more promising future than what 68k could offer.

I always look back and wish the 68k platforms had been a united front as far as Motorola was concerned because I still think it would have all been different if the ColdFire line had offered a full replacement for the 68k.

For Motorola, 68k was most and foremost a product to the telecommunication industry, to aero-space industry, to military industry, to all kinds of embedded usage - and NOT to desktop computers and workstations, which all had moved on, or were in the process of moving on, to much more modern and faster architectures.

Motorola had the StreamMaster reference platform using the ColdFire and VMLabs' NUON chip.  If AmigaOS could have just been ported to that...

Hey, what if AmigaOS had been ported to several architectures, like x86, amd64, PowerPC, ARM... omg - it kinda was, wasn't it. AROS did exactly that.

But then we're just back to the flawed design of AmigaOS...  I think the only way it would have moved forward without memory protection would be to run instances of the Amiga atop another OS.  Each instance would run in a protected space and all could communicate as virtual Amigas... It wouldn't be emulation as they'd still be running on a real processor, but the lowest level of the OS would need be something entirely new and able to mature into the real UI over time.

You are sort of describing MorphOS with its abox.

[kolla]

And your point is? Look, I've here an A2000 with a 2060 in it, and Matze's Graphics card. Guess what. The native hardware is not really used anymore, except the keyboard, and Paula for sound (sometimes). I do not really have a problem with that at all, the machine does exactly what I want it to do.

What's not classic about an A2000 CPU card with a 060 on it?
And a graphics card made just like they used to make them, could almost mistake it for a Piccolo SD64. Classic.

Amiga is for me much more a software defined term.

Maybe you should change hardware with TrashyMG then, he is "a fan of using the classic hardware", and I am not sure if a Vampire card with Apollo Core falls under "classic hardware", and the Apollo Team is in dire need of developers like you

[kolla]

a SCSI chip designed for PC

That I have never seen. PCs were about the last platform to adapt SCSI, while other "Small Computers" had been using this "Standard Interface" for years and years. On the PC, it was all about plugging something on the ISA bus, hence XT and IDE.