PowerPC accelerator - how does that work then?

[itix]

Or to make long story short: PPC is usable only as co-processor where it is completing heavy computing on a background. Calling an OS from PPC is too expensive.

[itix]

That's not exactly true, though, is it? There were plenty of applications that ran almost entirely on the PPC, calling the OS to do IO, graphics etc.

What applications? Unless you mean games, do you?

Anything using native UI is fail. Software like IBrowse/PPC was not an option.

Nevertheless PPC boards were expensive doorstops. Fast 68060 accelerator boards would have been much better investment.

[itix]

Not sure Id go so far as to say they were useless, but I agree an '060 is a better option for classics than ppc.

I had BPPC+BVision with PPC native JPEG datatypes and mpega.library installed but that is all. Few games (often buggy) and few demos didn't really justify investment.

Later I got chance to run MorphOS 0.x on it but in the end it was just waste of money.

I think culmination point was when I tried PPC native Unzip program that was slower than 68k native Unzip on my lousy 68040 @ 25 MHz.

[itix]

Processor intensive applications; typically games and media players principally. Not much productivity wise, though there were some utilities that could benefit. PPC accelerated datatypes were handy, particularly image ones with the OS3.9 picture.datatype where colour conversion and dithering can be offloaded to PPC too.

PPC native picture datatypes were nice but they were slower than 68k counterparts for small images. Still fast enough to replace 68k datatypes on my system where possible.

Video players on Amiga were always outdated and could display only few formats. And often my BlizzardPPC @ 160MHz was not fast enough to play videos at full frame rate.... PPC accelerated MP3 players were nice even if I had only 8-bit Paula.

PPC native Quake was very cool though. Even if little illegal. I am sure Quake sold more PPC accelerators than anything else...

But when I think about it paying 250-300 euro for PPC accelerator maybe was not that bad... it is just funny when an accelerator board costs more than your computer is worth :-)

[itix]

Well if you don't want any of that old hardware, go ahead and throw it my bin.

I sold it many years ago :-)

[itix]

and didn`t provided OS 3.9 code as assumed in original plan.

Oh, you can blame Haage & Partner for that...

Problem is that all app and game development software houses didn`t have that kind of patience in shrinking market situation.

For companies staying with Amiga was only waste of time. The market was not growing at all while other platforms were booming.

And even today if mass produced (ordered) PPC chips could be affordable and fast enough for some last MacOS X, maybe ReactOS, Android, Linux, MOS and AmigaOS 4 - but CUSA likes to play on what`s easily avail and sure and not to really invest in R&D. And nuff about rebranders of everything including Amiga name.

Commodore didn't choose 68000 because they wanted to make Motorola big. Motorola was already big and successful with their 68000.

This is how it should work with PPC chips. Freescale and AMCC make it big. Freescale have been trying it very hard but I guess they are failing...

Nevertheless the market situation is not in our hands. If CUSA is scucessful with their products, good for them. If not, I still dont care.

I enjoyed MorphOS on my Amiga 1200 with BlizzardPPC and I still enjoy it on my Mac mini, Efika, everything. Even if I consider BPPC/CSPPC ddin't deliver what I expected in 90s.

Hope that it was nice educational voyage :-)

Thanks :-)