Elbox Dragon "news"

[Karlos]

At least the name is pretty descriptive: Drag-on :-D

Seriously, it's hard not to be entirely jaded when it comes to amiga HW announcements these days. I really hope they prove the critics wrong on this, but I stopped holding my breath ages ago for this.

[Karlos]

B00tDisk wrote:
At this point there's been more hardware NOT produced than produced for the Amiga... :roll:

There's been more stuff "not produced" than produced for anything, at least given that there's no theoretical upper limit on what can be produced...

There were some problems with the previous MCF5475 Coldfire versions as they did not work as they should

How enigmatic. I assume they mean that it didn't run 680x0 object code without freaky side effects ;-)

If so, I don't suppose the next batch will be any better, either.

[Karlos]

@r-tea

The incompatibilities between 680x0 object code and the coldfire are well documented, including some opcodes that are implemented but slightly differently to their genuine 680x0 counterparts. It would be interesting to see how this issue is  solved, or even if in fact it was enough of an issue in the first place to be a problem.

Any idea when these things will be on sale ?

[Karlos]

As I see it:

Elbox seem to almost be two companies. One that makes hardware and one that makes pretty nasty software.

The former side of the company is to be applauded. It was presumably no minor job getting a coldfire based system up and running and I can't deny I'd like one, thanks very much ;-)

The arm that sees fit to make drivers that can beast your hard drive deserve to be lambasted for it. It's completely immoral to have such a devious device. On any other system it would be classed as malware.

To all those thinking that such things are fair game, see how you would feel about it if a malfuncitoning hack or patch trashed some bit of "other" memory that in turn made the drivers think whatever condition they need to trash your RDB has been met.

OS 3.x does not have any memory protection and given the surfeit of hacks and patches out there, this is not as unrealistic as it sounds. Possibly it has already happened and the victim was not even aware of what actually caused it.

Seriously, having such code is reprehensible.

[Karlos]

Piru wrote:
@stopthegop

They later claimed it was their anti-piracy measure, so I doubt it.

Pure speculation on my part but it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that this could have been badly managed "damage limitation". If so, I think it would have done them a lot less harm to say "we had a rogue developer that has since been disciplined|sacked|whatever and future drivers are guarenteed free from malicious code".

However, to all intents and purposes, they look as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of gently steaming poo.