Hyperion Blog Update: AmigaOS 4.1 Classic Promo Video

[Karlos]

The BVision is based on the Permedia2. It's totally outclassed by any supported Radeon, both in terms of available memory and speed*.

However, I do still have a special soft spot for the BVision card. When I first got it, it totally transformed my everyday usage of the A1200, moreso than the PPC card it attached to. Seeing actual hardware accelerated 3D on the machine (even if it is laughable by current standards) was a buzz

*An exception is in the bus transfer speed from the CPU to the video RAM. For an A1200, CPU access to devices on the Mediator1200's PCI backbone is considerably slower than the CPU -> BVision. This may mean that some applications run a bit quicker on the BVision. The only obvious one that springs to mind is CPU-decoded video playback.

[Karlos]

(Karlos still won't part with his... )

You'd have to wrest it from my cold, dead hands. I don't even have any PAL capable display devices to survive without it.

[Karlos]

One hitman on the way to your house even as we speak...

Many have tried, few have survived to tell the tale.

[Karlos]

Shame there isn't some adapter for connecting the radeon directly to the CSPPC expansion bus.

There is: the GRexx PCI that was designed by Phase5. Sadly, I don't think it's supported in OS4 (part of the original red/blue platform split, the GRexx is AFAIK, supported by MOS), or is likely to be in future. I'd love to be wrong about that though. Speaking from a pure hardware perspective, it was a far better solution for the BlizzardPPC than the Mediator1200 IMNSHO.

[Karlos]

Jens should totally get on it

A new PCI expansion board for the BlizzardPPC/CSPPC expansion bus for which drivers for 3.x/4.x/MOS etc. can be independently developed.

I'd kill for such an expansion

[Karlos]

Ok, I'm sure an English pound = an American dollar but what does a bob equal?

Absence of pie.

[Karlos]

Exactly. Mine is a 200Mhz 603 and it won't do much more than workbench...

I dunno, when I start it up, once booted my CPU meter docky thing shows it idling along at no more than 5% CPU use.

I think if there is a problem with the classic it is that most of the OS4 native software so far has been developed on faster systems and doesn't necessarily scale down well to 603 and secondly, the legacy 3.x software you might have for 68K doesn't necessarily run faster than it did on your real 68K and in some cases may run slower (such is the way with emulation, particularly on a CPU not orders of magnitude faster than the emulated one).