PowerPC accelerator - how does that work then?

[vox]

So nobody outside of OS4/MOS went the Apple route and simply did 68k in emulation? Huh.

Exact reason why OS 4 and MOS are seen as natural progression of Amiga PPC Cards. Unlike CUSA trolls that try to explain it was meant to be x86 way.

Sadly, while AmigaOS and MOS went PPC routes,
PPC kind of died as dekstop platforn, primary because it was left by Microsoft, IBM, Apple and most of Linux distro in that exact order of time (and all of them were part of lets replace x86 with PPC alliance in the beginning)

[vox]

Let's be clear about one thing. Commodore (the original) never produced any PPC hardware for Amiga at any time and future PPC compatibility was not on their radar. They did, however, produce x86 boards but they were designed to run x86 operating systems (typically MS-DOS) for business use. They weren't integrated with AmigaOS to any extent.

The PPC boards were entirely third party aftermarket expansions. However, their intent was to augment the host machine and allow AmigaOS to run applications that would otherwise be too processor intensive for 68K.

Surely, because PowerPC wasn`t avail at time Commodore died.
And yes, they made PC clones, but that didn`t do well.

They also did Sidecar AT/XT expansion boards to make Amiga hardware compatibile with PC, but only up to 286 or 386. On original Amiga 1000 1985 presentation PC Task or similar was demonstrated with machine.

So there is no trouble Commodore wanted soft or hard x86 compatibility to utilize the bussiness software, but AmigaOS never went x86 in any part.

However, there were many PPC related projects
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ppchistory.html
out of which only MOS and OS4 (and AROS PPC) survived

Amiga DE / OS 5 was supposed to support both PPC and x86 but never went real.

pOS, a WB enhancement that was independent idea of ProDAD was made beta 68k and also supposed to become PowerPC
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/pos.html

[vox]

Let's be clear about one thing. Commodore (the original) never produced any PPC hardware for Amiga at any time and future PPC compatibility was not on their radar. They did, however, produce x86 boards but they were designed to run x86 operating systems (typically MS-DOS) for business use. They weren't integrated with AmigaOS to any extent.

The PPC boards were entirely third party aftermarket expansions. However, their intent was to augment the host machine and allow AmigaOS to run applications that would otherwise be too processor intensive for 68K.

Note that Phase 5 wanted to move AmigaOS to PPC
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/prebox.html

So Phase5 card was a transition.

Even with OS4 / MOS times, first a G3/G4 card for A1200/A4000 was planned first before amigaOne board, but manufacturer failed.

Only x86 system that bare Amiga name was Amiga Inc improvisation
that had nothing to do with AmigaOS
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/os4dev.html

So surely there was much more effort in AmigaOS + PPC ways

[vox]

Bernd Meyer would disagree with you.

UAE and Amithlon are emulation boxes that provided like AmiKit, AmiSYS and AmigaForever later way to emulate the OS 3.x but not an inch way forward (like PowerUp, WarUp, MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 did).

Dammy and Baron would surely disagree too.

[vox]

That's not true. Yes amithlon does emulate a 680x0, but its not an amiga emulator as such and shares little in common with uae. Amithlon is more a way to get os3.x running on the metal on pc hardware as opposed to emulating an amiga.

Amithlon also lets a person run x86 AmigaOS3.x code under AmigaOS. You could compile 68k components to x86 code and run then in tandem with 68k.
While the OS itself makes only minor changes its not really accurate to say it didnt move forward and shares next to nothing in common with 68k "distros".

Perhaps you should learn about what it is youre typing before you type it?

OK, I know all about Amithlon, tested it at the time, yes its only x86 recompile of AmigaOS 3.x not new OS or any way forward. Yes, some apps in it are x86, some could be recompiled. Its not emulation and that is why its fastest of all x86 toys. Sadly doesn`t support much hardware and there are no x86 apps to run it. It dead ended quick even for some time it was considered as way forward. But didn`t produced any new code in terms of OS advancement. And is only AmigaOS related product that was taken out of sale as illegal.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/emulators/amithlon.html

And in fact it isn`t progress, it was just straight port. Layers like PowerUp, WarUp, PPC supported new apps and games, and later MOS and OS4 brought real progress ahead (In early stage that never made it to public OS4 was also just an OS 3.1 PPC port. But it took 30 months before it was public with many improvements in libs, execSG etc.). MOS approach was also great and innovative, first to make 68k emulation within the new OS! To bring new MUI, optimize everything and bring first completely native PPC apps - no coprecessing! 68k off and retired!

About AROS x86, yes it first appeared in 1997 but only recently did it implement most of AmigaOS 3.x features and went ahead.

OK?
So x86 Amiga developments, beside AROS, didn`t went much. With AROS I appriciate realy its multiplatform and open source, only one to be, so its kind of different.

This was most infamous anti x86 speech by Hyperion.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/emulators/hyperionblast.html

Surely, many things changed since then.
MOS was supposed to be first choice for next gen AmigaOS, but eventualy decision was make to do PPC port of AmigaOS 3.1 and from there go to today.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/aros.html
It was idea to make open AmigaOS
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/oafaros.html
and they made it - my salute!

But its not that x86 tied at all, and now it returned even to 68k!

So most of the OS progress was done on PPC in those terms, apart from AROS.

[vox]

Ok, please don't kill me. I know this has been beaten to death in one way or another. I also know OS4 is very anti-x86 right now (for now) as is MOS with their reuse PowerPC hardware drive (which I appreciate as I own both old PowerMacs as wells a A1200T/PPC).

My question is wouldn't something like a x86 SOC with a 68K emulation layer be a good fit? A trapdoor expansion for the A500/A1200 style machines could offer up SATA, Ethernet, possibly even a RTG driver for the SOC graphics driver and much faster performance than any 68K.

Intel CPUs haven't been very good at emulating PPC hardware to my knowledge (aka PearPC and what not) but that could simply have just been the software and not the chips fault.

It seems as long as the Amiga thinks it's getting a 68K CPU, it really doesn't matter what the architecture of the accelerator is. And if it comes with lots of the features provided by a SOC style solution and perhaps a DDR3 (not for speed reasons but rather availability reasons) RAM slot then woohoo!

I'm guessing this isn't viable only because nobody would spend the time to invest this type of development on the Amiga community.

Thoughts, please, not angry flame war comments.

No prob. Well, idea is overall good: but that is exactly what Natami does with FPGA and 68k emulation (or what Blizzard card offered with SCSI connector, faster RAM and faster 68k onboard beside PPC). We all wanted Natami on PCI card for our PeeCees and AmigaOnes, but its not planned so far. A Zorro version of it would fit all your dreams. However, all A1200/A4000 expansions advance the Classics to some high end (USB boards like mediator, Blizzard cards etc.) but still system has some remaining limitations (except completely Zorro based design like DraCo
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=43

But again, 68060 has its limits (and is exactly reason why Motorola - now Freescale moved to PowerPC) and it would limit performance of SATA, DDR3 etc. Natami designers are trying to overlap this limits to the max by designing "68070" softcore, but again, they plan to reach about 100Mhz PPC performance at all.

If something is dead, sadly its 68k since 1997 or so when 68060 production stop. ColdFire and similar follow ups are not compatibile enough even they bring 300Mhz performance.

Maybe a port of AROS to ColdFire could be possible as way ahead and ColdFire PCI accelerator for Natami board in the future, or similar.

I believe Natami is right chioce for you :-)

[vox]

lol!

and was "Better than OSX"

I assume "never went real" should translate to "Never existed".

In best tradition of Amiga Inc claims believe CUSA claimed they will kind of beat Apple, Dell etc.

And promised Workbench 5.0
http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en?start=15

"Workbench 5 will also be 100% Commodore compatible, able to run classic 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit era software via emulation. Our next generation Commodores and AMIGAs also provide optimum software flexibility by providing the option to run Windows software either from a dual boot menu at start up, or seamlessly integrated within Workbench 5 itself."

Fun never ends

[vox]

It was the way forward, McEwen knew it, and rejected it. Perhaps an act
of big-corporation tampering. All other things you mentioned about Amithlon,
would have turned out quite different, with some minimal financial support for the project, which was on the precipice of greatness.

Well what was used in initial release was an emulation box with not a single library improved, just some CGX AHI drivers for PC stuff and very few and buggy ones. I don`t say that project didn`t have potential, but there is nothing to be found but few user updates that made things less buggy and more usable, but soon the pace of PC hardware has left any PC that could use Amithlon as anceient history.

From AmigaHistory Amithlon page

The emulator, developed by Bernd Meyer, is based upon the authors' experience with the WinUAE JiT emulation, but features some dramatic changes to increase emulation speed (at the loss of compatibility). The slim-line ISOLinux distribution is used to boot directly into the Amiga emulation, removing the need for users to interact with a host operating system. This simple, yet effective change resulted in many users favouring Amithlon over AmigaOS XL as the emulation of choice.

So its kind of myth its complete x86 port.

Similar approach was AmigaOS XL
or this Linux driven UAE called Xamiga
http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-27682.html

These are just different approaches to emulation on 68k at time x86 JIT was not so fast and PC`s were not such grants that they could emulate high end Amiga with ease as today.

Interesting was that all this effort was made to make 68k AmigaOS emulated look like it really went PowerPC. As NovaDesign says at that time:

Unlike the slow versions of WinUAE and WinUAE JiT, AmigaOS XL forgoes on the chipset emulation, using the extra processing cycles to emulate the processor. The result is an Amiga emulator capable of running 68k applications between 5 - 10 times faster than a 68060 system. According to SysInfo (an Amiga benchmark utility), a 1 GHz AMD Athlon emulates an Amiga equivalent to a 450 MHz 68040. The benchmark was supported by Kermit Woodall of Nova Design, who tested one of their applications:

"We installed ImageFX on AmigaXL during a private meeting in St.Louis and the speed was amazing.
It was like having ImageFX completely native on a fast PowerPC machine!!"
Kermit Woodall, Nova Design

[vox]

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.

Well, there were quite a lot software supporting PPC use, as well as small libs, datatypes etc. For some time PPC saved the day, but it was short breathed as newer PPC cards never appeared, new PPC Amigas didn`t made it and MorphOS as first PPC AmigaOS took a lot of time to develop with new first real PPC only apps that would utilize 603/604 to the max.

Well, there were PPC cards with 060 where at that time (before MOS and OS4) card with slower PPC (low end 603) and 060 performed quite better because of OS 68k dependency then card with 040 and high end 604. Surely, with MorphOS and OS 4.0/4.1 that "table has turned"

And yes - first thanks to MOS! for first trully native PPC apps and games.
My belief would be that AmigaOS today would be far more advanced if it was based on latest MOS 1.x or MOS 2.x whatever was there in 2002-2004, instead of starting from AmigaOS 3.1 bare recompile and execSG. Not that I DO praise Hyperion for all the good work, but AmigaInc made wrong descision at that time prolonging PPC development, as well as later with court case, MacMini port and SAM restrictions, inability to find partner to continue AmigaOne series etc.

Even that (as promised) first OS 4 was just simple PPC recompile, it would take a lot of extra work OS4 team has done later on (OS 4.0 was way far away from its humble simple promises)
Compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#AmigaOS_4.0_.28The_Final_Update.29
to
http://www.intuitionbase.com/os4features.pdf

[vox]

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 :-)

Could never afford them at the time (Serbian economy was crippled too at the time) but waiting made two things possible: both hardware to advance to new and faster solutions and software to get fully PPC and more feature rich. But after the court case, newer incarnations of Amiga Inc lost even the OS4 and finally aliniated itself from anything remotely close to Amiga. Possibly because in process they lost the rights to use AmigaOS, didn`t payed the Hyperion for its work and didn`t provided OS 3.9 code as assumed in original plan.
A very good acrhieve of AmigaInc history until the newest CUSA/iCoin saga and court case is avail here https://sites.google.com/site/freeamiga/

(author SHOULD add the new events spice!)

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

Hope its visible how clearly PPC Amiga boards are part of Amiga evolution in both software and hardware, and its sad CUSA just tries to erase that part of history on its Amiga history (and own ego) representation under capitalist motto "Why would we promote someone elses product"? Because you try to mimick to be part of it. Same backfire would be "Why would we allow promotion of your product?" anywhere - but yet it is allowed.

So there I see quite of double standard.

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.

Hope that it was nice educational voyage :-)

[vox]

I guess you never used Oxyron Patcher. It is best installation any 68060 can do. It speeded everything - games, demos, utilities, gave more compatibility.

No 68040 can beat 68060 with Oxyron in any test.

Oxyron Patcher Benchmarks

Its 20 euros today
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=780

Could it help 68k emulation or Natami in any way? :-)

[vox]

Okay, at the risk of going on an OT tangent, what is the difference between Oxyron and OxyPatcher?

Oxy is short for Oxyron - no difference.

There was however a CyberPatcher that did the kind of same or similar and came with Blizzard cards. Anyway, interestingly it software patched missing instructions from 040 and 060 that existed in 00-030 and that had to be emulated (=slow)

[vox]

@itix: it was ok as a temporary solution. The thing is the port of the OS to PowerPC took a lot longer than expected (I remember the fancy roadmaps published by Hyperion,... showing it would take a year or two

Well, first OS4 developer realise was posted on 16 April 2004
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?item_id=1387

But it took longer way to final version that provided more functionality then promised.

Bigger problem was that Mai Logic AmigaOne board ceased production meanwhile and Eyetech died (=there was no hardware on sale at time of release) and first OS 4.0 didn`t support PPC equipped Classics.

For PPC Classics, OS 4.0 came on November 2007, about 10 years after these cards were made.

[vox]

So what you guys are saying that do not waste your money buying a PPC card for the Amiga 1200, that instead the best investment on an Amiga 1200 for an upgrade is either a 68040 or a 68060 and that is that? Are you guys saying that if I wish to go PPC in Amiga that it should be either a SAM or the new Amiga hardware other than that the Amiga 1200 PPC are waste of money and useless?

If using Classic games and software is the key - PPC card is not needed, 060 is cheaper solution. But Natami when out will be the best experience.

Yes, if you want to use OS 4.1 even maxed out A1200 or A4000 with PPC cards is way too slow compared to slowest SAM 440 (however SAM 460 would be recommended). If you want to use MorphOS, proper MacMini G4 is the way.

So, yes to both. Blizzard cards are today very rare and quite overpriced for what they offer.

[vox]

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

Well, since OS 3.9 just couldn`t make that much revenues, they could donate source code. Even today OS 4.1 misses some small features of OS 3.9 and it took significant time to catch up from PPC 3.1 code to all 3.9 features and beyond

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

True, Freescale did it at Apple PPC times, IBM with consoles, but sadly AmigaOS just missed those times (even making OS4 work on a bit older PS3 that allow OS would be like X1000 for everyone alongside great Yellow Dog Linux, but yet they choose Acube/A-EON Alliances)

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.

In my own opinion, if something kills them it will not be angre me: it will be their own stupid strategies, announcements and choices: like one to move Amiga line to "PRO" category and compete with most expensive PCs

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.

To me it was like puting ferrari engine in old Fiat 500 ... :-)
But it worked, lived and allowed MOS to develop as well as pathway for decision to make OS4 PPC

Thanks :-)

It is good to serve this small community. Sadly, low number of users goes with slow SW development and weird HW prices and avaliabilities, but we managed to live with it