0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
A neat homebrew tablet, I agree with you on. However, Amiga has little to do with it.
@Thorham:Hang on a minute... first you say Amiga is "hardware (680x0 + chipset)", then you complain that the OS is "stuck in the past!" With all due respect, the 680x0 and the classic Amiga chipset are obsolete hardware. Don't get me wrong, I love the classic Amiga, but if you insist that that is what Amiga is and always will be, the Amiga is a relic of the past, a museum piece used only by die-hard hobbyists. I can sympathise, but this is not a way forwards.In fact I love the 680x0, and I'm about to code some asm in it this afternoon, but it's possibly the least Amiga thing about the Amiga. Why? Because it was a generic part. It was also in Macs and Megadrives and goodness knows what else. Even the floppy disk drive was more uniquely Amiga (who else got 880k on their floppy disks?). The OS and the chipset were specifically Amiga products. Both of these need updating for the 21st century.@SamuraiCrow: I'm not talking about having the Bealgeboard and Minimig on the same board - perhaps some kind of serial link could be used at first. A sort of early proof of concept.
@nicholasThe beagleboard has an expansion port. I wonder if a 68k emulator could be installed on it and an interface made to connect it to an A1200's trapdoor expansion port... 600MHz accelerator card for Classic Amigas, anyone?
Such as...?You could run UNIX on a classic Amiga so a multi-user environment isn't impossible. It's not legacy hardware support that's holding us back here. Obviously Microsoft and Apple have changed their APIs a lot over the years, Windows 3.1 software won't run on Windows 7 anymore, heck even XP software needs to run through an emulation layer. If we need a new and radical AmigaOS then that's fine by me, but there's no reason it can't run old Amiga software through an emulation layer (although just running UAE on it is kind of cheating, it has to be integrated somehow so it doesn't "feel like" you're using an emulator). This kind of emulation causes me no ideological problems.If the hardware at least is backwards compatible then at worst we would be able to dual boot it. As pointed out, an AGA chipset implementation would take up a small fraction of a modern chipset die, even if it included a 680x0 coprocessor.
Mrs Beanbag: It's not a hardware issue, it's a question of software architecture. The Amiga kernel was designed for hardware with no memory protection, so (in a less than perfectly forward-thinking move) they designed it to take advantage of the freedom that allows. Message-passing between processes, for instance, simply involves one process handing over a pointer to the message content to another and saying "have at it," and the other process freely accessing the first's memory. It's blazing fast, but it's also completely insecure.Thus, there are actual software-architecture barriers to implementing something like memory protection - you'd have to figure out how to work around the existing API, and that's not necessarily easy. "Emulation layers" don't fix everything; it's entirely possible for one process to send another a whole handful of pointers and lots of wild, unprotected accessing of each others' data to take place without the OS knowing anything about it. (Granted, that's horrible coding practice, but when has that ever stopped anybody?) Thus, while I'm not convinced it's impossible, it most certainly wouldn't be easy.
I personally hadn't, but I had a few minutes...i7:Not going to try for audio drivers!
Ahh... ahhhhh... I think maybe you and I aren't quite so different afterall. The difference is that I never did live in the real world; it's what gives me my edge.When I have an idea, my thinking tends to progress something like this:1. WHAT it should be, and WHY2. HOW it could be done3. IF it will ever happen... I've never yet got this far. But the aim is not to back the winning horse. If the idea is good and possible, "it won't happen" is no reason to refuse to support it, because that is self-defeating. If nobody else will do it, maybe I should do it.WHAT in this case is an ARM powered HTPC/console with OS, because I think there is a market for it, and because I think it fits well with the Amiga's original ethos. (The CDTV and CD32 were blatantly aiming in the HTPC direction, ahead of their time maybe.)Now we can ask HOW it could actually be an Amiga as well. Or in the first instance at least, how it could be an "Amiga alternative" or "Advanced Amiga Substitute" if you will; I don't think we're at the stage of worrying about licensing the name just yet.
