Blizzard PPC the real numbers

[MarkTime]

There has been speculation, and now polls about
the data for Blizzard PPC and Cyberstorm PPC.

But the numbers where published.  An interview with
Wolf Dietrich in 1999 regarding phase5's production of the boards.

Wolf said, approximately 10,000 board were sold by phase 5.   He said, towards the end, the number of
Blizzard owners had surpassed the number of Cyberstorm owners.

This leads to some surprising results...the number of Blizzard owners may not be incredibly higher than cyberstorm owners.

Also, figure some boards are no longer in use or were defective, but also figure that DCE produced additional boards.

The leaves an approximation of 5,000 Cyberstorms in use, 5,000 Blizzards in use.

Also, the idea that Blizzard towers are full of 'hardware hacks'...uhmm I'm no sure who they
are slamming, prometheus, g-rex, mediator...

but the A4000's are similary full of hardware hacks as well...

Anyway, just trying to throw out some real numbers.

To be honest, it doesn't look good, but all these numbers dwarf the number of AmigaONE's and Pegasos boards out there....

its still just so teeeeeny tiiiinnnny...yikes.

Oh well, here's hoping for a mac version....at least then the hardware won't be scarce.

see ya's
MarkTime

[alx]

Also, the idea that Blizzard towers are full of 'hardware hacks'...uhmm I'm no sure who they
are slamming, prometheus, g-rex, mediator...

Wasn't the problem with an A1200/BlizzardPPC version that there are so many wierd expansions for the A1200, many of them on the clockport or hacks on top of the AGA chips, and it would be impossible to guarantee OS4 could work on all of these?

[MarkTime]

oh I'm sure there are clockport hacks on the A1200, but the A4000 has an astonishing array of hardware add-ons as well.

Both A4000 and A1200 had multiple rev's and both support AGA....

OS 4 will not support all config's and all hardware attached to A4000, nor will it support all software made for OS 3.1.

This has been well known limitation for a long time.  I am trying to see the *difference* between the non-100% support of A4000 and why they can only support A1200 if they could guarantee 100% support....that seems like an unfair burden to place only on Blizzard support.

with that said, its a real thing, of course, that a tiny market with many revs and complexities is a difficult thing....just wish they hadn't said it was a 99% thing.....when it was, a we'll decide later thing.

[amigamad]

Well im a blizzard ppc owner. :-o  :-)

[Hardboy]

One of the reasons can be lack of hardware documentation of the boards. Without this they´ll have to hack into the existing PowerUP code to get an idea of how things are working. As a futher consequence, they might end up with unwanted features of the boards -  it´s not to say if they don´t have documentation.

Just take a look at WarpOS. It´s hardly possible to get rid of the old PowerUp kernel,  and in the end, it makes a pain in th arse.

Many people says that the problem is the great deal of add-ons, but I don´t think that. I don´t think there´s a mayor difference with these, as with the CSPPC, but the BPPC itself, seems tobe much more troublesome...

[PulsatingQuasar]

The BlizzardPPC is indeed the problem.

It's interface is undocumented and I recall that they found some weird behaviour.

They were able to completely cut out the 68K processor on the Cyberstorm but for some strange reason they weren't able to kill the 68K processor on the BlizzardPPC which would be a serious performance penallty because of the context switching.

I don't know if they allready solved that problem but they need to do some serious hacking and research to get the BlizzardPPC to work.