potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[koaftder]

lou_dias wrote:

Karlos wrote:

Piru wrote:

This OT discussion should be posted as new threads.

And no, I won't take the bait. Artificially bumping the thread to top of the forum is {bleep}ing lame.

Sorry that was me. I wasn't really paying attention and just commented about the interrupt thing :-/

Actually I would say that was on topic.
There interrupts are the base of any OS.

The 1.7MB linux kernal boots up in my GC and connects to my ndbserver in less than 7 seconds total.

A much smaller Amiga OS 3.x ported to PPC or AROS PPC could do the same much faster...  Even combining the 512k 3.1 ROMS with the OS bootup, AOS3.1 takes up ~768k.  That's more than enough to fit on my modchip's flashram and that just gets copied to mainram on bootup...if it were ported...

Now, I don't know anything about WarpUp or any of those PPC hack-ons...  But are they running a AOS on the PPC side?  Or are they just a co-processor set-up?

There is no set rule that an OS has to use software interrupts to provide services, and not all processors have instructions for software based interrupts.

[Louis Dias]

Yeah, to say the GC's CPU couldn't be used to run an OS is just a trollish statement.  All CPU's have interrupts.  People critisize the GC's 486Mhz speed and power and completely ignore the ultra low latency T1 Mosys RAM that the GC has that obliterates SDRAM in performance.  I think it also has a 1MB cache.  The GPU has 3 MB of texture memory that allow for generating and texturing polygons in a single pass rather than the separate passes required by other GPU's.  The drive is lightning fast as well.  Again, it's about low seek times not raw max streaming that is rarely achieved when other platforms post there "theoretical" yet completely unrealistic system specs.

The GC was designed to be responsive.  To run at maximum efficiency at all times.  This seems like the perfect platform to run a multi-tasking OS.

[koaftder]

lou_dias wrote:
Yeah, to say the GC's CPU couldn't be used to run an OS is just a trollish statement.  All CPU's have interrupts.  People critisize the GC's 486Mhz speed and power and completely ignore the ultra low latency T1 Mosys RAM that the GC has that obliterates SDRAM in performance.  I think it also has a 1MB cache.  The GPU has 3 MB of texture memory that allow for generating and texturing polygons in a single pass rather than the separate passes required by other GPU's.  The drive is lightning fast as well.  Again, it's about low seek times not raw max streaming that is rarely achieved when other platforms post there "theoretical" yet completely unrealistic system specs.

The GC was designed to be responsive.  To run at maximum efficiency at all times.  This seems like the perfect platform to run a multi-tasking OS.

The comments regarding putting an OS on the game cube were more like, "Why bother" then "you cant". Lets face it, the gamecube is a highly specialized piece of equipment designed for running video games. Shure, some guys shoehorned linux on it but it's still not very usefull. No harddisk, you gotta NFS mount a volume over your network if you want storage. The display interface is low resolution, designed for use with a television set. ( who wants to use their computer with a lorez tv?) The memory may be fast but theres only 40mb of it and no way to expand it.

Basically what you have is a limited computer that requires another computer to provide services for it, and a network to be usefull.

Video game consoles tend to have a life of around 3-5 years, with each new version being a completely new hardware architecture. Basicaly it's a one time hardware platform.

In the end, it costs more trying to use a game console as a general purpose computer, all the sh*t you have to buy, the other machine to provide it with services, all the time people will have to spend porting code every 3-5 years, etc, etc. And you still end up with a machine that cant run most apps without serious modification of the code base to get it to work with such limited memory, a display interface that get like 480 lines on a tv ( would you like to browse the web at such a low resolution? )

And for the record, not all processors have interrupts! I'm currently working with a platform that has hardware interrupts, but no software interrupts. I am aware of several processor architectures that have neither hardware interrupts or software interrupts. Theres a lot of cores out there, interesting stuff.

[Louis Dias]

Well, you missed my posts about it being extremely portable and as the center-piece of a car's entertainment system at a low cost.

Also, you say it's low resolution, 720x480 in progressive scan looks great on my 50" DLP widescreen TV.  Also, 720x480 looks great on a 7" in-dash widescreen LCD.  Considering the Amiga was made for 640x200 or a flickering 640x400, going to 720x480 progressive doesn't sound like alot on paper but in the real world it's a world of difference.

Also, I'm not looking for it to be my main PC.  But it could be a way to re-introduce people to the Amiga and like I said be a baby-version of OS4.  Let them get their feet wet for the day when suitable hardware exists to host OS4.

You can purchase dedicated NFS devices that involve no PC at all

You can make or buy SD card adapter that read AND write to even the latest 1GB cards.  you can make one out of an old GC 4Mbit $5 memory card and an SD card socket.  Again, the idea here is portability and reliability.

The DVD drive is always there that holds 2CD's worth of reliable information, though some have claimed to write up to 3GB on full-size DVD's using the case mod.  It seems like the head has room to move all the way out to 12cm if you look at it.

A modded GC seems like quite a capable AROS box.  Isn't the point of AROS to moderize AOS 3.1 and move it to a platform that can expand the market?

Oh and personally, I'm not going to blow $400 on a new 360/PS3/Revolution and hack it to run AROS.  I'd much rather hack into a $60 Gamecube that I've owned for 4 years and I can take anywhere and not worry about theft or damage.

[koaftder]

lou_dias wrote:
Well, you missed my posts about it being extremely portable and as the center-piece of a car's entertainment system at a low cost.

Also, you say it's low resolution, 720x480 in progressive scan looks great on my 50" DLP widescreen TV.  Also, 720x480 looks great on a 7" in-dash widescreen LCD.  Considering the Amiga was made for 640x200 or a flickering 640x400, going to 720x480 progressive doesn't sound like alot on paper but in the real world it's a world of difference.

Also, I'm not looking for it to be my main PC.  But it could be a way to re-introduce people to the Amiga and like I said be a baby-version of OS4.  Let them get their feet wet for the day when suitable hardware exists to host OS4.

You can purchase dedicated NFS devices that involve no PC at all

You can make or buy SD card adapter that read AND write to even the latest 1GB cards.  you can make one out of an old GC 4Mbit $5 memory card and an SD card socket.  Again, the idea here is portability and reliability.

The DVD drive is always there that holds 2CD's worth of reliable information, though some have claimed to write up to 3GB on full-size DVD's using the case mod.  It seems like the head has room to move all the way out to 12cm if you look at it.

A modded GC seems like quite a capable AROS box.  Isn't the point of AROS to moderize AOS 3.1 and move it to a platform that can expand the market?

Oh and personally, I'm not going to blow $400 on a new 360/PS3/Revolution and hack it to run AROS.  I'd much rather hack into a $60 Gamecube that I've owned for 4 years and I can take anywhere and not worry about theft or damage.

As long as your having a good time hacking it, thats all that counts.  :-)  

I'd say why bother with aros or AOS 4 on gamecube. You already have linux on there, and with linux you have software avaiable to you to do almost anything. With AOS4 or aros you will be able to do a lot less...

[Louis Dias]

Well, it comes down to preference I guess.  Linux is too 'ix for me.  The average lazy user (myself included) doesn't care for linux or anything dos-like that involves lots of config filed that need to be edited...etc...  Just give me a simple gui that works.  That's AOS 3.1, that's the vision behind AROS.

I'm playing with Linux as a proof of concept.  As I am a Windows developer using Visual Studio, I am quite put off my having to create these make files to recompile xyz to make it work with configuration abc.

And I'm for moving THIS platform forward, not Linux.

[Tripitaka]

koaftder wrote:
I'd say why bother with aros or AOS 4 on gamecube. You already have linux on there, and with linux you have software avaiable to you to do almost anything. With AOS4 or aros you will be able to do a lot less...

True. Stack a ton of GC's in a rack and with the right software you could make a nice rendering farm. Having said that I would like OS4 on my GC if it was capable... ..just because I could. No logic I know but that's Amiga fandom for you.

[Louis Dias]

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010516S0056

The GameCube team chose to build off the existing PowerPC design to leverage the available tool chain, such as compilers and optimizers. IBM claims this has given developers a jump on creating new games. "Developers have been making software for the GameCube a long time before people knew we were doing the silicon," said IBM's West. "If you were to take code written for a PowerPC you could essentially run it on this device. We didn't deviate from what is a well-understood architecture by a large amount."

Incase anyone still doesn't think the GC's cpu is a real PPC.

[_ThEcRoW]

It's a cutted down/custom PPC, not a stock one.
And for the other question, how many GC's would be needed to make up a rendering farm?. Wouldn't be cheaper using a Indy or similar workstation, because you would need a copy of os4 for each gamecube, and that imply if you have 50 gc's you would need 50 os4 licences. Mmmmm.. not so cheap i think.
Just my two cents.

[Louis Dias]

if you read the article it describes the changes structurally as mostly on the integer processing.
floating point processing enhanced

if you read www.gc-dev.com's forums they use standard PPC cross-compilers to run homebrew code with some config file to take advantage of the extra instructions...

standard PPC compiled code runs just fine

this is another '+' for the GC and Revolution as a platform for OS4 and/or AROS PPC

[Tripitaka]

_ThEcRoW wrote:
And for the other question, how many GC's would be needed to make up a rendering farm?. Wouldn't be cheaper using a Indy or similar workstation, because you would need a copy of os4 for each gamecube, and that imply if you have 50 gc's you would need 50 os4 licences. Mmmmm.. not so cheap i think.
Just my two cents.

I never said anything about doing the render farm with OS4. Try Linux, that would keep the cost down. As I said OS4 on GC isn't logical, but if it's capable I would install it just beause I could.

[Louis Dias]

Judging from this:
http://www.geofront.co.uk/mac/amigaos4.html

I'd say 24 + 16 MB of ram will let you run 3 or 4 "modern" apps at the same time before memory starts becoming an issue...

[Louis Dias]

Amazing news from www.maxconsole.net

BREAKING NEWS: Viper-GC Extreme Details Emerge!

We've received a few pictures of Viper GC Extreme from the Viper Team. It will come in two parts. The chip itself will have 16Mbit flash, two connectors (programming & GC wires) and extended features compatible with Viper GC. The other part is the Viper USB Adapter. It can be used to flash the Viper GC Extreme and regular Viper GC. But here comes the kick-ass part: it can be plugged in the Modem/BBA slot of the GC to provide USB full-speed bidirectionnal communication. We're told it is extremely easy & powerful for coders and that a few lines of code are enough to send or received data.

That's everything!

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
Amazing news from www.maxconsole.net

BREAKING NEWS: Viper-GC Extreme Details Emerge!

We've received a few pictures of Viper GC Extreme from the Viper Team. It will come in two parts. The chip itself will have 16Mbit flash, two connectors (programming & GC wires) and extended features compatible with Viper GC. The other part is the Viper USB Adapter. It can be used to flash the Viper GC Extreme and regular Viper GC. But here comes the kick-ass part: it can be plugged in the Modem/BBA slot of the GC to provide USB full-speed bidirectionnal communication. We're told it is extremely easy & powerful for coders and that a few lines of code are enough to send or received data.

That's everything!

Except it probably makes the Gamecube a USB slave and not a USB host. Unlike firewire, USB is a host centric protocol and two slave devices cannot talk to each other. So assuming I'm correct this would not allow you to attach say a USB hard drive.

I'd say 24 + 16 MB of ram will let you run 3 or 4 "modern" apps at the same time before memory starts becoming an issue...

If you scroll down, you'll notice the machine in question has 256MB of RAM. Looking at the top screen where no programs are running you'll notice that only 205,307,280 bytes are free which comes out to about 196MB. That's 60MB of RAM being consumed before he even starts a single foreground application. I really don't see how that's going to fit into the GC's memory.

AROS would fit quite well and there's even a small chance it might see a Gamecube port someday (You could alway start a bounty after all).

[Louis Dias]

I would be willing to start a bounty.

how does that work?  Do I have to put up the money up front in some AROS-dev team controlled account or do I just pay up when it's completed.

A Gamecube AROS-MAX PPC DVD iso would be great.  My mod chip lets me boot right from DVD.

Heck, I can launch apps from SD card too...and there a read/write api already.

Storage is not an issue with me anyway as a network file server can be purchased stand-alone or running off my PC.  I already know it's  more than fast enough despite what some people on this site will tell you.  If it's fast enough for the business environment, it's fast enough for you and me.

EDIT:

Author says there will be a host and slave mode:
http://www.gcdev.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1511

JOY!

[_ThEcRoW]

That just makes no sense. If you want to code anything for worldwide usage, you need a license from nintendo to do it, if not, all the efforts would be illegal(remember accolade case vs. sega?).
First ask nintendo if they allow you or the one who will make the port, and then begin work. I'm not trying to give your mind away, but that project seems impossible one at the moment.
Cheers.