Question for A1 dev board customers.

[JurassicCamper]

Wilse wrote:
Hi Al,

I was on the brink of cancelling my order too, but with the pegasos not being readily available either, I decided to leave it for now.

Pegasos was never really an option for me. I beleive the Amiga Name / Legacy + being a Continuation from 3.9 etc is the best choice for me.

I was feeling the same a few weeks back. Just really can't wait anymore as its Holiday buying time and we could use a new PC or things for the house.

All the false dates and contradictions in what Alan has been saying has made me loose all confidence in it.

Eg: on 13/2 he said they were built. But in his post on the A1List the other day he said if the board testing went OK they would have been ordered.

Ordered or Built.... which is it ??

1Q 2004? Does that sound right for end user

If that's the case, I'll be using a Mac by July.

I would like to remain optimistic and beleive that they will turn up in 2 weeks. However I think i'll be joining the ranks of the many who have cancelled their order already. I've given my self until my birthday in a couple of weeks.

Message is Simple Alan if you want my £800 order 2 weeks. Otherwise I'm off down the travel agents.

[HyperionMP]

The new revision of the Articia S which is shipping with the new A1-XE boards seems to operate flawlessly.

Both Mai and Hyperion conducting very extensive testing on it, especially with respect to DMA transfers and other issues supposedly experienced on the Pegasos.

We used several PCI  based  IDE and SCSI controllers and carried out very heavy, overnight tests.

We did run into some well-documented issues with respect to the VIA 686B Southbridge but these issues were addressed in the firmware, just as they were on the PC for millions of PC mainboards.

Overall, we are more than satisfied with the quality and reliability of the hardware.

 

[Warface]

Where were the Pegasos users that should have been ranting about there broken boards?

As I've seen on the beta2 mailing list, april-less board owners had to have DMA off in linux for example, while with April not.

I presume problems of both Pegasos and AmigaONE are 1., not so serious 2., probably has fixes (april 1, 2, or DMA off in case of old and not yet apriled boards) 3., these issues were successfully kept within the closed mailing lists. Both the Pegasos and AmigaONE users have a closed mailing list. Outsiders have little clue what's really going on "in the other camp".

[JoannaK]

HyperionMP wrote:
The new revision of the Articia S which is shipping with the new A1-XE boards seems to operate flawlessly.

Both Mai and Hyperion conducting very extensive testing on it, especially with respect to DMA transfers and other issues supposedly experienced on the Pegasos.
 

Good.. I hope you get this testing right this time. Your last year announcements about 'There is no articia bug'  were shown to be a bit premature.   :-P

[T_Bone]

> Pegasos was never really an option for me. I
> beleive the Amiga Name / Legacy + being a
> Continuation from 3.9 etc is the best choice for me.

Actually, AOS4 is a continuation of AOS3.1... H&P wouldn't supply Hyperion with the 3.5/3.9 source.

[bhoggett]

@T_Bone

Actually, AOS4 is a continuation of AOS3.1... H&P wouldn't supply Hyperion with the 3.5/3.9 source.

While essentially true, I think some of the third party contributors to OS 3.9 - and let's face it OS 3.9 was mostly third party contributions anyway - have contributed their work to OS4 too.

Just how well everything works once it's been bolted together remains to be seen.

But this is no longer on-topic, as it's about the OS not the A1 boards.

[JurassicCamper]

T_Bone wrote:
> Pegasos was never really an option for me. I
> beleive the Amiga Name / Legacy + being a
> Continuation from 3.9 etc is the best choice for me.

Actually, AOS4 is a continuation of AOS3.1... H&P wouldn't supply Hyperion with the 3.5/3.9 source.

But dont forget Hyperion are using the same external developers that Haage & Partner used, so the 3.5 & 3.9 sources being released by by them is not a problem as. The developers have the code anyway. Its only the stuff Haage & Partner wrote thats an issue. But they were project managers more than anything else.

[PulsatingQuasar]

I have a couple of things to say about this!!

Why do you think there is a problem with the MAI chip. Maybe the technicians for the Pegasos and MorphOS did not use this chip properly!!!!

I don't know the layout of the Pegasos and other used components but maybe some components are used on the Pegasos that aren't used on the Teron and are causing these problems.
Maybe some of these problems were caused by to much intervering with the reference design

Who knows! But why should this be true??

Give AmigaOS some time!! In the days of Commodore is was said that a straight port of OS 3 to PowerPC would probably take 18 months. This is not a straight port and the BIOS problems caused some interference.

Let me also remind you that there is no hardware design completely faultless. The VIA 686B southbridge has a known problem which is patched by the VIA software drivers on the PC.

[HyperionMP]

In all fairness, the issues were so hard to reproduce that Gerald Carda had to come over to Mai himself before they even managed to reproduce them.

We never even noticed them at the time.

This time around both Mai and Hyperion did all kinds of sensible and not so sensible tests.

[Agafaster]

@HyperionMP

Very good to hear that !

Any info on the Board's performance through you tests, just out of interest ?

and I know you're not the person to ask, but your on hand - Any Idea when boards are to be sent to End-users (Earlybird or otherwise) of XE systems ?

Keep up the good work, looking forward to AOS4 !

@DaveP - yeah and not only "Zing" it appears to have added "ZiP" too !  :-D

@Wayne, et al: good work on the site refinements, the Progress bar is nifty ! :-o  :-D

[Atheist]

Hello HyperionMP, !!!!

I'm an "Iron Clad" purchaser of the 1.3 GHz model!!!

Hope to see a RAID card driver :-) for my 2 Gig ram beast!

AmigaOne! I'm going the distance!!!!

[JoannaK]

@HyperionMP
Ok, I hope we'll see those Xe boards out soon.

[JoannaK]

PulsatingQuasar wrote:
Why do you think there is a problem with the MAI chip. Maybe the technicians for the Pegasos and MorphOS did not use this chip properly!!!!

 

BlizzardPPC powered!!

I think those two tell a lot. Did you know that those same people who years ago designed those Blizzards and Cyberstorms are now making Pegasos? Years ago they got all those items working and now suddently they have lost even basic skills?  :-P

Besides.. it's well known fact that current Fixes on Articia-s (one that's been  under tests at Hyperion and Mai) are based on work Carda did last summer/fall. If that bug had been on Pagsos mobo, there would have been no need to update Mai chips...

[ksk]

@JoannaK
>Besides.. it's well known fact that current Fixes on Articia-s (one that's been under tests at Hyperion and Mai) are based on work Carda did last summer/fall.

Do you happen to have any reference to the information?
I originally thought that Carda just pointed out where/how the bug is seen, but what else he did?

>If that bug had been on Pagsos mobo, there would have been no need to update Mai chips...

I think the non-registered RAM support was coming anyway... IIRC, new ArtisiaS was to be made later in 2003 anyway (no, I do not have any link).

There must be also more than that, I think, as April2 is needed before peg1 FSB reaches 133Mhz.

Where/when should the ArtisiaS bug's appear in A1SE machines that users now have running with 133Mhz FSB?