Amiga Card PPC developing

[matthey]

All that money spent on design work would be wasted because by the time these cards would be available all the lawsuits will be settled and we will have AmigaOS4 running on every PPC machine available like the SAM, PS3, PPC Mac's, etc :crazy: .

[persia]

There's nothing that says how small we are than looking at the sad situation around OS4.  It wouldn't be that hard to run it on old PPC Mac equipment.  It wouldn't be that hard to adopt PearPC.  But we lack the resources and without equipment the numbers continue to shrink.

[adonay]

I find my self useing less and less advanced amigas lately.They are in their original casing and with no ppc card anymore as i dont see my use for it. There is nothing like a A1260D with scsi IV and exsternal scsi box + os 3.1 = my demo and whdloadbox "060 for hard demoes"  ...
Honestly i dont need OS4 i have my extremly fast vista box waiting for aros to advance ... My amiga is only used for mod music, games, demos, With other words all the old stuff that os4 or ppc does not do well as i am talking about hardwarebashing 68k apps....

For me that kind of card makes a interesting thought but i am not sure i would buy it. I have a BPPC used to have more than one but PPC and amiga is not my fix ...

[weirdami]

@dRfRANTIC

Are you, brand new user, that "man"?

[AeroMan]

Eerrr.... What about a cheap and good Microcontroller ? MPC5200 or AMCC440EPx...

Have you seen MPC5121e ? Looks really nice  :-D

I would not go for a G5 monster attached in an old Amiga, but a 20 bucks microcontroller at 760MIPS would give me a lot of fun.

Going for a bigger PPC would be nice to a brand new machine, in a tower, etc...

May I dream, at least ?

[orange]

sounds interesting, but there is also need for PPC graphics card. OS4 on AGA is just too slow. (and we all know the price of bvision et al)

[Senex]

If there is really enough demand and new PPC turboboards for the AGA Amigas would be produced, I'd consider this really a nice project, making lots of users happy and bplan earning a few bucks extra.

But personally I really wonder if it would be worth it to spend maybe 1000 Euro (100 for r&d, several hundreds for parts & production) for a pure expansion board that will be rendered useless once the 16 years old "main" board dies.

Thus I wonder if it wouldn't be better to let the development be based on one of the SOC designs bplan is working on for Genesi anyway, with a fat FPGA interconnected containing Dennis van Weeren's custom chip emulation for compatibility.

Of course this would require some software development as well to merge these two worlds, but in the year 2008, where the Minimig Amiga-reimplementation is available, AROS becoming more and more mature and with the Kickstart replacement bounty being at 2000 USD already, I wonder if the financial resources wouldn't be better spent on a complete mainboard and the beforementioned bounties to become finally independent of the old hardware and Amiga Inc.

And given the huge amount of years since Commodore became bankrupt, I also wonder if it would really matter to wait a few monthes more to mix something interesting out of bplan's current SOC designs, the Minimig and/or the Natami.

[AeroMan]

orange wrote:
sounds interesting, but there is also need for PPC graphics card. OS4 on AGA is just too slow. (and we all know the price of bvision et al)

The MPC5121e has built in graphics and sound  :-D  

[AeroMan]

I Fully agree with you !

You will have some other advantages also, like the possibility of getting faster video/audio/IDE than a physical AGA using FPGAs

But an accelerator is a good start point and an easy migration path (well, not for 1000 bucks...)

Starting with an accelerator is good to make it work without having to care about AGA. Just make the PPC work first. Then you could join the rest on the other side and redo the chipset on the FPGA.

I´m just drooling about it...  :-D

[persia]

Just get OS4 to work on old PPC based Macs, that will sustain the Amiga community until AROS becomes a real, functional OS.

[Plaz]

I'd like to know why the dev cost would be so high when phase5 already has a PPC card design done. They would need to revamp for RoSH compliance, but it's not like they're starting from scratch. I guess I'll have to have a look at the thread and translate best I can.

Plaz

[Plaz]

I don't think it's that much, 50 000€ is 50€ x 1000 amiga users

I still need to read the details, but remember... so far that amount is said to be the development cost. Then you have to add in the production cost. The final price tag would be higher.

Plaz

[itix]

Thus I wonder if it wouldn't be better to let the development be based on one of the SOC designs bplan is working on for Genesi anyway, with a fat FPGA interconnected containing Dennis van Weeren's custom chip emulation for compatibility.

As far as PPC Amigas are concerned I dont see point in AGA (as in emulated by FPGA). Neither OS4 or MorphOS (or AROS) can run old HW banging demos and games (those which take over computer). It is mostly that Paula and CIA support that matters rather than gfx.

If AGA compatibility is mandatory it is better continue 68k support in way or another than switch CPU.'

[Piru]

@Plaz

I'd like to know why the dev cost would be so high when phase5 already has a PPC card design done.

I'd say the reason is that it'd require pretty much full redesign, as many of the components haven't been available for years, and/or are not available as RoHS. Also, you'd need to write the software for the card, this is quite tedious and time consuming work, too.

Sure having done previous designs helps, so probably doing it all from scratch would cost even more.

Also that figure of 50keur is probably derived using some highly "scientific" method such as Stetson-Harrison, the actual cost could be very much different.

[actung_bab]

Jeff wrote:
Having been only recently able to run OS4 for the first time it seems obvious to me (IMHO) that both the 4000/CSPPC and the 1200/Blizzard are really inadequate for this OS. OS4 really seems to need considerably more ram and cpu power than is available on either of these systems.

what rubbish l run a amiga blizzard ppc 240mhz and bvsion
and os4 runs smooth and fast, very stable as well complete crap.


 :-)

[Senex]

If AGA compatibility is mandatory it is better continue 68k support in way or another than switch CPU.

Well, the planned approach of "just" a new turboboard for existing Amigas is without doubt the quickest and most compatible solution.

Just for me personally I considered that much money better invested in a chimera of PPC-SOC, Minimig, AGA+ from Natami and the 68k-reimplementation by Tobiflex, because it would probably be more long-living than the ancient Amiga mainboards and would in addition offer nice possibilities to play around, expand and update due to the FPGA.

But, obviously, interconnecting these two worlds would require a hell of development work on the software side as well, so simply book this idea as "just arsing around". :-)