How about creating a Open AMIGA Consortium?

[trekiej]

Looking at my earlier post, I see that Minimig and NatAmi is just that.  They are hardware with the capability to run Amiga

As far as Clone-A is concerned, is not creating an ASIC apart of the design process? (Application Specific Intergrated Circuit)  If a cycle exact design is implemented, a fab. company could make chips with it, if I understand it correctly.

[HenryCase]

biggun wrote:
I think we are mixing topics here.
My understanding of the topic was to promote the idea
of an open group of AMIGA HW engineers.

It would be better to work together to create new hardware.

However, the Amiga community has its limits. There are three new Amiga-compatible pieces of hardware being worked on (Minimig, CloneA, NatAmi). We do not have the capacity to support more and more machines, better to form groups to improve existing machines and ensure they have some level of compatibility with each other.

biggun wrote:
This definition of Amiga includes the following machines:

A1000 (OCS)
A500  (OCS)
A600  (OCS)
A2000 (OCS)
A3000 (OCS)
CDTV  (OCS)

A4000 (AGA)
A1200 (AGA)
CD32  (AGA)

MiniMig (OCS)
Natami (SuperAGA)

Where's ECS in that list?

biggun wrote:
The Aone and Pegasos are on the Hardware level not Amigas but PCs.
They are no more AMIGAS as any Dell or MAC is.

In what way? Only in the lack of OCS/ECS/AGA-like functions. The PPC CPU used in both the A1 or Pegasos don't mean they aren't real Amigas, so I hope you weren't referring to this.

[AMC258]

No A3000 ever came with OCS.

[bloodline]

AMC258 wrote:
No A3000 ever came with OCS.

The 600 was ECS too...

[freqmax]

I should add something else too. For any new software development I would require:
 * Memory protection
 * Preemptive multitasking
 * Multiuser structured security with file permissions etc.

Or else the risk for wrecking data or interrupt running applications is just too great to have a suitable working platform.

[persia]

Custom chips in 2008 are a profoundly stupid idea.  I can go on the internet and buy high end graphics or sound and be far, far better off.

[smerf]

Hi,

@ persia

WOW someone agrees with me.

@ everyone else

Shouldn't we ask Amiga Inc. for help on this?



smerf

[HenryCase]

persia wrote:
Custom chips in 2008 are a profoundly stupid idea.  I can go on the internet and buy high end graphics or sound and be far, far better off.

Yeah, and be like everybody else. Custom chips do have their advantages, and FPGAs make implementing them much easier (than building ASICs). FPGAs are reconfigurable so you can customise the level of acceleration you need for certain functions (if you were running a 3d rendering program, for example, you could load a FPGA core that takes away other acceleration and concentrates only on graphics processing).

smerf wrote:
Shouldn't we ask Amiga Inc. for help on this?

Why? So they could contribute nothing and take their cut of the profits? Hell no!

[A6000]

persia wrote:
Custom chips in 2008 are a profoundly stupid idea.  I can go on the internet and buy high end graphics or sound and be far, far better off.

If OEM's are able to produce custom chips, then that is good, the trouble with off the shelf components is a short life cycle, meaning spares becoming difficult to obtain in a few years, we should have learnt this lesson from motorola when they cancelled further developement of the 68k family.

[asymetrix]

Custom chips are cheap and fast, but :

hardware keeps changing

cannot get access to documentation without $$$ and userbase

We need our own custom chips so the Amiga platform is not running into supply, documentation & driver problems.

We should have our own custom chips, it makes us unique, 24bit/32bit copper chip dont sound that bad.

[persia]

That's the problem with custom chips, you can possibly design a wideo chip that will come close to the Nvidia chips of today, let alone those of 2010, wo12 etc.  A custom chip is in you machine forever, if I want to upgrade to the latest Nvidia card it takes 2 minutes to open the case, pop out one card and pop in a new one.  Plus Nvidia has thousands of employees working on these cards.  There's just no way a few hundred Amiga fans can outdo Nvidia, Custom chips just create headache because some joker thinks they can write directly to them and then you can't upgrade because your software breaks.

There's really two roads here, a modern Amiga inspired by Classic Amigas or a reimplimented retro machine with a tweek here and there.  There's a fundamental choice.  You need to choice, abandon state of the art or abandon classic except as UAE.

There is no way to make classic modern, we are at the same fork in the road Apple was at in 1997.  I'm not saying we need to make the same choice, Apple pretty much owns "state of the art" and the competition is hard, maybe a retro games box has a better chance, retro-gaming with the some retro-computing on the side may be a good niche for Amiga. The Amiga has been state of the art in a decade and a half.

The sad thing is, no matter what the choice the community will grow smaller, and neither way offers a guarantee of success.

[Sig999]

When you look at video cards, sound cards, etc. at a fundamental level all they are is custom chips on a board (as far as comparison goes).  Want better graphics... here, plug this in.... want better sound?...here plug this in. Run some drivers and away you go.

When you look at the Amiga historically, it comes at a time of transition between when a home computer was pretty much replaced at the end of its life you didn't upgrade your Vic20 into a C64.. you bought a new one.  Now you upgrade it - keeping parts you want.

The Amiga was pretty forward looking, but even so still had to take a step backwards in some regards:  Kickstart was originally loaded from disk - just like OS's today are.  Of course doing it from floppy was 'too slow' and so it went onto a ROM - good for then, not so good for now.  I think anyone developing new amiga base hardware needs to look at what isn't working for us now and address those things - look at what is working in todays world, and use that as a jump off point.

I think a consortium of sorts would be a good thing amongst the hardware developers. In a perfect world it could aid development by not having everyone reinvent the same thing... in a realistic world it opens the doors for them to share features - Super AGA takes off? No probs, you can plug this into your whatever other board..... everybody wins.

How many different Amiga emulation projects would still be here if not for opens source UAE? If everyone had to reinvent every part of the emulation for every single project I don't think you'd see many polished examples out there.

As for compatability... shoot - even different variants of the Amiga aren't 100% compatible with each other now. If folks can run native software on the new hardware, that's neat -- if not there's always emulation for the things that won't work...

Folks can rip on hardware banging, but at the time I think it was a needed evil - you wouldn't have had half the games etc. that made the system popular if they didn't - and lets face it, the paradigm at the time was 'this is the machine.. this is how it is' - you didn't see that many compatability issues spring from banging the C64 hardware.... and I can't blame games programmers at the time not seeing things like OS updates, hardware changes, etc. being in the future.

Sig.

[biggun]

Where's ECS in that list?

IMHO, ECS is a minor improvement that its not worth mentioning. But you can decide yourself.

In a nutshell the Chipsets have these features:
 

OCS
---
LOWRES
(320x256) 6-Bit (Planes)  = 64 Colors
HIRES
(640x256) 4-Bit (Planes)  = 16 Colors
Sound:
4 Channel x 14 Bit

ECS
---
LOWRES
(320x256) 6-Bit (Planes)  = 64 Colors
HIRES
(640x256) 4-Bit (Planes)  = 16 Colors
Productivity
(640x480) 2-Bit (Planes)  = 4 Colors
Sound:
4 Channel x 14 Bit

AGA
---
LOWRES
(320x256) 8-Bit (Planes)  = 256 Colors
HIRES
(640x256) 8-Bit (Planes)  = 256 Colors
Productivity
(640x480) 8-Bit (Planes)  = 256 Colors
SuperHires
(1280x256) 8-Bit (Planes)  = 256 Colors
Sound:
4 Channel x 14 Bit

Super-AGA
---
LOWRES
(320x256) 24-Bit (Truecolor)  = 16777216 Colors
HIRES
(640x256) 24-Bit (Truecolor)  = 16777216 Colors
Productivity
(640x480) 24-Bit (Truecolor)  = 16777216 Colors
SuperHires
(1280x256) 24-Bit (Truecolor) = 16777216 Colors
SuperHires-Productivity
(1280x1024) 24-Bit (Truecolor) = 16777216 Colors
Sound:
8 Channel x 24 Bit

Blitter: 100 times faster than AGA BLitter
Extras:  Enhanced 2-D Acceleration, 3-D Acceration



Yes, ECS was an improvement for WB users but not for games, I think that ECS is not that important.

AGA was of course a big improvement

And SUPER-AGA is a big improvement

[bloodline]

Actually, that's:

Audio: 4 x 8bit

or 2 x 14bit (trick).

[biggun]

bloodline wrote:
Actually, that's:

Audio: 4 x 8bit

or 2 x 14bit (trick).

It depends on how you look at it.
The quality of the analog output signal is always 4 x 14 bit.
So technically the OCS was supporting 4 channels with 14 bit quality.

But the 14 Bit has devided into a volume and sample value per channel.
As the Audio had 4 DMA channels you could not DMA load 4 x 14 bit.  

[HenryCase]

persia wrote:
A custom chip is in you machine forever, if I want to upgrade to the latest Nvidia card it takes 2 minutes to open the case, pop out one card and pop in a new one.

Upgrading an FPGA is even easier, its all done through software.

persia wrote:
There's just no way a few hundred Amiga fans can outdo Nvidia

There isn't anyone seriously aiming to outdo Nvidia or ATI.

persia wrote:
Custom chips just create headache because some joker thinks they can write directly to them and then you can't upgrade because your software breaks.

Any bad changes made to the FPGA can be undone by resetting the Natami.

persia wrote:
There's really two roads here, a modern Amiga inspired by Classic Amigas or a reimplimented retro machine with a tweek here and there. There's a fundamental choice. You need to choice, abandon state of the art or abandon classic except as UAE.

There are more than two roads. Natami is in the middle of the two paths you proposed, being a classic/retro machine with substantial improvements. Probably easiest to think of it as an A5000.

persia wrote:
The sad thing is, no matter what the choice the community will grow smaller, and neither way offers a guarantee of success.

The level of success that Natami enjoys will be dependant on a number of factors, but it's certainly got a lot of interest from within the Amiga community and BBRV are showing an interest in helping out, so it may be sold at a reasonable price for ex-Amiga users to consider.

Sig999 wrote:
I think a consortium of sorts would be a good thing amongst the hardware developers. In a perfect world it could aid development by not having everyone reinvent the same thing... in a realistic world it opens the doors for them to share features - Super AGA takes off? No probs, you can plug this into your whatever other board..... everybody wins.

I agree, sharing the workload benefits everybody.