Sonnet PPC PCI Card

[arnljot]

@alexh

Do you think we can find a capable programmer who would be interessted in the bounty I suggested?

I think that if such a person could get it to work under 3.9, then perhaps some of the experiences could be passed on to 4.x

It´t not a big thing if it could be pulled off. Just a nice little extension to the Amiga

[alexh]

I doubt it very much. Just look at what has happened to OpenPCI.

Porting open source linux drivers to AmigaOS for hardware we know works (to an extent) should be easier than something like this and yet the project lies stagnating :-(

[arnljot]

@alexh

I´m not familiar with that, what happened?

EDIT: oh, you must have edited

[alexh]

Not much, it was a very interesting project at the start, lots of interest, several drivers written... and then the support dried up and the core author seems to have got a bit bored too.

http://bvernoux.free.fr/DevPCI.php

Only four or five drivers were ever written for this interesting core library.

[arnljot]

@alexh

Yes I see what you mean. Though I hope that these point´s make a difference

2005 vs. 2008: Realism. Back in 2005 there was still hope Today efforts put into Amiga development is for the enthusiasts. Not for great masses, or even thousand of Amiga users, only the few. So things will move slowly, and things will be hard. But:

Sonnet: We might get the datasheet for the card from them.

Bounty: It´s not to entice the greed geene in a coder, but just practicality. There might be a sufficiently skilled Amiga coder out there who might not have the kit needed to look into this. The bounty seeks to cure this.

What I´m aiming for here is cynical optimism. How am I doing so far? :-D

[da9000]

@arnljot:

The unfortunate truth is that it's going to be very hard to get anybody to work on it. It's not easy work and requires a lot of hours. Most good developers/programmers/coders are already "taken" and you'd need a lot of money to convince them to spend the time. My belief is that it has to be a self-started project, and a project of love, much like Dennis' MiniMig.

What I *do* know for a fact is that to start a project you need to have access to certain things. For doing any kind of "driver work", that means docs to the hardware. For example, back in the Linux days I had found the register docs for the SiS6326 (or something like that - yes, very crappy) card, and because it was one of the few that I had the docs for, I decided to write my own driver for it (destined for DRI, but that's another LONG tale). If you or someone else can get the dev docs (and possibly tools, or source) from Sonnet, then you just made the possibility of that one person who'll make it their self-started project all of a sudden almost 100% reality (I personally think it'll be a matter of time - someone will start working on it).

Now if that self-starter doesn't have access to the docs and has to mess with "company politics" and such and such, guess what: they aren't likely to do it. They want to code, not deal with red tape.

PS. The FSF and FOSS communities (read: Linux) are very good at extracting documentation because they're very big, and I'm sure they'd have interest in supporting as much Mac hardware as possible, so it might be worth it to look in there for possible efforts to contact Sonnet and possible availability of the docs.

Lastly, some companies will sell you the documentation/tools, so it might be interesting to see if Sonnet is willing to sell and how much. Then the first "bounty" can go into getting those docs.

Sorry for the "negativity", but it's the reality and the way things are, unfortunately :-(

The only way to move forward is to realize these and try to find sensible solutions around them.

PS. Just read your last post: you're doing well with cynical optimism! :-)  And I think your bounty is a great offer for which there's need. I've been personally trying to get any PPC hardware for my Amiga to do some PPC coding, but haven't had any success, so I'm sure there are plenty of other coders in similar situations.

[mschulz]

First of all, my old blog entry:
cheap ppc alternative

da9000 wrote:
The first resource I as a programmer would need is the technical docs (registers, memory map layout, any other info on PCI transactions, etc.) of the Sonnet card. That will be absolutely necessary to get it up and running.

Ask them. Last time I spoke with the main engineer of Sonnet card he was very happy to answer my questions.

The Sonnet card based on the MPC106 CPU bridge, widely known in Amiga community due to the Troika project - their first approach was based on the Tundra Tsi106 northbridge - the very same as MPC106 (Tundra acquired the MPC106 and 107 from Freescale long time ago).

The Sonnet card is an awfully simple design. The MPC106 serves as the CPU to PCI and Memory to PCI bridge. All information you need is in Freescale/Tundra docs. Including the doorbell register which is used to trigger interrupt on the Sonnet card.

A possibility is also that Sonnet supplied a binary-only library that Mac programmers had to use to access the card.

That was only your speculation, wasn't it? Mac programmers did not need any library to use the sonnet card. The card took almost whole hardware over and the onboard CPU was not seen by software anymore. It was only used to bypass the interrupts up to the sonnet card (using the doorbell register)

[arnljot]

@mschulz

You wrote:
Let's go dual CPU, let's go Bi-Endian

I like that one!

Btw, good work on AROS. Do you need a new labour of love any time soon? ;-)

[arnljot]

@da9000

I´ve just committed the cyberstorm ppc to a bounty for the sonnet card now But if it doesn´t happen. Ask in a while for a csppc in amibay, and I will sell it to you for a good price if you are a os 3.x ppc utility coder. Doesn´t have to be big things, just have a pulse as a os3.x coder ;-). It will not be the extortinate ebay prices, I don´t need the money - I need Amiga PPC coders :-D

[jimmyboy]

Good luck with your project. Why dont you try other avenues tho. Classic Amigas are drying up as time goes by. More will will fail and more will be butchered on mod {bleep}ups. If you can find a coder get them to code OS3-4 to work on other ppc mainboards. Efika is a good start but its short on power. Amiga users will always be crippled due to lack of coders and lack of hardware. The hardware which is available is also limited in power which i believe puts coders off.

[da9000]

@mschulz:

I will ignore the apparent attitude in your reply because it seems you know more about this stuff, and it's smarter for me to learn.

So to briefly address your points:

mschulz wrote:
Ask them. Last time I spoke with the main engineer of Sonnet card he was very happy to answer my questions.

Since I'm not the one looking at starting this project, I've had no desire to contact them. However I'm glad to hear that they were friendly and reachable (how did you get access to said engineer, if I may ask?)

mschulz wrote:
The Sonnet card is an awfully simple design. The MPC106 serves as the CPU to PCI and Memory to PCI bridge. All information you need is in Freescale/Tundra docs. Including the doorbell register which is used to trigger interrupt on the Sonnet card.

I've never been involved in those failed projects so I didn't know. Glad to know though. Could you provide pointers to the Freescale/Tundra docs?

Furthermore, if said information is all that's needed, what are you speculations as to why nobody has jumped the gun already? I'm very curious to know, since you seem to have followed these projects and know of the simple design of the Sonnet card.

mschulz wrote:
That was only your speculation, wasn't it? Mac programmers did not need any library to use the sonnet card. The card took almost whole hardware over and the onboard CPU was not seen by software anymore. It was only used to bypass the interrupts up to the sonnet card (using the doorbell register)

Yes, I don't believe I stated that it wasn't speculation. As I've not worked with this particular hardware (or related ones) and thus I wouldn't know and wouldn't insinuate otherwise.


PS. I'm pretty sure I've read your blog post before, but it's been a while. I'll re-read it again - I'm sure you cover some of those points. Please shed as much knowledge on this subject as you can, and I'd be curious to hear your responses to AlexH's speculations. Because if there's something to learn, it's to see what went wrong with Elbox's project and try to avoid it next time (for whoever may wish to pursue such a project)

[da9000]

@arnljot:

I thank you for your suggestion and might take you up on it if I feel I have time to do anything. That's unfortunately one thing that can't be easily bought or had :-(

[da9000]

@jimmyboy:

I think a point that you and many others are missing (and you're not to be blamed for it, you're just different), is that certain people (like me) like the old form factor. We want to keep the Amiga looking like an Amiga. A PC box with a Ghz fast G4 running even AmigaOS4 doesn't "feel" like an Amiga to some of us. Perhaps that's a problem with us. I don't know. Perhaps it's our inner most psyche saying to us: look, it's OVER man. GAME OVER. The Amiga will never become a mainstream platform again, in which case we settle with what we've got (our old skool form factor) and try to squeeze the juice out of it. I don't know what's right or wrong, but I know that's how it is sometimes.

However, what I also know is that BOTH worlds can co-exist: you can have a PC-boxed new age Amiga, but if someone as clever as Phase5/DCE/Sonnet comes along and makes a nice pluggable expansion card for desktop Amigas, then maybe they too can enjoy some of that sheer Ghz power.

Of course the problem is always numbers... and unfortunately for the Amiga case, it's numbers of both classic Amigans and "modern" Amigans. We've got neither :-(

DAMN YOU COMMODORE! Maybe you burn in hell!

[freqmax]

Is there a large PPC software base out there ..? (as opposed the m68k)

@alexh:
"Prometheus PCI bridge. It turned out that it didn't work with the vast majority of sound cards because of some unimplemented portion of the PCI specification.", do you remember which part? (useful for future soundcard programming ).

[mike-]

Well, the shark ppc would probably be a modified version of the sonnet thingie based on the same probably patented principle, why they are delaying i is beyond me, perhaps to get the ppc chips cheaper and or a faster models. Who'd pay 449 euros for a 400 mhz ppc card today?

Im quite sure they'd have to add some sort of chip that speaks to the mediator pci to get things working correctly. Then again perhaps not. Since the "Shark PPC" seems pretty much identical to the sonnet

Wouldnt a classic amiga with this card still be a classic amiga? Perhaps we could see os4.1 running on classic amigas with this card. That would probably be our only chance of getting 4.1 fully featured.

But we would have nothing to loose trying.

Another thought that struck me was that freescale might not consider them a big enough costumer, or isnt this an issue with ppc?

It must be something else thats stopping them, look at the crazy prices for the Cyberstorm, people are going nuts over os4, having it on the classic is half the fun! I share the opinion about amgia one's not feeling like an amiga, it doesnt even have the amiga keys!

[motorollin]

mike- wrote:
Who'd pay 449 euros for a 400 mhz ppc card today?

Probably the same people who are prepared to prepared to pay €1000 for a 233MHz card...

--
moto