Official email info about sharkppc from elbox

[ikir]

Kronos always attack Elbox or things that he don't like...... don't care guys.

I'm going to order my A1 next week, and if Shark will be out, and OFFICIALLY supported i'll buy one for my 1200. Elbox hardware i had buy in the past is "state of the art", and them are the only reason why i can use my Amiga everyday, also for work.
Some my friends had chosed Shark instead of an A1 or both.
There is a Market, Mediator always sell very good, probably the best sell classic upgrade ever, and Shark have a good start point if it are good.

We'll se, but Kronos, you don't need to flame every Elbox post/news.

[KennyR]

Ok guys, time to tune into Sanity FM.

The Shark is VAPOR. It can't work in an Amiga PCI board, it doesn't work in an Amiga PCI board. It won't run OS4, it can't run OS4, Elbox have no intention of licencing OS4. It's just a Mac CPU board and there is absolutely no software, not even the lowlevel drivers, available for it. Not even Linux will run on it. You really must get over this.

Even if by some sweet miracle it wasn't vapor, what do you really gain? An old machine with a fast CPU dragged down by all the old Amiga bottlenecks and legacy. A G3 or G4 simply cannot perform to its abilities in this environment. What you'd get is the equivalent of a CPPC with no support. It's pointless.

If you call common sense anti-Amiga (@ ikir in particular), then your Amiga is not my Amiga. My Amiga is progressive. Yours is just pipe dreams and fluff and useless petitions.

[DaNi]

For me is good the launch of SharkPPC/sharkPPC+ when OS4 is finished. We can have 3 new hardware amigas, AmigaClassic with Sharkppc, pegasosI/II and AmigaONE, its good for amiga comunity for choose one of other. The shark have a little diference, you can have os4 on a g3/g4 with you 1200 board, on this case you can have new cpu new os and access to the original custom chips without any emulation, its is good, for games, demos etc and of course, i personality later buy a Amigaone but first, sharkppc for my amiga classic =)

[CU_AMiGA]

The Shark PPC WILL come out and WILL run Amiga OS 4. So there! The future looks bright for Amiga.

[Bennymee]

@Kronos


"And no, we haven't discussed OS4 for Shark or Peg1, but wether the Shark
is real or just vapor (until someone pulled it OT)."

Below was the discussion I placed an reply on:

>And again, what has the number of sold Pegs to do with it ? Remember
that Hyperion claimed that it was far to low to justify a port  



@Kronos

>You would be hard presses to gather 10000 active >Amigians, and only
>a minority of those run beefed upt "classics". Just >ask anybody who actually
>sells Amiga-HW/SW, and when he managed to sell >1000 units for the last
>me .....

I didn't write that, I said that I see a large potential market of machines and parts... to keep the scene year's a life  - potential Medaitor users.

@Kronos

>Oh and Amigas are falling apart everyday, they just >don't care wether OS4
>is ready or not. Just have a close look through >forums like this, and you will
>find lots of questions bout such systems behaving >strangly.

I see dozens of machines for sale on Ebay, Amibench, Amiga-news.de, perfectly working even with CyberStorm's or BlizzardPPC.   :-D

[Herewegoagain]

It's just a Mac CPU board and there is absolutely no software, not even the lowlevel drivers, available for it.

 :-?

How do you figure it's a Mac CPU card?   Mac's have thier own CPU slot, and do not use a PCI slot for CPU upgrades.

As for the rest of the things you state as fact.... well, that is your opinion.   I mean, I could shout those exact things about the PegII, but that doesn't mean that some company will not strike a deal for an OS4 license on that hardware.  

Although, I have my doubts about how Elbox are going to accomplish this, they do seem determined that they will get an OS4 license, which is more than we've heard from another certain company.

[mantisspider]

how fast can the shark cards go?

so an Amiga 1200 with a shark card and Mediator would be the equivalent of an AmigaOne?

If the price is cheaper than an A1 then I think a lot of Amiga owners would upgrade their machine. If its not cheaper then wont most people rather buy an A1?

[KennyR]

Herewegoagain wrote:
How do you figure it's a Mac CPU card? Mac's have thier own CPU slot, and do not use a PCI slot for CPU upgrades.

Older Macs also used a PCI upgrade card, AFAIR.

As for the rest of the things you state as fact.... well, that is your opinion. I mean, I could shout those exact things about the PegII, but that doesn't mean that some company will not strike a deal for an OS4 license on that hardware.

Opinion, yes, but one tempered by bitter experience of the Amiga market. In general, where something promises too much and has too little evidence to show, it's vapor. Look at the BoXer, the Walker, the Brainstormer G3, the original Escena A1... all had the same problem. Lots of promises without any explanation of how the practical side might work.

Something smells distinctly rotten about Elbox's explanation that "we'll release the shark when OS4 is ready". It sounds like Amiga Inc.s "we'll send your vouchers when OS4 is ready" when they are 2 million in debt. Either prospect really happening is remote.

Although, I have my doubts about how Elbox are going to accomplish this, they do seem determined that they will get an OS4 license, which is more than we've heard from another certain company.

Elbox and licences don't mix. Where are their own RTG software and USB stacks, after they refused to licence CyberGraphX or Poseideon?

@mantisspider

There's no way a mediator + shark + amiga will ever be nearly as powerful as an AmigaONE.

[odin]

CU_AMiGA wrote:
The Shark PPC WILL come out and WILL run Amiga OS 4. So there! The future looks bright for Amiga.

Er...right. You're our resident fortuneteller I gather? Please disclose if I'll win the lottery next week ;-).

[lempkee]

mantispider: the sharkppc normal model (the first one to come if any will come) will not be equilliant to amigaone nor amigaone micro, it will have less cpu power + diffrent thinsg will make it slower also, mostly because you add it to your cpu bus on the a1200 etc and that has its limits.

its just an addon wich will hopefully let you have a G3 or a G$ cpu on it (upto 500 mhz).

and it will cost less than the other ways and most of all you will keep your old hw intact, so for people like me i could use my fav machine all the time and dont care about emulators like uae to get my stuff running.

but ofcourse i will get an amigaone Micro when it comes aswell and maybe a peg2 but it remains to be seen what will happen , peg 2 was announced to come in october and now we are in december soon and if i was a troll i would have made alot of noise of it on ann.lu or here on this board , and also a1 micro wont come before quarter 1 2004.

as a last note in this, hyperion have had successfull contracts with elbox before (warp3d) and they are in contact with elbox about the shark but last time i bothered to ask they concluded it was just a big mystery to them as its to us how elbox will pull of the SW stuff to make it boot and work ..

if it really worked it would have been for sale since linux ppc worked on amigaones, and i know of alot of people who would have bought this card even if its only got linux for now..

cheers

[Herewegoagain]

Older Macs also used a PCI upgrade card, AFAIR.

None that I know of ever used a PCI slot.  Some did use the cache slot but that's different altogether.   All of the others had their own CPU slots.  

Many people thought that the Sonnet Cresendo PCI was a CPU upgrade on a PCI card, but it simply was just the name indicating it was for the original PCI based Macs.  Those macs had thier own CPU slot.  I know,  I have a PowerMac 8500 with a Cresendo PCI G3@450, and it definitely plugs into a CPU slot, not a PCI.  That was a common misconception about that product due to bad naming.

[Lando]

You would be hard presses to gather 10000 active Amigians, and only a minority of those run beefed upt "classics". Just  ask anybody who actually sells Amiga-HW/SW, and when he managed to sell 1000 units for the last me .....

I'm estimating here, but I've owned 3 mediators (2 1200 versions and an A4000 one) and, having spoken with other people who own mediators and comparing serial numbers, it seems that cards are numbered sequentially, so you can work out how many they sold.  When I got my first mediator (about 9 months after they came out) my board was numbered in the 3000 range.  When I got another a year later it was around 6500.  That was a year ago.  My mediator A4000 had a serial number around 350.  

So, going from what I can work out, sales figures for the Mediator (all versions) are at least 10,000.  

Considering that these people have spent so much money on their Amigas (mediators aren't cheap) it's reasonable to assume that a lot of them would also be willing to spend an extra couple of hundred quid to buy a Shark.  Even if only 25% of mediator owners bought a shark that's 2500 copies of Amiga OS 4.  This is a big enough market for Hyperion to want OS4 to run on the Shark, and for Elbox to make sure it works.

If and when OS4 does appear and runs on the Shark, I'd expect a surge in people buying mediators and Sharks

I have to say though, I sold my last real high-spec Amiga (A4000 PPC + Mediator) almost exactly a year ago, and I couldn't see myself going back to classic now.  It would cost the best part of a grand to get everything needed, and when I can get a higher performing Peg2 for just over £200 with OS included it just isnt worth it.  For people who already own mediators though, it's certainly an interesting prospect.

[Van_M]

Is the SharkPPC supposed to be working with a G-REX or a Prometheus or whatever else busboard?  I'm sorry if this question have been asked before.

[Lemmink]

So, how about the PM7200.
The sonnetcard for this MAC looks exactly like the card Elbox once showed (although is hat a shark logo on the cooler)

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/crescendo_7200.html

And judjeing from the looks of this picture the card is at last physically compatible to a PCI-Slot. The other PCI-MACs had the notch in the middle of their processorslot (I have one PM7600 right before me), this card as you can clearly see has the notch at exactly the same place as a PCI-card would.
On Top this acceleartor is the only that has the possibility of adding RAM directly to the card as due to a "fault" in the design of the 7200 the onboard-RAM could not be accesed from this accelerator.

I do not doubt that you could hack this card to work in an Mediator but I really doubt that Elbox will do it.
There is simply no point in doing it, it would cost less then an AOne: right, it would cost less then an AOne lite: maybe.
But it won`t come close to the power of even the discontiued AOne SE, especially since the + will never come `cos Sonnet doesn`t produce such a card.
You don`t belive Elbox will really design or even redesign a processorcard, do you ?. Since the end of P5 no one did design a Processorcard for the Amiga. If it would have been that easy do you think DCE would have simply replicated the P5 PPC-cards without enhanceing it even only in terms of clockspeed an RAM-interface ? If they, who had quite some knowledge on those things and the productionhardware didn`t do it, how do you expect Elbox to pull that stunt ?

[Kronos]

lempkee wrote:

as a last note in this, hyperion have had successfull contracts with elbox before (warp3d)

Yes,but only after Elbox tried each and every possible option to get W3D
without paying for it. Miles of flamewars can still be found in the ann-archives.

@Lando
Serial numbers are not a geat way of measuring, as these are often used
to make the company look bigger than it is. My boss for example decided
that we should start at 3000, and now we are 3550   ;-)  another part of the
company even started at 20000 .....

Such numbers are also often used to have the exact model tagged into them.

From discussion I had with a certain dealer (no names, no fingerprints)
I would guess that a total of 2-3000 units were sold worldwide.

[T_Bone]

Van_M wrote:
Is the SharkPPC supposed to be working with a G-REX or a Prometheus or whatever else busboard?  I'm sorry if this question have been asked before.

I doubt it very much. Even if it technically worked, I'd be extremely surprised if they "allowed" it to work on anything but a mediator.