Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[olsen]

@Olsen

I remember an article written during or near the end of Roadshow 68K development years ago. It was well written and spoke of how development process started with looking at the only available examples (AmiTCP sources?)

Do you remember the article?  Perhaps you wrote it.

It's likely that I did. I also wrote the article about the FastFileSystem reimplementation I was was responsible for.

It was a good read, I should have saved it. I remember emailing the author at the time about purchasing Roadshow 68K.  I think it was released as part of a monthly Amiga.com update or something available for club members to read.  Do you still have it?

I'd have to dig. While I never throw stuff away, it's sometimes an issue to figure out where it ended up. Currently, all my old data sits on a NAS system at home. But once you've gone beyond 28 GBytes of Amiga-related data that have accumulated over some 25 years, it becomes difficult to locate anything...

[biggun]

First of all I would like to congratulate you to your work and thank you for your decision to continue support for the 68K AMIGA line!

While the checksumming code certainly contributes to the performance, speed comes from how fast you can move data to/from the network I/O requests into/out of the TCP/IP stack's internal data structures. I'm lucky to have found one of the fastest copying routines to do this job.

This sounds very interesting.
If you say the copy loop is important for the network performance.
Would you mind in the future to include a 68050 version of this routine which might be tuned to use a parallel load? We could handwrite this code for you if you are willing to include it.

[rzookol]

@Olsen

I remember an article written during or near the end of Roadshow 68K development years ago. It was well written and spoke of how development process started with looking at the only available examples (AmiTCP sources?)

Polish translation:
http://www.ppa.pl/os4/artykuly-cam9.php

Translation from translation:
http://translate.google.pl/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ppa.pl%2Fos4%2Fartykuly-cam9.php&sl=pl&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

[magnetic]

Olsen

I guess all things have their time. And now maybe its finally Roadshows time for the Classic Amiga crowd. The one thing I have learned being in the Amiga scene since 1988 is that the market never seems to die. It somehow stays alive. I think properly presented 68k Roadshow will be received well. Good luck. A gui is really important, i'd like to mention again


NOTE
*******
Nordic Global aka Holger Kruse
Miami
MiamiDX
********

  Having met Holger Kruse at many US Amiga shows over the years. I purchased Miami DX through his registration system. I NEVER received my keyfile. Holger and Nordic Global were completely non responsive to emails. I learned from other amigans at conventions that there were many people out there this happened to and Holger dissapeared.  well...

At one Amiga show in St Louis, Holger somehow appeared or something. I remember cornering him at a party and asking him why people didtn receive keyfiles or an explanation.. Well his explantion for the poor business practice was " I had all the registration software and names on my Amiga 1200hd and it died along with the drive and all the data. No backup"  I kid you not. I think thats the last Amiga show he was seen at as well.  Wild..

[olsen]

First of all I would like to congratulate you to your work and thank you for your decision to continue support for the 68K AMIGA line!


This sounds very interesting.
If you say the copy loop is important for the network performance.
Would you mind in the future to include a 68050 version of this routine which might be tuned to use a parallel load? We could handwrite this code for you if you are willing to include it.

Thank you for the offer, but it is likely not worth the stretch.

The tests I ran strongly suggest that memory performance trumps CPU capabilities, and that even a 40 MHz 68040 can outperform a 50 MHz 68060 if its memory interface gives it a bit more of an edge.

In 2003 Roadshow 4.205 managed to squeeze about as much out of an "Ariadne I" card as possible, and that's with a 40 MHz 68040 CPU in an A3000T. Once you get this far, the limiting factors are more with the expansion hardware than with how much faster a hand-optimized copying routine for a specific CPU may run.

[olsen]

Polish translation:
http://www.ppa.pl/os4/artykuly-cam9.php

Translation from translation:
http://translate.google.pl/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ppa.pl%2Fos4%2Fartykuly-cam9.php&sl=pl&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

Yes, that's the one, and it actually has my name on it. Funny how it reads back in the english translation...

And I just found the original HTML text, which I sent to Amiga, Inc. on November 23rd, 2003.

[olsen]

Olsen

I guess all things have their time. And now maybe its finally Roadshows time for the Classic Amiga crowd. The one thing I have learned being in the Amiga scene since 1988 is that the market never seems to die. It somehow stays alive. I think properly presented 68k Roadshow will be received well. Good luck. A gui is really important, i'd like to mention again

I know - the GUI issue, however, repeatedly managed to stall development work. Unless something like a miracle happens, I'd rather not rely upon having a GUI ready to ship with the product.

NOTE
*******
Nordic Global aka Holger Kruse
Miami
MiamiDX
********

  Having met Holger Kruse at many US Amiga shows over the years. I purchased Miami DX through his registration system. I NEVER received my keyfile. Holger and Nordic Global were completely non responsive to emails. I learned from other amigans at conventions that there were many people out there this happened to and Holger dissapeared.  well...

At one Amiga show in St Louis, Holger somehow appeared or something. I remember cornering him at a party and asking him why people didtn receive keyfiles or an explanation.. Well his explantion for the poor business practice was " I had all the registration software and names on my Amiga 1200hd and it died along with the drive and all the data. No backup"  I kid you not. I think thats the last Amiga show he was seen at as well.  Wild..

If the story is true to the facts, then I can perfectly understand why Holger chose to bow out. Talk about major embarrassment. How can you recover from this degree of desaster and still keep the trust of the customers who invested their money? I guess there may be more than one way to approach such a situation, but not all of them may be apparent or open at the time desaster strikes.

[Golem!dk]

The CAM piece is online at the Wayback Machine as well.

[biggun]

In 2003 Roadshow 4.205 managed to squeeze about as much out of an "Ariadne I" card as possible, and that's with a 40 MHz 68040 CPU in an A3000T. Once you get this far, the limiting factors are more with the expansion hardware than with how much faster a hand-optimized copying routine for a specific CPU may run.

I see.
Of course for the NATAMI the 68K CPU has now access to 100MB and Gigabit Networkcards.

[olsen]

I see.
Of course for the NATAMI the 68K CPU has now access to 100MB and Gigabit Networkcards.

Then you are most likely to hit the limitations of the SANA-II architecture before the question comes up how to make the copying operations faster.

Gigabit traffic is practically unmanageable if the data has to be copied around using the CPU, for example. But this is the only option SANA-II currently offers. Also, the design of the TCP/IP stack Roadshow is built around knows not how to deal with DMA operations. Modern TCP/IP stacks cleverly mesh DMA operations with their own idea of how packets and TCP segments should be represented in their internal data structures.

Available CPU and network performance does not necessarily translate into actual TCP/IP stack performance. On OS4 Roadshow is hampered by the performance limitations imposed by its 1994 architecture, in spite of the fact that the networking hardware will do DMA just fine and the PPC CPU can push data around very quickly.

[ExiE_]

I know - the GUI issue, however, repeatedly managed to stall development work. Unless something like a miracle happens, I'd rather not rely upon having a GUI ready to ship with the product.

Well I am one of many (I guess) who contacted you over the years about possibility to buy 68k version of Roadshow, and you know what, i am still interested :-)

About the GUI and price. I think that the availability of the GUI would affect the price significantly. I mean the €10-15 for digital distribution sounds fair to me for GUIess version while the package with GUI incl. could be €25-35? (Would be more few years back...)

[olsen]

About the GUI and price. I think that the availability of the GUI would affect the price significantly. I mean the €10-15 for digital distribution sounds fair to me for GUIess version while the package with GUI incl. could be €25-35? (Would be more few years back...)

For now I won't bet that any GUI will be ready by the time the necessary work on preparing Roadshow 68k for release has completed. Time permitting, I'd like to see it getting out of the door as soon as possible. Who knows, maybe a GUI could follow later as an update for the project, but right now that's speculation on my part.

I'd rather see Roadshow 68k released with a decent documentation while there is still sufficient enthusiasm for the product. If you ship a product, you can update it. But if you never ship it...

[ExiE_]

I'd rather see Roadshow 68k released with a decent documentation while there is still sufficient enthusiasm for the product. If you ship a product, you can update it. But if you never ship it...

Cool. I just wanted say that GUI would justify higher price. I personaly dont need GUI at all. And I guess after people setup Roadshow for the first time without GUI there will be no way how to charge any more money for separate GUI later. Even though add GUI later on would be still nice.

[itix]

Once it's free, who is going to take care of it? For free?

Does RoadShow need daily caring? I mean, I is mature project which is presumably out of beta stages since many years. If you were going to develop completely new features it could be another bounty project again.

This won't be as much fun as having some sort of carrot providing an incentive to keep pulling the cart.

I dont expect Amiga software is going to sell more than 50-100 copies in total these days... most of sales happen when product is released and then stagnate to very low numbers. In few months you have saturated entire Amiga market and it is not growing.

It is your choice of course but in my opinion with limited market bounty generates more pleasure to both users and developer.

[Jeff]

@Golem!dk

Thanks!  You have a very good memory.

[olsen]

Does RoadShow need daily caring? I mean, I is mature project which is presumably out of beta stages since many years. If you were going to develop completely new features it could be another bounty project again.

When you assume responsibility for software of your creation, you are supposed to be able to answer questions regarding its performance, its limitations and give hints on working around them. That's not counting in collecting the information required for fixing bugs or adding new features.

The first part of "caring" is in helping the product to reach its audience, and make the audience care about the product. I can understand that a bounty would neatly fit the first part of such a process. Get the thing out the door and into the hands of the users. That would cover the first act.

The second part of "caring" is the tedious bit. Now that you've slain the dragon, so to speak, the villagers will start to complain about the damage the animal did to their property and expect you, the guy who slew the dragon, to be sympathetic to their pleads. After all, you did the big thing, everybody was happy, and now you're going to get dragged back into the daily business, which is not very exciting. I can't see a bounty taking care of the bug fixes and the enhancements. It may sound neat when you think about it, but once reality settles back in, you'll find that chasing after bugs and preparing for the next iteration of the product is not as exciting and motivating as things were when you prepped for the first act of the effort. There may be a reward in the distant future, but as experience shows, that distant reward can be poisonous for software development.

I dont expect Amiga software is going to sell more than 50-100 copies in total these days... most of sales happen when product is released and then stagnate to very low numbers. In few months you have saturated entire Amiga market and it is not growing.

It is your choice of course but in my opinion with limited market bounty generates more pleasure to both users and developer.

You're talking about the software equivalent of a one-night-stand. Wham, bang, thank you ma'am. I'm not that kind of guy. If it's software, your responsibilities will last, and last longer than you may have expected when you made worst case predictions. And the best thing to make them last is to stretch out the rewards aspect of development. So, to put it into words, I do not believe in bounties to provide for a lasting development process.