Excitement about NatAmi

[commodorejohn]

Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.

[Hattig]

OT: People like to poop on the Wii but it is my primary Netflix streamer/viewer and it does so in full DVD quality.

Yeah, I use it for iPlayer. Mainly because iPlayer on the PS3 doesn't disable the screen dimming the PS3 does in its UI... I'd rather have blocky SD video I can view than SD video that goes dark, and doing *anything* on the remote skips back to the iPlayer interface with a tiny video in the middle.

[Hattig]

I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.

This is a good point. Anyone from Natami care to comment?

[jj]

Well, that's more a fault of the architecture the browser was ported from.
Opera runs fine on the Wii natively.
As does Aweb on the Amiga. It also depends on whether your cache is on Ramdisk or HDD...

 
Sorry I can not let that one go.  Opera on the Wii is sooooooo slow and unusable.
 
Yes I have got a Wii and have briefly tried using that rubbish.  Its about as quick and good as the inernet browswer on the PSP.
 
Browsing on my Nokia N900 is a million times more satisfactory that using Opera on the Wii.
 
I am not denying that AOS4 or MorphOS for that matter can run in 88Mb of ram, but an operating system with that little ram spare would be a horrible idea if you actually wanted to use the thing for anything slightly modern or useful.
 
Christ My classic has got more ram than that with 128mb and yes that has not been enough when wanting to run some games etc.

[Hattig]

Opera on the Wii is enough for YouTube, although the on-screen keyboard is a PITA (but that's down to the Wii, and you can plug in a keyboard). It's the same on the PS3, the browser is just a PITA, it's not the technology, it's the console UI.

[Franko]

Christ My classic has got more ram than that with 128mb and yes that has not been enough when wanting to run some games etc.

Wow... what game on a classic need's 128Mb, I'd love to see that one...

[jj]

Wow... what game on a classic need's 128Mb, I'd love to see that one...

 
Some versions of quake needish 128mb ram.  There are other games but memory not brillaint.

[Hattig]

Wow... what game on a classic need's 128Mb, I'd love to see that one...

Settlers on a planet-sized map?

[jj]

Opera on the Wii is enough for YouTube, although the on-screen keyboard is a PITA (but that's down to the Wii, and you can plug in a keyboard). It's the same on the PS3, the browser is just a PITA, it's not the technology, it's the console UI.

 
I think that youtube is ok because the wii has its own special youtube interface

[jj]

Settlers on a planet-sized map?

When I said classic, I didn't mean stock
 
Its a heavily expanded A1200 with 603e/175 and Bivison.
 
Obviously there were no games released for stock miggys that need anywhere near this ram.
 
im talking new games ported to expanded classic hardware.

[Franko]

Some versions of quake needish 128mb ram.  There are other games but memory not brillaint.

Guess I'd forgot about that one and never really notice much about the need for memory with my 256Mb...

@ Hattig

Ahh.. The Settlers on of my all time favorites, Foundation was a total let down though...

[jj]

I loved settlers, played that for hours and hours and hours on end.
 
Never played any of the newer version

[SamuraiCrow]

I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.

This is a good point. Anyone from Natami care to comment?

My only comment is that from what I gathered from the team, the blitter and all of the chipset functions will be buffered to take full advantage of the DDR2 memories' bandwidth.

This is in contrast to the AGA chipset which didn't even take full advantage of 32-bit page mode.  (32 bits plus page mode was only supported by the display DMAs, audio sampling rates, and sprites.  It wasn't used by the AGA blitter at all despite the fact that it could have made up to 4x speed increase of AGA.)

[commodorejohn]

Hmm, interesting. I presume then that the new blitter is able to keep up with whatever speed DDR2 they're putting in it, or there wouldn't be much point in the buffering. Given the estimates on CPU speed, I'd hazard a guess that it's 133MHz, but of course I have no way of knowing.

[SamuraiCrow]

@commodorejohn

Each stage of the blitter is just an and-or-invert gate.  There is less latency for that than for the CPU instruction fetches.  I'd estimate closer to 200+ MHz for the blitter.  Add to that that there is better DMA allocation scheduling than the round-robin hardware scheduler that AGA had and you'll see how much improvements stack up.

@thread

According to Gunnar von Boehn on this thread on the NatAmi website (see seventh post from the bottom), the board layout for the NatAmi MX is complete.  By my guesses, production of the prototype will commence in small quantities for the team to work with soon.  This should speed up the design processes and benchmarks will likely follow.

[commodorejohn]

Right, right. Guess we'll see how it shakes out, hopefully soon!