Amiga Coldfire project dead?

[Karlos]

AGA is a Kludge, same rubbish parallax with 8 extra colours wooo, same sound and a slow slow 256 colour mode. It was too little too late and only an idiot would argue otherwise. Even the 1987 Acorn Archimedes had faster 256 colour mode (and faster CPU than A4000/030 with 8 channel stereo sound actually).

Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.

[bloodline]

Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.

Yeah I have to also note that the A1200 vs the Archimedies A3020 (I think, it was the last desktop wedge they did), the Amiga was just generally faster and I'm not sure why as the Archi was higher spec'd very weird :-/

[Kronos]

@Karlos
So your saying that your 1998 aftermarket addon CPU-card managed to outperform the 1987 (?) stock A3000 (A as Archimedes here) ?

[bloodline]

The RiscPC was actually released about '96ish it was Acorn's last machine

[Hattig]

Actually, a friend had a first generation Acorn RiscPC. Was a nice system, no question, and the chunky based display a lot faster than AGA but the CPU performance was not that great, depending on the task. My first A1200 accelerator card (25MHz 040), for example, was considerably faster at decoding jpeg images than it was, for example.

To be fair the A3000 series used an 8MHz ARM2 processor, which was far faster than a 68000, but certainly couldn't compete with a 25MHz '040 ... maybe a 20MHz 68030...

[Hattig]

The RiscPC was actually released about '96ish it was Acorn's last machine

The BBC A3000 with 1 MB RAM came out in May 1989 for £799.

The Acorn A3010 with 1 MB RAM came out in September 1992 for £499.

The A1200 with 2MB RAM and about half the CPU power came out at the same time for £399, and soon reduced to £299. I guess CPU power was the tradeoff you got for the cheaper price.

[bloodline]

To be fair the A3000 series used an 8MHz ARM2 processor, which was far faster than a 68000, but certainly couldn't compete with a 25MHz '040 ... maybe a 20MHz 68030...

Karlos is referring to the "RiscPC", not the Archimedies... I appreciate those who didn't grow up with these machines might find this all quite confusing

[bloodline]

The BBC A3000 with 1 MB RAM came out in May 1989 for £799.

The Acorn A3010 with 1 MB RAM came out in September 1992 for £499.

The A1200 with 2MB RAM and about half the CPU power came out at the same time for £399, and soon reduced to £299. I guess CPU power was the tradeoff you got for the cheaper price.

Actually I think the Archimedes used a 12Mhz CPU... But I was comparing my A1200 sock with the stock A3020 and noting that the A1200 was generally faster in pretty much all areas I tried... The Acorn was just clunky

Karlos was comparing the RiscPC with is accelerated Amiga, so his comparison was quite valid.

[Karlos]

@Karlos
So your saying that your 1998 aftermarket addon CPU-card managed to outperform the 1987 (?) stock A3000 (A as Archimedes here) ?

Oh, my 1995 Apollo 1240 turbo totally wiped the floor with the Archimedes A3000 By late 1998 I was getting my BlizzardPPC, if I recall correctly.

However, it also outperformed the Acorn RiscPC, which is the machine I was actually talking about. The example below shows the case stacking, my friends system was just the lower slice.



I suspect it might be that the ARM processor in said model had no floating point support though I doubt the 040 jpeg codec I was using at the time used FPU either.

One of the coolest add-ons in my friend's RiscPC was a 486 board for PC compatibility. It integrated rather well with the host system, which provided the emulated display within a window on the RISCOS desktop as well as the disk IO and everything else. Seeing it run Windows 95 was quite amusing

I think the machine was a 33MHz ARM 610. I could be wrong.

[Hattig]

Karlos is referring to the "RiscPC", not the Archimedies... I appreciate those who didn't grow up with these machines might find this all quite confusing

Ah yes, I missed that, I just saw the A3000 stuff. And yes, the 1992 were 12MHz, and thus the CPU should have performed like a 25MHz 68030 ... but I don't think coders ever hit the peaks on this hardware.

RiscOS had some shortcomings (co-op multitasking, for example) which must have affected things. Also I don't think the graphics chip was up to much in terms of neat features apart from a funky 256 colour mode despite only having 16 colour registers, so simple things like scrolling would have been very CPU intensive.

[bloodline]

Ah yes, I missed that, I just saw the A3000 stuff. And yes, the 1992 were 12MHz, and thus the CPU should have performed like a 25MHz 68030 ... but I don't think coders ever hit the peaks on this hardware.

RiscOS had some shortcomings (co-op multitasking, for example) which must have affected things. Also I don't think the graphics chip was up to much in terms of neat features apart from a funky 256 colour mode despite only having 16 colour registers, so simple things like scrolling would have been very CPU intensive.

Sounds about right to me! I suspect the Amiga's more mature and more elegant DMA based gfx/audio architecture took a lot of pressure off the CPU... I think an A1200 with an ARM (in 1992) would have been a VERY nice beast!!

[Hattig]

Sounds about right to me! I suspect the Amiga's more mature and more elegant DMA based gfx/audio architecture took a lot of pressure off the CPU... I think an A1200 with an ARM (in 1992) would have been a VERY nice beast!!

It would have been. The closest we'll know what it would have been like is the 3D0 console.

[nicholas]

I bought my A1200 on the day of release for £399 from Dixons.

No software with it whatsoever apart from the Workbench 3.0 disks and a voucher for a game from Ocean.

@Matt

Do you still have an Archie? If so, perhaps you could send it to Pavel or Michal and see whether AROS performs better than RISCOS on it?

[Karlos]

Ok, so if the AROS devs can get M68K AROS working on the Atari Falcon and ARM AROS working on RiscPC I can see I am going to have to make room for even more old hardware :lol:

[LoadWB]

I'm a mac user
not a pc abuser
but I'm not creative
just a silly scots native...

:lol:

In Scotland was a Commodore User,
Who someone proclaimed was a loser.
He objected, of course,
From his lofty high-horse
Then all had an alcoholic infuser.

Meh, I do not always work well under pressure.  (Obviously a joke on a joke about a joke.)

[bloodline]

I bought my A1200 on the day of release for £399 from Dixons.

No software with it whatsoever apart from the Workbench 3.0 disks and a voucher for a game from Ocean.

@Matt

Do you still have an Archie? If so, perhaps you could send it to Pavel or Michal and see whether AROS performs better than RISCOS on it?

Nope, I never had one... Though I do have RedSquirrel emulator on a hard drive somewhere

@Karlos... It would be a bit weird... All the old 80s/early 90s machines running an AmigaOS clone... One OS to rule them all!!! :-o