PowerPC accelerator - how does that work then?

[ciento]

OK, I know all about Amithlon, tested it at the time, yes its only x86 recompile of AmigaOS 3.x not new OS or any way forward.

It was the way forward, McEwen knew it, and rejected it. Perhaps an act
of big-corporation tampering. All other things you mentioned about Amithlon,
would have turned out quite different, with some minimal financial support for the project, which was on the precipice of greatness.

[Akiko]

In best tradition of Amiga Inc claims believe CUSA claimed they will kind of beat Apple, Dell etc.

Yep reminiscent of when McEwen announced his fantasy AmigaOS 5, which was supposedly better than OS X.

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/10/07/amiga-os5-to-be-better-than-mac-os-x/

Well I'll say one thing, CUSA and Ainc are perfect business partners.

[itix]

That's not exactly true, though, is it? There were plenty of applications that ran almost entirely on the PPC, calling the OS to do IO, graphics etc.

What applications? Unless you mean games, do you?

Anything using native UI is fail. Software like IBrowse/PPC was not an option.

Nevertheless PPC boards were expensive doorstops. Fast 68060 accelerator boards would have been much better investment.

[fishy_fiz]

Nevertheless PPC boards were expensive doorstops. Fast 68060 accelerator boards would have been much better investment.

Not sure Id go so far as to say they were useless, but I agree an '060 is a better option for classics than ppc.
My old bppc+grex+voodoo3 system rarely got touched in favor of amithlon and not just becuase of the vastly superior performance amithlon offers. There simply wasnt much worthwhile for ppc. Given the choice of the same hardware again ('040 + ppc in my case) or an '060 Id go for the '060 any day of the week. Overall its a much better experience.

[mousehouse]

Even an '060 is overrated IMHO as it can cause major headache's with the different versions of 68060.library... The 060 also came out after Commodore left us, there never was a 060 card from Commodore or AT. Only a rebadged Quickpack card if I'm not mistaken. They are faster than a 040 for sure, but feature and compatibility-wise nothing beats a 40MHz 040 such as the WarpEngine.

@Karlos

Great explanation of the PPC/68K coexistence on Classic Amiga's! I've done much reading about it the last year but this is the best summary I've seen ;-)

If you have any guides to programming for WarpOS that would be much appreciated... I cannot get the gcc 2.95 running properly to build native WarpOS binaries (apparently the powerpc assembler is missing)...

edit: making it easy to port programs, having an easily installable compiler with SDK is my "classic 3.9 holy grail" ;-)

[matt3k]

Even an '060 is overrated IMHO as it can cause major headache's with the different versions of 68060.library... The 060 also came out after Commodore left us, there never was a 060 card from Commodore or AT. Only a rebadged Quickpack card if I'm not mistaken. They are faster than a 040 for sure, but feature and compatibility-wise nothing beats a 40MHz 040 such as the WarpEngine.

I couldn't agree more, I owned a CS060 MKII and still own a WE 3040.  Side by side in normal usage test, the 3040 was faster in some aspects.  The built in SCSI in the WE certainly helped, in a 3000D the SCSI for the CS didn't fit.

[itix]

Not sure Id go so far as to say they were useless, but I agree an '060 is a better option for classics than ppc.

I had BPPC+BVision with PPC native JPEG datatypes and mpega.library installed but that is all. Few games (often buggy) and few demos didn't really justify investment.

Later I got chance to run MorphOS 0.x on it but in the end it was just waste of money.

I think culmination point was when I tried PPC native Unzip program that was slower than 68k native Unzip on my lousy 68040 @ 25 MHz.

[drHirudo]

I couldn't agree more, I owned a CS060 MKII and still own a WE 3040.  Side by side in normal usage test, the 3040 was faster in some aspects.  The built in SCSI in the WE certainly helped, in a 3000D the SCSI for the CS didn't fit.

I guess you never used Oxyron Patcher. It is best installation any 68060 can do. It speeded everything - games, demos, utilities, gave more compatibility.

No 68040 can beat 68060 with Oxyron in any test.

Oxyron Patcher Benchmarks

[mousehouse]

OK, I'll give it a try! Still need to figure out the correct jumpers for my GVP 4060DT (now quite unstable) but after I do, I'll give it a go. For the money a WE is the best card there is IMHO...

The nice folks at EAB pointed me to VBCC as a better alternative to gcc for creating 68K / PPC code. Will try that as well...

And 'zip' and 'unzip' versions on the PPC really fly compared to the 68K version... I'd say a factor 10x speedup. If I ever figure out how I'll recompile a nice version of LHA and ZIP for AmigaOS 3.x and WarpOS.

[Karlos]

What applications? Unless you mean games, do you

Processor intensive applications; typically games and media players principally. Not much productivity wise, though there were some utilities that could benefit. PPC accelerated datatypes were handy, particularly image ones with the OS3.9 picture.datatype where colour conversion and dithering can be offloaded to PPC too.

Even StormC 4 had ppc native compiler backends for both PPC and 68K which helped when compiling larger projects with it (storm had plenty of issues but that's a different discussion).

[zipper]

One example is Wildfire7\PPC image processing sw.

[itix]

Processor intensive applications; typically games and media players principally. Not much productivity wise, though there were some utilities that could benefit. PPC accelerated datatypes were handy, particularly image ones with the OS3.9 picture.datatype where colour conversion and dithering can be offloaded to PPC too.

PPC native picture datatypes were nice but they were slower than 68k counterparts for small images. Still fast enough to replace 68k datatypes on my system where possible.

Video players on Amiga were always outdated and could display only few formats. And often my BlizzardPPC @ 160MHz was not fast enough to play videos at full frame rate.... PPC accelerated MP3 players were nice even if I had only 8-bit Paula.

PPC native Quake was very cool though. Even if little illegal. I am sure Quake sold more PPC accelerators than anything else...

But when I think about it paying 250-300 euro for PPC accelerator maybe was not that bad... it is just funny when an accelerator board costs more than your computer is worth :-)

[vox]

It was the way forward, McEwen knew it, and rejected it. Perhaps an act
of big-corporation tampering. All other things you mentioned about Amithlon,
would have turned out quite different, with some minimal financial support for the project, which was on the precipice of greatness.

Well what was used in initial release was an emulation box with not a single library improved, just some CGX AHI drivers for PC stuff and very few and buggy ones. I don`t say that project didn`t have potential, but there is nothing to be found but few user updates that made things less buggy and more usable, but soon the pace of PC hardware has left any PC that could use Amithlon as anceient history.

From AmigaHistory Amithlon page

The emulator, developed by Bernd Meyer, is based upon the authors' experience with the WinUAE JiT emulation, but features some dramatic changes to increase emulation speed (at the loss of compatibility). The slim-line ISOLinux distribution is used to boot directly into the Amiga emulation, removing the need for users to interact with a host operating system. This simple, yet effective change resulted in many users favouring Amithlon over AmigaOS XL as the emulation of choice.

So its kind of myth its complete x86 port.

Similar approach was AmigaOS XL
or this Linux driven UAE called Xamiga
http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-27682.html

These are just different approaches to emulation on 68k at time x86 JIT was not so fast and PC`s were not such grants that they could emulate high end Amiga with ease as today.

Interesting was that all this effort was made to make 68k AmigaOS emulated look like it really went PowerPC. As NovaDesign says at that time:

Unlike the slow versions of WinUAE and WinUAE JiT, AmigaOS XL forgoes on the chipset emulation, using the extra processing cycles to emulate the processor. The result is an Amiga emulator capable of running 68k applications between 5 - 10 times faster than a 68060 system. According to SysInfo (an Amiga benchmark utility), a 1 GHz AMD Athlon emulates an Amiga equivalent to a 450 MHz 68040. The benchmark was supported by Kermit Woodall of Nova Design, who tested one of their applications:

"We installed ImageFX on AmigaXL during a private meeting in St.Louis and the speed was amazing.
It was like having ImageFX completely native on a fast PowerPC machine!!"
Kermit Woodall, Nova Design

[vox]

What applications? Unless you mean games, do you?

Anything using native UI is fail. Software like IBrowse/PPC was not an option.

Nevertheless PPC boards were expensive doorstops. Fast 68060 accelerator boards would have been much better investment.

Well, there were quite a lot software supporting PPC use, as well as small libs, datatypes etc. For some time PPC saved the day, but it was short breathed as newer PPC cards never appeared, new PPC Amigas didn`t made it and MorphOS as first PPC AmigaOS took a lot of time to develop with new first real PPC only apps that would utilize 603/604 to the max.

Well, there were PPC cards with 060 where at that time (before MOS and OS4) card with slower PPC (low end 603) and 060 performed quite better because of OS 68k dependency then card with 040 and high end 604. Surely, with MorphOS and OS 4.0/4.1 that "table has turned"

And yes - first thanks to MOS! for first trully native PPC apps and games.
My belief would be that AmigaOS today would be far more advanced if it was based on latest MOS 1.x or MOS 2.x whatever was there in 2002-2004, instead of starting from AmigaOS 3.1 bare recompile and execSG. Not that I DO praise Hyperion for all the good work, but AmigaInc made wrong descision at that time prolonging PPC development, as well as later with court case, MacMini port and SAM restrictions, inability to find partner to continue AmigaOne series etc.

Even that (as promised) first OS 4 was just simple PPC recompile, it would take a lot of extra work OS4 team has done later on (OS 4.0 was way far away from its humble simple promises)
Compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#AmigaOS_4.0_.28The_Final_Update.29
to
http://www.intuitionbase.com/os4features.pdf

[Bamiga2002]

And 'zip' and 'unzip' versions on the PPC really fly compared to the 68K version... I'd say a factor 10x speedup. If I ever figure out how I'll recompile a nice version of LHA and ZIP for AmigaOS 3.x and WarpOS.

Saw your thread on EAB . Go mousehouse, we want more PPC-optimized tools & utils !

[vox]

But when I think about it paying 250-300 euro for PPC accelerator maybe was not that bad... it is just funny when an accelerator board costs more than your computer is worth :-)

Could never afford them at the time (Serbian economy was crippled too at the time) but waiting made two things possible: both hardware to advance to new and faster solutions and software to get fully PPC and more feature rich. But after the court case, newer incarnations of Amiga Inc lost even the OS4 and finally aliniated itself from anything remotely close to Amiga. Possibly because in process they lost the rights to use AmigaOS, didn`t payed the Hyperion for its work and didn`t provided OS 3.9 code as assumed in original plan.
A very good acrhieve of AmigaInc history until the newest CUSA/iCoin saga and court case is avail here https://sites.google.com/site/freeamiga/

(author SHOULD add the new events spice!)

Problem is that all app and game development software houses didn`t have that kind of patience in shrinking market situation.

Hope its visible how clearly PPC Amiga boards are part of Amiga evolution in both software and hardware, and its sad CUSA just tries to erase that part of history on its Amiga history (and own ego) representation under capitalist motto "Why would we promote someone elses product"? Because you try to mimick to be part of it. Same backfire would be "Why would we allow promotion of your product?" anywhere - but yet it is allowed.

So there I see quite of double standard.

And even today if mass produced (ordered) PPC chips could be affordable and fast enough for some last MacOS X, maybe ReactOS, Android, Linux, MOS and AmigaOS 4 - but CUSA likes to play on what`s easily avail and sure and not to really invest in R&D. And nuff about rebranders of everything including Amiga name.

Hope that it was nice educational voyage :-)