PowerPC accelerator - how does that work then?

[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 :-)

[vox]

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

Its 20 euros today
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=780

Could it help 68k emulation or Natami in any way? :-)

[LoadWB]

Its 20 euros today
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=780

Could it help 68k emulation or Natami in any way? :-)

Okay, at the risk of going on an OT tangent, what is the difference between Oxyron and OxyPatcher?

[warpdesign]

@itix: it was ok as a temporary solution. The thing is the port of the OS to PowerPC took a lot longer than expected (I remember the fancy roadmaps published by Hyperion,... showing it would take a year or two

[wawrzon]

@itix: it was ok as a temporary solution. The thing is the port of the OS to PowerPC took a lot longer than expected (I remember the fancy roadmaps published by Hyperion,... showing it would take a year or two

no. it was not. it scared the rest of the remaining users away. me amongst others. pretty much like x1k today only on even smaller scale.

[Mrs Beanbag]

The reason I asked this very question is that I've got plans (read "pipe dream" if you know me well enough) to make an ARM based accelerator card for A1200, using Freescale i.MX series CPU, and 68k emulator in flash ROM.

I think it's possible, considering a Blizzard 1260 goes for £500 on ebay...

[vox]

Okay, at the risk of going on an OT tangent, what is the difference between Oxyron and OxyPatcher?

Oxy is short for Oxyron - no difference.

There was however a CyberPatcher that did the kind of same or similar and came with Blizzard cards. Anyway, interestingly it software patched missing instructions from 040 and 060 that existed in 00-030 and that had to be emulated (=slow)

[vox]

@itix: it was ok as a temporary solution. The thing is the port of the OS to PowerPC took a lot longer than expected (I remember the fancy roadmaps published by Hyperion,... showing it would take a year or two

Well, first OS4 developer realise was posted on 16 April 2004
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?item_id=1387

But it took longer way to final version that provided more functionality then promised.

Bigger problem was that Mai Logic AmigaOne board ceased production meanwhile and Eyetech died (=there was no hardware on sale at time of release) and first OS 4.0 didn`t support PPC equipped Classics.

For PPC Classics, OS 4.0 came on November 2007, about 10 years after these cards were made.

[AmigaClassicRule]

So what you guys are saying that do not waste your money buying a PPC card for the Amiga 1200, that instead the best investment on an Amiga 1200 for an upgrade is either a 68040 or a 68060 and that is that? Are you guys saying that if I wish to go PPC in Amiga that it should be either a SAM or the new Amiga hardware other than that the Amiga 1200 PPC are waste of money and useless?

[vox]

So what you guys are saying that do not waste your money buying a PPC card for the Amiga 1200, that instead the best investment on an Amiga 1200 for an upgrade is either a 68040 or a 68060 and that is that? Are you guys saying that if I wish to go PPC in Amiga that it should be either a SAM or the new Amiga hardware other than that the Amiga 1200 PPC are waste of money and useless?

If using Classic games and software is the key - PPC card is not needed, 060 is cheaper solution. But Natami when out will be the best experience.

Yes, if you want to use OS 4.1 even maxed out A1200 or A4000 with PPC cards is way too slow compared to slowest SAM 440 (however SAM 460 would be recommended). If you want to use MorphOS, proper MacMini G4 is the way.

So, yes to both. Blizzard cards are today very rare and quite overpriced for what they offer.

[wawrzon]

The reason I asked this very question is that I've got plans (read "pipe dream" if you know me well enough) to make an ARM based accelerator card for A1200, using Freescale i.MX series CPU, and 68k emulator in flash ROM.

I think it's possible, considering a Blizzard 1260 goes for £500 on ebay...

sure, but forget about these clumsy multiprocessor designs. the best would be an arm cpu starting emulation from flash and then starting the system under emu. but isnt there some obstacle, like some expected memory layout in low address space not available on other than 68k cpus?

[rvo_nl]

Hello this might be a bit off topic but I just wanted to say that I really love my ppc card and never regret buying one a few years ago. Sure, there isnt much classic (os3) software that utilises the cpu, but just for the Bvision alone its well worth the cash. And hey, OS4 isnt half bad either.

[nyteschayde]

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.

Well if you don't want any of that old hardware, go ahead and throw it my bin. I'd like another OS4.x compatible classic.

[Karlos]

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.

That's a bit over simplistic. Well-written code could use 68K where the cache flush overhead of invoking the PPC becomes too significant for something like decoding a small image. Not sure how many datatypes did that, but I experimented with patching things CopyMem() on my A1200 and used PPC for large copies (those bigger than 2x the combined cache size). Of course, most copies are too small to benefit, but synthetic tests validated the concept.

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.

Well, I was luckier in that my PPC was 240MHz, but my 040 only 25. The gulf in performance between the two is pretty conspicuous. At least one of the PPC players for 3.x was capable of using cgxvideo.library on my BVision. The Permedia2 doesn't have any video acceleration per se, but it does allow YUV textures to be scaled and painted onto trapezoids (judging by the occasional diagonal shear when not vsynced, it would seem this is exactly how it worked).

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 :-)

Well, one can slam the old PPC boards, but ever since fully PPC native operating systems have worked on them, they've shown that they are capable of giving a significant boost in performance over 68K when not shackled down by the old context switch mechanisms necessitated by the dual processor approach. My PPC board can run almost all my 68K classic software faster on OS4.1 than my 040 could, sometimes by a wide margin. The next generation of PPC accelerator cards from phase5 were set to be PPC only.

[bbond007]

Ok so I know the PowerPC accelerators for classic Amigas have both a PPC chip and a 68040 on board, but when does the PowerPC chip come in and how does it know?  Does a program have to run on the 68k at first (like a bootstrap) and then trigger some kind of switch, throw an exception, or call a library function or something?

I had a blizzard 603e PPC 240/060. I had problems getting the PPC to run stable in the desktop case. It would run stable in a PAWS case interestingly enough, but I never could get the LCD of the PAWS working. I ended up towering the system and eventually added the g-rex PCI bussboard and a Voodoo-III.

Honestly the PPC experience was underwhelming. I recall having some datatypes (that made browsing fast) and was able to play mp3s on the PPC. In the early days most PPC apps I tried would instantly crash. I did know the PPC worked though as I could run that supplied voxel terrain demo. Otherwise I was starting to think I had been duped on a bad card Stability did get better, but being in the middle of that whole WarpUp/PowerUP saga watching that unfolded(compatibility wrappers, bickering, etc.)  was enough for me. I never could get smooth frame-rates on those Hyperion ports.

I was able to utilize the PPC with a Shapeshifter video driver that made AGA run really quickly, but I think the MMU drivers I run now are probably almost as fast. The worst I was waiting and waiting for Fusion PPC to work with the Blizzard PPC. I don't know if that ever happened.

This time around I have a nice 1200D/060 I really don't miss the PPC experience. I had one of the faster PPC cards as well, so I could imagine one of the slower ones would be even more disappointing.

I do feel that comparing the 1200D I have now to that 1200T (with all the PC parts) I had is like comparing Darth Vader to Anakin. And the bloodshot puffy eyes(that no longer see for themselves) are the AGA chips...

[itix]

Well if you don't want any of that old hardware, go ahead and throw it my bin.

I sold it many years ago :-)