Hyperion Entertainment: Clarification of Current Situation

[aGGreSSor]

One example is Free Pascal on AROS.

Free Pascal strange on Amiga. It doesn't Amiga library sufficiently, useless. HPC was the best and Turbo Pascal 7.0 compatibly. As we will soon see a new version? Never..

[agami]

I'm am definitely in favour of having more commonality between classic and NG to help applications reach a larger audience. Something akin to the carbon library (in reverse) could make it easier to have binaries that run on both systems but with different outcomes.

It would most likely be more than a single library, and the minimum hardware spec on classic might be 040/25, but the benefit would also be a smoother transition from classic to NG as the apps you purchased will just run on NG. It would also create a brief market for 040 upgrades for classic Amigas.

[smerf]

Thanks for the info, maybe I will go ahead and purchase the final edition, who knows maybe it will speed up the old A1200 over the old. Like the software just wish it ran faster, but then again the old 4.1 is just like me old and slow.

[itix]

This is an interesting concept but what exactly does OS4Emu emulate?

It does not really emulate anything, it is just an API wrapper for OS4 calls so you can run OS4 software in MorphOS natively. It includes AmigaInput, new DOS, Exec and Gfx calls and full P96 wrapper to CGX.

What's making my life a bit hard work at the moment, is the real heavy lifting stuff, Compositing , advanced reaction features,

What is missing is CompositeTags() call (for rotating and alpha blending) and I have planned to create Reaction to MUI wrapper. So far I have not invested time on it anymore.

band width limitation that make certain double buffering tecniques trivial on an NG machine but slow on Classic RTG.

WinUAE and NG Amigas are certainly fast enough to run any AmigaOS software.

Certainly OS3 can be made on par with OS4. It is just that nobody is investing time to improve OS3.

[kolla]

What is the "Amiga experience" for you?

From the top of my head...

* GUI available from boot
* graphical early startup
* boot without startup-sequence is still with GUI
* top screen bar with system information
* menu pops up using RMB
* multiselect from menu creates an event chain that is executed when RMB is released
* screens with their own unique properties, resolutions, colour depths etc, private to the application or public
* Save|Use|Cancel

Plus a lot more I am sure. My point is just that nothing technically stands in the way of reimplementing what I mean with "amiga experience" in a modern and secure way. Of course, amiga programmers see this entirely differently.

[NorthWay]

My point is just that nothing technically stands in the way of reimplementing what I mean with "amiga experience" in a modern and secure way. Of course, amiga programmers see this entirely differently.

No, I agree 100%.
It should be possible to add nearly all the old flavour though you would have to have the OS alloc your structs and use OS calls to read out library values etc, so you would need to amend your source but you could still think in much the same way.

As for the technical parts, AFAIK no CPU has _really_ made an effort to ease data sharing with the possible exception of PA-RISC. The SASOS research community might have come up with answers on how to have all 3 of sharing/security/speed.
The micro-kernel people have been battling these issues forever, though they have it both worse and better as most of them want to be unix (or so safe that nothing is shared).

[kolla]

What makes me think so?
Because only the 040 and 060 can address that kind of memory (and then only with an mmu).

Not true, and also not relevant. Any 68k CPU with 32bit addressing space can deal with that ammount of RAM, given that the rest of the hardware permits it.

And, as I stated before, Zorro bus is too dated.
You want to run your memory via that?

It is not relevant for the discussion where you put that RAM. Someone could make a CPU card for A3000/A4000 with 2GB RAM on board, it is technically doable and AmigaOS would support it.

Seriously, anytime you want to benchmark any Amiga against my G5 you'll see how rediculous your statements are.

And my old minimac with 16GB RAM runs in circles around your G5, especially if you are running MorphOS that only supports one core and is limited to 2GB(?) of RAM, just like AmigaOS is. Which was my point.

[James2002]

Not true, and also not relevant. Any 68k CPU with 32bit addressing space can deal with that ammount of RAM, given that the rest of the hardware permits it.



It is not relevant for the discussion where you put that RAM. Someone could make a CPU card for A3000/A4000 with 2GB RAM on board, it is technically doable and AmigaOS would support it.



And my old minimac with 16GB RAM runs in circles around your G5, especially if you are running MorphOS that only supports one core and is limited to 2GB(?) of RAM, just like AmigaOS is. Which was my point.

Would I be correct  assuming that someone could do a 32 bit Microprocessor  CPU with  2 Gb that AmigaOS would run on that?

[kolla]

Would I be correct  assuming that someone could do a 32 bit Microprocessor  CPU with  2 Gb that AmigaOS would run on that?

My understanding of things...

The 68k architecture supports an address speace that is up to 32bit bit wide, meaning up to 4GB. AmigaOS also supports 32bit memory addressing, however many of those addresses are reserved (chipram, various I/O) and cannot be used as FastRAM for the CPU, which practically reduces the ammount of possible FastRAM to 2GB. And this is the same limitation, whether you are running OS3 or OS4.

I am not sure what you are asking, but someone could make 68k processor card with 2GB (gigabyte - Gb is gigabit, 2Gb would be 256MB) and AmigaOS should run fine, yes. I don't have access to WinUAE here, but how much system RAM is it possible to add to a system config in WinUAE?

[OlafS3]

From the top of my head...

* GUI available from boot
* graphical early startup
* boot without startup-sequence is still with GUI
* top screen bar with system information
* menu pops up using RMB
* multiselect from menu creates an event chain that is executed when RMB is released
* screens with their own unique properties, resolutions, colour depths etc, private to the application or public
* Save|Use|Cancel

Plus a lot more I am sure. My point is just that nothing technically stands in the way of reimplementing what I mean with "amiga experience" in a modern and secure way. Of course, amiga programmers see this entirely differently.

the most you write is optical/desktop related. For that you could propably already use Linux, the only thing you need to rewrite would be a special desktop or you configure it in a way that is similar. Then you have a modern desktop. But it cannot run Amiga software nor is it really offering something revolutionary compared to other distributions. But you can easily start with it, develop something and show it. There are certainly people here who are interested to use it. I personally am happy with AROS and have enough to do there even though it is not supporting MP and SMP.

[kolla]

You don't think I have tried with Linux and umpteen different DEs for the last 20+ years? No, you cannot just configure Linux to do the above.

[Iggy]

My understanding of things...

The 68k architecture supports an address speace that is up to 32bit bit wide, meaning up to 4GB. AmigaOS also supports 32bit memory addressing, however many of those addresses are reserved (chipram, various I/O) and cannot be used as FastRAM for the CPU, which practically reduces the ammount of possible FastRAM to 2GB. And this is the same limitation, whether you are running OS3 or OS4.

I am not sure what you are asking, but someone could make 68k processor card with 2GB (gigabyte - Gb is gigabit, 2Gb would be 256MB) and AmigaOS should run fine, yes. I don't have access to WinUAE here, but how much system RAM is it possible to add to a system config in WinUAE?

Actually, that IS a misunderstanding.
While the 68000 is 32 bit, early versions can only address 24bits of memory.

[Acill]

But can we buy a coupon and get a free OS4 T-Shirt?

[kolla]

Actually, that IS a misunderstanding.
While the 68000 is 32 bit, early versions can only address 24bits of memory.

Hence I wrote "up to", I am well aware that older 68000 and 68EC020 have smaller address space, 16bit and 24bit, but that is totally beside the point as the issue we were discussing is the upper limit. How much RAM can a modern 68SEC000 (which is the one produced still) address?

[ElPolloDiabl]

@ Kolla Have you tried one of the smaller Linux distros? You can get Xfce desktop which is lot like you asked for.

[guest11527]

The 68k architecture supports an address speace that is up to 32bit bit wide, meaning up to 4GB. AmigaOS also supports 32bit memory addressing, however many of those addresses are reserved (chipram, various I/O) and cannot be used as FastRAM for the CPU, which practically reduces the ammount of possible FastRAM to 2GB.

Well, not quite. The address space taken up by motherboard resources is much less than 2GB. The lower 16MB are pretty much everything, and you may add some parts of Zorro-III space if you like, but that neither fills 2GB.  

The problem is rather the exec function AllocEntry(), which reserves bit 31 as error indicator and hence cannot handle more than 2GB RAM.

Or rather: Almost. Everything beyond this function is pretty much 2GB-safe, so in principle one could even add memory beyond the 2GB limit as long as AllocEntry() has never a chance to access it - it wouldn't be hard to modify the function accordingly. With this small adjustment in mind, the limit is more like 3.5GB. Not that anything on AmigaOs would actually require this amount of memory in first place.