@bloodline,
I spent several hours yesterday looking at Comet, Staples and PC World,
Comet have an entry-level system for £270 Intel based HP system,
but it uses a shared memory Intel graphics card,
£12.95 delivery charge,
128Meg ATI-Radeon 9xxx looks like its £100 at PC World,
Comet also do a £470 mid-level PC base unit also HP,
with 128 Meg ATI-Radeon 9xxx SE,
it has various things not in the £270 one eg writable DVD whereas
the £270 is read only for DVDs but writable for CDs,
all the systems in Staples seem expensive,
If I make a system from the parts via PCWorld its:
£52.86 for CPU, mobo £47.59, 128Meg RAM £22.33, 128 Meg ATI-Radeon £100,
case £35,
which adds up to £267.80 without s/w or OS,
unbundled MS OS is £160 I was told,
Fast SCSI-2 interface for external drives is 29.95 from PCWorld,
looking at real machines made me realise what an achievement it is
to get AROS to boot directly on PCs,
>>>>It would certainly be a great thing to have AROS running Nativly on the A1.
>>>The PPC Linux hosted version of AROS is coming on rather quickly thanks to Markus,
>>>who is resolving some stack issues, and attempting to get the Graphics drivers
>>>to work.
>for me the word Linux is underlined here,
>can this Linux work be reused in a directly A1 booting AROS?
/*
Yes, when you think of AROS Hosted, think of Linux as a Hardware abstraction layer.
Running AROS on Linux can be thought of as the same as running AOS3.1 in UAE.
While AROS is running on Linux one can work out all the bugs and issues.
Then you can add the Firmware boot code and boot AROS on it's own.
*/
ok thats good, it means indirectly they are working on a direct boot,
/*
It should be noteed at 99.9% of the AROS source code is cross platform,
it's just the CPU specific/ASM stuff that needs reworking.
*/
as it should be!
/*/*
I feel if I buy a PC I am a turncoat or traitor, however if AROS directly
boots ie no Windows and its not Intel then maybe thats better than
using IBM PPC on the A1?
Its strange that IBM are now "good" and Intel are "bad",
Having read the book "Big Blue" IMO IBM are anything but good,
and there is no basis for thinking Intel are "bad": Intel never
did anything "bad",
MS OTOH IMO are bad,
*/*/
/*
To be honest, the "good"/"bad" lables are a redundant conceptual model.
Nothing is good or bad, things fall into two categories, "Usefull" and "Useless"
with respect to your requirements.
Windows for example is "Useless" if I want to use an OS that looks and feels
the way I want an OS to look and feel, but it is "Useful" is I want to run a
certain peice of software.
*/
an interesting viewpoint,
certainly I dont like at all the Windows interface,
to me it says "go away", whereas the Amiga interface says "FUN-time"!
The bundles provide a full set of s/w, but I am really intent on
bypassing MS.
Its quite insiduous how they force themselves on you the customer,
the default line of action is you end up with Windows and all the MS s/w,
that would be ok if they manufactured the h/w but they dont,
so its not right,
looking at machines I dont get what the big deal is about MS,
they have created a drab looking OS and the only interesting thing about it
I can see is that all h/w is geared to run on it,
Really h/w manufacturers should be forced to release c drivers for their
products so any OS can use any driver,
it is truly sinful that 3rd party h/w can be produced to only run on Windows,
/*
When choosing hardware you must first consider what your requirements are,
then choose what is useful and at the cheapest price. Ignore religious/political
issues like "brand" and "make", these things are unimportant when it comes to
technology.
*/
I am upset though that something so horrible as MS has a stranglehold,
why cant we have a quality monopoly,
/*/*
How clean is PC AROS boot?
(the cleanness of the PPC AROS boot appeals to me),
Re PC AROS if I have understood you:
1. I buy a PC,
2. I download AROS,
3. I directly boot AROS?
4. I run UAE above AROS for full 68k compatibilty?
Is this correct?
*/*/
/*
Yes, just download the AROS CD image, burn that to a CD-ROM,
then put that in the CD drive, turn the PC on...
AROS will boot and run by itself.
*/
sounds painless, so in theory I dont need MS?
now could I do this via the PCs hard disk instead of via CD-ROM?
ie if I download to the hard disk could I boot from that instead?
or if I download to an external SCSI hard drive on the Amiga and
then connect this to the PC via the interface I mentioned,
or is it only possible via CD?
/*
You will presented with an early startup menu allowing you to select
certain hardware options (good news if you have a Nvidia gfx card),
or you can ignore them and it will boot after 5 seconds.
*/
looks like I will get an ATI Radeon if I get a PC or use the
onboard shared graphics Intel card,
/*/*
In the UK have you any tips about buying a new PC?
Are the places like PCWorld, Comet, Staples, Dixons a good place to try
or should I go to specialist shops eg from computer mag adverts?
*/*/
/*
I would build the machine myself. There are plenty of shorps that sell PC parts
for good prices.
http://www.dabs.com is a great UK website selling top
quality parts for a low price.
Don't forget that Black Troll sell complete PC's with AROS already
installed for around £160 or so (depending upon the exchange rate).
High Street stores will rip you off.
*/
I will look into these then,
I read this after making yesterdays visit to those shops,
£160 is almost half the price of what I saw,
will the £160 PC come with MS OS or MS s/w or is MS completely absent?
what sort of graphics card?
do you think the shop bundles are there to catch ignorant first timers??
/*/*
>That's true, if we treated all memory access in AROS as Big Endien
>we could have the same 68k emulation method as OS4 and MorphOS use.
>But it has been decided that the performance penalty of running
>a little Endien CPU with Big Endian data was to significant
>(something like 30% penalty) that it was not worth it.
30% is nothing,
if a car goes by at 70mph and 10 minutes later another car goes by at 100mph
would you know the difference (I am talking about perceptions here),
(70mph being 30% slower than 100mph)
can you go both ways: ie have Big endian PC AROS and Little endian PC AROS,
*/*/
/*
30% is far too much. When running AROS on a 3.066Ghz CPU, are you
really happy to write off nearly a whole 1Ghz (919.8Mhz) of performance?
*/
it may depend on your upbringing, I was trained to never put speed as the
top priority, ie robustness + portability + compatibility etc are
higher up the ladder than speed
eg a formula 1 car is very fast but I dont see many people driving them
on the roads!
/*
There is no point to cripple a CPU, AROS runs using the Native byte order
of the CPU, thus it is big endien on 68k and PPC and little Endien on the x86.
*/
I dont mind though and many people are happy with WinUAE and Amithlon which
are big endian on x86,
the be686-amithlon-gcc shows that people are even prepared to produce
big endian compilers for x86,
/*
You could build a Big Endien AROS for the x86 but that would be incompatible
with the faster Little Endian one.
*/
effectively it would be AROS on a different platform,
it would be very interesting to see what exactly the slow down is,
you believe its 30% but as it hasnt been done we dont know for sure
/*/*
Besides if we use an integrated UAE we also get Hardware compatibility
>and improved stability so it's a benefit all round.
can you integrate UAE at the RAM level with little endian RAM?
if a 68k program accesses OS data structures ints and words at the byte level
or bytes at the word level the OS will get mangled
most programs wont do this so maybe you dont lose too much,
*/*/
/*
The Idea for the integrated UAE is so that the 68k and the x86 do not share
Data structures.
But instead allow the two system to synchronise their data.
*/
ok, you've gone down that path,
its going to be much more work,
I suppose if you redirect each 68k jump vector to also call the
corresponding x86 jump vector or something,
will each x86 API call have to synchronise the 68k data structures?
/*
This will allow 68k programs to run in the same environment as the x86 programs.
The only down side is that 68k programs will not be able to call x86
functions and vice versa. This could be possible, but probably not worth it.
The UAE Emulator will be running a 68k version of AROS (specially designed to
synchronise with the x86 version).
*/
I suppose the open nature of AROS means someone else could
create their own variant of AROS some other way, (I'm not volunteering just yet!)
whereas with AmigaOS we would all be stuck with the company's decision,
/*/*
everyone says its not a big deal that Eyetech created the A1,
I wondered whether they could prove this by doing their own one,
*/*/
/*
Anyone is able to sell Terrons.
I could put a little sticker on it if you like and sell it to you.
*/
see you are telling me its not a big deal,
how much would you sell it for?
/*/*
people on all Amiga variants could then start generating AROS native progs,
*/*/
/*
Since AROS is source code compatible with AmigaOS, it is easy to write your
program on your A1200 in C... and then take that source code to An AROS
machine and recompile for whatever CPU that is running.
gcc has a cross compiler, there is no probelm generating code for any
CPU from any CPU, providing you have the includes of course.
*/
your gcc outputs to multiple CPUs?
68k gcc only appears to output 68k series code,
but it sounds like your one outputs PPC and Intel code,
in which case there isnt an issue except for 68k people as it appears
you havent completed 68k Amiga AROS,
/*/*
computer 3D always sucks because you can literally see the computer slow down
and wince whenever something computationally complex happens,
*/*/
/*
I've guess you've not used a new 3D card then. I have yet to write a program
that causes my Radeon 9000 to slow down even with over 10000 objects
(using the DX7 interface).
*/
but as you throw more and more objects it must eventually slow down?
ie
for( i = 1 ; ; i++ ){ introduce_1000_objects() ; }
must eventually catch up with your CPU power,
how about 10000 explosions?
/*/*
Amiga.org is closed source isnt it?
*/*/
/*
No. Both Amiga.org and Amigaworld.net use xoops which is a great example of
opensource software. Aros-Exec.org also uses xoops.
*/
xoops is opensource but presumably the specific configuration is closed source??
/*/*
Note that if a 68k version is also done then it reaches all platforms via UAE,
so its just the native compile that would be lacking,
:this is a good reason for having a fully implemented 68k AROS,
*/*/
/*
We need the 68k AROS for the integrated UAE Emulator idea.
I also want to run AROS on my A1200. We do have a working 68k AROS,
but it needs to be adapted to boot the Amgia Hardwre.
At the moment it only boots the Palm PDA.
*/
reimplementing AmigaOS via the same custom chips!
you may need to study UAE to understand the custom chips!
(a bit like studying AROS to understand AmigaOS),
I hope you fix some of the existing bugs eg
AGA SetRGB32CM doesnt set the lower 4 bits of the blue component,
also blitter OS calls can fail horribly on bitmaps exceeding
1024 pixels width even though the h/w can cope with huge bitmaps,
according to the autodocs someone forget to set an AGNES big blit flag
they knew that in 1992 and havent yet fixed the bug!
/*/*
to this day I dont even know if closed source commercial binaries are
allowed on Linux,
*/*/
/*
It depends. If you link to a GPL library or use any GPL code,
then your software automatically becomes GPL.
If you link to an LGPL library then you program is not GPL or LGPL.
If you use any BSD code then that does does not cause your code to be BSD.
Simply check the licence of any software you are using to find out what you
can and can't do.
*/
so it can be done,
/*
AROS is covered by the APL, which is similar to LGPL. IF you use AROS source only
the code that you use must remain Opensource. The rest of your program is yours.
Licence issues are very complex.
*/
sounds a good license, some licenses are quite tight fisted!
