OS4 on the pegasos

[Mr_Capehill]

@Bill H:

Maybe so, but I think that many Pegasos and A1 owners have been quite happy with their computers. If somebody wonders which she should buy perhaps a little waiting is good, since AmigaOS 4.0 was just pre-released (to developers).

[bloodline]

who on Earth needs a 64-bit CPU in a system,...?

Exactly! We should all have stuck with our MOS6502's!!! who needs a 16-bit CPU in a system?

:-D

[ikir]

KennyR wrote:

MorphOS is everything people wanted from OS4 except the name, but implemented more cleanly, running on better hardware, and out two years earlier.

Trolling and speculations. Congratulations. OS4 is well written and you know it, both the system have some strong and weak point, you are instead spreading fud. And the Articia bug... doesn't exist. Has been proven but you want to spred false information. Pegasos 1 have a useless hardware workaround, OS4 betateste have a working idedivice with dma at full speed and without any workaound, only driver written right with articia support.

[Cymric]

bloodline wrote:

who on Earth needs a 64-bit CPU in a system,...?

Exactly! We should all have stuck with our MOS6502's!!! who needs a 16-bit CPU in a system? :-D

No, seriously. There are obvious examples where 64-bit designs are better and more efficient than a 32-bit one. Given the facts that very few people run these special applications at their own home, that everyday games are not amongst those, and that said systems are offered to game fanatics, I can only conclude one thing: you're being ripped off. It is just show. (Of course, you allow yourself to be ripped off, but I am very, very wary of the claim that such a system offers better performance over the regular 32-bit ones.)

There will come a day when 64-bit chips are 'hot', but this won't happen any time soon. It's going to be a mixed thing, with people experimenting with multiple cores and 64-bit extensions. Perhaps we'll see them arrive together.

[Dan]

bhoggett wrote:

KennyR wrote:

Not true. A1 is basically only sold for OS4.

Again wrong. The A1 was built to satisfy Eyetech's need for a custom system their industrial customers could not purchase from anywhere else, therefore allowing for high profit margins per unit to be maintained. They previously used old Amiga systems for this, but understandably were going to have problems as the supply slowly dwindled.

The OS4 tie-in is so that those systems can be sold to the consumer market too, with Eyetech looking for the same exclusive angle they have with their industrial niche.

Mini-ITX in the industrial market :lol:
That´s a very small marketshare. PC104 is the formfactor that rules that market even if smaller boards and those a little bit bigger like the size of a 3,5"diskdrive have taken a big share of the market.
Secondly where is Linux(or BSD) going on the A1? Nowhere.

A1 on the other hand is badly priced for these markets and has problems just running Linux. No-one wants to adapt their kernel to run on an expensive PPC board when they can do it for half the price with no workarounds on a Peg.

Both Peg and A1 are overpriced and overhyped. One rates as distinctly mediocre hardware, while the other borders on being downright poor. In both cases the operating systems are raw and unfinished.

There are other boards for running PPCLinux and not only that you are also competing against x86 compatibles as Transmetas and Vias processors and against the ARM family.
The industrial market isn´t a safe little playground for overpriced crap anymore, that was 15 years ago.

[Cymric]

ikir wrote:
[...] And the Articia bug... doesn't exist. Has been proven but you want to spred false information. Pegasos 1 have a useless hardware workaround, OS4 betateste have a working idedivice with dma at full speed and without any workaound, only driver written right with articia support.

After trawling across heated debates on old and forgotten forums I started to wonder that if indeed the infamous bug was based on a misunderstanding of obscure, but documented subtleties of the Articia S, what it was that that was actually fixed in hardware on the Pegasos. But I guess we'll never know.

[bhoggett]

Dan wrote:
Mini-ITX in the industrial market :lol:
That´s a very small marketshare. PC104 is the formfactor that rules that market even if smaller boards and those a little bit bigger like the size of a 3,5"diskdrive have taken a big share of the market.
Secondly where is Linux(or BSD) going on the A1? Nowhere.

Just to clarify: I'm not saying Eyetech are targetting the entire industrial market with the A1. Eyetech's main income has, for many years now, come mainly from selling Amiga based systems essentially as embedded devices to a small but loyal and established set of customers. Eyetech have been looking after those customers and those customers like to stay with Eyetech. However, with no more A1200s bieng built for many years now, and old machines gradually failing, Eyetech's supply of bases for their systems must have been dwindling away, even counting the refurbs. Hence the A1: a custom board no one else is selling (as far as the Eyetech customers are concerned) and whose price cannot be compared on a straight basis with similar x86 efforts because "it's not the same".

Aside from that, I agree with what you're saying.

[KennyR]

Bhogget wrote:
nVidia themselves release Linux drivers, and actively update them.

The point is they're still BINARIES, not source or any kind of API documentation. Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off. Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.

The A1 was built to satisfy Eyetech's need for a custom system their industrial customers could not purchase from anywhere else, therefore allowing for high profit margins per unit to be maintained.

I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4. No real effort has been made to get it to run anything else, except by Mai.

Pegasos ports still need workarounds, even if not for the Articia chip. Otherwise all those ports that have been almost done for over a year would be available for download.

Since when?? Workarounds for hardware? You're kidding, right? When someone makes a UDMA IDE driver on another PPC system, it should work on Pegasos, right? Well, maybe with a few tweaks. Not with the massive changes that Articia enforces just to get around the PCI bus locking alone! And that's not even going into the workaround for the cache integrity bugs!

Both Peg and A1 are overpriced and overhyped. One rates as distinctly mediocre hardware, while the other borders on being downright poor. In both cases the operating systems are raw and unfinished.

Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.

[Acill]

Karlos wrote:

Acill wrote:

When the hardware was being shown to them they also had a Teron (A1 is the same as this) and a G5 dual system. The Pegasos beat them all out.

So, your'e saying a single CPU G3 based machine beat a dual CPU G5 based one. At what, exactly?

Where did I say G3? It was a 1GHZ G4 system running linux that was used. It out preformed the G5 system in several systems. In the end it was picked for qualiety and prince point with matching performance. Read the Genesi and Morphzone news and take a look at hese things from time to time. Freescale is the branch of Motorola that seperated BTW.

[bhoggett]

Mr_Capehill wrote:

Maybe so, but I think that many Pegasos and A1 owners have been quite happy with their computers.

Yes, but those Pegasos and A1 owners are fanatical geeks.
 :-D

I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but it's true that all of them emerged from the hardcore Amiga users who would only let go of their Amiga passion when it was prised from their cold dead fingers. That's 3-4 thousand people though, not millions.

That hardcore entity is limited and in all honesty most who were going to go with an A1 or Peg have done so already. The chances of the market growing from that source are nil.

So the only significant way to consider the situation is from the outsider's point of view, and not from that of the people who threw their money at the new systems just because they were there, long before any of them really knew what they were getting. (In fact, I'd say most still don't know what they've really invested in)

Robert17 wrote:
Pegasos seems like a great piece of kit, will OS4 be on there and if not why not?!

I guess the question really is, why does the Pegasos NEED OS4?  MorphOS does well on the Pegasos, and is designed for it.  

The two different Operating systems are, for all intents and purposes, identical -- being that they both emulate the old real classic Amiga OS.  Neither OS is "Amiga", so why get hung up on a name brand?

Wayne

[bhoggett]

KennyR wrote:
The point is they're still BINARIES, not source or any kind of API documentation.

So? You said there was no decent support for nVidia cards, and no 3D drivers. Nothing about them having to be open source. You were wrong.

The drivers exist - in binary form - but they're good drivers, they're free (as in beer) and they fully support the card features.

Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off. Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.

I don't recall anyone saying it was any different. The gfx card race is really cut-throat and neither ATI or nVidia are willing to spill the beans.

The only ATI drivers that are open source are the reverse engineered ones, which ATI have not supported in any way. ATI do not support Linux and it shows because the ATI drivers for Linux are often plaugued with problems.

The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.

I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4.

So the A1 was designed specifically for an OS which would only exist years later, right? DOH!!!

I'm afraid you're plain wrong. It is true that had Hyperion not picked up the AOS4 mantle when they did Eyetech would have allowed the A1 project to rot away, but to suggest that the A1's creation was motivated solely by AOS4 is a joke.

Since when?? Workarounds for hardware? You're kidding, right? When someone makes a UDMA IDE driver on another PPC system, it should work on Pegasos, right? Well, maybe with a few tweaks. Not with the massive changes that Articia enforces just to get around the PCI bus locking alone! And that's not even going into the workaround for the cache integrity bugs!

A "tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.

Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.

Sure, but they're being sold at a fifth of the price of a Pegasos board, or even less, and you don't have to buy them. You can choose another model, and yet get exactly the same compatibility with the rest of your system. Conversely, the alternative to a Pegasos board is...
...another Pegasos board. Not exactly a breadth of choice, then.

[ikir]

Wayne wrote:
The two different Operating systems are, for all intents and purposes, identical -- being that they both emulate the old real classic Amiga OS.  Neither OS is "Amiga", so why get hung up on a name brand?

Wayne

Amiga OS4 is based on Amiga OS source code, it is the natural evolution of AmigaOS on the PPC. Why it shouldn't be Amiga?

ikir wrote:
Why it shouldn't be Amiga?

Just my opinion sir.  Just my opinion.  Unless you count the continual bungling of affairs, scandalous (possibly fraudulent) behavior and near bankruptcy, I don't really see Amiga Inc/KMOS (whomever they are)/Hyperion as being anything like Commodore.

I guess in reality -- being four years late -- I just don't "get it" any more.  Neither the AmigaOne nor Pegasos has a real market (certainly not the Amiga market) to sell to outside of the Linux community, so I personally feel that while they might be fun to play with, we've waited four years and gone through endless stupid (though entertaining) drama for what amounts to a dead-end product.

Either machine may sell well to the Linux community, and that is the niche they need to be marketing to.  The remaining Amiga market however will never put food on the table for anything but a few dedicated hobby developers.

(Sorry, I've been sick for two days, so I'm feeling a bit depressed really)

[guest1955]

I never understood the obsession with sticking to the original source code. I remember reading that XP was a rewrite and that Longhorn definately is another rewrite: Does that make them any less "Windows"?
Starting from scratch means you can "cut out the fat" and make  a streamlined system (But can still stick to the same API for some compatibility).

I think the only worry that MOS users have is that because their OS is not "Official" it will not gain as much support from the community as "AmigaOs 4".

Bye

[KennyR]

Bhogget wrote:
The drivers exist - in binary form - but they're good drivers, they're free (as in beer) and they fully support the card features.

Good if you define "good" as being "incompatible and buggy as hell", that is. The complaints of Linux users about these drivers are constant. Change kernel, you have to wait for update. Choose any CPU but x86, too bad. This goes totally against the Linux mindset.

The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.

And your implying that if one doesn't use these big companies for a computing solution then the result must be crap by default is equally laughable. You are trapped in this world where only the cutting edge is any good, which is really not better than some who believe anything x86 is inherently evil just by existing. Or is it that you simply believe that supporting any hardware other than that you currently own is a waste of time?

So the A1 was designed specifically for an OS which would only exist years later, right?

YES! It was! Hardware designs for the A1 were being processed years before a single line of code were being written for OS4. How have you missed that?

And then, when it was decided that the Escena A1 was vapor, and Eyetech offered the TeronCX (the board that mostly closely matched what Escena A1 would have been), OS4 was still only just a bare skeleton. So I'm not wrong, it's just you who who seem to be rather ill-informed. Which is surprising considering how long you've been hanging around the forums, even if it is only to push one subject always only.

A1 was meant for OS4, and isn't priced or supported or publicised for anything else. Who'd even pay Amiga Inc.'s brand tax for a board that wasn't intended to run OS4?

"tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.

Oh, really. The difference is that one will be totally unstable and lose data, the other that it will be inefficient. How is that insignificant? Don't mix semantics with practicalities, Bill.