@WolfToTheMoon

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And if it was PPC or ARM, we could argue the same thing.-

Possibly, but I think it needs more than a CPU. Both a Pegasos and Mac have PPC. And neither has any firmware relevant to an Amiga including the A1. An A1 is only an AmigaOS4 machine when it's booted off the harddisk.

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68K is long gone, as is custom hardware.

We still have ColdFire AFAIK. But there is still custom hardware. It's usually stuck on a PCI type card these days. And works from Windows drivers.

Not the same integration though it would have been nice to see an Amiga like machine these days where all the sound, VGA and firmware was made to work with eachother and be graphical from the start just like a real Amiga.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2010 at 04:05 PM.

@saimon69

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Guess my issue is kinda personal, as far as i remember i was going mad reading the mismanagement

Yeah I hated it too. AAA. C=. CU Amiga. All going in a heap.

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AROS did not fulfilled my needs either, at least was having that incredible feeling like the WB i was used too

I can see your points. AFAIR RedHat Linux was the in-distro before Ubuntu took over. I am surprised you wasn't happy with Linux and found AROS better for your needs, given how much support Linux gets. So that speaks well of AROS!

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AROS as a bridge for developing/sharing technologies with the os4 and morphOS incarnations and a provider of open tools

Yes. I can see that happening. And even now I see devs trying to include OS4 features in AROS. Things will really open up when AROS can run 68k applications out of the box in the AROS enviroment. At that point a bubble will burst. And if in future they somehow happen to incorporate a PPC emulator that does the WOS or PUP thing then crunch time will come.

Of course, we can't forget Amitlhon here. which drove a stake right through the Amiga market and caused a huge rift between us. The Amiga market would be divided, never to be the same again. Here we had a very neatly packaged Amiga emulator that focused more on fast 68K than the Amiga chipset. Made to act like a highend RTG Amiga. Running AmigaOS transparently on an x86 PC. Some even compared it to being like AmigaOS on native PPC. Note that they didn't say like native x86.

Eventually that would come. Some thought that, like AROS is today, that it was a native x86 port of AmigaOS. It looked so close. I even heard commments that they should dump the AmigaOS4 project and release this as AmigaOS4 instead. I thought this was stupid, why would they dump porting AmigaOS natively to another CPU for a 68K emulator?! How was that moving forward? It wasn't. Amithlon received high praises, but it was just a glorified Amiga emulator. It was stuck at OS3.9 68K.

And, even for an Amiga emulator, it really didn't do a great job, if you wanted to run real Amiga software. Forget decent chipset emulation. Might as well keep running UAE on Windows.

But Amithlon did set a precident for things to come. And things that were already in place. Less focus on the Amiga chipset and making use of PC VGA and sound cards instead. Perhaps opposite to what the original Amiga was all about.

It did have one neat feature. It's own native x86 Amiga code, allowing Amiga programs to run as native x86 code, and going back into emulation for calls to the OS. In some ways, this was like the PowerUP and WarpOS applications, running native code on the PPC and switching back to the 68k for AmigaOS. The same kind of idea, but instead of context switches, we had switches to an emulator on the same CPU.

Closing with this point, I wonder if the AROS developers considered support for Amithlon executables? Or even if they put some support in. I think this would be a good thing for AROS. Easier than supporting 68K code. And calls back to the OS should be easier to trace. AROS gaining more software.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2010 at 04:39 PM.

@cha05e90

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First of all I'm still *not* convinced that Hyperion where the one's who decided to go PPC.

If you go back in history you could blame Phaese 5. Wasn't it back in 1995 they released the PowerUP PowerPC cards? The decision was made back then. C= was talking Alpha. Mac was going PowerPC. The PPC was good, fast and solved a problem. And most importantly apart from higher clock speed, it was big endian.

There's now way x86 could have got a foot in back then. Even on an expansion card. Yes we've had x86 Amiga cards but did they run Amiga code externally or just PC DOS code?

The endian problem would have been huge back then. Making an emulator would have been harder. And by the end of it they would have had to scrap all big endian dependencies and bitfields making the new AmigaOS limited and similar to AROS. Plus the hard time of trying to rewrite the ASM code to be compatible.

What was popular? A 486/DX 66? Something like that. Err! And of course the PC vs. Amiga fight was bigger back then. We had Intel Outside. Or if Intel was Inside it was sitting on a toilet! Today we've got a lot softer. Todays economy and prce/power rattio have made us weak!

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If AT or one of the Amiga Inc.'s afterwards has said "we go direct to x86" Hyperion would have a done a x86 AmigaOS. They were only contractors. But this never happend.

I spoke to the Bill McDaddy in the early days, shaked his hand on two seperate occasions on the same weekend at the ACE2K festival. He wasn't an Amiga man, he was a PC man. He didn't understand this thing with PPC. And I told him my opinion. And unlike Dave Haynie thinks (and should know better) I didn't give a religious reason for it, I gave him a technical one on how x86 wasn't going to work as easily as he wanted and how PPC would. Of course after that he tried to flog that DE thing as soem kind of reinvented Amiga inspiried OS.

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Even if this is true I can't see where your remark has any relevance.

I agree. Not even the Pegasos was the Superduper A-Box we saw in CU Amiga. But the AmigaOne (Zico anyone?) meant something happened. Finally sometihng had happened. Okay it had a BIOS (old fashioned PC style text screen) and didn't have any copper to write to the VGA registers in realtime nor an Amiga floppy controller and whatever else. But it happened. It ran AmigaOS recompiled and updated from the actual AmigaOS code base and ran 68K apps. And the 800Mhz PPC craped all over my 40Mhz 68K anyway you looked at it! That's what mattered to me. So the wait for something happening was over. I invested in the OS4 opportunity. I am still investing my time now. For me it has payed off.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2010 at 04:12 PM.

@agami

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I'm not promoting anyone. I'm saying they are all the same.

I think here we much make a distinction between Hyperion the company and "Hyperion's Heroes" who are doing the AmigaOS4 work, the Frieden brothers. They do the work on OS4, but maintain they work for Hyperion, who also do other non-OS4 related things.

And then there is all the other developers. And alongside that developers who want to keep a copyright on code they have written.

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Hyperion's released product is so uninspiring and counter productive, it would actually have been less damaging to the overall Amiga situation if it were vapourware.

It's not meant to be inspired at all, it's meant to use the original code.

So you think it would have better if AmigaOS4 was announced and never came out? What would be the point of that!?

And why, do you think it came out too late? I think it did! But it came. The market was a mess. AROS was in the shadows while Amithlon was in the light. The Pegasos and MorphOS was gaining popularity. And then on top of it all the original AmigaOS gets resurrected. Talk about bad timing!

Or is it because you think Amiga/OS was left too late and the open source clones should have continued the Amiga theme alone?

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2010 at 04:13 PM.

@agami

Quote:

If there are different points of view based on the same set of facts then by definition one or more points of view are subjective.

We can also interpret facts or evidence different according to a framework or our worldview.

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AmigaOS 4 and the hardware it runs on may be seen by a lot of you as a hobby, just don't tell Hyperion. They didn't go through a long and expensive legal process so they could support a hobby of a hundred or so Amigans.

Actually, I remenber they said we were least important, and they wanted to enter OS4 into the embedded market. Hence the delay of AmigaOS4 for real Amigas with a PowerUP card. Then later we heard nothing much more and now we seem to be the main focus. IMHO the orginal plan was better, perhaps it didn't work out quite as well.

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I'm not talking about taking over the world,

Then again, if you don't try and reach too high, you will end up in a lower place.

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Actually, on more than a few occasions I've said that AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, an AROS are all holding on to he past, and in other ways are all the same.

Aside from the fact that Mac and Windows are doing the same thing but better off at doing it. Amiga is all about holding onto the past! It's slowly being de-commissioned from hardware and being reduced to an OS. Which is more irrelevant to the original hardware. But the point is have the Amiga OS now and keep using it! Like we always wanted too.

If we didn't want to do this and hold on to the Amiga spirit we'd all just buy PCs and use Wimdows 7! And get over the whole Amiga deal. Like a lot of ex-Amiga people have done today. Leaving the Amiga in the past, where it was better off anyway.

@Hypex

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Then again, if you don't try and reach too high, you will end up in a lower place

Well said

@agami

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agami wrote: Using an OS doesn't change facts about that OS. All my commentary is objective and not subjective.

Really? "uninspiring", "counter productive" and "stifling" are objective characteristics in what universe?

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All things are relevant. And when relating to OS 3.x OS 4 is no doubt an improvement In many ways. But relating to what technologies exist and what is plausible, it is a disappointment. Uninspiring and stifling.

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I'm not promoting anyone. I'm saying they are all the same. Hyperion's released product is so uninspiring and counter productive, it would actually have been less damaging to the overall Amiga situation if it were vapourware.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@Hypex

I honestly don't know how a text menu and a bunch of useful information can be considered a step DOWN from what we used to have.

Which was an animation of a disk going into a drive, a version number and a list of plugin cards and drives.

Seriously, do you really prefer the early startup menu to U-Boot?

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: ... But Amithlon did set a precident for things to come. And things that were already in place. Less focus on the Amiga chipset and making use of PC VGA and sound cards instead. Perhaps opposite to what the original Amiga was all about. ...

The original Amiga was about delivering high performance multimedia PC at afforable price.

What special about Amiga classic chipset In the light of AROS's NVIDIA GPU support? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

If you want to hit-the-metal on modern GPUs, just look in AMD Radeon HD’s GPU docs.

Last edited by Hammer on 10-Sep-2010 at 10:52 AM.

_________________

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @WolfToTheMoon Quote: And if it was PPC or ARM, we could argue the same thing.- Possibly, but I think it needs more than a CPU. Both a Pegasos and Mac have PPC. And neither has any firmware relevant to an Amiga including the A1. An A1 is only an AmigaOS4 machine when it's booted off the harddisk. Quote: 68K is long gone, as is custom hardware. We still have ColdFire AFAIK. But there is still custom hardware. It's usually stuck on a PCI type card these days. And works from Windows drivers. Not the same integration though it would have been nice to see an Amiga like machine these days where all the sound, VGA and firmware was made to work with eachother and be graphical from the start just like a real Amiga.

My Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop (with AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5730 and Intel Core i7 740QM) starts with Dell graphical logo.



My older laptops such as ASUS G1S (Intel Santarosa 2007, Geforce 8600MGT(dead due "bump gate")), ASUS G1SN (Intel Santarosa 2008, Geforce 9500MGS) and Sony Vaio VGN-FW45 (Intel Montevina 2008, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4650) all starts up with graphical logos.

ASUS's ROG(Republic of Gamers) branded BIOS graphical logos animates with sound.


My ASUS G1S/G1SN has the above BIOS animation.

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@Hypex

Quote:

We still have ColdFire AFAIK.

Slightly offtopic...

That Atari Coldfire(FireBee) is a vary nice machine!!! I must say I never owned an Atari, but I'm tempted! And that MiNT/MultiTOS is BSD based, hm...

_________________

@Hypex

Quote:

Aside from the fact that Mac and Windows are doing the same thing but better off at doing it. Amiga is all about holding onto the past! It's slowly being de-commissioned from hardware and being reduced to an OS. Which is more irrelevant to the original hardware. But the point is have the Amiga OS now and keep using it! Like we always wanted too.

The differences between people here is largely down to what parts of the past we want to hold on to.

Personally I want to hold on to the pieces that have stood the test of time: The highly responsive OS; the microkernel approach; the openness of the architecture; the modularity; the focus on subdividing work and spreading it across multiple tasks; datatypes; pervasive ARexx; the very nice balance between GUI and command line (AmigaOS and derivatives are the only OSs where I've felt like it's a relatively seamless process to work with both the command line and the file manager / workbench) and so on.

I don't care what the OS is called. The hardware it runs on matters, but not enough that I won't run an x86 version too if one is available (hence I play with AROS, though I also want an X1000 w/OS4 and a Natami). I don't care if it's the "rightful heir" by some convoluted or not so convoluted logic, or if it's based on the original source or reimplemented from scratch or handed down from the heavens.

Classics hold value to me for the nostalgia, but not enough to use exclusively or even mostly. X1000/OS4 holds an appeal for me because I have a soft spot for the PPC. AROS holds an appeal for me because it's open source and I can run it on my Linux box and I can be part in shaping it. MOS I just don't have a relationship to, but who knows maybe I'll play with that too some day.

I just want to be able to *use and play with* desktop environments I actually enjoy. I just don't get the secterianism in here. The respective platforms after all have far more in common than puts them apart in terms of the user experience, and the user experience matters far more than anything else.

_________________
Wiki for new/returning Amiga users - Projects: ACE basic compiler / FrexxEd / Git

@vidarh

++1

Excellent.

@WolfToTheMoon

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And that MiNT/MultiTOS is BSD based, hm...

I don´t share your opinion...

However, it is really nice OS.

@Wizzard_o

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I have an X1000 beta test contract in front of me. Should I bother signing it?

Go for it.

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@Wizzard_o

Amiga Inc. tried to promote 'Amiga Everywhere'. I guess that was their plan... Call it Amiga, ???, profit.

@Hammer

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The original Amiga was about delivering high performance multimedia PC at afforable price.

True but we've lost that. Along the way. For example, even an A1200 can be better equipped to display TV in a Workbench window. And where is our dual display support?

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What special about Amiga classic chipset In the light of AROS's NVIDIA GPU support?

More than one hardware sprite. Dual playfields. The copper. Of course sprite and playfields can be done by hardware overlay effects. If it can actually do that and not just write stuff in the bitmap. Faster than a CPU but realtime non-memory modfying effects are more efficient.

Whuch brings me to the copper. Sure, it was better suited to pallete based hardware, but can a modern GPU change resolution on each line or even modify it's registers while the screen is being rasterised?

That's what we miss in any of todays modern Amiga.

Quote:

If you want to hit-the-metal on modern GPUs, just look in AMD Radeon HD's GPU docs.

Possibly why ATI is supported greatly on OS4. If the docs are readily available. And from that link looks like ATI is second in line which sin't too bad for OS4.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Hammer Quote: The original Amiga was about delivering high performance multimedia PC at afforable price. True but we've lost that. Along the way. For example, even an A1200 can be better equipped to display TV in a Workbench window. And where is our dual display support? Quote: What special about Amiga classic chipset In the light of AROS's NVIDIA GPU support? More than one hardware sprite. Dual playfields. The copper. Of course sprite and playfields can be done by hardware overlay effects. If it can actually do that and not just write stuff in the bitmap. Faster than a CPU but realtime non-memory modfying effects are more efficient. Whuch brings me to the copper. Sure, it was better suited to pallete based hardware, but can a modern GPU change resolution on each line or even modify it's registers while the screen is being rasterised? .

Hardware sprite? What about multiple hardware 3D surfaces?

Dual playfields? What about multiple hardware 3D surfaces?

The copper? Modern GPUs includes multiple shader/stream processors that supports complex shader/GpGPU programs. DX10 era hardware supports both IEE754 floating point and integer data formats.

The different desktop resolutions can be displayed on hardware 3D surfaces. Complex shader programs can be applied on the 3D surfaces. AMD Eyefinity supports more than two displays.

The 3D surface can have up to 8192 x 8192 texture resolution (e.g. Radeon HD 4550). Videos can be displayed on the 3D surface.

AMD and NVIDIA relies on process fab tech to pack more features on to a chip.

Classic 2D platform type game Trine on modern GPU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OTJFsI6xyo

You have other 2D remakes on modern GPUs e.g. BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, StreetFighter IV, Mortal Kombat (shown in E3 2010) and 'etc'.

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUxh8sDIJg0

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_________________

@vidarh

Well said.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@olegil

Quote:

I honestly don't know how a text menu and a bunch of useful information can be considered a step DOWN from what we used to have.

What we had was a GUI from startup. We only saw info when we needed too. And the boot shell, unlike a UBoot shell actually did something useful when pressing up cursor instead of going weird. The presentation just doesn't match up.

Besides, most info dispapears so fast in UBoot it's almost useless having it. Perhaps not as useless as a PC where it really whizzes by for no reason. I've never understood why a PC BIOS prints info on the screen if no one has the time to read it. What are they made for other computers to looka t or what?

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Which was an animation of a disk going into a drive, a version number and a list of plugin cards and drives.

At least it was graphical and I could use the mouse.

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Seriously, do you really prefer the early startup menu to U-Boot?

Yes. For the reasons above and because using a GUI is easier than using methods more suitable for a Commodore 64, And if it is custom Amiga hardware it should be that way.