Nice one Elbox. Looking forward to a review to find out how compatible this thing is and how fast.

Depending on that I will decide whether to buy one or not.

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AmigaOne-XE G3 OS 4.
A4000 PPC
A1200 PPC

@dan.hutch

Quote:

So if the Dragon is fast enough to play a DVD while still using Workbench as shown in the videos then I reckon it will have a lot of appeal until a better PPC solution exists. You can still run most of the apps you would be running on OS4 anyway under OS3.9.

No, you got it all wrong. Dragon wasn't playing DVD. In the window there is output from TV card to which external DVD player was plugged in.

Speed of the Dragon depends on the software. Coldfire, similiar to 68040 and 68060 does not support some instructions and when you proceed one bit operations they work rather slow. Everything need to be compiled under Coldfire. Elbox claims that there are tools that enables cross-compilation.

Quoted after one of the attendants who wanted to clarify some misunderstanding.

Last edited by mailman on 12-Nov-2006 at 11:46 AM.

Quote:

tonyw wrote: @Darrin But - but - what is going to run on this? Only emulated 68K programs? There is no way that PPC programs like OS4 can ever run on it, so who is going to buy it? The only market that I can see is 68K owners running OS3.x.

If the Dragon's emulated 68k outperforms my 68030 A1200T then it's a winner for me. Plus, I'm looking forward to having decent (cheap) RAM expansion options and additional expansion slots.

It's not just an accelerator board.

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AmigaOne X1000, A4000(T), A3000, A2000, A1200(T), A1200, A500, CD32, Minimig+ARM, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64, C-One, C128, C128D, C64C, C64, VIC-20, CBM 8032, CBM4032, Efika, Ultimate64

@number6

http://dahoo.untergrund.net/other/az_xvid/

xvid versions. much smaller then the movs

@PulsatingQuasar

And did anyone pick up something here...

There wasn't an announcement of an announcement!

> What is the usage of Coldfire accelerator?

The power consumption of Coldfire MCF5475 is less than 2 watts.

ACK had mentioned about some sort of I/O board that enable classic Amiga accelerator to be used as stand alone computer.

Perhaps ACK or Elbox can create a similar I/O board with FPGA (Minimig) or Clone-A for Elbox Dragon.

Perhaps they can create PoE (Power Over Ethernet - max. 15 watts) Linux terminal for running Internet browser, remote terminal, class rom etc. Other possiblity is hand crank portable Linux computer, Amiga/Aros laptops etc.

Is the above idea possible?

@dan.hutch

Quote:

So if the Dragon is fast enough to play a DVD while still using Workbench as shown in the videos then I reckon it will have a lot of appeal until a better PPC solution exists. You can still run most of the apps you would be running on OS4 anyway under OS3.9.

A 400MHz PPC can't play a DVD without a vector unit, let alone a 266MHz ColdFire.

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@AMiGR

Quote:

A 400MHz PPC can't play a DVD without a vector unit, let alone a 266MHz ColdFire.

I read that they used a TV-card that was connected to a DVD-player.

@AMiGR

Quote:

A 400MHz PPC can't play a DVD without a vector unit, let alone a 266MHz ColdFire.

Although someone already told us in other post than it was just a DVD player connected to a TV card, bPlan has shown EFIKAs playing DVDs from their hard disks (using MorphOS1.5or Linux, I don't know).

A friend of mine had a big blue G3 tower (yosemite?) at 450Mhz and he played DVDs without problems. Maybe it was due to its 16MB ATI gfx card helping a little with some colour conversions or it was due to the use of good PPC northbridges. But he could play DVDs without skipping frames.

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The only spanish amiga news web page/club: CUAZ

@Darrin

ATM it looks quite slower than my old A3640 overclocked to 30MHz and seems infinitely slower than my old CSMKII or my current CSPPC

If I can't run old software I can't see the advantage of this card over a Pegasos/A1/WinUAE/Amithlon or simply my current accelerators.

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The only spanish amiga news web page/club: CUAZ

@Crumb

Quote:

Although someone already told us in other post than it was just a DVD player connected to a TV card, bPlan has shown EFIKAs playing DVDs from their hard disks (using MorphOS1.5or Linux, I don't know).

The keyword is "Hard Disks". It was under MorphOS, Linux MPlayer is slower.

Quote:

A friend of mine had a big blue G3 tower (yosemite?) at 450Mhz and he played DVDs without problems. Maybe it was due to its 16MB ATI gfx card helping a little with some colour conversions or it was due to the use of good PPC northbridges. But he could play DVDs without skipping frames.

Northbridge, ATi GFX card helping and an optimised player.

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@AMiGR, what the hell have you done with your hair??.. anyway good to see elbox deliver :)

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I was a ZX Spectrum owner....

@d0c

Halloween party, check my sig.

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@AMiGR

Quote:

A 400MHz PPC can't play a DVD without a vector unit, let alone a 266MHz ColdFire.

According to IBM the PPC440 could play DVDs 4 years ago when it was still around 400MHz...

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Whyzzat?

Quote:

Crumb wrote: @Darrin ATM it looks quite slower than my old A3640 overclocked to 30MHz and seems infinitely slower than my old CSMKII or my current CSPPC If I can't run old software I can't see the advantage of this card over a Pegasos/A1/WinUAE/Amithlon or simply my current accelerators.

Did you see it run yourself or was that teh impression from the videos? I'm sat on an oil rig in Brazil at the moment and I don't have the bandwidth to download anything. I'm off to visit the mother-in-law in Oz next week and I'll try and watch them then.

As long as it gives me good performance on hard-drive installable programs while allowing the use of a AGP garphics card with network support then it will suit my needs. If I want to run an old game that upsets the Coldfire then I guess we can always disable the card on startup via the mouse buttons and that should force the system to revert to the onboard 68020.

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AmigaOne X1000, A4000(T), A3000, A2000, A1200(T), A1200, A500, CD32, Minimig+ARM, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64, C-One, C128, C128D, C64C, C64, VIC-20, CBM 8032, CBM4032, Efika, Ultimate64

@OldFart who said Quote:

You know how to spoil the party, don't you?

Sorry, but I felt it was a valid question...

@dan.hutch who said Quote:

No, because spending £500-600 on a dated PPC motherboard is obvisously so much more worthwhile

A PPC can be clocked a lot faster than a Coldfire 68k, and PPC runs OS4. Sure, I'd prefer an x86 solution for OS4, but...

@hatschi who said Quote:

The main point for releasing it is that there are people who would be buying it - very simple. Just read my posts in this thread.

And if you read *my* post, I was basically asking why *anyone* would buy it. Is there *really* a market for it, or is that wishful thinking?
(edit: A market for cheap add-ons for old Amigas does not necessarily mean there is a market for a substantially more expensive board.)

Last edited by ChrisH on 12-Nov-2006 at 07:16 PM.

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Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@ChrisH

Quote:

Is there *really* a market for it, or is that wishful thinking?

Define "market". It's a tiny niche. A niche comparable to selling SD-card readers and MP3-addons for the C64 or selling expensive custom PPC hardware to people interested in anything "Amiga NG".
After all these years, Elbox and Individual computers are still alive, actively developing and selling their products. Also check out what people are spending on used Amiga equipment on ebay. 10 year old accelerators go for like 200-300 EUR - so there must be some kind of "market", even if has tiny proportions.

Last edited by hatschi on 12-Nov-2006 at 07:51 PM.

@minator

Sure, if you totally offload everything elsewhere and only do the decoding itself, it might cope. Find me a player than is that optimised and we'll talk again.

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One of the attenders said on PPA.pl that elbox claims that most of the unmodified 68k software runs at speed between 040 and 060 (because of the emulation). Coldfire shows its full potential on software compiled directly for it. They said there is an amiga compiler that can target Coldfire (I suppose they meant GCC) and there is a PC program that can convert 68k assembly sources to Coldfire ones. There are probably some talks behind the scenes with some Amiga software developers to recompile their software for CF. Asked about the compatibility with old software like NDOS games, Elbox said most of them workes very good. It was also said that SysInfo reports CF as 68030 clocked at 1700MHz.

source (in polish)

Edit: added link to source.

Edit: Changed 170MHz to 1700MHz. This information was corrected on PPA.pl by Elbox.

Last edited by yak on 13-Nov-2006 at 10:36 AM.
Last edited by yak on 12-Nov-2006 at 11:40 PM.
Last edited by yak on 12-Nov-2006 at 10:11 PM.

Quote:

yak wrote: SysInfo reports CF as 68030 clocked at 170MHz.

my 1990's wet dream have come thru...

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I was a ZX Spectrum owner....