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umisef 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 15:44:12
#21 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@jingof

Quote:
Assuming this is the likely outcome, what would it take to buy back the rights to Amithlon and how many in the Amiga community would be willing to put their money where they mouths are?


OK, a quick comment before this gets out of hand --- H&P have nothing to do anymore with Amithlon; Even the most generous reading of events would have had their contract (and thus their involvement) expire about a year ago.

There are two problems with releasing Amithlon, or Umilator, as open source. Neither one has to do with money.

The first is my good old friend Harald --- I have had about all the hate filled paranoid tirades I ever needed in my life, and have no desire for any more. Nor do I care for middle-of-the-night phone calls, silly pointless letters from incompetent lawyers, or any other form of abuse; And while my address and phone number have changed a few times in the last 6 years, it shouldn't be *that* hard to find me (in fact, if it takes anyone more than 15 minutes, they should work on their search skills :).

The second is one of resources --- open-sourcing stuff is no good unless someone is going to work on it. And not just any any someone, but someone who actually does more good than harm. And this last bit is a surprisingly steep hurdle, especially when it comes to code which is (a) as complex and (b) as messy (in places) as Amithlon/Umilator. Someone like evilrich could probably have a good shot at it, but he recently pointed out his lack of time (in a different context). And I certainly can't hold anybody's hand, because at the moment, I am completely overwhelmed with just the coding and coordinating at my day job.

Both Umilator and the 68k-to-PPC JIT are somewhere on some hard disk, and it probably wouldn't take me more than a couple of hours to find them. And if anybody is interested in the PPC JIT, give me a yell sometime next week, when I am back in Oz, and I'll go looking (note: it will require additional work which is of a highly mind-bending nature. If you don't understand how the UAE x86 JIT works, the current PPC code will be useless to you!). Something might come of it, and there is no risk for me.
To release Umilator, on the other hand, I would need to be positively convinced that someone competent wants to get down and dirty with it. I am not going to risk the wrath of Harald unless I am convinced there is a good chance the code will see actual useful improvements (which, being 5 years out of date, it desperately needs).

So, to repeat --- neither H&P, nor money, are an issue!

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elatour 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 16:12:02
#22 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 18-Jan-2005
Posts: 936
From: Toronto, Canada

@HammerD

Too bad it too became the victim of corporate interests, greed and huge egos, like so many others in the Amiga's troubled history. This further serves to highlight why it is finally high time to come up with a unified open-source solution, which I propose is AROS. If at all possible, some of the ingenious knowledge that went into this product should be open-sourced and contributed to the AROS project. It would be a shame for all of the hard work and ingenuity that went into this product to be relegated to the obscure junk pile of obsolete technologies/products.

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HammerD 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 16:38:26
#23 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Oct-2003
Posts: 934
From: Ontario, Canada

@umisef

I am willing to put some money up for it. I am not a programmer though, but I may be able to organize a project to get something going, similar as to what I've done wtih Remote Desktop for the Amiga.

What is Harald's claim on Umilator? I thought all his code was removed. If the contract with H&P is also expired...I think releasing it as open source should be ok, but I am no lawyer.

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jingof 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 19:21:38
#24 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 8-May-2007
Posts: 499
From: Jingo Fet is from "A Galaxy Far, Far Away"

@umisef

>>> OK, a quick comment before this gets out of hand

Well, the last thing I want is to cause problems for you or the group. I'll certainly back off if that's what you'd prefer. If I've been very disappointed about the fate of Umilator - I can only imagine how you've felt.

>>> The first is my good old friend Harald

Yeah, I thought I might have been misidentifying the objecting party, but what I say still stands with "Harald" replacing "H&P". That is, I can't understand his motives - they seem driven more by vengence than logic or even greed, which just floors me. But, admittedly, I know very little about what really transpired and online info is sketchy at best. So, I speak on the subject with reservation about my understanding of events. But IF there were a way around this impasse after 5 years, what would that entail and is it even realistic?

>>> I have had about all the hate filled paranoid tirades I ever needed in my life, and have no desire for any more. Nor do I care for middle-of-the-night phone calls, silly pointless letters from incompetent lawyers

Wow, that's horrible! I've never lived anything like that and I wouldn't want to push an idea that subjects you again. My main point was if money would persuade Harald to leave you alone and relinquish any claims, what would it take and would the community join me to raise it? Ransom money, I suspect, but considering the alternative... Or are you saying Harald would object on principle and would never consider such an offer from the community?

>>> I would need to be positively convinced that someone competent wants to get down and dirty with it

In terms of coding, I'd like to help, but I don't think I could. I'm a C++ expert with MS in Electrical Engineering and 20+ years experience, but I'm not typically involved with projects this "close to the metal" anymore. Business logic and n-tier architectures are my forte these days. Time would be an issue also.

Jingof

Last edited by jingof on 12-Nov-2007 at 07:26 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 12-Nov-2007 at 07:24 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 12-Nov-2007 at 07:22 PM.

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samos3.9 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 22:11:52
#25 ]
Super Member
Joined: 3-Aug-2004
Posts: 1227
From: Kernow Cornwall

@HammerD

Nice screen grab it looks great!

I tried to install the Amiga OSXL/ ONX 6.1 job a while ago ... but i got stuck on how to use QNX

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Sprocki 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 23:19:06
#26 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 18-Jul-2004
Posts: 212
From: Berlin - Germany

@HammerD

Thanks for your files. I get 1680x1050 to work on my display but it is always stretched to the full width due to your settings. They use a 1920x1200 screen to display 1680x1050 instead of centering it on the screen with the correct resolution. The monitor is set to display all resolutions 1:1 (without any resize), so the resize happens by your settings. I tweaked those values in P96M alot but did not work out. I cannot get anything better to work and 1680x1050 stretched looks very unnatural and is not very good to read. Sometimes when I changed those values for testing I got a complete white screen instead of the test picture but also at just 1280x1024 as before. I dod not even manage to get 1600x1200 which should work out very easily in theory. Maybe someone else has different settings on a widescreen that he can share?

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Sprocki 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 23:23:01
#27 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 18-Jul-2004
Posts: 212
From: Berlin - Germany

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

DrBombcrater wrote:
@Sprocki

If you're trying for 1920x1200 make sure and use 16-bit colour. Only the first 8MB of video memory is available to P96 under Amithlon and a 32-bit 1920x1200 screen needs more than that, so it won't work.

Is this P96's or Amithlon's limitation?

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Sprocki 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 12-Nov-2007 23:37:18
#28 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 18-Jul-2004
Posts: 212
From: Berlin - Germany

@TrevorDick

Quote:

TrevorDick wrote:
@HammerD

Quote:
I personally prefer 1920x1200 much better, as I think 1680x1050 is too wide and not tall enough especially when web browsing.

I quite agree. All the widescreen monitors are well and good but a vertical resoution is important for web browsing IMHO.

I bought the 2405FPW two years ago which has enough space to display 2 sheets in DIN A4 simultaneously plus toolbars. This is very good for e.g. reading eBooks on the one side and browsing the web on the other as browser windows mostly fit in there with full content. But I just can use this full resolution with UAE which is so much slower than Amithlon, therefore I want to use it with the latter. It would also be great to use the rotation of the monitor to view 1200x1920 but I'm afraid that won't work even less than the horizontal orientation.

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Sprocki 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 0:21:13
#29 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 18-Jul-2004
Posts: 212
From: Berlin - Germany

@umisef

Thank you for your statement on your current situation and thoughts. I very much encourage you to release Umilator. After all those years you still see there is a big demand for it. People ask for it again and again. I bought it 6 years ago now when it just came out. I was so embarrassed by this product. I always thought that it won't take that long until we all own PPC powered Amiga successors. Amithlon way always meant as a transitional road to dedicated Amiga-like machines. Yes, I own a Pegasos II with G4 for nearly 3 years now, but my main work is still done with Amithlon. I cannot believe that it is nearly half the time since Commodore's bankruptcy, one third of my Amiga career that I use it. Yes, for six years now Amithlon is my main system. I use it at most for my daily work. I love it and I never thought it would stay with me that long. It still is the best that I own.
But is has come to its ages. Some bugs never got fixed like this font selection bug or stopping AHI playback for one second, the RAM limitation to 1GB and the like. Yes, there were new kernels that pushed us forward, not just from you but also from Gary, and 3.10 is my everyday's use kernel. But also this is limited. It is limited to very few hardware that can be bought, there are nearly no drivers for current SATA ports, for GbE connectors or for more modern graphics cards (see my intention on warming up this thread: a real pain in the ass to try to setup the nativ resolution for my 2 year old TFT panel).
Some bugs and issued got fixed, others never. We had new kernels but never with a continuity in development as Gary always loses the sources whenever he has to release them.
Read the amithlonopen mailinglist. There are still people coming back and say "i never used it (or did not for a very long time) but want to do so now". Imagine, they come back to use a 6 year-old product! A lot of those people could never get Amithlon to work correctly due to the hard process of harddisk installation and the non-supported hardware. A computer that cannot get into the internet is unusable nowadays. Slow VESA modes tear down your fun of using it.
With just a more modern kernel and some bugs fixed Umilator could reactivate a lot of machines out there. Therefore I very much encourage you to release it. I know it will be hard to find somebody to care for the sources. Maybe you won't find anybody but at least you should try. Give it into someones hands who has the ability to care for it, who does not give up or lose sources permanently. Do a public inquiry: those who think they could care for Umilator shall write a mail to you and you can decide to whom it will go. Maybe none of them fulfills your expectations. Maybe several people do. Then hand it over to them. The more people work on it, the more bugs can be fixed, the more rusty nails can be polished and Umilator can be modernized. I know that some people ever and ever again try to build new kernels for getting better driver support for current hardware. This is hard. It could become much easier with you doing the long-time wanted step for all of us Amithlon users out there.

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umisef 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 9:39:33
#30 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@Sprocki

Quote:
Is this P96's or Amithlon's limitation?


IIRC, the driver can pass "16MB" to the P96, but then some weird things happen which I am fairly sure are due to P96 going haywire. Thus, Amithlon limits things to 8MB. With no "real" P96 supported Amiga gfx card having more than 8MB, that seemed the safest, and in 2001, screens with more than two million pixels were rather rare.

I am not sure whether it needs to be a power of two --- 1920x1200x32 should be possible with, say, 10MB, so it may be worth limiting things to 10MB instead.

I am currently in China, so I cannot check --- if someone really wants me to look into this, just send me a PM so that I will remember once I get back to my lovely 8 megapixel desktop(1) (a little while off yet).


(1): ObBrag --- one 2560x1600 monitor, two 1600x1200 on either side, in portrait mode.

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DrBombcrater 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 14:19:18
#31 ]
Super Member
Joined: 6-Feb-2004
Posts: 1382
From: UK

@Sprocki

Quote:
Some bugs and issued got fixed, others never. We had new kernels but never with a continuity in development as Gary always loses the sources whenever he has to release them.

If you check your facts you'll find I had one instance of lost source code - for the 2.04 kernel - but the code was recovered and publicly released, complete with an announcement on the ML.

The 3.00 sources are not lost either, they're sitting right here on my hard drive. They have not been made public because of a series of unsettling legal threats I have received over the past year. They are most probably nothing more than a giant bluff on the part of someone who isn't quite stable mentally but I've been reluctant to test that theory out.

However, checking my inbox, I've not heard anything about this for a few months now, so maybe my pet fruitcake has given up. Maybe it's time to sort something out with regards to the source.

_________________
Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

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umisef 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 14:49:16
#32 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@Sprocki

Quote:
Is this P96's or Amithlon's limitation?


Actually, I had a look at the source code for the powerfb/amithlonfb driver, or at least the x86 side of it (ssh is a wonderful tool :). Seems to me that I am only limiting things to *16* MB, except on Matrox cards, some of which are limited to 4MB.
In at least some versions, there is a setenv variable called "p96_memsize" which gives the upper limit in MB, but its default value is 16.

So, could someone please (a) confirm that P96 really reports only 8MB, not 16MB, and (b) have a look through the internal log (IIRC, there was a "dumplog" program which dumped the internal log to its standard out) to see what it has to say about the framebuffer? Because at the moment, I am a bit stumped....

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umisef 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 14:56:22
#33 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@DrBombcrater

Quote:
They have not been made public because of a series of unsettling legal threats I have received over the past year. They are most probably nothing more than a giant bluff on the part of someone who isn't quite stable mentally but I've been reluctant to test that theory out.


Would you be willing to elaborate on that, either here or in PM (or in email to any address @umilator.net, if you prefer that)? Because this sounds as if someone is pressuring you to violate the licensing conditions of a third party. Now if that "someone" is the someone I suspect it is, I can certainly understand your reaction; However, if it is said someone, then this is certainly going to far, and I (being one of the people who actually holds copyrights to some parts of those sources) would be mighty miffed at that "someone" (who wouldn't know how to compile a linux kernel if it bit him in the butt).

If you want me to, I can also send you a nasty (and actually factually correct) letter about how *not* releasing the sources is in violation of my copyright, and how I am going to do awful things to you if you don't comply. At that point, you would have nasty letters both for and against, so they should balance out :)

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bernd_afa 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 16:15:55
#34 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 14-Apr-2006
Posts: 829
From: Unknown

>IIRC, the driver can pass "16MB" to the P96, but then some weird things happen >which I am fairly sure are due to P96 going haywire. Thus, Amithlon limits things to >8MB. With no "real" P96 supported Amiga gfx card having more than 8MB, that

when mem set to 16 mb it happen on winuae too, that screen contents get lost after switch screen.

Seem P96 does not correct outsource screen data with greater than 16 MB when the gfx card mem get low.

only solution to avoid this is gove P96 much ram so it do not outsource the date because of low on ram.

Winuae have a P96 Mem setting upto 128 MB to avoid that

i think if you want use amithlon with more than 8 mb GFX ram you need change the driver that it can supprt more than 16 mb. maybe 64 MB is enough to avoid this P96 problems.

I send a mail to P96 Author if he can maybe help or tell what else can do, but no response get

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HammerD 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 17:07:44
#35 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Oct-2003
Posts: 934
From: Ontario, Canada

@bernd_afa

What version of Picasso 96 does Amithlon use? There is Picasso 96 3.0 out...but I do not know how to obtain it.

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AmigaOS 4.x Beta Tester - Classic Amiga enthusiast - http://www.hd-zone.com is my Amiga Blog, check it out!

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bernd_afa 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 19:35:51
#36 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 14-Apr-2006
Posts: 829
From: Unknown

@HammerD

I was amithlon betatester, have something that called P96 3.0 but i never see a advantage of 3.0 to P96 2.x with new kernel .;)

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HammerD 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 20:25:25
#37 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Oct-2003
Posts: 934
From: Ontario, Canada

@bernd_afa

Ok...just curious. I have your AFA OS installed on my Amithlon and OS 3.x. I have to look into it further to see what advantages it will give me...

I think that project is amazing...if we can replace OS 3.9 functions with new AROS ones that gives more functionality ....well that can only make sense.

Obviously it would be nice of all of these OS 3.x updates were collected then distributed in a central Installer it would be great. AmiKit has some patches listed too...we should all combine efforts to get a single unified, even if "unofficial" upgrade to OS 3.9...

Would make it easier for support, too.

Download the unofficial OS 3.9 BoingBag3....or something like that.

_________________
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Shadowolf 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 20:51:08
#38 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 22-Mar-2005
Posts: 137
From: Germany

@bernd_afa

>I send a mail to P96 Author if he can maybe help or tell what else can do,
> but no response get

As you should be well aware of, P96 is part of OS4 now.
That makes a 68k update very unlikely, especially as P96 was ported (from part-Assembly) and updated mostly by the OS4 team.

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HammerD 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 20:57:51
#39 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Oct-2003
Posts: 934
From: Ontario, Canada

@Shadowolf

As far as I am aware the P96 3.0 beta was 68k...I do not know if it was ever "released" to anyone though. But I could be wrong.

_________________
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Shadowolf 
Re: My Amithlon screenshot
Posted on 13-Nov-2007 22:57:43
#40 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 22-Mar-2005
Posts: 137
From: Germany

@HammerD

Whatever this P96 3.0 was supposed to be it's some years behind P96 for OS4 now.

My best bet on this is that 3.0 is some foul numbers game by someone.
Edit: Or it's just me beeing confused by the numbers. After all rtg.library for example still is at 41.xxxx, don't know the reason behind this for sure.
Had about 60 revisions in the last years though...

Last edited by Shadowolf on 13-Nov-2007 at 11:03 PM.

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