realistaclly for the future, it has to be any HW running amigaOS, preferably x86
I say leave the HW game to the natami crew. Coz Ainc suck dry dead dingo dongers at it.

_________________
In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

http://ozconspiracyhouse.myfastforum.org

@resle

This is good question. You know the first thing off the top of my head is "Kick ass graphics and Sound!!" Which is only partly true.

And, yeah, the OS of course now is near and dear to me. It's all about the OS now for me no doubt.

But I think there is a THIRD piece that made "Classic Amigas" special and nothing has it. Not modern PCs not Mac's, not any or the "Modern" Amiga's.

There are a couple parts to my Amiga history.

When I had an A1000, Yeah it was all about Graphics and Sound. I mean nothing could touch it. Thing is, I never used the OS. I mean Kick 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, while I miss the blue and orange were not what Amiga OS was to become to me later.

So later in my Amiga history, say the A2000, then A1200 & CD32 converted to a computer years.

It wasn't so much about "Graphics and Sound" PC's caught up for sure. I had grown fond of the OS. I was on the internet. Everything was about how easy it was too use, fast to boot, I could put 2 booting HDs in there and dual boot, I'll I do is hold down both mouse buttons and start up and select which one to boot from. My A2000 I had put an accelerator in, more ram, HD card, and everything "just worked".

So one of the things that "was" an Amiga to me that you still can't get on an x86 machine, was the whole, how do you say it, I guess the whole fact that part of the OS was in ROM and you could boot from floppy. The simple "BIOS" (early start menu in 2.0 on) menu that is FAST.

I think a "new" Amiga in x86 is possible, but I strongly believe in simply getting in a more Amiga like fashion of ROM thinking. Now I do think having to replace roms sucked. So I think I better idea would simply be like an AmigaX86 board, with a ROMv1.0 on it, then there is a large flash area. So the ROMv1.0 stay there. Now ROMv1.5 comes out, you just flash that new update into the flash area. If something ever goes wrong with a flash or want to go back you can clear the flash area and you still have the physical ROMv1.0 on the board.

But I think the ROM idea could make the "New" Amiga what a "Classic" used to be. You can boot like the old days, probably not from floppy , but from one of the dozen SD cards I have laying around, or of course USB sticks, CDs etc. The ROM would have the basic set of drivers so it would be like the old days so you can, boot a demo, a game, the OS, and you don't have to stuck to just one already installed HD and everything has to run off that HD.

That's kind of what sucks about everything these days. Everything in Windows I pretty much have to install on to my HD and run off there. The old days I could just try something off floppy. Or set up a few boot floppies for different tasks. I would like to do that with a "New" Amiga. Maybe set up a few boot SD cards as mini HDs or something. That is New Amiga thinking.

_________________
A3000D (16mhz, 2MB Chip, 4MB Fast, SCSI (300+MB), SuperGen Genlock, Kick 3.1)
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Back in my day, we didn't have water. We only had Oxygen & Hydrogen, & we'd just shove 'em together

@eniacfoa

Quote:

Coz Ainc suck dry dead dingo dongers at it.

dry dead dingo dongers Ha Ha Ha!!! Oh man that made me tear up for some reason!

_________________
A3000D (16mhz, 2MB Chip, 4MB Fast, SCSI (300+MB), SuperGen Genlock, Kick 3.1)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in my day, we didn't have water. We only had Oxygen & Hydrogen, & we'd just shove 'em together

I asked myself 'What makes a C64?' and 'What makes a pc?'

For the most part, Aristotelian logic holds for defining if a computer is or isn't a C64. It gets a bit fuzzier when defining what is or isn't a pc but generally people manage to do it.

I think it's unfortunate that defining Amiga is less fuzzy than defining a pc. But there is some fuzz in the equation.

Whatever it is that makes an Amiga incorporates being fun to use - amoung many other factors.

_________________

@NutsAboutAmiga

I was referring to CPU and IGP sharing main memory.

Last edited by Hammer on 06-Sep-2008 at 12:17 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Amiga is Natami hardware running Amiga OS !
Natami has got the spirit of original Amiga Hardware...

Amiga Hardware and Software

@itix

Quote:

Copper is useless on true colour screens.

I see your point but it was used to reset the bitmap registers and sprite updates. And for screen scrolling and background colour effects. Imagine how faster the OS3.9 install background gradient would have been drawn if the copper was used for every line instead of writing the same colour into every pixel line by line.

Quote:

Using sprites in multitasking system is difficult.

The Amiga made it possible! It was done on the Amiga.

Quote:

Amiga blitter was good for some operations but many programmers ignored it because it was too slow and it was better use CPU instead. Nothing new there.

But isn't a blitter still used now? On todays PC's? Hardware acceleration would be with a blitter as well, right?

@Hypex

Quote:

I see your point but it was used to reset the bitmap registers and sprite updates. And for screen scrolling and background colour effects.

Making background colour effects with copper does not work anymore in true colour display. Making sprite updates or changing viewable bitmap address is cool but not so important. You can do the same using CPU and today it would be less than 0.001% from overall CPU load.

Quote:

Imagine how faster the OS3.9 install background gradient would have been drawn if the copper was used for every line instead of writing the same colour into every pixel line by line.

If you used copper it would not be possible for hi/true colour displays and you must also somehow scale your copperlist for different screen sizes.

Guess which OS has HW accelerated gradients... :P

Quote:

The Amiga made it possible! It was done on the Amiga.

Not really :) You could not use sprites in WB games because sprites dont follow window and could even disappear (and have many other problems) depending on your WB setup...

In custom screens they could be used in some sensible manner but I dont think anyone ever did that...

Today you can implement sprites using GPUs. Just blit piece of bitmap with alpha channel from bitmap A to bitmap B and you have sprite. No size restrictions, no colour restrictions, no performance restrictions and you can have an optional alpha blending. You can also resize sprites using GPU or flip them.

Quote:

But isn't a blitter still used now? On todays PC's? Hardware acceleration would be with a blitter as well, right?

It could be called as a blitter but Amiga blitter is very basic compared to GPUs from today and yesteryear.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@resle

Quote:

So what's an Amiga at this point?

The problem with such as question is that people will have different opinions about what an Amiga is. But here I prefer to stick the the facts.

Quote:

So what's an Amiga at this point? 1) "Amiga Hardware, whatever os you run on it" I find difficult to imagine a box running, say, UBUNTU - and calling it an Amiga also if the underlying hardware is an A1 or even a true Amiga 2000-3000-4000.

By that description anything could be Amiga hardware. At first I thought you were saying, an Amiga that could run Unix, or Linux such as the APUS. An Amiga should in theory run Ubuntu, but a box running Ubuntu isn't an Amiga just because both could do it.

Quote:

2) "Any machine running an Amiga Os" Sounds more reasonable, but an OS is still just an OS. Think of Apple: macs are now standard PCs running MacOsX. And then, which one of the many? Aros? MorphOs? AmigaOs 4 because it's a bit more "official" in some way? Then if AmigaOs is ever ported to the X86 platform, any pc out there could be an Amiga, or not?

I could run MacOS on my Amiga A1200. Does that make it Mac? I could run Windows [95 DOS only] on my Amiga under PC-Task. Does that make it a PC? ? It's no on both counts. That would be a terrible PC! But a nice classic Mac.

But, regarding modern hardware, a song comes to mind here: " Even better than the real thing."

Quote:

3) "An Amiga Os on Amiga Hardware" Welcome to a mess of possibilities, with hardware X not properly supporting MorphOs but playing nice with AmigaOs, or AroS refusing to run on hardware Y and possibly installing on X but with a few limitations, etc. etc. I can't get any Amiga feeling from this.

Well take away MorphOS and AROS and what do you have? I think this is getting closest to the answer.

Quote:

So I really need to know from you: what's an amiga?

I can tell you what an Amiga is. It was a machine that rose up out of the 80's computer revolution lead by Jay Miner and his team of developers, with a 16-bit CPU, amazing graphic sound chipset and a multitasking operating system. It was called the Amiga. It was released by Commodore and went through several hardware and software updates. But it ended in the mid-90's.

The Amiga was supported further by various expansions cards and software attempting to keep the dream alive. But that's where ends. This is the Amiga. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, what do we have now? Everything we have now is little more than inspired at best. The last hope to keep going what was lost but should have been regarded as greater.

AROS tries to recreate AmigaOS by running directly on cheap (and fast) PC hardware. Certainly what would have been an abomination back in the Amiga's day. (The fact it can run on an old PC perhaps is an insult to the Amiga!)

MOS tried to port the OS on a newer and faster CPU that also was on an Amiga expansion card. Then was fully realised in the Pegasos computer.

UAE just emulates the Amiga like any other emulator does creating a software-machine.

But, people didn't want it to end, there was this wonderful hardware and OS that people wanted to keep alive. The OS had some updates, unusual to the original. Eventually the hardware was left too late. And so machines like the AmigaOne came along (ten years later ) that attempted to keep the dream alive and the only part of the Amiga left that we could do something with--the OS. Since the original hardware didn't seem so special anymore it was left up to the Amiga interface to the user. So AmigaOS was ported to a newer PowerPC processor, also chosen from the history of past Amiga expansions.

Is the AmigaOne an Amiga? No. I don't think so. It's nothing like a real Amiga! It's just a machine that tries to keep the dream alive, by somehow running natively a port of the original AmigaOS source code, to it's target CPU. So what is it then? It's an AmigaOne. All the hardware has in common with the Amiga is in name only. It just shares a major part of it's name with the Amiga. First five letters. And it's name has it's own twisted history.

These are the facts as I see it. Some may disagree. There is also another "Amiga" I have missed. The spirit and community that the Amiga machine generated. For example, I am typing this on a Mac (yeah that's another question ), but I am on an Amiga forum. I wouldn't bother to spend time on a Mac forum. I don't see a reason, unless I really have too. But, I enjoy Amiga forums. Even if people there don't use an Amiga anymore, or like me use certain machines to keep the dream alive, that Amiga spirit keeps them interested and wanting to see what's happening. And talk about it!

It is also the first place I would ask about alien PC and Mac subjects. Since they are in our "Amiga" lives now. Perhaps there are more logical places to ask, but to me the PC world is still a cold place, and I'm just as lost in Mac space. But Amiga people, that's my kind of people!

@DBAlex

Regarding AROS:
Quote:

although if they had given the Trace/JIT code away then I suppose that would invalidate MorphOS commercially...

No, it just wouldn't run on an AROS PC! I think most users would want that on x86.

Do many want a PPC optimised 68k-JIT for AROS on PowerPC?

@BigBentheAussie

Quote:

Love it or loave it we're on PPC now.....and I am sure there a plenty of existing (missed) opportunities there.

We've been on PPC since 1995 IIRC. Anyway, the Amiga now days is all about dragging the past with us.

Then again, Windows and the MacOS existed in the 1990's, so Microsoft and Apple are dragging the past into the present as well. Somehow that has become acceptable but if you want Amiga to be here as well then you get all sorts of abuse. Yeah, right.

@olegil

Quote:

The MPC5121 DIU can. It has 3D and 2D acceleration, with three 24bit display fields with alpha channel and/or chroma keying support. I seriously like that SOC

That is certainly a SOC I'd happily wear on a new AmigaOneish machine.

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

Macintosh dropped the 060 for PowerPC 601 @ 50mhz it was bit slower at emulating Mac programs but it did beat the heck out of 040 mac’s anyway, the first Power Mac series where horror because it head to emulate 680x0 MacOS7.5.x, well stuff improved whit MacOS7.6.x, and MacOS8.x, MacOS9 was pure PowerPC, but then they decided it was time to drop it too many problems, MacOSX was born.

This is what made the Mac look like a joke. It jumped processors and then had to include emulation. With OSX it jumped an OS and had to emulate classic OS in a sandbox. What a mess! And now they have jumped to another CPU which then has to have another emulator for OSX PPC apps! I take it OS9 PPC/68K isn't supported.

Windows has practically ran on the same CPU for the past 20 years! It has evolved with new instructions and motherboards but at the basic level it runs the same code. Sure there were different Windows that had support for older programs but really, how hard is it to make a legacy API just would call newer functions? Seems a lot cleaner than the brute sandbox emulation approach used on the Mac.

@itix

Quote:

Using sprites in multitasking system is difficult.

Why? The mouse pointer is a sprite.

@Hypex

Being able to move and display multiple screens with different resolution and colour depth was impressive I think. AmigaOS4 can do that (and more) but only by brute force I guess, and not if the screens have different resolution/depth.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Deniil715

Quote:

Why? The mouse pointer is a sprite.

Mouse pointer is global object controlled by the OS. Try making a WB game where you use a hardware sprite.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@itix

Quote:

Making background colour effects with copper does not work anymore in true colour display. Making sprite updates or changing viewable bitmap address is cool but not so important. You can do the same using CPU and today it would be less than 0.001% from overall CPU load.

Sure you can use the CPU but using hardware was neat way of doing it. And these days isn't using the hardware getting more popular? We have GPUs and all sorts of things these days. Look at 3d, okay 3d just uses hardware to render into a framebuffer but it is using a dedicated CPU for the job. The copper was a dedicated CPU for what it did. So the idea carries on.

Oh BTW, about using the CPU to render all lines of a screen, what do you think made UAE so slow? Yep, it had to render every line. Definitely not as neat as the original hardware. Doing it by brute force. Only now are machines really fast enough to emulate an Amiga fully working the hardware.

Quote:

If you used copper it would not be possible for hi/true colour displays and you must also somehow scale your copperlist for different screen sizes.

That was my point, for hi colours doing all the drawing is fine, as the card is faster at a 24-bit screen than a native Amiga 8-bit screen. But for a native screen mode, the copper should have been used, it would have rendered the gradient in an instant the way it should be done in the hardware.

As to scaling, well doesn't the software renderer also have to account for that? In any case you'd only have to calculate what to do from the top line to the bottom so it wouldn't be that hard IMHO.

Quote:

Guess which OS has HW accelerated gradients... :P

MorphOS?

Quote:

Not really :) You could not use sprites in WB games because sprites dont follow window and could even disappear (and have many other problems) depending on your WB setup...

So what? Who wants to play games on the Workbench anyway? No point playing a game if the WB is four colours and the sprites are 16. Most WB games were cards or asteroids. Boring!

Quote:

In custom screens they could be used in some sensible manner but I dont think anyone ever did that...

Yes they did! Which is what this was about, using sprites in multitasking. I can site MegaBall, a popular game of it's time. This also works on OS4! Does it work in MOS? Remember Drip!? Likewise. I'm sure there were others that used the OS to open a screen with sprites and use them to succession.

The OS was easier than doing it yourself if you didn't want full control. It was also easier in some ways. For instance, a copper list, the OS would calculate for you the screen start and stop. You could do a colour backdrop and just start at line 0 to the last line, no messing about, it worked it out and you attach it to the screen. Sprites, you just allocate, set images and tell it where it should appear. Done! No need to mess about putting that in a copper list. And, OS3 gave some support for double buffered screens and better dual playfield support IIRC.

Quote:

Today you can implement sprites using GPUs. Just blit piece of bitmap with alpha channel from bitmap A to bitmap B and you have sprite. No size restrictions, no colour restrictions, no performance restrictions and you can have an optional alpha blending. You can also resize sprites using GPU or flip them.

In Amiga terminology this would be called a BOB, a Blitter OBject. Similar to the old days with it similar restrictions but of course does move faster. Although the OS4 SDL library proves otherwise!

But, overlaying 2d objects automatically over another 2d screen is seen as a restriction these days, even if the hardware did it nicely. Now people want all sorts of effects and to blend the object into the screen. 3d really makes a point of this, where the objects are part of the whole image and could be overlayed on top, so in the modern era things have to be merged together as one final screen image.

Even with TV studios, 2d overlaying wouldn't be good anymore, because now days they would want all the special effects that a simple overlay will not provide.

Speaking of MorphOS, from before, remember the ABox? I was really excited at that hardware prospect. But I was disappointed when nothing became of it, and it instead ended up as the name of some sandbox within MorphOS. I had hoped the Pegasos would have included the original ABox idea. The hardware that ended up in the AmigaOne was just as exciting. The opportunity the Amiga could have been, but what a loss was the opportunity that could have been made out of the Amiga. Perhaps a greater loss.

Quote:

It could be called as a blitter but Amiga blitter is very basic compared to GPUs from today and yesteryear.

Sure, but the idea carries on. I have read about blitters in PC hardware. Who invented the term?

I have also read about VGA programming using raster interrupts and even PC tutorials talking about the PC VGA hardware as a copper! Is copper an old term? I thought only the Amiga had it? But I see it thrown around in circles, and as I just mentioned, in regards to the PC. Did the PC have a copper in the early days too?

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2008 at 02:59 PM.
Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2008 at 02:51 PM.

@Deniil715

Quote:

Being able to move and display multiple screens with different resolution and colour depth was impressive I think. AmigaOS4 can do that (and more) but only by brute force I guess, and not if the screens have different resolution/depth.

Yes, but I hear OS4.1 does it better! Closer to the copper, with hardware acceration. There was one thing I noticed about the screen dragging. When I used it my screens were barely a different resolution to eachother. I might have had DblNTSC and DblPAL, but they were similar. But, it did support different resoluions such as low res and high res and even interlaced in between and merged them alltogether.

By comparison, the OS4 way is restrictive, and nothing on the orginal. I really hate pulling a screen down and seeing blank behind. But, I wonder could a VGA chip handle a resolution change mid-screen? Can an interrupt be programed to change the screen mode and framebuffer pointer several times per refresh? Providing the same frequencies are used of course.

I suppose these days of LCD's it is becoming less of an issue, although they still do support different resolutions. I could see OS4 supporting different resolutions on screen at one again like the original Amiga, but the screens would be rendered into a master framebuffer of the highest resolution. Which is I think is how it is done now, just only a single resolution supported between dragable screens. Of course it would have to be scaled up, which the monitor should so itself. But LCD's blur the line between the two.

Simply changing the mode in the hardware and having that output it still would be the prefered way.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Sep-2008 at 03:19 PM.

@Hypex
Quote:

Sure, but the idea carries on. I have read about blitters in PC hardware. Who invented the term?

The term "blit" comes from "BLock Image Transfer". The term is quite "old". Here are some excerpts from a paper published in 1980:
Quote:

The frame buffer in main memory architecture (Figure 3.1) makes the frame buffer directly accessible to the main processor. However, it is almost always inefficient to manipulate the frame buffer with the main processor, except with processors that have special instructions for frame buffer manipulation, such as BitBlt in the Alto computer

and
Quote:

This functional frame buffer architecture performs in hardware all bit-shifting, bit-masking, and bit-manipulation usually associated with frame buffers graphics. The only remaining task for the processor (or a DMA controller) is to generate the addresses and transfer data to and from the frame buffer. Using the frame buffer function as a primitive, operations on rasters of arbitrary height and width can be implemented easily, such as RasterOP [1].

Note that they refer to the RasterOP concept and to the Alto computers from the 1970s.

@resle

Hmmm, A properly syncronised system running Amiga OS

At the moment only a Classic Amiga can do this!

So called modern systems cannot do this, eg graphics cards
can not be syncronised with other hardware or software.


No matter 86 or PPC based ( PC design ) will never fully
capture that Amiga feeling......ever, well not ever;
perhaps when they get to 100GHZ cores.......


Most game consoles can do this, perhaps Amiga OS on one of them,
they have similar hardware design and function..


Wol.

_________________
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.~Albert Einstein

@Hypex

Quote:

With OSX it jumped an OS and had to emulate classic OS in a sandbox. What a mess!

But they made it work!!!! Settlers 2 works on a iBook PPC through sandbox emulation of OS9! It works seemlessly! The game needs a patch, that's it! As I read OS4.x can play Sim City 2000 and little other 68k games. The killer ap of 68k Amiga games will NEVER work - WHLoad!!! Apple through force of will MAKE it happen, Amiga makes promises but can never keep them.

Amiga is retro! A 16/32bit computer released by Commodore that deserved better marketing and wider success.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios