@Hypex

Sure, but with anything Amiga those have to be substracted from the 2GB addressspace !!

The issue here is that some OS-functions return LONG instead of ULONG for addresses, signaling errors with negative values (and therefore only allowing 31bit for valid addresses).

_________________
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@cdimauro

Quote:

That's YOUR definition. For a more precise answer, take a look at the PowerPC emulator thread.

I have to agree with BigD here that an AmigaOne is an "NG Amiga" for all intensive purposes but see my points below.

Quote:

They are putting money in a something which is NOT an Amiga

I agree it's not an Amiga, but it isn't called an Amiga, it's called an AmigaOne.

This is Ctrl-ALt-F1 and Alt-F1 all over again. People can't you see the difference?!

Yes the "AmigaOne" doesn't have a Kickstart, doesn't have anything Amiga about it until Kickstart loads and doesn't accept keyboards with real Amiga keys on them. It doesn't have a copper, blitter or Paula. Nor a 68K CPU. And the CPU it does have has more in common with the copper than a 68K CPU. It doesn't have an Amiga firmware we could call AmigaWare, KickWare or AmigaStart. You should see the critical review I gave on the AmigaOne when it first came out. I should publish that online. Funny to look at being in retrospect now.

But it did come out. It made it out and it's what we got. This makes all the difference. Sure, there was too much time in between Amiga and AmigaOne to bridge the gap and for the NG AmigaOne to be any kind of real Amiga. But's that how it went. And that's how it goes. I've had to accept this as much as I've had to accept the PC as a matter of fact. Even if I don't like it. It's not the perfect thing but what is? Look at Apple when they gave up on the Mac and now sell expensive PCs in place and what disputes there were back then about the new "iMac" not being a real Mac. Pity Apple had to stop making real Mac hardware but that's how it goes.

What's that line in Indy3? "You lost today kid, but that doesn't mean you have to like it."

Loosing, no one likes that!

Quote:

Only SOME machines are called "AmigaOne". And that's the point.

Actually I dispute this. The only AmigaOne machines I accept are the SE,XE and µA1 series with G3 or G4 CPU. They others are not IMO AmigaOne macihnes. Thoughy they may use UBoot, the version is too different and lacks features as well as the CPU being different and trying to boot an "AmigaOne" CD on a modern "AmigaOne" machine will crash.

AmigaOne X500 is confusing, it's a Sam460. AmigaOne X1000, nice try but not in my book, nothing like the AmigaOne I'm using right now apart from the OS.

Once when you said "AmigaOne" people knew what you meant. Now it's all gone bloody confusing and "AmigaOne" has become almost meaningless because you can't use the term any more to describe an exact model or series. Good effort!

Not.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Feb-2014 at 02:41 PM.

@Hypex

Quote:

Kind of like a MOVEQ? Yes it would be shorter that way. But I was thinking of a full 64-bit integer.

You rarely need full 64-bit constants where upper 32-bits are not all zeros or ones. Cdimauro's analysis suggests about 80% constants are in 16-bit range (if I read article right).

Quote:

Quote: It only works if you have base address loaded for easy relative addressing but reduced code size would compensate greater data size. Yes, a a base would be used off, since PPC must work that way. That's how I was thinking.

I think there could be another option. With isolated address space you could compile executables to fixed address which is in 32-bit addressing range. In theory, at least.

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@Hypex

Quote:

AmigaOne X500 is confusing, it's a Sam460. AmigaOne X1000, nice try but not in my book, nothing like the AmigaOne I'm using right now apart from the OS.

A bit harsh since the build quality and reliability of the ACube and A-EON products seem to be way ahead of the Eyetech Teron boards. If it runs AmigaOS and looks like an Amiga (the X1000 case is awesome as is the B52 song reference on the motherboard as per Classic Amigas) then guess what? I recon they're Amigas

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@AmigaBlitter

Quote:

An old amiga user have built custom rendering engine (Real time ray-tracing) with 4 virtex 5.

Who and where ?

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@Hypex

Quote:

It doesn't have a copper, blitter or Paula.

So? Those are so 20 years ago.

Quote:

Now it's all gone bloody confusing and "AmigaOne" has become almost meaningless because you can't use the term any more to describe an exact model or series. Good effort!

Yes and the term Amiga didn't describe a specific model either.

_________________

@BigD

I agree.

The installation CD, issue was all down to AmigaKit not supplying a CD whit correct drivers on it. Can't understand how one can blame it on the hardware.

I did not like that chose to continue whit AmigaONE brand, because Eyetech made so many huge mistakes whit there hardware, using the same brand name.

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@pavlor

>> Most likely, if all A600 machines would have been "HD" versions, it might have changed something.
>1992 was too late.

Not sure about that. I had A2000 with HDD and 2M FAST since 1989.
And in 1992 I do not remember any major thing that I was unable to do vs PCs.
HDD enable user to see what 32bit AOS can do.

>>AAA was in prototype/testing in y1993/1994.
>Even then, it would be too little, too late. Much cheaper SVGA chips would offer better performance.

Better performace for some stuff yes.
But AGA already enable better video playback and higher resolution near-true-color graphics.
(do not know exact reasons, but I was able to view .jpg images (fast) on my A4000 while my friends WinNT systems were not able to open them)

In 1997/98 I got CV64-3D “just” to get flixer free resolutions with affordable monitors.

(never seen any need for 16bit audio, as my A4000 has had so high guality Paula standard, I never had PC audio with as little “noice” in the background)

>>So it's for Amigas that did not have AGA.
>Or for users who need 800x600 70 Hz 256 colours display.

Reminded me how much worse 256colors out of 262144 look when compared to 256 out of 24bit.
(not to mention 1440x780xHAM8 out of 24bit)

+interesting also how people later found ways to do fast 3D also with planar chipsets… too late for DOOM & wing commander etc.

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@KimmoK

Better performance for some stuff yes.

Quote:

But AGA already enable better video playback and higher resolution near-true-color graphics.

You most remember wrong, the 68020,68040 was too slow to play back video, even play back whit 604e using frogger was slow.

Quote:

(do not know exact reasons, but I was able to view .jpg images (fast) on my A4000 while my friends WinNT systems were not able to open them)

Just because the file has .jpg extension, does not mean it is a jpg file format in the file, it might have been a IFF file whit wrong name.

Quote:

(never seen any need for 16bit audio, as my A4000 has had so high guality Paula standard, I never had PC audio with as little “noice” in the background)

Maybe in the early days, anyway big difference between low quality sound cards and good quality one, but now days there is big difference, one thing you notice is that get clearer sound, more treble on good PC sound card, then on Paula audio.

Quote:

+interesting also how people later found ways to do fast 3D also with planar chipsets… too late for DOOM & wing commander etc.

Yes in the early days they did like 4x4 pixels in 320x200, later they manged to do 1x1 pixels on 320x200, well yes it looked better, but its low resolution compared to PC's.

DbPAL, DbNTSC no one used this modes because they where so slowwww, and interlaced modes gave you a headache.

Chip memory was so slow that there existed a lot patches to use Fast memory instead of Chip Memory like Fblit.

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@KimmoK

If anyone comes back on track to a useful discussion, PM me

_________________
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@NutsAboutAmiga

>You most remember wrong, the 68020,68040 was too slow to play back video, even play back whit 604e using frogger was slow.

In 1991 (Amicon91 event in sweden) A3000(030/25) was able to playback fullscreen video (25fps)+16bit audio with SCSI drive + sound card and DCTV (to get 4million colors on screen). (I filmed it with my camcorder but I've lost the tape)
When A4000(040/25) was introduced in finland (I was present) it could run full screen video.
(I do not remember what HDD interface it used, perhaps not standard IDE... btw. at the same happening Meskanen from Realsoft demoed how much faster 040/25 is in rendering than a standard 486 PC.)
A little later a friend demoed full screen video playback on A1200/030/50 with SCSi HDD.

I personally did a lot of anim/video things where I used full screen playback (from RAM).

Normal PCs could play 256colors at 15fps and not full screen.
Typical Macintosh based multimedia kiosk system in y1997 could not yet play full screen video.

>Just because the file has .jpg extension, does not mean it is a jpg file format in the file, it might have been a IFF file whit wrong name.

That was not the case. Same files opened on x86 systems just fine a few years later.
IIRC, the reason was that WinNT PC with some 16MB RAM could not open the file, but my A4000 converted the file to HAM8 and it worked just fine. (also I was able to edit the file when using QMEM or ImageFX)
So, if it was not because "only Amiga could do it", it was because I just had better picture manipulation SW on Amiga.

>big difference between low quality sound cards

Yes. Standard paula beat every standard PC soundcard that I've had in the nineties.
And same for every standard audio of motherboards... (Amiga designs have sound chips better shielded or isolated from interference or something) Today they seem to sell external audio for PCs to get better quality.

>later they manged to do 1x1 pixels on 320x200, well yes it looked better, but its low resolution compared to PC's.

In mid nineties also PC game graphics was in low resolution.
Anyway. chunky graphics mode should have been available via AGA.

btw. for example the Lambda sector game (unfinished) was about equally fast on my system via AGA as via Cybervision. (partly because of the poor performance of the CV?, anyway, perfectly payable)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twM-NEbluS8

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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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@KimmoK

Full screen video in 320x200 lowers, well yes I know, but PC's where running video in 640x480 at the same time, in most adventure games from CD whit Audio tracks.

IFF animations are low compression, not CPU intensive, it can't be compared whit AVI or MPEG video format.

Define low resolution 640x480x256 was pretty standard on PC, on Amiga most of the games where running 320x200x64 colors to save memory and because 256 colors planar was so slow.

An other problem was low refresh rate on Amiga 31Khz, not able to use standard PC monitors, flicking screens, requiring users to buy flicker fixers and scan doubles to aid the problem.

Later 1997-1999 PC games started to come whit 800x600 as standard.

Quote:

or example the Lambda sector game (unfinished) was about equally fast on my system via AGA as via Cybervision.

Common its running on a 68060, and the AGA rendering if you look closely you see that its not rendering all the horizontal lines at once, they are rendering every odd line and in the next frame every even lines, besides this is from 1998 many years after Commodore was dead.

How many good 3d games are there for Amiga? Not many, only people whit special talent where able to ever make some thing amazing on AGA.

Besides it 8bit CLUT, pc games where in 16bit or 32bit, I'm not saying it looks bad, but not amazing.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

"besides this is from 1998 many years after Commodore was dead"

Yes. I originally said that too bad that developers so late learned to do faster 3D on AGA HW.

(I did not play PC games in mid 90's ... at some point I had some 486/80 setup but got fedup with dealing with 640k limitations and with a GravisUltrasound that worked only via Win95, not with 90% of games...)

Staying offtopic.... in 1999 or so I bought Duron~600Mhz system for my wife's x86 needs ... insane how good graphics PCI Voodoo3 could do! Far better than PS2, just as an example. So... if comodore had not died ... and we had 3D games releases .... 060+Voodoo3 would have been ok games HW.
(RIP CBM, RIP Duron)


UPDATE: had to check that I remembered correctly...
SVGA caliber games started to appear in 1995, after CBM died.
So VGA and 320x200 256c/262144palette was maximum used in games untill then.

Last edited by KimmoK on 10-Feb-2014 at 11:45 AM.
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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

If commodore where going to make Amiga5000 it probable end up whit standard PC graphic cards, AGA killed Amiga, PC and Mac went the way of true color, and ended up a graphic card that did 640x480 a good speed whit we Amigans ended up whit AGA (320x200 NTSC / 320x250 PAL) at HAM8 or 8Bit, what is HAM8 anyway a hack, that makes the colors look blurry, maybe I'm heartless wanting to trow out AGA, who knows what might have been if Apple stayed whit 680x0 instead of going PowerPC, but the problem whit that CPU's where getting HOT.

At the time I don't recall true colour being the standard for quite some time. Especially with games I saw a lot of 256 CLUT screen modes.

But I did see AGA deliver a crisper colour experience. I think it was the right move, just a little too late. But I also think it was nade too complicated. They focused too much on building it on top of ECS. I think they should have left the ECS registers as is and just put some new ones in for a 24-bit palette. As well as instead of having fixed palette registers have a palette pointer instead. This would have simpllfied the bank switching mess they made trying to fit 256x 25-bit registers into a 32x 12-bit space!

It also would have enabled things like a simple copper list to produce a true colour screen. Imagine that! Sure it would have wasted chip ram but it would have been awesome! HAM8 wouldn't have been needed. But HAM/8 is a hardware thing. So do you mean it's a hardware hack? It just modified RGB values across screen.

Of course I also think the blitter should have been sped up and a warp mode added for scaling and 3d effects. I also think a variable pixel width should have been added. So a 1-bitplane screen could be opened with 8-bit pixel width and there you have 8-bit chunky.

OF course but late for me to think up these ideas now.

I also think the expansion of dualplayfields to 8-bitplanes was too far behind. Dual playfields on AGA was two 16-colour screens. Low palattte! Even with copper help.

Case in point. Everybody used to day the Amiga hardware was made for 2d parallex scrolling effects. But one day I saw Worms on the PC. I was shocked. It made the Amiga version look bad! When the game screen came on it had this cool scaling effect. And the different playfields and scrolling were there as well. So that goes to proove that doing things in software without hardware parallax and sprites can be done if not better in some cases. And so how things went.

Quote:

ts a real shame that they did not include any PCI slots in Amiga4000 / 3000 computers back in the day,

What was wrong with the ISA slots? Didn't Commodore stick them on? ISA was the PCI of the day.

@pavlor

Quote:

Even then, it would be too little, too late. Much cheaper SVGA chips would offer better performance.

It would have been better than the AGA we were left with. But I don't think replacing AGA with VGA was the way to go. A VGA mode yes, but not wthout the Amiga graphic chipset. It would have been a step back even with chunky if there was no copper to modify registers in realtime. Raster interrupts woud have been a poor substitute with only 256 colours on screen. And IIRC early VGA had limited 18-bit palette. Not 24-bit anyway.

@Hypex

Quote:

But I did see AGA deliver a crisper colour experience

I think that depended more on the Monitor / TV, TV's the colour where total blur, too new multi monitor and you notice the scan lines and darkness in between, Commodore 1084s, and colors and shapes is ok for video out signal.

Quote:

I think they should have left the ECS registers as is and just put some new ones in for a 24-bit palette

A pallette for anything above 8bit does not make lot of sense, well maybe if there was a 9bit mode, but,

the size of 24bit pellate is 2^24 * 3 = 48 MB ram you need just hold the pellate that is basically the same number of colors per pixel, when you also realize how expensive RAM was back then. Most graphic card did not have more the 4/8MB of RAM.

the problem was the planar mode, in general, it does make sens to split etch 8 bits from a color into 8 individual bytes, its huge wast of CPU resources to have to do Colour to Planar when you draw a pixels and C2P to convert normal graphics into some thing displayable, if they only made 8bit mode into chunky one, then I think 8bit speed might have made huge difference.

But it is just minor tweak, compared to graphic cards of 1993, you need 24/16/15 bit mode to really be able to deliver the same picture quality.

Quote:

blitter should have been sped up and a warp mode added for scaling and 3d effects

I do not think there was any thing called hardware 3D back then, well maybe there was in some weird arcade machine, but do not think PC's did have hardware 3d back in 1993.

Quote:

I also think the expansion of dualplayfields to 8-bitplanes was too far behind. Dual playfields on AGA was two 16-colour screens. Low palattte! Even with copper help.

Well dualplayfields are just 2 x 4 bitplanes, on other words its basically the same as a 8bit mode, but colors where divided between to pictures, 8bit was max AGA was able to handel.

Quote:

Case in point. Everybody used to day the Amiga hardware was made for 2d parallex scrolling effects. But one day I saw Worms on the PC. I was shocked. It made the Amiga version look bad!

Yes I know, its just one example of many, PC graphics made up for all Amiga tricks in speed, anyway if we wanted to do parallex effect on PC, you might simply OR Two picture into ONE, and setup the 8bit palette so it does not look bad.

Quote:

What was wrong with the ISA slots?

He he, ISA was a simple slot, originally it was simple 8bit bus, latter there was 16bit version.
And then come EISA that is the only thing that makes sens if you have a 32bit CPU (at the time).

PCI came in 1993, so it was too new for a 1992 Amiga4000, my point really is that Amiga was not the best hardware at the time, actually it was not able to compete in speed and picture quality in 1993/1994.

There was one thing that AGA did better, and that was the Vsync, i think it was way more common to see tearing, this when the picture is not fully drawn before its displayed, if display a video fast movement whit out Vsync you need higher frame rate, not notice the problem.

And lets get back to the point I'm happy AmigaONE is not based on the less successful designs of Amiga from 1992 to 1994.

And PowerPC is what AmigaOS 4 uses so that what we have to accept.

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@Hypex

Quote:

It would have been a step back even with chunky if there was no copper to modify registers in realtime.

Amiga emulator fellow for MSDOS (or WinUAE) can do all the Amiga effects on modern Graphic card, and it does it pretty well, you hardly notice its software emulated, and its not even done in the most effective way on the PC, as there are way more efficient ways to do it.

Again graphic speed on the PC makes up for any hardware feature Amiga did have back then.

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@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: I only read it, I am not a low-level chip designer like some in the community (working for big companies in this area) so I cannot judge it technical.

Non of the free 68k Cores I have seen was able to beat a 68030 with 25MHz, this might change in near future but as long as you can get a 68EC030 cheaper than the FPGA it will not be much help.

Quote:

They think it is possible.

I saw a lot comments of those working for big companies (none as a chip designer) on the Natami forum and many of them had less clue than I had.

Maybe my knowledge is outdated, but I had not seen the FPGAs specced in 'MHz' values, it was something like time per gate and you need more than one gate in a line for the representation of a CPU register. I mentioned that in the Natami forum and was harshly corrected by people explaining me that the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) doesn't have Gates.

Until today all working cores for an Amiga in a FPGA are based on Dennis van Weeren's work, they are all Minimigs (even if the hardware is called differently) AFAIK it was based on the UAE simulation of the Amiga chip set.

So much for those people babbling about their chip design knowledge.

_________________
AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@NutsAboutAmiga

Some HW 3D systems from y1992: http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/virtuality.html



" it was not able to compete in speed and picture quality in 1993/1994."

AGA was able to compete in video effects speed untill late 90's. Especially when you take the cost of it in consideration. And 1440x780 HAM8 was far superior in quality vs standard SVGA.

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@olegil

Yep, "to derail" is a known verb, but I never heard of "to rerail".

OldFart

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