@pavlor

Quote:

pavlor wrote: As we have no choice, our prefered way is "explicitly forbidden".

"Explicitly forbidden" is plain inaccurate; but go ahead, and call it whatever you like.

Hans

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@Hans

Quote:

Hans wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: See above: UAE developers will take care of the graphic cards. That's point proven then.

From here:
Goal is to include Voodoo 3 from MAME (when license is officially compatible) but it may be too complex and annoying job..

From here:
Single "modern" (or at least modernish) emulated card gets chosen that needs to fill all following criteria:

- must have at least 8M VRAM, preferably more (=full HD resolutions possible)
- must be all current "classic" hardware Amiga OS compatible (OS3, unix-likes, OS4). Does not need to be Amix compatible, it is not current enough
- must be already emulated/virtualized, must be license compatible.

Currently only one that fits is Voodoo 3. Note that speed nor hardware emulated 3D is not required!

From here:
Only update that I may do someday is to port some existing OS4 compatible PCI card emulation. Currently only existing is Voodoo 3 in MAME but it is very difficult task and it is software-only (with MAME game specific hacks that can't work very well in generic emulation).

As you can see, there's interest on integrating the Voodoo 3 emulator on WinUAE, but it's quite complicated and it will require time.

But, as the WinUAE history has showed, it'll happen. Probably Toni will do it when he has finished integrating all existing cards on WinUAE, and only the graphic ones will be left.

Toni also appreciates donations, so OS4 users have a chance to fasten this decision, opening a bounty for integrating Voodoo3 on WinUAE.
Quote:

Quote: cdimauro wrote: But at least you can release the kernel version which supports Z3 RAM as regular memory instead of using it as swap area. It seems (according to Costel) that you already have it, so why don't you release it? And even without an existing patch, it's trivial to create it for an OS4 developer, especially for the guy which worked to ExecSG. What is clear, instead, is that you do NOT want to do it... By "you" I assume that you mean Hyperion, and not me because:

Correct.
Quote:

a) I'm not in a position to make any such decision; and

Is it possible to have a clear and official statement about it from Hyperion? There's nothing technical here: just a business decision.
Quote:

b) I have zero involvement with the "classic" version of AmigaOS 4.x, and therefore have no idea if the patch you speak of actually exists.

Costel reported it, not me, but I don't know if he's reliable or not.
Quote:

Nor do I have a clue as to how easy/hard such a patch would be. Hans

As a developer I don't find difficult to imagine that there's a initialization part of the kernel that enumerates the existing peripherals, memory included. And for the memory there's should be a check for the memory type, and a decision in order to add it to the regular memory pool, or to the swap area.

So, the change should be fairly simple. Trial for a developer which has access to the sources.

Quote:

Hans wrote: P.S., I'm not actually against enabling Z3 RAM as Fast RAM for emulation (assuming that it's as trivial as what people who have never seen the code claim);

Skilled developers don't need to always see the code to make some claim, regarding some specific cases.

We aren't talking of an o.s made of 100s million lines of code: the Amiga o.s. was a very simple, tiny, and rudimentary o.s., and for that reason was also easy to disassemble and even patch (some guys are already doing it). I don't think that it has a changed much when it was ported to PowerPCs...


@pavlor

Quote:

pavlor wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Regarding PowerPC stuff, if you follow EAB, you can see that he systematically refuses to put his hands on PowerPC code, and from very long time. So, I don't think that he changes his mind. For someone with such PowerPC fobia, he did really great work!

Well, he "just" added the SUPPORT for PowerPCs, but doesn't want to touch any related code. And that's the problem (if it's a problem).

Quote:

pavlor wrote: @Birbo Quote: Did already someone ask kindly Hyperion, if that would be possible? Yes.

So, is there any official statement?

@AmigaBlitter

+1

I installed WinUAE + PPC and AmigaOS v4.1FE on my PC at work and it is entirely usable. What I really miss is a higher screen resolution...

Cheers to Toni (and anyone who contributed to WinUAE) and to the AmigaOS developers!

_________________
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Scientific Progress Goes Boing!

@cdimauro

Quote:

But at least you can release the kernel version which supports Z3 RAM as regular memory instead of using it as swap area. It seems (according to Costel) that you already have it, so why don't you release it?

@Hans

Quote:

OS4 doesn't "forbid" anything; the AmigaOS 4.x classic developers realised that the Z3 RAM in real hardware is too slow, and wisely chose to use it as swap space instead. If you were using real hardware you wouldn't consider this a limitation at all.

So much information from the betatest program... my NDA is crying
Ok, so when a signed NDA does not mean anything, so now tell us everything.
The real reason why Hyperion's can't release this kernel. It might be better if people will know the truth.

_________________

@Prober: the situation is quite simple here. Either Costel is a liar (there's no such kernel), or Hyperion do NOT want to release this (already existing) kernel.


@tygre

Quote:

tygre wrote: @AmigaBlitter +1 I installed WinUAE + PPC and AmigaOS v4.1FE on my PC at work and it is entirely usable. What I really miss is a higher screen resolution... Cheers to Toni (and anyone who contributed to WinUAE) and to the AmigaOS developers!

I see a lot of interest on having a better support for graphic cards on WinUAE/OS4, but no OS4 user acts on having it.

Why don't you open a bounty to let Toni integrate the Voodoo 3 emulation? It'll solve at least this problem, since Hyperion is refusing to give any support to the emulation.

@pavlor

Quote:

pavlor wrote: @Hans Quote: Has anyone actually tried using Z3 RAM as swap under WinUAE? While not ideal, a PC's RAM bandwidth is many times that of even the fastest RAM classic hardware let alone the bandwidth of actual Z3 RAM modules. I'd expect any paging to still be faster than on a real machine. SWAP is as fast as Fast RAM, of course... Problem is swap doesn´t work reliably in OS4 (at least in WinUAE).

Exactly. Swap doesn't really work. I was so happy to get swap on my A1-XE, but it turned out to be less than useful. I just churned on the disk a while, then locked up. Always. I even wrote a small test program to prove it doesn't work. Not sure if they ever got to fix it, since I now have an X1000.
Thread here.

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> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

Although I mentioned Hyperion probably won't support Winuae, one of hyperion members at AmigaUK30th did mention to me that there is a work around they have for the memory limit.

This must patch you guys have mentioned.

Last edited by TheAMIgaOne on 30-Oct-2015 at 09:40 AM.

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@cdimauro

Quote:

the situation is quite simple here. Either Costel is a liar (there's no such kernel), or Hyperion do NOT want to release this (already existing) kernel.

No, the situation is a bit more complicated.

_________________

@cdimauro

Quote:

also easy to disassemble and even patch (some guys are already doing it).

? Who?

_________________
retired

Hello
>integrating the Voodoo 3 emulator on WinUAE
I dont see the point of WinUAE emulating all the hardware that exists : I think that having something like uaegfx or Wazp3D (that wrap 68k to x86 driver) will be better/simpler

>Isn't Amiga supposed to have "AutoConfig"? Doesn't that mean that one could simply insert any virtual card (like a memory bank), have the Amiga ROM AutoConfigure it into a suitable memory space and have the bootstrap map it to the list of RAM available in the machine?

It dont happen :Just add some Z3 memory in winuae-os4 and you will see that autoconfig didnt mounted it (ShowConfig)

I have made a small program to add this Z3 memory "the os3 way" but it is not enough = you can see the memory in showconfig (and access manually) but the the OS4
1) dont see it (I mean not added to OS4 memory list + mmu stuff inits)
or
2)dont use it (i mean something like allocmen is written the way to not use it)
I have no advice on what happen...

Certainly the simpler (huuu :-/) method would be to disassemble cyberstorm.rom and modify the cyberstorm ram size that is (certainly?) written inside
So there will have (say) 512 MB in the cyberstorm so OS4 classic unchanged will still only use the cyberstorm ram ....but bigger


Alain Thellier

Last edited by thellier on 30-Oct-2015 at 06:12 PM.

@thread

Dolphin emulator runs 1080 games. Does Dolphin emulate some kind of video card?

_________________
retired

@Deniil715

Quote:

Deniil715 wrote: @pavlor Quote: pavlor wrote: SWAP is as fast as Fast RAM, of course... Problem is swap doesn´t work reliably in OS4 (at least in WinUAE). Exactly. Swap doesn't really work. I was so happy to get swap on my A1-XE, but it turned out to be less than useful. I just churned on the disk a while, then locked up. Always. I even wrote a small test program to prove it doesn't work. Not sure if they ever got to fix it, since I now have an X1000. Thread here.

Well, it seems a bug. And bugs can be fixed.


@Prober

Quote:

Prober wrote: @cdimauro Quote: the situation is quite simple here. Either Costel is a liar (there's no such kernel), or Hyperion do NOT want to release this (already existing) kernel. No, the situation is a bit more complicated.

Can you better clarify? Thanks.


@AmigaBlitter

Quote:

AmigaBlitter wrote: @cdimauro Quote: also easy to disassemble and even patch (some guys are already doing it). ? Who?

There's a know guy, which has "Cosmo" as nickname. You can find some information in his blog.

But you can find a lot of people involved in the Amiga o.s. reverse engineering and resource. Take a look here, for example.

Last but not least, here you can find the entire Amiga Exec 1.2 disassembled and commented, and on the main page of the site you can find more.


@thellier

Quote:

thellier wrote: Hello >integrating the Voodoo 3 emulator on WinUAE I dont see the point of WinUAE emulating all the hardware that exists : I think that having something like uaegfx or Wazp3D (that wrap 68k to x86 driver) will be better/simpler

But it may require much more work compared to the Voodoo 3 "transplant" from MAME to WinUAE.

I fully agree that the solution that you've suggested will be much better (I've also read your comment on AROS-Exec about a similar topic), because then it'll be easier to accelerate the 3D API calls to the host graphic subsystem, which gives a HUGE performance boost. But considering the very long development time in the post-Amiga land, maybe I'll see something like that when I'm retired...

Quote:

Certainly the simpler (huuu :-/) method would be to disassemble cyberstorm.rom and modify the cyberstorm ram size that is (certainly?) written inside So there will have (say) 512 MB in the cyberstorm so OS4 classic unchanged will still only use the cyberstorm ram ....but bigger Alain Thellier

I don't know if only changing that value will do the magic. It might be possible, but, considering the stagnant situation, it's worth a try.

Maybe the value can be found by dumping some information inside OS4 regarding the Cyberstorm memory, and using it as a reference for subsequent searches of such data inside the ROM. I don't know if it's mapped using the PCI protocol, but in this case it should be easier to dump those data.

@cdimauro

Quote:

Maybe the value can be found by dumping some information inside OS4 regarding the Cyberstorm memory, and using it as a reference for subsequent searches of such data inside the ROM. I don't know if it's mapped using the PCI protocol, but in this case it should be easier to dump those data.

It's possible that could work. When you save NVRAM settings from the Cyber menu UAE writes it to the ROM file. I don't know if the ROM file is split into nibbles like expansion.library dealt with or direct binary data but ti should be possible to modify the ROM code to report more RAM.

in any case one could ask why to stuff around trying to emulate OS4 on an Amiga emulator anyway with all that overhead? It makes sense to instead emulate a machine like the AmigaOne. So why hasn't this been done yet? Has anyone tried to emulate an AmigaOne?

It's a lot simpler to emulate an AmigaOne than an Amiga. All you need is a PPC emulator, that can run UBoot aa firmware and simulate some common PC hardware.

A Teron CX/PX emulator will do the trick. Pegasos emulator even

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Maybe the value can be found by dumping some information inside OS4 regarding the Cyberstorm memory, and using it as a reference for subsequent searches of such data inside the ROM. I don't know if it's mapped using the PCI protocol, but in this case it should be easier to dump those data. It's possible that could work. When you save NVRAM settings from the Cyber menu UAE writes it to the ROM file.

I don't think that the NVRAM settings have to do something with the on-board memory.
Quote:

I don't know if the ROM file is split into nibbles like expansion.library dealt with or direct binary data but ti should be possible to modify the ROM code to report more RAM.

Yes. Whatever is, with the PCI or Zorro protocol, it should be possible to dump such data, take a look at the ROM to locate it, and then... patch the ROM file.
Quote:

in any case one could ask why to stuff around trying to emulate OS4 on an Amiga emulator anyway with all that overhead?

Because currently it's the only solution.
Quote:

It makes sense to instead emulate a machine like the AmigaOne. So why hasn't this been done yet? Has anyone tried to emulate an AmigaOne? It's a lot simpler to emulate an AmigaOne than an Amiga. All you need is a PPC emulator, that can run UBoot aa firmware and simulate some common PC hardware. A Teron CX/PX emulator will do the trick. Pegasos emulator even

In theory, yes. In practice, you have to take QEMU, play around with it looking at a possible configuration match, and maybe you also need to change it. It's an effort that a "kernel guy" (of the targeted o.s.: OS4 or MorphOS) can do way much, much easier than another developer, even if he's a skilled one.

In short: someone like bigfoot , which already experimented with QEMU. If he creates a configuration and/or patch for QEMU which is able to emulate a Pegasos II, you'll have both OS4 and MorphOS running without any additional Amiga hardware layer.

@all
where can I get a copy of the cyberstormppc.rom file?

Am looking forward to some AOS4.1 laptop goodness

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@1Mouse

Please have have a look here.

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Anyone knows more info about dolphin's graphic card emulation?

_________________
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@cdimauro

Quote:

I don't think that the NVRAM settings have to do something with the on-board memory.

No but it writes to it which means it should be in a direct format. I just looked at a hex dump of the ROM file and it is.

Quote:

Yes. Whatever is, with the PCI or Zorro protocol, it should be possible to dump such data, take a look at the ROM to locate it, and then... patch the ROM file.

It's fairly large. Could take a while to disassemble. Don't know if it has checksum. But yes doable it looks.

Quote:

Because currently it's the only solution.

And only recently. And only by locating all the right files. But we've had years for people to put together an AmigaOne emulator.

Quote:

In theory, yes. In practice, you have to take QEMU, play around with it looking at a possible configuration match, and maybe you also need to change it.

That would be one way to start. There is also PearPC. Don't know of anything else.

@Prober

Quote:

Prober wrote: @Hans Quote: OS4 doesn't "forbid" anything; the AmigaOS 4.x classic developers realised that the Z3 RAM in real hardware is too slow, and wisely chose to use it as swap space instead. If you were using real hardware you wouldn't consider this a limitation at all. So much information from the betatest program... my NDA is crying Ok, so when a signed NDA does not mean anything, so now tell us everything. The real reason why Hyperion's can't release this kernel. It might be better if people will know the truth.

Ummm, no. All of what I said is based on publicly available information. You could piece together the same info with a quick search on Google.

Hans

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@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @cdimauro Quote: I don't think that the NVRAM settings have to do something with the on-board memory. No but it writes to it which means it should be in a direct format. I just looked at a hex dump of the ROM file and it is.

What can help is the possibility to set a different size for the memory, to see if the ROM file is changed as well.
Quote:

Quote: Yes. Whatever is, with the PCI or Zorro protocol, it should be possible to dump such data, take a look at the ROM to locate it, and then... patch the ROM file. It's fairly large. Could take a while to disassemble. Don't know if it has checksum. But yes doable it looks.

You need to disassembly nothing. My idea is to seek just for the data which comes from Zorro or PCI dump.

In short, the board should keep inside the ROM file the data which are read by OS4 to configure the exposed resources. If you can dump such data with a tiny OS4 program that scans the Zorro or PCI boards mapped on the system, then you can scan the ROM file looking at exactly those data, because the board simply passes such structures to the o.s..
Quote:

Quote: In theory, yes. In practice, you have to take QEMU, play around with it looking at a possible configuration match, and maybe you also need to change it. That would be one way to start. There is also PearPC. Don't know of anything else.

Toni tried with PearPC, but it didn't worked well, so he resorted to QEMU, which is much more versatile and supported. So, this is the way to follow.