@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: Geekbench 5's heavy AES workloads are useless for gaming and it's useless for Amiga 68K.

Geekbench is pure trash: don't use it.

Better to use real world applications.

one and only thing from orginal hardware that classic amiga still have to have is cpu working in 32 bit big endian mode.
which means no x86, no arm, no risc-v.

chipset is not important.
In 256 or thousands colors on amiga from commodore graphics is made as on pc from that time everything by cpu.
chipset has no support to 256 or thousands colors modes.
It only display them and work as dumb framebuffer.

68k may be changed to anything. software for amiga is made mostly in c/c++

Quote:

one and only thing from orginal hardware that classic amiga still have to have is cpu working in 32 bit big endian mode. which means no x86, no arm, no risc-v. chipset is not important. In 256 or thousands colors on amiga from commodore graphics is made as on pc from that time everything by cpu. chipset has no support to 256 or thousands colors modes. It only display them and work as dumb framebuffer. 68k may be changed to anything. software for amiga is made mostly in c/c++

You know the difference between a broken clock and ppcamiga1?
A broken clock is right twice a day...

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@ppcamiga1

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: one and only thing from orginal hardware that classic amiga still have to have is cpu working in 32 bit big endian mode. which means no x86, no arm, no risc-v.

As your regular opening gambit, we'll just yawn dismissively and move on to the more amusing stuff.

Quote:

chipset has no support to 256 or thousands colors modes.

This is daft, even by your standards. AGA supports 256-colour CLUT, 4096 and 262144-colour HAM modes. I realise that numbers larger than the number of fingers and toes you have are tricky, so let me help you by saying 256 is, well, 256, 4096 is "thousands" and 261244 is "hundreds of thousands". If you set your palette per scanline correctly for HAM8, you can exceed that.

Quote:

It only display them and work as dumb framebuffer.

So wait, which is it? No support for these, or the ability to display them? Don't forget that it can also blit and draw on them just like any other mode. Sure it's slow and not suited for realtime applciations, but to say it's a dumb framebuffer is incorrect.

Last edited by Karlos on 11-Dec-2023 at 06:17 PM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @agami You omitted the following: [List]

I didn't omit anything: I wasn't the one making a comparison.

Quote:

matthey wrote: @agami Hammer makes a good point though.

I never said that he didn't.

@Hammer, @matthey

I agree that AMD's APUs are going from strength to strength. I love their APUs. I have been using them since the original A series on the FM1 socket. I even went as far to get their non-retail Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G via AliExpress.
I vehemently agree with their strategy of integrating graphics cores with general compute cores in a single die/package. And it would seem that the strategy is paying off.

While an APU-based system in mATX or ITX form-factor represents a much more upgradable platform with good performance per Watt characteristics, this approach will not appeal to a vast majority of of the Raspberry Pi demographic. Mostly because of size, and overall power draw.
There's a hoard of scenarios where only the very small form-factor and 10W or less of the R Pi platform will do.

The Pi 5 at the upper end with 8GB of RAM lives in the crossover portion of the Venn diagram of these two approaches. Everything outside of that section is why these two approaches exist.

P.S. I found it a little disingenuous to use the Ryzen 3 2200G in the comparison because it is several generations behind, and is no longer available in retail channels. But the point made is still a salient one.

_________________
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@pixie

Quote:

pixie wrote: You know the difference between a broken clock and ppcamiga1? A broken clock is right twice a day...

Buuuuuurrrn!!!

Last edited by agami on 12-Dec-2023 at 01:21 AM.

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All the way, with 68k

@Bosanac

Quote:

An Amiga is whatever the owners of the Amiga trademark say it is. That’s it.

Unfortunately the Amiga never had any proper owners after Commodore. Even they were better to who owned it after. PC companies like Acer don't produce very good Amigas for the next generation.

Quote:

edit:

Ha. Where's the Plus/4 port? The guy who wrote a magazine article about how exciting it would be to run CP/M on a Plus/4 would be disappointed if he hasn't already died waiting.

Last edited by Hypex on 13-Dec-2023 at 12:21 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

An Amiga is whatever the owner of the Amiga trademark says it is. The definition of an Amiga in the Hardware reference Manual is what it was at the date it was published according to the Amiga trademark owner which made it valid.

Well that now looks to be the new Amiga Corp formed by Cloanto taking all the trademarks from Amiga Inc. Supposedly his plans are in some elusive Twitter thread. But the link I followed says nothing about it and I don't even recognise the guy.

https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2020-07-00032-EN.html

Quote:

AmigaOne hardware is not Amiga hardware but "AmigaOne" hardware. Amiga Inc. deliberately withheld full "Amiga" branding and the original contract/license was restrictive of the use of "AmigaOne", "AmigaOS" and the Boing Ball. The contract/license was aggressively renegotiated when Amiga Inc. was under financial distress at the time of Pentti Kouri's death resulting in very favorable terms for Hyperion who's majority shareholder lawyer wrote the contract

This makes sense as the AmigaOne is not Amiga hardware in the same way. There wasn't some Amiga design team working on it. It didn't have a case. It didn't come as a full product.

Quote:

Amiga branding was still not allowed and one of the few remaining license restrictions was that IP ownership could not be challenged. The people who really need to avoid calling an AmigaOne or other AmigaOS 4 hardware an Amiga are the employees of businesses that license Amiga IP with a no challenge of ownership clause. It looks like there has been some questionable marketing already that could be argued as a challenge of ownership.

Cloanto have provided a few challenges that have come up the last few years over certain naming. But they are a software company, not a hardware company. That hasn't stopped Mike Battilana from owning it.

Quote:

THEA500 Mini has shown that a 68k CPU with 880kiB floppy is not necessary to be accepted as Amiga compatible anyway. Supporting .adf and .iso formats is a good start although an option for a retro I/O board would appeal to hardcore retro Amiga users. The emulation of the 68k CPU+chipset, lack of the AmigaOS and lack of Amiga branding is cringe worthy but eye candy and a reasonable price made up enough to be accepted by hundreds of thousands of Amiga users. There is a lot of room for improvement but THEA500 Mini showed the way.

Of course the Mini does simulate all that including floppy as images. It tends to be criticised for being a custom board by people who think an Rpi should be inside instead. I don't know how much a custom ARM board pushes the price up but the same people think it should have no case as well. Doesn't look like a professional opinion that way. The Mini is aimed at the gamer market which a lot of A500 users were so skipping Workbench makes sense. But it is strange with no Amiga branding. Commodore missing is another quirk, though a C64 replica without a Commodore logo, would be stranger than an A500 replica without a Commodore logo.

Quote:

New Macs are very different and barely if at all compatible with the old Macs but Apple holds the trademark allowing the branding of their choice. MacOS or Mac OS is almost completely different from original to now. Apple has the naming privileges as owner.

And of course Apple continued as parent company and didn't leave the Mac in limbo but allowed it to evolve. Not that the hardware was that special, as in todays terms Amiga people would describe it as a a PC with a 68K CPU. Like AmigaOS, MacOS was found to have too many problems to be future proof, so was replaced.

Quote:

They could use MacOS on non-Mac hardware and that hardware would only be a Mac if they named it a Mac. They tend to use other branding like iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS but all these different OSs have similarities, share modules and run on ARM today. It's nice to have a modular OS that scales to a small footprint. They could call that Apple Anywhere or Apple Everywhere in contrast to the Amiga Nowhere and AmigaNOne in Amiga Neverland.

Apple Anywhere ha. That would be banned. Apple still like exclusive hardware.

Quote:

Beat me to it.

Almost verbatim.

@Hypex

Quote:

This makes sense as the AmigaOne is not Amiga hardware in the same way. There wasn't some Amiga design team working on it. It didn't have a case. It didn't come as a full product.

So in other word the BlizzardPPC and CyberStormPPC version of AmigaOS4.1 illegal, I do not remember any controversy about supporting the Phase5 hardware.

I feel many of arguments seams retrofitted to an agenda. That was not issue at the time.

On the contrary, first concept for AmigaONE was the accelerator card for the Amiga1200 and 4000 computers.

http://obligement.free.fr/articles/amigaoneppc1200.php

Escena failed to make working hardware, so it got scraped, this why they went with Terron-SE/XE prototypes cards.

It seems strange this somehow planed, it be like aiming at every hole in the road, and show stoppers.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 12-Dec-2023 at 06:56 PM.
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Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 12-Dec-2023 at 04:43 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 12-Dec-2023 at 04:38 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 12-Dec-2023 at 04:35 PM.

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@Hypex

Quote:

Well that now looks to be the new Amiga Corp formed by Cloanto taking all the trademarks from Amiga Inc. Supposedly his plans are in some elusive Twitter thread. But the link I followed says nothing about it and I don't even recognise the guy.

That would be Mike Battilana, I guess

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@Hypex

Its quite funny, Amiga Inc used to run coupon scam, to get people to invest money, so they can buyback the OS that they had license to Hyperion under buyback agreement, of course Amiga Inc was shell company, that tried to hustle Amiga developer into writing mobile application for an unknown OS called DE. With best sellers Planet Z and Snow Man maker, Hyperion was also licensed to make Ami2D for AmigaDE, did anyone get the t-shirts that were promised from the coupon scam? I wonder what had happen if Amiga Inc actually had enquired AmigaOS4.0 prerelease, it was highly unstable and was not running well on hardware Eyetech had chosen. I think they can’t possibly fund the development get to release candidate; they need have run several coupon scams to keep it afloat, more likely they planned to sell an unfinished product, and hope to recap there investment. I think customers had been screwed over big time, if that had happened.

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Hypex Quote:

Well that now looks to be the new Amiga Corp formed by Cloanto taking all the trademarks from Amiga Inc. Supposedly his plans are in some elusive Twitter thread. But the link I followed says nothing about it and I don't even recognise the guy. https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2020-07-00032-EN.html

Michele Battilana has been active in the Amiga community including showing up at many Amiga shows. He is soft spoken and other entities challenge ownership of the Amiga and are Amiga IP squatters. My perspective is that Michele is financially conservative and wants to secure the Amiga IP before pushing forward with goals to further the Amiga. Unfortunately, these Amiga IP squatters are blocking progress even after decades of failure.

Hypex Quote:

This makes sense as the AmigaOne is not Amiga hardware in the same way. There wasn't some Amiga design team working on it. It didn't have a case. It didn't come as a full product.

The case isn't so important. C= used repurposed cases for the Amiga 2000 and 4000T as I recall but then they had a PC compatible division.

Hypex Quote:

Cloanto have provided a few challenges that have come up the last few years over certain naming. But they are a software company, not a hardware company. That hasn't stopped Mike Battilana from owning it.

The original Amiga Corporation made hardware and the Amiga trademark mentions hardware.

https://trademarks.justia.com/872/87/amiga-87287078.html Quote:

Goods and Services Computer game programs; Computer game software downloadable from a global computer network; Computer hardware; Computer hardware and computer peripherals; Computer operating programs; Computer operating software; Computer operating systems; Computer programs for video and computer games; Computer software for emulating computer hardware, emulating computer operating systems on personal computers and mobile devices and instructional user guides sold as a unit; Computer software for emulating computer hardware, emulating computer operating systems on personal computers and mobile devices that may be downloaded from a global computer network; Computer software for emulating computer hardware, emulating computer operating systems on personal computers and mobile devices; Computer software platforms for emulating computer hardware and computer operating systems; Computer software, namely, game engine software for video game development and operation; Computer software for emulating computer hardware and computer operating systems that may be downloaded from a global computer network; Digital media, namely, pre-recorded video cassettes, digital video discs, digital versatile discs, downloadable audio and video recordings, DVDs, and high definition digital discs featuring software, games, music, videos, text, ebooks; Downloadable computer game software via a global computer network and wireless devices

Amiga Corporation hasn't been able to do much of anything so far due to IP squatter road blocks. So far they are closer to an IP holding company as all that I'm aware that they have done is license IP.

Hypex Quote:

Of course the Mini does simulate all that including floppy as images. It tends to be criticised for being a custom board by people who think an Rpi should be inside instead. I don't know how much a custom ARM board pushes the price up but the same people think it should have no case as well. Doesn't look like a professional opinion that way. The Mini is aimed at the gamer market which a lot of A500 users were so skipping Workbench makes sense. But it is strange with no Amiga branding. Commodore missing is another quirk, though a C64 replica without a Commodore logo, would be stranger than an A500 replica without a Commodore logo.

THEA500 Mini custom ARM board probably had a similar if not a little higher price compared to a RPi board. They could have used an embedded RPi board in their case. It would be interesting to hear the advantages and disadvantages they considered in making that decision.

Hypex Quote:

And of course Apple continued as parent company and didn't leave the Mac in limbo but allowed it to evolve. Not that the hardware was that special, as in todays terms Amiga people would describe it as a a PC with a 68K CPU. Like AmigaOS, MacOS was found to have too many problems to be future proof, so was replaced.

Apple let the Mac evolve? More like it was the great exodus as they led Mac to greener pastures over and over again. Old hardware was dead weight and a true Apple fan will upgrade. The Amiga market is different except for the fair weather fans that left. We like our 68k, chipset and compatibility. A blend of enhancement and nostalgia sells in the retro Amiga market. Many of us are waiting for an Amiga rebirth, a worthy successor or a 2nd coming not that we are really expecting it anymore. We are mostly happy with the old hardware but it is getting old and dying like we are. There is no new blood so the AmigaNOne dies with Trevor.

@Karlos

Quote:

It's worth noting that Commodore was considering the Windows NT kernel for the proposed PA RISC Hombre generation machines.

This is is one of the well known facts about Hombre.

Quote:

As the then trademark holders, Commodore would have been able to tell you the Amiga was a PA-RISC based machine running Windows NT (though in principle it could just have been the kernel with a different shell), with no backwards compatibility at all. There was the notion of a single-chip 68K/AGA implementation for that purpose.

This, however, is one of the well known factoids about Hombre. Was it planned that Windows NT would boot on it? Yes this can be confirmed. Was it planned that Windows NT would be the exclusive or official OS of the Hombre with no AmigaOS? No I cannot confirm this and it looks like an uncontrolled rumour despite the unlikelihood. I looked into this a few years back but didn't note down the specifics. Haynie would know. I recall reading some details in some Facebook post lost in the ether of Faceworld now.

Quote:

I can imagine how well some people would take that.

Not very well back then. It would have been like a sell out to spend resources designing a new Amiga only to run Windows on it! But what's interesting is that what became of the PA-RISC is the Intel Itanium. So had it survived the future Hombre Amiga may have been running on an Intel Itanium. Oh the irony. An Amiga with an Intel Inside!

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

If the A500 did use sims, it won’t have helped me, as had AGNUS, so it can’t address it anyway, need upgrade to FAT AGNUS to get additional 512kb of slow memory, as that only possible on A500+ model, it slow mem because memory is mapped to custom chip, but can’t be used by OCS, so again need a ECS chipset to make use of additional chip memory. Using WB with only 512kb of chip mem was painful, even with additional, 512kb fast memory in the trap door.

That reminded me. I did add a 512KB expansion RAM to my A500. It came in a video cassette shaped case, a disable switch and clock.

The switch became very useful as a poor mans Action Reply I discovered. Simply load up a game that make use of expansion RAM. Or slow RAM in this case. Now flip the switch and boo yah! RAM is now converted to ROM and likely to instantly crash. Reset and get out my favourite debugger to scan memory for modules, code and game secrets. I found a coders love letter to his girlfriend once.

@Karlos

Quote:

Get some new material for pity's sake, you're embarrassing yourself and all of trollkind.

And yet, despite low post count and interactions, ppcamiga1 is the catalyst for this whole thread and reason for its existence. He gave you a gift horse. Do you bite the hand that feeds you?

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: And yet, despite low post count and interactions, ppcamiga1 is the catalyst for this whole thread and reason for its existence. He gave you a gift horse. Do you bite the hand that feeds you?

Well.. truth be told, try as we might to extract the most we can from the bot, all ppcamiga1 seems able to say is:
Quote:

one and only thing from orginal hardware that classic amiga still have to have is cpu working in 32 bit big endian mode. which means no x86, no arm, no risc-v. chipset is not important. In 256 or thousands colors on amiga from commodore graphics is made as on pc from that time everything by cpu. chipset has no support to 256 or thousands colors modes. It only display them and work as dumb framebuffer. 68k may be changed to anything. software for amiga is made mostly in c/c++

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@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Karlos Quote: Get some new material for pity's sake, you're embarrassing yourself and all of trollkind. And yet, despite low post count and interactions, ppcamiga1 is the catalyst for this whole thread and reason for its existence. He gave you a gift horse. Do you bite the hand that feeds you?

Wait, did you just imply I'm a troll?

Last edited by Karlos on 13-Dec-2023 at 01:35 PM.

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@cdimauro

Quote:

It's the exact opposite: the Amiga o.s. has only threads (running on a single process).

That sounds like old joke about AmigaOS being a process and all running tasks being its threads.

Quote:

So, what's missing is the process concept & implementation.

Problem is even with the share thread like nature of AmigaOS tasks they aren't that close. A child task or child process is a misnomer. They don't share a process context and are implemented as separate processes.

A well known example is bsdsocket.library not giving shareable library bases so main process cannot share base with child processes. And there are a few threads online about getting in this. It seems to me people must be writing advanced programs if they need child processes, as they complicate it with more to manage, and code that has more strict rules to be thread safe so to speak. All the stuff I write manages it all in one process with signal handling. Except things like libraries that use IPC with a master process.

I get the impression that people are being too lazy or just don't understand the thread semantics on AmigaOS. It's as if they program it in a way to act like threads on other systems then wonder why their program breaks on something. It's easy to understand when you know AmigaOS does not offer real threading capability for processes.

The following post about OS4 having real threading features doesn't help. No info is given about. And questions on specifics are not answered so I take fact as a grain of salt.

https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=1217.msg13351#msg13351

@Hypex

Quote:

That sounds like old joke about AmigaOS being a process and all running tasks being its threads.

That's not really a joke, though, at from the commonly understood perspective. What AmigaDOS calls Processes are just Tasks augmented with IO support. Tasks are even more lightweight than threads in that context.


Quote:

The following post about OS4 having real threading features doesn't help. No info is given about.

One of the more frustrating problems I had back in the day was that I was unable to port some C++ code to OS4 from OS3.x because it used exceptions in a multiple task/process context. For OS3.x, I'd been using StormGCC and it came with threadsafe.lib that, among other things, made sure that an exception handler only executes in the same task that the excpetion was raised in.

This all goes to pot in OS4 as the GCC compiler model has no equivalent thread safety and as soon as a task throws an exception, it can get picked up by a different one and the wrong stack gets unwound. Hilarity and frustration ensue.

I don't know if this has changed since, but at the time, unhelpful stuff like "just rewrite it in C" was the answer.

Last edited by Karlos on 13-Dec-2023 at 12:30 PM.
Last edited by Karlos on 13-Dec-2023 at 12:29 PM.

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@Hypex

One main differences between AmigaOS and UNIX systems, is that programs are allocated differently memory locations on AmigaOS, while UNIX style, memory locations is same for all exe files, its MMU map that changes, in UNIX world programs can most only talk to each other using pipes or TCP or something like that, of course you use share memory but its also attached to file system, it’s another clumsy thing to use.

because address space is same for exe files, it manes also fork creates copy of parent task, and all address point to right places, even if variable content is different. Forks on Amiga will kind of almost be impossible, the only why I think it can be possible, is if we use exception handler, to trick the child task into writing and read into offset variable space. Of course, that be really slow.

And also, I think only way solve network problem, is if socket was its own process, then it be easy to do IPC communication between tasks, and connection, so it becomes isolated form everything else.

So I do not think fork problem is 100% realistic to solve, but at least, spin up process that talk to intermediate, seems like a possible solution.

Anyhow it be interesting to play with virtual networks and middle layer, perhaps it be way bypass the lack of IPv6, and other missing features in the network stack.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 13-Dec-2023 at 07:27 PM.
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Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 13-Dec-2023 at 07:22 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 13-Dec-2023 at 07:21 PM.

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