That's awesome. The price looks good as well! I've been holding out buying an A1 until now, but a cheque will be on the way soon!

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...

They sound nice, but still to rich for my tast. With OS4 not figured in that adds another $100 at least to the price here in the US not figuring in dealer markups, the current rate for the Euro makes it over $850 with the price of OS4 figured in. Thats just to much for an 800MHZ G3 board that I would just want to upgrade to a G4 as soon as it was out. Any idea what the G4 CPU upgrade board will be set at?

@Eyetech

Hi Alan, looks nice, but...of course I have some comments :)

1) I wish you would have let end users decide if they wanted a G4 as an option. I planned to put the microA1 in a cube-style case that can accomodate the heat of that CPU. PC users put P4 3GHz + chips in these cases, and ATI Radeon 9800PROS, so I think a G4 would be fine.

2) A better on-board graphics chip than the radeon 7000 would have been nicer. 7000 is probably fine for industrial use, but 7000 is rather weak for a desktop computer, especially on the 3D side.

3) I would have liked it if the silicon image southbridge was on the Consumer version - so that both versions would be the same and we got rid of the 686B chip, which I understand has crappy documentation, undocumented registers/setup requirements, and has been a pain in the ass in general to developers.

Otherwise, good luck in your sales! :)

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

@Acill

Damn, I wish IBM would stop call them the G3's.

These chips really do kick the pants out of the Motorola G4's but people automatically assume G4 must be better than G3 whilst in every day use they rarely are.

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@Hyperionmp

IBM doesn't call them G3s. They're 750 series chips.

And the Moto ones are MPC74xx.

G3/G4/G5 are Apple's designations. I wish Eyetech hadn't used them.

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Tony T.

People who generalize are always wrong.


1989 - 500 / 1991 - 3000 / 1997 - Genesis Flyer 1200T / 2003 - A1XE

@Eyetech

Excellent news Alan. Thank you for the update. The mini itx version looks promising. I have two questions for you however:

1. Who is working with you and the A1 for LInux kernels? Do you intend to get Linux and the A1 on an enterprise level capacity?

2. How many boards will be available worldwide?

3. When will you be able to go to the Aricia-P Northbridge?

Thanks for the time and congratulations

realize

@Acill

Quote:

adds another $100 at least to the price here in the US not figuring in dealer markups

AmigaOS 4.0 costs 75 Euros. That is USD 90 (sorry, the dollar isn't really the strongest currency ATM). Anything in excess of that is VAT and dealer margin.

Quote:

Thats just to much for an 800MHZ G3

I'm sure you read that before, but the 750FX and especially the GX are considerably faster than the G4 at the same clock. Only the 7447 can somewhat compete. Altivec is of course an important factor, and in fact it's currently the only factor that makes a G4 attractive - otherwise the IBM CPU's are considerably faster.

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Seriously, if you want to contact me do not bother sending me a PM here. Write me a mail

I think it's great news! The price was around what I was realistically expecting. The CPU prices are a bit scary though, I dread to think of G5 prices.

I'm a bit confused with the different models. As mentioned above I thought the idea was to get them as similar as possible to reduce prices?

ATI 7000 is not brilliant but you should be able to get Dreamcast, PS2 style graphics. Maybe Eytech could have put a 9200 on it but that could possibly involved redesigning 20% of the motherboard. Anyway it looks like it is upgradable. AGP through PCI is not quick but shouldn't be too much of a problem.

With a bit of luck I could have the money for one by Christmas. It will give me time to decide G3 or G4, 256MB or 512MB, Commercial or Industrial, 3.5 HD or 2.5 HD and cube or A1200 case.

I look forward to having a PPC Amiga. It's not the fastest machine in the world but my last Amiga ran at 25Mhz so it is going to be very interesting indeed.

(It's typical! Every time I do some real work I miss a major announcement. Last time it was Ainc buy out and before that it was the Pre-release.)

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This is excellent news for the whole Amiga community, a swift slap with a wet fish to the next person that complains about the price

[milhouse] We're into the looking glass here ... [/milhouse]

The spec looks fine for 99.9% of home users - I'm not sure how anyone can complain at the 7000's 3D performance to be honest, it can handle more than enough for Quake3 to throw at it (unless you want to run at 2048x1536 or something), whats likely to be more strenuous than that within the next 2 years??

It also gives a nice base factor for developers to refer to as a minimum spec, a major problem on the classic was software that only ran on 5% of machines, or didn't exploit 'serious' hardware (ie. AB3DII and XTreme Racing respectively).

EDIT: Oh yeah, A1200 case ahoy with a 2.5" HDD - yay!

@Americans,

It is a bit of a bind for you the current exchange rates but to me it makes a change. Here in Rip-off Britian, nearly every consumer product cost more. A games console for $100 would not be £55 at $1.8 - £1 rate but would be £100. A music CD at $10 would not cost a fiver but more like £10. Same with books. It's like we have parity with the dollar or something.

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@Holley

Definitely. I already have an XE, but if Eyetech can rustle up a good-looking "official" Amiga case I'd buy one of these things in a heartbeat (especially if the built-in RAM eliminates the memory incompatibility problems)

Speaking of which - have the Project Reality guys talked to Alan? this could be pretty good: Eyetech gets a custom case without having to shell out mega-$$$ to some industrial designers, we get a case where we had a say in the design, and the guys who designed the case get a piece of the action (sorry, been watching gangsta movies ). I don't see how anyone could lose anything, it's a win-win situation all around.

@Intuitioned

Quote:

ATI 7000 is not brilliant but you should be able to get Dreamcast, PS2 style graphics.

Err... no. The RV100 chip is vastly inferior to either of those machines. In terms of technology it is of a similar level to the Riva TNT or Voodoo Banshee - the nearest console equivalent would be the N64. It has only a single rendering pipeline, no hardware T&L, no vertex shader, no bandwidth saving systems, etc. As a 2D display device the RV100 is fine, but anyone with even a passing interest in 3D should just switch it off and fit something better.

I'm sure Eyetech must have problems getting hold of better chips or they'd be using them on the consumer version of the uA1. Something like the RV200 (Radeon 7500) or RV250 (Radeon 9000) would be a huge improvement.

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

@DrBombcrater

Blimey! If it really is slower than my 4 year old graphics card I think I should be looking at a µ-A1 I with AGP riser card.

(But you got to admit 1999-2001 era graphics still look quite good.)

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So it's worse than the Radeon 128 Mobility I have in my laptop? I thought it was newer than that ... must admit I don't pay much attention to PC games or their hardware ...

This may have been done to reduce the costs then (?) - as thats the first thing people have complained about anyway. Are the cheap 9200se's any good then?

EDIT: yeah, Quake2 still looks good, now for 99/00 graphics all we need is Carmageddon2 porting

@Holley

http://reviews.cnet.com/ATi_Radeon_7000/4505-8899_7-9388306-4.html

As you can see, even less than the Geforce 2MX.

@Holley

Quote:

So it's worse than the Radeon 128 Mobility I have in my laptop? I thought it was newer than that ... must admit I don't pay much attention to PC games or their hardware ...

Without knowing the exact specifications of the Radeon chip in your laptop I can't really comment, but most of ATI's mobile Radeon parts will easily gun-down the 7000 and leave it for dead. Only the the original Radeon Mobility with a 32-bit memory system would be slower, and that configuration is so rare I've never encountered a laptop that uses it.

Really the biggest problem with the Radeon 7000 is that it is not a Radeon in anything but name. All the good bits of the Radeon design were ripped out of it, leaving something that's more of a jumped up Rage 128.

It's a huge step up from AGA or any classic Amiga gfx card of course and it'll run Quake 2 easily enough, but the 7000 was a really bad chip when it came out (NVidia's rival, the GeForce 2 MX, beat the pants off it) and it hasn't aged well.

Still, there are plenty of worse chips out there. The uA1 could have ended up with some miserable SiS or Trident thing.

Quote:

Are the cheap 9200se's any good then?

Not really. The 'SE' bit means the memory bus has been chopped down from 128-bit to 64-bit, which hits performance very badly - any ATI card with SE in the name should be avoided. Spending a little extra on the normal 128-bit 9200 is a good idea as they are pretty good cards.

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

@Eyetech
Anothe4r person very impressed.

I hope the industrial boards can also be purchased by the public through some means. A passivily cooled 24/7 computer has domestic uses as well.

Best of luck.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

Not really. The 'SE' bit means the memory bus has been chopped down from 128-bit to 64-bit, which hits performance very badly - any ATI card with SE in the name should be avoided. Spending a little extra on the normal 128-bit 9200 is a good idea as they are pretty good cards.

Not! uA1 has no true AGP port, with PCI riser cards will share bandwidth! And PCI is 32bit@33MHz
Simply, PCI will not be fast enough to populate gfx card memory fast enough, at least where it will matter most -in 3d!
There is ATI Radeon 9200 SE PCI - only "Built by ATI" and therefore more expensive. I agree, non-SE variant is better choice (I can reccomend Gigabyte R9200 128-bit w 128Mb I use as fine card)

@bojan_bozovic

Then one would presume that some crafty Amiga games programmer would upload all the textures needed to the card before starting play (these 9200s seem to come with more ram than many Amiga games took up harddisk space).

Assuming this is technically possible, of course. Also, don't newer cards support texture compression? That would boost performance on the same bandwidth.

Or we could go to using polygon only graphics, get huge performance with low bandwidth, and create a whole new genre of modern game (a la Leading Lap on the A500, but on a more grandiose scale)

@Holley

32bit @ 33MHz gives 32*33/8=132 Mb/s bandwidth. Even gfx card memory has much greater bandwidth (128bit@333MHz perhaps, or more it goes over 500MHz memory speed at most expensive cards). I don't know exactly if it's going to happen, but I see where the bottleneck will be if user experiences it....


Old Elite rocks!