Many moons ago, I recommended a OS4/MOS/AROS port to the very inexpensive WiiU.

The toxic community backlash was "who will pay for it."

The answer is always no one.
That's the point...it should be done for free to expand the market.
It also shows the toxicity of this community. Bunch of bums who don't do things just for the sake of doing it and just want to make a quick buck.

Well - finally a great and useful OS has been ported to inexpensive PPC hardware. Granted it's just GC/Wii/vWii at best but it's not much of a stretch to extend it to full WiiU eventually.

https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjPV3pZUpS4

@Lou

"Great and useful". I mean, NT was the only version of windows from that era that didn't drain my will to live but surely it's more of a historical curiosity at this point.

It's definitely cool as a "because you can" thing, though.

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@Lou

Jailbreaking a garden wall games console is not for legal 3rd party businesses.

Last edited by Hammer on 11-Mar-2025 at 02:24 AM.

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@Hammer

It's a good point. Plenty of hot water to land in if you are a business doing this.

_________________
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Quote:

Hammer wrote: @Lou Jailbreaking a garden wall games console is not for legal 3rd party businesses.

Anyone delusional enough to attempt to do gamedev business with Nintendo deserves everything that collaboration entails.

Especially coming from Western society.

Then again, a sucker is born every minute...

As I alluded to in my original post...

Amiga has no market.

How do you grow a market?

Do something cool and fun.

Typical Amigan waiting for the savior to arrive: that's illegal.

No one cares.

Do it as open source. Require a legal copy of said_uselessOS_of_choice...unless we are talking about AROS of course....

Watch interest rise.

All this guy did was create a bootloader and a couple of GC/Wii specific driver and voila - the OS just works. He did it for MAC and now for GC/Wii. Wireless+network drivers are planned.

An actual WiiU build would be amazing...and much more useful! My WiiU has been hacked for years. Once the Switch 2 is released - I'll hack my Switch as well.

Also - you guys are no fun.

@Lou

Quote:

Amiga has no market. How do you grow a market?

No, no, no : Amiga has a market !

80% of our elite here create fake hardware for getting zero software market !

That's why they choose the PPC, FPGA and now ARM (= other than 68k) : true good hardware create software market ! Fake hardware create nothing...

They know true hardware (I mean true CPU 68k) create huge software market, they inverse, they create fake hardware (ARM emulation, incomplete FPGA, PPC OS C/C++ recompilation...)

Once you understand that, you understand everything...

@Lou

For use with a non SMP desktop OS a WiiU is inferior to a MacMini, even more so if it only run in Wii mode.

For a SMP OS it is better than a MacMini, but has to concede DualCPU PowerMac G4/5 configs.

Thats is before any potential legal drama.

Now if you had gaming centric SW in mind, sure those old consoles might be attractive, but WinNT as a gaming platform

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@Kronos

I played StarCraft on NT4.0 as it kept crashing on win98. the 90s was a weird time…

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@Kronos

Quote:

but WinNT as a gaming platform

… better known as Xbox…

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@Lou

Open source AROS on PPC is not an Amiga since it doesn't run 68K Amiga software.

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@CosmosUnivers

Quote:

That's why they choose the PPC, FPGA and now ARM (= other than 68k) : true good hardware create software market ! Fake hardware create nothing... They know true hardware (I mean true CPU 68k) create huge software market, they inverse, they create fake hardware (ARM emulation, incomplete FPGA, PPC OS C/C++ recompilation...)

AC68080's 68K instruction set is complete as Motorola's 68000 (A1000, A500, A600, A1500, A2000), 68020 (A2500/020) and 68EC030 (A4000/030). AC68080 V4 supports 68882's IEEE FP32 and FP64 except for FP80.

68060 FPU is not fully compatible with 68882 and has to emulate certain instructions.

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/68060-in-mac.40545/
68060 in 68040-based Mac doesn't work since 68060 is not fully compatible with 68040.
The same 68060 incompatibility problem for 68040-based NextStep workstations.

Look in the mirror for "the name" Motorola cultist.

Motorola provided a special software package that supported the emulation of the missing instructions, M68060SP, which is applied in the 68060.library.

Commodore apparently "planned ahead," making the AmigaOS 68060-compatible in the official releases that are enough for the OS to load 68060.library from mass storage.

Last edited by Hammer on 13-Mar-2025 at 02:19 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 13-Mar-2025 at 02:17 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 13-Mar-2025 at 02:15 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Commodore apparently "planned ahead," making the AmigaOS 68060-compatible in the official releases that are enough for the OS to load 68060.library from mass storage.

They did this for the 68040 and luckily the 68060 didn't screw it up.

On boot, the FPU is turned off in kickstart, and then turned on again by the 68040/68060.library.

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@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @Kronos Quote: but WinNT as a gaming platform … better known as Xbox…

So if I was to port a 1995 version of SUSE Linux onto a Nokia flipphone It would make perfect sense since it is kinda Android?

How many XBOX360 games work on that hacked WiiU?
How many Win9x games work on WinNT_PPC?

The whole project is as useless and pointless as it can get, but as a "because it was there" brainfart it's pure genius.

Which is why I pointed out that porting "OS4/MOS/AROS" to it makes no sense when there are plenty of better (and just as obsolete) HW options available.

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Quote:

Kronos wrote: The whole project is as useless and pointless as it can get, but as a "because it was there" brainfart it's pure genius.

I suspect the intersection of Windows fans and Wii fans finds some excitement in this.

They're just terrible communicators as to what exactly does it bring to the table.

Perhaps it's one of those "If you have to ask, you won't understand..." scenarios ?

@Heimdall

"WindowNT(PPC) fans"

All 3 of them....

_________________
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- blame Canada

Hammer Quote:

AC68080's 68K instruction set is complete as Motorola's 68000 (A1000, A500, A600, A1500, A2000), 68020 (A2500/020) and 68EC030 (A4000/030). AC68080 V4 supports 68882's IEEE FP32 and FP64 except for FP80.

FP80 support is important for compatibility! Motorola would not have been able to replace the 6888x instructions with as accurate of 68040 and 68060 instructions if extended precision had been removed. Extended precision can even be good for performance and code density.

Floating Point - Past, present and Future
https://youtu.be/LuKBvsvkzEs?list=PLISEtDmihMo1-ADUicHo5hl7RJRQ5ilJT&t=4736
William Kahan Quote:

And the idea is to compute these expressions in those (extended precision) registers so that when you compute the whole thing you get something that will be good pretty much to the last of the double precision digits that matter to you and it takes about 3 instructions or maybe 10 instructions if you want to be fussy. But if your language doesn't allow you to utter these things (extended precision registers) then what you've got to do is use double precision variables which have less precision and write a complicated program with 70 instructions in order to get the extra few bits of accuracy here which you need only in extravagant cases but you don't know in advance if your case will be extravagant or not so you program it up always. And therefor you have to do with only double precision variables in a long program what is done in a handful of instructions with these (extended precision) registers. However, failing to appreciate this subtlety, the folks at Sun would lose on benchmarks.

This was a 68k Sun Workstation where the compiler developers decided to get rid of the extended precision rather than support it. GCC developers have also decided to get rid of the "evil" extended precision of the deprecated x87 and dead 68k FPUs rather than choosing to support it correctly. VBCC almost supports extended precision correctly but Volker is resistant to change or introduce a new ABI for a dead 68k platform too. Proper extended precision compiler support is possible as William Kahan "the father of FP" designed it and VBCC extended precision support is so close but the 68k is dead killing development. Proper extended precision support is much easier to support with the 68k FPU than the horrible x86 FPU ISA. "However, failing to appreciate this subtlety," many people in the 68k Amiga community want to get rid of extended precision to cut corners for a declining and incompatible Amiga EOL spec. I want to develop the 68k Amiga to be better not bastardize it to be worse!

Hammer Quote:

68060 FPU is not fully compatible with 68882 and has to emulate certain instructions. ... Motorola provided a special software package that supported the emulation of the missing instructions, M68060SP, which is applied in the 68060.library. Commodore apparently "planned ahead," making the AmigaOS 68060-compatible in the official releases that are enough for the OS to load 68060.library from mass storage.

The 68040 and 68060 provide better 6888x FP compatibility than the AC68080! The 68040SP and 68060SP offer good 6888x compatibility if installed correctly.

https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MC68060UM.pdf Quote:

C.3.1 Floating-Point Emulation Results All numerical results and condition code settings produced by the M68060FPSP and visible to the user are identical to those produced by the MC68881/882 and MC68040 with the following exception: the M68060FPSP transcendental calculation results are not the same as for the MC68881/882, because the algorithms used in the MC68881/882 (CORDIC) cannot be effectively implemented in software. However, the error bound of the M68060FPSP transcendental routines (same as for the MC68040 routines) are equivalent or superior. For floating-point arithmetic instructions, the error bound is one-half unit in the last place of the destination format in the round-to-nearest mode, and one unit in the last place in the other rounding modes. Transcendental instructions have an error bound of less than 0.6 unit in the last place of double precision. The error bound for decimal conversions is 0.97 unit in the destination precision for the round-to-nearest mode and 1.47 units in the last digit of the destination precision for the other rounding modes.

The performance difference between the old 6888x CORDIC instructions and the new extended precision code that replaces the instructions may actually be improved in many cases. Adding a FMA instruction should improve the performance more and reduce the number of instructions necessary in the support code. The performance problem is the instruction trap overhead and the way that Commodore provided hard drive only support without the support code available in flash memory like some (one?) later Amiga accelerator(s) provided.

Kronos Quote:

"WindowNT(PPC) fans" All 3 of them....

The only reason there are not many PPC WindowsNT fans is the availability of x86-64 WindowsNT (aka Microsoft OS/2 and Windows). If AmigaOS 4 was available on any other architecture, there would be fewer PPC AmigaOS 4 fans.

Last edited by matthey on 13-Mar-2025 at 10:31 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 13-Mar-2025 at 09:42 PM.

@matthey

And?

That port is pointless, because it lacks a point, pointing to pointless points does not help making it a point.

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- blame Canada

Most of you speak from that which you know not.

A WiiU is a triple-core 1125 Mhz cpu with 2GB of RAM and Radeon 4670-ish gpu that runs 2 screens and has wi-fi and bluetooth.

It was around during the end of the 360/PS3 era but has 4x the ram and better gpu and OoO cores.

It already emulates an Amiga via RetroArch which I installed via the Homebrew Launcher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDH2Lw3EIoo

Here are example of it's native power:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-35eCQG9pLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nedakbQkBGQ

Also via the vWii NT port, most of the WiiU's capability over the Wii can be unlocked.

...and there's already Linux installers...
https://gitlab.com/linux-wiiu/linux-wiiu/-/blob/rewrite-4.19/README.md

Funny how other 'communities' just get things done rather than whine about how great 68k was while ignoring it's over-priced and slow development path.

I'm generally no fan of PPC...but a WiiU is better, cheaper and more useful than any other 'Amiga-compatible' PPC hardware.

Rather than expand the market - y'all will sit on your hands and/or whack it to 68k assembly...

@matthey

Quote:

FP80 support is important for compatibility! Motorola would not have been able to replace the 6888x instructions with as accurate of 68040 and 68060 instructions if extended precision had been removed. Extended precision can even be good for performance and code density.

For example, FP80 is important for MacOS 8.1, hence it's either 68LC040's software FPU or hardware FPU with FP32/FP64/FP80 and no half-baked hardware FPU with FP32/FP64.

Like MacOS, MS Windows 3.1 also used hardware FPU to assist GUI.

There's a fallout between Jim Drew and Gunnar von Boehn.

I prefer Fusion since it can change resolution modes like on a real color Mac.

I don't think Shapeshifter has patched MacOS 8.1 enough for Emu68's broken FP80 emulation. Shapeshifter with MacOS 7.5 works on Emu68.

AC68080 V2's FP52 and V4's FP64 are mostly for Quake enabler, a bias focus on games.

For the 3DO M2 project, IBM's low cost PowerPC 602's FPU only has FP32 support.

Quote:

The 68040 and 68060 provide better 6888x FP compatibility than the AC68080! The 68040SP and 68060SP offer good 6888x compatibility if installed correctly.

Mac Quadra ROMs have 68LC040/68040 support, but they have a show stopper crash with 68LC060/68060.

Mac Quadra couldn't boot with 68060 let alone booting with mass storage MacOS with 68060SP.

Last edited by Hammer on 14-Mar-2025 at 01:49 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Mar-2025 at 01:47 AM.

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