Is an Amiga without custom chips a real Amiga?

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"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

It's a DRACO!

http://amiga.resource.cx/mod/draco.html

@Lou

Quote:

It's a DRACO!

How well did those work, do you know?

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"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

From what I hear, as long as apps didn't bang hardware it worked well.

@Lou

CIAA / CIAB chips is responsible for lot of stuff, disk drive, io ports, timing, vertical blanking, its central part, also for interrupts. Not having the CIAA/CIAB chip in AmigaONE is major blow.

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@bison

I’m going to vote “Pancakes” here, “Real” is hardware, emulation is not “Real”, but on other hand does it matter what hardware it uses, if it has drivers? Not to me.

I only care about software that runs on it, and expect developers be so smart that their software supports upgrades.

Instead of being limit to 8bit sound, single core, less then 4gbytes, one floppy drive (but not two or tree), only chip memory, crash on fast memory, or no support for CPU cache. No support for FPU and MMU, no support for fonts larger then 8pixels, because they are not using system libraries, A lot of Amiga software is pure garbage.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

I don't give 2 farts about an AmigaOne. I mentioned the DRACO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nLaEC0dpqU

Last edited by Lou on 27-Oct-2021 at 06:43 PM.

@Lou

Sure, it was impressive back then so many years ago, it was market for this then, and its maybe useful now, it looks maybe a bit stretched, sadly did require some exotic hardware.

http://amiga.resource.cx/photos/dracomotion

anyway, it’s not impossible to image doing real time video editing on AmigaONE, we now have hardware accelerated video, decoding at almost no cost, with capture hardware it won’t be to hard record what’s being displayed. So maybe it’s just few drivers away actually.

The Draco systems where expensive, that’s way they were exotic, and AmigaONE are also expensive and now also exotic, they have lot in common, that way. The Draco systems was a step in right direction but too expensive to become popular.

any Amiga with 68060/50mhz and RTG was cool, back in the 199x's. not sure when Internet started to suck on Amiga, I guess it started with Flash/JavaVM. it was useful where long time all considered. or despite the mistakes.

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@bison

The Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985 and built until 1996
At its core, the Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors, which handle audio, video and direct memory access independently of the Central Processing Unit (CPU).
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga )

And as long as the owner of the brand name doesn't build something else with the name Amiga on it, it will always be the 68k computer with the custom chips designed by Jay Miner and improved by Commodore engineers like Dave Haynie.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 27-Oct-2021 at 07:47 PM.

@bison

One of the greatest philosophical questions of all time.

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Sam

@bison

My personal definition of "Amiga" is very broad and includes the classic Commodore Amiga systems, hardware and software emulators, OS4 systems, MorphOS systems and AROS systems.

I have the following ...
A2000HD running AmigaOS 3.1
MicroA1 running OS4
AmigaOS 3.2 running under emulation on my OS4 system
AROS (AspireOS and Icaros) running on my HP laptop

I like what I see and hear about MorphOS, but don't have compatible hardware yet.


redfox

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20 years ago (or even 25...) everyone said no new Amiga could be a 'real' Amiga without backwards compatibility to the custom chips. At the time, there was no UAE (or at least, no really good UAE) and no FPGA solutions. So we accepted that AmigaOnes would have to a kind of new Amiga that broke with the past.

Now in 2021, there is UAE and there is FPGA. Given that compatibility with 90s software is still desirable, partly because that software is still really good in many cases, but mostly because the intervening 25 years has not seen much in the way of great new Amiga software, any 'modern Amiga' would ideally have full chipset compatibility through either a software or hardware solution.

Personally I'd love to see a Mister or a Vampire on a PCI card that could be plugged into an AmigaOne to give it backwards compatibility (the video output feeding back into a window or screen in the 'real' graphics space. Failing that, I'd want to see chipset emulation built in to the core operating system. Not just UAE and RunInUAE, though that's a useful solution for many scenarios. But also built in to the 'native' API in such a way that there's a virtual chipset mapped to a fixed region of memory, and 68K software can interact with that simulated chipset by memory mapping, together with an emulation process that constantly updates the state of the virtualised system to reflect what's being poked into the virtual chipset address space.

As for what shape an all-new 64 bit, SMP, Arm or PPC or RISC-V 'thing' should do such that it's worthy of the name 'Amiga', is look and smell like an Amiga - user friendly and infinitely configurable and tunable beyond compare, and optimised for raw performance ahead of enterprise features, even at the expense of things like security

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@bison

Is an Amiga not made by Commodore an Amiga?

Sorry but it is redicilous.

hotrod Quote:

Is an Amiga not made by Commodore an Amiga?

Amiga Technologies produced hardware after CBM went bankrupt is usually considered Amiga hardware but it was officially Amiga branded by the company who owned the Amiga brand, which is probably the requirement. Draco, Boxer and AmigaOne hardware were officially licensed but not officially branded Amiga hardware. Today, hardware branded or labeled Amiga by Amiga Corporation would be considered by most people to be Amiga hardware with or without compatible Amiga custom chips. Some Amiga fans may not accept, recognize or buy hardware which departs too far from the original philosophy and lacks adequate 68k and custom chip compatibility as can be seen by the PPC AmigaOne hardware but even that hardware would be Amiga hardware if officially branded.

Last edited by matthey on 28-Oct-2021 at 01:34 AM.
Last edited by matthey on 28-Oct-2021 at 01:28 AM.

The OG Amiga may have been the first significant personal computer platform to incorporate custom silicon to offload tasks from the CPU as a standard feature, but it is by no means the only personal computer platform to do so since then.

Today, most common personal computing platforms incorporate custom/specialised silicon to offload tasks from the CPU. Motherboard chipsets, GPUs (GPGPUs), DSPs, APUs, SOCs, SIPs, etc. Does that make those platforms a modern day Amiga?

The OG Amiga was a trailblazing platform not just because of its inclusion of the custom chipset, but also because it had pre-emptive multitasking, and multimedia capabilities as standard. The rest of the computing world has not only caught up, but surpassed it.

A modern day Amiga platform should have some silicon that will offload tasks from the CPU, but in this regard it will not be doing anything different from other platforms. Right now, Apple is leading in the CPU-offload game in personal computing.

A new Amiga has little chance going up against Apple in the custom silicon game. The new Amiga will need to define its raison d'être through other aspects.

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All the way, with 68k

@bison

Is a Mac without 68k a Mac?

Amiga without custom chips is real Amiga of course.
And Amiga without custom chips is better Amiga than these from Commodore after Amiga 500.
Custom chips was fine in Amiga 500 times but Commodore do not spend money on R&D
so even in Amiga 1200 times custom chips was too slow and outdated.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: Amiga without custom chips is real Amiga of course. And Amiga without custom chips is better Amiga than these from Commodore after Amiga 500. Custom chips was fine in Amiga 500 times but Commodore do not spend money on R&D so even in Amiga 1200 times custom chips was too slow and outdated.

For once we agree.

Classic Amigas with custom chipset with only chip ram was basically a primitive gpu on a PC with no RAM that depended on the gpu's ram to work. The Draco proved this. Adding 'fast' aka normal RAM to an Amiga greatly speeds it up.

Never updating the speed of the system bus didn't help either. 3.57Mhz bus limited the architecture.
The Commodore C65 was going to run at that speed and had AGA-like graphics capabilities. Let that sink in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL4iX_iuBO8

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Last edited by Lou on 28-Oct-2021 at 07:03 PM.

I voted no and I stand by it. If an AmigaOne ran 90% of Amiga software it would be Amiga compatible. To accomplish that, an FPGA is needed to remap the old register mapped functions to a texture map so it can be either windowed or blown up full screen using a texture mapper.

If the operating system alone were enough to do it, MorphOS and OS 4.1FE would have successfully displaced the usage of the original Amiga models. The work isn't done yet.

@matthey: Regarding AmigaOne you are not 100% correct. "AmigaOne" was the official brand for new "Amigas" from the parent-company at that time (Amiga Inc., former Amino). So historical an AmigaOne is of course an official Amiga-computer.

As Amiga Inc. had no intention to produce hardware, their plan was to do this with hardware-partners and license the brand to them, but nevertheless it was their official name for NG-Amigas with AmigaOS4 (after considering AmigaDE as new AmigaOS before).

They could have named their attempt for new Amiga-computers "Amiga 8000" or "Amiga Super-Walker", but their choice was "AmigaOne".

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