The time has come to bring up the Amiga chipset's frequencies, but exploiting the potential hidden in its technology that literally bewitched us back in the day.

English: https://www.appuntidigitali.it/22638/missed-opportunities-to-improve-the-amiga-chipset-3-frequencies/

E' arrivato il momento di far salire le frequenze del chipset dell'Amiga, ma sfruttando il potenziale che si cela nella sua tecnologia che ci ha letteralmente stregati ai tempi.

Italian: https://www.appuntidigitali.it/22565/le-occasioni-mancate-per-migliorare-il-chipset-dellamiga-3-le-frequenze/

@cdimauro

Ah, the usual armchair nonsense...

Putting the chipset on a better process to boost the frequency was out of the question as both updating MOS or going out of house wasn't cost effective with C= concept of selling Amiga as a low cost (and by that low margin) mass product.

Even if that would have been an option, it would have required opening the design at which point one would have asked why not do in a way that makes sense on systems that don't have the 68000s "every 2nd cycle at best" quirk, systems that have enough memory and bandwidth to not need to have 5 and 6bit modes.

At which point the next question would arise, can they do these chips better and/or cheaper than buying of the shelf parts?

So the only "viable" plan for any of this to work would have been if C= had succeeded in marketing the A1000 as a midrange workstation (which they didn't as they had already ruined their reputation in such markets under Tramiel).

So we are back to "in order to fix C='s handling of Amiga one would need change things as early that they wouldn't have bought Amiga in the 1st place".

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @cdimauro Ah, the usual armchair nonsense... Putting the chipset on a better process to boost the frequency was out of the question as both updating MOS or going out of house wasn't cost effective with C= concept of selling Amiga as a low cost (and by that low margin) mass product. Even if that would have been an option, it would have required opening the design at which point one would have asked why not do in a way that makes sense on systems that don't have the 68000s "every 2nd cycle at best" quirk, systems that have enough memory and bandwidth to not need to have 5 and 6bit modes. At which point the next question would arise, can they do these chips better and/or cheaper than buying of the shelf parts? So the only "viable" plan for any of this to work would have been if C= had succeeded in marketing the A1000 as a midrange workstation (which they didn't as they had already ruined their reputation in such markets under Tramiel). So we are back to "in order to fix C='s handling of Amiga one would need change things as early that they wouldn't have bought Amiga in the 1st place".

The problem here is that you ignore(d) some facts:
- the Ranger chipset was already in development (1987/88) and it was targeting high-resolution (1024);
- ECS Denise (1990) supported the Super-High resolution (1280);
- the first AA systems were planned by beginning of 1991;
- AGA (AA) was released on 1992;
- AGA's Alice was the only chip outsourced because Commodore's MOS wasn't able to fabricate such complex chip;
- Amiga 1200's entire chipset (AGA) costed $12 (TWELVE!) to Commodore (so, included the complex Alice).

Read: the above technologies / chipsets required higher system clock frequencies.

TLDR: it was possible. And wasn't so much expensive.

@cdimauro

So?

- Ranger was in development but got canceled as C= didn't see it as a lucrative path
- ECS does not do "1280", once you get it to a reasonable aspect ratio your down to about VGA, 1Bit VGA if you wanted any performance left
- AA in 91 would have been o.k. but not really groundbreaking
- AA in 92 was to little to late for the A4000 and "meh" for the A1200
(an A1200 specced Amiga in 91, priced at 2xA500 may have been o.k. but we will never know).
- Agnus was borderline for MOS and impossible once it got upgraded to Alice, same would be true for 2x frequency Lisa or Paula
- 12$ does not include recouping development costs and it does not say how much a 3rd party solution with similar performance would have been

Upgrading post AGA makes only sense if your into fanfiction style HW not for C= trying to stay afloat or for 99% of the 1990 user base who only choose Amiga because it had the best and easiest to get games while also being an o.k. computer.
That role had been taken over by PC around 91 (and really showed itself in the years to come).

C= did start "big" with the VIC20 replaced it with the C64 which had very limited compatibility and again with the Amiga1000/500/2000 which had none.
An Amiga with a proper new HW would have retained good compatibility with applications and if games would have been either ported from PC or written new (since OCS games were all outdated) both would have been easier withmore conventional GFX-HW.

So the only valid question should have been: "can we build/update the chipset that is competitive in costs (including development) and performance, and can we keep that up for the long run?".

C= did a lot of stupid things, but not just in management but also engineering for plenty of unsanctioned projects p###ing resources away with no real market or long term planning.

Should've, could've, would've is all nice but the idea that there was an easy fix and that you of all people would have figured it out is.......

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

Being a workstation needs more than just the hardware.

Steve Jobs made sure the Macintosh had cutting-edge GUI business applications e.g. GUI versions of MS Excel (1985), MS Word (1985), Aldus PageMaker (1985), MacOneWrite Accounting Series (1985) and 'etc'. MS's Mac GUI experience was applied to Windows 2's Excel and Word Mac GUI ports. This is the "chicken vs egg" problem.

A real workstation like SUN-3 has ECC memory support. A1000 doesn't have an ECC memory support and it's not POSIX compliant. Commodore didn't "glue" POSIX-compliant subsystems like Windows NT's approach.

A1000 has the potential to be an office desktop computer, but cutting-edge GUI business applications weren't a priority for Commodore.

In 1985, Macintosh was ready for "day job" work.

#Metoo behavior wouldn't displace the high-resolution text UI-based establishment. Microsoft has to beat high-resolution text UI-based establishment.

The A1000 has preemptive multitasking and multimedia "tech demo" superiority with very weak "ready for work" business software.

For context in the market environment from https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix
Quote:

By the middle of the 1980s, XENIX was used in many different industries. ISPs had replaced large minicomputers with XTs or ATs running XENIX. Retailers, fast food chains, hotels, universities, smaller research labs, manufacturing centers, and many more companies were buying Lisas and ATs to act as UNIX servers to which they’d then attach a few dumb terminals. This was far cheaper at the time than buying each user a PC. Yet, aside from the unreleased graphics system from the MS-DOS/XEDOS/XENIX triumvirate based around AT&T’s protocol, XENIX did not include a GUI. Some companies then created their own GUIs, and one of those was Siemens’ release of XENIX named SINIX which included a GUI named Collage. .... In 1987, SCO released the SCO Xenix 386 Toolkit. Developers were now able to start creating both applications and device drivers for the Intel 80386 and when SCO released Xenix 386 (System V Release 2.3.1) later that year software was already available for the new OS. This version sold well and found its way into many small to medium sized businesses partially helped by the fact that it was the first fully 32 bit operating system available for the 386, and also helped by the fact that it could run multiple MS-DOS applications concurrently. (skip) In June, SCO released SCO UNIX System V/386 which brought the system up to SVR3.2. This work was two years in the making and required extensive work. SVR3.2 and Xenix 386 (based on SVR2) were not initially binary compatible, but working with Intel and AT&T, SCO was able to to incorporate the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard. The next major hurdle was getting device drivers to work, which took the majority of the second year of development time on the release. The name change was worked out with AT&T during 1988. SCO UNIX was released as a higher-end product with Xenix 286 and Xenix 386 still being in the product line. With SCO UNIX, the company offered several add-on packages including TCP/IP, X Windows, Motif, NFS support, and the Ingres relational database. In 1990, SCO released SCO Open Desktop. This release essentially bundled all of the add-on packages into a single software release, and added SMP support.

There's a reason for business' bias towards Unix, hence open source *nix.

MetaComCo was disestablished in 1988. Following MetaComCo, Perihelion Technology Limited (PTL) was established. In 2001, PTL was acquired by a Swedish company called ENEA. ENEA AB is still alive and provides real-time operating systems (RTOS) and consulting services.

_________________
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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @cdimauro So?

So, getting those higher frequencies was possible.
Quote:

- Ranger was in development but got canceled as C= didn't see it as a lucrative path

That's not the point: see above.
Quote:

- ECS does not do "1280", once you get it to a reasonable aspect ratio your down to about VGA, 1Bit VGA if you wanted any performance left

No, Super-High res allowed to display 1280 horizontal pixels.
Quote:

- AA in 91 would have been o.k. but not really groundbreaking

It was still too little for what it gave.
Quote:

- AA in 92 was to little to late for the A4000 and "meh" for the A1200 (an A1200 specced Amiga in 91, priced at 2xA500 may have been o.k. but we will never know).

Absolutely. I think that, besides Bruce, there's a general consensus about that.
Quote:

- Agnus was borderline for MOS and impossible once it got upgraded to Alice, same would be true for 2x frequency Lisa or Paula

Sorry, it was the opposite: it was Lisa and not Alice which was outsourced.

Agnus -> Alive hasn't suffered of such issues.

AFAIR Paula wasn't more complex: why it should have had problems running at > 7Mhz?
Quote:

- 12$ does not include recouping development costs

Whatever, but the Amiga 1200 was quite profitable for Commodore. Profit = considered ALL costs removed.
Quote:

and it does not say how much a 3rd party solution with similar performance would have been

Take a look at the PC's counterparts: they weren't so cheap.
Quote:

Upgrading post AGA makes only sense if your into fanfiction style HW not for C= trying to stay afloat or for 99% of the 1990 user base who only choose Amiga because it had the best and easiest to get games while also being an o.k. computer.

I don't care much post AGA: it was already too late.
Quote:

That role had been taken over by PC around 91 (and really showed itself in the years to come).

The main role, maybe. Not the entire role. The game market outside of PCs was still good for several years after that.
Quote:

C= did start "big" with the VIC20 replaced it with the C64 which had very limited compatibility and again with the Amiga1000/500/2000 which had none. An Amiga with a proper new HW would have retained good compatibility with applications and if games would have been either ported from PC or written new (since OCS games were all outdated) both would have been easier withmore conventional GFX-HW.

That could have been quite easy to integrate even on the existing "exotic" Amiga platform.
Quote:

So the only valid question should have been: "can we build/update the chipset that is competitive in costs (including development) and performance, and can we keep that up for the long run?". C= did a lot of stupid things, but not just in management but also engineering for plenty of unsanctioned projects p###ing resources away with no real market or long term planning. Should've, could've, would've is all nice but the idea that there was an easy fix and that you of all people would have figured it out is.......

Which is... exactly what were doing here: discussing about ideas...

@Hammer: ECC memory on... 1985? Seriously?

@cdimauro

Quote:

The problem here is that you ignore(d) some facts: - the Ranger chipset was already in development (1987/88) and it was targeting high-resolution (1024);

1. The original Amiga team's Ranger chipset was canceled in mid-1986.

The original Amiga team was directed to develop a monochrome high-resolution Denise 8369 before switching to a color high-resolution Denise.

Monochrome high-resolution Denise 8369 was "taped out" in Feb 1987.

Monochrome high-resolution Denise reached a releasable state.

Quote:

From Commodore - The Final Years: (skip) Shortly after CES ended in January 1987, Miner did the “tape out� and passed the chip designs over to Commodore’s Large Scale Integration (LSI) group. There, the West Chester engineers began planning to layout and manufacture the new hi-res Amiga chipset developed by the Los Gatos chip designers. On February 4, 1987, LSI head Ted Lenthe produced a development schedule with prototype samples expected in May and the first 1000 production units in July. He assigned Hi-Res Denise the chip number 8369. Commodore engineer Bob Raible would perform the layout for Hi-Res Denise, with assistance from Amiga engineers Glenn Keller and Mark Shieu. Engineer Victor Andrade became lead designer on another chip, dubbed Hi-Res Fat Agnus, which received chip number 8372. A new chip designer named Bill Gardei would provide simulation and testing support. Andrade and Raible would need to make a few tweaks on the Los Gatos design in order to ensure plug-in compatibility. The West Chester engineers wanted the new chips to be pin compatible with the A500 and A2000-CR boards to make future improvements of the systems easy, although the AmigaOS software would need to be upgraded to work with the chips. (skip) Chipset Crisis (skip) It began to dawn on the engineers that the monochrome hi-res Denise chip developed by the Los Gatos engineers was not worth developing anymore. The Hi-Res chip design had begun when Unix workstations, Mac, and IBM all had few or no colors, and that meant the system was a business machine. By 1987, not even the business world wanted monochrome anymore. The playfield had changed too much. (skip) Bob Welland and George Robbins looked at all this and began to consider two new goals for the chipset. First, they wanted a quick modification to the hi-res Denise chip to allow 640 x 480 noninterlaced with color. And second, they wanted to output the video signal to multisync VGA monitors. (skip) This view contrasted with Bob Welland and George Robbins, who wanted the designers to add four color registers to the existing mono 8369 Denise in order to produce a color Denise (plus four additional color registers to handle color in the sprites). (skip) However, Bob Welland compromised and presented a case for a simpler scheme to allow a 6-bit color palette (64 colors) and only 4 additional color registers. At the end of the meeting, the engineers agreed to implement his new scheme, subject to more analysis. (skip) The LSI engineers and system engineers developed a more concrete plan through their regular weekly meetings. Their first decision was to complete the design for Monochrome Hi-Res Denise 8369R1, and have it releasable, but not go into production for any system. It would instead be a useful test platform to work out bugs in the chip. (skip) The new chip, tentatively called Color Hi-Res Denise 8373, began to take shape. The team expected to have full tapeout in two months, meaning samples could arrive as early as December. At the Commodore Show, held at the Disneyland Hotel the weekend of October 3, 1987, both Dale Luck and RJ Mical attended. (skip) By November 23, the logic design for the new Color Hi-Res Denise was complete, and layout work began. It looked like the engineers might have samples before the Christmas shutdown of CSG. (skip) Ted Lenthe planned to work out the color bugs in the first version of 8373, followed by another revision to perfect the color output. He wanted this version ready by the March 1, 1988 Hanover show. That was Phase I. Phase II would then incorporate the changes required for genlock. These features were especially important because genlock was the only major feature not available in other competing chipsets on the market. The LSI designers walked a tightrope, attempting to improve on the existing architecture while maintaining backward compatibility. Because the Agnus and Denise chipsets were very integrated with each other and the RAM, each piece was very dependent on the others. This made it difficult for the LSI designers to evolve the chipset without breaking basic functionality.

Time wasting with #metoo R&D direction.



2. AAA reached displaying 24bit color picture state in Aug 1993.


Quote:

From Commodore - The Final Years: Commodore needed an HR department, and it needed to hire more engineers for the vital project. [/b] “The AAA chipset had four chips, and there was really only one person working on each one as far as the main architect,� explains Hepler. “I don't have a problem with that, but we could have used some extra support helping to simulate and so forth.�[/b] Although Victor Andrade was supposed to have been working on AAA all year, he had instead been working on the 4510 chipset until the middle of October 1989, at which time he began on AAA. (skip) By late 1989, the 32-bit AAA project was getting bogged down. According to Dave Haynie, several factors allowed the project to “The first reason was that the chip group didn’t get enough resources so they couldn’t advance the chip technology enough,� he says. “It really was a matter of not reinvesting enough money in the technology. We had plenty of hard work, which is we kept up as well as we did.� The second reason was that Commodore was taking on too many projects. James Redfield complained that his staff, especially Victor Andrade, was spending too much time cleaning up problems in 4510 and ECS Agnus chips. Andrea development was essentially suspended until those other two chipsets were in production.

C65 focus instead of the Amiga's next-gen chipset.

4510 refers to C65's new custom 65CE02 (released in 1988) with improvements to the processor pipeline to allow one-byte instructions to be completed in 1 cycle, rather than the 6502's (and most variants) minimum of 2 cycles.

4510 has a custom MMU to expand the address space to 20 bit (1 megabyte).

Too bad 65CE02's 1 IPC CPU effort wasn't the big-endian 16-bit RISC CPU-DSP.

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Last edited by Hammer on 03-Aug-2024 at 03:53 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 03-Aug-2024 at 03:43 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 03-Aug-2024 at 03:42 PM.
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_________________
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@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: @Hammer: ECC memory on... 1985? Seriously?

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sun3/Sun-3_Architecture_Manual_Ver_1.0_Jan85.pdf
Refer to section "9. The Sun-3 ECC Memory Architecture", page 48

For the 1985 era, Sun-3 has ECC memory support.

Sun-3 Architecture Manual document is marked confidential. I didn't sign Sun's NDA.

_________________
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Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
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@cdimauro

>No, Super-High res allowed to display 1280 horizontal pixels.

At 256/200 lines (PAL/NTSC) or bit more with overscan, not very useful.
Turn on the 2nd bit plane and the system comes to a crawl.

>Take a look at the PC's counterparts: they weren't so cheap.
I remember buying a basic VGA card retail for 40DM at that time, your sure the chip was more than 12$ if bought in bulk.

I do think that discussing "ideas" should be based on some reality.

They reality is that the mistakes which made C= so bad in 85-94 or the same one of 81-84 that put them in the situation where they needed to buy in that obscure startup to have any future beyond the C64.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: The problem here is that you ignore(d) some facts: - the Ranger chipset was already in development (1987/88) and it was targeting high-resolution (1024); 1. The original Amiga team's Ranger chipset was canceled in mid-1986.

That's a news, because 'til now all that I've read about the Ranger chipset is that it was developed 'til 87/88 and then cancelled.
Quote:

The original Amiga team was directed to develop a monochrome high-resolution Denise 8369 before switching to a color high-resolution Denise. Monochrome high-resolution Denise 8369 was "taped out" in Feb 1987. Monochrome high-resolution Denise reached a releasable state.

That's ok, and that's enough to understand if a higher clocked chipset could have been possible (which was the point of the entire discussion & article), thanks.
Quote:

Quote: From Commodore - The Final Years: (skip) Shortly after CES ended in January 1987, Miner did the “tape out� and passed the chip designs over to Commodore’s Large Scale Integration (LSI) group. There, the West Chester engineers began planning to layout and manufacture the new hi-res Amiga chipset developed by the Los Gatos chip designers. On February 4, 1987, LSI head Ted Lenthe produced a development schedule with prototype samples expected in May and the first 1000 production units in July. He assigned Hi-Res Denise the chip number 8369. Commodore engineer Bob Raible would perform the layout for Hi-Res Denise, with assistance from Amiga engineers Glenn Keller and Mark Shieu. Engineer Victor Andrade became lead designer on another chip, dubbed Hi-Res Fat Agnus, which received chip number 8372. A new chip designer named Bill Gardei would provide simulation and testing support. Andrade and Raible would need to make a few tweaks on the Los Gatos design in order to ensure plug-in compatibility. The West Chester engineers wanted the new chips to be pin compatible with the A500 and A2000-CR boards to make future improvements of the systems easy, although the AmigaOS software would need to be upgraded to work with the chips. (skip) Chipset Crisis (skip) It began to dawn on the engineers that the monochrome hi-res Denise chip developed by the Los Gatos engineers was not worth developing anymore. The Hi-Res chip design had begun when Unix workstations, Mac, and IBM all had few or no colors, and that meant the system was a business machine. By 1987, not even the business world wanted monochrome anymore. The playfield had changed too much. (skip) Bob Welland and George Robbins looked at all this and began to consider two new goals for the chipset. First, they wanted a quick modification to the hi-res Denise chip to allow 640 x 480 noninterlaced with color. And second, they wanted to output the video signal to multisync VGA monitors. (skip) This view contrasted with Bob Welland and George Robbins, who wanted the designers to add four color registers to the existing mono 8369 Denise in order to produce a color Denise (plus four additional color registers to handle color in the sprites). (skip) However, Bob Welland compromised and presented a case for a simpler scheme to allow a 6-bit color palette (64 colors) and only 4 additional color registers. At the end of the meeting, the engineers agreed to implement his new scheme, subject to more analysis. (skip) The LSI engineers and system engineers developed a more concrete plan through their regular weekly meetings. Their first decision was to complete the design for Monochrome Hi-Res Denise 8369R1, and have it releasable, but not go into production for any system. It would instead be a useful test platform to work out bugs in the chip. (skip) The new chip, tentatively called Color Hi-Res Denise 8373, began to take shape. The team expected to have full tapeout in two months, meaning samples could arrive as early as December. At the Commodore Show, held at the Disneyland Hotel the weekend of October 3, 1987, both Dale Luck and RJ Mical attended. (skip) By November 23, the logic design for the new Color Hi-Res Denise was complete, and layout work began. It looked like the engineers might have samples before the Christmas shutdown of CSG. (skip) Ted Lenthe planned to work out the color bugs in the first version of 8373, followed by another revision to perfect the color output. He wanted this version ready by the March 1, 1988 Hanover show. That was Phase I. Phase II would then incorporate the changes required for genlock. These features were especially important because genlock was the only major feature not available in other competing chipsets on the market. The LSI designers walked a tightrope, attempting to improve on the existing architecture while maintaining backward compatibility. Because the Agnus and Denise chipsets were very integrated with each other and the RAM, each piece was very dependent on the others. This made it difficult for the LSI designers to evolve the chipset without breaking basic functionality. Time wasting with #metoo R&D direction.

I absolutely agree, but reading this WoT we've now three important facts:
- the Ranger chipset was in development 'til 1987 at least (in January 1987, Miner did the “tape out�);
- the Ranger chipset wasn't a vaporware, like your favorite engineer stated (read: it's another LIE!), since it got a tape out;
- higher resolution chips were in development (Ranger and then what became the ECS Denise) since at least 1986 (the tape out was on January 1987). Those required higher frequencies for the chips.
Quote:

2. AAA reached displaying 24bit color picture state in Aug 1993.

Too late...
Quote:

Quote: From Commodore - The Final Years: Commodore needed an HR department, and it needed to hire more engineers for the vital project. [/b] “The AAA chipset had four chips, and there was really only one person working on each one as far as the main architect,� explains Hepler. “I don't have a problem with that, but we could have used some extra support helping to simulate and so forth.�[/b] Although Victor Andrade was supposed to have been working on AAA all year, he had instead been working on the 4510 chipset until the middle of October 1989, at which time he began on AAA. (skip) By late 1989, the 32-bit AAA project was getting bogged down. According to Dave Haynie, several factors allowed the project to “The first reason was that the chip group didn’t get enough resources so they couldn’t advance the chip technology enough,� he says. “It really was a matter of not reinvesting enough money in the technology. We had plenty of hard work, which is we kept up as well as we did.� The second reason was that Commodore was taking on too many projects. James Redfield complained that his staff, especially Victor Andrade, was spending too much time cleaning up problems in 4510 and ECS Agnus chips. Andrea development was essentially suspended until those other two chipsets were in production. C65 focus instead of the Amiga's next-gen chipset.

Which is another LIE. According to what you reported on another post, the AA/AGA project had at least SIX engineers working FULL TIME on it.

So, not ALL resources were redirected to the C65. Albeit it's not clear if the AAA was completely blocked by the AA and C65 projects (I assume so, because AA had priority -> go to production).

Last, but not really least, regarding AAA you haven't reported the full story. According to Eggebrecht, AAA became serious only on 1992 (one year before the interview that he gave), and before '92 it was more on discussions & tinkering instead of serious development.
Quote:

4510 refers to C65's new custom 65CE02 (released in 1988) with improvements to the processor pipeline to allow one-byte instructions to be completed in 1 cycle, rather than the 6502's (and most variants) minimum of 2 cycles. 4510 has a custom MMU to expand the address space to 20 bit (1 megabyte).

As you stated, it was completed on 1988: so, it wasn't draining resources from the engineering team.
Quote:

Too bad 65CE02's 1 IPC CPU effort wasn't the big-endian 16-bit RISC CPU-DSP.

Well, 65xx were very well known to be LITTLE-endian: so the opposite of what you wished.

Then, they weren't RISCs. Rather, they are example of complicated chips -> RISCs.

And far away from a DSP.

So, not good candidates for what you're seeking for.
Quote:

Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: @Hammer: ECC memory on... 1985? Seriously? http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sun3/Sun-3_Architecture_Manual_Ver_1.0_Jan85.pdf Refer to section "9. The Sun-3 ECC Memory Architecture", page 48 For the 1985 era, Sun-3 has ECC memory support. Sun-3 Architecture Manual document is marked confidential. I didn't sign Sun's NDA.

Strange. I was recalling beginning of '90s for them. Thanks.

@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @cdimauro >No, Super-High res allowed to display 1280 horizontal pixels. At 256/200 lines (PAL/NTSC) or bit more with overscan, not very useful. Turn on the 2nd bit plane and the system comes to a crawl.

I full agree, but the point here was another one: it was in production and it required higher frequencies (for Denise, at least) for being displayed.
Quote:

>Take a look at the PC's counterparts: they weren't so cheap. I remember buying a basic VGA card retail for 40DM at that time, your sure the chip was more than 12$ if bought in bulk.

But that's only for the VGA chip. With $12 you had:
- the graphic chip;
- the audio chip;
- the I/O chip for controlling mouse, (part of) joysticks, disks, serials, interrupts;
- the memory refresh logic.
Quote:

I do think that discussing "ideas" should be based on some reality.

Which is exactly the point of the discussion & article. At least from a technical perspective.
Quote:

They reality is that the mistakes which made C= so bad in 85-94 or the same one of 81-84 that put them in the situation where they needed to buy in that obscure startup to have any future beyond the C64.

Well, looking at its engineers, then it likely could have been the case.

@cdimauro

Quote:

But that's only for the VGA chip. With $12 you had: - the graphic chip; - the audio chip; - the I/O chip for controlling mouse, (part of) joysticks, disks, serials, interrupts; - the memory refresh logic. .

The CIAs were ancient and every 5ct chip could de better, Paula was slightly better.

The memory refresh only worked Chip and Slow RAM (and only a smallish amount of it).

The Amiga HW was good for what it was in a pure 68000 system with very low memory, once you move beyond that not does none of it makes sense it becomes an obstacle you have to work around.

C= engineers barely understood it and there was for sure no "Jay Miner" there that could have developed a cheap to produce competitive chipset on a shoe string budget.
Even less when tied to the boat anchor of the early 80s OCS design.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada