@samface

I would be enthousiastic. And all the Amiga users that can't afford 800$ would be happy too. Man, wake up! Look at the bounty system : if people are willing to cash 100$ just to add a feature to AROS or just to encourage Amizilla, do you think they won't be happier to pay only 100$ and get a full OS eventually.

Quote:

NOT! I'm sorry but if they were gonna get money from people in the Amiga community, it was only going to be if people got something for their money at the time of the payment.

Sorry again for your little logic, but did AmigaOne buyers really get anything when they got the Amiga One? Some had to wait years before they got the OS (it's not finished yet) and since they were alergic to Linux, they couldn't really use the machine.

If some people are ready to cash 800$ to get a hardware they wouldn't be able to use right away, do you really think some wouldn't be happier to just cash 100$ and get something sooner than the high-end Amiga hardware we've been expecting since 1993?

Who said Hyperion couldn't give the impatients preversions of the OS on x86 like they did for the PPC port?

Quote:

Any other suggestions, mr Myth-Buster?

Why? I'm still waiting for you to reply to what I (and others) had to say to your arguments.

So what will you do, just pick up something from this post or start being serious and try to reply to what we said in previous posts? AFAIK, having to talk to somebody that doesn't answer you isn't really what I fancy the most.

@falemagn

Quote:

Dealing with one processor instead of another one doesn't prohibit you to still target one subset of all possible hardware configurations. What problem do you have with that?

Simple, because you won't find a hardware supplier in the x86 market that is willing to cooperate with Hyperion to the same extent as Eyetech which means even more time and money for development and no funds until the product is out on the shelves. Furthermore, targetting a certain subset of PC hardware would force many of those who already owns a PC today to get new hardware in order to run the AmigaOS4 anyway, wouldn't it? Now, if you subtract all those who would choose to wait with buying the AmigaOS4 until it supports their hardware setup and all those who would choose to pirate copy the AmigaOS4 instead of buying it, how many possible sold copies of the AmigaOS4 remains?

Quote:

But heck, just look at AROS: it can boot and work flawlessy on a multitude of different machines and configurations, with different chipsets and all that. All done in the spare time of one single developer.

But for christ sake, you cannot compare AROS with the AmigaOS4 project from a development achievements point of view nor with regards to costs. AROS is developed on a voluntary basis and therefore has no development cost issues to consider. Furthermore, it has been in development in approx. 13 years. Using spare time or not, atleast it should tell you that we're not talking about a walk in the park here.

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How so, "as things stand now" is just another version of your "given the circumstances" or, say, "if this trend continues". What's wrong with that?

Well, you were basicly saying that if things remains as they seem today, they will remain so forever. It just seemed so... excessively obvious.

Quote:

Quote: Anyhow, I don't doubt the AmigaOS4 would sell more if it was available for the PC market and compatible at the same level as Amithlon. And that doubt is based on what reasoning, exactly?

Like so many times before, you're not reading what I write and then argue what you think I've written. What doubt?

Quote:

Mmm... right, so tell me, exactly which NVIDIA card does AOS4 support?

None yet AFAIK. Why do you ask, are you saying I would have claimed otherwise?

Quote:

Actually, it's you who keep stating that selling AmigaONE's would have somehow earned them this capital to invest, which to me sounds less plausible than if you had told me Elvis is still alive.

Nice rephrase, what I've actually talked about is how the AmigaOne sales has helped fund the AmigaOS4 development, something both Hyperion and Eyetech has acknowledged and expressed their thanks to the AmigaOne consumers for.

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Ever tried to listen to Hyperion and Eyetech about this?

Yes.

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They keep saying that AmigaOS4 is worked on by prople who have earned exactly ZERO from their work, so far. And the hardware has earned Eytech nothing but troubles, or so Alan said.

Now you're talking about an entirely different matter that doesn't contradict nor has any relevance to the things I've been talking about.

Quote:

Exactly how selling 1500 or so AmigaONE's would pay for more than 4 years of development on AOS4 by the various people involved?

I'm quite sure the AmigaOS4 project has cost plenty more than what they made on the sales of the AmigaOne, but atleast it was that financial aid they needed to keep going.

Quote:

So, Sammy, would you please stop stating as facts what in reality are just wild and unsubstantiated guesses of yours?

You'd be surprised how those wild and unsubstantiated guesses would magicly disappear by themselves if you just stopped inventing them.

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@IceDragon

Quote:

I do not know if AInc approached Bernie at sometime, but i would doubt it taking their history into account or at least the terms would have been unacceptable.

Oh, you don't remember AmiWest'01?

The problem with AInc in '01 was that they didn't have any money, but were trying to act as if they did. Which especially in hindsight was a monumentally stupid thing to do.

Yes, we were looking for a distributor who could contribute a Workbench/Kickstart license, and AI at the time was just not in any shape to be a distributor. Much time and goodwill was wasted on pretentions that they were. If instead they would have come out and said "look, guys, we can't be a distributor, but we will gladly license stuff to you, and you pay us license fees", things might have turned out very differently.

That is, of course, assuming there wasn't anything else happening, like a certain Belgian law professional pulling strings....

@samface

Quote:

Besides, we already have Cloanto's Amiga Forever which provides the exact same functionality but with more hardware compatibility since it runs on Windows instead of Linux or QNX.

If you believe that sentence, you should disqualify yourself from this discussion on ground of ignorance :)

Quote:

You keep focusing on possible returns on investments without a plan for how to earn a capital to invest first.

Well, interesting point --- SOMEONE must have been paying the Friedens' salary for the last 4+ years. Any pre-delivery royalties from AmigaONE sales are a drop in the ocean compared to that investment. So don't pretend that the current path didn't require a large amount of cash to start with.

@cHaOs667

Quote:

Show me both sales figures - NOW!

Given that you asked so nicely and politely --- just over 1500, according to official reports by H&P, not including those given away as freebies. You probably need to add some to that.... H&P got very defensive when asked about shipments which turned up at a show, but never showed up in the sales reports.

Now, you go and show any indication that the AOne, over the 4+ years of the project's lifetime, has sold more than that.

Oh, and make it NOW! :)

@falemagn

Wether anyone else but Hyperion would be able to sign up for a license agreement with Amiga Inc. and develop AmigaOS4 or not is highly relevant to the issue of wether AmigaOS4 could have been developed for different hardware or not. If you assume that my claims about Hyperion's and Eyetech's irreplaceable roles in this are true, it simply couldn't have been done in any other way. That is the point that I'm trying to make and that you refuse to, if not agree with, atleast understand to be my point.

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@falemagn

Quote:

Quote: But hey, just for you, I'll change my wording to that it is the most plausible scenario. There, feel better? This is not about me feeling better, it's about you stopping to stress uninteresting and irrelevant points, and focusing on the real meat instead.

And please, let's not entirely ignore the fact that someone else *had* stepped up to do OS4, but had this bizarre idea that they actually needed hardware to run it on, not promises of hardware.

Let's also not forget that the "stepping up" Hyperion and Eyetech did in November 2001 consisted of promising OS4 by March 2002, to run on the Escena A1200 PPC dongle. Somehow that turned into being allowed 4+ years to develop an OS, and into occasionally reselling rebranded Teron boards. If *that* had been the deal on the table at the time (rather than "create an OS in 4 months, and run it on custom hardware yet to be developed"), others might have been interested. Potentially even others who were more qualified, for whatever reason. What Hyperion and Eyetech did to Amiga Inc is a classic example of bait-and-switch; Get the contract with ridiculous promises (thus locking out any potential competitor who is less willing to make blatantly stupid statements), then when the time comes to deliver, renegotiate.

@umisef

Quote:

umisef wrote: @samface Quote: Besides, we already have Cloanto's Amiga Forever which provides the exact same functionality but with more hardware compatibility since it runs on Windows instead of Linux or QNX. If you believe that sentence, you should disqualify yourself from this discussion on ground of ignorance :)

I notice the smiley, but I would still like to clarify that I meant the same functionality from a user's perspective. No offense intended. :)

Quote:

Quote: You keep focusing on possible returns on investments without a plan for how to earn a capital to invest first. Well, interesting point --- SOMEONE must have been paying the Friedens' salary for the last 4+ years. Any pre-delivery royalties from AmigaONE sales are a drop in the ocean compared to that investment. So don't pretend that the current path didn't require a large amount of cash to start with.

Of course, but they obviously didn't have enough and needed that little extra financial aid to keep going. Atleast that is what I can understand from what both Eyetech and Hyperion has said.

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@umisef

No, its the turn of falemagn, he compared the two sales and i would like to see the source of his numbers for the amiga one and amithlon. Okay, you showed me now that the sales for Amithlon are over 1500 and sorry... 1500 sales are not an bestseller (particularly in the x86 world)

But now falemagn show me the AOne Sales figures so that you can prove youre comparison

_________________
Ei gude wie!
I love my AMIGA Collection...
2x A500 (1x 1MB) OS1.3
1x A600 (40MB HDD) OS2.05 (broken joyport)
1x A1200 (68030/50, 32 MB Fast RAM) OS3.1
1x A4000D 040/40 (48 MB Fast), OS3.9, Fastlane Z3, CV64, Deneb, Indi AGA
1x CD³²
1x µAOn

@samface

Quote:

Simple, because you won't find a hardware supplier in the x86 market that is willing to cooperate with Hyperion to the same extent as Eyetech which means even more time and money for development and no funds until the product is out on the shelves.

You are correct. You won't find any hardware supplier in the x86 market who delivers hardware with a BIOS which is so thoroughly broken that the OS developers have to spend a lot of time and effort porting an open source project to replace it. Which, indeed, did take up funds. However, I can't quite see why you would bring that up.

But hey, that time was probably roughly paid for by the royalty prepayments from A1 sales, so for now, it all balances out. Shame, though, that once the product is finished, the royalties will have been already spent...

Or maybe you were referring to Eyetech's extensive technical support with regards to Southbridge initialization issues, Northbridge "features" and the use of resistors instead of capacitors on USB ports? I am sure Eyetech's support proved invaluable to Hyperion when dealing with those issues. All those nights Alan would have spent crouched over a logic analyzer make programming an OS so much easier.

Sarcasm aside --- nobody can deny that any time OS4 misbehaves, the question of "is it the software or is it the hardware" comes up. That sort of scenario wastes incredible amounts of time(1), for all involved. How much better would it have been to have a known working motherboard, of which a few tens of thousands are in daily use and the hardware problems of which are thus known....

(1) Just the other day, I wasted more than an hour trying to work out why some code modification of mine wouldn't work --- only to ultimately find that the version of gcc I had was ignoring a flag that told it to leave a particular register alone. And that was a very benign kind of "bug in underlying architecture"; It was reproducable, easily confirmed once suspected, and didn't mysteriously disappear when something completely unrelated was changed. Most such bugs are much worse.

@samface


Quote:

Quote: >Besides, we already have Cloanto's Amiga Forever which provides >the exact same functionality but with more hardware compatibility >since it runs on Windows instead of Linux or QNX. If you believe that sentence, you should disqualify yourself from this discussion on ground of ignorance :) I notice the smiley, but I would still like to clarify that I meant the same functionality from a user's perspective. No offense intended. :)

I repeat my previous comment. If you believe the user experience from Amiga Forever is "the same" as that from Amithlon, you should not discuss either.

If you want to educate yourself, work out the average time the elapses between a key being pressed on the keyboard and the matching character showing up (i.e. being visible to the use) in a shell window, for either system.

@umisef

Interesting theory. Although, you don't think there is just a little bit too many circumstances that contradicts the theory that it all would have been just a part of Hyperion and Eyetech's evil scheme to take over classic AmigaOS and hardware development? I mean, with the motherboard from Escena that would plug into an A1200, it might actually have been possible to deliver in such short time frame since the OS would still have access to the classic hardware and the need for it could be gradually removed instead of having to be removed completely just in order to be able to boot like they had to when Eyetech were forced to switch hardware design partners and ended up with the AmigaOne standalone boards that we have today.

And then, the negotiations had taken 2 years already. With or without Eyetech, Amiga Inc. had hardly waited around for another year or two just to be able to offer a better deal when hardware was available. If it wasn't for the prospect of a next-generation PPC AmigaOS, why would any Amiga PPC hardware show up at all?

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@cHaOs667

Quote:

1500 sales are not an bestseller (particularly in the x86 world)

Forget "x86 world". There is no such thing.

Think "Amiga World". Find me any other Amiga product that, this millennium, has sold 1500 copies, and you have a bestseller. I think your best bet would be the Pegasos line of machines, oddly enough :)

@umisef

Considering that Amiga Forever has the advantage of being able to run on faster hardware and that many of the things that made Amithlon so much faster than UAE does now exist in UAE too (ie JIT, disabling chipset emulation, etc), I'd say it's a close call. Amiga Forever wins on backwards compatibility (who doesn't like firing up one of those old A500 games once in a while?) , hardware compatibility (should be rather self-explanatory) and not requiring a dual-boot setup to get along with Windows (yes, that is a feature if you're dependant on using it for work, etc.).

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@falemagn

Ok! So what do you do right now in aros? Im curious. I think its looking very good for the future with collage students assigned at the projekt, Schultz with ATI and x86-64 and all. There is to little info about whats going on at the core though.
Keep it up!

@samface

Quote:

Although, you don't think there is just a little bit too many circumstances that contradicts the theory

No, not at all.

Quote:

I mean, with the motherboard from Escena that would plug into an A1200, it might actually have been possible to deliver in such short time frame since the OS would still have access to the classic hardware

Considering how long it took for OS4 to even boot on the CSPPC or BPPC (which are in the exact same position in that regared as any hypothetical Escena boards), I'd say that "might" does not look very likely.

Quote:

And then, the negotiations had taken 2 years already.

Nonsense. Utter nonsense!

At AmiWest '01, OS4 was announced for November 1st, 2001. That's the OS4 done by H&P. On August 3rd, 2001, Alan still promised OS4 for October 2001. That's still the H&P OS4.

Think about it. The deal was announced in November 2001. 2 years before that, Amiga was still a subdivision of Gateway, and OS3.9 hadn't even been worked on. Hyperion itself had been in existence for a mere 7 months....

@samface

Quote:

Considering that Amiga Forever has the advantage of being able to run on faster hardware and that many of the things that made Amithlon so much faster than UAE does now exist in UAE too (ie JIT, disabling chipset emulation, etc), I'd say it's a close call.

See, that's exactly why you shouldn't be talking about this sort of stuff.

Under WinUAE, Windows gets a keyboard interrupt. Its keyboard driver talks to the keyboard hardware, and shoves a keypress event into UAE's event queue. Every once in a while (used to be every 20ms, no idea what it is these days), UAE checks the event queue, and if it finds a keypress event, triggers an emulated CIA interrupt; Emulated AmigaOS then gets the key from the emulated CIA, hands it to the shell, which updates the emulated screen. That emulated screen is nothing more than some memory; Every now and again (once again, not all that often), all the changes that happen in that emulated screen get copied to the real screen (or, if you happen to run with an OpenGL based display, into a GL surface, which at some later point gets composed onto the real screen).

In contrast, Amithlon directly receives the keyboard interrupt (it's one of those interrupts that get handled by the emulator itself). It immediately talks to the hardware, gets the key, and immediately(!) creates an emulated CIA interrupt. The shell gets the key, and updates its window in screen memory. The memory it updates *is* the memory of the gfx card, so any modification is immediately visible.

One model introduces a distinct delay, the other one doesn't. One is an emulator running on top of an OS, the other one isn't. Don't pretend they are the same, or you look foolish. The call is not even anywhere near "close".

(Oh, and no, UAE's JIT is still considerably slower than Amithlon's, and even with disabled custom chip emulation UAE wastes performance on counting emulated CPU cycles as the base of all timings, where Amithlon deals with actual hardware timers. And UAE had JIT when Amithlon came out, and the ability to disable chipset emulation.)

@umisef

Well, no matter how you choose to look at it, it's not like those development costs would have been any less without the AmigaOne sales to help funding the development costs.

Now, as for the reasons of the hardware problems Hyperion and Eyetech went through, I believe MAI funded the UBoot development, the southbridge problems was just as much of a problem for x86 boards with the same southbridge, the northbrdige problems was probably the "easiest" problem for them to solve in software thanks to their good relationship with MAI and the problems of resistors instead of capacitors on the USB ports was due to a layout problem that occurred in the factory that didn't require much time for finding the problem and correcting it. None of these problems are unique for PPC motherboard designs.

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)

@samface

Quote:

Well, no matter how you choose to look at it, it's not like those development costs would have been any less without the AmigaOne sales to help funding the development costs.

I beg to differ. Any development which was only necessary due to the, uhm, "pecularities" of their chosen hardware could have been avoided, and the costs (and other resources, such as programmer time) for it saved.

@umisef

Well, I'm a user and I've tried both Amiga Forever and Amithlon. They both works ten times faster (please don't take that literary) than an original Amiga, which is faster than the other is impossible for me to tell since both systems seems to respond within an instant. No technical explanation is ever going to change that as my personal first-hand user experience much less discredit me from having it. Of course that isn't saying that your technical explanations would in any way be wrong.

Now, given that both systems satisfies my need for speed, other features such as hardware compatibility and backwards compatibility with software requiring the classic Amiga chipsets becomes more important to me. Of course other people might have other needs and therefore also different priorities. I'm just expressing my highly subjective take on the matter.

_________________
Sammy Nordström, A.K.A. "Samface"

MINDRELEASE.net - The Non-Commercial Network of Digital Arts.

Samworks D & C - Professional Web Development (in Swedish)