@SpaceDruid

Quote:

I hate to bring in a bad word or to lower the tone of the thread, but this PC (sorry) I'm using is built from the latest tech - everything was cheap apart from the GFX card and there is nothing using IDE anywhere. Things have moved on.

It's pretty strange to talk about 'moving on' in relation to a machine that has a 400MHz CPU and PCI graphics...

Most of the potential buyers of this machine will already have an Amiga of some sort (Classic, A1, Amithlon, whatever) and almost of of those machines are using IDE drives. The lack of an IDE port complicates data transfer. No just connecting the old drive and copy everything over.

The small price premium of SATA optical drives over IDE ones should have been enough to cancel out the cost of an on-board SATA/IDE bridge.

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

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

Most of the potential buyers of this machine will already have an Amiga of some sort (Classic, A1, Amithlon, whatever) and almost of of those machines are using IDE drives. The lack of an IDE port complicates data transfer. No just connecting the old drive and copy everything over.

USBtoIDE and SATAtoIDE adapters cost almost nothing

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No PowerPC, No Fun
Make Amiga Great Again

@Fransexy

Yes, 10-15 Euro in Germany. And I have to admit to Adams point, that its really not relevant for a complete System. Even the PCI-GFX card is not the Problem, because there is simply no way in utilizing the higher bandwidth of AGP or PCI-E without a specialized GFX-Card driver AND SW demanding it.

The high bandwiths in modern PCGFX cards are there mainly for texture and object data, that doesn't fit in the oncard RAM. And thats a problem for Games only! In daily use, there is even single speed PCI enough for everything we can dream up SW-wiseon AmigaOS4 in a short to mid-range timeframe

When we caught up on the Games available for AmigaOS4 with the rest of the world, faster GFX is necessary. (in "two more weeks"(TM) that would be then )
But until then, we should be glad, if it materializes at all

@SpaceDruid

Quote:

See when this whole computer thing at home began, we used to have to build the motherboards ourselves and write all our own software. I say we should bring back those days! Who's with me? I've got me soldering iron warmed up and I'm ready to go. Amigans, give me some parts!

Not to forget when you could buy magazines with programs and games printed inside, talk about open source!

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Nicolas Mendoza

@dirigent

Quote:

But is that track, like, a clean-room implementation?

Far from it, I "karaoked" it over the original and mixed my vocals up to cover up the original...

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@nicomen

I once entered a "fountain" program on a ZX81, circa 1983-4, by poking the bytes directly into the ram - that was from a magazine listing. It worked! Ah, the glories of black and white displays, and you didn't even have to retune the TV from BBC2!

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@DrBombcrater

Quote:

Most of the potential buyers of this machine will already have an Amiga of some sort (Classic, A1, Amithlon, whatever) and almost of of those machines are using IDE drives. The lack of an IDE port complicates data transfer. No just connecting the old drive and copy everything over.

You can get ide2sata adaptors, like i already said.
And the price of sata disks might as well change in the near future. Look at sdram for example! It is now more expensive than ddr, which is simply because it is outdated and no longer being produced in big amounts.

Last edited by Tomas on 04-May-2007 at 12:58 PM.

Y'know...all things taken with an enormous grain of salt, and understanding that until these things are in production and for sale they might as well not exist, and realizing that with all due respect Adam K. hasn't delivered on a single frigging thing he's talked about so far (boards are produced, waiting for manuals to be printed, I'll be there with boards, no, I'll be there with CPU cards, I won't be there at all, yadda yadda yadda) - With all of that taken in to consideration I wonder if maybe, just maybe Adam and AInc took a page from the past, from the C= days and said "Well you know what? You couldn't buy bare motherboards from Commodore and build your own Amiga, so why not pick up where they left off?"

I'm just sayin'. Not saying it's smart, not saying it's gonna work, hell I'm not even saying anything is gonna actually appear (in fact I've got this creepy sort of Ryan-of-Merlancia vibe coming from everyone involved), but IF and I mean I F they've really got an ace in the hole and they're really going to produce these things, if that's not their strategy. A sort of "Build it and they'll come, like they did in '85."

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The problem with AmigaOS on PPC isn't that PPC is big-endian. The problem with AmigaOS on PPC is that PPC is dead-endian.

@Sneaky

Quote:

The high bandwiths in modern PCGFX cards are there mainly for texture and object data, that doesn't fit in the oncard RAM. And thats a problem for Games only!

Not just games i.e. non-gaming applications that runs on mainstream GpGPUs**. Note why AMD's Stream Processor product (using Radeon X19x0/R580 core) is shipped with 1GB of VRAM.

**Treating GpGPUs like CELL's SPUs...

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Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

BTW, did Amiga Inc. and ACK actually say that both boards would be out this summer? Right now it looks like the high-spec board will be released after the entry level one.

Hans

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http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Fransexy

Quote:

USBtoIDE and SATAtoIDE adapters cost almost nothing

And both have significant problems. Cheap USB-IDE adaptors are just bare adaptors, so you have to find some way to get power to the drive. More expensive ones have a PSU and enclosure, but they are generally poorly cooled and don't support spin-down so the hard drive slowly cooks to death. Transfer rates are about 1/3 of a real IDE port, too.

SATA-IDE converters are normally built around a PCB that can be a real pain to fit if the machine's case is small.

I still think it's deeply silly that people will have to spend £20 or so on one of these things because ACK didn't fit a £1 chip to their board.

@Sneaky
Quote:

The high bandwiths in modern PCGFX cards are there mainly for texture and object data, that doesn't fit in the oncard RAM. And thats a problem for Games only! In daily use, there is even single speed PCI enough for everything we can dream up SW-wiseon AmigaOS4 in a short to mid-range timeframe

Producing any motherboard with a display system that's not just obsolete, but a generation beyond obsolete, is just nuts. It basically limits the system, for it's entire life, to working with a creaky old low-end Radeon card.

That entails compromises that may not be instantly obvious. Don't, for example, buy a big TFT monitor to use with one of these things because the PCI Radeons don't have dual-link DVI. Same with HDMI, which is starting to take over from DVI and will be everywhere in a year or two.

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

@DrBombcrater

I think it's rather obvious that the low end system should be something similar to an A1200 or a consol if you like. All being built using the same enclosure, same gfx board, same HDD, same DVD-drive etc. I think the only reason to have any kind of PCI-slot in the first place is because it makes building the board cheaper/easier than putting the gfx chip on the board.

And what exactly would the point be of buying anything with DVI when there's no DVI support in OS4?

Well the low end system sounds good to me, if its ready to run out of the box, great a relatively cheap way to sample OS4.
plus if its in an amiga fantasy like case with tv out that would be awesome.
would these specs be capable of running divx's and stuff?

@AmiDog

Quote:

And what exactly would the point be of buying anything with DVI when there's no DVI support in OS4?

Hmm..recent monitors I have seen (even some very high end) are ridding themselves of DVI in favor of extra VGA.
Typing "DVI lawsuit" into google might provide some clues.

#6

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This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@number6
Quote:

Typing "DVI lawsuit" into google might provide some clues.

I did that and got three links, all pretaining to a 2003 lawsuit involving some company named "DVI inc.". A more general search without the quotes netted lots of links about DVI products, and a few about the 2003 lawsuit involving a company named "DVI Inc."

Are you suggesting that DVI Inc. owns the DVI standard? It appears they are a finance company.

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Here for the whimpering end

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

Producing any motherboard with a display system that's not just obsolete, but a generation beyond obsolete, is just nuts. It basically limits the system, for it's entire life, to working with a creaky old low-end Radeon card.

If I may chip in here... at work we use two and three monitor setups on our PCs, and the way we do this is by using PCI gfx cards. I can't remember what the model of the card is (only the IT guys are allowed to open the computers), but they're powerful enough to run Vista Glass with all the bells'n'whistles (and they have the "works with Vista" logo on the box - those are new cards!). Considering that the CPU on this new board's just a souped up 603, I think a DX9 capable card is probably plenty of muscle even if the bus it uses is only 66MHz.

@AmiDog

Quote:

And what exactly would the point be of buying anything with DVI when there's no DVI support in OS4?

I hope this will be implemented soon. DVI support is essential imho.

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ikir

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: @DrBombcrater Quote: Producing any motherboard with a display system that's not just obsolete, but a generation beyond obsolete, is just nuts. It basically limits the system, for it's entire life, to working with a creaky old low-end Radeon card. If I may chip in here... at work we use two and three monitor setups on our PCs, and the way we do this is by using PCI gfx cards. I can't remember what the model of the card is (only the IT guys are allowed to open the computers), but they're powerful enough to run Vista Glass with all the bells'n'whistles (and they have the "works with Vista" logo on the box - those are new cards!). Considering that the CPU on this new board's just a souped up 603, I think a DX9 capable card is probably plenty of muscle even if the bus it uses is only 66MHz.

I'd also like to point out that all three of my City's Super-Walmarts now only sell PCI graphics cards off their shelves which is probably due to the average customer not know the difference between PCI, PCI-Express and AGP (They used to sell all 3 types). My point is, that PCI cards are still being made and in large quantities too if Walmart stocks them.

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AmigaOne X1000, A4000(T), A3000, A2000, A1200(T), A1200, A500, CD32, Minimig+ARM, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64, C-One, C128, C128D, C64C, C64, VIC-20, CBM 8032, CBM4032, Efika, Ultimate64

@Rob

Elbox LOL now there's a business that has no office in Cracow.
When you visit the area, you know have fun walking & driving around for 2 hours. No phones, when you ask locals no one even the businesses in the area heard of them. ROFL

@NomadOfNorad

Quote:

Interesting. Haven't read the transcript yet, but, did he say anything about maybe having a Help key on that branded keyboard?

Unfortunatley, he said branded not custom built, therefore I would imagine it is a standard keyboard, just badged.

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Peter Swallow.
A1XEG3-800 [IBM 750FX PowerPC], running OS4.1FE, using ac97 onboard sound.

"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."