@DBAlex

Quote:

There would be an installer than seamlessly installs all of this, so the user can simply insert an old disk and boot it.

Great idea!! Floppy compatibility is good for Classic owners but what about ex-Amigans coming back to the fold? I have bought 2 copies of the old ECS game 'Apidya' off Ebay to use with WHDLoad. Both sets of disk had bad block and hence the WHDLoad installation failed!!!

We need electronic distribution, especially with our old floppy disks beginning to suffer from 'Bit-Rot'!!!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@umisef Quote:

And how do you suppose to speed up 3D rendering with an FPU-less processor which has access to all of 64kB of memory? How much rendering have you done on a C64 recently?

For someone who used to have such a "can do" attitude (see Amithlon for example), it's sad to see that now (in almost every single post) you only criticise things, rather than thinking "how can break those limitations & do something cool" :( .

BTW, equating the XMOS chip to a C64 is kind of ridiculous. How many C64's had access to a PPC main bus running at hundreds of MHz? How many C64's had dedicated parallel cores designed to do jobs that weren't hard-coded into it (such as accessing that bus)? Of course we don't know exactly how it will be wired-up in the X1000, but then again you shouldn't be making such wildly pessemistic comparisons either.

_________________
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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@BigD Quote:

I have bought 2 copies of the old ECS game 'Apidya' off Ebay to use with WHDLoad. Both sets of disk had bad block and hence the WHDLoad installation failed!!!

What about obtaining a WHDLoad installation from someone else? Since you own the game, I don't see there should be any serious legal problems, even if it might be a grey area.

Regarding floppy compatibility, yes, it would be great, but I'm not sure that it could ever work well: Most games use copy-protection (non-DOS disks), and so probably wouldn't be readable even by UAE. (If WinUAE manages this then it must have taken a guargantuan effort.)

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@ChrisH

Quote:

BTW, equating the XMOS chip to a C64 is kind of ridiculous

No, it is not. Both have 64kB of RAM. And that alone is a disabling characteristic for 3D rendering in 2010.

Quote:

How many C64's had dedicated parallel cores designed to do jobs that weren't hard-coded into it

How many single-core XCore chips have parallel cores? Just as many as C64s.

Oh, and the C64 had a coprocessor attached via a serial bus which was actually more powerful than the main processor. How many programs did *you* have that did their calculation on the floppy drive?

Quote:

How many C64's had access to a PPC main bus running at hundreds of MHz?

And what, pray tell, gives you the idea that the XCore chip is hooked up to the "PPC main bus"? It's not designed for that.

Quote:

For someone who used to have such a "can do" attitude

A can-do attitude means not shying away from things which are hard. It won;t last very long if instead of hard things, you try to do the impossible. Thus, *especially* for someone with a can-do attitude, the question "is there an ironclad reason why it is impossible, rather than merely hard" is an important one. Without the can-do attitude, it doesn't matter, because you won't try to do either; But once something merely hard is a challenge, you really, really want to work out that difference!

@ChrisH

I some what I agree whit umisef on this,

What does the XMOS chip do on the card?
What is going to be used for?

No one can answer this question

the answers we have gotten so far is some geek who is interested will use for some thing?
Or because its a geeky chip its going to sell,

So way not add a chip for HD video decoding instead?
I think a HD video decoding chip general more interested for most people the a geek has strange obsessions whit strange electronics.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 25-Jun-2010 at 08:02 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 25-Jun-2010 at 07:59 PM.

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@umisef

Quote:

umisef wrote: And what, pray tell, gives you the idea that the XCore chip is hooked up to the "PPC main bus"? It's not designed for that.

Who cares what it was designed for. I'll use the darn thing any way possible to accomplish
whatever task I may feel it is possible of.
Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: What does the XMOS chip do on the card? What is going to be used for? No one can answer this question

And it can not be discussed in any thread, at this time, due to self appointed experts
and people(?) dedicated, as stated by one of them, to destroying this community
and the Amiga experience in general.

@NutsAboutAmiga

"So way not add a chip for HD video decoding instead?"

I think the x1000 has also that.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@umisef
Pyromania, Amiga.org site administrator, says he want to do a transputer accelerated rendering engine for Alladin or something, anyway, fun stuff, dismissing everything it's not the right attitude for a can do man as you were in Amigaland (I was told).
With your tech knowledge you can emphasize bad sides of anything, but you could also do the opposite exercise and a few could stand up.

Let the bitterness go, and do something Amiga, i know you want, you're always here talking

_________________
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Amiga 2000 DKB 2MB ChipRam GVP G-Force040 Picasso 2 OS3.9 BB2
AmigaCD 32

@DAX

Quote:

Pyromania, Amiga.org site administrator, says he want to do a transputer accelerated rendering engine for Alladin or something, anyway, fun stuff

How hard is it to understand that a Transputer was a general purpose CPU, with a memory controller and an FPU (in the case of the T800 family, which is what you'd be using for this sort of thing) --- and thus is, as far as 3D rendering is concerned, completely unlike the XCore chip?

Yes, transputers were cool. Even a single one was, at the time, fairly competitive with "mainstream" CPUs; And once you combined lots of them, and wrote your software to make best use of the parallelism, you could get great performance. For a while, programming neural networks on such machines put food on my table. If they had managed to hit the original price target of a few bucks per chip, instead of hundreds of dollars, things would have been great.

Now, XCore has managed to hit that old price target. But in the process, they have given up some things which mean they are no longer shooting at the same market as the transputers did. So why bring up transputers in a discussion about the usefulness, or lack thereof, of the XCore chip on the X1000?

@umisef

So I take it you already have your AmigaOne X1000 and are putting it through it's paces? Nice to have X1000 experts on here that have never touched or even seen one in person.

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@Mechanic

Quote:

Quote: And what, pray tell, gives you the idea that the XCore chip is hooked up to the "PPC main bus"? It's not designed for that. Who cares what it was designed for. I'll use the darn thing any way possible to accomplish

Well, for starters, the PA6T is an SoC --- it doesn't have an (externally accessible) "main bus". So hooking up the XCore to its main bus would be rather hard to accomplish....

But even if we ignore that, the XCore is an intelligent I/O processor, which is *also* an SoC. Which means it *also* doesn't have any provision for being hooked up to a high speed bus. It can implement medium speed I/O protocols by, essentially, bit-banging the I/O lines (making use of shift registers) --- but medium speed I/O protocols are orders of magnitude slower than a "PPC main bus" would be.

Quote:

whatever task I may feel it is possible of.

*Feeling* that something is possible does not make it possible. The proof is in the *doing*.

@TrevorDick

I want to say only one thing to you...

very nice Boing tie !

I hope you will bundle one with every X1000...

_________________
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AmigaOS, the last hope...

@DiscreetFX

Quote:

So I take it you already have your AmigaOne X1000 and are putting it through it's paces? Nice to have X1000 experts on here that have never touched or even seen one in person.

Let me guess --- you have never dropped a raw egg from head height onto concrete in the Southern hemisphere, right?

If I told you that I believed, but had no evidence whatsoever to support that believe, that in Australia, raw eggs dropped from that height bounce like rubber balls, rather than break --- would you really consider yourself unqualified to point out the problems with that believe simply because you had not actually run the experiment in Australia?


I *have* done "3D rendering" on an FPU-less 64kB machine. It was over 20 years ago, and the machine was an Apple //gs. And yes, the XCore could do the same thing about 3 orders of magnitude faster, but the problem is that "the same thing" is not what anybody wants to do in 2010.
You are the one whose business deals with 3D rendering. Answer the simple question --- how many vertices does an scene description have in 2010? One that people would actually want to render, not for a benchmark, but for actual production work?

@umisef

Please test it on your X1000 and let us know.

@Zorro

Your right, Trevor's boing tie rocked!

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 25-Jun-2010 at 11:36 PM.

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@DiscreetFX

Quote:

Please test it on your X1000 and let us know.

What's the "it" in that sentence?

I make you a deal --- if you write some 3D rendering accelerator to run on an XCore chip, I'll get one and benchmark it for you.

Similarly, if you send me a perpetuum motion machine, I will test it. And if you send me a method for squaring the circle or thirding an angle, I shall test that, too.

What *IS* your fascination with trying to pretend the X1000 is something it is not? Why don't you concentrate on what it *IS*, instead?

Last edited by umisef on 26-Jun-2010 at 12:03 AM.

@umisef

We will send you a Quantum Computer too. Wait for the tracking number later tonight. The point is several people including Trevor have worked very hard to bring Amiga OS 4.x fans a more modern machine and invested a lot into that. it's unkind of you to try and hurt thier sales before they even have a chance to complete the machine and make it available to customers. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

If you are still a great programmer (I don't doubt this) you could instead create a modern version of Amithlon, show by doing like you say instead of just being negative on Amiga forums all day.

Should'nt you be on forums that cater to a more modern configuration?




I wanted to also mention I felt really bad for you when Amithlon went off the market and it became unavailable to buy. It sounded like a very stressful time for you and lots of hard work went to waste do to things out of your control. That happened right when I wanted it. I still feel that Amithlon never got to reach it's full potentual and it would have been interesting to see it advance.

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 26-Jun-2010 at 02:13 AM.
Last edited by DiscreetFX on 26-Jun-2010 at 01:26 AM.
Last edited by DiscreetFX on 26-Jun-2010 at 01:25 AM.

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@DiscreetFX

Umisef has no access to any unrestricted XMOS material nor their very interesting roadmap.

I wouldn't take his opinion on the XMOS chip very seriously.

_________________

@DiscreetFX

Quote:

DiscreetFX wrote: @umisef Thanx but we will wait for the official XMOS development tools and documentation for Amiga OS 4.x and the X1000.

That's just another wording for "Oh we wont do it but when there is a demand for it, we will see how we coul make customers happey"

If you would really see a chance in the XMOS, you would already have bought a development kit, you have not bought one ... well you don't see a chance.

_________________
AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@umisef

Quote:

umisef wrote: What *IS* your fascination with trying to pretend the X1000 is something it is not? Why don't you concentrate on what it *IS*, instead?

Every Amiga that has landed on my desk has been nuaght more
than raw material for what it can be. Time and again the words
impossible and 'can't be done' have proven to be just that, words.

For the X1000, it will be something it is not. It will do
things it cannot. Impossible, what the heck does that mean.?

You're preaching to people who have no concept of impossible.
'Can't be done' only means 'I need more info' or a 'different
point of view', or..........

You are just wasting time on us. We're not wired that way. Sorry.

@DiscreetFX

Quote:

Arko wrote: @DiscreetFX Quote: DiscreetFX wrote: Thanx but we will wait for the official XMOS development tools and documentation for Amiga OS 4.x and the X1000. If you would really see a chance in the XMOS, you would already have bought a development kit, you have not bought one ... well you don't see a chance.

YEAH! EXACTLY! What's wrong with you.?

Don't you know you're supposed to know everything before you do.