@OlafS25

Quote:

Neither AmigaOS or MorphOS have anything like that.

That was exactly my point: All these ways were tried - with known results. 10000 users could be sustainable community (Bill McEwen once mentioned 5000 users as goal, but I´m more close to reality ).

Last edited by pavlor on 19-Dec-2015 at 02:06 PM.

@All:

Having spent a couple of hours reading this thread...

I see very little beyond hyenas fighting over a fresh carcass insisting individual ownership of it instead of sharing...

I don't see any resolution to the above than to call for any such threads with 10+ pages of consistent argumentative crap being thrown to be locked by a moderator.

I'll stick with developing my own software and whether anyone is actually interested or not try to make something of the "Amiga" system I have.

As for the OS family...

We have AmigaOS up to 3.9 for 68K machines and the Frankenstein hack-a-thons they become.
We have AmigaOS 4.x for PowerPC based machines,
We have the MorphOS clone also for PowerPC using the legacy of PowerPC Apple hardware...
We have AROS as an Open Source Effort that anyone can support...

make your choice and be happy with it!

If none of the above work for you then learn what you need to know and make your own.

I'm sick to the back teeth and then some of all the backstabbing (moo bunny crap, good riddance), my is is better than yours (pissing contests!!! ugh!!!!) and the whole "we need {x}!!!" arguments.

I get enough crap from children being an Assistant Language Teacher without seeing worse here.

Some Animals have better arguments and behaviour and that is using teeth and claws.

Why don't we ALL put effort into making something good with the platform we have and cherry pick what we want from other platforms that is usable stuff.

@Kronos

Quote:

It has not worked to the extend that Amiga fanatics from 1st world countries are still sitting on the fence 14 years later ...

Yes, and that fence is getting uncomfortable!

I'm going to get asteroids if I sit on it much longer.

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

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

Porting to XBOX or PS3 won't be an option because MS and Sony are too protective about hacking.

Not to mention that both have already abandoned PPC, so they will no longer be a source of new hardware, even if they were open systems.

If Apple moving to x86 was the beginning of the end for PPC on consumer products, then Xbox and PS4 moving to x86-64 must be the "end of the end".

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

@Signal

Quote:

I wish somebody would do something. Nobody is doing anything.

Not everything that is being worked on is being talked about, I'm certain.

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

@bison
Quote:

bison wrote: @Signal Not everything that is being worked on is being talked about, I'm certain.

So am I.

_________________
Tinkering with computers.

@cdimauro

Quote:

"Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate."

In that case, I guess I can post this without invocation.

https://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/hitler-had-one-testicle/2015/12/19/id/706510/

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

@Belxjander

Quote:

TRIPOS corrected: We have Workbench up to 3.X for 68K machines and the Frankenstein hack-a-thons they become. We have AmigaOS 4.x for PowerPC based machines, We have MorphOS for PowerPC based machines, such as AmigaOne X5000, Sam460/AmigaOne 500 and more than 80 other mainstream systems, including many laptops... We have AROS as an Open Source Effort that anyone can support...

Made a few corrections...

@TRIPOS

I was not including being so specific about each system for a reason so your "correction" gives the impression of trolling.
Hopefully I am wrong about that.


anyway... do you have a comprehensive listing of all the available systems in question that can be consulted?

@Belxjander

Quote:

Hopefully I am wrong about that.

Of course you were. Just pointing out some facts.

The OS for 68k machines is for example sold new (even slightly updated) in several versions even today (you could buy v1.3, v2.1 and v3.1 new today, you can even have the slightly improved v3.1 delivered on real floppies), but it is not sold under the "AmigaOS" brand, it's referred to as "Workbench" (which is a registered trademark of Cloanto, the owner of the OS). And sporadically available leftover NOS copies of "3.9" at some dealers aside, the latest official OS version still produced/developed(?)/sold as new is version "3.X" (capital X). But this AFAIK is not sold separately, but included with Amiga Forever.

Quote:

anyway... do you have a comprehensive listing of all the available systems in question that can be consulted?

For MorphOS?

Of course:

http://library.morph.zone/Supported_Computers

@TRIPOS

Quote:

the latest official OS version still produced/developed(?)/sold as new is version "3.X" (capital X).

Cloanto wouldn´t agree with this one.

@pavlor

Well, that's what they call it, so...

@TRIPOS

Quote:

Well, that's what they call it, so...

Yes Cloanto sells its AmigaOS files under "Workbench" trademark, but at same time uses amiga-os identificator (Structure and Names of Emulation and System Files) and recognises AmigaOS 4 as another version of the same OS it sells (Name of the Amiga Operating System, Distribution of CBM/Amiga ROM and OS Files etc.).

@matthey

What bottle necks do you see in the '060?
Motorola went fully superscalar with this last 68K.
It actually might be easier to upclock the '040.

Quote:

iggy wrote: What bottle necks do you see in the '060? Motorola went fully superscalar with this last 68K. It actually might be easier to upclock the '040.

The 68040 may be more popular based on what it supports in hardware but I doubt the design is a good candidate for an "upclock". While a die shrink would make it run cooler, it would still run hot in comparison to modern processors. The 68060 dropped the voltage and added gating to turn off unused units which made it run cool, especially for the day. The 68060 was designed to run in laptops from the beginning unlike the 68040 which required a redesign for the 68040V. The 68040 has a shallower pipeline than most processors today. This generally limits clock speeds and reduces performance but is good for speculative branching and reduces the amount of logic needed (normally good for power efficiency). The 68060 has a good pipeline depth for a general purpose processor. The big bottleneck on the 68060 is the instruction fetch which is only 32 bits for 2 powerful integer units although there is a decoupled buffer which helps. The 68060 can only forward longword (32 bit) sized results (common for 32 bit processors) but longword immediates like OP.L #,EA are too big for the fetch. I came up with a 100% compatible ISA enhancement which can compress many of these instructions whose immediate value would fit in a word (common). If this had been implemented in the 68060, it would have helped reduce the fetch bottleneck considerably (ColdFire came up with the MOV3Q instruction but it is ugly and very limited in immediate range). The instruction fetch is the only glaring bottleneck and increasing it to 64 bit fetch is enough to feed 3 integer pipes on the 68k with it's average instruction length being shorter than most other processors. After looking at statistics of (Amiga) 68k code, I strongly recommended 3 integer pipes which is what the Apollo is now using (this is very unusual for a CPU but has the potential for amazing integer performance). Of course this would need a good compiler instruction scheduler to take advantage since the Apollo (and 68060) design has in order execution (but CISC instruction scheduling is generally significantly simpler than for RISC). The 68060 performs quite well considering the lack of a good instruction scheduler (SAS/C has one but it is not that great and ends up scheduling many instructions that should have been removed). The 68060 should have had a few more instructions in both integer units especially the SWAP instruction which is common where the 68k lacks shift/rotate greater than 8 and the result is 32 bits so it could be forwarded. The removal of 64 bit result multiply from hardware was a mistake as GCC was already using it extensively to convert division by a constant into a multiply. The 68060 did not have a fully pipelined FPU like the Pentium which reduced performance in mostly FPU code but I doubt it hurt performance much in the more common mixed code while saving some logic. Many other more modern features are internal optimizations. ColdFire processors added a link stack and instruction folding which the 68060 did not have. The similarity of the designs between CF and 68k means it is likely that these features would not have been a problem on the 68060. The CF received an ISA update while the 68060 was still using the old 68k ISA but it is a mixed bag. There should have been an ABI update which passes arguments to functions in registers for the CF instead of adding instructions to the ISA that help code density for stack based arguments but then we aren't talking about the inefficiencies of the CF.

I doubt the existing 68040 or 68060 designs are in states which are good candidates to modernize. The process used to develop and manufacture them is old and tedious. Now days sythesizable CPU cores are developed in FPGA. More modern CF designs are fully sythesizable. It might be easier to modify the superscalar v5 CF core with some of the 68060 logic but then it looks like the Apollo core would easily outperform the v5 CF if an ASIC was created. I would bring in some outside experts to examine the state of the Apollo core and give their opinion before deciding anything. I chose 2 people I wanted to look at it contacting one and tracking down where the other lives. Of course I was just the little guy trying to make things happen. It is difficult with out the backing of bigger players. C= practically blocked and backed out of lucrative deals which would have proliferated the AmigaOS into embedded systems (cable boxes) and kiosks. Has anything changed? Will it ever change?

Last edited by matthey on 20-Dec-2015 at 11:14 PM.

@matthey

Even if they had managed to push Amiga OS into embedded, it would not have meant much, everyone would still jump to more modern and robust operating systems within very short time, and Linux would still rule the embedded market.

Last edited by kolla on 20-Dec-2015 at 11:38 PM.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

Quote:

kolla wrote: Even if they had managed to push Amiga OS into embedded, it would not have meant much, everyone would still jump to more modern and robust operating systems within very short time, and Linux would still rule the embedded market.

It wasn't so much push as allow. Some development and support may be necessary but there could be income too. The AmigaOS used to be scalable, modular, simple and had a small footprint, especially with the 68k. The 68k is easy to work with and debug at a low level. This is all very good for embedded but there has to be affordable hardware available. I wish we could compare the Raspberry Pi units sold for embedded systems vs PPC Amiga sales combined. We might have to do some more polling ;).

@matthey

AmigaOS was never scalable, I don't quite grasp how you can see it as that. Scalable means being able to scale, and AmigaOS cannot scale beyond its very strict limitations. Compared to other operating systems from its period, I don't even think Amiga OS had such a small footprint. Compared to its peers, AmigaOS had a long list of features it was lacking. Once you installed third party packs to AmigaOS to catch up with the rest, the footprint quickly grew a lot.

I can mention that I have used an A600 in an embedded type of job, hooking it up to a lab setup, where it would play animations based on input from a panel of buttons hooked to serial port, communicating arexx with DPaintV player (or maybe it was SCALA, I cannot remember). Researchers just had to turn it on, and it would be loaded and ready to play animations. Google "looming ntnu amiga" and you will find it, I am sure. Back then I used Amiga because it was reliable on timing for playing back animations, and it was simple to hook up. Today the same experiments are still running, but now using Windows.

Why do you want to compare RPi vs PPC Amiga? Anyone can tell you, RPi sales outnumbers those of PPC Amiga by a vast magnitude. Officially there were 5 millions sold in February, today there are probably a million or so more sold. And PPC Amiga systems sold are probably less than a few thousand.

Last edited by kolla on 21-Dec-2015 at 03:37 AM.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

Quote:

kolla wrote: AmigaOS was never scalable, I don't quite grasp how you can see it as that. Scalable means being able to scale, and AmigaOS cannot scale beyond its very strict limitations. Compared to other operating systems from its period, I don't even think Amiga OS had such a small footprint. Compared to its peers, AmigaOS had a long list of features it was lacking. Once you installed third party packs to AmigaOS to catch up with the rest, the footprint quickly grew a lot.

Hardware dependence is different than scalability. AmigaOS 68k can be cut down to operate with less than half a megabyte of memory or can be scaled up to a fairly modern and powerful GUI environment. Most dynamic multitasking operating systems do not scale down as far as the AmigaOS. The 68k AmigaOS could probably be 15%-30% smaller with better optimization and maybe 5%-15% smaller with the ISA changes I wanted to make so yes, it could have been smaller. New features can be added where the AmigaOS is lacking to scale it up. Minimal changes have been necessary to allow the AmigaOS to be a fairly modern OS and it has been able to keep good compatibility so far. We will see if that holds when adding SMP and 64 bit addressing support.

Quote:

I can mention that I have used an A600 in an embedded type of job, hooking it up to a lab setup, where it would play animations based on input from a panel of buttons hooked to serial port, communicating arexx with DPaintV player (or maybe it was SCALA, I cannot remember). Researchers just had to turn it on, and it would be loaded and ready to play animations. Google "looming ntnu amiga" and you will find it, I am sure. Back then I used Amiga because it was reliable on timing for playing back animations, and it was simple to hook up. Today the same experiments are still running, but now using Windows. Why do you want to compare RPi vs PPC Amiga? Anyone can tell you, RPi sales outnumbers those of PPC Amiga by a vast magnitude. Officially there were 5 millions sold in February, today there are probably a million or so more sold. And PPC Amiga systems sold are probably less than a few thousand.

You probably used an Amiga 600 for your embedded/kiosk project because it was small, cheap and easy to work with. This is not the case with PPC Amigas so they are not being used for embedded systems. The Raspberry Pi is being used for embedded systems by the thousands because it is small, cheap and fairly easy to work with. I expect more Raspberry Pis are sold for embedded systems than Amiga PPC systems are sold. Cheap hardware would not only encourage development but attract new markets like embedded. The Raspberry Pi was never marketed for embedded use yet it probably is a bigger market than the Amiga. This is sad as the Amiga had so much potential for low end affordable computers but the mentality has been mid to high end desktops or bust (bust = bankrupt).

@matthey

Just bought some Silverlit Tech 50 in joystick that does 8-bit
games (sadly no C64 ot even NES) and new generation runs
16-bit games.

Motherboard is about 1.5x2 cm wide and components seem
like they can be made for peanuts.

On the other hand if Apollo went ASIC wouldn't it kill any income
Freescale (or whoever owns it now) has from selling spare
68k chips ? Could be problematic in that case ...