@manga303

Thanks for sharing. I really like what you wrote.

Would you do me a favour and post the exact same thing in this thread.

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All the way, with 68k

@thread

For folks looking for the A1222 in the 'real world' there aren't too many videos out there, but I've collected the ones I know about into a YouTube playlist. Please let me know if there are any that should be added. Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAbdbe5OAG8v1Nkh0FM8V63KbgIk0339Z

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

Now that the A1222+ is being commercially marketed, I discovered that the the A1222 Guide was updated on Oct. 15.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan

@RobertB & Eliyahu

I just noticed the updates. Several of the incompatible programs that were barriers to me buying the system are now working. I'm not sold yet, but it is starting to look usable.

_________________
I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

@manga303

My first impression is Guide for New A1222 Users? What New A1222 Users? Right now, the last update I have seen on the A1222 isn't on any of the official sites, isn't on the main A1222 site, but is in some exclusive Facebook post from an Amiga company that doesn't even list it on their main site. Amedia. That makes it rather exclusive. This would further enforce your point.

The A1222, or Tabor as it was known, an ode to the A1200 but without a case, is an unfortunate tale. A great idea when announced and even people who hadn't entered into an OS4 machine were interested. But, the idea of a low cost OS4 machine, was ruined by a poor CPU choice that was the catalyst for a slippery slope downhill from which it never recovered and the idea is almost destroyed by the pricing a decade later soon enough. An LTE type emulator is a technical achievement, but, if an emulator was needed for the same type of CPU which looks silly, why not just go the whole hog and chose one like ARM where they can go all the way? I mean, it's not like an x86-64 running x86-16 mode instructions, x86 decades apart.

Unfortunately for Trevor, he has to keep going with it, after investing so much into it. Anyone else would have cancelled the idea like most future boards in Amiga history. It's obvious here, Trevor will endure the cost of the sunk cost fallacy with the Tabor. I must say, if Trevor has any kind of technical adviser that recommended the P1022 CPU, I think he has a right to sue their pants to the ground!

That all said, to address some of your other points, I think the reason info is so hard to find is that some of us have been OS4 users for almost two decades. So we've lived through what works and what doesn't. What used to work and what new things we have now. There's a focus on 68K compatibility but, at the same time, it isn't intended to be stuck at the 68K level. It's intended to move beyond limitations and provide a modern AmigaOS environment. So if there is missing info, then it's because the ones using AmigaOS 4 were once classic Amiga users, but decades later now we're all old! Lol

This doesn't help new comers interested. I've heard lots of comments over the years. Some people in the early days thought OS4 sat on top of Linux as if it was like some kind of Windows 3.1 FWG. Others didn't even know it had any 68K compatibility built in, despite being a big selling point, and if it hadn't using PowerPC would have been pointless. In recent times some tried to browse the internet and wanted to know why the browser was broken, lol. This surprised me the most, as Amiga browsers were broken in the 90's, so why would that change? (Hello IBrowse, can you CSS yet? ) It further enforced the stereo type of most Amiga users playing games and not using AmigaOS for practical applications like web browsing. Coming back full circle, to the A1222, the info is spread across several sites that aren't updated very much. This is not uncommon. A-EON appears to lack a web master because for years most pages are broken in some way and shoot blanks at you. The X1000 page is one such example. At some point it went blank. When the X1000 was dropped and the X5000 was the NKOTB. The A1222 doesn't even have it's own page yet. And finding info on supported Radeon drivers. Plus 3D drivers. That's another nightmare! The horror never ends.

Bonus points. I found this image on A-EON site under Corporate. Why does it look like Trump?

@Hypex

The CPU choice is perplexing. I can only assume it either wasn't thought out/researched properly or it was more easily sourced.

It could even be a case of misunderstanding the importance of an FPU, after all FPU and MMU have always been a optional extras for 68K Amiga. Of course, this view fails to take into consideration that every PPC used on the Amiga and subsequent NG machines had an FPU (and MMU) as standard and the optional bonus unit is now a vector unit. Consequently, any software that has been developed over the course of NG has tended to use FPU for any floating point.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Most of the software catalogue likely still has source and could be recompiled. The problem is that you now have different binaries for the 1222, but in some sense this is not so different as having different 68K binaries for integer-only and FPU equipped classics. It just might be the case that there's a lot more software that cares about the FPU than there was.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: ... , if Trevor has any kind of technical adviser that recommended the P1022 CPU, I think he has a right to sue their pants to the ground!

IMR the Friedens always told they can handle this, just remember how far they got with the Notebook.


Quote:

Hypex wrote: Hello IBrowse, can you CSS yet? )

No one needs an IBrowse as long as they can use the Kinderwolf browser from the Friedens.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 03-Dec-2023 at 02:14 AM.

@PhantomInterrogative

For most things it is, for others, not so much. Hence why I wrote all of those pages.

If there are specific programs you'd like me to test more thoroughly, let me know. I'd be happy to give them a spin and give an honest impression.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

So this is in peoples hands now? I bought a case and everything in prep ... 7 years ago.

How is the performance vs. my SAM 440ep-Flex? How did that odd FPU work out. Thanks.



bp

_________________
:::: Amigas: 1000, 2000 '020, SAM440ep-Flex 733

@blakespot

That question has a rather long answer. So long as the software is not floating-point heavy, performance is way faster than your SAM440. But the FPU emulation layers aren't perfect by any means. I've written rather extensively about this, both online and in Amiga Future magazine.

If you have the time, please consider reviewing my online guide to the A1222 at http://eliyahu.org/tabor -- it should answer most of your questions thoroughly.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@eliyahu

Do FPU-enabled 68K applications running under JIT generate the correct native FPU instructions for the host CPU? I get that PPC code for the standard FPU necessarily takes a hit, but there's no reason emulated code has to.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Karlos

Unfortunately, no. This is really something I would have liked, but no one worked on Petunia to support generating SPE-native code. This also means that certain software like Cinema 4D doesn't work well at all on the A1222.

It's something that can be changed in the future, but no developer has volunteered to do the work so far.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@eliyahu

Well, that's less than ideal.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@eliyahu

One of my anim submissions to the 2023 Amiga Art Contest was done using an ARexx script with ImageFX doing some FPU heavy processing. It took 7 hours to render 1320 frames on an i5 3GHz using WinUAE 5.0. I think Petunia would need that SPE FPU emulation overhaul before I would even consider using it for some of the art I do. Either that, or an OS4.x native PPC-SPE ImageFX would be necessary for such work.

_________________
I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

@eliyahu

Quote:

Unfortunately, no. This is really something I would have liked, but no one worked on Petunia to support generating SPE-native code. This also means that certain software like Cinema 4D doesn't work well at all on the A1222.

Jesus. It just gets worse and worse. I wouldn't worry about ppc native applications because there is zero reason why they could not just get recompiled for the borked FPU. Maybe a slight inconvenience having to download the right package from aminet but that is about as bad as it would get.

But basically no one could be bothered to fix petunia and thus meaning that all fpu intensive 68k software that CAN NOT be recompiled will now not work in any meaningful way on this?

Jesus. that is not good.It is slow, it costs 1500$ and now it can't really run any of the more important and bigger 68k applications either?

I kind of feel sorry for Trevor. His heart is in the right place but his business decisions are just ... suboptimal.

@Karlos

Quote:

The CPU choice is perplexing. I can only assume it either wasn't thought out/researched properly or it was more easily sourced.

Possibly easily sourced or a cheap batch. Not long after GCC dropped support the elusive SPE. As useful as a Cell PPC in a PS3 and perhaps not as powerful.

Quote:

It could even be a case of misunderstanding the importance of an FPU, after all FPU and MMU have always been a optional extras for 68K Amiga. Of course, this view fails to take into consideration that every PPC used on the Amiga and subsequent NG machines had an FPU (and MMU) as standard and the optional bonus unit is now a vector unit. Consequently, any software that has been developed over the course of NG has tended to use FPU for any floating point.

That true. On 68K FPU and MMU were optional. Mostly being optional extras that only hardcore Amiga gamers or experts bought. But on PPC that has all changed as FPU and MMU comes as standard. I would place FPU as more important simply because code rarely would use MMU directly or even with the API. But with FPU it's expected. Now not all code will use floats but it's more common. 68K had maths libraries. Funny, I even saw a complaint about the classic maths libraries not being available for OS4 native code, because someone wanted to use the eternal library and not use FPU code inside the binary. They were upset at that but I think that's taking the Amiga programming too far.

Quote:

It's not all doom and gloom though. Most of the software catalogue likely still has source and could be recompiled. The problem is that you now have different binaries for the 1222, but in some sense this is not so different as having different 68K binaries for integer-only and FPU equipped classics. It just might be the case that there's a lot more software that cares about the FPU than there was.

Different binaries does slightly complicate it. And it does go back to the old ways of optimised code for CPU. It's a fine idea but in the Amiga scene it lacks standards so you need to manually copy the right binary. GCC was just updated to 11 in SDK but but SPE code will hold GCC back again since they need an obsolete version. One thing OS4 hasn't helped is to to sort out sloppy software. For one thing, they are still using the old User-Startup system. when they should have moved over to modular files by now. It's a bit ridiculous OS4 hasn't even started to complete the work done in 1989 when Commodore began to modularise the OS into different files. And they don't have a migration manager yet to transfer system settings to another volume.

@OneTimer1

Quote:

IMR the Friedens always told they can handle this, just remember how far they got with the Notebook.

Don't remember the notebook. Not Alice? Don't recall anything else.

Well, I'm sure they could handle it, but that doesn't mean they should have. If it improves their finances that's good for them but it still needs to be practical.

A dog can walk to the park, lie down in front of everybody, and sit there licking it's balls. But just because it can lick its privates in public, doesn't mean it should. Not sure where I was going with that comparison.

Quote:

No one needs an IBrowse as long as they can use the Kinderwolf browser from the Friedens.

Could kids use it at the kindergarten?

That browser doesn't work on 68K so no one can use it on 68K. But not only does IBrowse work on 68K. You download it and it works.

Last edited by Hypex on 07-Dec-2023 at 03:23 PM.

@eliyahu

Quote:

eliyahu wrote: ... no one worked on Petunia to support generating SPE-native code. This also means that certain software like Cinema 4D ...

Blender or Pov Ray are supportung PPC under AOS4

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 07-Dec-2023 at 05:30 PM.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @OneTimer1 Quote: IMR the Friedens always told they can handle this, just remember how far they got with the Notebook. Don't remember the notebook. Not Alice? Don't recall anything else.

http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2011-10-00049-EN.html
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2013-05-00088-EN.html

It was explained why it will hardly work but the Friedens where still confident.

Quote:

That browser doesn't work on 68K so no one can use it on 68K. But not only does IBrowse work on 68K. You download it and it works.

This thread is about A1222 a PPC/Power mother-board dedicated to AOS4, therefor it should run Frieden's special Firefox port for AOS4.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 07-Dec-2023 at 05:32 PM.

@OneTimer1

Come on. That port of Firefox was submitted as completed years ago and never worked particularly well then, even though it might have met all the goals set for it. Why should it suddenly be expected to work any better now?

It's no secret that OS4 is lacking a modern, standards compliant browser, is it?

Last edited by OldAmigan on 07-Dec-2023 at 09:03 PM.

_________________
Fred Booth
========================================
A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030
AmigaOne and OS4.1
Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0
Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
2006 Macb