@digitaldisaster

Me see nothing either (Safari with Flash).

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@Herewegoagain

Found the bug, the flash animation was created on a Windows 2000 PC using Flash MX 2004 and tested with the defualt browser which was, sigh, IE 6. IE 6 uses the tag to get the location of teh swf file from but Firefox/Safari/Everything else uses the to find the swf file. I only changed the first tag to reflect the location of the swf on the server and so only IE would work. Sorry about that.
Yes donations have stalled at £74, publicity in the news on the AW.net main page should help. I am going to update the info in the project section and make is display all of the info that is stored in the DB (it currently shows about 1/5 of it) then link it into the roadmap. When that is done we should try to get it publicised some more, esspecially in the Linux (and Mac?) communitie(s).
I am still waiting for news from a potential investor.

@all

The projects setcion has been updated, all information stroed in teh database is now displayed and teh microATX motherboard has been added, the 2nd generation boards are still a mystery I'm affraid

@all

Looks like we've got some attention from the blue camp: http://www.morphzone.org/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3077&forum=3

I had better go get my soldering iron out...

@digitaldisaster

By the way, there was another donation today, £7, this is going way too slow. We need publicity, any ideas? Front page AW.net news would be a start.

Also there is a new website coming that will look like AW.net and we are setting up AW.net subdomain

@digitaldisaster

If you want to toss a banner on kefren.be feel free to email it to me ;)

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Amon's digital home

@Amon_Re

I would if I had one, would the logo work (It isn't transparent IIRC)?

@digitaldisaster

I'll have to check, i'll see what i can do

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Amon's digital home

@digitaldisaster
> Actaully, if you could license the IBM G5 northbridge then yes given a couple of competent
> ASIC devlopers and the cash needed then it could be done.

I know I'm coming into this thread a bit late, but that idea would be very very expensive. I work at Atmel designing FPGA and FPslic silicon, other people in the office to ASICs and ASSCs and I get to sit through their quarterly financial report meetings and see what things look like. With you at a company doing other things you might pull off a "build an embedded or industrial machine and sell a few extras as Amigas" trick, but wow. NRE (Non-Recurring Expenses, basically paying for the design to be put on silicon and buying the masks, package design if any, everything you only pay once that covers all die manufactured) costs on ASICs can run you a lot of dough, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then the manufacturing costs.

Why not just buy IBM G5 northbridge chips from IBM, as they're already done? Or MAI or Marvell or Tundra or Whoever??

It seems to make more sense to just buy already existing parts at this point, and build a system around those chips and connectors and standards.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@billt

That is the plan, from waht I can remember at that point I was simpl saying that it would be possible, if a little supid and financially unviable. Would you be interested in joining the project to help with engineering work?

@digitaldisaster
>If we put 2xGigabit Ethernet connectors on then yes we may well remove the 10/100
>connectors, depends how much it costs to keep them. The connectors wouldn't cost much but
>wou could get a few doalrs back off the PHY's

I think this is a good idea. We really only need one, some might like two connectors. They can be 10/100/Gb each so you don't need seperate ports for 10/100 and another for Gb. My MythTV box has a single ethernet port suporting any 10/100/Gb speed... And I would like Gb available, as if I ever get the Myth box actually doing what I want, it will be convenient to have extreme speed so it can stream to other computers in the house. Also for another linux box that I hope to use for playing with verilog simulations for FPGA projects. I don't expect to do anything huge, but verilog sims have the ability to get gargantuous... Plus I'll be running X GUIs over the network, and for that the faster the better. :)

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@billt

I think this is the best idea, there are 2x10/100 ports on the board and 2x10/100/1000, no-one will need 10/100 if they can use 10/100/1000.
One of the 10/100 ports is lost when the PPC405 service processor is removed and replaced by some form of microcontroller (probably, whatever does the job for the elast amount of $$$) the other (attached to the AMD8111 southbridge can go aswell to save a few books on the PHY+RJ45 connector.

@all

Another donation, £23, total now stands at ~£99

Get a bank loan. It's the only solution.

I agree with angrybrit here. A bank (or similar) loan is the only way you'll raise the funds for this project. The costs for bulk manufacturing such a project will be huge, no contribution system will come near to covering any costs (bar maybe a prototype board or 2). Or is this what youre trying to raise funds for ?? Sorry, I didnt bother reading all the posts because as much as Id like to believe something will come of it I just cant read it as anything but a nice fantasy. Unless you can come up with some proper money for bulk hardware purchases/manufacturing the prices will be way above what anyone but a handful of people would be willing to spend. People are already complaining about the price of A1's for the hardware you get compared to the price of other more powerful hardware, so I really cant see people willing to spend 3x that (an informed guess) again for a machine that, while closer to the mark, will still be slower than other hardware 1/5th of the cost. Good luck with it, but unless you can get ahold of some real money you'll not get more than a handful of boards made, and I cant imagine hyperion supporting a machine with a user base in single numbers

@fishy_fis

I can understand you not reeding the whole thing, this thread is huge! The donations simply give us the money to buy the evaluation board+schematics etc., the board goes to Hyperion for initial porting and the schematics etc. are used to create the updated board without the service processor and with FW800 on the AMD8111 southbreidges 33mhz PCI port.
Once we have that we can get OS4 at east running on it, not even to the standard of the pre-release but what was shown at demos arround the country, even if it has to be booted off another machine (Though I see no reason why a SIL IDE PCI controller card couldn't be used) and we ccan take this to potential investors.
I do not expect the community to pay (oughtright) for production, that is for me and investors (one reason why i am not buying the board, my money will almost certainly be sued to pay for the preproduction boards.
If the boards were to be made 100 at a time then it would cost ~$3375 per board which means $337,500 per batch excluding costs such as transport. Note we will use a much higher volume than 100 at a time as the cost is simply to high. By my estimates at 10,000 is will cost $2000 per board (~£1000) but that doesn't factor in either the removal of certain components such as the service processor and 10/100 PHY's etc. or the addition of the FW800 chips.

@digitaldisaster
> ...would have to get access to the PCI-SIG docs and that means a huge subscription fee.

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/order_form

Do you begin to see why minator thinks this will cost some tens of thousands of dollars to make a motherboard sellable? :) Do you have an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, CAD software, verification/testing software, etc? Do you have ROM programmers to write whatever BIOS code gets put on your board? (I have a Willem 3.1 progrmmer which can be used fo this, send me blanks and code and I'll write the chips for you - http://www.az-electronics.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=4 I don't currently have any extra adaptors yet but plan to get some of them)

I don't know how much it cost, but Forefront ordered a CDROM with PCI docs a few years ago from the PCI-SIG. There's also a number of decent books that might be more managable:

PCI Express System Architecture
PCI System Architecture
PCI-X System Architecture (With CD-ROM)
PCI & PCI-X Hardware and Software, Fifth Edition
HyperTransport System Architecture

etc. from a quick search on amazon. I have older editions of a couple of these and they are very good. The Mindshare one is good for initial reading up on PCI, and the PCI & PCI-X Hardware and Software book I think is an updated version of another I have (mine was before it had PCI-X I believe) goes into a lot more detail but is a harder read.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@The_Editor
>If its going to have anything to do with Amiga ... You can forget nVidia.

Indeed. Forefront tried cntacting Nvidia about us writing AmigaOS drivers for their chips. We wanted to NDA, no open-source, we'd do all the work and spend all the money, etc. but they didn't even have the courtesy to reply with a polite "Thank you but no", they simply completely ignored us.

Big companies like this will be hard to even talk to let alone work with or buy parts from. Consider the post's we've seen on these web sites claiming that Eyetech used the VIA southbridge for the AmigaOne as Via was the only vendor of such chips willing to sell parts in such miniscule numbers. And even then they won't provide adequate documention for the DMA issues to be resolved easily, those involved must resort to reverse-engineering PC BIOS code to figure out what needs done for AmigaOne.

Remember, the Amiga market is infinitesimal at this point. You may think that buying some hundreds units of each component for an production run is a respectable number, but the vendors consider this to be pretty much equivalent to zero units. It's going to be difficult to get their attention.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

Finally made it through all the posts onthis site. Whew! I do have one last question before I decide to reserve part of myu next paycheck for a donation. What is the legal situation of these donations right now? I don't know the business or non-profit regulations or tax regulations in your country... But here in the USA, without a business or non-profit organization registered with the appropriate government agencies, these donations here would be gonsidered personal taxable income. Are the donations currently protected from income tax claims by your government by a non-profit or business entity receiving/holding them, or are you personally receiving these funds at the moment? This can be an important issue to make sure is dealt with to maximize the amount of money donated actually being available for use on the dev board, and minimize taxation... For all I know your tax and other related laws in this situation are very very different than what I'd have to deal with if I was doing this same thing here in USA, but I think all of us would like everything to be legit and have the money donated protected by any laws meant to protect such types of funds.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@digitaldisaster

Something to look into?

From that PPCnux article:

IBM CPC925 + NVIDIA nForce4 = Key to success for a PPC high performance desktop?

A Non-Apple company uses this system architecture with PCI-Express for its new dual-G5 mainboard.

While the first product based on the IBM G5 Northbridge and NVIDIA Hypertransport Southbridge (originally meant for AMD64 CPUs) is an AdvancedTCA LINUXblade PPC20A, it could also be used for a most up to date desktop system since it implements all of today's neccessary and cutting edge features in just two chips:

CPC925

* 2x Elastic Interface for dual PPC970FX
* 128Bit DDR400 memory interface
* AGP8X
* 16Bit Hypertransport

nForce4 (SLI)

* 16Bit 1000MHz Hypertransport interface
* 20 PCI-Express lanes, different configurations possible (e.g. 2 gfxcards)
* Standard 32Bit 33MHz PCI bus with up to 6 slots
* 10 USB 2.0 ports
* RAIDable storage controllers
o 2 channels of parallel ATA-133
o 4 ports of Serial ATA 3Gb/s
* AC'97 sound with up to 8 channels and dual S/PDIF output with AC3 or Stereo PCM up to 24Bit 96KHz
* Gigabit Ethernet with CPU offloading engine

Thanks to IBM's choice of Hypertransport as chip interconnect there is now a situation that lets PPC board manufacturers use cheap and modern southbridges from the PC world and together with IBM's G5 northbridge create a turnkey solution for most demanding desktop or workstation applications based on the PPC platform.

Read more about the first product that implements this design in the German part of PPCNUX.

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And btw after reading this ArsTecnica post (Bad Andy) I'm quite impressed that you think that you can pull this all off. :)

Quote:

system integration is A B*TCH. When I realized how ugly this is... my interest in 970 embedded vaporized... until it gets fixed. The fundamental problem is that the 970 doesn't come up out of reset ready to talk through the FSB, nor does the CPC925 (which is aka UN3) ... instead both need to be brought up from reset with control parameters loaded via I2C (JTAG) ports, from another micro or state machine. IBM's JS20s use a 405 to do this job! As I've heard it second-hand, Apple uses a HC-08 (far less overkill) but in either case the system integration is a big, big job, and Elastic-bus control parameters a very tedious job to optimize for any new PCB (and variability of same). Embedded folks simply don't have the interest or resources to deal with this level of system design and complexity.