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terminills 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 22:20:18
#101 ]
AROS Core Developer
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 1472
From: Unknown

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote:
@kolla

Quote:
Is PowerPC any more Amiga than ARM is? If so - why?


I would say so because it had an accelerator with a PowerPC. It was the first non-68K foreign CPU on an Amiga accelerator card. Though, if Phase 5 were truly attempting to revive the Amiga where Commodore left off, an Itanitum may have been a better choice.

ARM on the other hand has lagged behind in the Amiga world. And only in the last few years has arrived on Amiga boards. Even then it's in limited capacity. As a co-processor on video cards or used as a 68K emulator. But not directly accessible like PowerPC was through libraries. The closest I last found was being able to run ARM binaries externally.

Perhaps they are avoiding the kernel wars again with an ArmUP going against a WarpARM. While it would be great decompressing JPEGS at 1.5Ghz and doing 3d rendering even faster than the fastest PPC that can be plugged into an Amiga, does the Amiga market want that? It would introduce another binary format and Aminet would need extending again. The "real" Amiga market, even the high end market with ZZ900 boards and SSD on SCSI with 100Mhz 68060, still has a focus on 68K. To the point that new accelerators aren't even trying to replace the 68K or add a co-processor to run software at modern speeds, they are emulating the 68K to run 68K code as fast as possible.


Well then obviously the DEC Alpha is the only true next gen Amiga CPU as that's the CPU Commodore chose . :)

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NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 22:26:58
#102 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@Karlos

Quote:
Lol. Remind me how the *vast majority of all Amiga software ever written* runs on OS4?


FIxing NallePuh helped.

Never expected Dpaint4 to work
(yeh there are few bugs, but its nothing that can't be fixed.)

680x0 software is not written for AmigaOS4, Draco’s and Amithlon has helped maybe, but end of the day, majority of software need little bit more then a few libraries. That’s not PowerPC problem its problem with mjority of 680x0 software never written for something like Draco, Amithlon or AmigaONE.

Currently AmigaOS4.x does itself a few disfavors, with wrong sized fake screen modes, and clock speed. Of cause some of the changes are collation cause compatibility, like restricting access to exec base. This changes again nothing do with choice of CPU but because of features that is on high demand.

The 2en cause why 680x0 software is not working, is because they are full bugs, ignoring things like BytePerRow, and many, many more assumptions. Many programs simply can’t be promoted to RTG they only support AGA.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 17-Jan-2023 at 10:48 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 17-Jan-2023 at 10:44 PM.

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NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 22:38:33
#103 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@terminills

Dec Alpha is listed a LE CPU, just like Intel.

680x0, ColdFire, PowerPC and Spark is BE, I think Spack was ever only used on Servers.
PowerPC is the only one that was used in Game Consoles and Desktop.

ARM was only LE, but become bi-endian, around 2011 ARM made switch to bi-endian.

Amiga Inc only choice at time was PowerPC, ColdFire might worked but will also need a JIT compiler, to overcome instructions conflict, and this CPU's run on lower Clock Frequency.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 17-Jan-2023 at 10:40 PM.

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Karlos 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 23:19:07
#104 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@NutsAboutAmiga

You seem to have missed the point. ppcamiga insists emulation is pointless, yet the vast majority of Amiga software on OS4 runs under emulation, because the vast majority of Amiga software is written for 68K, not PPC. What doesn't run under direct emulation runs in RunInUAE.

The cognitive dissonance he suffers from must be debilitating.

The time will soon come when emulated 68K on x64 will outclass the highest end PPC still running OS4. It may already be here for all I know; certainly the writing was on the wall with Amithlon back in the day. The time will likely come when emulated 68K running on ARM does the same. Why? Because affordable x64 and ARM consumer kit continues to be developed.


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rzookol 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 23:25:31
#105 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 4-Oct-2005
Posts: 318
From: Poland, Lublin

@NutsAboutAmiga

Not only servers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5 was in small deskop/pizzabox form.

Last edited by rzookol on 17-Jan-2023 at 11:25 PM.

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Karlos 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 17-Jan-2023 23:34:54
#106 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:
Amiga Inc only choice at time was PowerPC


They didn't choose it, it was chosen for them. By the time this happened, PowerUp and WarpOS were quite well established. It was ultimately phase5 that decided we should go PowerPC when they produced the first CSPPC card.

For the record, Commodore had intended to go to with a completely different PA-RISC solution had they survived.

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V8 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 6:36:58
#107 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 30-Mar-2022
Posts: 129
From: Unknown

@rzookol

That one came out when SUN was already in terminal decline. They had already released solaris for x86, which flopped because no commercial software, and now they pushed for a non-existing sparc desktop market.
At about this time is also when networking and internet started to become very important for servers and sun had made a big bet on "streams" which is an alternative way to design a network stack compared to bsd sockets and osi model.

Poor implementation of the networking layer and using a weird non-standard api had consequences. Linux on cheap x86 had significantly better, streamlined and optimized bsd socket stack and was completely killing the performance of significantly more expensive and "on paper" more powerful sparc/solaris when it came to things like webserving.
I think it took a "code red" and a couple of years until SUN released ISS (was this the name of the update?) that was an update that was meant to fix the huge performance cap in their streams implementation, to bring the very expensive sparc to at least close to parity with the perfornace of off the shelf cheap x68 running linux.

But at that time it was already too late and solaris had been completely displaced in the main growth segment: web-serving and was basically relegated to be just a solution for legacy systems.

This was when OS and HW at SUN died from a practical standpoint. Sun still remained alive for a while and tried to make a living out of JAVA but the old company was dead.


Sparcstation5 was in many way like X1000. The final push to try to become relevant again in a market that has moved on to better things.

Last edited by V8 on 18-Jan-2023 at 06:41 AM.
Last edited by V8 on 18-Jan-2023 at 06:40 AM.

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kolla 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 6:55:21
#108 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 20-Aug-2003
Posts: 2859
From: Trondheim, Norway

@NutsAboutAmiga

Do your research better - the ARM systems I did big-endian Gentoo for came to market in 2004 (Cisco/Linksys NSLU2). ARM was pretty much always bi-endian, BE-32 (word invariant) first, and later BE-8 (byte invariant).

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kolla 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 6:59:47
#109 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 20-Aug-2003
Posts: 2859
From: Trondheim, Norway

@terminills

HP PA-RISC, not DEC-Alpha.
(And natural successor to PA-RISC, as already pointed out, was Itanium)

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Karlos 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 8:41:47
#110 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@Kolla

People go to lengths to retroactively justify the PPC as the natural successor to 68K for desktop and completely neglect that it was Apple who decided that and phase5 that made it happen for the Amiga. At the time, it seemed a reasonable choice but the benefit of hindsight is that, unlike foresight, it has 20/20 clarity.

As soon as Apple started with OSX, they were already maintaining intel builds and the moment they decided it was appropriate, just after clearing their remaining stock of Dual G5 workstations, they jumped over. The lesson here is that Apple learned that the CPU is largely irrelevant in modern computing. Most software is written in compiled languages and the moment you do that you largely dismiss architectural differences. They did the same thing again with the ARM transition.

Despite the clear message here, some people cling to PPC like it's the only thing that makes sense. Yet only a handful of our software base is PPC exclusive and an even smaller subset in a state where it cannot be ported to some other architecture.

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V8 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 9:06:07
#111 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 30-Mar-2022
Posts: 129
From: Unknown

@Karlos

Apple did have experimental builds on x86 for a time but don't think they were ever close to complete or releasable.
I recall there was well over a year or two in wall time where photoshop on G5 were absolutely crushed by photoshop on x86 performance wise.
And there is just so long you can go "but, this isa is more elegant and more efficient when the only thing people (that does not write assembler) care about is 'how long does it take to run this filter in photoshop'"
They were slaughtered in the press for how poor the performance of ppc was and I think that they would have made the switch much earlier if they could and if the x86 builds were more mature.

Since then, which happened decades ago, PPC performance has dropped like a rock as it switched to being aimed at low power/low compute embedded use while at the same time x86 has increased performance and performance/watt significantly.

For amiga the future in my view is 68k, emulated or nor. That is where all the software is.
Sure, ppc has a bunch of straight linux ports of linux software but that software can be easily recompiled for 68k once you have a 68k fast enough to run semi-modern applications.
There is virtually zero amiga/ppc-only software where sources are not available that are worth keeping.

Last edited by V8 on 18-Jan-2023 at 09:09 AM.
Last edited by V8 on 18-Jan-2023 at 09:08 AM.

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Karlos 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 9:39:11
#112 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@V8

The point is, they built and maintained OSX for intel since day 1. They only released it when the time was right for them. What they didn't do is put all their eggs in the PPC basket. In doing so they established best practises for cross architecture development. And it's paid off. They could probably switch to RISC V by now if they had any desire.

I wholeheartedly agree that the way forwards for Amiga today is 68K, albeit under emulation of whatever guise.

Last edited by Karlos on 18-Jan-2023 at 10:39 AM.

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kolla 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 18-Jan-2023 17:48:45
#113 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 20-Aug-2003
Posts: 2859
From: Trondheim, Norway

@V8

Quote:
Apple did have experimental builds on x86 for a time but don't think they were ever close to complete or releasable.


Er.. OSX was "Rhapsody" (aka OpenSTEP) on x86 for years before it was finally released as OSX on PowerPC. Rhapsody development mostly took place on x86 and it took time to get it working on PowerPC systems. It was when that finally landed that OSX could be released. So for years, it was PowerPC that had "experimental builds" while x86 was the default. How many years was the OSX/PowerPC period? Ehm.. not that long!

Time line:
OSX release - March 24, 2001
Intel transition announced - June 2005
First Intel Macs with OS 10.4.4 - January 2006

So less than 5 years, and during those years, a whole team made sure OSX kept running well also on x86, code name "Marklar".

The challenge in transitioning is not the OS, it’s the third party software portfolio. But even that is less of a hassle now, with "same-endianess" and porting to an already established (in the apple ecosystem) architecture.

Last edited by kolla on 18-Jan-2023 at 06:01 PM.

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agami 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 19-Jan-2023 1:59:41
#114 ]
Super Member
Joined: 30-Jun-2008
Posts: 1637
From: Melbourne, Australia

@V8

Quote:
That one came out when SUN was already in terminal decline.

Check your facts.

SUN SPARCstations go back to the late '80s. Well before SUN made a major move to x86 in the early 2000s, in which they ported Solaris to x86 and stared selling Servers with Linux.

@Karlos @V8

The Origins of the OS X x86 builds goes back to NeXTSTEP being available for x86, and then Apple going all in on Web Objects with Rhapsody (Mac OS X Server 1.0) in the late '90s, when they weren't sure if they should limit their server SKU to PowerPC.

The resurgent Apple made a decision to launch their own line of PowerPC-based data centre products under the Xserve moniker, focusing OS X Server on PowerPC, but they made sure there was always an x86 build of the OS if the server HW business didn't catch on like the personal computing HW was doing.

Last edited by agami on 19-Jan-2023 at 01:59 AM.

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Hypex 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 22-Jan-2023 13:00:09
#115 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Karlos

Quote:
I think emulation makes the most sense here anyway. The dual processor architecture of PowerUP was a pain. Optimizing software for least amount of context switching was essential. The moment MorphOS and OS4 appeared they dropped the 68K in the original boards immediately and no matter how fast an 060 you may have had, it was the right move. Taking away the complexity of context switching allowed many 68K applications to run a lot faster. A case in point, the 020+ doom attack port that I used to play reasonably well at 320*200 on CGX on my 040 could run at 640*400 at a comparable speed under petunia on the 603e.


It would have been more complicated had they used the 68K to execute 68K code. Even though they could have optimised the context switching. What's interesting is how faster it was under emulation.

OTOH, when it comes to hardware, it was thought the AmigaOne should have had some plug in card with the Amiga chips. Not so much 68K. But the custom chips. Or even simple (by comparison) chips like CIA being simulated on Xorro or the like. A few Sams have FPGA chips but I don't know what if anything uses them for any purpose.

Quote:
The writing was on the wall there and then that emulating a 68K inside an actual Amiga was something doable. I have no doubt the Pi4 running Emu68 is going to kill it.


And interesting how that started. Just need to run OS4 natively on ARM then to keep up.

If Emu68 can make use of multicores in the emulation no doubt it would put an X5000 under fire. Only half of physical registers natively compared to double amount on emulated CPU? Split across the cores! Now that would put a new meaning to register renaming and allocation.

Sightly back tracking. But even the 68K is said to have used microcode. So isn't a purely decode and execute cycle. Compared to this, I read a question on Quora asking if modern x86 is CISC or RISC. I would have expected externally CISC but internally RISC used. But the answer wasn't it being clear cut either way and that a modern CISC and RISC would be almost identical inside. For reference:
https://www.quora.com/Are-modern-x86-processors-RISC

Last edited by Hypex on 23-Jan-2023 at 08:50 AM.

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Hypex 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 22-Jan-2023 13:13:07
#116 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@terminills

Quote:
Well then obviously the DEC Alpha is the only true next gen Amiga CPU as that's the CPU Commodore chose . :)


Only? Surely it was an option as the HP RISC was what they were looking at? The Alpha looks very similar architecturally to the PPC.

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Karlos 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 22-Jan-2023 13:26:03
#117 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Aug-2003
Posts: 4394
From: As-sassin-aaate! As-sassin-aaate! Ooh! We forgot the ammunition!

@Hypex

I don't see how using multiple cores helps the emulation of a scalar, single core processor*. The opportunity for instruction parallelism is too small. You could emulate a number of 68K cores concurrently, pinning each to a core, but then you'd need an OS with SMP running on it to make use of it. 68K Linux would be a candidate but I don't think there's much demand.

What I'd like to be able to do is use them to implement other virtual hardware that can typically should run separately from the main emulation.

*Disclaimer: I don't know how the bare metal Emu68K works sufficiently for this to be more than an opinion. Perhaps the author (sorry, autocorrect simply refuses to allow me to type the name lol) can clarify.

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DiscreetFX 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 23-Jan-2023 2:42:08
#118 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Feb-2003
Posts: 2480
From: Chicago, IL

Get the heretics! Warm up and sharpen the guillotines before it’s too late!

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spudmiga 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 28-Jan-2023 15:56:57
#119 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 12-Dec-2002
Posts: 855
From: England, United Kingdom

@CosmosUnivers

Quote:


I am unemployed without money, but good knowledge in our field and a certain know-how.




Ok, you win me over with your incredibly investment opportunity.
I am assuming cheque is acceptable in your small town. I can send £500,000 today and another £500,000 when I see some results. Let me know who I make it payable to, or alternatively I can transfer over Western Union?

Spud

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A600

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ppcamiga1 
Re: Looking for partner(s) to open a physical Amiga 68k shop somewhere in Europe
Posted on 29-Jan-2023 10:03:58
#120 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 23-Aug-2015
Posts: 762
From: Unknown

cosmos made something that 68k and ppc users may use
you get more customers and more money
maybee some 3d gfx hardware

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