@DiscreetFX

Within 2 months We are taking email address of those interested on the website here: www.a600gs.com

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Do you have some Amiga or C64 9-pin joysticks ? Plug them into the A600GS for multiplayer fun!

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@amigakit

Okay, but where does my Video Toaster plug in?

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@amigakit

Has it got a parallel socket for 4-player adapter games?

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@BigD

You don't need a 4-player adapter. You can hook up two USB gamepads and 2x Amiga joysticks.

@DiscreteFX

LOL!

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@DiscreetFX

Quote:

DiscreetFX wrote: @amigakit Okay, but where does my Video Toaster plug in?

In your V4-SA, obviously.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

A600GS is today featured on The Retro Hour show, hosted by Dan Wood and Ravi Abbott:

https://theretrohour.com/amiga-kit-how-to-run-a-full-time-amiga-business-in-2024-the-retro-hour-ep415/

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@amigakit

Interesting podcast as always

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Save your position in games and resume them instantly by simply selecting the saved game icon and clicking Start. Don't worry: the amount of saved games is not limited. This useful feature has been added to the A600GS this week. Check out: https://wiki.amiga.org/a600gs

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There are several years of development for our System V46 components. These have been put to good use for the A600GS project. Some of the many components used within the pre-installed AmiBench:

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Cardiff, 9th March, 2024

AmigaKit Ltd is pleased to announce an important software development for the forthcoming A600GS computer system. The new ARM Graphics Library is pre-installed accelerating the performance of AmiBench and 68K applications.

The ARMgraphics.library was created by AmigaKit's in-house developer to bypass the bottleneck of the 68K graphics functions. It accelerates graphics rendering performance in applications.

AmiBench is pre-installed on the A600GS computer system. It opens the desktop environment in high resolution 1080p with True Colour icons. Now it can use the new ARM Graphics Library for various purposes including faster rendering of windows, icons and backgrounds.

Third party developers can take advantage of this library by using it's powerful functions from their 68K application. It also offers an opportunity for 68K games developers to enhance their games with faster graphics rendering.

The library provides a link between 68K programs and the native ARM processor.

Further work is underway to patch 68K system graphics functions so older applications that are not written to use the ARM Graphics Library can benefit.

AmigaKit has developed AK-Datatypes, Picture Datatype and Datatypes Library over the many years for the Enhancer Software on X5000, X1000 and A1222+. These have been compiled for 68K to run on the A600GS, In addition these system components can also be accelerated by the ARM Graphics Library for extra performance.

The A600GS computer system is due for launch in the second quarter of 2024.

Additional Information about A600GS, AmiBench and it's components can be found on these websites:

A600GS: www.a600gs.com
AmiBench: wiki.amiga.org/amibench

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@amigakit

it is arm with emulator
just install android on this

@ppcamiga1

KKK
It never fails xD

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The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

Excellent news. I hope this get ported to more platform outside of A600GS / Amibench.

Pistorm and Pi builds would be great.

I cant help but think if you had put this into a full size Amiga replica case with working replica Amiga keyboard, (i know it would of likely double the costs if not more) but i think you would have had a real killer product on your hands, and I know eye candy and kinda daft thing like that shouldn't matter.

What the system can do, it should matter more, as this will kick A500 mini into the ground for what it can do, but likely just because of the way it looks, i kinda feel it going to struggle. I hope im wrong.

Put it like this the A500mini should of not sold a thing at £130 at launch for a fairly locked down Pi3 rough spec system, when you could pick up a Pi400 complete system for £90 at the time, a much faster, far more open system, capable of doing a lot more, but the power of marketing and Eye Candy is very important.

Had the A600GS came out looking like this concept Amiga, made a few years ago,

I think it would be getting a lot more interest. But still wish you luck with it.

(Plus I know I did say to get this a success you needed to go cheaper, like £50 sub make it a stocking filler price and a price point were not many would think about it, I still kinda stand by both arguments, cheaper people think well I can afford that I’d give it go, pricey you get the more people begin to question the product and weather not they need it, eye candy can over come some of this.)

Last edited by amigang on 11-Mar-2024 at 12:31 PM.
Last edited by amigang on 09-Mar-2024 at 09:48 PM.

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@amigang

Quote:

Put it like this the A500mini should of not sold a thing at £130 at launch for a fairly locked down Pi3 rough spec system, when you could pick up a Pi400 complete system for £90 at the time, a much faster, far more open system, capable of doing a lot more, but the power of marketing and Eye Candy is very important.

Yes, it was nice to get an official product after so many years that looks the part in the living room! Also, it is more than capable of running the AMiNIMiga Workbench and the Pandory soft mods for more problematic games like Jim Power while also supporting 2 player mice games and 4-player adapter games. The only niggle I have is the end of level music for the built in game Alien Breed 3D is too slow and annoys me. Since most people gave up on the Amiga when they'd had their fill of X-Copy on the A500 I really don't see why you'd need a Pi400 unless you were the tightest individual known to man or you just like hacking things! THEA500 Mini easily reaches 030 AGA performance for games like Guardian CD32 though people have reported that Zeewolf 2 suffers some issues. Since I prefer Guardian to Zeewolf 2 that doesn't concern me!

I wish the A600GS well but it will do nothing that a Pandory V3 equipped THEA500 Mini/Maxi can achieve since network capability has now been added. The AmiStore is a great USP for the A600GS but it's not available yet! Dream of a better day that isn't here yet! That sounds familiar! It'll be the best damn Amiga, "When it's done!"

Last edited by BigD on 10-Mar-2024 at 09:29 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 10-Mar-2024 at 12:43 AM.

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@BigD

“I really don't see why you'd need a Pi400 unless you were the tightest individual known to man or you just like hacking things! THEA500 Mini easily reaches 030 AGA performance for games“

True, the A500 mini hardware for what it was designed to do, play Amiga game, it’s all you likly need, but I just pointing out a system that cost less offered 3x time the performance, wifi, blu tooth, a already highly active hacker /modder scene, loads of os/software, retro pi, and is capable of doing a lot more was available.

Plus there are uses case for more power, if you want to play around with lightwave / 3d stuff, run a high end Amiga desktop, Amikit Xe runs ok, but I am more tempted than I should be to upgrade to pi5 for more performance, specially for things like rabbit hole, where I may just want a YouTube vid running in the corner or Spotify having these kinda background apps running can start to impact the performance of the emulation.

But your right if it just Amiga games then you don’t need much power in fact A1200 games run just about ok on a pi zero 2 that can be had for £10.

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@amigang

Quote:

But your right if it just Amiga games then you don’t need much power in fact A1200 games run just about ok on a pi zero 2 that can be had for £10.

I get it; THEA500 is overpriced and too powerful for "just A1200 level" games but not powerful for Workbench programs! I call B$ on both counts. A 030/50 AGA level of performance is a minimum level for new AGA games and to get good performance out of DPaint IV AGA for example. AMiNiMiga IS useful and I have used it for DPaint animating though it could do with serial support for graphics tablets (which it might get now that we have serial networking support!

I guess the Retrocengo faithful won't like it because it's too modern and uses a pad when they would prefer an awful "up for jump" joystick but THEC64 JOYSTICK is compatible for such folks. Outside of our clique, the A600GS and Pi400 3D printed Amiga-like setups are not up to the standards of other "Mini Console/Computer" products and will fail in the mainstream because of that sadly.

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amigang Quote:

True, the A500 mini hardware for what it was designed to do, play Amiga game, it’s all you likly need, but I just pointing out a system that cost less offered 3x time the performance, wifi, blu tooth, a already highly active hacker /modder scene, loads of os/software, retro pi, and is capable of doing a lot more was available. Plus there are uses case for more power, if you want to play around with lightwave / 3d stuff, run a high end Amiga desktop, Amikit Xe runs ok, but I am more tempted than I should be to upgrade to pi5 for more performance, specially for things like rabbit hole, where I may just want a YouTube vid running in the corner or Spotify having these kinda background apps running can start to impact the performance of the emulation. But your right if it just Amiga games then you don’t need much power in fact A1200 games run just about ok on a pi zero 2 that can be had for £10.

I agree. RPi hardware offers much more value than THEA500 Mini and A600GS hardware. It's not even close but THEA500 Mini gains value by offering a builtin game bundle and a nostalgic look mouse, controller and case. The A600GS has a controller, some bundled software and an ARM graphics library to gain back ... lost performance?

The popular in-order ARM Cortex-A53 cores in THEA500 Mini, A600GS and RPi 3 are not a good choice for 68k emulation. This CPU core requires good scheduling for performance and the load-to-use penalty of 3 cycles kills performance. JIT emulators are unlikely to schedule code where 68k memory accesses do not have load-to-use penalties.

add.l mem,d0 ; 68k load+ALU with no load-to-use penalty and executing in 0.5-1 cycle (L1 cached data)

JIT emulators are likely to turn this 68k code into the following ARM code taking ~5 cycles (L1 cached data).

load mem,r1 ; load 1 cycle
; load-to-use stall of 3 cycles
add r1,r0 ; 1 cycle

JIT compilers typically don't optimize more because it takes processing power and it is not known how often the code will execute. So how common are these load instructions? "Computer Architectures A Quantitative Approach" gives instruction frequencies of some SPECint2000 benchmarks.

load 26%
store 10%
ALU 49%
branch 15%

Loads are about 1/4 of instructions which are likely to have an extra 3 cycles added each using JIT emulation. This is 4 cycles per load more than the 68060 for a common OP mem,reg instruction. This is a lot considering ALU instructions can be executed at up to 2 per cycle.

20 instructions typical workload ARM Cortex-A53 emulating 68k code
load x5 with load-to-use stalls (5*4= 20 cycles)
store x2 (2*1= 2 cycles with store buffer)
ALU x10 (10*0.5 to 10*1= 5-10 cycles)
branch x3 (most are conditional predicted branches so 0 cycles)
---
total: 27-32 cycles

20 instructions typical workload 68060
load+ALU x5 (5*0.5 to 5*1= 2.5-5 cycles)
store x2 (2x1= 2 cycles with store buffer)
ALU x5 (5*0.5 to 5*1= 2.5-5 cycles)
branch x3 (most are conditional predicted branches so 0 cycles)
---
total: 7-12 cycles

With a cycle vs cycle comparison, the 68060 core is several times stronger than a Cortex-A53 core executing JIT 68k code. The Cortex-A53 has much larger caches and a much higher clock speed but is far from efficient at executing 68k JIT code (load-to-use stalls waste about half of the cycles without instruction scheduling and waste more cycles than the 68060 uses to execute the same code). The simplest solution is to give the 68060 core similar caches and similar clock speed to a Cortex-A53 core. The more complex solution is an OoO RISC core that may only partially remove the load-to-use stalls while growing in size, expense, power used, heat and cache requirements.

It's sad how forum members were excited and praised emu68 code that was only a few ARM instructions more than 68k code even though load-to-use stalls reduce performance to half on a Cortex-A53 core not even counting the performance loss from AArch64 using more instruction cache. Then forum members were excited and praised the optimized ARM graphics library for a A600GS Cortex-A53 core that is stalled half the time with load-to-use stalls, wastes memory and wastes Amiga developer effort optimizing a turd. Then you have the A1222 FPU emulation that is practically worthless, wastes development efforts and completely sabotages 3D software which was one of the few positives of AmigaOS 4 hardware. Speak the truth and you are ignored though. The Amiga fans who accepted reality have already left.

From: A600GS ARM Graphics Library announcement posts.

amigang Quote:

Excellent news. I hope this get ported to more platform outside of A600GS / Amibench. Pistorm and Pi builds would be great.

The whole point of a custom SBC instead of commodity RPi hardware was to act as a proprietary hardware dongle to keep the competition out. The same was true of THEA500 Mini. Do you think AmigaKit or RGL have better economies of scale than Raspberry Pi Ltd to make these custom SBCs cheaper?

amigang Quote:

I cant help but think if you had put this into a full size Amiga replica case with working replica Amiga keyboard, (i know it would of likely double the costs if not more) but i think you would have had a real kill product on your hands, and I know eye candy and kinda daft thing like that shouldn't matter, what the system can do, should matter more, as I this will kick A500 mini into the ground for what it can do, but likely just because of the way it looks, i kinda feel it going to struggle. I hope im wrong.

The C= Post Bankruptcy docs has a parts cost list for the A1200 circa 1993.

floppy drive $33
power supply $14
keyboard $9
casework $3
other final assembly components $17
manufacturing costs $10

The floppy drive is optional today. The power for a small SBC is often low enough today that it doesn't need an external power supply. That leaves $39 for the cost back then. The general trend for parts costs was to decrease every year while inflation increases other costs making it difficult to predict how much Amiga 1200 cases and keyboards would cost today. Some parts like molds could have significant up front costs to put back in production. Economies of scale reduce costs but C= may have sold as few as 100,000 Amiga 1200 units which is likely less than THEA500 Mini.

A somewhat modernized 68060@1-2GHz, AA+ custom chip spec and maybe integrated 3D GPU SoC could be produced for roughly $1-7 as an ASIC. The SBC cost could probably be around RPi 3 pricing with 1GiB of memory so roughly $35. An Amiga 1200 replica system with real keyboard may be possible for less than $100 but the RPi 400 $70 cost would be difficult to match. The RPi 400 4×Cortex-A72@1.8 GHz CPU performance would be difficult to match with an in-order 68k CPU but it should be cheaper to produce, lower power, cooler, native 68k code would have better performance and it could be coupled with a more powerful GPU.

Last edited by matthey on 11-Mar-2024 at 08:13 PM.

Latest work last week was on updating Personal Paint for the A600GS (news item coming this week)

AmiBench has also been updated with a new Picture Datatype 46.13 introducing HAM support.

WBStartup drawer renamed to simply StartUp drawer as we are running AmiBench and not Workbench



Here is a sneak peak at the new PPaint update showing 1080p and 4K screenmodes available:

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@matthey

Quote:

20 instructions typical workload ARM Cortex-A53 emulating 68k code load x5 with load-to-use stalls (5*4= 20 cycles) store x2 (2*1= 2 cycles with store buffer) ALU x10 (10*0.5 to 10*1= 5-10 cycles) branch x3 (most are conditional predicted branches so 0 cycles) --- total: 27-32 cycles 20 instructions typical workload 68060 load+ALU x5 (5*0.5 to 5*1= 2.5-5 cycles) store x2 (2x1= 2 cycles with store buffer) ALU x5 (5*0.5 to 5*1= 2.5-5 cycles) branch x3 (most are conditional predicted branches so 0 cycles) --- total: 7-12 cycles

The real-world ARM Cortex A53 has clock speeds beyond 1.3 Ghz e.g. All Winner H6's ARM Cortex-A53 has 1.8 Ghz.

68K is a Motorola product and the Commodore has no problems using 68K clones.

Quote:

A somewhat modernized 68060@1-2GHz, AA+ custom chip spec and maybe integrated 3D GPU SoC could be produced for roughly $1-7 as an ASIC. The SBC cost could probably be around RPi 3 pricing with 1GiB of memory so roughly $35. An Amiga 1200 replica system with real keyboard may be possible for less than $100 but the RPi 400 $70 cost would be difficult to match.

You haven't included R&D in the tape-out stage and wafer start cost for 68060's moderation.

Economies of scale problems are real.

Quote:

The RPi 400 4×Cortex-A72@1.8 GHz CPU performance would be difficult to match with an in-order 68k CPU but it should be cheaper to produce, lower power, cooler, native 68k code would have better performance and it could be coupled with a more powerful GPU.

RPi has moved into Broadcom BCM2712's quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A76 @ 2.4 Ghz.

Last edited by Hammer on 22-Apr-2024 at 04:40 AM.

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