20 April 2018, 21:48 | #141 |
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the nextgen amiga should be a new 68080 a4000 with loads of memory and improved vram maybe use a pci card ill buy two.
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20 April 2018, 22:01 | #142 |
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21 April 2018, 00:05 | #143 |
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21 April 2018, 00:20 | #144 | |
J.M.D - Bedroom Musician
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21 April 2018, 08:39 | #145 |
son of 68k
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21 April 2018, 10:46 | #146 |
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People are hitting the hardware directly on the Pi these days, including the 3D Acceleration. It does require that you don't run a traditional OS though, you boot directly into the application.
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21 April 2018, 15:35 | #147 | ||
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This would probably be easiest in something like AROS or one of the assembly OS available (MenuetOS, KolibriOS, BareMetal OS, ...). Quote:
Remember that the Commodore NG Amiga was a very different beast than the so called NG efforts existing today. Don't get me wrong: direct hardware hacking is fun but it's very hard to have continuous hardware improvements with it unless one does something like early Playstations or the PC VGA standard: keep old hardware support as a part of the new system. |
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22 April 2018, 02:32 | #148 | |
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Windows, OTOH, has stayed the same system since it first came out, doing small incremental updates year after year. |
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22 April 2018, 12:25 | #149 |
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Say what you will about Microsoft, but their backwards compatibility in Windows is quite a feat.
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23 April 2018, 17:39 | #150 | ||
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Imagine if Amigas could only be programmed through system libraries and the hardware details were a closely guarded secret. Apple did that with the Macintosh and its gaming reputation suffered. Luckily Commodore didn't. Instead they documented the hardware and showed us how to use it directly, through the system, or both. The first code I ever wrote for the Amiga was a magazine type-in that accessed the hardware directly. It took me nearly a year to fully understand system programming, but many other coders never bothered because direct programming was easier and more rewarding. I also tried direct programming on my first PC, an IBM JX. Just getting a serial mouse to work was a nightmare, and the graphics code I wrote would not work on other PCs. I learned a lot about PCs on this machine, but it also showed me what a mess that architecture was (and it never got better). |
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23 April 2018, 19:20 | #151 | |
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In comparison, programming the Amiga is a breeze. Just stick to plain 68000, 1.3 library functions for OCS chipset or 3.0 for AGA, and your code will work on practically any real Amiga (maybe not on 'NG' machines, but they are not true Amigas). Debugging the Amiga is easy because there's no memory protection so you can poke around anywhere without fear, programs are small enough to disassemble and step through (and 68000 machine code is much easier to understand than Intel), and if the system goes unstable you can reboot in seconds. Trading compatibility for performance is a non-starter for me. PCs suffer because of it. The Amiga doesn't have to. When Commodore was talking about going Power PC I thought it was a mistake. I suggested that if they insisted on abandoning the 68000 they might as well just go Intel. Perhaps if they had we might have gotten newer more powerful 'Amigas', but current trends in the 'NG' Amiga scene suggest that it would have fractured the market. We are lucky that Commodore died before they got a chance to mess it up. That's why I am excited about Apollo's Vampire accelerators, which speed up real Amigas to NG performance levels while still maintaining virtually 100% compatibility with standard 68000 code. A few years ago I looked into what was happening on the Amiga scene and it seemed to be dead, despite the availability of (ridiculously expensive) NG hardware. Now there's a resurgence of interest in classic Amigas, and people are (re)discovering their appeal. Before now I would not have believed there were enough buyers for over 2700 Amiga accelerator cards, nor that I would ever consider spending hundreds of dollars on one. Let's hope this trend continues! |
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23 April 2018, 20:29 | #152 |
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Is this completely true? What about the 2nd Gen chipset ECS, differs from OCS 1st Gen, hence the heavy compatibility issues of the early 1990's.
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24 April 2018, 09:49 | #153 | ||
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It all depends on the level at which you're programming the Amiga. If you're banging the hardware, doing direct jumps into ROM code and using absolute addresses for RAM, it will be sure to fall over as soon as you try it on another configuration.
At the other end of the scale, if your program uses the OS and doesn't bang the hardware at all, it should work on every machine from that version on, including NG systems. Coding in this way would also let your game take advantage of things like graphics and sound cards, USB input devices and so on, even on a classic machine or a Vampire. Quote:
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24 April 2018, 10:37 | #154 |
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I suppose that any NG AmigaOS needs to be able to run classic binaries and media images regardless of the host architecture. I believe some modules of AROS attempt to do this, but as an OS AROS leaves a lot to be desired as of yet.
And it needs to do it flawlessly too - the user should never be able to tell that it's happening. |
24 April 2018, 10:55 | #155 |
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Or even 2.7GHz machine. PPC Mac prices have really dropped in last couple years and soon anything over 100e is too much, even of the fastest models
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24 April 2018, 11:06 | #156 |
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Indeed, even faster I was just thinking of a 1.8GHz machine I had myself and gave away for free. Only later when support for it was introduced by MorphOS did I regret it
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24 April 2018, 11:56 | #157 | |
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If you want to have decent performance you'd better access your screen's bitplanes directly. If you want to play Protracker then you *have* to access Paula directly - as audio.device has dma wait problems and simply can't do this. |
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24 April 2018, 12:54 | #158 |
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to make a short comment myself too...
IF Commodore would have survived it would have dropped most of the chipset in favor of standard components. It is simply a matter of resources and money, no chance to compete here. I myself owned a A4000 (68030) back in the days with graphic card added (Picasso 2). It was a huge difference if you are interested in f.e. productivity software. The chipset was good for gaming but not for serious software. It was still amiga for me . But to compare A4000 with added graphic card to what people now call NG hardware and say no difference is not true in my view, it still was Amiga with 68030, there were still the same expansion slots, it runs the same OS and the original chipset was still there even if not used depending on the software. Amiga always was (for me) mainly hardware, at that time hardware was way more important than the OS. Of course that changed over the years, hardware has become cheap and widely available and now OS (and software) makes the difference. But even if I see it this way I see Amiga as a retro device so Vampire at least comes next to what you could call "Amiga NG". MorphOS running on used Macs is still MorphOS, Aros running on X86 the same and X5000 is basically a standard board with a different processor and uncompetitive price but not Amiga. But that is a personal view of course |
24 April 2018, 21:28 | #159 | |
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Any incompatibilities between graphics chips etc. on the Amiga are not due to the documented hardware, which is fully compatible if used correctly. This is quite different to PCs, where compatibility is maintained via custom drivers which interface to the constantly changing incompatible hardware underneath. On a Windows PC it is virtually impossible to access the hardware directly, and even if you could the documentation is poor to nonexistent. That is by design, and is one reason why in its heyday the Amiga beat the pants off comparable PCs. |
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24 April 2018, 22:34 | #160 | |||
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Clock speeds are just a numbers game. My current PC has a dual core CPU that runs at 2.8GHz, but apparently that isn't fast enough today (I have been reliably informed that if I want to develop programs for a 2kB PIC MCU I need an I7 with 16GB and a SSD). And since I refuse to 'upgrade' from Windows Xp my PC is now a security risk and I have been branded a 'criminal' for using it on the Internet. Modern PCs have a ridiculous amount of power which is largely wasted, still have lots of issues and are getting worse. Programming them is no fun either due to the huge amount of crap you have to deal with. Unfortunately it seems that 'NG' Amiga is going the same way. |
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