AAA Chipset in software?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Marchie

I can't deny the AAA board looks fascinating. Completed but never produced...

since the AAA chips were still full of bugs...

AAA was still supposed to be backward compatible, was it not? So exisitng software should work with it no?

fully compatible to ACS/ECS but not fully to AGA, since AGA development started actually later than AAA, as Commodore realized they couldn't finish it in time and resorted to something much simpler and closer to ECS.

that's why AGA has a completely unchanged Paula a almost unchanged Alice/Agnus and only Denise/Lisa got a real upgrade.

An FPGA implementation sounds cool, I know I'd try it out of there was ever a Vampire core with AAA. But hey, there's a big gap between 'I think it sounds cool' and 'someone should spend their time doing it'

Vampire is doing some more reasonable/useful updates like 16bit support in Pamela/Paula or SVGA and probably some 3D acceleration in future.

AAA would only be nice for historical reasons...

I would actually suggest to put in some features outlined in the Hombre specification, that are - at least in the video section - closer to the Amiga Chipset than I originally thought (documents where released some while ago)

I don't think a FPGA implementation is worth it, but in software it might be a interesting thing to play with.

[AmigaHope]

There's absolutely no way to accomplish this. Even if you had one of the Nyx boards, they don't even boot. We have no idea how Linda, Monica, and Andrea worked -- because they never worked.

It's not like the C65 where there are actual working prototypes that we can base our emulation on.

[quantum8]

AAA is an interesting anecdote in history and not much else since it wasn't released and nothing was written for it.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

There's absolutely no way to accomplish this. Even if you had one of the Nyx boards, they don't even boot. We have no idea how Linda, Monica, and Andrea worked -- because they never worked.

As far as I understand (see also Gorf's post) they were more or less functionally complete, but needed more time for proper debugging.

They definitely could be able to do something meaningful considering the Nyx/AAA prototype inside C= laboratories appears for a few seconds, turned on and with a familiar AmigaDOS screen on the infamous Dave Haynie documentary "The deathbed vigil"

Now obviously the question "is it worth it / what would be worth it for" is a completely different matter...

[Phantasm]

People put a lot of effort into things that aren't worth it all the time. I for example have put almost 2 years into reverse engineering and redeveloping the Ami-Express BBS software. It's something I have nostalgia and a passion for so I enjoy working on it even though there are only 2 or 3 people actually using it. You never know someone might just decide it's cool enough to develop even if its not worth it.

[grelbfarlk]

Ok how about this, lets flip the title to RTG in Software. To begin the argument that RTG support was actually what Commodore was planning to add to the OS, the real thing we're lacking is Kickstart and Early Boot Screen support for RTG.
How about we figure out a way to fix graphics.library and add a Kickstart module enabling a basic RTG output (at a few predefined resolutions like 640x200/640x480) allowing Early-Boot-Screen and No Startup-Sequence boots to go straight to an RTG output.

[d4rk3lf]

This is actually pretty cool idea, imho.
At least for thinking.

It's unrealistic... but not that much unrealistic.
We (only) have to wait for some Amiga fan to become billionaire, and then just throw in some millions out of fun, for the projects like this. First to finish AAA, then to pay programmers and artist to make some cool things with it.

[Pyromania]

@d4rk3lf

Why think small? I’m hopeful some Amiga fan becomes a trillionare since that’s never been achieved by one person before. Then they will have a few billion laying around for their Amiga hobby.

[Paul_s]

If AAA is ever released Medhi Ali should cut the ribbon and the cake aboard a sinking ship

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

How about we figure out a way to fix graphics.library and add a Kickstart module enabling a basic RTG output (at a few predefined resolutions like 640x200/640x480) allowing Early-Boot-Screen and No Startup-Sequence boots to go straight to an RTG output.

This is not "fixing" graphics, it is "rewriting" graphics as the two big RTG implementations pretty much replace most of it. Besides, even then this would not work because you would still need to load a graphics driver for the corresponding graphics card, which is card dependent and right now sits on the disk.


However, at the time the boot menu is loaded, there is not yet any disk access, so you couldn't load an RTG driver. Thus, this cannot work, you would need some ROM-resident portion of a primitive graphics driver sitting on the corresponding board. Unfortunately, Amiga graphics cards do not work like this.


For the PC, this works because graphics cards come with their "VGA bios" which implements some very elementary IO functions to switch to a specific graphics mode, and to allow the Os to render text or (very simple) graphics to screen, unaccelerated.


We do have Autoconf on the Amiga, but no way of an Autoconf ROM providing an RTG driver.

[Pyromania]

Could WinUAE have it’s plugin architecture extended so other developers could add a AAA Chipset plugin as a experimental feature?

[Toni Wilen]

PicassoIV has flash ROM which is used to load picassoiv.resource so in theory it could have full driver in flash if needed..

WinUAE already has picasso96 driver in "ROM" (uaegfx.card) and Picasso96 supports memory resident drivers (it does not require physical file), for example AROS m68k uses it automatically to enable early boot in RTG mode.

AAA won't happen. There is no software and never will be.