(announcement) AMIGA MEETS GIGAHERTZ

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

So why not AROS or AmigaOS 4?

Because the companies making those two are delirious. OS4, MorphOS, should all run on -any- PPC Mac and they don't. That doesn't even need hacking to make an OS run in it, so why not? AROS could be made if people had interest I guess?

I mean the only point of a very expensive PPC expansion is any of those things, right? To run widely unsupported operating systems?

[brett71]

Originally Posted by spudje

Ultimate PPC cancelled for Amiga30...
I guess we can now say "vapourware status confirmed!"

Guess I'll have to save for a Cyberstorm PPC anyway

It'll be very disappointing if this turns into another example of an Amiga product announced with all sorts of potential, raising expectations, and then fails to ever materialize. But then again, this seems to be the norm these days, with very few exceptions (Jens, Kipper2K, etc...)

[b0lt-thrower]

Maybe the thread should be renamed GIGAHERTZ MEETS BRICK WALL!

[jbenam]

So what happened at Amiga30? Did they say ANYTHING at all about the UltimatePPC?

[spudje]

No it was announced a few days before the event they wouldn't be present.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by spudje

No it was announced a few days before the event they wouldn't be present.

2 more weeks then?

[Ikilledher]

A few days before the event the Ultimate PPC guys told us they would not attend. Apparently the production of the (very successful) Ultimate 1541-II took a lot of their time and the Ultimate PPC had lesser priority.

Although marketing-wise they’d probably better not announced it I applaud every effort put into Amiga. We’re all hobbyists here.

[roomeo]

I dont understand why they announced to be at this event. If they had something to show they should have turned up as a surpise.

[spudje]

Any news or should we forget about is for good?

[MrFluffy]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i know i've said this before but there already exists a ubiquitous and relatively cheap and high-performance PowerPC machine in the form of the XBox 360. Apparently it is possible to hack them to install Linux on it. So why not AROS or AmigaOS 4?

Its a bit messy though, which version of 360 you have, if it will run cfw and full homebrew or just let you use the likes of a xkey to run backups. Same deal with the ps3 which has a cel processor which is fairly close to the ppc too and also available quite cheap now. Also both consoles actually are a bit lacking in ram for a really nice ppc desktop, both having 512Mb, though arranged differently with different access speeds.

I would have thought the easiest option is still to get a ppc equipped mac if you want to dabble in ppc in the meantime of something like this project coming out. In benchmarks the later compatible ppc macs well outpace the rest of the options performance wise.
I have a pegasos1 with a 600mhz g3 ppc in it, and 2gb of ram and a radeon agp gfx card for scratching my ppc itch. On morphos 3.9 its pretty snappy but it seems I use it most for watching ppc demo's and the odd bit of general internet use when I'm feeling a bit quirky.

[wmaciv]

What's up with this project? Any news?

[UberFreak]

Is this a trick question?

[DopPie]

Some time ago I asked Gideon about it. I believe he said the diagrams and logic were finished. But something went wrong somehow. Maybe the components/software or the team I don't know. One thing I do remember very clearly he said; "I'll never do something for the Amiga ever again".

He likes the C64 community way more and decided to put his efforts there. I can understand that.

I would consider this project dead.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by DopPie

One thing I do remember very clearly he said; "I'll never do something for the Amiga ever again".

And could you blame him? He is right. Look at all the shit any Amiga developer or prospective developer of hardware gets into.
It is a shame because he would have been able to pull off something, he is a straight up guy.

[Korodny]

Originally Posted by Akira

And could you blame him?

Yes.

He is right.

• They announced way too early.
• The PPC CPU they chose had some nice features, but it was incompatible with all PPC CPUs used in the Amiga scene before.
• They couldn't answer how tightly integrated the two systems (68k, PPC) would be. The PPC had no way to play sound unless it could access the custom chips...
• They claimed "WarpUp/WarpOS through support pledged by the original author", while said original author told me had pledged nothing like that
• Their website initially claimed they'd talked to H&P about an OS4 port - a decade after H&P hat totally abondened the Amiga market

After 20 years of bullshit, the Amiga community is bound to be sceptical of ambitious projects (unless you stick THE NAME on it - apparently that makes all doubts go away immediately). If you fuck up your PR and your project planning like the Ultimate PPC project did from the beginning, complaining about the nasty, nasty community afterwards doesn't get you my sympathy.

[spudje]

I talked to him about this as well. Indeed hardware design was done. Software/firmware development was to be done by someone else but that person never delivered.

I asked him to open source his hardware design and said he'd consider it, but nothing happened since.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Korodny

complaining about the nasty, nasty community afterwards doesn't get you my sympathy.

Nowhere it was said he did that. I inferred that. From comments like the one you posted, for example. If that was the reason, I can't blame him.

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by spudje

I talked to him about this as well. Indeed hardware design was done. Software/firmware development was to be done by someone else but that person never delivered.

I asked him to open source his hardware design and said he'd consider it, but nothing happened since.

The CPLD code regarding the two buses talking to each other is not finished as I understood it. Next to drivers.

Regarding sound, AHI could solve that (through a 68k context switch). The sonnet card can also not talk directly to the Amiga hardware.

It has the same FPU (or actually SPE) as the Tabor, I think.

MMU also is somewhat different. Not sure if segment registers are used in WarpOS, but this PPC doesn't have them... Or did it miss the BAT registers...one of the two..

The author of WarpOS is actually very helpful and helped me with some WarpOS stuff even quite recently (This year). Pledging his help might be wrongly formulated.

[jediknight]

why worry or bother if you want ppc go buy a mac g5 quad core they run nice and a modern os , hell i do it doesnt or rarely even crash , what a system , now forget making new hardware just make it run on a g5 apple wont mind if you ask nicely they would love it.

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by jediknight

why worry or bother if you want ppc go buy a mac g5 quad core they run nice and a modern os , hell i do it doesnt or rarely even crash , what a system , now forget making new hardware just make it run on a g5 apple wont mind if you ask nicely they would love it.

Why every time these kind of negative comments. Why the demotivation of people doing this kind of stuff. Why are you not on a Mac forum. Why doing old computers at all and not just use x86's latest and greatest.

Anyway....There was an update posted on their website. (which was the actual reason for me to post here and not above comment).