A600GS ARM Graphics Library

[copse]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I'm not dismissing this thing out of hand, but I do think there are better ways to do it. Given that, it's almost certain that it will be tied to Amikit and won't be portable - that would defeat the purpose of selling more boxes.

It seems to me that this is getting made because it makes sense for their product, and wouldn't be getting made otherwise. Are you suuggesting they should spending their limited money and resources on some other thing that more interests you? Not sure I understand. Better for who?

[alexh]

It would be better for AmigaKit if whatever they are working on at the GFX API level could reach as many users as possible so that enthusiasts might consider using it. This could mean UAE4ARM, Amiberry or whatever they think would not require too much dev-time to bring their environment to a wider audience.

Thinking that a feature like this will be a selling point for A600GS is I think a bit naive, developers are unlikely to flock to their product, at least not in the way they did for Vampire or PiStorm. It makes sense to release their product first and then bring the API to other platforms so developers will indirectly write for A600GS.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by copse

It seems to me that this is getting made because it makes sense for their product, and wouldn't be getting made otherwise. Are you suuggesting they should spending their limited money and resources on some other thing that more interests you? Not sure I understand. Better for who?

Perhaps I was not making myself clear? See Alexh's reply. Better for everyone.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by alexh

Thinking that a feature like this will be a selling point for A600GS is I think a bit naive, developers are unlikely to flock to their product, at least not in the way they did for Vampire or PiStorm.

And I don't see developers flocking to any of those platforms either, so without developers, what is the library for?

Are they giving away A600GS units to interested developers? Have they made any gesture toward sharing how this API works?

As I see it this definitely seems to be something that will be tied to their "platform" and end up nowhere.

[Karlos]

I see a lot of assumptions about what this library is or isn't, so I'll just throw my own guess in that it's literally just patching out aspects of the vanilla graphics.library and providing an implementation of p96 for RTG. It may make use of an additional core or GPU (or even both), but it is equally likely it's just a hook that allows the emulation to invoke native code on the same core as that's probably the easiest approach.

It would be cool if it is making use of the GPU and or additional cores though.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I see a lot of assumptions about what this library is or isn't, so I'll just throw my own guess in that it's literally just patching out aspects of the vanilla graphics.library and providing an implementation of p96 for RTG. It may make use of an additional core or GPU (or even both), but it is equally likely it's just a hook that allows the emulation to invoke native code on the same core as that's probably the easiest approach.

It would be cool if it is making use of the GPU and or additional cores though.

Probably along these lines - yes.

As it is a Library, it will work in a synchronous mode and whatever it does: AOS will pause during that until the invoked function is done.

To really work in an asynchronous fashion it would need to act as a device or a task, that accepts messages. Such a device/task could offload the work to a second core and do the work in the background, while the AOS side keeps on doing other things. When finished an interrupt would generate a message - signaling back that the work is done.

An other way would be a kind of special "copper-list": a smallish list of gfx-commands interpreted by the second core, without further interaction with the OS.

A while ago I saw something interesting implemented for a proprietary dev-board: a RasPi was attached to it via ethernet and a GLES stream was sent from the board to the RasPi, which displayed the 3D-scene ...
So something like a "GLES.device" should be possible.

Edit - here it is:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Twiggy]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I was interrested about this A600GS until I knew about what Amigakit was doing to other Amiga oriented websites.

https://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=953

https://amitopia.com/amigakit-goes-a...iga-community/

And a beige case would have been better

I'll wait for the A500 maxi quietly.

Bloody hell! When the Amiga corpse hasn't been ripped apart enough already.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I see a lot of assumptions about what this library is or isn't, so I'll just throw my own guess in that it's literally just patching out aspects of the vanilla graphics.library and providing an implementation of p96 for RTG. It may make use of an additional core or GPU (or even both), but it is equally likely it's just a hook that allows the emulation to invoke native code on the same core as that's probably the easiest approach.

It would be cool if it is making use of the GPU and or additional cores though.

If it's patching graphics.library, would it not also be useful for non-RTG drawing too?

[Thomas Richter]

P96 is already replacing the graphics.library functions to make use of a hardware blitter if one is available. That includes all the blitter primitives like rectangle drawing, text drawing, area copy or line drawing. Thus, there is nothing to gain (except incompatibilities) in this direction.

[amigakit.com]

@Thomas Richter

We are not using P96 in our pre-installed AmiBench distribution. Therefore native ARM graphics support is essential for enhancing our A600GS computer system performance over rival products.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Twiggy

Bloody hell! When the Amiga corpse hasn't been ripped apart enough already.

It's only one side of an argument. The truth lies somewhere between the two.

I tried posting a comment on both threads weeks ago asking both sides for clarification but when one side is the moderater I don't expect it will ever get posted. (e.g. no willingness to look at both sides)