Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

If it were AI, it would be more coherent.

That's the old AI that strived to be more coherent. This one is designed to be more human-like. It fooled me for a while, until I noticed it was repeating the same stuff over and over virtually word for word. Needs a better randomizing algorithm. I hear that quantum computers are good for that.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Needs a better randomizing algorithm.

My Arx1024 PRNG in C# can help you with that. No quantum computers required

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Did it actually lose any value? Vampires are still sold at a pretty high price ..

Perhaps they are, but there's no doubt that PiStorm has reduced their value. If I was to trade my Vampire in for a PiStorm I would be happy to get just enough to pay for it, which would be less than half what I paid for the Vampire. I don't think I will though. The Vampire is plenty fast enough for me so I don't have much incentive to upgrade. These days I'm more interested in playing with low-end machines, which are a bit more of a challenge.

And also this was true and is true for any new generation of CPUs and turbo boards and so on... newer stuff tends to be faster

Yes, but Amiga fans have traditionally been more inclined to stick with what they have than constantly upgrade. That is not an invalid stance.

If you fear something, that is just not based in reality, it simply never is a valid reason. It is an unreasonable emotional reaction.

No - emotional reactions are quite normal, and shouldn't be suppressed just because they aren't 'rational'. Case in point, you are having an emotional reaction to my list of (mostly emotional and subjective) reasons to be antipathic towards PiStorm.

The truth is, retro computing is far more about emotion than rational utility, and there's nothing wrong with that.

This thread is full of people complaining about how they were disappointed in the A1200 for one reason or another. That's an emotional reaction. Rationally speaking, nobody should have been disappointed in the A1200 because they knew (or should have known) what the machine was capable of. If it didn't meet their requirements they should have just ignored it, and if no Amiga suited them they should have gone the PC or Mac way etc. without looking back. It's because fans got emotionally attached to the Amiga they got upset by any supposed lack of progress. Did any of us get upset when other platforms fell by the wayside? No, we just accepted it and moved on.

But the Amiga is different. It's more than just a lump of hardware to be discarded when something better comes along. Right from the start it invoked emotions that we cherish and wish to preserve or amplify - which is what retro computing is all about!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the Amiga is different. It's more than just a lump of hardware to be discarded when something better comes along. Right from the start it invoked emotions that we cherish and wish to preserve or amplify - which is what retro computing is all about!

Indeed

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the Amiga is different. It's more than just a lump of hardware to be discarded when something better comes along. Right from the start it invoked emotions that we cherish and wish to preserve or amplify - which is what retro computing is all about!

It's true, wedge Amigas like the A1200 after they have lived past their usable life as a device to play games on and use as a computer, doing maybe document writing or number crunching, or creating graphics and sound, or just editing graphics and sound, or watching media on, you can just flip it over and use it as a doorjamb.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

you can just flip it over and use it as a doorjamb.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

I don't think it's really that Amiga specific, you see similar things in all retro communities.

I don't frequent any other retro communities, so I am really curious how it is elsewhere.

All I know is that the Amiga 'community' has bickered about the right way to Amiga ever since the PPC showed up. Then there was OS4, the Vampire cards, and right now as seen in this thread PiStorm (I'm sure I missed a lot of other things).

I just think it would be much more pleasant and productive if people would just accept that there many different ways to use an 'Amiga'. You don't have to use all of them, but you don't have to shout 'this is wrong!' all the time either.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Rationally speaking, nobody should have been disappointed in the A1200 because they knew (or should have known) what the machine was capable of.

You got it backwards:
People were disappointed BECAUSE they knew what it was capable of - or better, what is was not capable of.

They expected more and Commodore let them down.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Perhaps they are, but there's no doubt that PiStorm has reduced their value.

Why? It's pretty obvious there are people who do not want anything like the PiStorm, they want a pure hardware-only experience. Plus, the Vampire is more than just a CPU, isn't it? It's a whole treasure trove of additional goodies for those that want to carry on hardware banging.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Why? It's pretty obvious there are people who do not want anything like the PiStorm, they want a pure hardware-only experience. Plus, the Vampire is more than just a CPU, isn't it? It's a whole treasure trove of additional goodies for those that want to carry on hardware banging.

Yes, there are people who want 'real hardware', but there are many more who will get whatever does the job best and cheapest - and that's not Vampire. Furthermore Vampire development is not democratic - you have to put up with what Gunnar decides to give you.

I'm not so sure that Vampire provides enough more than PiStorm to make up for the higher price. I can't have an MMU in the V2 because Gunnar says the FPGA is full, and I can't justify spending NZ$1000 for a Mantacore. I would be too embarrassed to sell my V2 for more than NZ$300 when someone could get a PiStorm for the same price.

I'm not saying the Vampire doesn't generally do a good job, but it's not much more 'real' Amiga hardware than a PiStorm is. A purist would reject both, but PiStorm at least has the ability to act 'real'. Vampire is going the other way with its enhanced AGA etc.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

7. Raspberry Pi availability. At one time some models were unobtainium, and the price increased dramatically. Models may be discontinued at any time and there is no second source.

Now I'm not gonna debate the other points because it's such a waste of time, but as for this one...every other Amiga accelerator is literally the same thing, they stop being sold after a while and you either need to buy a second hand one or just give up. Why do you think the Raspberry Pi is so different from a Blizzard 1230?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

You got it backwards:
People were disappointed BECAUSE they knew what it was capable of - or better, what is was not capable of.

They expected more and Commodore let them down.

A1200's potential was just lacking compute power.

AGA can scale to about 62 fps Clickboom Quake demo1 320x200 benchmark with sufficient CPU power. 640x200p res has 31 fps.

At 320x200p, AGA with ARM Cortex A72 @ 1.8Ghz (Emu68) will beat Athlon XP @ 1.8Ghz with any ISA SVGA cards including ISA based ET4000AX and ET4000W32xx cards

My point, C= AGA is enough for mainstream TV resolution textured map 3D gaming display.

A1200 didn't deserve to be gimped with low compute power.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

There are many valid reasons to be antipathic towards PiStorm.

1. It doesn't represent the Amiga as a retro computer. PiStorm is so powerful that it makes possible stuff a 'real' Amiga couldn't dream of doing. In the retro scene this is considered to be cheating and/or invalid (eg. someone says their A1200 gets 35 fps in Doom, and then you find out they have a PiStorm).

PiStorm is use to verify AGA's texture mapped 3D display potential when there's sufficient compute power.

Arguing for AAA wouldn't make any difference when compute power is low.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

2. Lazy developers may produce software that works OK on a Pistorm but is much too slow on the 'real' Amiga that most fans have. This puts pressure on them to either buy a Pistorm when they are otherwise happy with what they have, or put up with not being able to run the latest stuff. Over time this situation could get worse, to the point where nobody develops software for real Amigas anymore.

Hyperion is re-releasing Pentium/PowerPC-era game ports for fast 68K.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

3. Loss of 'value'. You mortgaged the house to buy an 060 or Vampire. Now something comes along that's both much faster and much cheaper.

Mortgaged the house to buy an 060 or Vampire is not wise.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

4. Lack of diversity. People may stop making other hardware because it can't compete against PiStorm.

Z3660 has its "ARM Storm" design i.e. PiStorm is not the only Amiga ARM solution in town.

Z3660's ARM with FPGA SoC is from AMD.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

5. Inflated performance claims. Sysinfo shows an insane CPU speed that often isn't achieved in real life. Actual speed may vary wildly and unpredictably depending on JIT operation. The CPU is very fast but the bus interface isn't.

7.1 MB/s is the max performance for any fast CPU into 32-bit Chip RAM.

Emu68 is not running any host Linux OS i.e. no distractions.

Official RPi Linux distros are LE i.e. hint: Vulkan driver.

I have a Pentium III @ 700 Mhz IBM T20 laptop to compare against.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

6. Deflated cost claims. The PiStorm interface might be cheap but the whole setup costs a lot more (not everybody has a spare RPi and SD card lying around).

Micro-SD card is platform neutral since many laptops have micro-SD slot.

My current micro-SD in my laptop is 256 GB to supplement its 2TB NVMe storage. Lesser capacity micro-SD cards are reused for Amiga's usage.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

7. Raspberry Pi availability. At one time some models were unobtainium, and the price increased dramatically. Models may be discontinued at any time and there is no second source.

There's a Raspberry Pi EOL table e.g. https://endoflife.date/raspberry-pi

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

8. Can be tricky to set up if you don't have a preconfigured SD card.

My PiStorm's 32GB micro-SD card for my A500 was preconfigured.

I can configure my own Emu68 micro-SD when I configured my 64 GB micro-SD. I can handle old school MS-DOS, hence I handle FDisk.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

9. Compatibility issues. Stuff that works on a 'real' Amiga might not work on PiStorm and vice versa.

A500 with PiStorm-RPi 3A+ and turtle mode runs many WHDLoad games.

RPi 4B and A1200 have higher sync issues when compared to A500 with PiStorm-RPi 3A+

I plan to test the following
RPi 4B with A500,
RPi 3A+ with A1200.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

It doesn't emulate an MMU so it's not suitable for some applications eg. software development.

The same problems for AC68080, MC68EC030, MC68020 and MC68EC020.

EMu68's 68K MMU is in the road map.

There's Bebbo GNU C Compiler for cross-compiling and WinUAE's virtual Amiga with MMU.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

10. RPi users are obnoxious and elitist. After 30 years of the Amiga being a retro computer we thought we might have seen the back of that, but no - they just swapped their PC/Mac/PPC for an RPi.

There's nothing elitist with the low cost PiStorm.

Remember, 68K CPU is Motorola's toy, not Commodore's. Commodore planned to ditch Motorola with their PA-RISC clone.

Motorola pushed out of smartphones/PDA (Dragon Ball VZ), desktops (68K) and workstations (68K) is the fault of Motorola's leadership team.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I bought ClickBoom's Quake port when it came out, and could barely manage 10 fps on my A3000 with 50MHz 060 and RTG. Talk about disappointing!

I'll argue 68060 is half gen jump between 486DX and Pentium.

I estimated CyberStorm 060 @ 50Mhz (with 32-bit external bus) and CyberVision 64 (S3Trio 64V) Quake performance for my A3000 upgrade, my guess turns out about correct. I selected a Pentium 150/S3Trio 64UV+ PC clone as my university-era PC.

According to Gunnar, Motorola had 68060-B in development before they canceled it.

With 68060-B canceled, it's the end for 68K's evolution from Motorola/Freescale. There is no second source insurance with a creditable design team for 68K until Apollo-Core's AC68080 design.

AMD is the second source insurance for X86 with a creditable design team when Intel attempted to pull a "PowerPC" with Itanium.

I'm aware of ColdFire, but they are kitbash from 68K. Motorola/Freescale kitbash PowerPC e5500 with a custom FPU (not PowerPC FPU standard).

I extremely dislike Motorola/Freescale's kitbash instruction set mentality as a product segmentation tactic.

I'm okay with IBM POWER9.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

Now I'm not gonna debate the other points because it's such a waste of time, but as for this one...every other Amiga accelerator is literally the same thing, they stop being sold after a while and you either need to buy a second hand one or just give up. Why do you think the Raspberry Pi is so different from a Blizzard 1230?

Sure you could say the same about the Blizzard 1230 (you'll pry mine out of my cold dead hands) but while an individual accelerator card might go out of production others spring up in its place. Often they are better too. Also, cards like the Blizzard 1230 are not so fast that you can't substitute a different card.

PiStorm is different. Nothing else can compare to it (yet) which makes it frustrating when you can't get one. However I will say that most RPi models seem to be readily available now, so this complaint may no longer be valid (it was valid when I was looking at getting one).

Don't think that the list I made means I hate PiStorm. It has plenty of upsides too, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to turbocharge their Amiga to the max.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

Why do you think the Raspberry Pi is so different from a Blizzard 1230?

To be honest a Blizzard 1230 is WAY worse than basically any Raspberry Pi, as there are very likely at the very least (and I'm being extremely conservative here) 100x less units that were produced of the former.

Not to mention many RaspberryPis are still currently manufactured (and production is planned for many, many years to come), hence the worst case scenario of a catastrophic failure of the RPi side installed on a PiStorm can be solved in a hugely easier way with either a brand new or a second hand unit purchase. Good luck finding a working (?) 1230 in just a couple of mouse clicks as you can do with a RPi - and I'm not even trying to take into account the required different expenses.

I really can't see how this point can be brought up in a discussion, there's really nothing subjective here, just plain facts.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

I'll argue 68060 is half gen jump between 486DX and Pentium.

My A3000 used to do most stuff about as fast as the Pentium 75 PC I had.

But for some reason Clickboom's Quake ran really slow on my machine. If I still had it today I would track down the cause, but I sold it around 2001 so...

According to Gunnar, Motorola had 68060-B in development before they canceled it.

I can believe that. Problem is after Apple went PPC they had no market for desktop 68k CPUs. If Commodore had still been alive it might have been different.

AMD is the second source insurance for X86 with a creditable design team when Intel attempted to pull a "PowerPC" with Itanium.

Intel tried very hard to stop AMD from doing that. That's why they renamed the 586 to Pentium, because they couldn't trademark a number. But the PC market was big enough to allow (and encourage) that. The 68k market wasn't.

Which wasn't anything to get upset about. 68k has a wonderful instruction set that makes programming in asm a joy. Those of us who had started out coding in asm from the early days appreciated that. RISC architectures like PPC and ARM are a pain, and x86 isn't great either. Amiga OS had good support for asm coding too (at least before KS2). We didn't care if other CPUs were faster or had more features, it was the 68k's elegant ISA and ease of producing efficient code that attracted us to it.

Later revisions of the 68060 were officially rated at 75MHz and could be overclocked to at least 80MHz. That was plenty fast enough for the 90's even long after Commodore was gone. I don't think we can complain about that. If you wanted more performance you should have just gotten a PC - not excoriated Motorola for not making faster CPUs for a dead platform!

I extremely dislike Motorola/Freescale's kitbash instruction set mentality as a product segmentation tactic.

Motorola kept developing the 68k for embedded applications where it was common to have different instruction sets for different chips, which was OK because they didn't run a 'standard' OS.

Others did the same. Microchip for example had several different PIC families with instruction set variations (PIC10/12, PIC16, PIC18, DSPIC) then added PIC24 (16 bit) and PIC32 (MIPS 32 bit instruction set). Within families there are lots of variations too, in the memory map, peripherals present etc., so the compiler has to be told the exact chip to produce code for.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

To be honest a Blizzard 1230 is WAY worse than basically any Raspberry Pi, as there are very likely at the very least (and I'm being extremely conservative here) 100x less units that were produced of the former.

Not to mention many RaspberryPis are still currently manufactured (and production is planned for many, many years to come)

Blizzard 1230 was produced 30 years ago. I doubt the RPi will be around in 30 years time either (at least not as we know it).

This whole Blizzard 1230 thing is a straw man. Nobody was expecting it to be available today. Even if other accelerator cards are having supply issues it doesn't mean RPi gets off the hook.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Even if other accelerator cards are having supply issues it doesn't mean RPi gets off the hook.

Well, I'd say it 'gets off the hook' for being available right now.

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This whole Blizzard 1230 thing is a straw man.

Ok, let's ignore the 1230.

In the list of the PiStorm "issues" you compiled, you claimed RPi availability was and/or might become an issue sometimes in the future.

Now, it is true that during the pandemic it was really hard to get one.

But those issues have long been solved. I'd argue literally every other Amiga commercial accelerator has way more availability issues than the PiStorm. It's basically a non-issue, at least (?) compared to the other viable options.