What OS and programming enviroment do you use?

[Solar]

Last time I had the time to configure that much eye-candy was on my Amiga, pre-1999... nice look, though.

(Damn, how I miss the time when 10 hours computing a day was nothing but fun. Today it's 9 hours boring / frustrating / inefficient work and 1 hour cramming too much I want to get done in too little time.)

[distantvoices]

I like the background. It's kinda cool stuff.

Should switch to enlightenment again. It's been my first linux desktop environment. KDE is a bit bloated thou' it does its job rather well.


@solar: If the amiga4 (with the g4 cpu) comes out and at a reasonable price, I maybe do me a treat and get one. Seems to be fun. But the olden times ... oy vey, the many hours spent behind the c64 boxen, gone they are and what remains are sweet memories 'bout loooong computing sessions in dark winters nights. *gg*

[Solar]

If the amiga4 (with the g4 cpu) comes out and at a reasonable price...

The AmigaOne is available, but scrap the "reasonable price" part.

[distantvoices]

tsss ...

one thousand bucks for a 800 mhz machine??!!! be it g3 be it g4? They don't have all the mugs in their drawer, do they? correctly thats "they've lost their marbles" *rofl*

[Solar]

That's what more sane Amigians (me among them) are trying to tell them ever since they announced their producing custom PPC hardware - which was three years ago.

People claim that the PPC is the "cleaner" architecture, they claim that "mainstream" hardware users wouldn't run anything else but pirated Windows or for-free Linux anyway, and they believe that the hardware niche will - in some arcane way I cannot fathom - "protect" them from the competition of the big players.

"Nuts" is the right word. :-\

[srg]

AFAIK the AmigaOne is just a PowerPC g3 or g4 reference board, it's not an amiga, just a well, PPC reference board. Sure it'll run AmigaOS4, which means that Amiga Will just be a PowerPC operating system. IMHO it's ripped the heart and soul out of the Amiga (which was a custom machines and operating system).

People say that you can't stay running on old harware anymore, but IMHO the AmigaOne would be the qeuivalent of migrating the PC to Itanium and not keeping the old hardware (ISA, PCI, PIC, PIT etc).

Anyway, and AmigaOne running Linux - appart from the Amiga ROM it's NOT an Amiga, just a PPC Linux machine. BTW just to make sure, does the AmigaOne have an amiga ROM????

srg

[Solar]

Oh jolly, right into the midst of the discussion of "what makes an Amiga an Amiga"... for me, it was always the operating system, and I've been ranting long and loud that it is absolute folly for a community of so small numbers and finance to chose anything else as a hardware platform than mainstream... but Amigians have been brainwashed to see x86 as devil incarnate, and so well that they still believe it when they buy overpriced, underpowered hardware and still claim it "better".

No, the AmigaOne doesn't have a "ROM" to speak of.

In the old Amigas, the ROM ("Kickstart") bore the POST, kernel, and basic functionality, with the rest booted from disk. That allowed floppy-booted games to run with only a bare minimum of (unneeded-for-games) OS code in memory.

With the AmigaOne (and it's evil (?) brother, the bplan Pegasos, running the spin-off "MorphOS"), it's just your everyday basic BIOS booting everything from disk.

So, no, the very different Amiga is no more, it's only another OS on inferior hardware. Ah, what have we come to... :-[

[srg]

Oh jolly, right into the midst of the discussion of "what makes an Amiga an Amiga"... for me, it was always the operating system, and I've been ranting long and loud that it is absolute folly for a community of so small numbers and finance to chose anything else as a hardware platform than mainstream... but Amigians have been brainwashed to see x86 as devil incarnate, and so well that they still believe it when they buy overpriced, underpowered hardware and still claim it "better".

No, the AmigaOne doesn't have a "ROM" to speak of.

In the old Amigas, the ROM ("Kickstart") bore the POST, kernel, and basic functionality, with the rest booted from disk. That allowed floppy-booted games to run with only a bare minimum of (unneeded-for-games) OS code in memory.

With the AmigaOne (and it's evil (?) brother, the bplan Pegasos, running the spin-off "MorphOS"), it's just your everyday basic BIOS booting everything from disk.

So, no, the very different Amiga is no more, it's only another OS on inferior hardware. Ah, what have we come to... :-[

For me, an Amiga is the hardware and the innovative operating system. Without the custom chips, it's nothing, just an operating system. The Amiga was the whole platform, CPU, copper, blitter, os, everything.

BTW If you want and excuse to buy expensive, relativly underperforming hardware, buy a mac.

srg

[Solar]

Without the custom chips, it's nothing, just an operating system. The Amiga was the whole platform, CPU, copper, blitter, os, everything.

The thing is, with a 68030 or better in the system, there were patches available to make blits with the CPU instead of the blitter since it was faster. Accelerator boards with faster CPUs, memory and SCSI replaced the onboard CPU; graphics cards with 3D support replaced Agnus/Alice and Denise/Lisa; sound cards with DSP-supported MP3 playback replaced Paula; interface cards replaced the crufty serial interface which balked out at anything >57200 bit/sec.... and suddenly, all those custom chips (which were truly great in the 80ies) were good for was accessing the floppy drive.

Those custom chips were in the lead up until the early nineties, but even if the third generation of 'em would have been implemented, they wouldn't hold a candle to today's hardware.

Time moves on, as sorry as we may feel for it.

[Pype.Clicker]

i wouldn't say so ... i've been looking at Nvidia technical docs recently, and man, those pixelshaders, transform & lightining etc. units *really* look like your good old copper on the principle. Thing is that now, 'custom hardware' have become mainstream and we have standardized bus that allow such hardware to be accessed the same way on different machines ...

[srg]

i wouldn't say so ... i've been looking at Nvidia technical docs recently, and man, those pixelshaders, transform & lightining etc. units *really* look like your good old copper on the principle. Thing is that now, 'custom hardware' have become mainstream and we have standardized bus that allow such hardware to be accessed the same way on different machines ...

Hey that's a point, in the case of SuperVGA's, they've allways been custom chips. Interesting that the Amiga was so far ahead of it's time. It's just a shame that the custom chips were integrated on the motherboard and not on a card. Then a copper upgrade for example would be like changing from a matrox G400, to a Radeon or geforce.

As long as there have been standard busses (I don't think the custom chips were on the zorro, that could be the trouble) then custom is the new standard.

srg

srg

[Solar]

The problem is not that Amiga custom chips didn't have the basic technology right; it's that a single company (Amiga) cannot dream of competing with the specialists in their respective fields.

You just can't design a chipset / motherboard today anymore that will beat tomorrow's ASUS / nVidia / CreativeLabs state-of-the-art beasts, because it's always tomorrow's generation you have to compete with. And even if you do design such a thing, your board will cost much more than yesterday's budget workhorses that are "good enough" for the other half of your potential customers.

It's a lose-lose situation. Amiga things they can pull it off once again because they have a strongly dedicated user "base". ("Outpost" would probably fit the situation better.)

But even among the few of us here, do you think a company could come up with a reasonable system-in-a-box that would please all of us?

PS: The Copper never did more than resetting chip registers in dependency of the current raster line. Pixelshaders and T&L units are way more advanced than that.

[srg]

The problem is not that Amiga custom chips didn't have the basic technology right; it's that a single company (Amiga) cannot dream of competing with the specialists in their respective fields.

You just can't design a chipset / motherboard today anymore that will beat tomorrow's ASUS / nVidia / CreativeLabs state-of-the-art beasts, because it's always tomorrow's generation you have to compete with. And even if you do design such a thing, your board will cost much more than yesterday's budget workhorses that are "good enough" for the other half of your potential customers.

It's a lose-lose situation. Amiga things they can pull it off once again because they have a strongly dedicated user "base". ("Outpost" would probably fit the situation better.)

But even among the few of us here, do you think a company could come up with a reasonable system-in-a-box that would please all of us?

PS: The Copper never did more than resetting chip registers in dependency of the current raster line. Pixelshaders and T&L units are way more advanced than that.

I reckon that nVidia could possibly do it, I mean they are massive in both graphics chips and chipsets.

srg

[Solar]

But they wouldn't license such technology exclusively, but rather sell to the mass market - there goes your "custom" hardware system, again.